It may seem jarring to transition from Plato’s Republic , written sometime before 348 BCE, and Vergil’s Aeneid, written , at the very least, three hundred years later. We have to move from a waning democracy in Athens, where the threat of Macedonian power was growing unchecked, and the dominance of King Philip was becoming a foregone conclusion, to Rome, about 650 miles westward, where in 348 BCE the city was still relatively small and angling for local superiority against its central Italian neighbors. We must cross the divide between the extensive domain of Greek culture -- all the way from Sicily to the Indus river, where it had been seeded under Alexander the Great and his generals -- to the hinterlands of Europe where illiterate nations lived a mostly nomadic existence. By Virgil’s time, Greek dominion of the East -- Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt -- had passed into Roman hands. Rome’s Republican institutions were already gutted in Vergil’s youth, and that cent...
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