reconciling the poet's mind to the old forms of religious worship.
Reconcile is, perhaps, hardly the right word; we may doubt whether he
had ever quarrelled with them. As he believed in the Power and its
manifestations, so too he believed in the traditional modes of
propitiating it, not asking himself the _raison d'etre_ of this or that
ceremony, still less looking on them with pity and contempt, like
Lucretius, but accepting them in his broad humanity as part of the life
and thought of man in Italy.
fortunatus et ille Deos qui _novit_ agrestes.[878]
Let us mark the word _novit_. The husbandman has come to recognise these
emanations of the Power and to know them as friends; the word could not
have been used of malignant spirits. As I said in an early lecture, man
advances in his knowledge of the Power as he advances in civilisation.
So the rural rites have a claim on his sympathy no less than the men who
performed them; he knew them in their detail, and he knew them in the
spirit which animated them. He must have studied them in detail, and not
only the rural cults, but those of the city too; every gesture in
worship has an interest for him, and so great is our respect for his
accuracy that we accept what he tells us even if we cannot explain
it.[879] His careful learning in all these details has been the means of
preserving for us large sources of knowledge; for Servius, Macrobius,
and other commentators accumulated stores of it in endeavouring to
interpret him.
Now, this is not mere antiquarianism in Virgil, any more than is the
detail of old life which abounds in Scott's poems and novels. These two
men had the same wide, sympathetic outlook on the world. Scott was
interested in everything and everybody, whether living or dead long ago,
and in all they did; and I think we may say the same of Virgil, though
he is said to have been rather reserved and shy than genial and
talkative like Scott. Virgil's mind was not so much "curious," I think,
as sympathetic, and his delight in these religious details arises from
his love of Italy and all that man did in it. He caught the spirit of
the old Italian worship, which, as we saw, demanded that each act should
be performed accurately according to rules laid down. He recognises the
necessity, and with true Italian instinct he acts upon it as he writes.
He knows that these acts of cult are one outward expression of that
quality which had made Rome great--_pietas_, the sense of duty to
family, State, and Deity.
So far I have been considering what I may call the psychological basis
of Virgil's religion--the man's sympathetic nature and wide outlook,
which included in its love of Italy even the old practical worship of
Italians. I have now to go on to the poet's greatest work, in which the
idea of duty was not merely recognised in religious acts but exemplified
in an ideal Roman. It is mainly in the _Aeneid_ that we see him looking
forward as well as backward, for it is there that we have the chart of
the Roman's duty drawn to the scale of his past history, and meant to
guide him in the future in still more glorious travel.
There are two ways in which we may contemplate the _Aeneid_ as a whole
and the teaching it offered the Roman of that day. We may think of it
(if I may for a moment use musical language) as a great fugue, of which
the leading subject is the mission of Rome in the world. Providence,
Divine will, the Reason of the Stoics, or, in the poetical setting of
the poem, Jupiter, the great protecting Roman deity, with the Fates
behind him somewhat vaguely conceived,[880] had guided the State to
greatness and empire from its infancy onwards, and the citizens of that
State must be worthy of that destiny if they were to carry out the great
work. This mighty theme pervades the whole poem and, like the subject of
a fugue, enters and re-enters from time to time in thrilling tones. It
is given out in the prophecy put into the mouth of Jupiter himself at
the beginning of the first book; it is heard in still more magnificent
music from the shade of old Anchises in the last moments of the hero's
visit to Hades in the sixth book, and again in the description of the
shield which Venus gives her son.[881] Though the poem is unequal and
some parts of it are left without the final touches, yet whenever the
poet comes upon this great theme the tone is that of a full organ. This
is, I think, apart from those exquisite beauties of detail which are for
those only who have been initiated in the Virgilian mysteries, what
chiefly moves the modern reader of Virgil. There are drawbacks which,
for us moderns at least, detract from the general effect: the
intervention of gods and goddesses after the Homeric manner, but without
the charm of Homer; the seeming want of warm human blood in the hero;
the stern decrees of Fate overruling human passions and interests; but
he who keeps the great theme ever in mind, watching for it as he reads,
as one watches for the new entry of a great fugue-subject, will never
fail to see in the _Aeneid_ one of the noblest efforts of human art--to
understand what makes it the world's second great epic.
But this great destiny of Rome has been accomplished by the service of
man; by his loyalty, self-sacrifice, and sense of duty; by that quality
known to the Romans as _pietas_; and the second lesson or reminder of
the _Aeneid_ lies in the exemplification of this truth in the person and
character of the hero. We moderns find it hard to interest ourselves in
the character of Aeneas. But as Prof. Nettleship remarked long ago,[882]
a Roman reader would not have thought him dull or uninteresting; if that
had been so, the poem could hardly have become popular from the moment
of its publication. I am inclined to think that the _development_ of the
character of Aeneas under stress of perils, moral and material, was much
more obvious to the Roman than it is to us, and much more keenly
appreciated. For him it was the chief lesson of the poem, which makes it
as it were a "whole duty of the Roman"; and as this lesson is really a
part of Roman religious experience I am going to occupy the rest of this
lecture with it.
The development of the character of Aeneas, under the influence of
perils and temptations through which he is guided by Jupiter and the
Fates, is not a subject which has received much attention from modern
criticism.[883] Yet to me, at least, it would be surprising if the
leading character of the poem were, so to speak, a statue once and for
all conceived and executed by the artist, instead of a human being
subjected to various experiences which work upon his character as well
as his career. There were circumstances in Virgil's time which made it
natural that a poet of a serious and philosophical turn of mind should
be interested in the development of character and make it part of his
great subject. We have more than once had occasion to notice the growth
of individualism in the last two centuries B.C. Beyond doubt personal
character had a great interest at this time for thinking men, apart from
its development; the world was ruled by individuals, and at no time has
so much depended on the disposition of individuals. Men had long begun
to take themselves very seriously, and to write their own biographies.
So entirely had the individual emancipated himself from the State, that
he had almost forgotten that the State existed and claimed his _pietas_;
he worked and played for his own ends.[884] Even the armies of that
melancholy age were known and thought of, not as the servants of the
State, but as Sullani, Pompeiani, and so on. This almost arrogant
self-assertion of the individual was a fact of the time, and could not
be suppressed entirely; it was henceforward impossible to return to the
old times when the State was all in all and the individual counted for
little.
But in the _Aeneid_, if I am not mistaken, there is an almost perfect
balance between the two conflicting interests. The State is the pivot on
which turns all that is best in individual human character; in other
words, Aeneas is not playing his own game, but fulfilling the order of
destiny which was to bring the world under Roman dominion. Individualism
of the wrong type, that of Dido, Turnus, Mezentius, has to be escaped or
overcome by the hero, for whom the call of duty is that of the State to
be; but, all the same, the hero is an _individual_, and one conceived
not merely as a type or a force. True, he is typical of Roman _pietas_,
and bears his constant epithet accordingly; but if we look at him
carefully we shall see that his _pietas_ is at first imperfect, and that
his individualism has to be tamed and brought into the service of the
State _with the help of the State's deities_. This is what makes the
_Aeneid_ a religious poem; the character of Aeneas is pivoted on
religion; religion is the one sanction of his conduct. There is no
appeal in the _Aeneid_ to knowledge, or reason, or pleasure,--always to
the will of God. _Pietas_ is Virgil's word for religion, as it had been
Cicero's in his more exalted moments. In the Dream of Scipio we read
that "_piis_ omnibus retinendus est animus in custodia corporis: nec
iniussu eius a quo ille est vobis datus, ex hominum vita migrandum est,
_ne munus humanum adsignatum a deo defugisse videamini_."[885] In these
words, as is shown by those that follow, the _munus hominum_ is exactly
what it is in the _Aeneid_, duty to Man and the State, and as it is laid
down for man by God, it is also duty to Him. The State finds its
perfection in the individual so long as he thus fulfills the will of
God.[886]
Let us now go on to watch Aeneas as he gradually develops this perfect
balance of motive.
Aeneas is marked at the very outset of the poem as "insignem pietate
virum"; the key-note of his character is sounded here at once with
skill, and the key thus suggested (to use musical metaphor once more) is
maintained steadily throughout it. The quality demanded by the gods from
every true Roman who would take his part in carrying out the divine
mission of Rome must be emphasised in the ideal Roman. Yet, as we read
on, we soon discover that Aeneas was by no means as yet a perfect
character. It can hardly be by accident that the poet has described him
as yielding to despair and bewailing his fate on the first approach of
danger--forgetting the mission before him and the destiny driving him
on, and wishing that he were lying dead with Hector under the walls of
Troy (i. 92 foll.). It would have been easy enough for Virgil to have
taken up at once the heroic vein in the man, as it was left him by
Homer,[887] and to have made him urge his men to bestir themselves or to
yield bravely to fate. And this is precisely what Aeneas does _when the
storm is over and the danger past_ (198 foll.); yet even then he is not
whole-hearted about it:
talia voce refert, curisque ingentibus aeger
_spem voltu simulat_, premit alto corde dolorem.
At the very moment, that is, when he expresses his belief in his destiny
and the duty of making for Italy, he still has misgivings, though he
dare not express them.
Heinze has remarked[888] that before this, at the sack of Troy, he had
shown a want of self-control, and yielded to a mad passion of desperate
fighting that is not to be found in the Aeneas of the last six books
(ii. 314 foll.):
arma amens capio nec sat rationis in armis.
_Furor_ and _ira_ drive him headlong; we are reminded of the mad fury of
Mezentius or Turnus.
Again, after the death of Priam Venus has to remind him of his duty to
his father, wife, and son (ii. 594 foll.), reproaching him for his loss
of sanity and self-control:
nate, quis indomitas tantus dolor excitat iras?
quid furis, aut quonam nostri tibi cura recessit?
non prius aspicies ubi fessum aetate parentem
liqueris Anchisen, superet coniunxne Creusa
Ascaniusque puer?[889]
During the wanderings narrated in the third book it is Anchises who
leads, and who receives and interprets the divine warnings; he seems to
be the guardian and guide of his son: to that son he is "omnis curae
casusque levamen" (iii. 709), and he is "felix nati pietate" (iii. 480).
He is, in fact, the typical Roman father, who, unlike Homer's Laertes,
maintains his activity and authority to the end of his life, and to whom
even the grown-up son, himself a father, owes reverence and obedience.
As Boissier has pointed out,[890] the death of Anchises is postponed in
the story as long as possible, and it is only after his death that
Aeneas is exposed to a really dangerous temptation; it is immediately
after this event that, as we saw, he loses heart at the first storm, and
then, on landing in Africa, falls a victim for the moment to the queenly
charms of Dido. We may notice that up to this point his _pietas_ has
been a limited one, hardly called upon for exercise beyond the bounds of
family life and duty; when he is himself at the head, not only of the
family, but, so to speak, of the State, it has to take a wider range,
and to be put to a severe test.
To all that has at different times been written about Virgil's treatment
of the Dido legend I must venture here to add another word. Heinze has
shown[891] that no certain origin can be discovered for the form of the
story as Virgil tells it; it may have been Naevius who first took Aeneas
to Sicily, but we do not know whether he or any successor of his
invented the essential point of Virgil's story,--the suicide of Dido as
a consequence of her desertion by Aeneas.[892] In any case the question
arises, why our poet should have deliberately abandoned the current and
popular version, and exposed his hero to such imminent danger of
deserting the path which Jupiter and the Fates had marked out for
him,--of sacrificing his great mission to the passion of a magnificent
woman, and to the prospect of illicit ease and unsanctioned dominion.
Heinze is of opinion that Virgil's motive was here a purely artistic
one; he wanted an opportunity to introduce the pathetic element into his
epic. "There was no lack of models; the latest bloom of Greek poetry had
been in nothing more inventive than in dealing with all the phenomena of
the passion of love,--its agony, shame, and despair, and the
self-immolation of its victims."[893] He enforces this view with great
learning, and all he writes about it is of value; but I must confess
that he has not convinced me that this was Virgil's chief motive. He
seems to me to leave out of account two important considerations: first,
that though the poet drew freely on every available source, Greek and
Roman, for the enrichment of his subject and its treatment, yet the
whole design and purpose of the _Aeneid_ is Roman and not Greek, and the
introduction of a love-story _as such_ would have been foreign to that
design, and also to the aims and hopes of Augustus and the best men of
the age. Secondly, Heinze seems to forget, like so many others who have
written about the Dido episode, that Virgil had before his very eyes
facts sufficiently striking, a romance quite sufficiently appalling, to
suggest the adoption of the form of the story as we have it in the
fourth book. Twice in his own lifetime did a single formidable woman
work a baleful spell upon the destinies of the Roman empire. In neither
case did the spell take fatal effect; Julius escaped in time from the
wiles and the splendour of Cleopatra; Antony failed indeed to escape,
but brought himself and her to fortunate ruin. It is to me inexplicable,
considering how all Virgil's poems abound with allusions to the events
of his time, and with side-glances at the chief agents in them, that
neither Heinze nor Norden should have even touched on the possibility
that Cleopatra was in the poet's mind when he wrote the fourth book. It
is perhaps difficult for one who puts the poem on the dissecting-board,
and whose attention is continually absorbed in the investigation of
minute points in the fibre of it, to bear in mind the extraordinary
events of the poet's lifetime,--the civil war, the murder of Julius, the
division of the Roman world, the distraction of Italy, the attempt of
Antony, or rather, indeed, of his enslaver, to set up a rival Oriental
dominion, and the rescue of Romanism and civilisation by Augustus. Had
Lucretius himself lived in that generation, he could hardly have escaped
the influence of these appalling facts. Whoever will turn to the late
Prof. Nettleship's essay on the poetry of Virgil, appended to his
_Ancient Roman Lives of Virgil_,[894] can hardly fail to be convinced
that on the later poet's mind they had produced a profound impression,
the effects of which are traceable throughout the whole mass of his
work. His Roman readers, whose state and empire had been brought to the
verge of ruin by the exaltation of individual passions and ambitions,
would look for these constant allusions and understand them far better
than we can.
I maintain, then, that the poet adopted his version of the story of Dido
not simply as an affecting and pathetic episode, but (in keeping with
his whole design) to emphasise the great lesson of the poem by showing
that the growth and glory of the Roman dominion are due, under
providence, to Roman _virtus_ and _pietas_--that sense of duty to
family, State, and gods, which rises, in spite of trial and danger,
superior to the enticements of individual passion and selfish ease.
Aeneas is sorely tried, but he escapes from Dido to perform the will of
the gods; it is Jupiter, ruler of the Fates and the Roman destinies, who
rescues him, and thus the divine care for Rome, an idea of which
Augustus wished to make the most, is carefully preserved in the tale. If
for us the character of Aeneas suffers by his desertion of Dido, that is
simply because the poet, seized with intense pity for the injured queen,
seems for once, like his own hero, to have forgotten his mission in the
poem, and at the very moment when he means to show Aeneas performing the
noblest act of self-sacrifice, renouncing his individual passion and
listening to the stern call of duty, human nature gets the better of
him, and what he meant to paint as a noble act has come out on his
canvas as a mean one.
In Virgil's story, then, we have in contrast and conflict the opposing
principles of duty and pleasure, of patriotism and selfishness, and the
victory of the latter in the person of Aeneas by the help of the great
god who was the guardian of the destinies of Rome, and of the goddess
who was the mother of the hero and the reputed progenitor of the Julian
family. When once this great trial is over, the way is clear for the
accomplishment of Aeneas' mission, though he still has trials to face,
and as yet is not fully equipped for meeting them.
Whoever, after reading the stormy scenes of the fourth book, will go
straight on to the fifth, cannot but be struck with a change of tone
which would have been doubly welcome to a man of that true Roman feeling
which Virgil was counting on as well as inculcating throughout his
work--doubly welcome, because he would find it not only in the
incidents, but in the character of Aeneas. We here leave self and
passion behind, and are introduced to scenes where the careful
performance of religious and family duties seems to produce ease of mind
and the tranquillity that comes of a soothed conscience. For the first
time in the poem we meet with a characteristic of that best Roman life
which was dear to the heart of Augustus, and with which we may be quite
certain that the poet himself was entirely in sympathy. Strange, indeed,
it is that this should be the case in a book so wholly based for its
externals on Greek poetical traditions; but it is none the less true,
and it is a striking example of Virgil's wonderful genius for
transforming old things with new light and meaning.[895]
It is not only then, or even mainly, the traditional necessity of
describing games in an epic poem, that is the _raison d'etre_ of the
fifth book; the object was rather, as I understand it, to gain the
needful contrast to the stormy passion of the fourth, and a relief for
the mind of the Roman reader before he approached the awful scenery and
experiences of the sixth, while at the same time there could be
indicated--and for a Roman reader more than indicated--the _first
beginning of a change_ in the character of the hero. All this is
effected with wonderful skill by making Aeneas perform with detailed
carefulness the Roman ritual of the _Parentalia_ as it was known to the
Romans of the Augustan age. The _Parentalia_, as I have said
elsewhere,[896] were not days of terror or ill-omen, but rather days on
which the performance of duty was the leading idea in men's minds; that
duty was a pleasant and cheerful one, for the dead were still members of
the family, and there was nothing to fear from them so long as the
living performed their duties towards them under the due regulations of
the _ius divinum_. The ritual indicates the idea of the yearly renewal
of the rite of burial, with the propitiation of the departed which was
necessary for the welfare of the family; and when the liturgical nine
days were over, the living members met together in the _Caristia_, a
kind of love feast of the family, at which all quarrels were to be
forgotten, and from which all guilty members were excluded. In families
of wealth and distinction in Virgil's time the days of mourning might be
followed by _games in honour of the departed_. Thus a Roman would at
once recognise the fact that Aeneas is here presented to us for the
first time as a Roman father of a family, discharging the duties
essential to the continuance and prosperity of that family with
cheerfulness as well as with _gravitas_; and that his _pietas_ here
takes a definite, practical, and truly Roman form, though it is not as
yet extended to its full connotation as the performance of duty towards
the State and its gods.
All this is quite in keeping with the little touches of characterisation
which we can also notice in this book. In the second line Aeneas pursues
his way _certus_, even while he gazes at the flames of Dido's funeral
pyre, not knowing what they meant. He presides at the games with the
dignity of a Roman magistrate, and reproachingly consoles the beaten
Dares with words which seem to reflect his late experience at Carthage
(v. 465):
infelix, quae tanta animum dementia cepit?
non vires alias conversaque numina sentis?
_cede deo_.
When the ships are burnt he does not give way to despair, as in the
storm of the first book, but prays for help to the omnipotent Jupiter,
in whose hand were the destinies of his descendants (v. 687 foll.). But
he is not yet perfect in his sense of duty; he feels the blow severely,
and for a moment wavers (v. 700 foll.):
... casu concussus acerbo
nunc huc ingentis, nunc illuc pectore curas
mutabat versans, Siculisne resideret arvis
oblitus fatorum, Italasne capesseret oras.
It needs the cheering advice of old Nautes (_quicquid erit, superanda
omnis fortuna ferendo est_), and the appearance of the shade of
Anchises, to confirm his wavering will with renewed sense of his
mission. This appearance of his father, "omnis curae casusque levamen,"
with the summons to meet him in Hades, is, as Heinze has seen,[897] a
turning-point in the fortunes and the character of Aeneas, and prepares
us for the final ordeal and initiation which he undergoes in the
following book.