temples laden with antique arms and armor deposited as votive offerings, terracotta statues of gods and heroes, and even documents stored for safe-keeping.  In the expansion of Rome over the Campus Martius unmarked tombs with their antique furniture were often disclosed.  It is apparent from his works that Vergil examined such material, just as he delved into Varro’s antiquities and Cato’s “origins” for ancient lore.  His remarks on Praeneste and Antemnae, his knowledge of ancient coin symbols, of the early rites of the Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work.  It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast hoard of material.  There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic.  Wherever the work had received the final touch, the composition shows a flawless unity.

[Footnote 2:  Carcopino, Virgile et les origines d’Ostie.]

The poet’s response to personal experience reveals itself nowhere more than in the political aspect of the Aeneid a fact that is the more remarkable because Vergil lived so long in Epicurean circles where an interest in politics was studiously suppressed.

What makes the poem the first of national epics is, however, not a devotion to Rome’s historical claims to primacy in Italy.  The narrow imperialism of the urban aristocracy finds no support in him.  Not the city of Rome but Italy is the patria of the Aeneid, and Italy as a civilizing and peace-bringing force, not as the exploiting conqueror.  Here we recognize a spirit akin to Julius Caesar.  Vergil’s hero Aeneas, is not a Latin but a Trojan.  That fact is, of course, due to the exigencies of tradition, but that Aeneas receives his aid from the Greek Evander and from the numerous Etruscan cities north of the Tiber while most of the Latins join Turnus, the enemy, cannot be attributed to tradition.  In fact, Livy, who gives the more usual Roman version, says nothing of the Greeks, but joins Latinus and the Latian aborigines to Aeneas while he musters the Etruscans under the Rutulian, Turnus.  The explanation for Vergil’s striking departure from the usual patriotic version of the legend is rather involved and need not be examined here.  But we may at any rate remark his wish to recognize the many races that had been amalgamated by the state, to refuse his approval of a narrow urban patriotism, and to give his assent to a view of Rome’s place and mission upon which Julius Caesar had always acted in extending citizenship to peoples of all races, in scattering Roman colonies throughout the empire, and in setting the provinces on the road to a full participation in imperial privileges and duties.  With such a policy Vergil, schooled at Cremona, Milan, and Naples, could hardly fail to sympathize.