Although Virgil lived and wrote two thousand years ago, he was the heir to a literary and cultural tradition that was many centuries older. A master of his art and a great creative genius, it is both understandable and natural that the form and content of the Aeneid were influenced by other writers. Among these influential sources are Homer, the Cyclic Epics, Euripides, Alexandrian poets, and earlier Roman writers.
The foremost influence on Virgil was Homer, the Greek poet who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. By Virgil’s time, Homer was acknowledged as the greatest of all poets, and Virgil studied Homeric epic poetry in order to develop his own artistic techniques. Writing the Aeneid, Virgil consciously competed against Homer, for he was composing what he hoped would become the national poem of the Roman people, just as the Homeric epics were of such special significance to the Greeks.
From Homer, Virgil derived many of the technical characteristics of the Aeneid, such as the use of hexameter verse, in which each poetic line consists of six metrical feet, each foot having two syllables; the twelve-book division of epic poetry; and the use of epithets. However, the two poets’s attitudes toward the world vary greatly. The Homeric epics are works in praise of the greatness and nobility of rugged individualism, whereas the Aeneid preaches the priority of organized society and the state over its citizens in order for individuals to achieve happiness. There is much to commend in both attitudes, and both poets express their views in works of great beauty.
Virgil strove to duplicate many of the famous episodes in the Iliad and the Odyssey in order to surpass Homer’s literary reputation. Additionally, he wanted to demonstrate that Latin was as well adapted to poetry as Greek.
The first half of the Aeneid resembles the first half of the Odyssey, which, because that poem has twice as many divisions as Virgil’s epic, comprises the twelve books that concern the wanderings of Odysseus as he seeks his homeland of Ithaca. The two heroes sail the same seas, and in Book III of the Aeneid, Virgil brings Aeneas and his people into contact with some of the same perils, thus providing strong reminders of the earlier epic.
In addition, the Aeneid’s second half, which begins with Book VII, bears a likeness to the Odyssey’s second half: Aeneas’s struggle to establish the Trojans in Italy recalls how Odysseus forced out his wife Penelope’s suitors, who usurped his place in his own household during his absence. Without any doubt, however, the Aeneid’s last six books, particularly starting with Book IX, when war finally breaks out, more strongly resemble the Iliad. One example of this similarity is the comparison between Turnus, who fights against the Trojans during Aeneas’s absence, and Hector, the Trojan prince who engages the Greeks in the absence of Achilles, who, angry with Agamemnon for having taken the woman Briseis from him, refuses to participate in the war until fairly late in Homer’s epic. Achilles eventually returns to battle and slays Hector in order to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero, just as Aeneas slays Turnus in order to avenge Pallas’s death at the hands of the Rutulian prince.
Many of the dreams, prophecies, and lists of genealogies in the Aeneid evoke Homer’s works. For example, Aeneas’s dream of Hector on the night that Troy falls to the Greeks recalls Achilles’s vision, in Book XXIII of the Iliad, of the great warrior Patroclus, who, having been slain by Hector, implores Achilles to perform the funeral rites necessary for his passage into the underworld. Patroclus visits Achilles because he is driven by a profound personal concern, while Hector’s appearance, like other incidents in the Aeneid that are based on Homer, is full of patriotic import. This parallel between Hector’s and Patroclus’s appearances is the only significant reference in the Aeneid’s Book II to Homer, who could not have influenced Virgil’s description of Troy’s fall for the simple reason that his Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, before Troy is destroyed, while his Odyssey begins ten years after the war is over.
It should be noted, however, that Homer was thoroughly learned in the stories having to do with Troy’s fall, particularly the wooden horse, which is referred to three times in the Odyssey—by Helen and Menelaus in Book IV, when Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, visits them at Sparta while seeking news of his absent father; by the blind bard Demodocus in the presence of Odysseus, who is being entertained with tales of the Trojan War in the king of Phaeacia’s court in Book VIII; and finally by Odysseus himself when, in Book XI, he speaks to Achilles’s ghost in the underworld about the bravery of his son Pyrrhus, who, as one of the warriors hidden in the wooden horse, showed no fear while waiting to be sprung from the horse’s body cavity.
