28o Outlines of European History Virgil (70-19 B.C ) pictured by a ripe and cultivated mind, unsurpassed even in the highly developed literature of the Greeks. The other great literary name of the epoch is that of Virgil, the friend of Horace. Hardly so penetrating a mind as Horace* Virgil j ipvgr theless remains one of t he great interpreters of the age in which he lived. Moreover, his command of Latin verse Fig. 1 1 7. Ruins of the Roman Temples at Baalbek, Syria The Roman temples of the Sun-god at this place are among the great- est buildings ever erected (p. 284). The huge block in the foreground belongs to an inclosure wall ; this block is about sixty-one feet long, thirteen feet wide, and nearly ten feet thick is supreme. He has reflected to us in all its poetic beauty the rustic life of his time on the green hillsides of Italy, but he is better known to the modem world at large by his great epic, the Y^neid. Unlike the Homeric songs, the epic of Virgil is not the expression of a heroic age (p. 142). It is the product of a self-conscious, literary age — the highly finished work of a literary artist. He takes his materials largely from the early Greek stories of the Trojan cycle, but he feels the inspiration
