The Triumph of Hercules complicated by her evil relative Milo, who has murdered her father the king but has tricked her into thinking it was someone else because she trusts him too much. Milo tricks Hercules into killing his friend, for which he is punished by his father Jove (Jupiter/Zeus) who takes away his enormous strength, because he has misused it. Milo is conspiring with his sorceress mother to take the throne for himself. Now only as strong as a mortal man, Hercules is overpowered when he tries to rescue the princess Ate (pronounced Ah-tay) from Milo and is then accused of being a
Eclogues a new political mythology, Eclogue 4 reaches out to imagine a golden age ushered in by the birth of a boy heralded as "great increase of Jove" ("magnum Iovis incrementum"), which ties in with divine associations claimed in the propaganda of Octavian, the ambitious young heir to Julius Caesar. The poet makes this notional scion of Jove the occasion to predict his own up the scale in epos, rising from the humble range of the bucolic to the lofty range of the heroic, potentially rivaling Homer: he thus signals his own ambition to make Roman epic that will culminate in