It is the great past, illustrated by the pageant of heroes and the prophetic pictures of Aeneas’s shield, that kindles the poet’s imagination.  His sympathies are generous enough to include every race within the empire and every leader who had shared in Rome’s making, from the divine founder, Romulus, and the tyrannicide, Brutus, to the republican martyrs, Cato and Pompey, as well as the restorers of peace, Caesar and Augustus.  He has no false patriotism that blinds him to Rome’s shortcomings.  He frankly admits with regret her failures in arts and sciences with a modesty that permits of no reference to his own saving work.  What Rome has done and can do supremely well he also knows:  she can rule with justice, banish violence with law, and displace war by peace.  After the years of civil wars which he had lived through in agony of spirit, it is not strange that such a mission seemed to him supreme.  And that is why the last words of Anchises to Aeneas are: 

  Hae tibi erunt artes:  pacisque imponere morem
  Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tragedy of Dido reveals better perhaps than any other portion of the Aeneid how sensitively the poet reflected Rome’s life and thought rather than those of his Greek literary sources.  And yet the irrepressible Servius was so reckless as to say that the whole book had been “transferred” from Apollonius.  Fortunately we have in this case the alleged source, and can meet the scholiast with a sweeping denial.  Both authors portray the love of a woman, and there the similarity ends.  Apollonius is wholly dependent upon a literal Cupid and his shafts.  Vergil, to be sure, is so far obedient to Greek convention as to play with the motive—­Cupid came to the banquet in the form of Ascanius—­but only after it was really no longer needed.  The psychology of passion’s progress in the first book is convincingly expressed for the first time in any literature.  Aeneas first receives a full account of Dido’s deeds of courage and presently beholds her as she sits upon her throne, directing the work of city building, judging and ruling as lawgiver and administrator, and finally proclaiming mercy for his shipwrecked companions.  For her part she, we discover as he does, had long known his story, and in her admiration for his people had chosen the deeds of Trojan heroes for representation upon the temple doors:  Sunt lacrimae rerum.  The poet simply and naturally leads hero and heroine through the experience of admiration, generous sympathy, and gratitude to an inevitable affection, which at the night’s banquet, through a soul-stirring tale told with dignity and heard in rapture, could only ripen into a very human passion.

The vital difference between Vergil’s treatment of the theme and Apollonius’ may be traced to the difference between the Roman and the Greek family.  Into Italy as into Greece had come, many centuries before, hordes of Indo-European migrants from the Danubian region who had carried into the South the wholesome family customs of the North, the very customs indeed out of which the transalpine literature of medieval chivalry later blossomed.