The Aeneid Primitiveness Quotes Page 3

From Evander's perspective, this wouldn't count as primitiveness. The tough, agricultural life Numanus describes sounds a lot more like the "meaner, tarnished age" he describes in the third quotation from this section as having replaced the original golden age. Still, if you look at what Numanus is saying, here and in the rest of his speech, he is definitely portraying his own peoples' life as more primitive than that of the dandified city dwellers he imagines the Trojans to be. Numanus places a different value on primitiveness than Evander does – not as providing a life of harmony and peace, but as making a nation tough enough for war.

This description of the funeral of Evander's son Pallas reinforces the poem's depiction of the Arcadians as connected with the earth. This is achieved primarily through the simile (that is, a poetic comparison) that likens Pallas to a flower. And yet, if Pallas the Arcadian is like a flower, and a flower can be picked – and thus destroyed by the hand of man – what do these lines suggest about the potential fate of the rest of Arcadian society?

By taking care to indicate that the "height we now call Alban" did not yet have a name at the period when the Aeneid takes place, Virgil emphasizes the primitiveness of his poem's setting.