Margaret Brucia, “The African-American Poet, Jupiter Hammon: A Home-born Slave and his Classical Name," IJCT 7 (2000-2001), pp. 515-522.

This article argues for a Vergilian origin of the name of the eighteenth-century African-American slave Jupiter Hammon, considered the first published Black American poet. Names from classical antiquity were often bestowed on American slaves. The most prominent reference in classical literature to the god Jupiter Hammon, whose name is the conflation of Jupiter and an aspirated form of the Egyptian god Ammon, occurs in Vergil’s Aeneid. Henry Lloyd, the master of Jupiter Hammon, owned a copy of what he refers to as “Ogilby’s Vergil.” This popular sixteenth-century translation of the complete works of Vergil into rhyming couplets with commentary by the Scotsman John Ogilby was probably Henry Lloyd’s source for his slave’s unusual name.