Abstract
Vergil's Aeneid, epic of national identity, was produced at a time when in all probability nobody in Italy (including quite possibly Princeps himself) could have been easily confident of significance of what history had now brought to pass.2 This essay accordingly seeks to contemplate poem as an artifact in dialogue with its immediate audience's practical assumptions and expectations about new political realities in Res Publica that Augustus so determinedly claimed to be resuscitating. Amid all the very high level and density of relations and communications that united Roman civic body in every direction in Republic, curiosity about sentiments of Populus Romanus still seems neglected.3 Excited interest in popular feelings was characteristic of many republican principes and consequently ever fundamental to political life at all manner of occasions for rhetorics of self-presentation, whether mundane or more extraordinarily charismatic, in civic spaces of city. But modem analysts have not always been ready to ponder whether in fact Vergil's artistry succeeded not only in pleasing community at large but thereby also in communicating aesthetically a regime's legitimacy.4 The Aeneid quickly commanded great authority in Rome and so ever after
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