Long Tradition. By no means should one infer that Vergil was the only epic poet of Rome. On the contrary, he worked in a long-established tradition. The Annales of Ennius, who died a century before Vergil was born, already borrowed the dactylic hexameter for the recording of year-by-year Roman history (indeed, as an epic poet, Ennius presents himself as the reincarnation of Homer). Even earlier than this, Livius Andronicus had made a translation (although into saturnians) of Homer's Odyssey. But the genre was, from the beginning, a complicated one. For one thing, the poems of Hesiod date from approximately the same period as those of Homer, namely, the eighth/seventh century B.C.E., but the Works and Days of Hesiod is not a single long narrative about battles or wondrous adventure, like the Iliad and Odyssey, but rather a work...