Like most Romans, Virgil was subject to the sway of Greek culture and Greek philosophy. For example, Plato, whose imaginative speculations concern the nature of the soul and its fate after death, influenced the Aeneid's Book VI, in which Aeneas visits his father in the underworld. Nonetheless, Virgil wrote in the Latin language and was the product of a Roman environment. His education, like that of all well-off Romans, was predominantly Greek, but Rome had its own long and fruitful literary history, which he was also familiar with.
Among Roman writers, Virgil learned most from Ennius, an epic poet of the second century B.C., who composed the Annales, a poem tracing Rome's history from Aeneas's wanderings to Ennius's own time; Lucretius, a poet of the early first century B.C., who wrote On the Nature of Things, a philosophical epic from which Virgil derived many of his own philosophical ideas; and Catullus, a lyric poet who lived in Julius Caesar's time. Each of these Roman writers was himself under the influence of Greek literary models, just as Virgil was.
Discovering the many sources from which Virgil drew ideas in no way lessens the magnitude of his achievement. A student of his predecessors but never a mere imitator, he reshaped, unified, and gave new meaning to his borrowings. His genius is shown by the beauty and originality of the Aeneid, which has become the literary justification and explanation of the Roman Empire to the entire world.
