It has been inferred from the position of authority which Aeneas assumes that Vergil favored a strong monarchial form of government and intended Aeneas to be, as it were, a prototype of Augustus.  The inference is doubtless over-hasty.  Vergil had a lively historical sense and in his hero seems only to have attempted a picture of a primitive king of the heroic age.  Indeed Aeneas is perhaps more of an autocrat than are the Homeric kings, but that is because the Trojans are pictured as a migrating group, torn root and branch from their land and government, and following a semi-divine leader whose directions they have deliberately chosen to obey.  In his references to Roman history, in the pageant of heroes of the sixth book, as well as in the historical scenes of the shield, no monarchial tendencies appear.  Brutus the tyrannicide, Pompey and Cato, the irreconcilable foes of Caesar, Vergil’s youthful hero, receive their meed of praise in the Aeneid, though there were many who held it treason in that day to mention rebels with respect.

It is indeed a very striking fact that Vergil, who was the first of Roman writers to attribute divine honors to the youthful Octavian, refrains entirely from doing so in the Aeneid at a time when the rest of Rome hesitated at no form of laudation.  Julius Caesar is still recognized as more than human,

  vocabitur hic quoque votis,

but Augustus is not.  The contrast is significant.  The language of the very young man at Naples had, of course, been colored by Oriental forms of expression that were in part unconsciously imbibed from the conversations of the Garden.  These were phrases too which Julius Caesar in the last two years of his life encouraged; for he had learned from Alexander’s experience that the shortest cut through constitutional obstructions to supreme power lay by way of the doctrine of divine royalty.  In fact, the Senate was forced to recognize the doctrine before Caesar’s death, and after his death consistently voted public sacrifices at his grave.  Vergil was, therefore, following a high authority in the case of Caesar, and was drawing the logical inference in the case of Octavian when he wrote the first Eclogue and the prooemium of the Georgics.  This makes it all the more remarkable that while his admiration for Augustus increased with the years, he ceased to give any countenance to the growing cult of “emperor worship.”  That the restraint was not simply in obedience to a governmental policy seems clear, for Horace, who in his youthful work had shown his distrust of the government, had now learned to make very liberal use of celestial appellatives.

Augustus, then, is not in any way identified with the semi-divine Aeneas.  Vergil does not even place him at a post of special honor on the mount of revelations, but rather in the midst of a long line of remarkable principes.  With dignity and sanity he lays the stress upon the great events of the Republic and upon its heroes.  We may, therefore, justly conclude that when he wrote the epic he advocated a constitution of the type proposed by Cicero, in which the princeps should be a true leader in the state but in a constitutional republic.