Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan Wars came a man heading west

He was carrying his father on his back and he was holding the hand of his small son

This is an adissious its in this and in that vision Virgil gives an image of the first Romans of the Empire

Virgil's an heir was the great epic poem that formed a founding narrative of Rome

It made such an impact that it soon became a standard text in all schools and wiped away the myths that preceded it

It was written in Augustus reign at the start of the Imperial era and has been called an Apologia for Roman domination

It's also been called the greatest work of literature ever written in Europe

But how much was Virgil's poem influenced by the extraordinary times in which it was written?

How does it transcend the political pressures of imperial patronage?

And what are the qualities that make it such a universal work?

With me to discuss Virgil's an heir at Catherine Edwards, senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at Berwick College University of London

Edith Hall, professor of Greek cultural history at Durham University

and Philip Hardy, corpus Christi professor Abelatton at the University of Oxford

Edith Hall, could we start with the first literary sighting of in years?

He's a Trojan figure in Homer's Iliad. How do we come across him and why do you think Virgil picked on him?

Well Virgil picked on an ear for two reasons. One is quite simply that he was the ancestor of Augustus

under whom Virgil is writing and he's writing a genealogy and an ancestry for him

but the second reason is that he's the most important Trojan to survive the fall of Troy

and Augustus wants to trace back his ancestry to Troy

And what is he doing in Iliad?

...