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AUGUSTAN BACKGROUND
nothing other than a restatement of the old order, nothing other than a restoration
of the Roman state to what it had been and was by nature. He was removing
alien elements which had been introduced and enabling the Romans to
be their true selves again. How far this was true is another question — what
seems very likely is that Augustus commanded the support of the majority of
the Romans in this view of their contemporary situation, and it was to explore
and to clarify these hopes that Virgil wrote the Aeneid. In it he presents his
anticipations of history (the pageant at the end of Book 6, the description of the
shield at the end of Book 8) in a fashion which accords with the Augustan view
of the Roman achievement; and in his hero he exemplifies those virtues of
pietas, constantia, religio which seemed so desirable in Romans of his day. In the
last analysis Virgil found that these qualities fail, or seem to fail, to make
complete order out of the world's chaos; but they were the qualities which his
epic was designed to illustrate and exemplify, and the Aeneid in exploring what
the Roman way of life had achieved and could achieve leaves the reader free to
ponder on what it seemed in the last resort unable to achieve. And this surely is
a primary virtue in a national epic.
2. THE AENEID AND ITS LITERARY BACKGROUND
One of the fountains of the Aeneid's inspiration was, as has been shown, 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. His poetry was considered
in Virgil's time to embody the perfect form of epic in its construction
and organization, and to offer the reader moral lessons about life and how to live
it as well as the excitement and intensity of dramatic action at its highest pitch
and the aesthetic satisfaction of description and story-telling in a distant world
which was half real and half supernatural. There can be no doubt that the poetry
of Homer cast its spell over Virgil, and the idea of adapting and indeed continuing
the Greek stories fascinated his poetic imagination. The comparison was
immediately made by Propertius (2.34.65—6):
cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite Grai;
nescioquid maius nascitur I Hade.
Yield, you writers of Rome, yield, you Greeks; something is being born that is greater
than the Iliad.
The idea was expressed in the Donatus life (21), where the Aeneid is described
as a kind of equivalent of both Homer's poems — quasi amborum Homeri
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