A word or two about the character of Aeneas. It may be that the trouble with him is really the trouble with us. We are not mature enough to accept, as epic hero, a man who is imaginative, sensitive, compassionate (everywhere except in parts of Books IV and X), and, in short, civilized; in other words, a paradox. There seems to be almost no aggression at all in the character of Aeneas: even in his dreams he wants to get out of trouble and avoid fighting. We don’t like this; we find most satisfactory those moments when he is telling Dido off, or making bitter sarcastic speeches at Lucagus and Liger. We object, further, that when he does fight, he knows very well that he is protected by the gods and by magic armor. (Yet we do not mind the latter in the case of, for instance, Superman; and would we rather have our hero sponsored by devils?) In the matter of invulnerability we are, I think, a little unjust: Virgil takes some pains to show that he can be hurt: he rushes in, unarmed, to preserve the truce; he is grievously wounded by the death of Pallas. In any event, we need not feel too guilty if we are not crazy about Aeneas; there is little in the record to show that the Romans left enthusiastic encomia, either. As between Virgil and Homer, there can be no real comparison. Judged by any standard, Homer is the greater writer; judged by our own, Virgil is sometimes the better one. His immediate audience consisted of men much more like ourselves than did Homer’s; and Virgil is considerate of their special sensitivities in a way that Homer did not have to bother to be. What he thought he might require of Homer, of course he went and took; it seems to me that in the taking he always modifies, often, from our point of view, improves. He will, for one thing, always design and order more carefully: Book VI, for example, is much more artistically worked out than the descent to the dead in the Odyssey. And the games in Book V, though many details are lifted entire from the Iliad, have quite their own quality, a light-heartedness in the horseplay, a humor and gaiety entirely different from the uncouth bragging and brawling of the Homeric competitors. I think it is only literary scholars who could possibly look down their noses at this book. And in his scenes and stories of battle Virgil, it seems to me, is far more respectful to the modern reader’s sense of credulity than Homer is; no student of a work rather current in 1917, _Small Problems of Infantry_, would have any difficulty in understanding what went wrong with the mission of Nisus and Euryalus in Book IX.