Hence it was only natural that when Virgil essayed the task of writing the national Epic of his country, he should be studious to embody in his work all that was best in Greek Epic poetry.
It is difficult in criticizing Virgil to avoid comparing him to some extent with Homer.

But though Virgil copied Homer freely, any comparison between them is apt to be misleading.

A primitive epic, like the _Iliad_ or the _Nibelungenlied_, produced by an imaginative people at an early stage in its development, telling its stories simply for the sake of story telling, cannot be judged by the same canons of criticism as a literary epic like the _Aeneid_ or _Paradise Lost_, which is the work of a great poet in an age of advanced culture, and sets forth a great idea in a narrative form.

The Greek writer to whom Virgil owes most perhaps, is Apollonius of Rhodes, from whose _Argonautica_ he borrowed the love interest of the _Aeneid_.

And though the Roman is a far greater poet, in this instance the advantage is by no means on his side, for, as Professor Gilbert Murray has so well said, 'the Medea and Jason of the _Argonautica_ are at once more interesting and more natural than their copies, the Dido and Aeneas of the _Aeneid_.