When Virgil sat down to write Rome’s national epic, he was faced with no small task. He had to produce a masterpiece that would rival Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, please the emperor Augustus, and arouse patriotism in the Roman people. He had to shape Aeneas into a true Roman hero, a valiant man who first survives war and a shipwreck and then chooses duty over love, willingly leaving Dido to fulfill his duty of founding a new empire. Significantly, however, Virgil had a major obstacle to overcome: the Fall of Troy. For Virgil, there was no escaping that Aeneas’s people, the Trojans, lost the Trojan War and that loss certainly didn’t look very grand, glorious, or superior. Could Virgil’s epic hero founder of the illustrious family tree that bred the Roman empire and Augustus himself really be a loser? Virgil had to remedy this perception in order to make sure that Aeneas did not come across as a failure. He had to guarantee that any Roman reading this epic knew that it was not the Trojans’ naivety or ignorance or inexperience that cost them the war; rather, it was their generosity of spirit. Virgil knew he had to paint the Greeks as ruthless tricksters, evil beings, beguiling snakes, and deceitful scoundrels, and then paint the Trojans as wonderfully …show more content…
He does so by using diction with a more critical tone towards the Greeks. When Virgil writes, “This fraud of Sinon, his accomplished lying, won us over; a tall tale of fake tears had captured us...”, (lines 259261) you can tell that he wants Sinon and the Greeks to look conniving and untrustworthy. Although Sinon’s story is fake, he says, “Day in , day out, Ulysses found new ways to bait and terrify me, putting out shady rumors...”, (lines 128129). This shows how the Greeks can be seen as cruel even in the eyes of their own