CHAPTER XI.

THE AENEID AS AN EPIC POEM OF HUMAN LIFE.

I.

The national, religious, and political ideas which form the central

interest of the poem have been considered in the previous chapter. We have

seen how Virgil was moved by an impulse similar to that which acted on

Ennius in a ruder age, and in what way he strove to express the meaning

which the idea of Rome has for all times, and to find an adequate symbol

of the dominant sentiment of his own time. It remains to consider how far

the poem sustains by its command over our sympathies the interest thus

established in its favour; and to ascertain what value the Aeneid, as a

poem of action, unfolding a spectacle of human life, manners, character,

and passion, possessed for the Romans and still possesses for ourselves.

The action of the poem, apart from its bearing on the destinies of the

world, has a grandeur and dignity of its own. It is enacted on a great

theatre, developes itself by incidents giving free play to the highest

modes of human energy and passion, and through the agency of personages

already renowned in legend and poetry. In that mythical age which the poet

recalls to life no spectacle could be imagined more deserving to fix the

attention of the world than the fall of Troy, the building of Carthage,

and the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome. Whatever else may be

said of the personages of the story, they are conceived of as playing no

common part in human affairs. In following their fortunes we breathe the

air of that high poetic region which forms the undetermined border-land

between mythology and history. We look back on the ruined state of the

greatest city of legendary times, and we mark the first beginnings of the

two Imperial cities which in historical times disputed the empire of the

world. The poem evokes the associations, ancient and recent, attaching to

the various scenes through which the action passes,—Troy, Carthage,

Sicily, the shores of Latium, the Tiber, and the hills on which Rome was

built. The vagueness of the time in which the action is laid enables the

poet to connect together, in a most critical position of human affairs,

the fortunes of the chief powers of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The spheres

of man’s activity in which the action moves—war and sea-adventure in

search of undiscovered lands—give the fullest scope to energetic

representation. In his conception of the voyage of Aeneas and of a great

war determining the issue of his enterprise, Virgil followed the greatest

epic examples, and found a subject to which he could impart the interest

of adventurous incident and heroic achievement. In his conception of the

part played in the action by the passion of love, he introduced a more

familiar and modern phase of life which the examples of the Greek

tragedians and of the Alexandrine epic had proved to be capable of

idealising treatment.

The actors moreover who play their part in these critical events are not

‘common or mean.’ The crisis is conceived of as one so momentous, from the

issues involved in it, as to call forth the passions and the energies of

the old Olympian Powers. But even the human personages of the story appear

with a prestige of glory and sanctity, and yet are sufficiently unfamiliar

to excite new expectations. Aeneas, as the son of a mightier goddess(558),

is distinguished in the Iliad by the honours of a higher lineage than

Achilles. He is brave in war, the comrade of Hector, a hero deemed worthy

to encounter Achilles himself as well as Diomede in battle. He is

especially dear to the gods, and is marked out by prophecy as destined to

bear, and transmit to his descendants, the rule over the remnant of the

Trojans. To Anchises attaches the sanctity of one enjoying a closer

communion with the immortals, of one at once favoured and afflicted above

others, and elevated, like Oedipus, out of weakness and suffering here,

into honour and influence beyond the grave. Iulus receives a reflected

glory from the transcendent greatness of the Julian house. Dido or Elissa

was a name famous in Phoenician legend, and associated with the ancient

renown of Tyre. Evander is illustrious from his Arcadian origin, from his

relation to Hercules, from the fame of his mother as one of the Italian

Camenae. Even the mere ethnical names of Latinus and Turnus receive

individuality by being introduced in the line of old Italian dynasties,

and in direct connexion with Faunus, Picus, and other beings of the native

mythology.

It may therefore be said that in the choice of the time and the scenes in

which his action is laid, in the character of the action itself, and in

the eminence of the personages taking part in it, Virgil fulfils all the

conditions of his art which reflexion on the models of the past and on the

circumstances in life most capable of interesting the imagination could

teach him. The care with which he prepared himself for his task is as

remarkable as the judgment with which he conceived its main conditions.

The conduct of his story shows the most intimate familiarity with the

incidents and adventures contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Cyclic

poems and the dramas founded on them, in the Homeric hymns and the

Alexandrine epic. It shows how Virgil so combines and varies the details

thus suggested, as to recall many features of the Homeric age, and at the

same time to produce the impression of something new in literary art. The

revived image of that age must have affected the contemporaries of the

poet in a manner different from its effect on us. To us both the Iliad and

the Aeneid are ancient and unfamiliar: the one comes before us as an

original picture of manners, the other as a copy taken in a long

subsequent age. But to a Roman of the time of Augustus the life of the

Homeric age must have appeared almost as remote as it does to us. The

direct imitations of Homer in the Aeneid might produce on his mind the

same mixed impression of novelty and familiarity which is produced on a

modern reader by the reproduction and recasting of the doctrines,

incidents, and language of the Bible in the two epic poems of Milton. The

fascination of this world of supernatural agency and personal adventure,

brought home to him for the first time in the most elevated tones of his

own language, may have charmed the Roman reader in the same way as the

revival of mediaeval romance in the literary languages of modern Europe

charmed the readers of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first

part of the nineteenth centuries. And if such were the first impressions

produced by the poem, a closer examination of it must have shown that the

imagination of Virgil had out of ancient materials built up something new

in the world. If his representation of the heroic age wants the vivid

truth and _naïveté_ of Homer’s representation, yet it is impressive with

the dignity of antique associations, and rich with the colouring of his

own human sensibilities.

But the Aeneid not only revives the romance of the Greek heroic age: it

creates the romance of ‘that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus,

and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.’ It bestows the colour and warmth of

human life on dim traditions, on vague names, on the memories of early

warfare clinging to ancient towns, and on the origins of immemorial

customs and ceremonies. The task of giving poetic life to the dry prose of

Cato, to the dust of antiquarian learning, and to the rigid formalism of

the old Roman ceremonial must have taxed the poet’s powers more than that

of reawakening the interest in the old Homeric life. Virgil accomplishes

this result through his power of living at the same time in the past and

in the present; of feeling powerfully the associations of a remote

antiquity, and the immediate action of all that was most impressive to

thought and imagination in the age in which he lived.

The earlier works of Virgil had proved his strength in descriptive and

didactic poetry, and in the expression of personal feeling, of national

sentiment, and of ethical contemplation; but they had given no indication

of epic, and little of dramatic genius. Although the episode of the

‘Pastor Aristaeus’ is a specimen of succinct, animated, and pathetic

narrative, it must be remembered that this was a late addition to the

Georgics, and was probably written after considerable way had been made in

the composition of the Aeneid. An epic poet, over and above his purely

poetic susceptibility, must possess the art and faculty of a prose

historian. Homer has in an unequalled degree the clearness, vividness, and

movement in telling his story, which characterise such writers as

Herodotus. The account given of Virgil’s mode of composition proves that

he took great pains both with the plan and the execution of his narrative.

He is said to have arranged the first draught of his story in prose, and

then to have worked on the various parts of it as they interested him at

the time of composition. There are clear indications that the books were

not written in the order in which they stand; and a few inconsistencies of

statement between the earlier and later books were left uncorrected at the

time of the author’s death. The poem, in the careful arrangement of its

materials, bears the stamp of the manner in which it was composed. Like

that of every other great Roman, the genius of Virgil was thoroughly

orderly and systematic. But along with the power of order Virgil had what

many Roman writers want, the power of variety. The narrative of the Aeneid

is full of movement, succinct or ample according to the prominence

intended to be given to its different parts. The various streams of action

are kept separate, yet not too far apart to cause any confusion or

forgetfulness when the time comes to unite them. There is at once weight

and energy in the movement of the main current: it neither hurries nor

flags, but advances for the most part steadily, ‘quadam intentione

gravitatis.’ If it wants the buoyancy and vivacity of the narrative of

Herodotus, it shows the concentrated energy which distinguishes the works

of the great Roman historians. It brings before us rather a series of

grave events, bearing on a great issue and following an inevitable course,

than the vicissitudes of individual fortunes and the play of human

passions and impulses: and in this it is in accordance both with the

actual history of Rome, and with the record of it contained in literature.

Virgil cannot be said to have failed either in the conception of his

subject, in the collection and preparation of his materials, or in the art

and faculty demanded for impressive narrative. Yet all feel that the

Aeneid is much inferior to the Homeric poems in natural human interest, as

it is much inferior in reflective interest to the greatest extant dramas

of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poem, as a whole, produces the impression

rather of careful construction than of organic growth. The reflexion

employed on it is rather that of a critic applying artistic principles to

impart unity to many heterogeneous materials, than that of an imaginative

thinker, seeing his story unfold itself before him in the light of some

great intuition into the secret meanings of life.

His inferiority to Homer in the power of making his story at once vividly

real and nobly ideal arises partly from an inferiority in his own temper,

and partly from the inferior adaptability of the life of his own age to

imaginative treatment. There is no trace in Virgil of that keen enjoyment

of personal adventure and bodily activity which is present in every page

of the Homeric poems. Virgil’s materials are gathered from study and

reflexion, not from strong and many-sided contact with life. Though he

writes of ‘arma virumque’ with a Roman sense of the duty of disregarding

danger and death, he has none of the ‘delight of battle’ which animates

the Iliad and the poetical and prose romances of Scott. Neither does he

make us feel that elevation of spirit in the presence of the danger of the

sea, which the author of the Odyssey among ancient, and Byron among modern

poets, communicate to their readers.

But the vast difference in manners, feelings, and modes of thought,

between an early and a late age—between the spring and the autumn of

ancient civilisation—presented still more insuperable obstacles to Virgil

in his attempt to accomplish the work of Homer. In the first period

imagination is the ruling faculty of life, the great impeller to action

and discovery, the chief prompter both of hope and fear: and thus the

movement and impulses of such an age readily yield themselves to

imaginative treatment. Poets and dramatists of a later time who desire to

represent life in its most energetic phase endeavour to reproduce some

image of this early time by a constructive act of imagination. A dramatist

may take the mere outline of some ancient legend and fill it with modern

thought and sentiment. He is not called on for that realistic reproduction

of manners and usages which an epic poet is expected to exhibit on his

larger canvas. The difficulty which the latter has to meet is that of

verifying by anything in his own experience the impression which he forms

from the study of ancient art and records. Homer alone, by living the

imaginative life of an earlier time, was able to represent that life in

its truth, its fulness of being, its vivid sense of pleasure and pain. The

age mirrored in the Homeric poems is the true age of romance and personal

enterprise, when the individual acquires ascendency through his own

qualities of strength, beauty, courage, force of mind, natural eloquence;

when the world is regarded as the scene of supernatural agencies

manifesting themselves in visible shape; when men live more in the open

air than in houses and cities, and have to procure subsistence, comfort,

and security by energy of body and the inventive resources of their minds;

and when their hearts are alive to every natural emotion, not deadened by

routine or enervated by excess of pleasure. Hence it is that all Homer’s

accounts of war and battles, of sea-adventure, of debates in the council

of chiefs or in the assemblies of the people, of games and contests of

strength, are so full of living interest. Hence too comes the vivacity

with which all the details of procuring food, the enjoyment of eating and

drinking and sinking to sleep, the arming or clothing of heroes, the

management of a ship at sea, the ordinary occupations of the hunter or the

herdsman are described. To the same cause is due the truth and

appropriateness of all the descriptions from Nature,—of the dawn and

sunrise, of storms, of the gathering of clouds, of the constellations, of

the stillness of night, of the habits of wild animals, of the more violent

forces of the elements, of the omens which suddenly appear to men engaged

in battle or assembled in council in the open air and awaiting a sign for

their guidance.

An image of this Homeric life Virgil has to reproduce from the midst of a

state of society utterly unlike it. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an

age of order and material civilisation, in which great results were

produced, not by individual force, but by masses and combinations of men

directed by political sagacity and secret council; in which the life of

the richer class was passed in great cities and luxurious villas; in which

the comforts of life were abundantly supplied through the organisation of

commerce and the ministrations of a multitude of slaves(559); in which the

outward world was enjoyed as a beautiful spectacle rather than as a field

of active exertion and personal adventure; in which the belief in the

supernatural was fixed in imposing outward symbols, but was no longer a

fresh source of wonder and expectation; an age too, in which the natural

emotions of the heart and imagination were becoming deadened by satiety

and the ‘strenua inertia’ of luxurious living.

The art of Virgil is thus powerless to produce a true image of the life

and manners of the Homeric age. Yet he does surround the actors in his

story with an environment of religious belief and observances, of

political and social life, of material civilisation, of martial movement

and sea-adventure, formed partly out of his poetical and antiquarian

studies, partly out of the familiar spectacle of his own age, partly out

of his personal sympathies and convictions. And this representation,

though it necessarily wants the vital freshness and vigour of Homer’s

representation, has a peculiar dignity and charm of its own. It must be

accepted as an artistic compromise, and not as the idealised picture of

any life that has ever been realised in the world. It is one of the

earliest and most interesting products of that kind of imagination which

has in modern times created the literature of romance(560). The work in

English poetry which comes most near to the Aeneid in the union of modern

ethical and political feeling with the spectacle of the martial life and

the ideas of the supernatural belonging to a much earlier time, is ‘The

Faery Queen(561):’ though the allegorical meaning of that poem is as

different as possible from the solid basis of fact—the marvellous career

of Rome—on which the Aeneid is founded. Virgil produces much more than

Spenser the illusion of a kind of life not absolutely withdrawn from

mundane experience. The scenes through which he guides the personages of

his story are the familiar places of central Italy, of Sicily, of the

Greek islands, of the shores of Africa. These personages are engaged in

important transactions, such as make up the actual history of early

nations,—wars, alliances, intermarriages, and the like. Even the

supernatural element in the poem produces the illusion, if not of

conformity with the belief of men in the age in which the poem was

written, yet of conformity with that stage in the whole growth and

decomposition of ancient beliefs which, through the works of art and

poetry, has made the deepest impression on the world. Thus if Virgil’s

representation of scenes, persons, incidents, modes of life, supernatural

belief, etc. wants both the freshness and _naïveté_ of Homer and the

ideality and exuberance of fancy characteristic of Spenser, it is yet a

solid creation of the classical mind, exercised for the first time on a

great scale in bodying forth an imaginary foretime, peopling it with the

personages of earlier art or of the poet’s fancy, and filling up the

outlines of tradition with the sentiment, the interests, and the ideas of

the age in which the poem was written.

In addition to his great knowledge of antiquity and his gift of living in

the creations of earlier art and poetry, Virgil possessed in his own

imaginative constitution elements of power which enabled him to give

solidity and beauty to the world of his invention. Among these elements of

power his feeling of religious awe, his sense of majesty investing the

forms of government, his veneration for antiquity, his susceptibility to

the associations attaching to particular places, are conspicuous. His

sympathy with the primary human affections suggests to him the details of

many pathetic situations. He has a Roman admiration for courage,

endurance, and magnanimous bearing. His refined perceptions, perfected by

a life of studious culture and by familiarity with the social life of men

inheriting the traditions of a great governing class, enable him to make

the various actors on his stage play their parts with grace and dignity.

By some of these sources of imaginative power Ennius also was moved in the

composition of his epic. In that which is Virgil’s strength, sympathy with

the primary human affections, it would have been impossible for any poet

who came after them to have surpassed Homer, Sophocles, or Lucretius. But

in Homer this sympathy is combined with a sterner, in Sophocles with a

severer mood. In Lucretius the feeling is identified with the general

melancholy of his thought. The feeling of humanity in Virgil is as

original and pervading as the feeling with which Nature affects him. From

all these elements of inspiration, his imagination is able to body forth

the world of his creation in the remote border-land of history and

mythology, and to impart to it not only solidity and self-consistency, but

also grandeur of outline and beauty of detail.

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately

after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting

in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or

furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element

in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light

beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the

presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And

even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the

purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and

energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active

amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to

attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as

regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of

Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to

Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into

disrepute(562). He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning;

that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if

through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But

the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the

lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated

in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of

an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by

personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of

bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

Et vera incessu patuit dea.

* * * * *

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina(563).

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by

women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire;

as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the

pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of

device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the

ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many

extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character.

The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of

majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the

part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet

sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast

attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter

Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus(564).

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the

earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to

Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves

towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect

made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto

Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda(565).

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of

the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper(566).

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears

in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit

of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,

Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:

Nec te Troia capit(567).

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla

introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate.

Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign

enemy(568). Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers

between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the

few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation

of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the

same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave

birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna

alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in

the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek

imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin

reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that

doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the

Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,

Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris

Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem

Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit(569).

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced(570) in

accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency

guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in

accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin

mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of

kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the

ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take

part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or

Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in

the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the

story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa,

and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may

have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and

the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those

not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are

inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible

world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which

enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets

of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the

passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror

inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance

of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus

till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black

torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description

of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the

solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes(571).

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces

the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself

to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri

Caelicolis et quanta solet(572)—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the

reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and

Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae

Numina magna deum(573).

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and

practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the

Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The

religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each

family into one community(574), had been transmitted in popular beliefs

and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the

establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of

the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older

spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain

places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some

visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all

the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in

the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, identified with the

continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that

passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the

Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis

Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.

Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem

Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret(575).

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view

seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the

‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is

committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old

Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the

unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed

in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,

Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri(576).

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities

pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the

despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy

within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat(577).

When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit(578).

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’

for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous

wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods

is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of

the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the

sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their

reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs.

It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that

we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and

of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,

Sanguinis et sacri pateras, _animamque sepulchro_

_Condimus_, et magna supremum voce ciemus(579).

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and

the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the

strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of

these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost

of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and

gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old

affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of

Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!

Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris

Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum

Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,

Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno(580)?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in

the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,

Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,

‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:

Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:

Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:

Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,

Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto(581).’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence,

Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and

altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona

Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,

Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat

Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem

Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras(582).

Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus—

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum(583).

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of

view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is

justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the

Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative

invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which

awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book

entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato

among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in

transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the

‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to

the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead

do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an

unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more

august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The

spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus

than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less

austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole

humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of

the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the

primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices

transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form

a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the

various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which

he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent

picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, mystical, and

philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single

representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry

further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with

the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious

reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or,

perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl

by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes(584)—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that

sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges

that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is

unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of

Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human

imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an

object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of

moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his

recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness

and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the

profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that

trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem(585)—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and

follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the

account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact

acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and

Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of

a religious epic, that the commencement and completion of every enterprise

are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M.

Gaston Boissier(586), following Macrobius, has pointed out the special

propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of

such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of

the ritual application of the words ‘porricio(587)’ and ‘porrigo’, and of

the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs(588),—‘Aenea,

vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander

of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred

symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the

ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that

in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of

veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,

Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;

Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum

Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet(589).

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and

its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the

peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of

Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna(590).

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief,

and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong

suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the

importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the

dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer

or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to

the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the

changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the

religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws

of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of

superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum(591),

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened

convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his

other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it

embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity,

and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects

of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

III.

While the various religious elements in Virgil’s nature find ample scope

in the representation of the Aeneid, his apathy in regard to active

political life is seen in the tameness of his reproduction of that aspect

of human affairs. In the Homeric βουλή and ἀγορά we recognise not only the

germs of the future political development of the Greeks, but the germs out

of which all free political life unfolds itself. To the form of government

exhibited in the Aeneid, the words which Tacitus uses of a mixed

constitution might be more justly applied,—‘it is one more easily praised

than realised, or if ever it is realised, it is incapable of

permanence(592).’ And even if the Virgilian idea could be realised in some

happy moment of human affairs, it does not contain within itself the

capacity of any further development. The difficulties of the problem of

government are solved in Virgil by the picture which he draws of passive

and loyal submission on the part of nobles and people to a wise,

beneficent, and disinterested ruler and legislator(593). The idea of the

ruler in the Aeneid is the same as that of the ‘Father.’ It is under such

a rule, exercised from Rome as its centre, that the unchanging future of

the world is anticipated—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum

Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit(594).

The case of Mezentius does indeed show that Virgil recognised the ultimate

right of rebellion when the paternal king passed into the tyrannical

oppressor; but such an instance affords no scope for representing the

manifestation of political passions and virtues. The free play of

conflicting forces in a community has no attraction for Virgil’s

imagination. He suggests no thought either of the popular liberty realised

in the best days of the Roman commonwealth, or of the sagacity and

steadfast traditions of the Roman Senate. The only trace of discussion and

opposition appears in the debate within the court of Latinus. But the

antagonism between Drances and Turnus is one of personal rivalry, not of

political difference; and the only limit to the sovereignty of Latinus

lies in his own weakness of will and in the opposition of his household.

But besides the ideals of popular freedom and senatorian dignity which

were realised in the Republic, the Roman mind was impressed by another

political ideal, the ‘Majesty of the State.’ The one political force that

remained unchanged, amid the various changes of the Roman constitution

from the time of the kings to the time of the emperors, was the power of

the executive. And this power depended not on material force, but on the

sentiment with which the magistrate was regarded as the embodiment for the

time being of that attribute in the State which commanded the reverence of

the people. The greatest political offence which a Roman could commit

under the Republic was a violation of the ‘majesty of the Commonwealth;’

under the Empire ‘of the majesty of the Emperor.’ The sentiment out of

which this idea arose was felt by Virgil in all its strength. Thus

although the actual government of Latinus is exhibited as a model neither

of wisdom nor of strength, it is invested with all the outward semblance

of powerful and ancient sovereignty—

Tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis,

Urbe fuit summa, Laurentis regia Pici,

Horrendum silvis et religione parentum.

Hic sceptra accipere et primos attollere fasces

Regibus omen erat; hoc illis curia templum,

Hae sacris sedes epulis; hic, ariete caeso,

Perpetuis soliti patres considere mensis(595).

The spectacle of the fall of Troy acquires new grandeur from the

representation of Troy, not, as it appears in Homer, as a city with many

allies, but as the centre of a wide and long-established empire—

Postquam res Asiae Priamique evertere gentem

Inmeritam visum Superis, ceciditque superbum

Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia(596).

Urbs antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos(597).

Haec finis Priami fatorum; his exitus illum

Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem

Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum

Regnatorem Asiae(598).

The tragic splendour of Dido’s death is enhanced by her proud sense of a

high destiny fulfilled and of queenly rule exercised over a great people—

Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum Fortuna, peregi:

Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.

Urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi(599).

Thus although the necessities of his position and his own ‘inscitia

reipublicae’ prevented Virgil, in his representation, from appealing to

the generous political emotions of a free people, he was able not only to

gratify the pride of empire felt by his countrymen, but to sustain among

them the sense of imaginative reverence with which the sovereignty of the

State over its individual members deserves to be regarded.

But there is another class of political facts which interest the mind as

much as those which arise out of the play of conflicting forces within a

free commonwealth,—viz. the relations of independent powers with one

another. And of this class of facts both Homer and Virgil make use in

their representations. In Homer we see the spectacle, never realised in

actual Grecian history at least till the days of Alexander, of the many

independent Greek powers united under one leader in a common enterprise,

and of the various powers of the western shores of Asia combined in

defence of their leading State. The antagonism between the Greeks and

Trojans is, in point of general conception, more like the hostile

inter-relations of nations in modern times, than like the wars of city

against city, with which the pages of later Greek history are filled(600).

The union of the Italian tribes and cities under the command of Turnus,

and that of Trojans, Arcadians, and Etrurians—all foreigners recently

settled in Italy—under Aeneas, may be compared to the union of independent

Greek powers under Agamemnon, and that of ‘the allies summoned from afar,’

who, while following their own princes, yet submitted to the command of

Hector. Yet in Virgil’s conception of the great powers of the world, and

even of cities most remote from one another, as having an intimate

knowledge of each other’s fortunes,—in the idea of what in modern times

would be called a ‘foreign policy’ and ‘the balance of power,’ which

dictates the mission of Turnus to Diomede, and the appeal of Aeneas to the

Etrurians to take part with him in averting the establishment by the

Rutulians of a sovereignty over the whole of Italy,—we meet with a

condition of international relations and policy, which, if based on the

experience of any period of ancient history, might have been suggested by

the memory of the time when Hannibal’s great scheme of combining the fresh

vigour of the western barbarians, the smouldering elements of resistance

in Italy, and the military power and prestige of the old monarchies of

Macedonia and Syria, was defeated not more by the irresolution and

disunion among those powers, than by the traditional policy through which

Rome had made her dependent allies feel that her interest was identified

with their own. But this aspect of the world, though an anachronism from

the point of view either of the time when the poem was written, or of that

in which the events represented are supposed to happen, enhances the

dignity of the action, by exhibiting the enterprise of Aeneas as a

spectacle attracting the attention and involving the destinies of the

great nations of the world.

The state of material civilisation exhibited in the Aeneid must be

regarded also as a poetical compromise between the simplicity and rude

vigour of primitive civilisation and the splendour and refinement of the

age in which the poem was written. Thus Acestes, the friendly king and

Sicilian host of Aeneas, welcomes him on his return from Carthage in the

rough dress of some primitive hunter—

Horridus in iaculis et pelle Libystidis ursae(601).

Evander receives him beneath his humble roof,

stratisque locavit

Effultum foliis et pelle Libystidis ursae(602).

The Arcadian prince is roused in the morning by the song of birds under

the eaves, and proceeds to visit his guest accompanied by two watchdogs

which lay before his door. On the other hand the description, in the

account of the building of Carthage, of the foundation of the great

theatre—

hic lata theatris

Fundamenta petunt alii, immanisque columnas

Rupibus excidunt, scaenis decora alta futuris(603);

the picture of the great Temple of Juno—

Aerea cui gradibus surgebant limina nexaeque

Aere trabes, foribus cardo stridebat aenis(604);

of the rich frescoes and bas-reliefs adorning it—

Artificumque manus inter se operumque labores

Miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas

Bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem(605);

of the great dome under which the throne of Dido is placed—

media testudine templi, etc.;

the description of the Temple of Apollo at Cumae,—the account of the

banquet in the palace of Dido with its blaze of ‘festal light’—

dependent lychni laquearibus aureis

Incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt(606),

(a picture partly indeed, like that in Lucretius—

Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes, etc.,

suggested by the imaginative description of the banquet in the Palace of

Alcinous)—appear to owe their existence to the impression produced on the

mind of Virgil by some of the great architectural works of the Augustan

Age—such as the Theatre of Marcellus, the Pantheon, the Temple of the

Palatine Apollo, and by the spectacle of profuse luxury which the houses

and banquets of the richer classes at Rome exhibited.

The class from which the personages of the Aeneid are taken is almost

exclusively that of those most elevated in dignity and influence. Virgil

does not attempt to bring before us the rich variety of social grades,

which adds vivacity and verisimilitude to the spectacle of life and

manners presented by Homer, Chaucer, and Shakspeare. It does not enter

into Virgil’s conception of epic art to introduce types of the class to

which Thersites, Irus, Eumaeus, Phemius, and Eurycleia belong. If he makes

any exception to his general practice of limiting his representation to

the class of royal and noble personages, it is in the glimpse which he

affords of devoted loyalty in the person of Palinurus and of affection and

grief in that of the bereaved mother of Euryalus. Where, after the example

of Homer, he introduces various figures belonging to the same class, he

fails to distinguish them from one another by any individual trait of

character or manners. Thus Dido has her suitors as well as Penelope; but

the former produce no life-like impression of any kind, like that produced

by the careless levity and gay insolence of Antinous and Eurymachus.

As a painter of manners Virgil adopts the stately and conventional methods

of Greek tragedy rather than the vivid realism of Homer. The intercourse

of his chief personages with one another is conducted with the dignity and

courtesy of the most refined times. Homer’s personages indeed act for the

most part with a natural dignity and courtesy of bearing,—proceeding from

the commanding character which he attributes to them, as well as from the

lively social grace of their Greek origin,—which can neither be surpassed

nor equalled by any conventional refinement. But these social virtues can

be rapidly exchanged for vehemence of passion and angry recrimination. In

the manners of Virgil’s personages we recognise the influence of refined

traditions, and of the habits of a dignified society. His personages show

not only courtesy but studied consideration for each other. Thus while

Latinus addresses Turnus in words of courteous acknowledgment—of which the

original suggestion may be traced to a tragedy of Attius—

O praestans animi iuvenis! quantum ipse feroci

Virtute exsuperas, tanto me impensius aequum est

Consulere, atque omnis metuentem expendere casus(607);

Turnus replies to him in the terms of respect which are due to his age and

position—

Quam pro me curam geris, hanc precor, optime, pro me

Deponas letumque sinas pro laude pacisci.

Et nos tela, pater(608), etc.

The element of self-command amid the deepest movements of feeling and

passion enhances the stately dignity of manners represented in the poem.

Thus in the greatest sorrow of Evander, when he is recalling with fond

pride the youthful promise of Pallas—

Tu quoque nunc stares immanis truncus in armis,

Esset par actas et idem si robur ab annis,

Turne(609),—

he remembers that he is detaining the Trojans, who had come to pay the

funeral honours to his son—

sed infelix Teucros quid demoror armis?

Vadite et haec memores regi mandata referte(610).

The queenly courtesy of Dido springs from deeper elements in human nature

than conformity to the standard of demeanour imposed by elevated rank—

Solvite corde metum, Teucri, secludite curas.

Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt

Moliri et late finis custode tueri.

Quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem

Virtutesque virosque, aut tanti incendia belli?

Non obtunsa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,

Nec tam aversus equos Tyria Sol iungit ab urbe(611), etc.

The sea adventures of the Aeneid seem to be suggested rather by the

experience of travellers in the Augustan Age, than by the spirit of wonder

and buoyant resistance with which Odysseus and his companions encounter

the perils of unexplored seas and coasts. The fabulous portents of

legendary times appear in the shape of the Harpies, the Cyclops, the

sea-monster Scylla, etc., but they do not produce that sense of novelty

and vivid life which the same or similar representations produce in the

Odyssey. The description of the Harpies is grotesque rather than

imaginative. There is a touch of pathos in the introduction of the

Cyclops—

Lanigerae comitantur oves: ea sola voluptas

Solamenque mali(612),

reminding us of the κριὲ πέπον, etc. of the Odyssey; and the picture of

his assembled brethren—

Cernimus adstantis nequiquam lumine torvo

Aetnaeos fratres, caelo capita alta ferentis,

Concilium horrendum(613)—

is conceived with a kind of grim power, showing that the imagination of

Virgil does not merely reproduce, but endows with a new life the figures

which he borrows most closely from his original. But the life-like

realism, the combined humour and terror of Homer’s representation, are

altogether absent from the Aeneid. These marvellous creations appear

natural in the Odyssey, and in keeping with the imaginative impulses and

the adventurous spirit of the ages of maritime discovery: but they stand

in no real relation to the feelings and beliefs with which men encountered

the occasional dangers and the frequent discomforts of the Adriatic or the

Aegean in the Augustan Age.

In his conception of these real dangers of the sea, which have to be met

in the most advanced as well as the most primitive times, Virgil’s

inferiority to Homer, both in general effect and in lifelike detail, is

very marked. The wonderful realism of the sea adventures in the fifth Book

of the Odyssey produces on the mind the impression that the poet is

recalling either a peril that he himself had encountered, or one that he

had heard vividly related by some one who had thus escaped ‘from the issue

of death:’ and that there was in the poet too the genuine delight in

danger, the spirit

‘That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine,’

which has been attributed to the companions of his hero’s wanderings.

Odysseus, like Aeneas, feels his limbs and heart give way before the

sudden outburst of the storm; but, though swept from the raft and

overwhelmed for a time under the waves, he never loses his presence of

mind or his courage—

ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὣς σχεδίης ἐπελήθετο τειρόμενός περ,

ἀλλὰ μεθορμηθεὶς ἐνὶ κύμασιν ἐλλάβετ’ αὐτῆς,

ἐν μέσσῃ δὲ καθῖζε τέλος θανάτου ἀλεείνων(614).

The poet of the Odyssey may have encountered such storms as are described

in the passage here referred to, and we cannot doubt that in such case he

bore his part bravely, ‘redeeming his own life and securing the safe

return of his comrades.’ If Virgil in some unadventurous voyaging ever

happened to be ‘caught in a storm in the open Aegean,’ it probably was in

the position of a helpless sufferer that he contemplated the wild

commotion of the elements.

On the other hand he shows a keen enjoyment of the pleasure of sailing

past famous and beautiful scenes with a fair wind and in smooth water—

Linquimus Ortygiae portas pelagoque volamus

Bacchatamque iugis Naxon, viridemque Donysam,

Olearon, niveamque Paron, sparsasque per aequor

Cycladas, et crebris legimus freta consita terris.

Nauticus exoritur vario certamine clamor(615).

The first sight of land from the sea is vividly brought before the eye in

such passages as these—

Quarto terra die primum se attollere tandem

Visa, aperire procul montis, ac volvere fumum(616).

Iamque rubescebat stellis Aurora fugatis,

Cum procul obscuros collis humilemque videmus

Italiam(617).

Crebrescunt optatae aurae, portusque patescit

Iam propior, templumque apparet in arce Minervae(618).

The disappearance of the shores left behind, and the opening up of new

scenes in the rapid onward voyage, leave on the mind a fresh feeling of

novelty and life in such passages as—

Protinus aerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces,

Litoraque Epiri legimus, portuque subimus

Chaonio, et celsam Buthroti accedimus urbem(619);

and in this in which the historic associations of famous cities are

evoked—

Apparet Camarina procul, campique Geloi,

Immanisque Gela, fluvii cognomine dicta.

Arduus inde Acragas ostentat maxima longe

Moenia, magnanimum quondam generator equorum(620), etc.

These and similar passages—such as that describing the moon-light sail

past the enchanted shores of Circe—remind us of the great change which had

come over the world between the age of the Odyssey and that of the Aeneid.

The one poem is pervaded by the eager curiosity of the youthful prime of

the world, attracting the most daring and energetic spirits to the

discovery and peopling of new lands; the other by that more languid

curiosity, awakened by the associations of the past,—by the longing for

some change to break the routine of a too easy life,—and by the refined

enjoyment of beauty, urging men to encounter some danger and more

discomfort for the sake of visiting scenes famous in history, rich in

natural charms, or in works of art, the inheritance from more creative

times.

In his scenes of battle, Virgil is as inferior to the poet of the Iliad as

he is to the poet of the Odyssey in those of sea adventure. In the details

of single fights, in the account of the wounds inflicted on one another by

the combatants, in the enumeration of the obscurer warriors who fall

before the champions of either side—

his addit Amastrum

Hippotaden, sequiturque incumbens eminus hasta

Tereaque Harpalycumque et Demophoönta Chromimque(621),

he follows closely in the footsteps of Homer. He is, however, more sparing

of these details, so as to avoid the monotony of Homer’s battle-fields and

single combats. The Iliad was originally addressed to a people of

warriors—

οἶσιν ἄρα Ζεὺς

ἐκ νεότητος ἔδωκε καὶ ἐς γῆρας τολυπεύειν

ἀργαλέους πολέμους, ὄφρα φθιόμεσθα ἕκαστος(622).

And although through the mouth of the wisest of his heroes, Homer

expresses some sense of weariness of the

‘war and broils, which make

Life one perpetual fight’—

αἶψα τε φυλόπιδος πέλεται κόρος ανθρώποισι—

yet all accepted this life as their destiny; and those who first listened

to the song of the poet would feel no satiety in the details of battle and

records of martial prowess, glorifying perhaps the reputed ancestors of

those chiefs whom they themselves followed to the field or to the storming

of cities. To Virgil’s readers, the record of such a time as that

described in the Iliad would come like echoes from an alien world. In so

far as the Romans of the Augustan Age had any vital passion corresponding

to the interest with which Homer’s Greeks must have witnessed in

imagination the spectacle of wounds and death in battle, it was in the

basest form which the lust of blood has ever assumed among civilised

men,—the passion for the gladiatorial shows. It is clear that Virgil

himself, though he can feel and inspire the fire of battle at some

critical moment—

ingeminant hastis et Troes et ipse

Fulmineus Mnestheus(623);

though he can express a Roman contempt for death,—

Est hic, est animus lucis contemptor(624),

and can sympathise with the energetic daring of his Italian heroes and

heroine,—Turnus, Lausus, Pallas(625), and Camilla,—yet shares the

sentiment with which his hero looks forward to peace as the crown of his

labours, and regards the wars which he was compelled to wage as a hated

task imposed on him by the Fates—

Nos alias hinc ad lacrimas, eadem horrida bella,

Fata vocant(626).

Yet even in the incidents of his battle-pieces Virgil does not follow

Homer slavishly. The warlike action of the poem is not a mere succession

of single combats, or a confused _mêlée_ of battle, surging ‘this way and

that,’ between the rampart that guards the ships and the walls of the

city. It is said that the greatest soldier of modern times, in the

enforced leisure of his last years, condescended to express a criticism,

not indeed a favourable one, on Virgil’s skill as a tactician; and it is

an element of novelty in the representation of the Aeneid that it suggests

at least some image of the combined operations of modern warfare. But it

is in the play which Virgil gives to the other human emotions of his

personages, tempering and counteracting the blind rage of battle, that the

poet of a more advanced era most conspicuously appears. The ancient world

at its best, whether we judge of it from the representations of its poets,

or the recorded acts of its greatest men and most powerful and enlightened

States, did not rise to that height of chivalrous generosity which scorns

to take an enemy at a disadvantage, or to wipe away the memory of defeat

or disaster by a cruel revenge. Achilles in his treatment of Hector,

Caesar in his treatment of Vercingetorix, the Spartans in dealing with

Plataeae, the Syracusans with the remnant of the defeated Athenians, the

Athenians themselves with the helpless defenders of Melos, the Romans with

the Samnites who spared their lives at the Caudine Forks,—all alike fall

below the standard of nobleness which men of temper inferior to that of

the great men and nations of antiquity often reached in mediaeval times.

Those who appear to come nearest this standard in ancient times,—who could

at least honour courage in an enemy or refuse to press too heavily upon

him in his defeat,—are the Carthaginian Hannibal and his not unworthy

conqueror. Virgil cannot be said, in this respect, to rise altogether

superior to the spirit of the old Greek and Roman world. In the Aeneid it

is thought no shame, but rather a glory, for soldiers to slay defenceless

or wounded men in battle or in the dim confusion of a night foray. Yet the

sentiments of his warriors engaged in battle are more tempered with

humanity than those of the heroes of the Iliad. There is no word of

throwing the bodies of the slain to dogs and vultures. There is no such

deadly struggle over the bodies of Lausus or Pallas as over that of

Patroclus. Turnus and Aeneas alike act on the principle expressed in the

request of the dying champion of Italy,—

Ulterius ne tende odiis(627).

Not only is the warlike passion less cruel in the Aeneid, but the feeling

of the sanctity which invests the dead is stronger. The only passage in

the Aeneid which might have exposed Virgil to the reproach of Lucretius,

as forgetting in the supposed interests of religion the certain claims of

humanity, is that in which Aeneas, following the example of Achilles, sets

aside the captive youths for immolation to the Manes of Pallas.

But the chief source of interest in the Virgilian battle-pieces is the

pathetic sympathy awakened for the untimely death of some of the nobler

personages of the story. The tender compassion called forth by the blight

which fell in his own time upon the earliest of the ‘breves et infaustos

populi Romani amores(628),’ and reappeared again in the deaths of Drusus

and Germanicus—that compassion which dictates the words

si qua fata aspera rumpas

Tu Marcellus eris(629),

appears in his description of the fates of Pallas and Lausus, of Euryalus

and Camilla. The reverence for the purest of human affections which shines

through the lines

Transiit et parmam mucro levia arma minacis,

Et tunicam, molli mater quam neverat auro(630),

and

At vero, ut voltum vidit morientis et ora,

Ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris,

Ingemuit miserans graviter dextramque tetendit,

Et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago(631),

may be discerned also in some of the minor incidents of the poem, as in

these lines—

Vos etiam, gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in arvis,

Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles,

Indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error(632).

The emotions awakened by the deaths of Mezentius and of Turnus are of a

sterner character. So too the poet’s compassion for the heroine of his

later books, Camilla, falling by the hand of an ignoble antagonist, is

mixed with a sense of scornful satisfaction at the retribution which

immediately followed—

Extemplo teli stridorem aurasque sonantis

Audiit una Arruns haesitque in corpore ferrum.

Illum expirantem socii atque extrema gementem

Obliti ignoto camporum in pulvere linquunt;

Opis ad aetherium pinnis aufertur Olympum(633).

Virgil’s susceptibility to local associations and to impressions of a

remote antiquity must also be taken into account as supplying materials

and stimulus to his inventive faculty. No poet so often appeals to the

imaginative interest attaching to the earlier condition of places or

things of old renown or famous in the later history of the world. Thus the

building of Carthage, the first view of the Tiber—

Hunc inter fluvio Tiberinus amoeno

Verticibus rapidis et multa flavus harena

In mare prorumpit(634)—

the gathering of the Italian races from ‘mountainous Praeneste, from the

tilled lands around Gabii, from the banks of the cool Anio, and the

rivulets sparkling among the Hernican hills,’—the contrast between the

primitive pastoral aspect of the Tarpeian Rock and the Capitol, of the

site of the Forum and the Carinae, and the familiar spectacle of outward

magnificence which they presented in the Augustan Age,—are brought before

the mind with a more stimulating power than the experiences of storm or

battle through which the hero of the poem is conducted. The local

associations of Mount Eryx, of the lake of Avernus, of the fountain

Albunea, of the valley of Amsanctus, of the Arician grove, of the site of

Ardea, are evoked with impressive effect. The names of the promontories

Palinurum, Misenum, and Caieta are invested with an interest derived from

their connexion with the imaginary incidents and personages of the poem.

The ritual observances and the legend connected with the Ara Maxima

suggest the description of ceremonies and the narrative of events in the

earlier half of Book viii.; and the custom—so ancient that its original

meaning was forgotten—of opening the gateway of Janus Quirinus on the rare

occasions when a state of war arose out of a state of unbroken peace, is

traced back to a time antecedent to the existence either of Rome or Alba—

Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes

Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum

Roma colit, etc.

* * * * *

Ipse Quirinali trabea cinctuque Gabino

Insignis reserat stridentia limina Consul;

Ipse vocat pugnas, sequitur tum cetera pubes,

Aereaque adsensu conspirant cornua rauco(635).

Perhaps the most original and not the least impressive of those personages

whom Virgil introduces into his composite representation—the Sibyl—is

conceived under the strong sense of the mystery and sanctity which

invested the oracles of the Sibylline books.

The personal and national susceptibilities of Virgil’s imagination and the

circumstances of the age in which he lived are thus seen largely to modify

that representation of life and manners of which the main outlines are

suggested by the Homeric poems, and of which many of the details are

derived from the Cyclic poems, from the Greek tragedies founded on the

events which followed on the death of Hector, and from the Italian

traditions and aetiological myths which Cato had preserved in his

‘Origines,’ and Varro and other writers in their works on antiquities.

Virgil’s power as an epic poet does not consist in original invention of

incident or action, but in combining diverse elements into a homogeneous

whole, and in imparting poetic life to old materials, many of them not

originally conceived in a poetic spirit. The interest which he thus

imparts to his narrative is different from, and inferior to, that

attaching to the original representation in the Homeric poems. Had

Virgil’s representation been as faithfully drawn from the life as that of

Homer, it still would have been less interesting, from the fact that

ancient Romans are less interesting in their individuality than the Greeks

of the great ages of Greek life, and from the fact also that the manners

of an advanced age do not affect the imagination in the way in which those

of a nation’s youth affect it. Not only was Virgil’s own genius much less

creative than that of Homer, his materials possessed much less plasticity.

There is no need of any act of reconstructive criticism to enable us to

feel the immediate power of the Iliad and the Odyssey. To do justice to

the power of the Aeneid we must endeavour to realise in imagination the

state of mind of those who received the poem in all the novelty of its

first impression,—at once ‘rich with the spoils of time,’ and ‘pregnant

with celestial fire.’

IV.

The most important element in the Aeneid, regarded as a poem of heroic

action, remains still to be considered, viz. the conception and

delineation of individual character. The greatest of epic poets in ancient

times was also endowed with the most versatile dramatic faculty. And this

faculty was displayed not only in the conception of a great variety of

noble types of character, but also in the modes in which these conceptions

were embodied. The Greek language is greatly superior to the Latin in its

adaptability to natural dialogue. In this respect Cicero’s inferiority to

Plato is as marked as Virgil’s inferiority to Homer. The language of Homer

and the language of Plato are equally fitted for the expression of the

greatest thoughts and feelings, and for the common intercourse of men with

one another. Neither that of Virgil nor of Cicero adapts itself easily to

the lively play of emotion or to the rapid interchange of thought. The

characters of Homer, like the characters of Shakspeare, reveal themselves

in their complete individuality, as they act and re-act on one another in

many changing moods of passion and affection. The personages of Virgil are

revealed by the poet, partly in his account of what they do, and partly

through the medium of set speeches expressive of some particular attitude

of mind. Virgil’s imagination is the imagination of the orator rather than

of the dramatist. It is not a complete and complex man, liable to various

moods, and standing in various relations to other men, but it is some

powerful movement of the θυμός in man, that the oratorical imagination is

best fitted to express. Milton also, like Virgil, reveals the characters

of his personages with the imaginative power of an orator rather than with

that of a dramatist. But he possesses another resource in the analytical

power with which he makes his chief personage reveal his inmost nature and

most secret motives in truthful communing with himself. It is through the

soliloquies in the ‘Paradise Lost’ that we can best realise the whole

conception of Satan, in his ruined magnificence, and in his lost but not

forgotten capacity of happiness and nobleness. The soliloquies of these

personages perform for the epic poet the part performed by the elaborate

introspection and discussion of motives in modern prose fiction. Homer

also avails himself frequently of the soliloquy, as he does of natural

dialogue and more formal oratory. In the Aeneid the chief personage is

often introduced, like the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey,

‘This way and that dividing the swift mind;’

but the process generally ends in the adoption, without any weighing of

conflicting duties or probabilities, of the obvious course indicated by

some supernatural sign. The soliloquies of Dido are to be regarded rather

as passionate outbursts of prayer to some unknown avenging power than as

communings with her own heart. The single soliloquy, if it may be called

such, which brings the speaker nearer to us in knowledge and sympathy, is

the proud and stately address in which Mezentius seems to make the horse,

which had borne him victorious through every former war, a partaker of his

sorrow and his forebodings—

Rhaebe, diu, res si qua diu mortalibus ulla est,

Viximus(636), etc.

But not only are the media through which Virgil brings his personages

before us less varied and flexible than those of Homer, but the characters

themselves are more tamely conceived, and less capable of awakening human

interest. And this is especially true of the character of Aeneas as

contrasted with those of Achilles and of Odysseus. The general conception

of Aeneas is indeed in keeping with the religious idea of the Aeneid. He

is intended to be an embodiment of the courage of an ancient hero, the

justice of a paternal ruler, the mild humanity of a cultivated man living

in an age of advanced civilisation, the saintliness of the founder of a

new religion of peace and pure observance, the affection for parent and

child, which was one of the strongest instincts in the Italian race. A

life-like impersonation of such an ideal would have commanded the

reverence of all future times. Yet at no time has the character of Aeneas

excited any strong human interest. No later poet or moralist set it up, as

Horace sets up the characters of Achilles and of Ulysses, as a subject of

ethical contemplation. Ovid in the deepest gloom of his exile retains

enough of his old levity to jest at his single lapse from saintly

perfection—

Et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor

Contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros(637).

As compared with the hero of the Odyssey, Aeneas is altogether wanting in

energy, spontaneity, intellectual resource, and insight. The single

quality in which he is strong is endurance. The principle which enables

him to fulfil his mission is expressed in the line—

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est(638).

His courage in battle springs from his confidence in his destiny—

Tum socios maestique metum solatur Iuli

Fata docens(639).

One of the few touches of nature which redeem his character from tameness

is the momentary feeling of the rage of battle roused by the resistance of

Lausus—

saevae iamque altius irae

Dardanio surgunt ductori(640).

The occasion in which he seems most worthy of his place as a leader of men

is after the death of Mezentius, where the self-restraint of his address

contrasts favourably with the intemperate ardour expressed in some of the

speeches of Turnus—

Maxima res effecta, viri: timor omnis abesto(641).

He appears as a passive recipient both of the devotion and of the

reproaches of Dido. He undergoes no passionate struggle in resigning her.

The courtesy and kindliness of his nature elicit no warmer expression of

regret than the words—

nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae,

Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus(642).

The only exercise of thought required of him is the right interpretation

of an omen, or the recollection of some dubious prediction at some

critical moment. Even the strength of affection which he feels and which

he awakens in the hearts of his father and son does not move us in the way

in which we are touched by the feelings which unite Odysseus to Penelope

and Telemachus, to Laertes and the mother who meets him in the shades, and

tells him that she had ‘died neither by the painless arrows of Artemis nor

by wasting disease’—

ἀλλά με σός τε πόθος σά τε μήδεα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ,

σή τ’ ἀγανοφροσύνη μελιηδέα θυμὸν ἀπηύρα(643).

The failure of Aeneas to excite a lively personal interest is not to be

attributed solely to a failure of power in the poet’s imagination. In the

part he plays he is conceived of as one chosen by the supreme purpose of

the gods, as an instrument of their will, and thus necessarily unmoved by

ordinary human impulses. In the words of M. de Coulanges, ‘Sa vertu doit

être une froide et haute impersonnalité, qui fasse de lui, non un homme,

mais un instrument des dieux(644).’ The strength required in such an

instrument is the strength of faith, submission, patience, and endurance;

and it is with this strength that Aeneas encounters the many dangers and

vicissitudes to which he is exposed, and withdraws from the allurements of

ease and pleasure. The very virtues of his character act as a check rather

than as a stimulus to those natural impulses out of which the most living

impersonations are formed. To compare great things in art with what are

not so great, the impression produced by the superiority of Aeneas to

ordinary passion is like the impression produced by the superior tolerance

and enlightenment of some of Scott’s heroes, when contrasted with the more

animated impulses and ruder fanaticism of the other personages in his

story. That he is, on the one hand, the passive receptacle of Divine

guidance, and, on the other, the impersonation of a modern ideal of

humanity, playing a part in a rude and turbulent time, are the two main

causes of the tame and colourless character of the protagonist of the

Aeneid. And as loyalty to a leader is the sole form of political, as

distinct from patriotic virtue which Virgil acknowledges, the other Trojan

chiefs—the faithful Achates, the speaker Idomeneus, the more martial

figures of Mnestheus and Serestus—do little more than play the part of the

ἄγγελος or of the κωφὰ πρόσωπα in a Greek tragedy. The interest awakened

by Anchises arises solely from the halo of sacred associations investing

him. Iulus, as the eponymous ancestor of the Iulii, seems to be a

favourite of the author; yet he fails to interest us as a youth of high

spirit and promise. Telemachus we know and sympathise with in his rising

rebellion against the insolence of the suitors—

νῦν δ’ ὅτε δὴ μέγας εἰμί, καὶ ἄλλων μῦθον ἀκούων

πυνθάνομαι, καὶ δή μοι ἀέξεται ἔνδοθι θυμός(645),

in his longing for the return of his father to redress his wrongs, in his

kindly hospitality, and sense of the outraged honour of his house—

νεμεσσήθη δ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ

ξεῖνον δηθὰ θύρῃσιν ἐφεστάμεν(646).

That Iulus fails to awaken a similar interest, that we do not share his

ardour in the chase or the glow of pride with which he lays his first

enemy low, is due to the fact that the poet’s imagination fails in the

vital realisation of his conception.

Most of the minor characters who appear in the Aeneid require no analysis.

Creusa, Anna, and Andromache are vague impersonations of womanly

tenderness and fidelity of affection. Lavinia, the shadowy Helen of the

story, appears only for a moment, and though she is described by images

suggestive of beauty and of a delicate nurture—

mixta rubent ubi lilia multa

Alba rosa(647),

we are left without the knowledge by which to measure the extent of the

wrong done to her and Turnus by the enforced severance of their

affections. Amata exhibits the blind animal rage of a mother whose

affections have been outraged, but her figure wants the firm outlines and

substance of the Hecuba of the Iliad. The prophetic office of Helenus

enables him to advance the action of the story by preparing the mind of

Aeneas for his immediate future: the jealous interference of Iarbas

accelerates the doom of Dido: Acestes performs the part of a kindly host

to the Trojans in Sicily. But of any individual traits of character they

exhibit no trace whatever. Drances serves as a vehicle of impassioned

oratory, and as a kind of foil to the generous impulsiveness of

Turnus—just as the timid craft of Arruns is a foil to the splendid

rashness of Camilla;—and perhaps he is not much less real to our

imaginations than Polydamus, who is the only personage of the Iliad that

we think of rather as the embodiment of an abstract

quality,—moderation,—than as a living man. But in the delineation of

Drances there is no sign of that power which, by a few graphic strokes of

description and the force of dramatic insight, has made Thersites stand

forth for all times as the type of an envious and ignoble demagogue.

Though there is more effort of thought in the delineation of Latinus as

swayed to and fro by his religious sense of duty and the influence of

others, and though there is true pathos in the words with which he allows

the declaration of war to be made—

Nam mihi parta quies, omnisque in limine portus:

Funere felici spolior(648);—

yet he does not live before us as Priam lives in the scene with Helen on

the walls of the town, and he has no power to move our hearts with the

awful compassion which the grief of Priam awakens in the last books of the

Iliad. Perhaps the most impressive of the secondary personages in the

Aeneid is Evander, as he appears in the dignity of his simple state in the

eighth Book, and in the dignity of his great sorrow in the eleventh.

Pallas and Lausus, Nisus and Euryalus, afford occasions for pathetic

situations, rather than perform any part affording scope for the display

of character. The romantic career of Camilla interests us; and she has the

further attraction to modern readers of reminding them of a martial

heroine of actual history: but we scarcely recognise in the vivid

delineation of her deeds those complex elements which in their union form

a whole character for our imaginations, whether in the representations of

literature or in our experience of life.

The chief personal interest of the story is centred in those whose

fortunes and action bring them into antagonism with the decrees of Fate,

and who perish in consequence,—in Turnus, Mezentius, and Dido. Patriotism,

courage, and passion are exhibited in a fatal but not ignoble struggle

with the purposes and chosen instruments of Omnipotence. The tragic

interest of this antagonism stimulates the imagination of the poet to a

more energetic delineation of character. And in the representation of this

struggle it is quite true, as has been well shown by Mr. Nettleship, that

Virgil’s own sympathies go with the ‘victrix causa’ which ‘pleased the

gods,’ not with the ‘victa’ which pleases our modern sensibilities. He

professes not to question but

‘To justify the ways of God to men.’

The death of Mezentius satisfies poetical as well as political justice.

Turnus brings his doom upon himself by the intemperate vehemence and

self-confidence with which he asserts his personal claims. Though Aeneas

and Dido are both represented as ‘forgetful of their better name,’ yet, as

happens in real life more generally than in fiction, it is the woman only

who suffers the penalty of this forgetfulness. Yet though in all these

cases the doom of the sufferers is brought about in part through their own

fault, Virgil does not, as an inferior artist might do, endeavour to

augment the sympathy with his chief personage, by an unworthy detraction

from his antagonist. No scorn of treachery or cowardice, no indignation

against cruelty, mingles with the feeling of admiration which the general

bearing of Turnus excites. The basis of his character seems to be a

generous vehemence and proud independence of spirit. If Aeneas typifies

the civilising mission of Rome and is to be regarded as an embodiment of

the qualities which enabled her to give law to the world, Turnus typifies

the brave but not internecine resistance offered to her by the other races

of Italy, and is an embodiment of their high and martial spirit—of that

‘Itala virtus’ which, when tempered by Roman discipline, gave Rome the

strength to fulfil her mission. The cause which moves Turnus to resist the

Trojans is no unworthy one, either on patriotic grounds or on grounds

personal to himself. If the Greeks were justified in making war against

the Trojans on account of Helen, the Italians may be justified in making

war against the same people on account of Lavinia. His appeals to his

countrymen are addressed to the most elemental of patriotic impulses—

nunc coniugis esto

Quisque suae tectique memor: nunc magna referto

Facta, patrum laudes(649).

He slays his enemy in fair battle, and though he shows exultation in his

victory, yet he does not sully it by any ferocity of act or demeanour—

qualem meruit Pallanta remitto,

Quisquis honos tumuli, quidquid solamen humandi est

Largior(650).

After his hopes of success are shaken by the first defeat of the Latins,

and by the failure of the mission to Diomede, and when the timidity of

Latinus and the envy of Drances urge the abandonment of the struggle, he

still retains a proud confidence in his Italian allies—

Non erit auxilio nobis Aetolos et Arpi,

At Messapus erit, felixque Tolumnius(651), etc.

He is ready, like an earlier Decius, to devote his life in single combat

against the new Achilles, armed with the armour of Vulcan—

vobis animam hanc soceroque Latino

Turnus ego, haut ulli veterum virtute secundus,

Devovi: ‘Solum Aeneas vocat.’ Et vocet oro:

Nec Drances potius, sive est haec ira deorum,

Morte luat, sive est virtus et gloria, tollat(652).

He sees ‘the inspiring hopes of triumph disappear, but the austerer glory

of suffering remains, and with a firm heart he accepts that gift of a

severe fate(653)’—

Usque adeone mori miserum est? Vos o mihi Manes

Este boni, quoniam Superis aversa voluntas:

Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae

Descendam, magnorum haut unquam indignus avorum(654).

In the final encounter he yields, not to the terror inspired by his

earthly antagonist, but to his consciousness of the hostility of Heaven—

di me terrent et Iuppiter hostis(655).

His last wish is that the old age of his father, Daunus, should not be

deprived of the consolation of his funeral honours. Although the headlong

vehemence of his own nature, no less than his opposition to the beneficent

purposes of Omnipotence, seems to justify his fate, yet, as in the Ajax of

Sophocles, the αὐθαδία in Turnus is rather the flaw in an essentially

heroic temper, than his dominant characteristic. The poet’s sympathy with

the high spirit of youth, as manifested in love and war, and his pride in

the strong metal out of which the Italian race was made, have led him,

perhaps involuntarily, to an embodiment of those chivalrous qualities,

which affect the modern imagination with more powerful sympathy than the

qualities of a temperate will and obedience to duty which he has striven

to embody in the representation of Aeneas.

The vigorous sketch of Mezentius, as he appears in Book x., has received

from some critics more admiration than the sustained delineation of Turnus

through all the vicissitudes of feeling and fortune through which he

passes. Chateaubriand says, that this figure is the only one in the Aeneid

that is ‘fièrement dessinée.’ Landor describes him as ‘the hero

transcendently above all others in the Aeneid.’ And there is certainly a

vague grandeur of outline in this conception of the ‘contemptor divom’ and

oppressor of his people, who is ‘not only the most passionate in his grief

for Lausus, but likewise gives way to manly sorrow for the mute companion

of his warfare,’ indicative of a bolder invention than that which is

usually ascribed to Virgil. It is remarkable that poets whose spirit is

most purely religious,—both in the strength of conviction and the

limitation of sympathy produced by the religious spirit—Aeschylus, Virgil,

and Milton—seem to be moved to their most energetic creativeness by the

idea of antagonism to the supreme will on the part of a human, or

superhuman but limited will: and that they cannot help raising in their

readers a glow of admiration as well as a sense of awe in their embodiment

of this clash between finite and infinite power. The sketch of Mezentius

cannot indeed be compared with two of the most daring conceptions and

perfected creations of human genius,—the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the

Satan of Milton,—yet, if it does not enlist our ethical sympathies like

the former of these, like the second it receives the tribute of that

involuntary admiration, which is given to courage, even when allied with

moral evil, so long as it is not absolutely divorced from the capability

of sympathetic and elevated emotion.

In the part which Dido plays in the poem, Virgil finds a source of

interest in which he had not been anticipated by Homer. And although the

passion of love, unreturned or betrayed, had supplied a motive to the

later Greek tragedy and to the Alexandrine epic, it was still not

impossible for a new poet to represent this phase of modern life with more

power and pathos than any of his predecessors. It was comparatively easy

to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of

Apollonius. But the Dido of Virgil may compare favourably with the

creations of greater masters,—with the Deianeira of Sophocles, with the

Phaedra and the Medea of Euripides. And Virgil’s conception is at once

more impassioned than that of Sophocles, and nobler and more womanly than

those of Euripides. Her character, as it is represented before the

disturbing influence of this new passion produced by supernatural

artifice, is that of a brave and loyal, a great and queenly, a pure,

trusting, and compassionate nature. The most tragic element in the

development of her love for Aeneas is the struggle which it involves with

her high-strung sense of fidelity to the dead—

Ille meos primus qui me sibi iunxit amores

Abstulit: ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro(656).

The first feeling awakened in her mind by Aeneas is compassion for his

sufferings, and the desire to make the Trojans sharers in the fortune

which had attended her own enterprise. When by the unsuspected agency of

the two goddesses she has been possessed by the fatal passion, it is to no

ignoble influence that she succumbs. It is the greatness and renown of one

whom she recognises as of the race of the gods, which exercise a spell

over her imagination—

Multa viri virtus animo, multusque recursat

Gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore voltus

Verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem(657).

No weakness, no unwomanly ferocity mingles with the reproaches which she

utters on first awakening to the betrayal of her trust. A feeling of

magnanimous scorn makes her rise in rebellion against the plea that her

desertion was the result of divine interposition—

Scilicet is Superis labor est! ea cura quietos

Sollicitat(658);

and a lofty pathos animates her trust in a righteous retribution, the

knowledge of which will comfort her among the dead—

Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,

Supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido

Saepe vocaturum. Sequar atris ignibus absens,

Et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,

Omnibus umbra locis adero:—dabis, improbe, poenas:

Audiam, et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos(659).

The awe inspired by supernatural portents, by restless visions in the

night, by the memory of ancient prophecies, by the voice of her former

husband summoning her from the chapel consecrated to his Manes, confirms

her in her resolution to die. Her passion goes on deepening in

alternations of indignation and recurring tenderness. It reaches its

sublimest elevation in the prayer for vengeance, answered long afterwards

in the alarm and desolation inflicted upon Italy by the greatest of the

sons of Carthage—

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,

Qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos,

Nunc, olim, quocunque dabunt se tempore vires(660).

In her last moments she finds consolation in the great memories of her

life—

Urbem praeclaram statui: mea moenia vidi:

Ulta virum, poenas inimico a fratre recepi:

Felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum

Nunquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae(661).

Her latest prayer is that, even though no outward retribution overtake her

betrayer, yet the bitterness of his own heart may be her avenger—

moriemur inultae,

Sed moriamur, ait: sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.

Hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto

Dardanus, et secum nostrae ferat omina mortis(662).

Once more she appears among the Shades, and maintains her lofty bearing

there as in the world above. No sympathy with his hero makes the poet here

forget what was due to her. She listens in scornful silence to the tearful

protestations of her ‘false friend(663),’ and passes on without any sign

of forgiveness or reconciliation—

Tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit

In nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem(664).

V.

That the passion of Dido is powerfully conceived and delineated, that it

satisfies modern feeling more legitimately than the representation of the

unhallowed impulses of Phaedra, or of the cruel and treacherous rancour of

Medea, will scarcely be questioned. Yet perhaps it is doing no injustice

to the genius of Virgil to say that his power in dealing with human life

consists generally in conceiving some state of feeling, some pathetic or

passionate situation, rather than in the creation and sustained

development of living characters. How the great impersonations of poetry

and prose fiction, which are more real to our imaginations than the

personages of history or those whom we know in life, come into being, is a

question which probably their authors themselves could not answer. Though

reflexion on human nature and deliberate intention to exemplify some law

of life may precede the creative act which gives them being, and though

continued reflexion may be needed to sustain them in a consistent course,

yet no mere analytic insight into the springs of action can explain the

process by which a great artist works. The beings of his imagination seem

to acquire an existence independent of the experience and of the

deliberate intentions of their author, and to inform this experience and

mould these intentions as much as they are informed and moulded by them.

Virgil’s imagination in the creation of Dido seems to be possessed in this

way. She grows more and more real as her passion deepens. Virgil’s

intention in this representation may have been to show the tragic

infatuation of a woman’s love—

furens quid femina possit:

but his sympathetic insight into this passion—an insight already shown in

the Eclogues—stimulates the forces of his imagination to a nobler as well

as a more vital creation than in any other of his impersonations. Dido

ranks for all times as one of the great heroines of poetry. So long as she

appears on the scene the interest in the exhibition of her nature

overpowers all other interests. But this is not the case with Virgil’s

other personages. We are more interested in what they say and in what

happens to them than in what they are. In other words, it is by his

oratorical and descriptive, rather than by his dramatic faculty, that he

secures the attention of his readers. As oratory was one of the most

important powers in ancient life, so it became a prominent element in

ancient epic and dramatic poetry,—in Homer, Ennius, and Virgil, as well as

in Sophocles, Euripides, and the Roman tragedians. The oratory of the

Aeneid shows nothing of the speculative power—of the application of great

ideas to life—which gives the profoundest value not only to many speeches

in Sophocles, but also to some of those in the Iliad, and notably to such

as proceed from the mouth of Odysseus. It cannot equal the vivid

naturalness of the speeches of Nestor, nor the impassioned grandeur of

those of Achilles. Neither is it characterised by the subtle psychological

analysis which is the most interesting quality in the rhetoric of

Euripides. On the other hand, it is not disfigured by the forensic special

pleading and word-fencing which is an occasional flaw in the dramatic art

of Sophocles, and a pervading mannerism in that of the younger poet. The

impression of grave political deliberation is left on the mind by some of

the fragments of Ennius more effectually than by anything uttered in the

councils of gods or men in the Aeneid. But it is in the greatest of modern

epics that the full force of intellect and feeling animating grave

councils of state is most grandly idealised. The speeches in Virgil,

though they want the intellectual power and the majestic largeness of

utterance of those in Milton, are, like his, stately and dignified in

expression; they are disfigured by no rhetorical artifice of fine-spun

argument or exaggerated emphasis; they are rapid with the vehemence of

scorn and indignation, fervid with martial pride and enthusiasm, or,

occasionally, weighty with the power of controlled emotion. They have the

ring of Roman oratory, as it is heard in the animated declamation of Livy,

and sometimes seem to anticipate the reserved force and ‘imperial brevity’

of Tacitus. They give a true voice to ‘the high, magnanimous Roman mood,’

and to the fervour of spirit with which that mood was associated. And this

effect is sometimes increased by the use which the polished poet of the

Augustan Age makes of the grave, ardent, but unformed utterances—‘rudes et

inconditae voces’—of the epic and tragic poets of the Republic.

The descriptive faculty of Virgil is quite unlike that of Homer, but yet

it has great excellences of its own. In the Iliad and Odyssey man appears

‘vigorous and elastic such as poetry saw him first, such as poetry would

ever see him(665);’ and the outward world is described in the clear forms

and the animated movement which impress themselves immediately on the

sense and mind of men thus happily organised. Virgil too presents to us

the varied spectacle of human life and of the outward world under many

impressive aspects. But these aspects of things do not affect the mind

with the immediate impulse which the natural man receives from them, and

of which he retains the vivid picture in his mind. As in his pastoral

poems and in the Georgics Virgil seems to abstract from the general aspect

of things the characteristic sentiment which Nature inspires in particular

places and at particular times, and to see the scene which he describes

under the influence of that sentiment, so in the Aeneid various human

‘situations’ are conceived under the influence of some sense of awe or

wonder, of beauty or pathos, of local or antique association; and the

whole description is so presented as to bring this central interest into

prominent relief. The thought of the whole situation, not the sequence of

events in time or causal connexion, is what determines the grouping and

subordination of details.

Thus in the description of the storm in Book i., the dominant feeling by

the light of which the circumstances are to be realised is that of sudden

and overwhelming power in the elements and of man’s impotence to contend

against them. In the description of the harbour in which the ships of

Aeneas find refuge we feel the sense of calm and peace after storm and

danger. In the interview between Venus and her son the impression left on

the mind is that of a mysterious supernatural grace enhancing the charm of

human beauty, such as is produced by the pictorial representations of

religious art. We seem to look on the rising towers and dwellings of

Carthage with that joyful sense of wonder and novelty with which the

thought of the beginning of great enterprises, or of the discovery of

unknown lands, and the first view of ancient and famous cities, such as

Rome or Venice, appeal to the imagination. In the second Book the effect

of the whole representation is enhanced by the sentiment of awe and

mystery with which night, and darkness, and the intermittent flashes of

light which break the darkness, impress the mind. Thus as a prelude to the

terrible and tragical scenes afterwards represented, the apparition of

Hector comes before Aeneas in the deepest stillness of the night—

Tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris

Incipit(666).

Then follow the confused sights and sounds of battle, like those of the

νυκτομαχία in the seventh Book of Thucydides and of that in the Vitellian

war of Tacitus,—the spectacle revealed by the light of the burning city—

Sigaea igni freta lata relucent(667);

the vivid gleams in which the death of Priam, the cowering figure of

Helen, the majestic forms of the Olympian gods taking part in the work of

destruction, are for a moment disclosed out of the surrounding darkness,

the alarm and bewilderment of the escape from the house of Anchises and of

the vain attempt of Aeneas to recover the lost Creusa—

Horror ubique, animos simul ipsa silentia terrent(668).

The third Book is pervaded by the feeling of the sea,—not as in the

Odyssey of its buoyant and inexhaustible life, nor yet of the dread which

it inspired in the earliest mariners,—but in that more modern mood in

which it unfolds to the traveller the animated spectacle of islands and

coasts famous for their beauty or their historic and legendary

associations. In the fifth Book, as is pointed out by Chateaubriand, the

effect of the limitless and monotonous prospect of the open sea in

producing a sense of weariness and melancholy, such as that expressed in

‘The Lotus-eaters’—

‘but evermore

Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam,’

is profoundly felt in the passage—

At procul in sola secretae Troades acta

Amissum Anchisen flebant cunctaeque profundum

Pontum adspectabant flentes; ‘heu tot vada fessis

Et tantum superesse maris,’ vox omnibus una(669).

It was seen how the sense of supernatural awe adds to the tragic grandeur

of the despair and death of Dido, as in the lines, which bear some trace

of a vivid passage in Ennius—

agit ipse furentem

In somnis ferus Aeneas: semperque relinqui

Sola sibi, semper longam incomitata videtur

Ire viam, et Tyrios deserta quaerere terra(670).

Thus too the mind is prepared for the spectacle revealed in the Descent

into Hell by the awful sublimity of the Invocation—

Di quibus imperium est animarum umbraeque silentes(671).

The description of the funeral rites of Pallas produces that complex

impression of sadness and solemnity mixed with proud memories and thoughts

of the pomp and circumstance of war which affects men in the present day,

when witnessing the spectacle of the funeral of some great soldier who has

died full of years and honour—

Post bellator equus positis insignibus Aethon

It lacrimans guttisque umectat grandibus ora.

Hastam alii galeamque ferunt, nam cetera Turnus

Victor habet. Tum moesta phalanx Teucrique sequuntur

Tyrrhenique omnes et versis Arcades armis(672).

In the employment of illustrative imagery Virgil is much more sparing than

Homer. The varied forces of Nature and of animal life supplied materials

to the Greek poet by which to enhance the poetical sense of the situation

which he describes; and all these forces are apprehended by him with a

vivid feeling of wonder, and presented to the imagination with a truthful

observation of outward signs, and with a sympathetic insight into their

innermost nature. Virgil is not only more sparing in the use of these

figures; he is also tamer and less inventive in their application. In

those drawn from the life of wild animals he, for the most part,

reproduces the Homeric imagery, though we note as one touch of realism in

them that the wolf, familiar to Italy, frequently takes the place of the

lion, which was probably still an object of terror in Western Asia at the

time when Homer lived. Another class of images reproduced from Homer is

that of those in which a mortal is compared to an immortal, as at i. 498—

Qualis in Eurotae ripis, aut per iuga Cynthi,

Exercet Diana choros, etc.,

though in this some variations are introduced from a simile in Apollonius.

Another passage of the same kind is immediately derived from the

Alexandrine poet—

Qualis, ubi hibernam Lyciam Xanthique fluenta(673), etc.

There is, however, another class of ‘similes’ used by Virgil in his epic,

after the example of the Alexandrines, which can scarcely be said to

fulfil the function of a poetical analogy, but merely to give a realistic

outward symbol of some movement of the mind or passions, without any

imaginative enhancement of the situation. Such, for instance, is the

comparison at vii. 377, etc. of the mind of Amata to a top whipped by boys

round an empty court,—a comparison suggested by a passage in

Callimachus(674); and that again at viii. 22, etc. of the variations of

purpose in the mind of Aeneas, produced by the surging sea of cares

besetting him, to the variations of light reflected from the water in a

copper cauldron,—a comparison directly imitated from Apollonius (iii. 754,

etc.). There are others again of what may be called a somewhat

conventional cast, which acquire individuality from the colour of local

associations, such as the introduction (at xii. 715) of two bulls battling

together (as they are also described in the Georgics)—

ingenti Sila, summove Taburno;

the comparison (at xii. 701 etc.) of Aeneas, towering in all his warlike

power, to Athos or Eryx—

aut ipse, coruscis

Cum fremit ilicibus, quantus, gaudetque nivali

Vertice se attollens, pater Appenninus ad auras(675);

and that at ix. 680, etc., in which the two sons of Alcanor are likened to

two tall oaks growing—

Sive Padi ripis Athesim seu propter amoenum(676).

But there are other comparisons in Virgil indicative of more original

invention, observation, and reflexion, which serve the true purpose of

imaginative analogies, viz. that of exalting the peculiar sentiment with

which the poet desires the situation he is describing to be regarded. In

the perception of these analogies it is not merely intellectual curiosity

that is gratified by the apprehension of the τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο in the

phenomena; but the imagination is enlarged by the recognition of analogous

forces operating in different spheres, which separately are capable of

producing a vivid and noble emotion. As an instance of this perception of

the analogy between great forces in different spheres, the one of human,

the other of natural activity, we may take the comparison of the Italian

host advancing in orderly march after its tumultuous gathering from many

quarters, to the movement of mighty rivers when their component waters

have found their appointed bed—

Ceu septem surgens sedatis amnibus altus

Per tacitum Ganges, aut pingui flumine Nilus

Cum refluit campis et iam se condidit alveo(677).

Others again show the vivid interest mixed with poetical wonder which

animated Virgil’s power of observation in his Georgics—as for instance

that at i. 430 of the busy workers in Carthage to bees in early summer

toiling among the flowery fields—an image ennobled also by Milton, who

characteristically describes the bees as ‘conferring their state-affairs,’

while it is not to their political, but to their industrial, martial, and

social or domestic aptitudes,

(cum gentis adultos

Educunt fetus)

that Virgil draws attention. Of the same class is the comparison at iv.

404, etc., of the Trojans preparing to leave the shores of Carthage to the

movement of ants engaged in gathering together some heap of corn for their

winter’s store—

It nigrum campis agmen, etc.

Others again are suggested by his subtle and sympathetic discernment of

the conditions of inward feeling; as the comparison at iv. 70, etc. of

Dido to the hind, which, unsuspecting of danger, has received a mortal

wound from a hand ignorant of the harm which it has inflicted—

haeret lateri letalis harundo.

The awe and mystery of the unseen world suggest the comparison of the

crowd of shades pressing round Charon’s boat to innumerable leaves falling

in the woods, or to flocks of birds driven across the sea by the first

cold of autumn—

Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo

Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto

Quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus

Trans pontum fugat et terris inmittit apricis(678).

The point of comparison in this simile is not merely the obvious one of

the number of leaves falling or birds flying across the sea in autumn, but

rather the inner likeness between the passive helplessness with which the

leaves have yielded to the chill touch of the year, and that with which

the shades—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα—have yielded to the chill touch of death.

Nor perhaps is it pressing the language of Virgil too far to suppose that

in the words ‘terris inmittit apricis’ he means to leave on the mind a

feeling of some happier possibilities in death than the certainty of ‘cold

obstruction.’ One of the most characteristically Virgilian similes—that at

vi. 453—

qualem primo qui surgere mense

Aut videt, aut vidisse putat per nubila Lunam—

is almost a translation of the lines of Apollonius (iv. 1447)—

τὼς ἰδέειν, ὥς τίς τε νέῳ ἐνὶ ἤματι μήνην

ἢ ἴδεν, ἢ ἐδόκησεν ἐπαχλύουσαν ἰδέσθαι(679),—

but the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of

the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form

of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower

world. Other images are suggested by the poet’s delicate sense of grace in

flower or plant, combined with his tender compassion for the beauty of

youth perishing prematurely. Such are those which enable us more vividly

to realise the pathos of the death of Euryalus and of the burial of

Pallas. Yet though these images are characteristically Virgilian, they

also bear unmistakeable traces of imitation. The lines—

Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro

Languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo

Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur(680);

and again—

Qualem, virgineo demessum pollice, florem,

Seu mollis violae, seu languentis hyacinthi,

Cui neque fulgor adhuc, nec dum sua forma recessit;

Non iam mater alit tellus, viresque ministrat(681)—

recall not only the thought and feeling of Homer—

μήκων δ’ ὣς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν etc.,

but the cadences and most cherished illustrations of Catullus, in whose

imagination the grace of trees and the bloom of flowers are ever

associated with the grace and bloom of youth and youthful passion.

Had Virgil lived to devote three more years to the revisal of his work,

there is no reason to suppose that he would have added anything to its

substance. Some inconsistencies of statement, as, for instance, that

between iii. 256 and vii. 123, would have disappeared, and some

difficulties would have been cleared up. But the chief part of the ‘limae

labor’ would have been employed in bringing the rhythm and diction of the

poem to a more finished perfection than that which they exhibit at

present. The unfinished lines in the poem would certainly have been

completed and more closely connected with the passages immediately

succeeding them. There is no indication that these lines were left

purposely incomplete in order to give emphasis to some pause in the

narrative. Virgil was the last poet likely to avail himself of so

inartistic an innovation to give variety to his cadences. For the most

part they appear to be weak props (‘tibicines’(682)) used provisionally to

fill up the gap between two passages, and indicating but not completing

the thought that was to connect them.

What more of elegance, of compact structure, or of varied harmony Virgil

might have imparted to his rhythm, it is impossible to determine. We might

conjecture that his aim would have been, as regards both expression and

metrical effect, to act on the maxim ‘ramos compesce fluentes,’ than to

give them ampler scope. In a long narrative poem like the Aeneid that

perfect smoothness and solidity of rhythmical execution which characterise

the Georgics—in which poem the position and weight of each single word in

each single line is an element contributing to the whole effect—is hardly

to be expected. A narrative poem demands a more easy, varied, and even

careless movement than one of which the interest is contemplative, and

which requires to be studied minutely line by line and paragraph by

paragraph, before its full meaning is realised. If the movement in the

Aeneid appears in some place rougher, or less compact, or more languid

than in others, this may be explained not only by the imperfect state in

which the poem was left, but by the difficulty or impossibility of

maintaining the same uniform level of elevation in so long a flight. Yet

it cannot be said that there is any loss of power, any trace of

contentment with a lower ideal of perfection in the general structure of

the verse of the Aeneid. The full capacities of the Latin hexameter for

purposes of animated or impressive narrative, of solemn or pathetic

representation, of grave or impassioned oratory, of tender, dignified, or

earnest appeal to the higher emotions of man, are realised in many

passages of the poem. Virgil’s instrument fails, or, at least, is much

inferior to Homer’s, in aptitude for natural dialogue or for bringing

familiar things in the freshness of immediate impression before the

imagination. The stateliness of movement appropriate to such utterances as

Ast ego quae Divom incedo regina(683)

does not readily adapt itself to the description of the process of

kindling a fire or preparing a meal—

Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates,

Suscepitque ignem foliis atque arida circum

Nutrimenta dedit rapuitque in fomite flammam(684).

To English readers the verse of the Aeneid may appear inferior in majesty

and fulness of volume to that of Milton in his passages of most sustained

power; but it is easier and less encumbered and thus more adapted to

express various conditions of human life than the ordinary movement of the

modern epic. It flows in a more varied, weighty, and self-restrained

stream than the more homogeneous and overflowing current of Spenser’s

verse. The Latin hexameter became for Virgil an exquisite and powerful

medium for communicating to others a knowledge of his elevated moods and

pensive meditativeness, and for calling up before their minds that

spectacle of a statelier life and a more august order in the contemplation

of which his spirit habitually lived.

The last revision would also have removed from the poem some redundancies,

obscurities, and weakness of expression. There is a greater tendency to

use ‘otiose’ epithets than in the Georgics, and a minute criticism has

taken note of the number of times in which such words as ‘ingens’ and

‘immanis’ occur in the poem. Though the interpretation of the meaning of

the Aeneid as a whole is probably as certain as that of any other great

work of antiquity, yet there are passages in it which still baffle

commentators in deciding which of two or three possible meanings was in

the mind of the poet, or whether he had himself finally resolved what turn

he should give his thought. As there are lines left incomplete, so there

are lame conclusions to lofty and impassioned utterances of feeling. Such

for instance is the prosaic and tautological conclusion of the passage in

which Lausus is brought on the scene—

dignus, patriis qui laetior esset

Imperiis et cui pater haud Mezentius esset(685).

But it is only a microscopic observation of the structure of the poem that

detects such blemishes as these. In the Aeneid Virgil’s style appears as

great in its power of reaching the secrets of the human spirit, as in the

Georgics it proved itself to be in eliciting the deeper meaning of Nature.

He combines nearly all the characteristic excellences of the great Latin

writers. His language appears indeed inferior not only to that of

Lucretius and Catullus but even to that of Ennius in reproducing the first

vivid impressions of things upon the mind. The phrases of Virgil are

generally coloured with the associations and steeped in the feeling of

older thoughts and memories. Yet if he seems inferior in direct force of

presentation, he unites the two most marked and generally dissociated

characteristics of the masters of Latin style,—the exuberance and vivacity

of those writers in whom impulse and imagination are strong, such as

Cicero, Livy, and Lucretius,—the terseness and compactness of expression,

arising either from intensity of perception or reflective condensation, of

which the shorter poems of Catullus, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the

writings of Sallust, and the memorial inscriptions of the time of the

Republic and of the Empire afford striking examples. Virgil’s condensation

of expression often resembles that of Tacitus, and seems to arise from the

same cause, the restraint imposed by reflexion on the exuberance of a

poetical imagination. By its combination of opposite excellences the style

of the Aeneid is at once an admirable vehicle of continuous or compressed

narrative, of large or concentrated description, of fluent and

impassioned, or composed and impressive oratory. It possesses also the

power, which distinguishes the older Latin writers, of stamping some grave

or magnanimous lesson in imperishable characters on the mind—

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.

Disce puer virtutem ex me verumque laborem,

Fortunam ex aliis.

Aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum

Finge deo(686).

But Virgil is not only great as a Latin writer. The concurrent testimony

of the most refined minds of all times marks him out as one of the

greatest masters of the language which touches the heart or moves the

manlier sensibilities, who has ever lived. A mature and mellow truth of

sentiment, a conformity to the deeper experiences of life in every age, a

fine humanity as well as a generous elevation of feeling, and some magical

charm of music in his words, have enabled them to serve many minds in many

ages as a symbol of some swelling thought or over-mastering emotion, the

force and meaning of which they could scarcely define to themselves. A

striking instance of this effect appears in the words in which Savonarola

describes the impulse which forced him to abandon the career of worldly

ambition, which his father pressed on him, in favour of the religious

life. It was the voice of warning which he ever heard repeating to him the

words—

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum(687).

And while his tenderness of feeling has made Virgil the familiar friend of

one class of minds, his high magnanimous spirit has equally gained for him

the admiration of another class. The words of no other poet, ancient or

modern, have been so often heard in the great debates of the English

Parliament, which more than any other deliberations among men have

reproduced the dignified and masculine eloquence familiar to the Roman

Senate. One of the greatest masters of expression among living English

writers has pointed, as characteristic of the magic of Virgil’s style, to

‘his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines giving utterance,

as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of

better things which is the experience of her children in every time(688).’

It is in the expression of this weariness and deep longing for rest, in

making others feel his own sense of the painful toil and mystery of life

and of the sadness of death, his sense too of vague yearning for some

fuller and ampler being, that Virgil produces the most powerful effect by

the use of the simplest words in their simplest application.

‘O passi graviora—’

‘Vobis parta quies—’

‘Dis aliter visum—’

‘Di, si qua est caelo pietas—’

‘Heu vatum ignarae mentes—’

‘Iam pridem invisus superis et inutilis annos

Demoror—’

‘Si pereo hominum manibus periisse iuvabit—’

‘Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis—’

‘Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda—’

‘Impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum—’

‘Quod te per caeli iucundum lumen et auras—’

‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore—’

‘Securos latices et longa oblivia potant—(689)’

these and many other pregnant sayings affect the mind with a strange

potency, of which perhaps no account can be given except that they make us

feel, as scarcely any other words do, the burden of the mystery of life,

and by their marvellous beauty, the reflexion, it may be, from some light

dimly discerned or imagined(690) beyond the gloom, they make it seem more

easy to be borne.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

1 Eclog. ix. 35.

2 ‘Leporum

Disertus puer ac facetiarum.’ Catullus xii. 8.

3 The name of Trebatius also, though one associated with law rather

than literature, may be added as a connecting link between the

friends of Cicero and of Horace.

4 Munro’s Lucretius, Introduction to Notes, ii. page 305.

5 ‘These writers your fine Hermogenes never reads, nor that ape, whose

whole art is to repeat the songs of Calvus and Catullus.’ Hor. Sat.

i. 10. 17–19.

6 Hor. Sat. ii. 1. 11.

7 Ann. i. 1; Hist. i. 1.

8 Cf. Juv. ii. 28: In tabulam Sullae si dicant discipuli tres.

9 Od. iii. 4. 28.

10 Cf. Eleg. i. 41–42:—

Non ego divitias patrum fructusque requiro

Quos tulit antiquo condita messis avo.

11 Cf. v. 1. 129–130:—

Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci

Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.

12 ‘Imbellis et firmus parum.’ Ep. i. 16.

13 Eleg. i. 1; i. 10.

14 ‘On the one side Augustus leading the Italians into battle with the

Senate and people, the Penates and the great Gods—on the other

Antonius with a barbaric and motley host, advancing in triumph from

the peoples of the dawn and the shore of the Red Sea, bears with him

Egypt, and the might of the East, and furthest Bactria, and

following in his train,—sin accursed!—an Egyptian bride.’ Aen. viii.

678 _et seq._

15 ‘Be it thine, O Roman, to govern the nations with thy imperial

rule.’

16 ‘Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.’ Ennius.

17 In the Ancyraean inscription we find the following passage (Bergk’s

reading): ‘Legibus novis latis multa revocavi exempla maiorum

exolescentia iam ex nostra civitate,’ etc.

18 Cf. Ancyraean inscription: ‘Templum Apollinis in Palatio cum

porticibus, aedem Divi Iulii, Lupercal,’ etc. (where we notice the

recognition of the divinity of Julius Caesar, along with the old

Olympian and national gods, Apollo, Jupiter Tonans and Feretrius,

Quirinus, the Lares and Penates, and with the deified abstractions

Libertas and Juventas).

19 A similar influence is attributed by M. Sainte-Beuve to Louis XIV.

After speaking of the freedom and licence of French literature under

the patronage of Fouquet, he adds, ‘Le jeune roi vint, et il amena,

il suscita avec lui sa jeune littérature; il mit le correctif à

l’ancienne, et, sauf des infractions brillantes, il imprima à

l’ensemble des productions de son temps un caractère de solidité, et

finalement de moralité, qui est aussi celui qui règne dans ses

propres écrits, et dans l’habitude de sa pensée.’

20 Aen. vi. 795.

21 Hor. Od. iv. 15. 9.

22 Aen. viii. 678 _et seq._

23 Hor. Od. i. 2. 50.

24 Aen. i. 287; vi. 796; Hor. Od. iv. 15. 15.

25 Aen. i. 288.

26 Georg. ii. 170.

27 Aen. viii. 716.

28 Hor. Od. iv. 5. 20; Ep. ii. 1. 2.

29 ‘Ad hoc templum divo Claudio constitutum quasi arx aeternae

dominationis aspiciebatur.’ Tac. Ann. xiv. 31.

30 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

31 Od. iii. 3. 9, etc.; Ep. ii. 1. 5.

32 Aen. vi. 801.

33 Od. iv. 5.

34 These comparisons may be more naturally referred to Roman

‘Euhemerism,’ than to the survival of the spirit of hero-worship,

which, although still active in Greece, was a mode of feeling alien

to the Roman imagination.

35 Cp. infra, chap. vi.

36 The belief in the divinity of the genius attending on each

individual, and also the custom of raising altars to some abstract

quality in an individual, such as the ‘Clemency of Caesar,’ help

also to explain this supposed union of the god and man in the person

of the Emperor. The language of Virgil in Eclogue IV. also throws

light on the ideas possible as to the union of the divine with human

nature.

37 This is indicated by the bare feet.

38 The substance of these remarks is taken from the late O. Jahn’s

‘Höfische Kunst und Poesie unter Augustus,’ published in his

‘Populäre Aufsätze.’ The account of the cameos is given solely on

his authority. Several ideas on the whole subject of the deification

of the Emperors are derived from the same source.

39 Sueton. De Vita Caesarum, ii. 90 _et seq._

40 ‘Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia ab aetate prima et cupide et

laboriosissime exercuit.’ Sueton. ii. 84.

‘Augusto prompta ac profluens, quaeque deceret principem, eloquentia

fuit.’ Tac. Ann. xiii. 3.

41 ‘Aiacem tragoediam scripserat, eandemque, quod sibi displicuisset,

deleverat. Postea L. Varius tragoediarum scriptor interrogabat eum,

quid ageret Aiax suus. Et ille, “in spongium,” inquit, “incubuit.”’

Macrob. ii. 4. 2.

42 Sat. ii. 1. 20.

43 Ep. ii. 1. 248.

44 Essays Literary and Theological, by R. H. Hutton.

45 Cf. Propert. El. iv. 9. 34:—

Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides.

Do. ii. 1. 36:—

Et sumta et posita pace fidele caput.

46 Velleius ii. 88.

47 Tac. Ann. iii. 30: ‘Ille quamquam prompto ad capessendos honores

aditu, Maecenatem aemulatus sine dignitate senatoria multos

triumphalium consulariumque potentia anteiit, diversus a veterum

instituto per cultum et munditias, copiaque et affluentia luxu

propior: suberat tamen vigor animi ingentibus negotiis par, eo

acrior quo somnum et inertiam magis ostentabat.’

48 ‘Gallus for whom my love grows from hour to hour even as the green

alder-tree shoots up in the early spring.’

49 Eclog. vi. 70, etc.

50 Sat. vii. 93, 94.

51 ‘When you say it makes no matter what a man’s father was, provided

he is of free-birth.’ Sat. i. 6. 7–8.

52 ‘And as when often in a mighty multitude discord has arisen and the

base rabble storms with passion.’

53 ‘Ancus, unduly vain, even already delighting too much in the veering

wind of the people’s favour.’

54 Cp. Merivale’s Roman Empire.

55 Vester, Camenae, vester in arduos

Tollor Sabinos; seu mihi frigidum

Praeneste, seu Tibur supinum,

Seu liquidae placuere Baiae. Od. iii. 4. 21–24.

56 Cf. the lines of Juvenal, vii. 66–68, in especial reference to

Virgil:—

Magnae mentis opus nec de lodice paranda

Attonitae, currus et equos, faciesque Deorum

Aspicere, et qualis Rutulum confundat Erinnys, etc.

57 ‘’Gainst flaming Sirius’ fury thou

Art proof, and grateful cool dost yield

To oxen wearied with the plough,

And flocks that range afield.’ Martin.

58 ‘May my delight be in the fields and the flowing streams in the

dales; unknown to fame may I love the rivers and the woods. O to be,

where are the plains, and the Spercheos, and the heights, roamed

over in their revels by Laconian maidens, the heights of Taygetus.’

59 Cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 470: ‘Mollesque sub arbore somni.’

Hor. Ep. i. 14. 35: ‘Prope rivum somnus in herba.’

Virg. Eclog. ii. 40: ‘Nec tuta mihi valle reperti.’

Hor. Ep. i. 11. 10: ‘Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem.’

60 ‘It is great riches for a man to live sparingly with a contented

mind.’

61 Ep. i. 14. 34–35.

62 Compare Munro’s Lucretius, p. 306 (third edition).

63 ‘To be sleepless through the calm nights, searching by what words

and verse I may succeed in holding a bright light before your mind,

by which you may be able to see thoroughly things hidden from view.’

64 ‘While I seem ever to be plying this task, to be searching into the

nature of things, and revealing it, when discovered, in writings in

my native speech.’

65 iii. 8.

66 Virg. Eclog. vi. 72; x. 50.

67 Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

68 ‘All other themes which might have charmed the idle mind in song,’

etc.

69 Born at Alexandria, but afterwards settled at Rhodes. He ultimately

returned to Alexandria.

70 ‘Often did Macer, now advanced in years, read to me his poem on

birds, and of the serpent whose sting is deadly, and of the herb

that heals.’ Trist. iv. 10. 43–44.

71 Sueton. De Viris Illustribus.

72 ‘Lead him home from the city, my strain, lead Daphnis home.’

73 Woermann, Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und

Römer; Helbig, Campanische Wandmalerei.

74 Cf. ‘Senecae praedivitis hortos.’ Juv. ‘Pariterque hortis inhians,

quos ille a Lucullo coeptos insigni magnificentia extollebat.’ Tac.

Ann. xi. 1.

75 The substance of these remarks is derived from Helbig’s Campanische

Wandmalerei.

76 Cf. Plautus, Pseudolus, i. 2. 14:—

Neque Alexandrina beluata conchuliata tapetia.

77 Scholium quoted by W. S. Teuffel in his account of L. Varius.

78 Tristia, iv. 10. 41, etc.

79 W. S. Teuffel.

80 Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius: ille meo quis?

Quis nisi Callimachus? Si plus adposcere visus,

Fit Mimnermus, et optivo cognomine crescit. Ep. ii. 2. 99.

Propertius may have been dead at the time when these lines were

published; but we may remember that the famous lines on ‘Atticus’

did not see the light till after the death of Addison.

81 ‘And the musical voice of Horace charmed my ears, while he makes his

polished song resound on the Ausonian lyre.’

82 Od. iv. 3. 13. 16:—

‘At Rome, of all earth’s cities queen,

Men deign to rank me in the noble press

Of bards beloved of man: and now, I ween,

Doth envy’s rancorous tooth assail me less.’ Martin.

83 Ep. i. 19. 19–20.

‘O servile crew! how oft your antics mean

Have moved my laughter, oh, how oft my spleen.’ Martin.

84 Ep. ii. 1. 117.

‘’Tis writing, writing now is all the rage.’ Martin.

85 ‘After the result of the campaign of Actium, when the interests of

peace demanded that supreme power should be conferred on one man,

those great geniuses disappeared. Truth too suffered in many ways,

at first from ignorance of public life, as a matter with which men

had no concern, and soon from the spirit of adulation.’ Hist. i. 1.

86 E. Quinet.

87 Traditum ab antiquis morem. Hor. Sat. i. 4. 117.

88 Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, etc. Hor. Od. iii. 4. 9.

89 ‘Virgile depuis l’heure où il parut a été le poëte de la Latinité

tout entière.’ Sainte-Beuve.

90 ‘To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,’ ‘who sang the idle songs

of shepherds,’ ‘my task is on a lowly theme.’

91 ‘I must strive to find a way by which I may raise myself too above

the ground, and speed to and fro triumphant through the mouths of

men.’

92 ‘Give place, all ye Roman writers, give place, ye Greeks: some work,

I know not what, is coming to the birth, greater than the Iliad.’

Eleg. iii. 32, 64–65.

93 Cf. Wölflin in the Philologus, xxvi, quoted by Comparetti.

94 Tac. De Oratoribus, ch. xiii.

95 ‘Si Virgile faisait aux Romains cette illusion d’avoir égalé ou

surpassé Homère, c’est qu’il avait touché fortement la fibre

Romaine.’ Sainte-Beuve.

96 ‘Live then, I pray, yet rival not the divine Aeneid, but follow it

from afar, and ever reverence its track.’ Thebaid xii. 816.

97 ‘Mantua, home of the Muses, raised to the stars by Aonian song, and

rival of the music of Smyrna.’ Silius, Punic. viii. 595.

98 E.g. iv. 14. 14; xii. 4. 1; xiv. 186; v. 10. 7; viii. 56, etc.

99 viii. 18. 5–9.

100 Ep. iii. 7.