[875] The substance of this and the two following Sections formed two
Articles in the Quarterly Review, Nos. 201 and 203, for January and
July respectively, 1857. They are reprinted with the obliging approval
of Mr. Murray.
_Homer and some of his Successors in Epic Poetry: in particular, Virgil
and Tasso._
~_Milton and Dante in relation to Homer._~
The great Epic poets of the world are members of a brotherhood still
extremely limited, and, as far as appears, not likely to be enlarged.
It may indeed well be disputed, with respect to some of the existing
claimants, whether they are or are not entitled to stand upon the
Golden Book. There will also be differences of opinion as to the
precedence among those, whose right to appear there is universally
confessed. Pretensions are sometimes advanced under the influence of
temporary or national partialities, which the silent action of the
civilized mind of the world after a time effectually puts down. Among
these there could be none more obviously untenable, than that set up on
behalf of Milton in the celebrated Epigram of Dryden, which seemed to
place him at the head of the poets of the world, and made him combine
all the great qualities of Homer and of Virgil. Somewhat similar ideas
were broached by Cowper in his Table Talk. The lines, as they are less
familiarly remembered, may be quoted here:
Ages elapsed ere Homer’s lamp appeared,
And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard;
To carry Nature lengths unknown before,
To give a Milton birth, asked ages more.
But this great master is also subject to undue depreciation, as well
as flattered by extravagant worship. I myself have been assured in a
company composed of Professors of a German University, who were ardent
admirers of Shakespeare, that within the sphere of their knowledge
Milton was only regarded as of equal rank with Klopstock. It is not,
I trust, either national vanity or religious prejudice, nor is it
the mere wonder inspired by the wide range of his attainments and
performances, which makes England claim that he should be numbered in
the first class of epic poets; in that class of which Homer is the
head, distinguished before all competitors by a clear and even a vast
superiority.
It would be difficult to institute any satisfactory comparison between
Milton and Homer; so different, so wanting in points of contact, are
the characters partly of the men, and even much more of their works.
Perhaps the greatest and the most pervading merit of the Iliad is, its
fidelity and vividness as a mirror of man and of the visible sphere
in which he lived, with its infinitely varied imagery both actual and
ideal. But that which most excites our admiration in Milton is the
elasticity and force of genius, by which he has travelled beyond the
human sphere, and bodied forth to us new worlds in the unknown, peopled
with inhabitants who must be so immeasurably different from our own
race. Homer’s task was one, which admitted of and received what we may
call a perfect accomplishment; Milton’s was an undertaking beyond the
strength of man, incapable of anything more than faint adumbration,
and one of which, the more elevated the spectator’s point of view, the
more keenly he must find certain defects glare upon him. The poems of
Milton give us reason to think that his conceptions of character were
masculine and powerful; but the subject did not admit of their being
effectually tested. For his nearest approaches to perfection in his
art, we must look beyond his epics.
A comparison between Milton and Dante would be somewhat more
practicable, but it would not accord with the composition of the group,
which I shall here attempt to present, and which has Homer for its
centre. On the other hand, Dante might, far better than Milton, be
compared with Homer; for while he is in the Purgatorio and Paradiso
far more heavenly than Milton, he is also throughout the _Divina
Commedia_ truly and profoundly human. He is incessantly conversant with
the nature and the life of man; and though for the most part he draws
us, as Flaxman has drawn him, in outline only, yet by the strength and
depth of his touch he has produced figures, for example, Francesca and
Ugolino, that have as largely become the common property of mankind,
if not as Achilles and Ulysses, yet as Lear and Hamlet. Still the
theological basis, and the extra-terrene theatre, of Dante’s poem
remove him to a great distance from Homer, from whom he seems to have
derived little, and with whom we may therefore feel assured he could
have been but little acquainted.
The poets, whom it is most natural to compare with Homer, are those
who have supplied us in the greatest abundance with points of contact
between their own orbits and his, and who at the same time are such
manifest children of genius as to entitle them to the honour of being
worsted in such a conflict. These conditions I presume to be most
clearly fulfilled by Virgil and Tasso; and we may begin with the elder
of the pair.
Perhaps Chapman has gone too far when he says ‘Virgil hath nothing of
his own, but only elocution; his invention, matter, and form, being
all Homer’s[876].’ Yet no small part of this sweeping proposition can
undoubtedly be made good.
[876] Commentary on Il. ii.
With an extraordinary amount of admitted imitation and of obvious
similarity on the surface, the Æneid stands, as to almost every
fundamental particular, in the strongest contrast with the Iliad. As
to metre, figures, names, places, persons and times, the two works,
where they do not actually concur, stand in as near relations one to
another, as seem to be attainable without absolute identity of subject;
yet it may be doubted whether any two great poems can be named, which
are so profoundly discordant upon almost every point that touches
their interior spirit; upon everything that relates to the truth of
our nature, to the laws of thought and action, and to veracity in the
management of the higher subjects, such as history, morality, polity,
and religion.
~_Contrast between form and spirit in the Æneid._~
The immense powers of Virgil as a poet had been demonstrated before he
wrote the Æneid. He had shown their full splendour in the Georgics;
though the ἦθος, or (so to speak) the heart, even of that great
work was touched with paralysis by his Epicurean and self-centring
philosophy. The Æneid does not bear a fainter impression of his genius.
The wonderfully sustained beauty and majesty of its verse, the imposing
splendour of its most elaborate delineations, the power of the author
in unfolding, when he strives to do it, the resources of passion, and
even perhaps the skill which he has shown in the general construction
of his plot, cannot be too highly praised. But while its general nature
as an epic (for the epic poem is preeminently ethical) brought its
defects into fuller view, the particular object he proposed to himself
was fatal to the attainment of the very highest excellence. While
Homer sang for national glory, the poem of Virgil is toned throughout
to a spirit of courtierlike adulation. No muse, however vigorous, can
maintain an upright gait under so base a burden.
~_Catalogue in the Iliad and in the Æneid._~
And yet, in regard to its external form, the Æneid is perhaps, as a
whole, the most majestic poem that the European mind has in any age
produced. We often hear of the lofty march of the Iliad; but though
its versification is always appropriate and therefore never mean,
it only rises into stateliness, or into a high-pitched sublimity,
when Homer has occasion to brace his energies for an effort. He is
invariably true to his own conception of the bard[877], as one who
should win and delight the soul of the hearer; and so, when he has
strung himself, like a bow, for some great passage of his action,
‘has brought the string to the breast, the iron to the wood,’ and
has hit his mark, straightway he unbends himself again. Thus he
ushers in with true grandeur the marshalling of the Greek army in the
Second Book, partly by the invocation of the Muses, and partly by an
assemblage of no less than six consecutive similes, which describe
respectively the flash of the Greek arms, the resounding tramp, the
swarming numbers, the settling down of the ranks as they form the
line, the busy marshalling by the commanders, the majesty of Agamemnon
preeminent among them[878]. Having done this, he sets himself about
the Catalogue, with no contempt indeed of poetical embellishment by
epithets, and with an occasional relief by short legends, but still
in the main as a matter of business, historical, geographical, and
topographical. And thus he proceeds, with perfect tranquillity, for
near three hundred lines, until his work is done. We then find that
he has given us, together with a most minute account of the forces,
a living map of the territories occupied by the Greek races of the
age. But Virgil, in his imitation of the Homeric Catalogue (upon
which there will be further occasion to comment hereafter, with
reference to other matters), has pursued a course quite different.
Waiving Homer’s gorgeous introduction, which pours from a single
point a broad stream of splendour over the whole, Virgil with vast,
and indeed rather painful, effort, carries us through his long-drawn
list at a laboriously-sustained elevation. To vary the wearisome
task, he uses every diversity of turn that language and grammar can
supply[879]. He passes from nominative to vocative, and from vocative
to nominative. Somebody was present, and then somebody was not absent.
Arms and accoutrements are got up as minutely, as if he had been a
careful master of costumes dressing a new drama for the stage. That
we may never be let down for a moment, he distributes here and there
the similes, which Homer accumulated at the opening, and introduces,
between the accounts of military contingents, legends of twenty or more
lines. Upon the whole, the level of his verse through the Catalogue,
instead of being, like Homer’s, decidedly lower, is even higher than is
usual with him. There is not in it, I think, a single verse approaching
to the _sermo pedestris_. His reader misses that tranquillizing relief
so agreeable in Homer, which varies as it were the play of the muscles,
and freshens the faculties for a return to higher efforts. Virgil seems
to treat us, as horses at a certain stage of their decline are treated
by experienced drivers, who keep them going from fear that, if they
once let them stop or slacken, they will be unable to get up their pace
again. He never unbends his bow. But a table-land may be as flat, and
even wearisome, as a plain; and the ornaments in the Æneid frequently
are not, and indeed could hardly be, more ornamental than the passages
which they purport to embellish.
[877] Od. xvii. 385.
[878] Il. ii. 455-83.
[879] See also Lessing’s Laocoon, c. xviii. respecting the Shield in
the Æneid.
The difference of the two Catalogues cannot be more clearly exhibited
than by comparing Homer’s description of the very first contingent,
that from Bœotia[880], with Virgil’s opening paragraph about Mezentius;
or Homer’s last and nearly simplest, on the Magnesians[881], with the
description of Camilla, (certainly a description of remarkable beauty,)
with which is closed the glittering procession of the Italian army in
the Æneid.
[880] Il. ii. 494-510. Æn. vii. 647-54.
[881] Il. ii. 756-9. Æn. vii. 803-17.
The sustained stateliness of diction, metre, and rhythm in the Æneid
is a feat, and an astounding feat; but it is more like the performance
of a trained athlete, between trick and strength, than the grandeur
of free and simple Nature, such as it is seen in the ancient warrior,
in Diomed or Achilles; or in Homer, the ancient warrior’s only bard.
Different persons will, according to their temperaments, be apt to
treat this augustness of diction as a merit or a fault: all, however,
must acknowledge it to be a wonder. In this respect Virgil has been
followed with no ordinary power, but yet not equalled, by Tasso. And
the impression, created in this respect by the Æneid as it stands, must
be heightened when we remember that it is still an unfinished poem,
and that the author had at his decease by no means brought it, and the
later books of it in particular, up to what he considered the proper
standard.
The immense and untold amount of imitation in Virgil has perhaps tended
to make us less than duly sensible of his vast original powers; and
the mean and feeble effects produced by the character, if we can call
it a character, of his Æneas, cheat us into an untrue supposition that
he could not have possessed a real power of this the highest kind of
delineation.
~_Character of Æneas._~
It is perhaps hardly possible to exhaust the topics of censure which
may be justly used against the Æneas of Virgil. His moral deficiencies
are not (so to speak) hidden amidst the accomplishments of a manly
intellect, nor his intellectual mediocrity redeemed by any fresh and
genuine virtues. He is not, to our knowledge, a statesman; nay more,
he is not a warrior; for we feel that his battles and feats of war are
the poet’s, and not his: and when he appears in arms we are tempted
to ask, ‘Son of Venus, what business have you here?’ The violent
exaggerations, by which Virgil attempts to vamp up his hero’s martial
character, only produce the ψυχρὸν of Longinus; a cold reaction,
approaching to a shudder, through the reader’s mind. As, for instance,
when in the Shades below, the poet represents the Greek chieftains[882]
as trembling and flying at the sight of him, the nobleness of the
verses cannot excuse either the tasteless solecism of the thought,
or the profanation offered to the memory of Homer in the person of
his heroes, who indeed often made Æneas tremble, but never trembled
at him themselves. But Virgil goes further yet, when he makes Diomed
assert[883] that, having been engaged in single combat with Æneas, he
knows by experience how terrible a warrior he will prove; and that, had
there been two more such men, Troy would have conquered Greece, and
not Greece Troy. Now, Æneas never in the Iliad even once executes a
real feat of war; and as to the single combat between the two chiefs,
Diomed first knocked him down with a stone[884], and then, after he had
been carried off and apparently set to rights by his mother, he was
thrice saved from the deadly charge of the same warrior by the single
intervention of Apollo, who by divine force arrested the attack. In
passing, it may be observed that, since Virgil could, with impunity, as
it appears, so far as his popularity was concerned, thus mutilate and
falsify the author from whose wealth he so largely borrowed, either the
knowledge of Greek literature in its head and father, Homer, must have
been very low among even the educated Romans, or else their standard of
taste must have been seriously debased before they could accept such
compliments.
[882] At Danaûm proceres, etc.--Æn. vi. 489.
[883] Æn. xi. 282-7.
[884] Il. v. 302-10.
It is common to find fault with Æneas for his vile conduct to Dido, and
for the wretched excuse he offers in his own behalf, when he encounters
her offended spirit in the regions of Aidoneus and Persephone. But the
truth is, that this fairly exhibits and illustrates not only the total
unreality of this particular character, but, as will be further noticed
presently, the feeble and deteriorated conception of human nature at
large, which Virgil seems to have formed. Man has been treated by him
as, on the whole, but a shallow being: he had not sounded the depths of
the heart, nor measured either the strength of good or the strength of
evil that may abide in it. The Virgilian Æneas is a made up thing, far
fitter to stand among the νεκύων ἀμένηνα κάρηνα, than among men of true
flesh and blood.
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with[885].
[885] Macbeth iii. 3.
Nor can we draw an apology for the defects of this primary character
in Virgil from the Æneas of Homer. The Dardanian Prince is indeed
in the Iliad, as to everything essential, a taciturn and background
figure. He is placed very high in station and authority, and, as we
have seen[886], he may probably have been, by the dignity of lineal
descent, the head of the whole Trojan race. But Homer pays him off
with generalities; for, as no Poet is greater in the really creative
work of character, so none better understands how, where the purpose
of his poem requires it, to take a lay figure, and stuff him out with
straw. In what may be called the vital action of the Iliad, Æneas has
no considerable share, either martial or political. He is very far
indeed behind the noble Sarpedon in the first capacity, and Polydamas
in the second, as well as Hector in both. Still, if there is in the
Homeric Æneas nothing grand, nothing vigorous, nothing profound,
there is on the other hand nothing over-prominent or pretentious, and
therefore nothing mean, nothing inconsistent, nothing untrue. All the
Homeric characters, down to Thersites, are drawn each in its way with
a master’s hand; Æneas forms no exception: on the contrary, we have
to admire the skill with which, in a kind of middle distance, his
outline is filled up, and he is kept entirely clear of any confusion
with either those greater characters on the Trojan side, who have been
named, or with the effeminate Paris. This is the more worthy of note,
because, as the favourite child of Venus, he bore a qualified and dim
resemblance to her chief minion; as we may see by certain traits of his
very negative bearing in the field, and by Apollo’s putting him (if
the phrase may be allowed) to bed in Pergamus[887], when he had been
rescued from Diomed, just as Venus had done with Paris, after she had
saved him in the Third Book from Menelaus[888].
[886] Achæis, or Ethnology, sect. ix. p. 491.
[887] Il. v. 445.
[888] Il. iii. 382.
Neither did Virgil fail in the delineation of his hero, or
‘protagonist,’ from simple want of power to portray human character. No
such want can be ascribed to the poet of the Fourth Book of the Æneid.
And if it be true that, amidst all the stormy wildness and intensity of
the passion of Dido, there is something not quite natural--something
that recalls the very remarkable imitation of it in the ‘Duchesse de
la Vallière’ of Madame de Genlis, and leaves us almost at a loss to
say which of the two has most the character of a copy, and which of
an original--what are we to say of the genuine and manly character of
Turnus? The whole of that sketch is as good and true as we can desire;
and the noble speech in particular, in which he rebukes the trim
cowardice of Drances, is a work of such extraordinary power and merit,
that it is fit (and this I take for the summit of all eulogies) even to
have been spoken by the Achilles of Homer. In vigorous reasoning, in
biting sarcasm, in chivalrous sentiment, and in indignant passion, it
presents a combination not easily to be matched; and it is, as a whole,
admirably adapted to the oratorical purpose, for which it is presumed
to have been delivered. But, indeed, from our first view of Turnus to
our last, we do not find in him a single trait feeble in itself, or
unworthy of the masculine idea and intention of the portrait, except
where, in the very last passage of his life, his free agency seems to
be taken, as it were by force, out of his hands.
~_The false position of Virgil._~
The failure in the Æneas of Virgil cannot be compared with the case of
any modern romance, such as the Waverley or Old Mortality of Scott,
where the hero may be an insipid person. All the greater modern
inventors have been compelled to lay their foundations in the palpable
breadth of some historic event: it was the prouder distinction of the
Homeric epic, that it had a living centre; it hung upon a man; there
was enough of vital power in Homer for this end: his Achilles and his
Ulysses were each an Atlas, that sustained the world in which they
also moved. Virgil made his poem an Æneid, instead of following the
example of the Cyclic poets; he thus pledged himself to his readers,
that Æneas should be its centre, its pole, its inward light and life.
But he did not keep his word: he had drawn the bow of Homer without
Homer’s force. He marks perhaps the final transition from the old epic
of the first class to the new. After him we have the epics of fact, the
Pharsalia, the Thebaid, and so forth. But Æneas stands before us with
the pretensions of Achilles and Ulysses; and the failure is great in
proportion to the gigantic scale of the attempt. When, in the Italian
romance, the character of the ideal man, as shown in Orlando, again
became the basis of new epic poems, we again find in the protagonist
great weakness indeed, as compared with Achilles and Ulysses; but
strength and success as compared with the Æneas of Virgil.
Upon the whole we are thrown back on the supposition that this crying
vice of the Æneid, the feebleness and untruth of the character of
Æneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to
discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant
obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus. As
the entire poem, so the character of its hero, was, before all other
things, an instrument for glorifying the Emperor of Rome. It at once
followed, that in all respects must that character be such as to avoid
suggesting a comparison disadvantageous to the person whose dignity,
for political ends, had already been elevated even into the unseen
world; nay, whose forestalled divinity was to be kept in a relation
of absolute and broad superiority to the image of his human ancestor.
Æneas is himself addressed in the action of the Æneid, as
Dîs genite, et geniture deos.
In order to arrive at the disastrous effects of this mental servitude,
take, first, the measure of the cold and unheroic character of
Augustus; then estimate the degree of relative superiority, which it
was essential to Virgil’s position that he should preserve for him
throughout; and thus we may come to some practical conception of the
straitness of the space within which Virgil had to develop his Æneas,
or, in other words, to run his match against Homer. All the faults, and
all the faultiness, of his poem may be really owing, in a degree none
can say how great, to this original falseness of position.
On account of the personal principle on which the ancient epic was
constructed, failure in the character of the hero must almost of
necessity have entailed failure in the poem. Most of all would this
follow in a case where, as in the Æneid, the hero is never out of view,
and where the action does not, as in the Iliad, travel away from his
person, in order then to enhance the splendour and effectiveness of his
reappearance. Thus the falseness of Virgil’s position was not confined
to an individual character, but extended to his entire work. Living,
too, in an age less natural and more critical than that of Homer, he
provided against criticism, so far as regarded its merely technical
functions, more, and he studied nature less. He had to construct his
epic for a court, and a corrupt court, not for mankind at large; it
followed, that he could not take his stand upon those deep and broad
foundations in human nature itself, which gave Homer a position of
universal command. Hence as a general rule he does not sing from the
heart, nor to the heart. His touches of genuine nature are rare. Such
of them as occur have been carefully noted and applauded, for he is
always studious to set them off by choice and melodious diction. For my
own part, I find scarcely any among them so true as the simile of the
mother labouring with her maidens at night, which he owes to Homer[889]:
[889] Hom. Il. xii. 433.
Castum ut servare cubile
Conjugis, et possit parvos educere natos[890].
[890] Æn. viii. 407-13.
~_As to religion, liberty, and nationality._~
With rare exceptions, the reader of Virgil finds himself utterly at a
loss to see at any point the soul of the poet reflected in his work. We
cannot tell, amidst the splendid phantasmagoria, where is his heart,
where lie his sympathies. In Homer a genial spirit, breathed from the
Poet himself, is translucent through the whole; in the Æneid we look in
vain almost for a single ray of it. Again, Virgil lived at a time when
the prevailing religion had lost whatever elements of real influence
that of Homer’s era either possessed in its own right, or inherited
from pristine tradition. It was undermined at once by philosophy and
by licentiousness; and it subsisted only as a machinery, a machinery,
too, already terribly discredited, for civil ends. Thus he lost one
great element of truth and nature, as well as of sublimity and pathos.
The extinction of liberty utterly deprived him of another. Homer saw
before him both a religion and a polity young, fresh, and vigorous; for
Virgil both were practically dead: and whatever this world has of true
greatness is so closely dependent upon them, that it was not his fault
if his poem felt and bears cogent witness to the loss. Even the sphere
of personal morality was not open to him; for what principle of truth
or righteousness could he worthily have glorified, without passing
severe condemnation on some capital act of the man, whom it was his
chief obligation to exalt?
And once more. Homer sang to his own people of the glorious deeds of
their sires, to whom they were united by fond recollection, and by
near historic and local ties. This was at once a stimulus and a check;
it cheered his labour, and at the same time it absolutely required
him to study moral harmony and consistency. Virgil sang to Romans of
the deeds of those who were not Romans, and whom only a most hollow
fiction connected with his hearers, through the dim vista of a thousand
years, and under circumstances which made the pretence to historical
continuity little better than ridiculous. Or rather, he sang thus, not
to Romans, but to their Emperor; he had to bear in mind, not the great
fountains of emotion in the human heart, but his town-house on the
Esquiline, and his country-house on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli.
In dealing with Greeks, with Trojans, with Carthaginians, he again lost
Homer’s double advantage: he had nothing to give a healthy stimulus
to his imagination, and nothing to bring him or to keep him to the
standard of truth and nature. And here, perhaps, we hit upon some clue
to the superior character and attractions of Turnus. The Poet was now
for once upon true national ground: he was an Italian minstrel, singing
to Italians, whether truly or mythically is of less consequence, about
an Italian hero. Thus he had something like the proper materials to
work with; and the result is one worthy of his noble powers, though
it has the strange consequence of setting all the best sympathies of
his readers, and of implying that his own were already set, in direct
opposition to the ostensible purpose of his poem.
It appears, however, as if this great and splendid Poet, being
thrown out of his true bearings in regard to all the deeper sources
of interest on which an epic writer must depend, such as religion,
patriotism, and liberty, became consequently reckless, alike in major
and in minor matters, as to all the inner harmonies of his work, and
contented himself with the most unwearied and fastidious labours in its
outward elaboration, where he could give scope to his extraordinary
powers of versification and of diction without fear of stumbling upon
anything unfit for the artificial atmosphere of the Roman court. The
consequence is, that a vein of untruthfulness runs throughout the whole
Æneid, as strong and as remarkable as is the genuineness of thought and
feeling in the Homeric poems. Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by
lamplight. Homer gives us figures that breathe and move, Virgil usually
treats us to waxwork. Homer has the full force and play of the drama,
Virgil is essentially operatic. From Virgil back to Homer is a greater
distance, than from Homer back to life.
~_Homer is misapprehended through Virgil._~
But more. Virgil is at once the copyist of Homer, and, for the
generality of educated men, his interpreter[891]. In all modern Europe
taken together, Virgil has had ten who read him, and ten who remember
him, for one that Homer could show. Taking this in conjunction with the
great extent of the ground they occupy in common, we may find reason to
think that the traditional and public idea of Homer’s works, throughout
the entire sphere of the Western civilization, has been formed, to a
much greater degree than could at first be supposed, by the Virgilian
copies from him. This is only to say, in other words, that it has been
sadly impaired, not to say seriously falsified; for there is scarcely
a point of vital moment, in which Virgil follows Homer faithfully, or
represents him either fairly or completely. Now this traditional idea
is not only the stock idea that governs the indifferent public, but
it is likewise the idea with which the individual student starts, and
which governs him until he has reached such a point in his progress as
to discover the necessity, and be conscious moreover of the strength,
to throw it off. This, however, is a point that, from the nature of
human life and its pursuits, very few students indeed can reach at
all. Elsewhere we shall see, with what evil and untrue effect Virgil
has handled some of the Homeric characters. It is the same in every
minor trait; and it seems strange that so great a Poet should not have
had enough of reverence for another Poet, greater still and enshrined
in almost the worship of all ages, to have restrained him from such
constant and wanton, as well as wilful, mutilations of the Homeric
tradition. It would, however, appear that Virgil’s miscarriages are not
all due to carelessness, in the common sense of it. In many instances,
unless so far as they can be referred to the necessities that press
upon a courtier, it would seem as if they must be ascribable to torpor
in the faculties, or defect in the habit of mind, by which Homer should
have been appreciated. Nay, sometimes he appears to have been moved
simply by metrical convenience to alter the traditions of Homer. Let us
take first a minor instance to test this assertion.
[891] In Dibdin’s ‘Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics,’ we find
nineteen editions of Virgil between 1469 and 1478. The _Princeps_
of Homer was only printed in 1488. Panzer, according to Dibdin,
enumerates ninety editions of Virgil in the 15th century (ii. 540.).
Mr. Hallam says (Lit. Eur., i. 420.), ‘Ariosto has been _after Homer_
the favourite poet of Europe.’ I presume this distinguished writer does
not mean to imply that Homer has been more read than any other poet.
Can his words mean that Homer has been more approved? It is worth while
to ask the question: for the judgments of Mr. Hallam are like those of
Minos, and reach into the future.
Nothing can be more marked than the prominence of the Scamander as
compared with the Simois in Homer. The Simois is named by him only six
times, and none of the passages show it to have been a considerable
stream. In the Twenty-first Book[892], Scamander invites Simois to join
him in pouring forth the flood which was to bear away Achilles, but
his ‘brother’ neither replies, nor takes part in the action. It would
appear, indeed, from geographical considerations, which belong to the
topography of the Troad, that in the summer Simois was probably dry.
This entirely accords with the passage in which this river supplies
ἀμβροσίη[893], a figure, as may be presumed, of grass, for the horses
of Juno. At any rate, that passage is at variance with the idea of the
river as a tearing torrent. Again, Homer mentions[894] that many heroes
fell, he does not say in, but about, the stream: above all, he does not
say they fell into its waters, but in the dust of it, or near it:
[892] Il. xxi. 307, et seqq.
[893] Il. v. 777.
[894] Il. xii. 22.
καὶ Σιμόεις, ὅθι πολλὰ βοάγρια καὶ τρυφάλειαι
κάππεσον ἐν κονίῃσι.
Again, Scamander is personified as the god Xanthus, and plays a great
part in the action: Simois is not personified at all. Scamander is
δῖος, διοτρεφὴς and much besides: Simois has no epithets. Simoeisius is
the son of Anthemion, a person of secondary account; but Scamandrius is
the name given by Hector to his boy. Simois, for all we know, may have
been either a dry bed, or little better than a rivulet; but armed men
are thrown into Scamander, and whirled by him to the sea. Lastly, the
plain where the Greek army was reviewed is λειμὼν Σκαμάνδριος, πέδιον
Σκαμάνδριον. Now a right conception of these rivers is not altogether
an insignificant affair, but is material to the clearness of our ideas
upon the military action of the poem. What then has Virgil done with
them? He has simply reversed the Homeric representation. Xanthus is
with him the unmarked river, Simois is the mighty torrent. Witness
these passages:
Mitto ea, quæ muris bellando exhausta sub altis,
Quos Simois premat ille viros. (Æn. xi. 256.)
Again: