Now Veldeke handles the Vergilian material altogether freely - while laying claim to the utmost fidelity in following his Roman model - as appears from only a few exemplary characteristics: he does not in classical style begin in medias res but rather in chronological order with the Fall of Troy, even at the risk of certain duplications in the relating of this Fall at the banquet of Dido; the third canto is omitted altogether, perhaps because all the false starts on the way to the site of the new Troy fall wide of his purpose; despite the great interest of his medieval audience in weaponry, the description of Aeneas's shield is notably abbreviated because the events thereon depicted would mean little to much of that audience. But the person of Lavinia, marginal and nebulous as she remains in Vergil, comes into her own for Veldeke through first the detailed dialogues, the Minnereden, reflecting upon the poignancy of love and its progress under its courtly canons, since the aberrant love for Dido needs to be adequately corrected, indeed overtrumped by the proper love for Lavinia; then, accordingly, in the lengthy epilogue (12607: Do Turnus lach erslagen - 13528 = 921 lines) devoted principally to the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia with ample description of the festivities as to dress, fare, entertainment and gifts; their happy life and realm together with finally the genealogy terminating not with Augustus but drawn into the poet's present of the Holy Roman Empire, sealed with the veracity of its source, for if Vergil spoke truly, so did he, Heinrich von Veldeke.
We cannot demonstrate an immediate connexion between the Roman d'Eneas or Veldeke's Romance and Maffeo Vegio's Aeneid XIII but the groundwork had been laid for what we might today superciliously call unconscionable tinkering or at best an inconsequential jeu d'esprit, but was then, as we shall presently show, taken as a legitimate continuatio of Vergil's epic. Still, the question remains why this continuatio is undertaken in Latin only a good two centuries after it had been realized in two vernaculars, possibly, though it cannot be conclusively proven, because the early Renaissance brought a new fluidity, even a malleability into the Aeneid, which for a millennium and a half had been fixed in place as the unattainable and unalterable classic.
In a very rough sketch this is some of the background of Vergilian reception when Maffeo Vegio comes on the scene. He was born in Lodi in Lombardy in 1407, the same year as his friend Lorenzo Valla, a key figure in the rebirth of Latin letters (n.b. the Elegantiae), in New Testament studies (wherein he proved to be the decisive stimulus for Erasmus), and in the ultimate refutation of the fraudulent claim of the Donation of Constantine, alone on philological grounds, whom he survived by a year, dying in high ecclesiastical office at Rome in 1458. His first school teacher at the age of seven in Milan is characterized by Anna Cox Brinton (to whom we shall return presently) as a plagosus Orbilius; he fared better with his second through whom he acquired a real love of the Classics, read them voraciously, and every day learned some favorite passage by heart.
