It was published by his executors, and immediately took its place as the great national Epic of the Roman people.

Virgil seems to have been a man of simple, pure, and loveable character, and the references to him in the works of Horace clearly show the affection with which he was regarded by his friends.
Like every cultivated Roman of that age, Virgil was a close student of the literature and philosophy of the Greeks, and his poems bear eloquent testimony to the profound impression made upon him by his reading of the Greek poets.

His first important work, the _Eclogues_, was directly inspired by the pastoral poems of Theocritus, from whom he borrowed not only much of his imagery but even whole lines; in the _Georgics_ he took as his model the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod, and though in the former case it must be confessed that he suffers from the weakness inherent in all imitative poetry, in the latter he far surpasses the slow and simple verses of the Boeotian.

But here we must guard ourselves against a misapprehension.

We moderns look askance at the writer who borrows without acknowledgment the thoughts and phrases of his forerunners, but the Roman critics of the Augustan Age looked at the matter from a different point of view.
They regarded the Greeks as having set the standard of the highest possible achievement in literature, and believed that it should be the aim of every writer to be faithful, not only to the spirit, but even to the letter of their great exemplars.