Which author claims the Aeneid reflects Augustus's governmental policy in moral, social and religious ideas, not because Augustus's ideas, but because Virgil's; both saw things the same way?

• A. Ian Du Quesney
• B. Deryck Williams
• C. Desmond M
• D. Camps

Answer: (B)

The question is testing how critics read the Aeneid in relation to Augustan policy: does the poem simply echo the regime’s aims, or does it express Virgil’s own vision that happens to align with Augustus? The best-supported view here is that Deryck Williams argues the Aeneid reflects Augustus’s governmental program in moral, social, and religious ideas not because Augustus dictated them to Virgil, but because Virgil shared those ideas with the emperor. In Williams’s reading, Virgil’s voice carries a personal stamp—pietas, order, reverence for Rome—that coincides with Augustan ideals—so the work appears to express Virgil’s stance as well as Augustus’s policy. This makes the claim that the poem reflects Virgil’s perspective (which aligns with Augustus) the most accurate description.

The other scholars named are associated with different readings about the poem’s relationship to Augustan power or Virgil’s own agency, but they do not articulate this Virgil-centered alignment as clearly or as specifically as Williams does.