The Roman poet Virgil (sometimes spelled "Vergil") is best-known for his epic work The Aeneid which celebrates the founding of Rome. The work takes its shape from the Greek epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and like the latter work, it tells of what happened to one of the leaders in the Trojan War in the years immediately following that conflict. Yet while there are similarities between Homer and Virgil, there are also important differences showing that Virgil is a product of a different culture, has a particular agenda in the writing of his epic that sets him apart, and shaped his work in a way that allowed it to be seen as both a synthesis of Greek and Roman culture but also as a precursor and standard for Western culture thereafter.
Three of the more obvious differences between the epics of Homer and the epic of Virgil are as follows: 1) Homer's works were part of an oral tradition and were not written down until long after they had been composed and passed from generation to generation, while Virgil produced a manuscript which he constantly revised and which he in fact wanted destroyed after his death because he was not happy with it; the Emperor Augustus ordered that Virgil's manuscript be preserved (Payne 197). 2) Virgil's epic was intended to praise the rule of Augustus, supposed descendant of Aeneas, the founder of Rome, and to celebrate the peace and prosperity Augustus achieved, while Homer's poems celebrated the mythic past of Greece but did not have a particular political object in mind (Payne 196). 3) The critical respect accorded Homer has not been given to Virgil as well, and his reputation was diminished by the view that he had done little more than imitate Homer with the Aeneid:
Its first half, recounting the wandering of Aeneas and his vanquished colleagues after the fall of Troy, owed more than a little to The Odyssey. Its last six books, in which the hero wages war on Italian tribes and fulf...