By the time Virgil was putting the finishing touches to this book, the unsettled condition of the Roman state had begun to change for the better. A decade’s opposition to Octavian, led by the sons of Pompey and his old partner Antony, had come to an end with the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. The East and West could join again; there could now be one world, under the tempered principate of the man who had matured from the young Octavian into Caesar Augustus. And Virgil could turn to the project he had never forgotten, fulfill the longings that, as allusions in both Eclogues and Georgics had shown, still occupied at least his unconscious mind, the composition of an epic poem that should justify this great nation, remind her citizens of all she had cost, inspire them to be worthy of their tradition. To this work, the Aeneid, Virgil devoted the rest of his life. He did not ever consider it finished; he had still three years’ work ahead of him, he estimated, when he went to Greece, at the age of fifty, to study more carefully the scenes of the book in which he described the wanderings of Aeneas. There he fell ill, was brought back to Brundisium, on the heel of Italy, where he died in 19 B.C. In his dissatisfaction with the unfinished state of his work, he left instructions that the manuscript of the Aeneid should be burned; Augustus, however, in the words of Tenny Frank, “interposed the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will.” No dictator, ever, has exercised a happier veto. R. H. CAST OF CHARACTERS In the fighting between the Greeks and Trojans around Troy, Virgil calls both sides by tribal names as well as national names, and sometimes uses patronymics: thus the Greeks are also called Achaeans, Argives, Danaans, Dolopes, Ithacans, Myrmidons, and so on; and the Trojans are called Dardanians, Ilians, Teucrians, Phrygians. I have used these terms much less than Virgil did, and tried, for the sake of avoiding confusion and clutter, to stick to the terms Greek and Trojan, wherever possible. Likewise, in the wars between the Trojans and Latins in Italy, we find the enemies of Aeneas described as Italians, Latins, Rutulians, and Etruscans. But there were also some Etruscans on his side; these were led by Tarchon, the anti-Aeneas faction by Mezentius. His other principal allies were the Arcadians, whose king was Evander. The principal Greek warriors were Agamemnon, Menelaus, Ulysses, Diomedes, and Ajax; the most conspicuous on the Trojan side Aeneas, Hector, and possibly Paris.