More than Propaganda
The Aeneid is, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, a very well-written book. (Yes, I know I give a lot of stuff 5 stars, but that's because so many of the books I'm reading turn out to be so good.) Virgil reuses a lot of material from those two books, but he does a good job with it. He takes what had been a Greek epic, with Greek heroes, and turns it into a very patriotic Roman epic. In some ways, The Aeneid is a colossal propaganda piece. One of the ideas behind the writing of the book is to establish that Augustus Caesar is descended from the gods, and is fated to bring in a golden age of peace. In fact, Octavian commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid for that very purpose. However, because the story of Aeneas is larger than just proving Octavian's claim, the book itself is more than propaganda.
