In Virgil's Aeneid, Iopas is a bard at the court of Dido. He appears at the end of Book 1, where he sings the so-called "Song of Iopas", a creation narrative, at the banquet given for Aeneas and his Trojans.
Contents
Text, context
The passage in Virgil:
As Christine G. Perkell points out, Iopas's song consists of "commonplaces of the didactic genre" rather than heroic song, which is the kind of song one could have expected from a court poet like Phemius or Demodocus from the Odyssey. Iopas's song resembles Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, Hesiod's Works and Days, and Virgil's own Georgics.
Interpretation
Many interpretations have been offered for Iopas's song. Classicist Eve Adler, who paid particular attention to how the Trojans at the banquet wait with applauding the song until the Carthaginians have expressed their appreciation, notes that Iopas's naturalistic explanation of the world (requiring no gods) comes as a surprise to the Trojans; Adler sees the passage as anticipated in Virgil's Georgics, at the end of Book 2 and the beginning of Book 3. For Adler, Iopas is a kind of Lucretius-figure (whose message Virgil rejects).