CHAPTER X - THE AENEID AS THE EPIC OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Summary

Various Modes of National Sentiment expressed in the Aeneid

The Aeneid, like the Annals of Ennius, is a poem inspired by national sentiment, and expressive of the idea of Rome. But the ‘Res Romana,’ the growth of which Ennius witnessed and celebrated, had become greatly extended and had assumed a new form since the epic of the Republic was written. Yet the sentiment of national glory was essentially the same in the age of the elder Scipio and in the age of Augustus, though in the first it may be described as still militant, in the second as triumphant. In each time the Romans had a firm conviction of their superiority over all other nations, and a firm trust in the great destiny which had attended them since their origin, and still, as they believed, awaited them in the future. The ground on which their national self-esteem rested was their capacity for conquest and government; the result of that capacity was only fully visible after the empire over the world was established.

The pride of empire is thus the most prominent mode in which the national sentiment asserts itself in the poetry of the Augustan Age.