Aeneid | Virgil Begins His Epic

In the following excerpt, Anderson discusses the significance of the opening line of the Aeneid: 'I sing of arms and of the man.''

It is not enough ... to describe Vergil's opening ["I sing of arms and of the man"] as a skillful allusion to inevitable rivalry with Homer. To be sure, he used two nouns of different orders, one referring to a person, one to a thing, and the nouns suggest main elements of the two Homeric narratives. Two nouns together, however, interact; they cannot be absorbed separately as mere equivalents to separate Greek epics. When George Bernard Shaw entitled his comedy Arms and the Man, he knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what Vergil meant with his pair of nouns: they affect...

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