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1 results

  • 18 - The Aeneid

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 333-369

  • Summary

    Virgil's Aeneid was conceived and shaped as a national and patriotic epic for the Romans of his day. Certainly the Romans hailed it as such, and it rapidly became both a set text in education and the natural successor to the Annales of Ennius as the great poetic exposition of Roman ideals and achievements. One of the fountains of the Aeneid's inspiration was the national aspiration of Rome in Virgil's time; another, of equal if not greater importance, was the epic poetry of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey represented in the classical world the highest achievement of Greek poetry, and the admiration universally felt by the Romans for Homer was for the great national poet of the Greek world whose literature they revered. The Olympian deities enabled Virgil to enter in description the mythological world which delighted Ovid in his Metamorphoses.