Caieta

{{Short description|Mythological Greek character}}

{{other uses|Caieta (city)}}

File:Aeneas Erects a Tomb to his Nurse, Caieta, and Flees the Country of Circe (Aeneid, Book VII) MET DT10857.jpg

In Roman mythology, Caieta ({{langx|grc|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).Vergil Aeneid 7.1-4 The poet Ovid, working a generation later, provides an epitaph:

::HIC • ME • CAIETAM • NOTAE • PIETATIS • ALVMNUS

::EREPTAM • ARGOLICO • QVO • DEBVIT • IGNE • CREMAVITOvid Metamorphoses 14.443-444

"Here me, Caieta, snatched from Grecian flames, my pious son consumed with fitting fire."Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library 43 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 331. 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.Servius In Vergili Aeneidem Commentarii 7.1