When we visit Washington, DC, the great buildings are not imitations of Greek, but of Roman architecture. Our country was founded not as a democracy, but as a Republic. George Washington was called “The Father of His Country.” Each of these three facts, and many more, are due to the enduring and world-wide influence of Virgil’s Aeneid.
In a Rome weakened by wealth and pleasure, then shattered by civil war, only to unite under an emperor, Virgil celebrated the subordination of individual ambition and pleasure to pietas—a triune duty to God, to the nation built under God’s will, and to the future of the family. Building on the brilliance of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as Platonic philosophy, Virgil expanded the quest from the restoration of the family and one’s individual relation to God to the restoration of the whole nation and its relation to heavenly power. This was the original conception of our nation which our Founding Fathers honored in so many ways, and which we are in great peril as we now forget.
Dante, the greatest of all poets, chose Virgil as his heaven-sent fictional guide, not merely through Hell but Purgatory as well, signaling the seeds of vast Christian wisdom which he found.