refore, justly
conclude that when he wrote the epic he advocated a constitution of the
type proposed by Cicero, in which the _princeps_ should be a true leader
in the state but in a constitutional republic.

It is the great past, illustrated by the pageant of heroes and the
prophetic pictures of Aeneas's shield, that kindles the poet's
imagination. His sympathies are generous enough to include every race
within the empire and every leader who had shared in Rome's making,
from the divine founder, Romulus, and the tyrannicide, Brutus, to the
republican martyrs, Cato and Pompey, as well as the restorers of peace,
Caesar and Augustus. He has no false patriotism that blinds him to Rome's
shortcomings. He frankly admits with regret her failures in arts and
sciences with a modesty that permits of no reference to his own saving
work. What Rome has done and can do supremely well he also knows: she can
rule with justice, banish violence with law, and displace war by peace.
After the years of civil wars which he had lived through in agony of
spirit, it is not strange that such a mission seemed to him supreme. And
that is why the last words of Anchises to Aeneas are:

Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tragedy of Dido reveals better perhaps than any other portion of
the _Aeneid_ how sensitively the poet reflected Rome's life and
thought rather than those of his Greek literary sources. And yet the
irrepressible Servius was so reckless as to say that the whole book had
been "transferred" from Apollonius. Fortunately we have in this case the
alleged source, and can meet the scholiast with a sweeping denial. Both
authors portray the love of a woman, and there the similarity ends.
Apollonius is wholly dependent upon a literal Cupid and his shafts.
Vergil, to be sure, is so far obedient to Greek convention as to play
with the motive--Cupid came to the banquet in the form of Ascanius--but
only after it was really no longer needed. The psychology of passion's
progress in the first book is convincingly expressed for the first time in
any literature. Aeneas first receives a full account of Dido's deeds of
courage and presently beholds her as she sits upon her throne,
directing the work of city building, judging and ruling as lawgiver
and administrator, and finally proclaiming mercy for his shipwrecked
companions. For her part she, we discover as he does, had long known
his story