Read it through once

Nor, on one count or another, can we expect to find the proximate approach to the classic in any modern language. It is necessary to go to the two dead languages: it is important that they are dead, because through their death we have come into our inheritance—the fact that they are dead would in itself give them no value, apart from the fact that all the peoples of Europe are their beneficiaries. And of all the great poets of Greece and Rome, I think that it is to Virgil that we owe the most for our standard of the classic: which, I will repeat, is not the same thing as pretending that he is the greatest, or the one to whom we are in every way the most indebted—it is of a particular debt that I speak. His comprehensiveness, his peculiar kind of comprehensiveness, is due to the unique position in our history of the Roman Empire and the Latin language: a position which may be said to conform to its destiny. This sense of destiny comes to consciousness in the Aeneid.