CHAPTER VI.

STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION OF THE POEM, IN RELATION TO THE POEM OF

LUCRETIUS.

I.

The influence, direct and indirect, exercised by Lucretius on the thought,

composition, and even the diction of the Georgics was perhaps stronger

than that ever exercised, before or since, by one great poet on the work

of another. This influence is of the kind which is oftener seen in the

history of philosophy than of literature. It was partly one of sympathy,

partly of antagonism. Virgil’s conception of Nature has its immediate

origin in the thought of Lucretius; his religious convictions and national

sentiment derive new strength by reaction from the attitude of his

predecessor. This powerful attraction and repulsion were alike due to the

fact that Lucretius was the first not only to reveal a new power, beauty,

and source of wonder in the world, but also to communicate to poetry a

speculative impulse, opening up, with a more impassioned appeal than

philosophy can do, the great questions underlying human life,—such as the

truth of all religious tradition, the position of man in the Universe, and

the attitude of mind and course of conduct demanded by that position.

Nor was it a poetical and speculative impulse only that Virgil received

from his predecessor. A new didactic poem, dealing largely with the same

subject-matter as that treated by Lucretius,—such as the earth, the

heavens, the great elemental forces, the growth of plants, the habits of

animals, and the like—contemplating, among other objects, that of

determining the relation of man to the sphere in which he is placed, and

seeking to invest the ordinary processes of Nature with an ideal

charm,—could not help assuming a somewhat similar mould to that which had

been originally cast for the philosophic thought and realistic observation

of the older poet.

Again, in regard to the technical execution of his work, rhythm and

expression, Virgil inherited the new wealth introduced into Latin

literature by Lucretius. Lucretius had given to the Latin Hexameter a

stronger and more unimpeded flow, a more sonorous and musical intonation

than it had before his time. He stamped the force of his mind on new modes

of vivid expression and of rhythmical cadence, which, though they might be

modified, could not be set aside in any future representation of the

‘species ratioque,’ the outward spectacle and the moving principle of

Nature.

Many circumstances conduced to bring Virgil, more powerfully than any

other Latin poet, under the spell of Lucretius. As is remarked by Mr.

Munro(307), when the poem of his predecessor first appeared Virgil was at,

or near, the age which is most immediately impressed and moulded by a

contemporary work of genius. The enthusiasm for philosophy, expressed in

the short poem written immediately before he began to study under Siron,

implies that he had been already attracted by the subject of which

Lucretius was the only worthy(308) Latin exponent; and his studies under

that teacher must have prepared his mind to receive the higher instruction

of the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ The song of Silenus in the sixth Eclogue and

many expressions and cadences in other poems of the series attest the

poetical, if not the speculative, impression thus produced. But the

clearest testimony of Virgil’s recognition of the influence of his

predecessor is found in that passage of the Georgics in which he speaks of

himself most from his heart,—

Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, etc.,—(II. 475.)

and in which he declares his first wish to be that the Muses should reveal

to him the secrets of Nature; but, if this were denied him, he next prays

that ‘the love of the woods and running streams in the valleys’ might be

his portion. He may not have meant the lines

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, etc.,—(II. 490.)

to be taken as a description of the individual Lucretius, or those

containing the other picture, placed by its side,

Fortunatas et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,

Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores, etc.,—(II. 493.)

as a description of himself. Such direct personal references are not in

keeping with the allusive style in which he writes of himself and others.

He seems rather in these passages to set forth two ideal states of mind,

that of philosophic contemplation, on the one hand, that of the pure love

of Nature and conformity with the simple beliefs of country-people, on the

other, as equally capable of raising men above the vulgar passions and

pleasures of the world. But it is evident that he thought of Lucretius as

the poet who had held up the one ideal to the imagination and the severer

mood of his countrymen, and of himself as holding up the other to their

poetical feeling and their human affections.

He would thus seem to have looked on Lucretius with something of that

veneration with which Lucretius regards Epicurus, Empedocles, and Ennius,

and with which Dante long after regarded Virgil himself. The two greatest

among the Roman poets had many feelings in common,—the love of Nature, the

love of study, especially the study of ancient poetry and of science, a

natural shrinking from the pomp and luxury of city-life and from the

schemes of worldly ambition, an abhorrence of the crimes and violence of

civil war. They felt the charm of the same kind of outward scenes,—of

rivers flowing through green pastures, of meadow and woodland, of rich

corn-fields and vineyards. They had the same strong sympathy with the life

of animals associated with man’s labour, the same fellow-feeling with the

pain and the happiness of which human affection is the source. The

numerous passages in which phrases or cadences, thought or imagery in the

Georgics recall phrases or representation in the earlier poem(309), leave

no doubt that Virgil found in Lucretius a heart and spirit with which his

own largely receptive nature could in many ways sympathise, as well as

that he recognised in him a guide whom he could follow in imagination

‘among the lonely heights of Parnassus(310).’

Yet, on the other hand, it is quite true that both the character and

genius of Virgil are essentially of a different type from those of

Lucretius.—They are both thoroughly original representatives of different

elements in the Roman and Italian character.—So far as he represents the

mind and temper of Rome, Lucretius represents the old order which had

passed away. Though scarcely anything is known of the circumstances of his

life, yet his _gentile_ name (as is shown by Mr. Munro), his relation of

equality to Memmius, the stamp of his powerful personality impressed on

his poem, point to the conclusion that he was one of the old Roman

aristocracy, born into a time when many of its members had begun to retire

in disgust from active interest in the Republic, which they were no longer

able to govern. It was, as has been already remarked(311), to this class

among the Romans, almost exclusively, that the taste for literature was

confined in the last age of the Republic; and it was among men of this

class, such as the Luculli and Hortensius, and the Velleius and Torquatus

of Cicero’s Dialogues, that the Epicurean philosophy found its chief

adherents. The poem of Lucretius shows all the courage and energy, the

power of command, the sense of superiority and the direct simplicity of

manner emanating from it, which are the inheritance of a great governing

class. He is the one man of true genius for poetry whom that class gave to

Rome. His lofty pathos and tenderness of feeling are the graces of his own

nature, refined and purified by the most humanising studies. His profound

melancholy is a mood natural to one who looks on the passing away of a

great order of things, political, social, and religious, in the midst of

scenes of turbulence and violence, and takes refuge from an alien world in

the contemplation of another order of things, infinitely more majestic

than either the old social state which was shaken and tottering to its

fall, or the new which was yet ‘powerless to be born.’

There could scarcely be any greater contrast, in social relations and the

dispositions arising out of them, between any two men, than between the

representative of the old governing families of the Republic, and the

humbly-born native of the Cisalpine province,—delicate in health, modest

and self-distrustful, yet endowed with a deep consciousness of genius and

a resolution to follow that guidance only,—entering on manhood and

beginning his career as poet contemporaneously with the events which

determined the ascendency of the new order of things, and identified with

it through his personal relations to the leading men of the new Empire,—a

poet who derived from his birth and early nurture ‘the spirit of the ages

of Faith(312),’—one too who had been happy in his early home-affections

and in the friendships of his manhood, and who was able to dedicate his

mature years to his art under conditions of the greatest personal and

national security. In considering the influence of the ideas of Lucretius

on the mind of Virgil, we must accordingly make large allowance for the

medium of alien sympathies, personal, social, and political, through which

they were refracted. We must take into consideration also the wide

difference between the philosophic poet and the pure poetic artist. The

feeling of Virgil towards philosophy was apparently one of aspiration

rather than of possession. He shows no interest in the processes of

enquiry,—in tracing the operation of great laws in manifold phenomena,—in

investigating one obscure subject after another, with the confident

assurance that every discovery is a step towards the light and the

ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. Virgil recognises the source of

his own strength in the words

Flumina _amem_ silvasque.

It is the power of love which quickens his intuition and enables him to

perceive the tenderness and beauty revealed in the living movement of

Nature. He receives and applies the complete ideas of Lucretius, but he

does not follow them with the eagerness of their author through the

various phases of their development. Certain results of a philosophic

system affect his imagination, but he does not seem to feel how these

results necessarily exclude other conclusions which he will not abandon.

Hence arises his prevailing eclecticism,—the existence of popular beliefs

side by side in his mind with the tenets of Epicureans, Stoics, and

Platonists,—of some conclusions of the Lucretian science along with the

opposing doctrines expressed in the poetry of Alexandria. Even in the

arrangement of his materials and the grouping of his landscapes, some

chance association or rhythmical cadence seems to guide his hand, more

often than the perception of the orderly connexion of phenomena with one

another.

II.

The idea which Lucretius revealed to the world in fuller majesty and life

than any previous poet or philosopher, was the idea of Nature,

apprehended, not as an abstract conception, but as a power omnipresent,

creative, and regulative throughout the great spheres of earth, sky, and

sea, and the innumerable varieties of individual existence. The meaning

conveyed by the Greek word φύσις, as employed by Democritus, Heraclitus,

Empedocles, etc., is powerless to move the imagination or enlarge the

sense of beauty, when compared with the illimitable content of ‘Natura

daedala rerum’ as conceived by the Latin poet. Nature is to him the one

power absolutely supreme and independent in the Universe, too vast and too

manifold to be subject to any will but her own,—

Libera continuo dominis privata superbis.

Her independent existence is incompatible with that of the multitude of

beings, of limited power and intelligence, which the old mythologies

established as lords over the world and man. The gods, abiding in a state

of blessed ease and indifference, are themselves dependent on a power

infinitely transcending their own. But in what relation does man stand to

this power? He too is within her sphere, altogether subject to her, but no

special object of her regard. He exists only through compliance with and

resignation to her conditions. And these conditions are on the whole

unfavourable to him. He can gain only a scanty subsistence by a continual

struggle with reluctant and rebellious forces in the earth; and even after

all his toil and care, causes over which he has no control, such as the

inclemency of the skies and incalculable vicissitudes of heat and cold,

frustrate his endeavours.

Quod superest arvi _tamen id natura sua vi_

_Sentibus obducat_, ni _vis humana resistat_

Vitai causa valido consueta bidenti

_Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris_.

Si non fecundas _vertentes_ vomere glebas

_Terraique solum subigentes_ cimus ad ortus,

_Sponte sua nequeant liquidas_ existere in auras.

Et tamen interdum _magno quaesita labore_

Cum iam per terras frondent atque omnia florent,

Ant nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol

Aut subiti perimunt imbris gelidaeque pruinae,

Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant(313).

How deeply the thought expressed in these lines—the thought of the hard

struggle which man is forced to carry on with an unsympathetic Power—sank

into the mind of Virgil, is evident from the various passages in the

Georgics in which the phraseology as well as the idea expressed by

Lucretius is reproduced. These lines in which the struggle between the

‘vis humana’ impersonated in the husbandman, and the resistance offered by

Nature to his energetic labours, is vividly described, suggest whatever

there is of speculative thought in the Georgics. And though it would be

misleading to speak of that poem as, in any sense, a philosophical poem,

yet, as in all other great works of genius, some theory of life—of man’s

relation to his circumstances and of his place, either in a spiritual or

natural dispensation—pervades and gives its highest meaning to the

didactic exposition.

Lucretius further regards this state of things, so far from being

remediable by man, as necessarily becoming worse. Each new generation of

husbandmen and vinedressers finds its burden heavier:—

Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator

Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores(314), etc.

The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair

crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser(315), can now

scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of

men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it(316). The cause of this decay

in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the

elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more

rapid than the supply of new materials. ‘In the long warfare waged from

infinite time’—

Ex infinito contractum tempore bellum—

the destructive forces are gaining the superiority over the restorative

forces of Nature; and this process is hastening on the advent of that

‘single day’ which will overwhelm in ruin the whole framework of earth,

sea, and sky(317).

What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do?

Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of

Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and

reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the

poem, which Virgil also remembered(318), he did recognise the fact that

human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to

enrich and beautify the earth:—

Inde aliam atque aliam culturam dulcis agelli

Temptabant, fructusque feros mansuescere terram

Cernebant indulgendo blandeque colendo(319).

But he seems to have no idea of further progress. Though he contemplates

with imaginative sympathy the trials of the ‘grandis arator’ and the

‘vetulae vitis sator,’ he has no guidance to offer them. The lessons

taught by Lucretius are not those of active energy, applicable to every

condition of life, but the lessons of a resigned quietism and a

contemplative energy, adapted only to men of leisure, enjoying ample

resources for the gratification of their intellectual tastes.

That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth

made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact

that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea

of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such

subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer:

‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to

struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s mouth(320) the sentiment

that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of

man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance

which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the

didactic directions of the Georgics were given.

The Lucretian idea of Nature, both in its philosophical and poetical

significance, runs through the Georgics; but it is modified by other

considerations, and it is rather latent than prominent in the poetry and

in the practical teaching of the poem. The mind of Virgil is not

possessed, as the mind of Lucretius was possessed, by the thought of the

immensity of her sphere and the universality of her presence. He sees her

presence in the familiar scenes and objects around him. The idea adds

variety, grace, and liveliness to his description of every detail of rural

industry. A sense of the ministering agency of Nature is a more pervading

element in his poetry than that of her power and majesty. Objects are

still regarded by him as separate and individual. The conceptions of

Nature which created mythology contend in his mind with the

half-apprehended conceptions of universal law and of the interdependence

of phenomena on one another. Thus the poetical element in his descriptions

of the life of plants and trees, or of the forces of flood and storm, does

not spring from such deep sources in the imagination as the same element

in the descriptions of the older poet. But neither is it limited to the

perception of the ‘outward shows’ of things which gratify the eye, or the

sounds which delight the ear. Even in the Eclogues the intuition into

Nature is deeper than that. The study of Lucretius has enriched the

Georgics with the most pervading charm of the poem—the sense of a secret,

unceasing, tranquil power (like that ascribed by Wordsworth to May—

Thy help is with the weed that creeps

Along the barest ground, etc.),

communicating to outward things the grace and tenderness of human

sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.

But the Lucretian conception of Nature in its relation to human wants has

been greatly modified by the religious tendency of Virgil’s thought, his

respect for traditional opinion, his sense of man’s dependence on a higher

Spiritual Power. Nature he regards as no more independent in her sphere

than man is in his. The laws and conditions imposed on her have been

appointed with reference to the relation in which she stands to man. Where

these conditions are unfavourable, they have been appointed to quicken

man’s faculties and force him into the ways of industry. Lucretius dwells

on the fact that two-thirds of our globe are unsuited for human

habitation, as disproving the opinion of a Divine creation of the world

for the benefit of man(321): Virgil dwells on the fact that two temperate

regions have been assigned to weak mortals as a proof of Divine

beneficence(322). Virgil also accepts the idea that the earth once was

more productive than it is(323), but he accepts it in the spirit of Hesiod

rather than of Lucretius. In the Golden Age, under Saturn, the earth bore

all things spontaneously. It was Jove—or Providence—who imposed on man,

and continues to impose on him, the necessity of labouring for his

subsistence; and this he did, not, as Hesiod believed, in anger at the

deceit of Prometheus, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. The

poetical references to the Saturnian Age and the subsequent reign of Jove

need not imply a literal belief in the fables of mythology, any more than

the allusion at Georg. i. 62 to the fable of Pyrrha and Deucalion implies

the literal acceptance of the explanation there given of the existence of

the present race of men. But as that allusion seems meant to convey the

belief in a Divine creative act, so the former allusion seems to convey a

belief in a Divine moral dispensation. The idea of Providential guidance,

of a Supreme Father, wielding the forces of Nature, shaping the destinies

of man, acting for the most part by regular processes in order that man

may learn to understand his ways(324), but making his personal agency more

manifest from time to time, as after the death of Caesar, by signs and

wonders interrupting the order of Nature, supersedes or largely modifies

the conception of natural law. The other powers of the Greek Olympus and

of the Roman Pantheon are no longer, as the former are in the Iliad, at

war with one another, but all work in harmony with the Supreme Will. Like

the fables just referred to, the names of these deities seem to be

introduced symbolically, to signify the different modes of activity of the

one Supreme Spiritual Power, and the different forms under which he is to

be reverenced.

The speculative idea of the Georgics is thus rather a theological than a

philosophical idea. The ultimate fact which Virgil endeavours to set forth

and justify is the relation of man to Nature, under a Divine dispensation.

He too, as well as Lucretius, recognises the tendency of all things to

degenerate; but this tendency he attributes, not to natural loss of force,

but to the fiat of Omnipotence—

sic omnia fatis

In peius ruere.

He too recognises the liability to failure and loss from causes over which

man has no direct control,—the violence of storms, the inclemency of

seasons, etc.,—as well as from others which he is able to provide against

by constant vigilance. What resource has he against these untoward

conditions? First he is bound to watch the signs of impending change which

Providence has appointed, so as to leave as little as possible at the

mercy of the elements. Next he has the resource of prayer, and the power

of propitiating Heaven by customary rites and sacrifices, and by a life of

piety and innocence. The ethical precepts of the poem, as is said by a

distinguished French writer, may be summed up in the medieval maxim,

‘Laborare est orare(325).’

To inculcate the necessity of a constant struggle with the reluctant

forces of Nature, and to show how this struggle may be successfully

conducted by incessant labour, vigilance, propitiation of the Supreme Will

by prayer and piety, thus appears to be the main ethical teaching of the

Georgics. And this statement of Virgil’s aim is not inconsistent with the

interpretation of his meaning, first suggested by Mr. Merivale, and

accepted and admirably illustrated by Conington. But the phrase

‘glorification of labour’ suggests modern rather than ancient

associations. Labour is not glorified as an end in itself; it is

inculcated as a duty, as the condition appointed by Providence for

attaining the peace, abundance, happiness, and worth of the life of the

fields. As of old

Τῆς ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν,

so now they make the sweat of man’s brow the means through which the

‘divini gloria ruris’ can be realised. By the labour spent in drawing into

actual existence the glory and beauty of the land man best fulfils his

duty and secures his happiness. There is no truer source for him of

material and moral good, of simple pleasures, of contemplative delight.

Yet if we wish rightly to appreciate the purely didactic parts of the

poem, it is impossible, as has been fully shown by Conington in his

General Introduction to the Georgics, to overrate the stress which Virgil

puts on the ceaseless industry, foresight, vigilance, and actual

force(326) which must be put forth by the husbandman, as the condition of

success in the struggle in which he is engaged. The very style of the

Georgics bears the impress of this predominant idea. It is this idea which

seems to give Roman strength to the workmanship of the poem; as it is the

sense of the rich and tender life of Nature which gives to it the softness

of Italian sentiment, so marvellously blended with that Roman strength.

The imperial tone of conquest and command and civilising influence makes

itself heard in such lines as these:—

Exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis.

Tum denique dura

Exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentes.

In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur(327).

This idea of the need of a struggle with Nature, latent under all the

special precepts of the Georgics, is thus seen to arise out of the

philosophical thought of Lucretius. But the lesson inculcated by Virgil is

directly opposite to that state of quietism and pure contemplation in

which Lucretius finds the ideal of human life. Virgil’s teaching is that

best adapted to the strenuous temperament of his countrymen and to the

general condition of men in all times. And it will be found that this idea

of a hard struggle, ordained by Supreme Power, against adverse

circumstances, in which man receives Divine guidance by prayer and patient

interpretation of the will of Heaven, and through which he attains to a

state of final rest, runs through the Aeneid as well as the Georgics.

Virgil reaches a practical result opposed to that which Lucretius reaches,

by subordinating the Lucretian conception of man’s relation to Nature to

the Platonic belief in the supremacy of a Spiritual Will and in the moral

dispensation under which man is placed. It is this belief which appears to

underlie Virgil’s acceptance of the religious traditions of antiquity,

which might have been expected to have received, for all educated minds,

their death-blow at the hands of Lucretius.

The science of Lucretius, as distinct from his philosophy of Nature and

human life, is also partly accepted by Virgil, and partly rejected in

favour of the tenets of an opposite school. In such passages as i. 89–90,

Seu pluris calor ille vias et caeca relaxat

Spiramenta, novas veniat qua sucus in herbas(328), etc.,

i. 415–423,

Haud equidem credo, etc.,

iii. 242,

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, etc.,

we recognise the Lucretian explanation of the constitution of the earth,

of the material elements of the mind, of the physical influence of love.

Other passages again, such as i. 247, etc.,

Illic ut perhibent aut intempesta silet nox,

and iv. 219–227,

His quidam signis, etc.,

are in harmony with the Stoical doctrines and in direct opposition to the

Epicurean science. Some of these apparent inconsistencies of opinion may

be explained on the supposition that Virgil changed his allegiance from

one school to another during the composition of the Georgics. But probably

the truer explanation is that he was

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri(329),

and that he accepted certain results of science which impressed his

imagination, without caring for their consistency with others which he

equally accepts. There is a constant tendency in him to allow his belief

in the miraculous to interfere with his belief in natural law; as for

instance in the account he gives of the birth of bees (iv. 200), and again

of their spontaneous generation from the blood of slain bullocks (iv.

285). He has not the firm faith in natural agency which Lucretius had.

Phenomena are still regarded by him as isolated, not interdependent. The

ordinary course of Nature he supposes to be interrupted by marvels and

portents. The signs of coming things are represented, not as Lucretius

would have represented them, as natural antecedents or concomitants of the

things portended, but as arbitrary indications appointed for the guidance

of man.

III.

For the technical execution of his poem Virgil could gain little help from

his Greek models. The mass of materials which he had to reduce to order

was much larger and more miscellaneous than the special topics selected

for their art by the Alexandrians. The subject treated in the Georgics

would have afforded scope for several poems treated on the principle on

which Aratus and Nicander treated their subjects; and not only was the

mass of materials larger and more varied, but the whole purpose of the

Georgics was more complex. Virgil’s artistic aim was not only to combine

into one work the topics which he treats successively in the four books of

the Georgics, but to interweave with them the poetry of personal and

national feeling, of speculative ideas, of ethical and religious teaching,

of science, of the living world of Nature. In Lucretius, on the other

hand, he found an example of the systematic treatment of a vaster range of

topics,—a range so vast, indeed, that the principal topics of Virgil’s art

enter as subsidiary elements into one part of his representation.

Lucretius too had shown how to combine with the systematic exposition of

his abstract theme a strong personal interest and a strong ethical

purpose. He had shown how, out of the treatment of this abstract theme,

opportunities naturally arose for uttering the poetry and pathos of human

life, and for delineating in all its beauty and majesty the outward face

and revealing the inner secret of Nature. He thus supplied the general

plan which Virgil might follow, with modifications suited to his narrower

range of subject and his more purely didactic office. We see how Virgil

adopts this plan, modified to suit his own ideas, in the personal

dedication; in the Invocation and short introduction to his various books;

in his manner of arranging, connecting, and illustrating the successive

stages of his exposition; and, lastly, in the use which he makes of

episodes, chiefly at the end of various books, with the view of enabling

his readers to feel the intimate connexion of his subject with the most

valued interests of life,—with religion and morality, with family

affection, with peace, prosperity, and national greatness.

The first parallel to be noticed, in the comparison between the two poems,

is in the personal address. Maecenas stands in the same relation to the

Georgics as Memmius does to the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ But as Memmius in the

body of the poem is often merged in the ideal philosophical student, so

Virgil, after the lines of compliment at the opening of his various books,

for the most part directs his instructions to some imaginary husbandman.

In the tones in which Memmius and Maecenas are respectively addressed

there may be an equal sincerity of feeling. But a difference in the

relation in which the poets stand to those whom they address makes itself

felt in the contrast between such lines as these,

Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas

Suavis amicitiae,

and

O decus, O famae merito pars maxima nostrae(330).

In the one case we recognise the man, born into the equal relations of an

aristocratic Republic, who knows of no social superior in the world, and

is attracted to him whom he honours by his dedication solely by the charm

of friendship. In the other case, though the affection may not be less

sincere, there is the unmistakeable note of deference to a social

superior.

The difference between the position which the two poets occupied and of

the times in which they lived is still more manifest in the selection of

the person whom they each fix on as the object of their reverential

homage. Though the poem of Lucretius is inscribed to Memmius, it is really

dedicated to the glory of Epicurus. His image presides over the massive

temple raised to the Power of Nature. He is the great benefactor of the

world, exalted by his service to mankind, not only above all living men,

but above those whom the popular religion had in early times elevated to

the rank of gods—

deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi.

In every book of the poem his praises are repeated in language of

enthusiastic devotion. In the poem of Virgil the living Caesar occupies

the place of a tutelary deity—

In medio mihi Caesar erit, templumque tenebit.

He is ranked above all living men, and above the great men of the past by

whom Rome had been saved from her enemies: he is addressed as the

immediate object of care to the native gods of Italy, and as destined

after death to rank among the ruling powers of Heaven. Something is said

in his honour in every book of the poem. The lines near the end,

Caesar dum magnus ad altum

Fulminat Euphraten bello, victorque volentis

Per populos dat iura, viamque adfectat Olympo(331),

seem intended to leave the thought of his actual greatness as the abiding

impression on the mind of the reader; as the concluding lines of the

Invocation seem intended to make his presence felt as that of its

inspiring deity. While we cannot doubt that the admiration expressed by

Lucretius is the sincere and generous tribute of genius acknowledging a

great debt and unconsciously exaggerating the nobleness of its benefactor,

it is impossible to determine how far Virgil’s language is the expression

of sincere conviction, and how far it is dictated by the necessities of

his position.

But it is in their invocations of a Superior Power to aid them in their

task that we recognise the strongest contrast between the philosophic

poet, who, while denying all supernatural agency, is yet carried away by

his imagination to attribute consciousness, will, and passion to the great

creative Power of Nature,—the source of all life, joy, beauty, and

art,—and the ‘pius vates,’ influenced by the religious sense of man’s

dependence on a Spiritual Power, deeply feeling the poetical charm of the

old mythology, and striving to effect some reconcilement between the

fading traditions of Polytheism and the more philosophical conceptions

prevalent in his time. Lucretius for the moment adopts the symbolism of

ancient mythology, and probably the actual figures of pictorial art (which

elsewhere he speaks of as a great source of human delusion), to impart

visible presence, colour, and passion to his thought; but he leaves no

doubt on the reader’s mind that his representation is merely symbolical.

Virgil, on the other hand, appears in the opening lines of the Georgics to

attribute a distinct personality to the beings of that composite

Polytheism which had gradually grown up out of the union of Greek art and

Roman religion, but which it is difficult to comprehend as having any real

hold over the minds of men who had received any tincture of Greek

philosophy. In the divine office which he assigns to Caesar he adopts the

latest addition to this eclectic Pantheon; and this new divinity he

introduces in the midst of the old gods, just as he fancifully introduces

Gallus in the Eclogues amid the choir of Apollo and the Muses.

But in the Eclogues there is no feeling of doubt in our minds that the

representation is purely fanciful. The strain in the Georgics is

altogether too serious; the juxtaposition of Caesar with the gods of

Olympus and the protecting deities of the husbandman is too carefully

meditated to admit of our supposing the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to

‘adsuesce vocari’ to be intended to be taken as a mere play of fancy. We

cannot think of Lucretius, perhaps not even of Cicero, reading Virgil’s

Invocation, and especially the concluding lines of it, without a certain

feeling of scorn. We cannot help asking how far could the pupil of Siron,

the student of Epicurus and Lucretius, the enlightened associate of

Maecenas, Augustus, Pollio, Horace, etc., attach any serious meaning to

the words of this Invocation. How far was he simply complying with an

established convention of literature? how far using these mythological

representations as symbolism? how far was he identifying himself in

imagination with the beliefs of his ideal husbandman?

To answer these questions we must endeavour to realise the very composite

character which the Pagan religion, the accumulation of many beliefs from

the earliest and rudest fancies of primitive times to the studied

representations of Greek art and the later symbolical explanations of

philosophical schools, presented to men living in the Augustan Age. In

this Invocation and in the body of the poem we can trace three or four

distinct veins of belief, existing together, without producing any sense

of inconsistency, and combining into a certain unity for the purpose of

artistic representation.

Religion in the Augustan Age presented a different aspect to the dwellers

in the town and in the country; to the refined classes whose tastes were

formed by Greek art and poetry, and to men of the old school,—senators

like Cotta or antiquarians like Varro,—who sought to conform to the

ancient Roman traditions; to students of philosophy, who either, like the

Epicureans, denied all Divine agency, or like the Stoics, resolved the

many divinities of the popular belief into one Divine agency under many

forms. The peculiarity of Virgil’s mind is that his belief, at least as

expressed in his poetry, was a kind of syncretism composed out of all

these modes of thought and belief. Like Horace and Tibullus, he

sympathises in imagination with that rustic piety which expressed the

natural thankfulness of the human heart for protection afforded to the

flocks and the fruits of the field, by festivals and ceremonial

observances like the Palilia and Ambarvalia, by sacrifice of a kid to

Faunus, or offerings of flowers and fruit to the Penates. The feelings

connected with this vein of belief as they are represented in the poetry

of the Augustan Age,—

Faune nympharum fugientum amator, etc.,—

and again in Tibullus,

Di patrii, purgamus agros, purgamus agrestes, etc.,—

of a happy and generally of a genial and festive character, and not

altogether devoid of such elements of simple piety as find expression in

the

Caelo supinas si tuleris manus, etc.,

of Horace. Poetical sympathy with the beliefs and picturesque ceremonies

of the peasants among whom they lived enhanced the real enjoyment derived

from their country life by men of refined feeling like Horace and

Tibullus. But Virgil’s feeling in regard to the religious trust and

observances of the country people appears to be stronger than mere

poetical sympathy. He sees in them a class of men more immediately

dependent than others on the protection of some unseen Power, and thus

forced, as it were, into more immediate relation with that Power. The

modes in which they endeavoured to gain the favour of that Power or to

express their thankfulness for its protection were probably among the

influences which had moulded his own early belief and character in his

Mantuan farm. In the prayer

Dique deaeque omnes studium quibus arva tueri(332),

as in the later exclamation,

Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes(333),

he is identifying himself in imagination with a living mode of popular

belief, and one to which he may have been attracted by his early

associations as well as by poetical sympathy.

But the Invocation recognises the creations of Greek art along with the

ruder and simpler objects of Italian worship. The ‘Fauni Dryadesque

puellae’ assume to Virgil’s fancy the forms of Greek art and poetry. The

legend of Neptune producing the horse by the stroke of his trident

suggests the attributes of Ποσειδῶν ἵππιος, not of the Italian Neptunus.

It is not the Roman Minerva, but ἁ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθάνα, who is associated in

poetry and legend with the olive,—

Φύτευμ’ ἀχείρωτον αὐτόποιον

γλαυκᾶς παιδοτρόφου φύλλον ἐλαίας.

He calls upon Pan to leave his native groves and the woodland pastures of

Lycaeus, just as Horace describes him as passing nimbly from his Arcadian

haunt to the Sabine Lucretilis. These gods, nymphs, and satyrs of an alien

belief were now to Romans as to Greeks the recognised materials which art

and song had to shape into new forms. In the vigorous prime of Greek

poetry, so late even as the age of Sophocles and Herodotus, there was a

real belief in the personal existence and active agency of these

supernatural beings. This real belief first gave birth to, and was

afterwards merged in, the representations of art. Art, which owed its

birth to religious sentiment, superseded it. But after a time and under

new conditions the strong admiration for the beauty or significance of the

objects represented in art produces a strong wish to revive the belief in

their reality; and in minds peculiarly susceptible of such influences the

wish tends to fulfil itself.

Probably Virgil himself would not have cared to probe too deeply the state

of half-belief in which his heart and mind realised the bright existence

and kindly influence of beings consecrated to him by the most cherished

associations of living art and the poetry of the past. Even Lucretius,

while sternly rejecting all belief in their existence as absolutely

incompatible with truth, feels from time to time attracted by their

poetical charm. Horace, we can see, from the absence of anything in his

Satires, or Epistles, implying a real belief in the gods of mythology,

keeps his literary belief apart from his true convictions. In the case of

Virgil, it is not possible, at all events for a modern reader, distinctly

to separate them. The power of the old mythology over the fancy and the

weakness of scientific thought in ancient times to overthrow that power is

nowhere more visible than in his poetry.

But there was another mode of Greek influence acting on the educated minds

of Rome, stronger than that of the ancient mythology. That influence was

the religious speculations of the various philosophical schools(334).

There was, on the one hand, the Epicurean acceptance of an infinite number

of gods dwelling in the ‘Intermundia,’ enjoying a state of supreme calm,

apart from all concern with this world or the labours and pursuits of men.

They might be objects of pure contemplation, and pious reverence to the

human spirit; but they were capable neither of being propitiated nor made

angry by anything that men could do. The Stoic doctrine, on the other

hand, recognised the incessant agency and forethought of a Supreme

Spiritual Power over human life. It accepted the stories and beings of the

traditional religion, but explained them away. The various deities

worshipped by the people are the various manifestations and functions of

this one Supreme Spiritual Power, whether called by the name of Zeus, or

by the abstract name of Providence (πρόνοια). This is the Power addressed

in the famous hymn of Cleanthes, and that appealed to in the familiar τοῦ

γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν of Aratus. It is part of Virgil’s eclecticism to

combine the science of Epicurus with the theology of the more spiritual

schools. The Supreme Spiritual Power in the Georgics is generally spoken

of under the title of ‘Pater.’ It is noticeable that the word Iuppiter is

used either with a purely physical signification, as in

Iuppiter umidus austris—

Et iam maturis metuendus Iuppiter uvis—

or as in the phrases ‘sub Iove,’ ‘ante Iovem,’ in reference to the stories

of the ancient mythology. Even in this Invocation, the object of which

seems to be to assign function and personality to the gods of Olympus and

of Italy, the influence of the Stoic theology was recognised in ancient

times in the identification of the sun and moon—‘clarissima mundi

lumina’—with Liber and Ceres(335). The rhythm of the lines 5–7 can leave

no doubt whatever as to this identification, notwithstanding the appeal to

Varro’s example, who distinguishes the various deities whom he invokes. It

is characteristic of Virgil’s art to introduce such a variation in any

passage which he imitates, and also to suggest a thought which he does not

distinctly develope. In the lines 95–96,

neque illum

Flava Ceres alto nequiquam spectat Olympo(336),

he reproduces a thought which Callimachus had expressed in his hymn to

Artemis(337)—

Οὓς δὲ κεν εὐμειδής τε καὶ ἴλαος αὐγάσσηαι

κείνοις εὖ μὲν ἄρουρα φέρει στάχυν(338).

The ‘flava Ceres’ of Virgil’s description seems to call up before our mind

a picture of the harvest-moon looking down on the corn-fields of the

prosperous husbandman.

The national religion of Rome was something distinct both from the rustic

Paganism of Italy, and from that aesthetic amalgamation of Greek and Roman

beliefs and that semi-philosophical rationalism which art and literature

made familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age. The great symbol of that

national religion was the Temple of Jove on the Capitol(339).

That religion was based on the idea that the wide empire and eternal

duration of Rome had been appointed by Divine decree. As distinguished

from the national religion of Greece, which expressed itself in new and

varied forms of art, Roman religion was one which adhered to ancient rites

and expressed itself in the pomp of outward ceremonial and other

impressive symbols. It acted on the imagination through the sense of

vastness, pomp, stateliness, and solemnity; that of Greece through the

sense of life, joy, beauty, and harmony animating its ceremonial and

embodying itself in its symbols. The objects of Roman worship were almost

innumerable. In addition to the greater divinities which it shared with

the Greek worship, and besides the various native divinities common to it

with the religion of other Italian races, Roman religion had erected

temples to various abstract qualities, such as Peace, Faith, Concord, and

the like. This tendency to multiply their deities, to deify mere

abstractions, and to recognise a distinct deity as presiding over every

common act and process of life, weakened or destroyed the sense of the

personality of the gods, and thus indirectly promoted that advance to

Monotheism which philosophy had made in a different direction. While the

Greeks conceived of each local god or hero as a distinct person, endowed

with his own human qualities and his own visible shape, and thus naturally

adapted for the representations of dramatic poetry or plastic art, the

Romans worshipped rather one Divine impersonal power with many attributes

and functions. The need which the popular imagination feels of some

personal embodiment of the idea of Godhead probably explains the readiness

with which, in the dissolution of older faiths, the worship of the Emperor

became the chief symbol of the national faith.

So far as the conceptions of the national religion of Rome, which have a

powerful influence on the action of the Aeneid, enter into this

Invocation, it is in the recognition of the divinity of Caesar. But here

he is associated with the rural gods, who listen to the prayers of the

husbandman, rather than, as elsewhere both in Horace and Virgil, with the

majesty of the Roman State. The passage probably, as is suggested by

Ribbeck, owes its origin to the decree of the Senate in 36 B.C.,—after the

naval victory gained by Agrippa over Sextus Pompeius,—by which the worship

of Caesar, ‘inter municipales deos,’ was established. There is probably no

passage in Virgil, scarcely any in Latin poetry, which must strike the

modern reader as so unreal as this, or so untrue to the actual convictions

of educated men. There is none in which the language of adulation appears

so palpably, or in which the love of mythological allusion, as one of the

conventional ornaments of poetry, appears to exercise so unfortunate an

influence on the truthful feeling of the poet. It seems strange that a man

of the commanding understanding of Augustus should have derived any

pleasure from the supposition that he might become the son-in-law of

Tethys, from the statement that the glowing Scorpion was already beginning

to make room for him in the sky, or from the appeal made to him to resist

the ambition of supplanting Pluto as the future ruler of Tartarus. In

contrast with this state of feeling we learn to respect the masculine

sense and dignity with which Tiberius disclaims the attribution of divine

honours: ‘I, Conscript Fathers, call you to witness and desire posterity

to remember, that I am but a mortal, and am performing human duties, and

consider it enough if I fill the foremost place(340).’ But though it is

not possible that the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to ‘adsuesce vocari’ should

ever appear natural to us, or that we should ever read them without some

feeling that they are unworthy of the manliness of a great poet, we may

yet recognise some symbolical meaning in them beyond the mere expression

of overstrained eulogy. In such expressions as

Auctorem frugum tempestatumque potentem(341),

Virgil associates the idea of the power of Caesar with the main subject of

his poem; and probably, as is pointed out by Ribbeck, he suggests the

thought of the dependence of Rome and Italy for subsistence on the

vigilance of their ruler(342). In the mention of Tethys there is a

reference to recent naval successes; and in the ‘tibi serviat ultima

Thule’ there may be an allusion to the contemplated expedition to Britain,

and certainly, as in so many other passages of the poetry of the age,

there is a recognition of the wide empire of Rome. In the lines

Anne novum tardis, etc.,

we recognise the idea which connected the apotheosis of Julius Caesar with

the appearance of the ‘Iulium Sidus’ (see Ecl. ix); while the lines

Nam te nec sperant Tartara regem, etc.,

read in connexion with those at the end of Book I,

Hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo

Ne prohibete, etc.,

are evidently prompted by the conviction that the well-being and security

of the world are dependent on a single life.

In this apparent acceptance of new and old modes of belief,—in this

neopaganism of art,—it is difficult to say how far we are to recognise the

representations of fiction, conscious that it is fiction, as in the

mythological art of the Renaissance, or how far we are in the presence of

a temporary revival of a faith which satisfied a simpler time, in

inconsistent conjunction with incompatible modes of modern thought.

Probably not even the poets themselves, and least of all Virgil, could

have given an explanation of their real state of mind. The dreams of an

older faith were still haunting them, though its substance was gone. The

traditions of the Greek mythology survived, endowed with what, in the

absence of any new creed, might seem immortal life, in the pages of poets,

and in the paintings and other works of art which afforded a refined

pleasure to educated men. The national faith of Italy and Rome still kept

the outward show of life in many visible symbols, and still retained a

hold over the mass of the people. The herds and flocks were still believed

to flourish under the kindly protection of Pales and Faunus. The festive

pleasures of country life at the harvest-home or the vintage season were

enjoyed on old religious holidays, and formed part of ceremonies handed

down from immemorial antiquity. The pomp and ceremonial of what was

peculiarly the Roman worship still met the eye on all great occasions

within the walls of the city:—

Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges et maxima taurus

Victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro,

Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos(343).

The magnificent temples of deities blending the attributes of native

Italian gods with those of the gods of Olympus seemed to preside over the

tumult and active business of the Forum; and the majesty of the Capitoline

Jove was still recognised as the manifestation of the stability and power

of the State. But the Roman imagination was at the same time beginning to

be impressed by a new symbol of Divine agency, which was felt in all

national concerns. The ideal majesty of Jove was merging, as an object of

veneration, in the actual majesty of Caesar, regarded as the vicegerent of

the Supreme Power. All these phases of religious belief, Greek and

Italian, old and new, some appealing to the popular, some to the educated

mind, meet in the poetry of the Augustan Age, and nowhere in more close

conjunction than in this Invocation. They appear in still stranger

connexion with the later results of science and philosophic thought. It is

impossible to find any principle of reconcilement in accordance with which

their proper place in the reasonable intelligence of the age may be

assigned to each. They came together in Virgil as a composite result of

the union of his literary and philosophic tastes with his religious

feeling and national sympathies. So far as we can attach any truth of

meaning to this Invocation, we must look upon it as a symbolical

expression of Divine agency and superintendence in all the various fields

of natural production.

Virgil is much more sparing than Lucretius in the proems to his other

books. In the second book there is a brief invocation to Liber, who is

introduced, with rich pictorial colouring, as the special god of the

vintage; and at lines 39–46 there is an appeal to Maecenas, which

disclaims, perhaps not without some reference to the contrary practice of

Lucretius, all intention to detain his hearer ‘through digressions from

the main theme and long preambles.’ In the fourth there is again a brief

appeal to Maecenas, a statement of the subject, an admission of its homely

character,—‘In tenui labor,’—an expression of the hope that, even out of

these materials, great glory may ensue if Apollo hears the poet’s prayer

and no unpropitious powers impede the course of his song. The introduction

to the third book is more extended, and more interesting from the light

which it throws on the motives which determined Virgil to the choice of

the subject of his epic poem. Here, too, as in the first and second books,

there is an appeal to the tutelary deities of the herds and flocks, the

Italian Pales, and the ‘Pastor ab Amphryso,’—the Apollo νόμιος of Greek

legend and rural worship. The associations of Greek poetry are also evoked

in the reference to the woods and streams of Lycaeus, to the lowing herds

of Cithaeron, to the dogs that range over Taygetus, and to the famous

horses of the Argive plain. The choice of the subject is justified by the

contrast suggested between its novelty—‘silvas saltusque sequamur

Intactos’—and the hackneyed poems founded on mythological subjects which

his immediate predecessors in poetry had written in imitation of their

Alexandrine prototypes. But he indicates here, with a new application of

the words of Ennius, the aspiration to compose a great national epic in

celebration of the exploits of Caesar:—

temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim

Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora(344).

Under the allegory of the games which he proposed to celebrate, and the

marble temple which he proposed to raise on the banks of the Mincio, he

associates the thought of his early home with his ambition to rival the

great works of Greek genius (for this seems to be the meaning of the lines

Cuncta mihi, Alpheum linquens lucosque Molorchi,

Cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia cestu)(345),—

and to spread the fame of Caesar through distant ages. This invocation

must have been written later than the crowning victory of Actium, but

before the plan of the Aeneid had definitely assumed shape in the poet’s

mind. From the allegorical representations of the designs in gold, ivory,

and marble for the ornaments of the temple, and still more clearly from

the direct statement

Mox tamen ardentis accingar dicere pugnas

Caesaris(346),

it may be inferred that his first idea was to make the contemporaneous

events the main subject of his epic, and to introduce the glories of the

Trojan line as accessories. Under what influence he changed this purpose,

making contemporary events subsidiary and the ancient legend the main

argument of his poem, will be considered in the chapters devoted to the

examination of the Aeneid.

IV.

As affecting the arrangement and illustration of their materials, there is

this essential difference between the poems of Lucretius and Virgil, that

the one is a great continuous argument, the development of speculative

truths depending on one another; and its professed aim is purely

contemplative,—the production of a certain state of mind and feeling. The

other is the orderly exposition of a number of precepts, depending on

experience and special knowledge; its professed aim is the mastery over a

great practical occupation. Lucretius uses poetry as the vehicle of

science, Virgil as the instrument of a useful art. In the first we expect,

and we find, in so far as the poem was left completed, rigorous

concentration of thought, and an exhaustive treatment of the subject. In

the second we expect, and we find, an orderly and convenient arrangement,

and such a selection of topics as, while producing the impression of a

thorough mastery of the subject, leaves also much to be filled up by the

imagination or experience of the reader. Still, that Virgil regarded

Lucretius as his technical model may be inferred from the use which he

makes of several of his formulae, such as ‘Principio,’ ‘Quod superest,’

‘His animadversis,’ ‘Nunc age,’ ‘Praeterea,’ by which the framework of his

argument is held together. Virgil uses these more sparingly, and with a

more careful selection, so as, while producing the impression of

continuity of thought, not to impede the pure flow of his poetry with the

mechanism of logical connexion. He follows Lucretius also, who here

observed the practice of the Greek didactic poets, in maintaining the

liveliness of a personal address by the frequent use of such appeals as

these, ‘Nonne vides,’ ‘Contemplator,’ ‘Forsitan et ... quaeras,’ ‘Vidi,’

‘Ausim,’ etc.

In illustrating and giving novelty to his various topics Virgil has the

example of Lucretius to justify him in catching up and dwelling on every

aspect of beauty or imaginative interest which they are capable of

presenting. And it is here that the more careful art of Virgil, and the

fact that he attached more value to the perfection of his art than to the

knowledge he imparts, give him that technical superiority over the older

writer which, notwithstanding the tamer interest of his subject, and

perhaps the tamer character of his own genius, has made the Georgics a

poem much more familiar to the world than the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ Virgil,

for one thing, enjoys greater freedom of omitting any set of topics,—any

of those details on which Cato or Varro would have felt themselves bound

to be specially explicit,—which would detract unduly from the beauty and

general amenity of his exposition; or by a simple touch (such as the ‘Ne

saturare fimo pingui,’ etc.) he can suggest the necessity of attending to

such topics, while leaving their full realisation to the reader. He thus,

by greater selection and elimination of his materials, avoids the monotony

and the long prosaic interspaces between the grander bursts of poetry

which his vast argument imposes on Lucretius. But, further, he avails

himself of many more resources to give variety of interest and literary

charm to the topics which he successively deals with. Each and all of

these topics,—the processes of ploughing and sowing, the signs of the

weather, the grafting of trees and the pruning of the vine, the qualities

of horses and cattle, the tending of sheep and goats, the observation of

the habits of bees,—bring him into immediate contact with the genial

influences of the outward world. The vastness as well as the abstract

character of his subject forces Lucretius to pass through many regions

which seem equally removed from this genial presence and from all human

associations. It is only the enthusiasm of discovery—the delight in purely

intellectual processes—that bears him buoyantly through these dreary

spaces; and it is only the knowledge that from time to time glimpses of

illimitable power and wonder are opened up to him, and admiration for the

energy and clear vision of his guide, that compel the flagging reader to

accompany him. But Virgil leads his readers through scenes, tamer indeed

and more familiar, yet always bright and smiling with some homely charm,

or rich and glowing with the ‘pomp of cultivated nature,’ or fresh and

picturesque with the charm of meadow, river-bank, or woodland pasture.

The secret of the power of Lucretius as an interpreter of Nature lies in

his recognition of the sublimity of natural law in ordinary phenomena. The

secret of Virgil’s power lies in the insight and long-practised meditation

through which he abstracts the single element of beauty from common sights

and the ordinary operations of industry. Thus, to take one or two

instances of the way in which the charm of Nature is communicated to the

drudgery of rural labour:—what a sense of refreshment to eye and ear is

conveyed by the lines which describe the practical remedies by which the

farmer mitigates the burning drought of summer:—

Et cum exustus ager morientibus aestuat herbis,

Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam

Elicit; illa cadens raucum per levia murmur

Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(347).

Again, what a picture of rich woodland beauty is created out of the

occurrence, in the midst of practical directions, of some homely

traditional maxims, in accordance with which farmers judged of the

probable abundance of their crop:—

Contemplator item, cum se nux plurima silvis

Induet in florem et ramos curvabit olentis:

Si superant fetus, pariter frumenta sequentur,

Magnaque cum magno veniet tritura calore(348).

So too, in a technical account of the different varieties of soil, he

brings before the mind, by a single descriptive touch, a picture of

abundant harvest-fields,—

non ullo ex aequore cernes

Plura domum tardis decedere plaustra iuvencis(349);

and enables us to feel the charm of a rich pastoral country,—with its

lonely woodland glades, its brimming river flowing past mossy and grassy

banks, and the shelter and shade of its caves and rocks, in the midst of

homely directions for the care of mares before they foal:—

Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum

Flumina, muscus ubi et viridissima gramine ripa,

Speluncaeque tegant, et saxea procubet umbra(350).

In the inculcation of his practical precepts his aim is even more to exalt

the dignity and to exhibit the delight of rural labour, than to explain

its methods or inculcate its utility.

He imparts a peculiar vivacity, grace, and tenderness to his treatment of

many topics by the analogy which he suggests between the life of Nature

and of man. The perception of analogy originates in the philosophical and

imaginative thought of Lucretius; and it is in the second Book, in the

composition of which, as Mr. Munro has shown, Virgil’s mind was saturated

with the ideas, feelings, and language of his predecessor, that this

element of poetical interest is most conspicuous. The following examples,

occurring in the technical exposition of the growth and tending of trees,

are all taken from the second Book; and two of them, those marked _g_ and

_h_, are immediately suggested by Lucretius:—

(351)_a._ Parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra.

_b._ tenero abscindens de corpore matrum.

_c._ Exuerint silvestrem animum.

_d._ Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma.

_e._ Mutatam ignorent subito ne semina matrem.

_f._ atque animos tollent sata.

_g._ Viribus eniti quarum et contemnere ventos

Adsuescant.

_h._ Ac dum prima novis adolescit frondibus aetas,

Parcendum teneris.

_i._ Ante reformidant ferrum.

_k._ Praecipue dum frons tenera imprudensque laborum.

Many more examples might be added from the other Books. The force of many

of the epithets applied to material objects, such as ‘ignava,’ ‘laeta et

fortia,’ ‘maligni,’ ‘infelix,’ etc., consists in the suggestion of a kind

of personal life underlying and animating the silent processes of Nature.

Virgil, too, like Lucretius, shows the close observation of a naturalist,

and a genuine sympathy with the pains and pleasures of all living things,

especially of the animals associated with the toil or amusement of men.

The interest of the third Book arises, to a great degree, from the truth

and vivacity of feeling with which he observes and identifies himself with

the ways and dispositions of these fellow-labourers of man,—with the pride

and emulation of the horse, the fidelity and companionship of the dog, the

combative courage of the bull and his sense of pain and dishonour in

defeat, the patience of the steer and his brotherly feeling for his

yoke-fellow in toil, and with the attachment of sheep and goats to their

offspring and to their familiar haunts(352). The interest of the fourth

Book, again, turns on the analogy implied between the pursuits, fortunes,

wars, and state-policy of bee-communities and of men. It is the sense of

this analogy that imparts a meaning deeper than that demanded by the

obvious force of the words—a more pathetic feeling of the vanity of all

earthly strife—to that final touch in the description of the combat in

mid-air between two hosts, led by rival chiefs:—

Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta

Pulveris exigui iactu compressa quiescunt(353).

In thus relieving the dryness of technical detail, by availing himself of

every aspect of beauty associated with it, and by imparting the vivacity

of human relations and sensibility to natural objects, Virgil makes use of

the same resources as elicit springs of poetic feeling from many of the

dry and stony wastes through which the argument of Lucretius leads him.

There are others however employed by Virgil, which Lucretius uses more

sparingly or not at all. There are, in the first place, all those which

arise out of the conception of the ‘human force,’ impersonated in the

‘sturdy ditcher,’ the ‘farmer roused to anger,’ the ‘active peasant,’

contrasting with and conflicting with that other conception of the life of

Nature. And as in Lucretius the speculative ideas, penetrating through

every region of the wide domain traversed by him, elicit some poetic life

out of its barrenest places, so the two speculative ideas, of Nature as a

living force, and of man’s labour, vigilance, forethought in their

relation to that force, impart a feeling of imaginative delight to

Virgil’s account of the most common details of the husbandman’s toil. The

strength and vivacity thus imparted to the style has been well illustrated

by Professor Conington in his Introduction to the Georgics. It may be

noted however that, even in this imaginative recognition of the strength

and force of man in conflict with the force of Nature, Virgil is still

following in the tracks of Lucretius. Such expressions as

Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris—

ferro molirier arva—

magnos manibus divellere montes—

in the older poet first opened up this vein which was wrought with such

effectual results by his successor. But Conington has, in his notes, drawn

attention to another vein of feeling, which is all Virgil’s own, and which

enables him to give further variety and charm to these homely details. The

husbandman has not only his hard and incessant struggle—‘labor

improbus’—but he has the delight of success, the joy of contemplating the

new beauty and richness, created by the strength of his arm. This feeling

breaks out in the ‘Ecce’ of the line already quoted,—

Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam;

in the ‘iuvat’ of

iuvat Ismara Baccho

Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum(354);—

and in the ‘canit’ of the line

Iam canit effectos extremus vinitor antes(355).

Another set of associations, interwoven with the rich and firm texture of

the poem, are those derived from earlier science and poetry. Of the

resources of learned allusion Lucretius makes a singularly sparing use.

The localising epithets and mythological names in which Virgil’s poem

abounds possessed no attraction for his austerer genius, nourished by the

severe models of an older time, and rejecting the ornaments and

distractions from the main interest familiar to Alexandrine literature.

Virgil had already shown in the Eclogues this tendency to overlay his

native thought with the spoils of Greek learning. Such phrases as

‘Strymoniae grues,’ ‘Pelusiacae lentis,’ ‘Amyclaeum canem,’ ‘Idumaeas

palmas,’—the references to the ‘harvests of Mysia and Gargarus,’ to the

‘vines of Ismarus,’ ‘Cytorus, waving with boxwood,’ etc. etc., must have

been charged, for Virgil’s contemporaries, in a way which they cannot be

for a modern reader, with the memories of foreign travel or of residence

in remote provinces, or with the interest attaching to lands recently made

known. To us their chief interest is that by their strangeness they

enhance the effect with which the more familiar names of Italian places

are used. Thus the contrasted pictures of the illimitable pastures of

Libya and of the wintry wastes of Scythia enable us to realise more

exquisitely the charm of that fresh(356) Italian pastoral scene

immediately preceding, the description of which combines the tender

feeling of the Eclogues with the deeper realism of the Georgics. Thus too

the great episode on the beauty and riches of Italy (ii. 136–176) is

introduced in immediate contrast to the account of the prodigal luxuriance

of Nature in the forests and jungles of the East. But even to a modern

reader such expressions as these—

Vos silvae amnesque Lycaei—

vocat alta voce Cithaeron—

O, ubi campi

Spercheusque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis

Taygeta, etc.,

seem to bear with them faint echoes from a far-off time, of some ideal

life of poetry and adventure in the free range and ‘otia dia’ of pastoral

scenes,—of some more intimate union of the human soul with the soul of

mountains and woodland than is granted to the common generations of men.

On Virgil himself, to whom the whole of Greek poetry and legend was an

open page, the spell which they exercised was of the same kind as that

exercised by the magic of classical allusion on the poets and painters of

the Renaissance.

The contrast between Lucretius and Virgil, as regards their relation to

the ancient mythology, has already appeared in the examination of the

Invocations to their respective poems. This contrast is still more brought

out by the large use which Virgil makes of mythological allusions in the

body of his poem, as compared with the rare, and generally polemical,

references to the subject in Lucretius. Virgil recalls the tales and

poetical representations of mythology sometimes by some suggestive

epithet, or other qualifying expression, as in speaking of ‘poppies

steeped in the sleep of Lethe,’ ‘Halcyons dear to Thetis,’ ‘the Cyllenian

star,’ ‘the slow-rolling wains of the Eleusinian mother,’ and the like.

More frequently however he does this by direct mention of some of the more

familiar, and occasionally of some of the more recondite, tales which had

supplied materials to earlier poets and painters. Thus, in connexion with

the topic of lucky and unlucky days, he hints at the tale of the war of

the Giants with the Olympian gods, at that of Scylla and Nisus in

connexion with the signs of the weather, at that of the Centaurs and

Lapithae—the ‘brawl fought to the death over the wine cup’—in the account

of the vine, at that of the daughter of Inachus tormented in her

wanderings by the vengeance of Juno in connexion with the plague of flies

with which cattle were afflicted, etc. etc. Less familiar stories, of

picturesque adventure or of a kind of weird mystery, are revived in the

passages—

Talis et ipse iubam cervice effudit equina

Coniugis adventu pernix Saturnus, et altum

Pelion hinnitu fugiens implevit acuto(357),

and

Munere sic niveo lanae, si credere dignum est,

Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit,

In nemora alta vocans; nec tu aspernata vocantem(358).

Such allusions came much more home to an ancient than to a modern reader.

They were familiar to him from the pages of poets, or from pictures

adorning the walls of his own town and country-houses, or seen in the

temples and other sacred places of famous Greek and Asiatic cities, and

forming great part of the attraction of those cities to travellers then,

as the pictures seen in the galleries, palaces, and churches of Rome,

Florence, and Venice do to travellers now. But though the colours of these

poetic fancies have faded for us, they are felt to be a legitimate source

of variety in the poem, and to be an element of interest connecting the

humbler cares of the country-people with the refined tastes of the

educated class. They are not introduced as a substitute for truthful

representation of fact, but rather as adding a new grace to this

representation. Neither do they, as in Propertius, overlay the main

subject of the poem by their redundant use. They probably produced the

same kind of impression on an ancient reader, as allusions from the works

of Latin or Italian poets in Spenser or Milton produce on a modern reader.

Occasionally they may seem weak and faulty from their incongruity with the

thought with which they are associated. Thus in the passage at i. 60,

etc.,—

Continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis

Imposuit natura locis, quo tempore primum

Deucalion vacuum lapides iactavit in orbem,

Unde homines nati, durum genus(359),

the mind is offended by the juxtaposition of the great thought, which

Lucretius had striven so earnestly to impress on the world, with one of

the most unmeaning fables that ever violated all possibilities of natural

law. So too the contrast between the artistic and recondite elegance of

the lines (iii. 549–550),

Quaesitaeque nocent artes; cessere magistri

Phillyrides Chiron, Amythaoniusque Melampus(360),

and the grand, solemn realism of the parallel passage in the account of

the Plague of Athens,—

Mussabat tacito medicina timore(361),—

makes us feel how unapproachable by all the resources of art and learning

is that direct force of insight united to fulness of feeling with which

Lucretius was endowed above nearly every poet, ancient or modern.

Equally remote from the practice of Lucretius is the use made by Virgil of

that amalgamation of mythological fancy with the rudiments of science

which assigned names, personality, and a poetical history to the various

constellations:—

Pleiadas, Hyadas, claramque Lycaonis Arcton.

But Virgil’s practice is in accordance with that of all the Greek poets

from Homer and Hesiod down to the latest Alexandrine writers. He thus

enriches the treatment of his subject with the interest of early science,

and with the associations of the open-air life of hunters, herdsmen, and

mariners in primitive times. Lucretius is impressed by the splendour,

wonder, and severe majesty of the stars as they actually appear to

us,—‘aeterni sidera mundi,’ ‘caeli labentia signa,’ ‘noctis signa

severa,’—without any superadded association of mythology or antiquity.

Neither does he use that other resource, by which Virgil adds an antique

lustre to his subject—the introduction of quaint phrases and turns of

speech, derived from Hesiod, such as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’ ‘laudato

ingentia rura, Exiguum colito,’ or those derived from the traditional

peasant-lore of Italy,—‘hiberno laetissima pulvere farra,’—which Virgil

intermingles with the classic elegance of his style. Still less could

Lucretius appeal to the associations of the popular religion. Such

expressions as ‘fas et iura sinunt,’ ‘hiemes orate serenas,’ ‘nulla

religio vetuit,’ and the mention of old religious ceremonies and practices

prevalent in the country districts, such as that at i. 345,

Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges(362),

and at ii. 387,

Et te, Bacche, vocant per carmina laeta, tibique

Oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu(363),

not only afford a legitimate relief to the inculcation of practical

precepts in the Georgics, but impress on the mind the dignity imparted to

the most ordinary drudgery by the sense of its association with the

religious life of man.

On the other hand, it is to be noticed how sparingly Virgil uses one of

the grandest resources in the repertory of Lucretius,—that of imaginative

analogies, through which familiar or unseen phenomena are made great or

palpable by association with other phenomena which immediately affect the

imagination with a sense of wonder and sublimity. The apprehension of

these analogies between great things in different spheres proceeds from

the inventive and intellectual faculty in the imagination,—that by which

intuitions of vast discoveries are obtained before observation and reason

can verify them; and in this faculty of imaginative reason Lucretius is as

superior to Virgil, as Virgil is to him in artistic accomplishment. One of

the few ‘similes’ in the Georgics is that often-quoted one, in which the

difficulty which man has in holding his own against the natural

deterioration of things is compared to the difficulty which a rower has in

holding his own against a strong adverse current (i. 201–203):—

Non aliter, quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum

Remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit

Atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni(364).

There is suggestiveness and verisimilitude in this image. But it does not

make us feel the enlargement of mind and the poetic thrill of the thought

which are produced by many of the great illustrative images in Lucretius.

Virgil too is much inferior to the older poet, and much less original, in

the general reflections on life which he occasionally introduces,—such as

that at iii. 66,—

Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi

Prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus(365).

In so far as the thought here expressed is true, the truth cannot be said

to be either new or profound.

The inferiority of Virgil to Lucretius, in that faculty of imagination,

which perceives an inner identity between great forces in the material and

in the spiritual world, is apparent also from a comparison of their

respective diction. There is often a creativeness, a boldness of invention

and insight into the deepest nature of things, in the language of

Lucretius, such as did not reappear again in Italian poetry till more than

thirteen centuries had passed, and which makes us feel how much nearer he

was in many ways than any other Latin poet to our modern modes of thought

and feeling. There is, on the other hand, scarcely any great poem from

which so few striking and original images can be quoted as from the

Georgics. The figurative language arising out of the perception of the

analogy between the vital processes of Nature and various modes of human

sensibility is rather like that unconscious identification of Nature with

humanity out of which mythology arose, than the conscious recognition of

some common force or law operating in totally distinct spheres. And even

this identity or analogy between the life of Nature and of man is not

conceived with such power and passion in Virgil as in Lucretius. But if

Virgil’s language is inferior to that of his predecessor not only in vivid

creative power, but in clearness and idiomatic purity, it is much superior

in the uniform level of poetical excellence which it maintains. In this

respect Virgil compares favourably with some of the greatest masters of

style among English poets, for example with Wordsworth, Shelley, and

Byron. There is nothing redundant or monotonous in the style of the

Georgics, nothing trivial or mean; while always rich and pregnant with

suggestion, it is never overstrained or overloaded; while always elevated

to the pitch of poetry, it never seems to soar too far above the familiar

aspects of the world. Nothing shows the perfect sanity of Virgil’s genius

more clearly than his entire exemption from the besetting sin of our own

didactic poetasters of last century—a sin from which even Wordsworth

himself is not altogether free—that of calling common things by pompous

names, and of dignifying trifles by applying heroic phrases to them. If he

seems sometimes to deviate from this habitual temperance of manner in the

account of his bee communities, he does so purposely, to convey through

this gentle vein of irony something of that pensive meditativeness of

spirit which is produced in him by reflection on the transitory passions,

joys, and vicissitudes of our mortal life.

The general superiority of Virgil’s art to that of Lucretius is equally

apparent in his rhythm. The powerful movement of spirit which Lucretius

feels in the presence of the sublimer spectacle of Nature and of the more

solemn things of human life does indeed produce isolated effects of

majestic speech and sonorously rhythmical cadence, swelling above the

deep, strong, monotonous flow of his ordinary verse, which neither Virgil

nor any other poet has surpassed. But in variety, equable smoothness and

grandeur, in that tempered harmony of sound which never disappoints and

never burdens the ear, it may be doubted whether the musical art of any

poet has maintained such a uniform level of excellence as that maintained

in the Georgics. Virgil produces more varied effects than Lucretius can do

even in his more finished passages, while at the same time binding himself

by stricter laws in the composition of his verse. This he does by the

greater variety and greater frequency of his pauses, by uniformly placing

the words of strength and emphasis in the strong positions of the line,

and by a skilful regulation of the succession of long and short, of

accentuated and unaccentuated syllables, and of lines of a more rapid or

slower movement. The result is that the feeling of his rhythm becomes a

main element in the realisation of his meaning.

The principal resources by which Virgil, in the didactic exposition of his

subject, avoids that monotony of effect which was likely to arise from the

strong Roman concentration of purpose with which his work was executed,

and, without deviating from the true perception of facts, is able to

invest a somewhat narrow range of interests with charm and dignity,—

angustis hunc addere rebus honorem,—

are thus seen to be, first his feeling of Nature, of man’s relation to it,

of his joy in the results of his toil, and, secondly, the associations of

strange lands, of mythology, of antiquity, and of religious custom. The

instruments by which these resources are made available are the careful

choice and combinations of words and the well-practised melody of his

verse. These resources and instruments have been considered in relation to

and contrast with those employed by Lucretius. There is, moreover, this

difference between the method of the two poets, that Virgil is much more

of a conscious artist, that he seems to go more in search of illustrations

and the means of artistic embellishment, that he endeavours to make for

himself a wreath, ‘undique decerptam;’ while the occasional accessions of

a more powerful poetic interest to the ordinary exposition of Lucretius

arise naturally in the process of his argument, from the habit of his mind

to observe the outward world, the ways of all living things, and the

condition of man in their intimate connexion with the great speculative

ideas of his philosophy. His modes of varying the interest of his subject

and adorning it are thus more simple and homogeneous; they work more in

harmony with the purpose of his poem, so as to produce a pervading unity

of sentiment and impression. The variety of resources used by Virgil

gives, at first sight, a composite character to his art. But there is,

deeper than this apparent composite character, an inner unity of tone and

sentiment pervading the whole work. The source of this unity is the deep

love and pride which he feels in every detail of his subject, from the

great human interests with which these details are associated in his mind.

What these human interests are is brought out prominently in the episodes

of the poem, which still remain to be considered.

V.

The finest poetry in the didactic poems of Lucretius and of Virgil and the

thoughts which give the highest interest to their respective poems are

contained in passages of considerable length, rising out of the general

level or undulations of the poem into elevations which at first sight seem

isolated and unconnected with one another. It may be doubted whether even

the power of thought and style in Lucretius could have secured immortality

to a mere systematic exposition of the Atomic philosophy; nor could the

mere didactic exposition of the precepts of agriculture, though varied by

all the art and resources of Virgil, have gained for the Georgics the

unique place that poem holds in literature. It is in their episodes that

each poet brings out the moral grandeur, and thereby justifies the choice

of his subject. In Lucretius, these passages are introduced sometimes in

the ordinary march of his argument, more often at the beginning or

completion of some important division of it, and are intended both to add

poetical charm to the subject and to show man’s true relation to the

Universe, and the attitude of mind which that relation demands of him. The

object of Virgil in some of his minor and in one or two of his larger

episodes may be merely to relieve the dryness of exposition by some

descriptive or reflective charm. But even these passages will in general

be found to draw attention to the religious, ethical, or national bearing

of his subject.

Some of these passages have been suggested by parallel passages either in

Hesiod or Lucretius. The largest of all the episodes, that with which the

poem concludes, has, for reasons already considered, only a slight and

external relation to the great ideas and interests with which the poem

deals. But the three most important passages, those of most original

invention and profound feeling, viz. those at Book I. 466 to the end of

the Book, Book II. 136 to 177, and also from line 458 to the end, serve

like those great cardinal passages in the Aeneid, in which the action is

projected from a remote legendary past into the actual present, to bring

into light the true central interest of the poem,—the bearing of the whole

subject on the greatness and well-being of the Italian race.

Any of the passages which are not needed for the special practical purpose

of the poem may be regarded as episodical, such, for instance, as that

thoroughly Lucretian passage in Book I. in which the feelings of rooks are

explained on purely physical principles, or that passage of Book IV.

inspired by the teaching of an opposite school, in which the theory of a

divine principle pervading the world—the same theory as that accepted as

his own by Virgil in Aeneid VI.—is enunciated as a probable explanation of

the higher instinct of the bees. And it is characteristic of the

eclecticism of Virgil’s mode of thought, and also of the lingering regret

with which he regards the evanescent fancies of the old mythology, that he

not only combines these tenets of the most materialistic and most

spiritualistic philosophies in the same poem, but that the philosophic or

theosophic solution of Book IV. 219, etc. comes shortly after a passage in

which the same phenomenon is accounted for on the ground of the service

rendered by bees in feeding the infant Jove in the cavern of Mount Dicte.

Another passage of a scientific rather than a philosophic character is

that at Book I. 233, etc., in which the five zones girding the heaven and

the earth are described in language closely translated from Eratosthenes.

Besides the scientific interest which this passage must have had to the

poet’s contemporaries, it serves to draw forth Virgil’s antagonism to the

religious unbelief of Lucretius, in the expression

Munere concessae divom,

and also to imply his dissent from the emphatic denial which Lucretius

gives, at Book I. 1065, to the Stoical belief in the existence of the

Antipodes:—

Illi cum videant solem, nos sidera noctis

Cernere, et alternis nobiscum tempora caeli

Dividere, et noctes parilis agitare diebus(366).

Another passage of a semi-philosophical character is that at Book III.

242–283, in which the Lucretian idea of the all-pervading influence of the

physical emotion of love over all living things in sea, earth, and air,—an

idea in which Lucretius was anticipated by Euripides(367) and by other

earlier Greek poets,—appears in combination with the purely mythological

conception of the direct personal agency of Venus, and with the legend of

‘the mares of Glaucus of Potniae.’

More important than these, as illustrative of the main ideas and feelings

of the poem, but still subsidiary to the greater episodes, are the

following: Book I. 121–159, Book II. 323–345; and in the same class may be

included III. 339–383, and IV. 125–148. The first of these, ‘Pater ipse

colendi,’ etc., is immediately suggested by Hesiod’s account of the Golden

Age; but the greater part of it, the account of the progress of the

various arts of life, is simply a summary of the long account of human

progress at the end of the fifth Book of Lucretius. The idea of the

purpose with which Providence has imposed labour on man is Virgil’s own;

and this thought contributes much of its ethical meaning to the poem. The

passage ‘Ver adeo frondi nemorum,’ etc., in which all the glory of Nature

as she unfolds herself in the exuberant life of an Italian spring is

described in lines of surpassing beauty and tenderness, is thoroughly

Lucretian in feeling, idea, and expression. The charm of climate, of

vegetation, and of life is in complete harmony with the specially Italian

character of the second Book. The digression at Book III. 339, ‘Quid tibi

pastores Libyae,’ containing the elaborate picture of a Scythian winter,

suggested by the winter scene in Hesiod, also serves through the effect of

contrast to heighten the charm of the fresh pastoral life of Italy

described in the lines immediately preceding.

The actual description of winter has been criticised unfavourably, and not

altogether without justice, by one of the most independent and at the same

time most scholarly of English critics(368), who compares it with a

corresponding passage in Thomson. It is inferior in simplicity and direct

force of representation to the corresponding picture in Hesiod. Virgil’s

imagination seems to require that even where the objects or scenes he

describes are taken from books, they should be such that he could verify

them in his own experience. It is this apparent verification, where the

subject is not originally suggested by his own observation, that imparts

the marvellous truthfulness to his art. Such lines as those—

Aeraque dissiliunt volgo—

to

Stiriaque impexis induruit horrida barbis—(369)

convey a less real impression of winter than the single line—an idealised

generalisation from many actual winters—which ends the description of the

various occupations and field-sports which an Italian winter offers to the

husbandman:—

Cum nix alta iacet, glaciem cum flumina trudunt(370).

Perhaps none of the minor episodes recurs to the mind so often with so

keen a feeling of delight as the passage at IV. 125 to 148, beginning

‘Namque sub Oebaliae,’ etc. Virgil here introduces himself in his own

person, and draws a picture of one whom he had known, and who had

interested him as actually realising that life of labour and of happiness

in the results of his labour, which in the body of the poem is held up as

an abstract ideal. The scene of this vivid reminiscence,—the district

Qua niger umectat flaventia culta Galaesus(371),—

seems to have had peculiar attraction both for Virgil and Horace. It is

there—

umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi—

that Propertius pictures to himself Virgil meditating his Aeneid and still

conning over his earlier Eclogues—

Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus.

It is to ‘that nook of earth’ that Horace looks, if the unkind Fates

forbid his residence at his favourite Tibur, for a resting-place for his

‘age to wear away in.’ But it is not only to the local charm that

attention is drawn, and to the beauty of plant, flower, and fruit, created

by the labour of love which the old Cilician gardener—some survivor

probably from the Eastern wars of Pompey—bestowed on his neglected spot of

ground. Here also the true moral of the poem is pointed, that in the life

of rural industry there is a deep source of happiness altogether

independent of wealth, and which wealth cannot buy:—

Regum aequabat opes animis, seraque revertens

Nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis(372).

A more prominent place is assumed by the two episodes with which the third

and fourth Books close. In the first of these, which extends from line 478

to 566, and which describes a great outbreak of cattle-plague among the

Noric Alps and the district round the Timavus,—a locality which seems to

have had a special attraction to Virgil’s imagination(373),—he aims at

painting a rival picture to that of the plague at Athens with which the

poem of Lucretius ends. It would be unfair to compare the unfinished piece

of the older poet, overcrowded as it is with detail and technical

phraseology, with an elaborate specimen of Virgil’s descriptive power,

exercised on a kind of subject in which the speculative genius of the one

poet gave him no advantage over the careful and truthful art of the other.

Yet, as has been already pointed out(374), there are here and there

strokes of imaginative power in the larger sketch, and marks of insight

into human nobleness, roughly indeed expressed, as at 1243–6—

Qui fuerant autem praesto, contagibus ibant

Atque labore, pudor quem tum cogebat obire

Blandaque lassorum vox mixta voce querellae.

Optimus hoc leti genus ergo quisque subibat(375)—

in which the sincerity of the older master still asserts itself. There is

great beauty however of pastoral scene, of pathos and human sympathy, of

ethical contrast between the simple wants of the lower animals and the

artificial luxury of human life, in Virgil’s description. In the lines

520–522 one of those scenes in which he most delighted is brought before

the imagination:—

Non umbrae altorum nemorum, non mollia possunt

Prata movere animum, non qui per saxa volutus

Purior electro campum petit amnis(376).

The last element in the picture suggests at once the ‘Saxosas inter

decurrunt flumina valles’ of the Eclogues, and the lines earlier in the

book—

Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum

Flumina.

And the whole feeling of the passage is in harmony with that in Lucretius,

ii. 361:—

Nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes

Fluminaque illa queunt summis labentia ripis

Oblectare animum, sumptamque avertere curam(377).

And in thorough harmony both with the pathos and the ethical feeling in

Lucretius are the following:—

it tristis arator,

Maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum(378):

and

Quid labor aut benefacta iuvant? quid vomere terras

Invertisse gravis? atqui non Massica Bacchi

Munera, non illis epulae nocuere repostae:

Frondibus et victu pascuntur simplicis herbae,

Pocula sunt fontes liquidi atque exercita cursu

Flumina, nec somnos abrumpit cura salubris(379).

If the space assigned to the different episodes is to be regarded as the

measure of their importance, the long episode at the end of the fourth

Book, from line 315 to 558, would have to be regarded as of nearly equal

value to all the others put together. And yet, notwithstanding the

metrical beauty of the passage, it must be difficult for any one who is

penetrated by the pervading sentiment of the Georgics to reach this point

in the poem without a strong feeling of regret that the jealousy of

Augustus had interfered with its original conclusion. As a Greek fable,

composed after some Alexandrine model, mainly concerned with the fortunes

of Orpheus and Eurydice,—for the shepherd Aristaeus, the

cultor nemorum cui pinguia Ceae

Ter centum nivei tondent dumeta iuvenci(380),

really plays altogether a secondary part in the episode,—it has little to

do with rural life, and nothing at all to do with Italy. Its professed

object is to give a fabulous explanation of an impossible phenomenon,

though one apparently accepted both by Mago and Democritus. To enrich this

episode with a beauty not its own, Virgil has robbed his Aeneid—on the

composition of which he must have been well advanced when he was called

on, after the death of Gallus in 26 B.C., to provide a substitute for the

passage written in his honour—of some beautiful lines which are more in

keeping with the larger representation and profounder feeling of the epic

poem, than with the transient interest attaching to this recast of a

well-known story. Even regarded simply as an epyllion or epic idyl, it may

be questioned whether the Pastor Aristaeus is of an interest equal to that

of the epic idyl of Catullus, ‘Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus,’

etc. There is this coincidence between the poems, that they each contain

one story or idyllic representation within another, and in each case it is

to the secondary representation that the most pathetic and passionate

interest belongs.

Opinions may differ as to whether the passion of Ariadne or the sorrow of

Orpheus is represented with most skill. There seems this difference

between the two, that in the one we feel we are reading a fable, that the

situation is altogether remote from experience, that it is one suited for

a picture or a poem of fancy. The beautiful picture of Ariadne, on the

other hand, appears like one drawn from the life, and her passionate

complaint is like that of a living woman. But still more undoubted is the

superiority of Catullus in pictorial or statuesque reproduction seen in

that part of his poem in which the original subject, the marriage of

Peleus and Thetis, is described. Catullus, above all other Latin poets,

except perhaps Ovid, can bring a picture from human life or from outward

nature before the inward eye; and this power is, much more than Virgil’s

power of suggesting deep and delicate shades of feeling, appropriate to

the more limited compass of the idyl. It is no disparagement to Virgil to

say that in this kind of art he is inferior to Catullus. Catullus, though

a true Italian in temperament, largely endowed with and freely using the

biting raillery—‘Italum acetum’—which ancient writers ascribe to the race,

had in his genius, more than any Roman writer, the disinterested delight

in art, irrespective of any personal associations, characteristic of the

Greek imagination. Virgil’s art, on the other hand, produces its deepest

impressions only when his heart is moved. Even in the Eclogues this is for

the most part true. Something must touch his personal sympathies, his

moral or religious nature, or his national feeling, before he is roused to

his highest creative effort.

In the three cardinal passages which remain to be considered, in the

composition of which the deeper elements of Virgil’s nature were

powerfully moved, the impression which the changing state of the national

fortunes produced upon him is vividly stamped. The first of these (i. 464

to the end) was written in the years of uncertainty and alarm preceding

the outbreak of the last of the great Civil Wars. The unsettlement all

over the Empire, from its eastern boundary to its furthest limits in

Europe,—the agitation and impetuous sweep of the river before plunging

into the abyss,—is described and symbolised in the concluding lines of the

Book:—

Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum;

Vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes

Arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe:

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,

Addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens

Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas(381).

This state of alarm is shown to be connected with the great national crime

which Rome was still atoning,—the murder of Julius Caesar. The episode

arises immediately out of the enumeration of the signs of the weather,

which, from their importance to the husbandman, are treated of at

considerable length in the body of the poem. As the sun is the surest

index of change in the physical, so is he said to be in the political

atmosphere. The eclipse which occurred soon after the murder of Caesar is

regarded as a sign of compassion for his fate and of abhorrence of the

crime. Then follows an enumeration of other omens which accompanied or

preceded that event,—some of them violations of natural law, such as those

which occur in the narrative of Livy, when any great disaster was

impending over the Roman arms,—

pecudesque locutae,

Infandum—

Et maestum inlacrimat templis ebur, aeraque sudant(382):—

others arising out of a great sympathetic movement among the spirits of

the dead,—

Vox quoque per lucos volgo exaudita silentis

Ingens, et simulacra modis pallentia miris

Visa sub obscurum noctis(383);

others showing themselves in ominous appearances of the sacrifices, or in

strange disturbance of the familiar ways of bird and beast,—

Obscenaeque canes importunaeque volucres

Signa dabant—

Et altae

Per noctem resonare lupis ululantibus urbes(384);

others manifesting themselves through great commotion in the kingdom of

Nature,—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, great floods,—

‘The noise of battle hurtling in the air,’

lightnings in a clear sky, and the blaze of comets portending doom. These

all succeed one another in Virgil’s verse according to no principle of

logical connexion, but as they might be successively announced to the

awe-struck citizens of Rome. The whole passage is pervaded by that strong

sense of awe before an invisible Power—the ‘religio dira’—by which the

Roman imagination was possessed in times of great national calamity. The

issue of all these portents appeared in the second great battle in which

Roman blood fattened the Macedonian plains. Then by a fine touch of

imagination, and looking far forward into the future, the poet reminds us

of the contrast, indicated in other passages of the poem, between the

peaceful and beneficent industry of the husbandman and the cruel

devastation of war:—

Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis

Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,

Exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila,

Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis,

Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris(385).

Next follows the prayer to the national gods of Italy to preserve the life

of him who could alone raise the world out of the sin and ruin into which

it had fallen, and alone restore their ancient glory to the fields, which

now lay waste from the want of men to till them:—

Non ullus aratro

Dignus honos, squalent abductis arva colonis,

Et curvae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem(386).

In the second of the great episodes this sorrow for the past and

foreboding for the future has entirely cleared away. The feeling now

expressed is one of pride and exultation in Italy, as a land of rich crops

and fruits, of vines and olives, a land famous for its herds and flocks

and breed of horses, for its genial climate, for the beauty of the seas

washing its coasts, for its great lakes and rivers, its ancient cities and

other mighty works of men; famous too for its hardy, energetic, and

warlike races,—

Haec genus acre virum Marsos pubemque Sabellam,

Adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos

Extulit(387),—

for its great men and families who had fought for it in old times, and for

one greater still, who was then in the furthest East defending Rome

against her enemies,—

Haec Decios magnosque Camillos,

Scipiadas duros bello, et te, maxime Caesar,

Qui nunc extremis Asiae iam victor in oris

Imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum(388).

This passage, introduced as a counter-picture to the description of the

rank luxuriance of Nature in the vast forests and jungles of the East,

concentrates in itself the deepest meaning and inspiration of the poem.

The glory of Italy is declared to be the motive for the revival of this

ancient theme—

_Tibi_ res antiquae laudis et artis

Ingredior(389).

As Varro represents his speakers as looking on the great picture of Italy

in the Temple of Tellus while they discuss the various ways of tilling and

improving the soil, so Virgil in the midst of his didactic precepts holds

up this ideal picture of the land to the love and admiration of his

countrymen. By a few powerful strokes he combines the characteristic

features and the great memories of Italian towns in lines which recur to

every traveller as he passes through Italy,—

Adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem,

Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis,

Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros(390).

No expression of patriotic sentiment in any language is more pure and

noble than this. It is a tribute of just pride and affection to the land

which, from its beauty, its history, its great services to man, is felt to

be worthy of the deep devotion with which Virgil commends it to the heart

and imagination of the world.

In the last of the great episodes which remains to be considered, all the

higher thoughts and feelings by which beauty, dignity, and moral grandeur

are given to the subject are found concurring; and the presence of

Lucretius is again felt as a pervading influence, though modified by

Virgil’s own deepest convictions and sympathies. The charm of peaceful

contemplation, of Nature in her serenest aspect and harmony with the human

soul, of an ethical idea based on religious belief and national

traditions, of a life of pure and tranquil happiness, remote from the

clash of arms and the pride and passions of the world, is made present to

us in a strain of continuous and modulated music, which neither Virgil

himself nor any other poet has surpassed. Virgil creates a new ideal of

happiness for the contemplation of his countrymen by combining the old

realistic delight in the husbandman’s life with the imaginative longing

for the peace and innocence of a Saturnian Age, and with that new delight

in the living beauty of the world and in the charm of ancient memories

which it was his especial office to communicate. This ideal is contrasted,

as is the older poet’s ideal of ‘plain living and high thinking,’ with the

pomp and magnificence of city life,—

Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis

Mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam—

Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes

Lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris(391),—

and, as in the older poet also, with the distractions, the restless

passions, and the crimes of ambition. Virgil, as in other passages,

compresses into a few lines the thought which Lucretius with simpler art

follows through all its detail of concrete reality. Thus the

Gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum(392)

of Virgil is intended to recall and be explained by the more fully

developed representation of the old cruelties of the times of Marius and

Sulla, contained in the lines—

Sanguine civili rem conflant divitiasque

Conduplicant avidi, caedem caede accumulantes;

Crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris;

Et consanguineum mensas odere timentque(393).

In their protest against the world both poets are entirely at one. But the

ideal of Virgil’s imagination, on its positive side, is more on the

ordinary human level than that of lonely contemplation in accordance with

which Lucretius lived and wrote. The Virgilian ideal, like that of

Lucretius, recognised a heart at peace and independent of Fortune as a

greater source of happiness than any external good. But this peace the one

poet sought for in a superiority to the common beliefs of men; the other

rather in a more trusting acceptance of them. Some other elements in

Virgil’s ideal Lucretius too would have ranked among the supreme sources

of human happiness. The lines

Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati,

Casta pudicitiam servat domus(394),

beautiful as the thought and picture is, are not more true to human

feeling, scarcely touch the heart and imagination so vividly, as the lines

which suggested them—

Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor

Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati

Praeripere(395).

Other elements in Virgil’s ideal Lucretius would have sympathised with, as

he did with all natural human pleasure; but the elements of social

kindliness expressed in the lines—

Ipse dies agitat festos, etc.

could mix only as an occasional source of refreshment with his lonely

contemplation. The great difference between the two men is that Virgil’s

ordinary feelings and beliefs are in unison with the common ways of life;

he has a more active sympathy with the toils and pleasures of simple men;

and, above all, he regards it as the highest good for man, not to secure

peace of mind for himself, but to be useful in supporting others, in

contributing to the well-being of his country, of his family, even of the

animals associated with his toil:—

hinc patriam parvosque Penates

Sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos(396).

This ideal Virgil seems to regard as one that might be attained by man, if

he only could be taught how to appreciate it(397); nay, that has been

attained by him in happier times when the land was cultivated by free men,

each holding his own plot of ground. This was the life of the old Italian

yeomen, the life by which Etruria waxed strong and brave, the life to

which Rome herself owed the beginning of her greatness(398). It is the

life which the national imagination, in its peaceful mood, and yearning to

return into the ways of innocence and piety, discerned in that distant

Golden Age, when all men lived in contentment and abundance under the rule

of the old god, from whom the land received the well-loved name ‘Saturnia

tellus(399).’

Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,

Hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit

Scilicet, et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,

Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.

Ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante

Impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis,

Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat;

Necdum etiam audierant inflari classica, necdum

Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses(400).