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The tense of speech indications in Vergil's Aeneid

Summary An analysis of the introductions and conclusions of all instances of direct speech in Virgil's Aeneid (book I - VI) reveals that in these introductions and conclusions the present tense is used to describe events that are contemporaneous with "the effective span of story time", i.e. the moment in the story world that is narrated at that point in the narrative. The effect of this is that the narrator takes up a position inside the story world, from which he describes what he sees as the story time proceeds. This type of presentation is called the immediate mode. The use of the perfect tense is a more complex matter. On the one hand, the perfect is used as the main tense of (a particular part of) the narrative: the narrator presents his material from his own position in time. In this paper this retrospective presentation is called the detached mode. On the other hand, isolated perfect tense forms also occur in the immediate mode. In such cases the perfect is not just anterior to the speaker's time (as is the case in the detached mode), but has to be interpreted as anterior to the effective span of story time.