Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types. Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic preoccupations;[34] but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric[35] fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious fictions by the _declamatores_. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises above the schools. Vergil was too great to move on that level; but even he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method. He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization inferior to his composition. (5). _Epic Diction_ Generations have felt in the _Æneid_, first of all, high and constant beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful. The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.[36] atque arida circum Nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam. Tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerealiaque arma Expediunt fessi rerum; frugesque receptas Et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo. I. 175.