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.