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.
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.
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.
