I was reading a book on Augstan Rome and it mentioned how scholars suggest that the Aeneid was pro-Augustan propaganda. What is it that makes them believe that?
In Book 6, Aeneas enters the Underworld to meet his father Anchises, who recently died. He oversaw the souls that were meant to born into our world, "thinking carefully, and was reviewing as it chanced the numbers of his own folk, his dear grandsons." After meeting and talking to his son, Anchises shows his son the future souls meant to be born in Italy and in Rome, and tells us what Rome will be like. But...since it was written in Roman times, Virgil cites myth as history and history as myth.
Romulus, the founder of Rome appears, with his reign "glorious Rome will match earth’s power and heaven’s will, and encircle seven hills with a single wall..."
Augustus truly takes the show. Anchises shows Aeneas him and exclaims "This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified, who will make a Golden Age again in the fields where Saturn once reigned, and extend the empire beyond the Libyans and the Indians (to a land that lies outside the zodiac’s belt, beyond the sun’s ecliptic and the year’s, where sky-carrying Atlas turns the sphere, inset with gleaming stars, on his shoulders): Even now the Caspian realms, and Maeotian earth, tremble at divine prophecies of his coming, and the restless mouths of the seven-branched Nile are troubled. Truly, Hercules never crossed so much of the earth..."
Although Aeneas leaves the Underworld satisfied in his future, this is Augustan propaganda to all reading and listening to the Aeneid.