Virgil and the Transition from Ancient to Modern Literature

Abstract

Some writer has said, "If Virgil were the sole remaining monument of the Roman civilization he would he sufficient," Possibly many a reader would contest a statement broad as this; all without exception, however, will agree that from the days when Virgil’s contemporaries copied h is style and wrote epics in imitation of the Aeneid, that the influence of the "Master Poet" upon the literature of the world has been a vital, a constant force. Probably because m ore than any other poet of antiquity Virgil represents the dominant mood of our own times has he again become a poet of such supreme importance. Even today in this age of aeroplanes, of radio, in short in this practical 20th century, do we hear echoes of his Eclogues in a newspaper column, quotations from his great epic from a soldier in the trenches. Just as a Homer, a Shakespeare remain alive after hundreds of years, so Virgil retains his uplifting and enlarging influence.