The Nature of Things showed Virgil the way to the Georgics, and the Georgics showed him that he could attempt an even longer poem, his epic Aeneid. But there is a deeper influence of Lucretius upon the Aeneid to be considered. Lucretius put the idea of salvation into the ‘great poem’ and Virgil then put it into the heroic poem. Virgil’s Aeneas is a man who is on a quest to found a city, and the poem studies how human beings may hope for happiness and security. Lucretius finds safety within the individual, in the citadel of the soul; the Aeneid finds it in human institutions, in city and land,
...more
