4 - The after-life of the Aeneid

Summary

Influence and reputation

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the after-life of the Aeneid is the sheer variety of ways in which it has been read, explained, criticised, imitated and admired from late antiquity until our own time. Homer enjoyed no such continuity, for the study of Greek virtually disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages and was not fully revived until the Renaissance. It is not possible here to consider in any detail the poem's role as a touchstone of changing literary taste or to enter the arid debate as to which was the greater, Homer or Virgil. Generally speaking, Homer was held to excel in invention or ingenium, Virgil in art, and the Aeneid was studied, copied and praised for its supreme technical mastery. Poetry was classified from antiquity to the Renaissance as a kind of rhetoric (‘eloquent speech’), and almost every known rhetorical figure could be illustrated from the poem.

Virgil was always regarded as a learned poet, doctus poeta, and the Aeneid was seen as a treasure-house of ancient Italian lore, much of it preserved by Virgil from earlier Italian antiquaries. But the poem's chief claim to fame was its genre-status as the first great national epic to be written in imitation of Homer: as such it became itself the principal model for later poets striving to create national epics in their own vernaculars. The Troy legend which was Virgil's starting-point became popular in medieval and renaissance chivalric romance.