g the Gods would permit him to return to his home.
There were Trojan heroes, however, as well as Greek, and AEneas was one of
them. Virgil, the Latin poet, has told in the AEneid the story of his
troubles and adventures. AEneas, too, was driven over the waters, for the
Gods had told him it was the will of Jupiter, or Zeus, as it is in Greek,
for him to seek Italy and there found a city. Part of his journey is the
same as that of Ulysses. He, too, stops at the country of the one-eyed
giants and has to row as fast as he can to escape the rocks that they
throw at his vessel. He, too, hears the thunders of Mount AEtna and sees
the flashing of the fires of the volcano. His sailors point to it in fear
and whisper to one another, "That is the giant Enceladus. He rebelled
against the Gods and they piled the mountain on top of him. The fires of
Jupiter burn him, and he breathes out glowing flames. When he tosses from
one side to the other, the whole island of Sicily is shaken with a mighty
earthquake."

Virgil was no homeless singer; he was one of the great literary men of
Rome, and he read his poems aloud to the Emperor Augustus. He had a
handsome villa and a troop of friends. He enjoyed everything that was
beautiful and seemed as happy when a friend had written a good poem as if
he had composed it himself. He was never satisfied with his verse till he
had made every line as perfect as possible. When he was ill and knew that
he could not recover, he made a will, and in it he ordered the AEneid to be
burned, because it was not so polished as he wished. "I meant to spend
three years more on it," he said. Fortunately for all the people who enjoy
a great poem, the Emperor forbade that this part of the will should be
carried out. He gave the manuscript to three friends of Virgil, all of
them poets, with orders to strike out every phrase that they believed
Virgil would have struck out on revision, but not to add one word. This is
the way that the AEneid was saved for us. If it had been destroyed, we
should have lost the work of one of the best storytellers that have ever
lived.

Livy, too, was a friend of the Emperor Augustus, He lived in Rome,
enjoying his companions, the libraries of the city, and, most of all, his
independence. Even Virgil was ready to insert a few lines here and there
in a poem to gratify his friends, or to choose a subject that he knew
would please the Emperor; but Livy wrote on the subject that pleased him
and