PREFACE TO THE 1ST EDITION

This book does not attempt to pass value-judgements but to establish historical facts. It does not ask what Virgil should or could have done, but what he wished to do; it tries to understand how the Aeneid came into being, in so far as it was the result of the poet's conscious and purposeful artistic actions. It is true that this method will also cast sidelights on the poet's personality, his view of the world, the intellectual currents of his time; I have touched upon these things when the questions which I have asked myself could be answered in no other way. I have completely ignored the language and metre of the Aeneid : both are of the greatest importance for the effect of the work, but not for the understanding of the work as an epic poem. My greatest desire was to further this understanding; if I have succeeded, the history of poetic technique will also have benefitted. I do not need to spell out how much remains to be done in this field; my work has necessarily suffered from the fact that there is as yet no adequate study of the technique of pre-Virgilian prose or verse narrative, and the post-Aristotelian theory of narrative art is also still totally obscure. I have only been able to fill these gaps to a very small extent for my own purposes; my main aim had to be to deduce from the work itself the artistic intentions of the Aeneid . There had not been many previous studies of this precise subject, but every contribution to the understanding of any single line was there for me to draw upon, and it goes without saying that I could not have written this book without the work of generations of commentators. I have made use of this common store of knowledge built up by their diligence without giving detailed references, or even checking to establish, for example, who was the first to discover the Greek original of one of Virgil's lines, or who first aired a now generally accepted explanation; for the rest I have tried to give honour where honour is due, although the extent of international literature on Virgil is so great that I cannot be sure that I have succeeded. Again and again I could have entered into controversies about points great and small; I refrained from this for the most part, only referring to a few very recent works which seem to me to be typical of certain directions taken by modern interpreters of Virgil.

The two halves of the book attempt to reach the same goal by different paths. In the first half I have analysed the technique of fairly long passages of the Aeneid . I hope that these chapters will, if used in conjunction with the existing commentaries, serve as an introduction to those wishing to learn to understand the work. For each passage I have tried to establish what the poet was trying to do, and reconstruct the considerations which led him to the existing solution; I have tried to establish what the poet found in his sources and what he borrowed from his models, thereby providing a basis for the examination of his own contribution as adaptor or new creator. At the same time I had to consider how the shaping of his whole work was influenced not only by his aesthetic goals but also by his political and moral standpoint. The

second half summarizes the results gained from this examination and attempts to organize them into a systematic account of his epic technique. I could not always avoid repeating myself; I hope to have avoided this where possible by the use of plentiful cross-references.

BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1902