This dissertation examines the figuring of Aphrodite in the Greek poetic tradition and its reception in Vergil’s Aeneid. In particular, it considers the unflattering depictions of the goddess of love, along with her powers and complements, that, on the one hand, conceptualize her as a chaotic elemental force at odds with civilized existence, and, on the other, repeatedly subject her to humiliating disempowerment. Drawing on J. Mira Seo’s reading of characters as “nodes of intertextuality” (2013: 4) and extending to divine figures the insights of recent scholarship on the interpretative value of the dynamics of fama, I contend that the dark fama of the goddess of love is an intertextual presence in the Aeneid that shapes and dramatizes the process of the characterization of its Venus to an extent that has not been previously appreciated. In Vergil’s poem, we find fragments of Venus’ dark poetic past embedded within new narratives and reconfigured to new, often oppositional, effects. In turn, this composite make-up undermines the stability of her character, as past and present voices compete in a dialectical process that ultimately denies a fixed identity to this profoundly referential figure. I also posit that Vergil dramatizes the doubleness inherent in his Venus by “relocating” some of the dark elements that typify the poetic articulation of the goddess of love into the articulation of his Juno. In turn, this resonance of Juno’s characterization with Venus’ fama destabilizes the oppositional relationship between the Aeneid’s divine antagonists, whose conflict in many ways shapes the poem. Finally, I show that the deep affinity between Juno and Venus is both dramatized in the seamless merging of their influence within Dido’s experience of an “odi et amo” passion and amplified by the parallel erotic coloring that marks their preoccupation with Aeneas. In blurring the distinctness of the goddesses’ identities, Vergil invites critical reflection on poetic apprehensions of divine individuality and on other oppositional configurations, both within the world of his poem and within the historical realities with which it is engaged.