[Footnote 2: Carcopino, _Virgile et les origines d'Ostie_.]

The poet's response to personal experience reveals itself nowhere more
than in the political aspect of the _Aeneid_ a fact that is the more
remarkable because Vergil lived so long in Epicurean circles where an
interest in politics was studiously suppressed.

What makes the poem the first of national epics is, however, not a
devotion to Rome's historical claims to primacy in Italy. The narrow
imperialism of the urban aristocracy finds no support in him. Not the
city of Rome but Italy is the _patria_ of the _Aeneid_, and Italy as a
civilizing and peace-bringing force, not as the exploiting conqueror.
Here we recognize a spirit akin to Julius Caesar. Vergil's hero Aeneas,
is not a Latin but a Trojan. That fact is, of course, due to the
exigencies of tradition, but that Aeneas receives his aid from the Greek
Evander and from the numerous Etruscan cities north of the Tiber while
most of the Latins join Turnus, the enemy, cannot be attributed to
tradition. In fact, Livy, who gives the more usual Roman version, says
nothing of the Greeks, but joins Latinus and the Latian aborigines to
Aeneas while he musters the Etruscans under the Rutulian, Turnus. The
explanation for Vergil's striking departure from the usual patriotic
version of the legend is rather involved and need not be examined here.
But we may at any rate remark his wish to recognize the many races that
had been amalgamated by the state, to refuse his approval of a narrow
urban patriotism, and to give his assent to a view of Rome's place
and mission upon which Julius Caesar had always acted in extending
citizenship to peoples of all races, in scattering Roman colonies
throughout the empire, and in setting the provinces on the road to a
full participation in imperial privileges and duties. With such a policy
Vergil, schooled at Cremona, Milan, and Naples, could hardly fail to
sympathize.

It has been inferred from the position of authority which Aeneas assumes
that Vergil favored a strong monarchial form of government and intended
Aeneas to be, as it were, a prototype of Augustus. The inference is
doubtless over-hasty. Vergil had a lively historical sense and in his
hero seems only to have attempted a picture of a primitive king of the
heroic age. Indeed Aeneas is perhaps more of an autocrat than are
the Homeric kings, but that is because the Trojans are pictured as a
migrating group, torn root and branc