For Greek tragedians who wrote in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., their favorite source of plots was their mythological heritage, and, naturally, the Trojan War was a major part of this tradition. Many playwrights dealt with incidents drawn from Homer or the Cyclic poets, and Virgil, being a scholar as well as an artist, was thoroughly acquainted with these dramatists, including Sophocles and Aeschylus. The plays of the Greek dramatist Euripides especially influenced him, for Virgil possesses the same humanistic outlook and horror of war that Euripides was renowned for. Euripides's Trojan Women and Hecuba, which question one of the most pathetic situations of any war — the fate of noncombatants who, through no fault of their own, must suffer bitter hardships and endure the loss of home, family, pride, and country — must have been on Virgil's mind when he wrote about the fate of the Trojans in Book II. No doubt Virgil recalled Euripides's Andromachë when he described Aeneas's encounter with Andromachë, Hector's widow, at Buthrotum in Book III, by which time she had become Helenus's wife.
By the third century B.C., the center of Hellenic culture and scholarship had moved from mainland Greece to the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Here, a school of poetry developed that is noted for its love of learning, literary decoration, and stylistic polish. Virgil and many of his Roman compatriots were deeply and permanently influenced by this school's methods. One of the most important poets of this period was Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the Argonautica, an epic in four books that concerns the quest for the Golden Fleece. A comparison of the romance of Jason and Medea in the Argonautica to that of Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid, and the treatment of the gods in both poems clearly indicate Virgil's debt to Apollonius.
