The Aeneid reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have reiterated, an unsurpassed range of reading.  But it is not necessary to repeat the evidence of Vergil’s literary obligations in an essay concerned chiefly with the poet’s more intimate experiences.  In point of fact, the tracking of poetic reminiscences in a poet who lived when no concealment of borrowed thought was demanded does as much violence to Vergil as it does to Euripides or Petrarch.  The poet has always been expected to give expression to his own convictions, but until recently it has been considered a graceful act on his part to honor the good work of his predecessors by the frank use, in recognizable form, of the lines that he most admires.  The only requirement has been that the poet should assimilate, and not merely agglomerate his acceptances, that he should as Vergil put it, “wrest the club from Hercules” and wield it as its master.

In essence the poetry of the Aeneid is never Homeric, despite the incorporation of many Homeric lines.  It is rather a sapling of Vergil’s Hellenistic garden, slowly acclimated to the Italian soil, fed richly by years of philosophic study, braced, pruned, and reared into a tree of noble strength and classic dignity.  The form and majesty of the tree bespeak infinite care in cultivation, but the fruit has not lost the delicate tang and savour of its seed.  The poet of the Ciris, the Copa, the Dirae, and the Bucolics is never far to seek in the Aeneid.

It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil’s boyhood garden-plot.[1] The note of intimacy, unexpected in an epic, the occasional drawing of the veil to reveal the poet’s own countenance, an un-Homeric sentimentality now and then, the great abundance of sense-teeming collocations, the depth of sympathy revealed in such tragic characters as Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, the insistent study of inner motives, the meticulous selection of incidents, the careful artistry of the meter, the fastidious choice of words, and the precision of the joiner’s craft in the composition of traditional elements, all suggest the habits of work practiced by the friends of Cinna and Valerius Cato.

[Footnote 1:  For a careful study of this subject see Duckett, Hellenistic Influence on the Aeneid, Smith College Studies, 1920.]

The last point is well illustrated in Sinon’s speech at the opening of the second book.  The old folktale of how the “wooden horse,” left on the shore by the Greeks, was recklessly dragged to the citadel by the Trojans satisfied the unquestioning Homer.  Vergil does not take the improbable on faith.  Sinon is compelled to be entirely convincing.  In his speech he uses every art of persuasion:  he awakens in turn curiosity, surprise, pity, admiration, sympathy, and faith.  The passage is as curiously wrought as any episode of Catullus or the Ciris.