But it is Virgil who really begins the development of epic art.  He took over from Apollonius love as part of the epic symbolism of life, and delicate psychology as part of the epic method.  And, like Apollonius, he used these novelties chiefly in the person of a heroine.  But in Virgil they belong to an incomparably greater art; and it is through Virgil that they have become necessities of the epic tradition.  More than this, however, was required of him.  The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work.  That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.  Virgil not only implies, he often clearly states, the original epic values of life, the Homeric values; as in the famous: 

  Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus
  Omnibus est vitae:  sed famam extendere factis,
  Hoc virtutis opus.[10]

But to write a poem chiefly to symbolize this simple, heroic metaphysic would scarcely have done for Virgil; it would certainly not have done for his time.  It was eminently a time of social organization, one might perhaps say of social consciousness.  After Sylla and Marius and Caesar, life as an affair of sheer individualism would not very strongly appeal to a thoughtful Roman.  Accordingly, as has so often been remarked, the Aeneid celebrates the Roman Empire.  A political idea does not seem a very likely subject for a kind of poetry which must declare greatly the fundamentals of living; not even when it is a political idea unequalled in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire.  Had Virgil been a good Roman, the Aeneid might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome generally, desired, a political epic.  But Virgil was not a good Roman; there was something in him that was not Roman at all.  It was this strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life.  We must remember here the Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue—­that extraordinary, impassioned poem in which he dreams of man attaining to some perfection of living.  It is still this Virgil, though saddened and resigned, who writes the Aeneid.  Man creating his own destiny, man, however wearied with the long task of resistance, achieving some conscious community of aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself:  the poet whose lovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of that, is assuredly carrying on the work of Homer.  This was the development in epic intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of civilization.