Caieta

For other uses, see Caieta (city).

In Roman mythology, Caieta (Ancient Greek: Καιήτη, Cāiēta) was the wet-nurse of Aeneas. The Roman poet Vergil locates her grave on the bay at Gaeta, to which she also gives her name (cf. Caietae Portus).^[1] The poet Ovid, working a generation later, provides an epitaph:

HIC • ME • CAIETAM • NOTAE • PIETATIS • ALVMNUS

EREPTAM • ARGOLICO • QVO • DEBVIT • IGNE • CREMAVIT^[2]

Aeneas Erects a Tomb to his Nurse, Caieta, and Flees the Country of Circe (Aeneid, Book VII)

"Here me, Caieta, snatched from Grecian flames, my pious son consumed with fitting fire."^[3] The fourth-century commentator Servius writes that there was some controversy about whose wet-nurse Caieta was: in addition to Aeneas, he offers Creusa and Ascanius as possibilities.^[4]

References

1. Vergil Aeneid 7.1-4
2. Ovid Metamorphoses 14.443-444
3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library 43 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 331.
4. Servius In Vergili Aeneidem Commentarii 7.1