By meticulous comparisons between Vegio's book 13, Vergil's books 1-12, and the work of Ovid, on which Vegio also drew, Putnam teases out the ways in which Vegio transformed the mood of the work as a whole--how he made Turnus, rather than Aeneas, the one who rages, and managed to stage the hero's stellification, in Ovidian terms, not as a Christian rebirth to salvation but as the proper reward for a pagan's supremely virtuous life on earth. Vegio's scenes of festival and feasting have a nice Virgilian feel to them, as Aeneas and Latinus recall the struggles of the past in present tranquility--as well as a vivid period sense of the ways in which public ritual could seal and solidity a new community's identity.Putnam teaches us to appreciate Vegio's artistry--and his ability to reweave a troubling work of art until it clearly embodied the best pagan, but not Christian, morality. In his own way, Vegio glimpsed the incompleteness, the broken arch, that is a prominent feature of the epic's architecture.