Nowhere is Homer more easily recognized as Virgil's chief source of poetic reference than in Book VI of the Aeneid. The story of Aeneas's descent into the underworld abounds in details that reflect original counterparts in Book XI of the Odyssey, which tells of Odysseus's own visit to the land of the dead to consult the ghost of the Theban seer Tiresias, who resembles Anchises in his prophetic role. However, Anchises's philosophical concepts, which prepare for the historical pageant that is central to Book VI, have absolutely no place in the Odyssey, being alien to Homer's joyous, life-embracing realism. Anchises's presenting Rome's glorious future is entirely different from Tiresias's role, which is to advise Odysseus only on the events of the hero's own future before and after arriving home in Ithaca.
Here, as elsewhere, Virgil's main reason for constructing parallels to Homer, which he was no doubt certain his readers would identify and relish, was to add luster to the Aeneid as a latter-day epic appearing in another language more than seven centuries after his immensely prestigious, literary forebear. Virgil gives Homer's original incidents an import for the development of his own epic that is absent from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Never far from his mind is his purpose of making the Aeneid a national epic (discussed in the next essay), which neither of Homer's works were. Once we understand how Virgil adapted his borrowings from Homer for his own ends, we see how far he was from being a mere imitator of the great poet who preceded him.
In the centuries that immediately followed the time of Homer, a number of epics of little quality were written that supplemented the information in the Iliad and the Odyssey. These poems, known as the Cyclic Epics, describe the events of the Trojan War before and after the period covered by the Iliad and recount the additional adventures of other heroes besides Odysseus. Only fragments of these minor epics survive today, but scholars have a fairly good idea of their entire contents. The Cyclic Epics provided Virgil with a wealth of mythological material, which he incorporated into the Aeneid in order to enrich his poem. The most important portions of the Aeneid to be drawn from these minor poems are the stories of the wooden horse and the sack of Troy, which are dramatically retold in Book II.
