The Iliad is a story set in the war between Greeks and Trojans the Odyssey is the story of one Greek hero's homecoming after the sack of Troy. His masterstroke was to see in the story of Aeneas an opportunity to create a structural and thematic reworking of both the epics of Homer. There were eighteen books, unfinished at their author's death, of which only fragments survive, but enough to show that Virgil often echoes the grand cadences and phrases of his predecessor.īut in composing the Aeneid Virgil deliberately departed from the annalistic tradition. His Annales, as their name implies, was a chronological record of the story of Rome from the fall of Troy (Virgil's starting-point too, though his treatment is not chronological) to the death of Romulus. Earlier, Quintus Ennius (239–169 bc) had written heroic narrative epic, proudly claiming to be a reincarnation of Homer. Lucretius' great didactic epic De Rerum Natura (‘on the nature of things’) was an exposition of the physical universe according to the doctrine of Epicurus: although Virgil reacted against its materialism, he was much indebted to Lucretius' style and technique. Other Latin poets before Virgil had written important large-scale hexameter compositions.
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