Baptism at the Savica is a short epic poem by the romantic Slovenian poet France Prešeren, published in
1836: in it the influence of the Virgilian Aeneid can be traced, and yet it has not been sufficiently
investigated, especially for ideological reasons, by scholars of Slovenian literature. Through the comparison
of certain passages of the poem with the Aeneid, this paper demonstrates the possibility of reading Prešeren’s
poem as a 'proto-harvardian' rewrite of the Aeneid based on the notorious opposition between two competing
'voices', the 'public' and 'private', whose point of departure is in the narrative form of the Virgilian Troiae
halosis, that is, the autobiographical story of Aeneas, i.e. the experience of the protagonist reliving his own
story in his words.
