iends.

Like every cultivated Roman of that age, Virgil was a close student
of the literature and philosophy of the Greeks, and his poems bear
eloquent testimony to the profound impression made upon him by his
reading of the Greek poets. His first important work, the _Eclogues_,
was directly inspired by the pastoral poems of Theocritus, from whom
he borrowed not only much of his imagery but even whole lines; in
the _Georgics_ he took as his model the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod,
and though in the former case it must be confessed that he suffers
from the weakness inherent in all imitative poetry, in the latter
he far surpasses the slow and simple verses of the Boeotian. But here
we must guard ourselves against a misapprehension. We moderns look
askance at the writer who borrows without acknowledgment the
thoughts and phrases of his forerunners, but the Roman critics of
the Augustan Age looked at the matter from a different point of view.
They regarded the Greeks as having set the standard of the highest
possible achievement in literature, and believed that it should be
the aim of every writer to be faithful, not only to the spirit, but
even to the letter of their great exemplars. Hence it was only natural
that when Virgil essayed the task of writing the national Epic of
his country, he should be studious to embody in his work all that
was best in Greek Epic poetry.

It is difficult in criticizing Virgil to avoid comparing him to some
extent with Homer. But though Virgil copied Homer freely, any
comparison between them is apt to be misleading. A primitive epic,
like the _Iliad_ or the _Nibelungenlied_, produced by an imaginative
people at an early stage in its development, telling its stories
simply for the sake of story telling, cannot be judged by the same
canons of criticism as a literary epic like the _Aeneid_ or _Paradise
Lost_, which is the work of a great poet in an age of advanced culture,
and sets forth a great idea in a narrative form. The Greek writer
to whom Virgil owes most perhaps, is Apollonius of Rhodes, from whose
_Argonautica_ he borrowed the love interest of the _Aeneid_. And
though the Roman is a far greater poet, in this instance the advantage
is by no means on his side, for, as Professor Gilbert Murray has so
well said, 'the Medea and Jason of the _Argonautica_ are at once more
interesting and more natural than their copies, the Dido and Aeneas
of the _Aeneid_. The wild love of the witch-maiden sits