It describes a world in which people were stronger, more impressive, and closer to the gods, and indeed the gods often play an important role in epic poetry. Ancient epic also comes with certain other expectations: for example, it tends to be set in the past and deals with the deeds of ancestors. In antiquity ‘epic’ suggested a certain type of metrical form, the dactylic hexameter, which is a type of verse particularly suited to telling narratives.

They also tend to be long: the Aeneid, for example, is nearly 10,000 lines of verse. Epic poems are usually narratives about the great deeds of heroes, often involving war, dangerous journeys, or adventures. The idea of theme and scope is also relevant to ancient epic. For example, if someone describes a Hollywood film as being an ‘epic’, I’d assume that the film deals with important and world-changing events, perhaps over a prolonged time period, and probably that it goes on for a long time. I don’t know what your immediate associations are when you hear the word ‘epic’, but to me, the English word immediately suggests something big and grand. This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A276 Classical Latin: the language of ancient Rome. The discussion will introduce you to a small number of key Latin words used to express these values, though it doesn’t expect or require any knowledge of the Latin language. (Virgil lived between 70 and 19 BCE, and wrote the Aeneid at the end of his life.) We’ll then go on to look in detail at some sections of the poem, looking in particular at how it presents Roman values.

I’ll begin by introducing the genre of epic poetry in which the Aeneid was written, and by looking at what happens in the poem, and how it relates to the events of Virgil’s own day. As well as being powerful literature, the Aeneid tells us a great deal about how the Romans saw themselves and their culture, and what it meant to be a Roman. The Romans regarded the Aeneid as their great national epic, and it had enormous influence over later writers and thinkers. In this free course, you will learn about Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem about the origins of the Roman people.

The essential aeneid