ABSTRACT
The distinction between oral and literary epic, commonly made by critics, though useful for certain purposes, is apt, indeed, to distort the position of Virgil’s poem in the literary tradition to which it belongs. For him, as for his contemporaries, the poems of Homer were the work of a poet who differed from later epic poets only in being incomparably greater. Virgil’s Aeneid cannot claim to compete with Apollonius’ Argonautica as a linguistic tour de force, it is after all written in a different language. But Apollonius’ epic is only superficially Homeric; Virgil’s evocation of Homer aims deeper, at the very core. In returning to Homer, he returned, moreover, in no archaizing mood; he returned to challenge directly the greatest poet of antiquity. The poem remains none the less manifestly, in form, a Homeric epic. Virgil makes of course no particular effort at accurate reconstruction of Mycenaean times.
