poem, since Homer was the only authority for the life of the heroic age.

The Aeneid was nothing less than the bold attempt to arouse Roman patriotism and to create national enthusiasm by means of a literary creation constructed on Homeric foundations and largely out of Homeric materials.

The Iliad furnished the hero, Aeneas the son of Venus and Anchises, and it also furnished the driving motive of the poem, the anger of Juno, and it likewise furnished the pattern for the war and the battles by which the native races were subdued. The Odyssey furnished the outline for the journeyings and for most of the adventures in or near fairyland, but the influence of both poems is evident in all parts of the poem, even if the first six books roughly correspond to the Odyssey, the last six books to the Iliad.

Some of the structural similarities with the Odyssey are the following: several years of the hero's wanderings have passed before the action of the poem begins; the hero is driven by a storm to a region where his glory is already known; Odysseus hears a song in which his own praise is sung and Aeneas sees representations of his own greatness done in bronze;

each is urged to tell of his wanderings and his name; and each takes up in the same manner the story of his miseries and adventures.

In both poems the story of the hero's own adventures is told in the first person, "I suffered this, or I did that," but when they leave the land to which they had been storm-driven, the poet tells the tale in his own person and both Odysseus and Aeneas act and speak in the third person.

The storm is similarly described in both, even the same minute details reappear, e.g., Homer says: "Poseidon covered sea and land alike with clouds, and night came down from the heavens," and Virgil renders it thus:

Eripiunt subito nubes caelumque diemque Teucrorum ex oculis; ponto nox incubat atra.

Aeneas as well as Odysseus passed by or near Scylla, Charybdis, Circe, and the Sirens, but it was obviously impossible for them both to have had similar adventures with the Cyclops, for that monster had but one eye, and this single eye could not have twice been blinded. Virgil introduced the shrewd device of having Odysseus abandon unknowingly one of his companions in the haunts of the Cyclops,

then having this abandoned companion appeal to Aeneas for safety and tell to Trojan ears the horrible tale of the fate of his own associates within the cave of Polyphemus.

Jupiter sent Mercury to make known his purpose that Aeneas must not remain with Dido, as the same god was sent by him to Calypso to perform a like service concerning Odysseus.

Games were held in honor of Anchises, exactly as they had been held in honor of Patroclus. A ship-race is substituted for the chariotrace, but the incidents are very similar. In some of the other contests the very details of the Iliad are repeated. In the foot-race of the Homeric games Ajax, the son of Oileus, is about to win, when he slips and falls in the dung and filth of slaughtered oxen; so also Nisus who is in front of the runners falls down in the gore and filth of cattle which had just been slain.

In Homer's account of the contest in archery it is said that a dove was fastened by a thong to a pole or mast; then the announcement was made that the one who cut the thong would receive the second prize, the one who hit the bird would be the winner. In this contest

Teucer shot and missed the bird, but cut the thong so that the loosened bird flew aloft, but Meriones, who was all-prepared, slew the bird as it flew and thus won the first prize.

There is a logical difficulty in this contest, for had the first archer succeeded in the easier task of hitting the tethered bird the second archer could have had no contest, for he certainly would not have aimed at the thong. One would have supposed that Virgil could have made a slight change here and thus have provided a real contest, but he did not; for in this same contest in archery Mnestheus' shot severs the cord which bound the bird and as it flies aloft it is transfixed by the arrow shot from the bow of Eurytion. Virgil could not represent the great archer of the Trojans, Pandarus, as victor, for Pandarus had been slain, but he represents Eurytion as the brother of that treacherous bowman.

Such athletic contests as are described by both of these poets were the very life of the ancient Greeks and their greatest glory was the athletic prize, but such contests held no high place among the Romans, and the feelings aroused in a Greek by such descriptions had no counterpart in their emotions. The games in

Virgil are not only an imitation, but they are exotic, foreign to Latin life and thought.

Aeneas, too, was forced to take a trip to Hades in order to consult the shade of Anchises, just as Odysseus had made the same journey to consult the shade of Tiresias. When Odysseus was starting on this journey, one of his companions had died from accident unobserved by his companions; this shade of the unburied sailor met Odysseus before he entered Hades and begged him to perform the fitting burial rites, then erect on the top of his mound an upright oar, the oar with which in life he had rowed with his companions. Aeneas in a similar manner learns of the death of his follower and promises to erect for him a mound and on that mound to fix the oar with which he, Misenus, had rowed.

Aeneas as well as Odysseus found that a sword could not avail against the shades, for they were unsubstantial phantoms. The silent anger with which Ajax turned away from Odysseus furnished Virgil the chosen method for describing the meeting in Hades of Dido and Aeneas.

The description of the war which occupies much of the last six books of the Aeneid