After the years of civil wars which he had lived through in agony of
spirit, it is not strange that such a mission seemed to him supreme. And
that is why the last words of Anchises to Aeneas are:

Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tragedy of Dido reveals better perhaps than any other portion of
the _Aeneid_ how sensitively the poet reflected Rome's life and
thought rather than those of his Greek literary sources. And yet the
irrepressible Servius was so reckless as to say that the whole book had
been "transferred" from Apollonius. Fortunately we have in this case the
alleged source, and can meet the scholiast with a sweeping denial. Both
authors portray the love of a woman, and there the similarity ends.
Apollonius is wholly dependent upon a literal Cupid and his shafts.
Vergil, to be sure, is so far obedient to Greek convention as to play
with the motive--Cupid came to the banquet in the form of Ascanius--but
only after it was really no longer needed. The psychology of passion's
progress in the first book is convincingly expressed for the first time in
any literature. Aeneas first receives a full account of Dido's deeds of
courage and presently beholds her as she sits upon her throne,
directing the work of city building, judging and ruling as lawgiver
and administrator, and finally proclaiming mercy for his shipwrecked
companions. For her part she, we discover as he does, had long known
his story, and in her admiration for his people had chosen the deeds of
Trojan heroes for representation upon the temple doors: Sunt lacrimae
rerum. The poet simply and naturally leads hero and heroine through
the experience of admiration, generous sympathy, and gratitude to
an inevitable affection, which at the night's banquet, through a
soul-stirring tale told with dignity and heard in rapture, could only