Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated in Brunetière’s _évolution des genres_, evidently epic meant something controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits _personæ_ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material, but the epic form, to a new end. His Sinon[42] is a typical instance of artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he has become through his new function and motivation creatively original. Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but Vergil does not rely on the general _mêlée_; he modifies it subtly in the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the present. The _Æneid_ is not a Latin _Iliad_; it is a Roman epic. Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer in the direction of drama.[43] How, and how far, imitation of drama can serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.[44] Epic diction, he discerns, in order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom. B. THE NARRATIVE POETRY OF OVID