It is important to remember that had Virgil not known the Homeric epics, the Aeneid would have had a much different form and style. "Virgil is accredited with using Homer in composing his masterpiece for it demonstrates his sensible and intelligent understanding of his poetic heritage" (Milch, 1991).
Brook Otis, a noted classical scholar investigated the influence of Homer on Virgil in his book Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, according to Otis "Virgil had given quite a new meaning, a thoroughly contemporary meaning to the didactic form. This is the light then in which we must look at the Aeneid if we were really to understand it. Virgil really uses Homer-.
In other words Homer gave him a form, something of style, a great deal of content, but not the essential idea or meaning, not the ideological truth he wanted to convey- "But it was above all his combination of empathy with editorial "sympathy" that gave him control over his Homeric material enable him to correlate mythological symbols with psychological events and made possible his marvelous transformation of epic conventions.".
Although The Aeneid shares many characteristic with the Homeric epic it is different in important ways. For this reason the Aeneid is considered a literary or secondary epic in order to differentiate one from the other. The Homeric epics were oral and improvised, while the Aeneid, composed later in the epic tradition was non-oral and crafted with the aid of writing. Literary epics seek to achieve novelty and originality so there is no repetition, have a serious didactic purpose, and are intended to communicate a serious philosophical, moral, and patriotic message. W. Y. Sellar the author of The Roman Poets of Augustan Age compares the Aeneid to Homer and argues that .
is an epic of national glory. "But if we ask what are the most powerful sources of interest in the Greek and in the roman epic respectively, the answer will be that in the first theses springs immediately out of human life; in the second they spring out of national fortune.