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RECONCILING EAST AND WEST IN VIRGIL'S AENEID

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From: AUMLA : Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association
Date: 20050501
Author:Whitehorne, John

Studies on Virgil1 typically identify several reasons why the poet should have chosen the legend of Aeneas as his subject when in 29 BC2 he at last began work on his long awaited and long deferred epic.3

In his earliest works, the Eclogues, Virgil had measured himself first against the Alexandrian poet Theocritus, the master of the short hexameter poem. Short poems, inspired by Greek models and written in a variety of metres, were the form of poetry currently fashionable in Virgil's own time in the later Roman republic. Then in the Georgics he had tested himself against Callimachus, perhaps ...

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