'Something greater than the Iliad is being brought to birth', wrote Virgil's contemporary Propertius, in Western literature's most famous flourish of advance publicity. The Aeneid was published after Virgil's death, and at once established itself as Rome's national poem. The hero Aeneas flees from the sack of Troy, and after much suffering carves out a foothold for the future Romans in Italy. While defining and celebrating what it means to be Roman, the Aeneid confronts, with a bleak pathos, the tragedy involved in Rome's destiny.

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