Even before it became generally available as a written text, Virgil’s Aeneid was famous. A younger poet, Propertius, wrote in elegiac verse an announcement: Give way, you Roman writers, give way, Greeks. Something greater than the Iliad is being born. (2.34.65–66, trans. Knox) As copies appeared and multiplied, the Aeneid became the textbook for the Roman school and the medieval school after that.
