ABSTRACT
Richard Jenkyns has recently argued that Virgil wrote his poetry in order to promote the expansive idea and reality of the Roman empire. In so doing, Virgil’s wonderfully sensitive and recombinative imagination gave to western culture a new kind of patriotic sensibility and relationship to the land. This tied a Lucretian, worshipful sensibility of place to a Roman imperial ideology that celebrated the virtues of warrior-founders of culture. These included, by association, Augustus himself. Virgil thereby created patria, a mystical notion of the new imperial homeland to be labored over, fought for and colonized by a virtuous community, both in the Georgics and in the colonial epic par excellence, the Aeneid. According to Jenkyns, Virgil created this ideology for more than merely propagandistic reasons, although Augustus was encouraged to adopt it as his own.1
