The sentence Reject Aeneas, accept Pius! or ‘Reject Enea, accept Pius!’ is definitely among the most frequently cited quotes of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the great Sienese humanist and diplomat who later became Pope Pius II. The phrase is often used to highlight the du-ality of Piccolomini’s complex personality, perpetually torn between the world of classical antiquity, epitomised by the eponymous hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Christian world, represented by his own epithet and papal name, Pius. Too often, literary scholarship has interpreted this sentence as the new pope’s condemnation and renunciation of the liter-ary works that he had written before his ecclesiastical career, particularly those on the theme of love. However, a closer examination of the sources in which Piccolomini’s fa-mous statement appears, alongside a careful reading of his writings on love, reveals that such interpretations are sensationalistic and stem from lack of awareness of the broader context in which he wrote these resonant words.
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