Virgil, who came to maturity as a poet while the republic was in its death throes, longed for the peace that Augustus promised and eventually brought, and supported wholeheartedly the emperor's policies. The simultaneous appearance of these two figures on the world's stage — the man of power able to inspire the man of poetic genius — resulted in the Aeneid, whose primary purpose was to remind its original readers of the heroic past from which Rome was believed to have sprung, and to arouse hopes for an equally heroic future.
(All quotations are from Robert Fitzgerald's translation, The Aeneid, published by Random House, 1983.)
