Of the surviving corpus of Latin literature, there is only one work that has always been considered canonical, in any sense of the word, and that is Virgil's Aeneid. It is canonical in that it has been, since the poet's death in 19 B.C., a school text and thus a part of the literary vocabulary of all educated people; it is canonical in T. S. Eliot's refined and delicate definition of the classic in exhibiting an extraordinary range of sympathies and sensibilities in a pure and elegant diction; and it is canonical in what might be called the ancient sense (although the word canon was not applied to literature until the eighteenth century) as an epic poem of broad scale and heroic subject, the highest and most important of all literary genres.' In its historical context, the Aeneid is part of a much larger literary development, what seems (at least in retrospect) to have been a deliberate attempt to create a Roman national literature to rival the artistic monuments of classical and archaic Greece. Even before it was completed, Virgil's poem was greeted as a Roman equivalent of the Homeric epics.2 Horace, too, explicitly saw himself as a new classic. In introducing his first three