But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the _Æneid_ should be unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope. How, then, is the _Æneid_ dramatic? In the composition of the whole only by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such articulation as had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the parts singly his art is more dramatic. The _Æneid_ as a whole is not dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.[26] For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again, the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his own epic mission—_dux femina facti_. Follows his view of the city, big already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace. Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to a waiting stage and a waiting audience, _enter Dido_.[27] Moreover in the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry[28] and became a rhetorical commonplace with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility, in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above. For the fourth book of the _Æneid_, as fully as the _Antigone_, is tragic in its purgation of pity and fear.