The Virgil tradition is crowded with lost or threatened voices, always subordinated to the Augustan voice and frequently unnamed. In the battle between Virgil and Augustus, Augustus always wins. So Dryden in his dedication to his Aeneid talks of “those” who think this or that. What endures is Dryden's heavily Augustan “translation,” to which we return later. Similarly modern critics will tend to refer darkly to “those who make their living by detecting ambiguities,” or to the “damage done by imposing Vietnam on the wars of Aeneas.” Just as Virgil's language, though odd and audacious in its synchronic manifestation, becomes normative in its reception by grammarians, who use it as their handbook precisely to create and uphold the norm, so his political outlook must be clear and univocal – to praise Augustus through his ancestors. That is an easy message for Servius to infer, living and writing as he did after centuries of increasingly autocratic rule, with the divinity of the emperor an absolute given. The aim here is to identify the presence or the suppression of the oppositional voice to be found in the early commentary tradition. The suppression of such voices in the first four centuries of Virgil's reception has strong similarities to that at the end of the twentieth.

Of the power of the first 400 years of the Virgilian tradition to create their own construction of Virgil, C. Martindale has well noted that “Servius was as far from Virgil as we are from Shakespeare,” and that we must avoid reifying antiquity as a “time-free zone.” As with the philology of Servius, so with his hermeneutics, there is need for caution, but meanings embraced in Servius, as well as possibilities rejected, may also be taken to indicate debate at a much earlier period.