When Augustus set Virgil to work on the Aeneid, Rome had already won. The civil wars had exhausted themselves; the principate was consolidating its hold on the Mediterranean world. And yet the Greeks, subdued and provincialized, retained one thing Rome could not seize at swordpoint: Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were about Greece, and you can’t be the apex civilization of human history if the finest story ever told is about someone else.

And so Augustus sent for Virgil, who then committed one of the great heists in literary history. He took a minor Trojan — Aeneas, a man memorable in the Iliad only for surviving the war — and cast him as the founding patriarch of Rome. In Virgil’s telling, Aeneas, a refugee in Italy from fallen Troy, was the ancestor of Romulus, and therefore of Rome, and therefore of Augustus himself. The whole Homeric tradition, it turned out, had been a very long prologue to Rome’s founding. Virgil did not build a rival epic to compete with Homer; he simply reached across eight centuries and claimed that Homer had been telling a Roman story all along.

In 2015, with a popular black president in the White House, a female heir apparent consolidating her lead in the polls, and the Republican Party seemingly consigned to demographic irrelevance, Lin-Manuel Miranda did something similar. He turned the Founding Fathers black.