Why Did Virgil's Use Of Propaganda

In the fifth and fourth centuries Rome’s tyrannical rule was defeated, and an aristocracy of patricians became the ruling class. The common people, the plebeians, had been weakened in society after the King’s defeat, but to meet the demands of the people, Tribunes were put into power as the heads of the plebeians. Up until this point, the “task of maintaining a body of law was met through oral traditions”, but the tribunes “demanded that laws should be reduced to writing and made public”. This made the development of a common alphabet for the Roman people a priority, and the Latin language was soon established. The resulting Twelve Tables became one of the earliest known Roman establishments of the written word. Literature, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, soon started the tradition of using the written word as a form of propaganda that could be geared toward the literate and therefore more influential in society. Other “literary propaganda in the form of letters, treatises, published books and speeches” from more strictly political circles were also made and used in abundance.
With the emergence of the Roman Republic, the Senate, consisting of the patricians of the society, became “the governing body and the only body where debate was possible”. To debate properly in the Senate, “one had to know the persuasive art of rhetoric and oratory, or public speaking”. Cicero and Quintilian, both men of political influence in the Roman Republic, were well known as “quintessential figures of Roman rhetoric”, and they both used this art to promote the power of a leader and to gain