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VIRGIL
BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXX
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION, 1
THE POET, 8
THE PASTORALS, 13
THE GEORGICS, 28
THE ÆNEID,--
CHAP. I. THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE, 41
“ II. ÆNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY, 53
“ III. ÆNEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE, 64
“ IV. DIDO, 71
“ V. THE FUNERAL GAMES, 85
“ VI. THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES, 105
“ VII. THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM, 128
“ VIII. THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES, 137
“ IX. ÆNEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER, 145
“ X. TURNUS ATTACKS THE TROJAN ENCAMPMENT, 153
“ XI. THE DEATH OF PALLAS, 161
“ XII. THE DEATH OF CAMILLA, 167
“ XIII. THE LAST COMBAT, 171
“ XIV. CONCLUDING REMARKS, 180
ADVERTISEMENT.
This volume of the Series was to have been undertaken by the late Mr
Conington. None can be more sensible than the present writer of the loss
which all readers have sustained in the substitution rendered necessary
by his lamented death.
The Editor begs to acknowledge the courteous permission of Mr
Conington’s representatives and publishers to make full extracts from
his admirable version of the Æneid.
INTRODUCTION.
Virgil has always been, for one reason or other, the most popular of all
the old classical writers. His poems were a favourite study with his own
countrymen, even in his own generation; within fifty years of his death
they were admitted to the very questionable honour, which they have
retained ever since, of serving as a text-book for schoolboys. The
little Romans studied their Æneid, from their master’s dictation, as
regularly, and probably with quite as much appreciation of its beauties,
as the fourth form of an English public school, and wrote “declamations”
of some kind upon its heroes. In the middle ages, when Greek literature
had become almost a deserted field, and Homer in the original was a
sealed book even to those who considered themselves and were considered
scholars, Virgil was still the favourite with young and old. The monks
in their chronicles, philosophers in their secular studies, enlivened
their pages with quotations from the one author with whom no man of
letters would venture to confess himself wholly unacquainted. The works
of Virgil had passed through above forty editions in Europe before the
first printed edition of Homer appeared from the Florence press in 1448.
He has been translated, imitated, and parodied in all the chief European
languages. The fate of Dido, of Pallas, and of Euryalus, has drawn tears
from successive generations of which the poet never dreamed.
In the middle ages his fame underwent a singular transformation. From
the magic power of song the transition seems incongruous to the coarser
material agency of the wizard. But so it was; Virgilius the poet became,
in mediæval legends, Virgilius the magician. One of his Eclogues (the
Eighth), in which are introduced the magical charms by which it is
sought to reclaim a wandering lover, is supposed to have given the first
impulse to this superstitious belief. All kinds of marvels were
attributed to his agency. It was said that he built at Rome, for the
Emperor Augustus, a wondrous tower, in which were set up emblematic
figures of all the subject nations which acknowledged the imperial rule,
each with a bell in its hand, which rang out whenever war or revolt
broke out in that particular province, so that Rome knew at once in what
direction to march her legions. In the same building--so the legend
ran--he contrived a magic mirror, in which the enemies of the Empire
could be seen when they appeared in arms; and another--surely the most
terrible agency that was ever imagined in the way of domestic police--in
which the guilt of any Roman citizen could be at once seen and detected.
A fount of perpetual fire, and salt-springs of medicinal virtue, were
said to have been the gifts of the great enchanter to the Roman
populace. At Naples the marvels which were attributed to his agency were
scarcely less; and even now there is scarcely any useful or ornamental
public work of early date, in the neighbourhood of that city, which is
not in some way connected by vulgar tradition with the name of Virgil.
The wondrous powers thus ascribed to him were, according to some
legends, conferred upon him by Chiron the learned centaur--by whom the
great Achilles, and the poet’s own hero, Æneas, were said to have been
educated; by others, with that blending of pagan belief with Christian
which is so commonly found in mediæval writers, they were referred to
direct communication with the Evil One.[1]
French scholars have always had the highest appreciation of the Augustan
poet, and his popularity in England is to this day as great as ever.
Even a practical House of Commons, not always very patient of argument,
and notoriously impatient of some prosaic speakers, will listen to a
quotation from Virgil--especially when pointed against a political
opponent. Those to whom his rolling measure is familiar still quote him
and cheer him so enthusiastically, that others listen with more or less
appreciation. To the many who have almost forgotten what they once knew
of him, his lines awake reminiscences of their youth--which are always
pleasant: while even those to whom he is a sound and nothing more,
listen as with a kind of sacred awe. The debates of our reformed
Parliament will certainly be duller, if ever Virgil comes to be
proscribed as an unknown tongue.
English translators of Virgil have abounded. But the earliest and by no
means the least able of those who presented the Roman poet to our
northern islanders in their own vernacular was a Scotsman, Bishop Gawain
Douglas of Dunkeld, that clerkly son of old Archibald “Bell-the-Cat”
whom Scott names in his ‘Marmion.’ Few modern readers of Virgil are
likely to be proficients in the ancient northern dialect which the
bishop used; but those who can appreciate him maintain that there is
considerable vigour as well as faithfulness in his version. Thomas
Phaer, a Welsh physician, was the next who made the attempt, in the long
verses known as Alexandrine, in 1558. A few years later came forth what
might fairly be called the comic English version, though undertaken in
the most serious earnest by the translator. This was Richard
Stanyhurst, an Irishman, a graduate of Oxford and student of Lincoln’s
Inn. He seems to have been the original prophet of that “pestilent
heresy,” as Lord Derby calls it, the making of English hexameters; for
that was the metre which he chose, and he congratulates himself in his
preface upon “having no English writer before him in this kind of
poetry.” Without going so far as to endorse Lord Derby’s severe
judgment, it may be confessed that Stanyhurst did his best to justify
it. His translation, which he ushered into public with the most profound
self-satisfaction, is quite curious enough to account for its reprint by
the “Edinburgh Printing Society” in 1836. One of the points upon which
he prides himself is the suiting the sound to the sense, which Virgil
himself has done happily enough in some rare passages. So when he has to
translate the line,
“Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum,”
he does it as follows:--
“The townsmen roared, the trump tara-tantara rattled.”
When he has to express the Cyclops forging the thunderbolts, it is
“With peale meale ramping, with thick thwack sturdily thund’ring;”
and very much more of the same kind.
The Earl of Surrey and James Harrington tried their hand at detached
portions, and although the quaint conceits which were admired in their
day have little charm for the modern reader, there is not wanting,
especially in the former, a spirit and vigour in which, some of those
who came before and after them lamentably failed. The translations by
Vicars and Ogilby, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have
little claim to be remembered except as the first presentations of the
whole Æneid in an English poetical dress. In dull mediocrity they are
about equal.
In 1697, Dryden, at the age of sixty-six, finished and published his
translation; written, as he pathetically says, “in his declining years,
struggling with want, and oppressed with sickness;” yet, whatever be its
shortcomings, a confessedly great work, and showing few traces of these
unfavourable circumstances. His great renown, and the unquestionable
vigour and ability of the versification, insured its popularity at once;
and it was considered, by the critics of his own and some succeeding
generations, as pre-eminently the English Virgil. Dr Johnson said of it
that “it satisfied his friends and silenced his enemies.” It may still
be read with pleasure, but it has grave faults. Independently of its
general looseness and diffuseness, in many passages amounting to the
vaguest paraphrase, there are too many instances in which, not content
with making his author say a good many things which he never did say, he
palpably misinterprets him. There are many passages of much vigour and
beauty; but even of these it has been said, and not unfairly, by a later
translator, Dr Trapp, that “where you most admire Dryden, you see the
least of Virgil.” Dryden had the advantage of consulting in manuscript a
translation by the Earl of Lauderdale (afterwards published), which has
considerable merit, and to which in his preface he confesses obligations
“not inconsiderable.” They were, in fact, so considerable as this, that
besides other hints in the matter of words and phrases, he borrowed
nearly four hundred lines in different places, with scarcely an attempt
at change.
Dryden was followed by various other translators more or less
successful. Pitt and Symmons, the latter especially, might have earned a
greater reputation had they preceded instead of followed the great poet
whose laurels they plainly challenged by adopting his metre. But the
recent admirable translation of the Æneid into the metre of Scott by Mr
Conington will undoubtedly take its place henceforward as by far the
most poetical, as it is also the most faithful and scholarly, rendering
of the original.
THE POET.
Publius Virgilius Maro--such was his full name, though we have
abbreviated the sounding Roman appellatives into the curt English form
of “Virgil”--lived in the age when the great Roman Empire was
culminating to its fall, but as yet showed little symptom of decay. The
emperor under whom he was born was that Octavianus Cæsar, nephew of the
great Julius, whose title of “Augustus” gave a name to his own times
which has since passed into a common term for the golden age of
literature in every nation. In the Augustan age of Rome rose and
flourished, in rapid succession, a large proportion of those great
writers to whose works we have given the name of classics. This
brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes--to the
increase of cultivation and refinement, to the leisure and quiet which
followed after long years of war and civil commotion; but in part also
it was owing to the character of the Roman emperor himself. Both
Augustus and his intimate friend and counsellor Mæcenas were the
professed patrons of letters and of the fine arts. Mæcenas was of the
highest patrician blood of Rome. He claimed descent from the old
Etruscan kings or Lucumos--those ancient territorial chiefs who ruled
Italy while Rome was yet in her infancy, such as Lars Porsena of
Clusium. Clever and accomplished, an able statesman in spite of all his
indolence, Mæcenas had immense influence with Augustus. At his splendid
palace on the Esquiline Hill--the Holland House of the day--met all the
brilliant society of Rome, and his name very soon became a synonym for a
liberal patron of art and literature. To be eminent in any branch of
these accomplishments was to insure the notice of the minister; and to
be a _protégé_ of his was an introduction at once, under the happiest
auspices, to the emperor himself. Such good fortune occurred to Virgil
early in his life.
He was born in the little village of Andes (probably the modern
Pietola), near Mantua, and received a liberal education, as is
sufficiently evident from the many allusions in his poems. When grown to
manhood, he seems to have lived for some years with his father upon his
modest family estate. He suffered, like very many of his countrymen--his
friend and fellow-poet Horace among the number--from the results of the
great civil wars which so long desolated Italy, and which ended in the
fall of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The district near Mantua
was assigned and parcelled out among the legionaries who had fought for
Antony and young Octavianus against Pompey. Cremona had espoused the
cause of the latter, and Mantua, as Virgil himself tells us, suffered
for the sins of its neighbour. His little estate was confiscated,
amongst others, to reward the veterans who had claims on the gratitude
of Octavianus. But through the intercession of some powerful friend who
had influence with the young emperor--probably Asinius Pollio, hereafter
mentioned, who was prefect of the province--they were soon restored to
him. This obligation Virgil never forgot; and amongst the many of all
ranks who poured their flattery into the ears of Augustus (as Octavianus
must be henceforth called), perhaps that of the young Mantuan poet,
though bestowed with something of a poet’s exaggeration, was amongst the
most sincere. The first of his Pastorals was written to express his
gratitude for the indulgence which had been granted him. If the Cæsar of
the day was susceptible of flattery, at least he liked it good of its
kind. “Stroke him awkwardly,” said Horace, “and he winces like a restive
horse.” But the verse of the Mantuan poet had the ring of poetry as well
as compliment.
These Pastorals (to be more particularly noticed hereafter) were his
earliest work, composed, probably, between his twenty-seventh and
thirty-fourth year, while he was still living a country life on his
newly-recovered farm. They seem to have attracted the favourable
attention of Mæcenas; and soon, among the brilliant crowd of courtiers,
statesmen, artists, poets, and historians who thronged the
audience-chamber of the popular minister, might be seen the tall,
slouching, somewhat plebeian figure of the young country poet.[2] He
soon became a familiar guest there; but although Augustus himself, half
in jest, was said to have spoken of his minister’s literary dinners as a
“table of parasites,” it is certain Virgil never deserved the character.
This intimacy with Mæcenas must have led to frequent and prolonged
visits to Rome; but his chief residence, after he left his Mantuan
estate, seems to have been at Naples. It was at the suggestion of this
patron that he set about the composition of his poem upon Roman
agriculture and stock-breeding--the four books of Georgics. His greatest
and best-known work--the Æneid--was begun in obedience to a hint thrown
out by a still higher authority, though he seems to have long had the
subject in his thoughts, and probably had begun to put it into shape.
Augustus had condescended to ask the poet to undertake some grander
theme than an imaginary pastoral life or the management of the country
farm. The result was the Æneid, modelled upon the two great poems of
Homer--in fact, a Roman Iliad and Odyssey combined in one. It was never
completely finished, for Virgil, whose health was at no time robust,
died before he had put in the finishing touches which his fastidious
taste required. It is even said that in his last illness he would have
burnt the copy, if his friends would have allowed the sacrifice. It is
hardly probable, as a German scholar has ingeniously suggested, that it
was because the cruelties of Augustus’s later years made him repent of
having immortalised a tyrant. He died in his fifty-first year, at
Brundusium, where he had landed in the suite of the emperor, whom he had
met during a visit to Athens, and who brought him back with him to
Italy. He was buried, as was the custom of the Romans, by the side of
the public road leading out of Naples to Puteoli; and the tomb still
shown to travellers, near Posilippo, as the last resting-place of the
poet, may at least mark the real site. He died a comparatively rich man,
possessed of a town-house at Rome, near the palace of Mæcenas, with a
good library. Living, as he did, in the highest society of the capital,
where he was very popular, he never forgot his old friends; and it is
pleasant to read that he sent money to his aged parents regularly every
year. So highly was he esteemed by his own cotemporaries, that on one
occasion when he visited the theatre, the whole audience is said to have
risen in a body and saluted him with the same honours which were paid to
Augustus. He preserved to the last his simple manners and somewhat
rustic appearance; and it is believed that his character, amongst all
the prevalent vices of Rome, remained free from reproach--saving only
that with which he was taunted by the libertines of the capital, the
reproach of personal purity. It is as much to his honour that Caligula
should have ordered all his busts to be banished from the public
libraries, as that St Augustin should have quoted him alone of heathen
authors, in his celebrated ‘Confessions.’
THE PASTORALS.
The earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his
Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called
“Bucolics”--_i. e._, Songs of the Herdsmen--and sometimes “Eclogues,” as
being “selections” from a larger number of similar compositions which
the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The
actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually
introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds,
keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland
country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with
scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his
own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides,
from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek
Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under
beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical
prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in
fact, however familiar to us in the language of ancient and modern
poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the satyrs and fauns and
dryad-nymphs with whom a fanciful mythology had peopled the same region,
and who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral poets in the
company of their human _dramatis personæ_. The Arcadia of history was a
rich and fertile district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as
one of our own midland counties. Like them, if it had any reputation at
all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation
for dulness. It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of the
qualities of the animal seem to have been shared by the natives
themselves. “A slip of Arcadia” passed into a proverbial nickname for a
boy who was the despair of his schoolmaster. The Arcadia of the poets
and romance-writers, from classical times down to our own Spenser and
Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr Conington says, “the poets’ golden land,
in which imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life of the
present.” This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the
early days of authorship down to a very recent date. Thyrsis and
Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetical existence
of something like fifteen hundred years, and talk very much the same
language in the Pastorals of Pope that they did in the Greek Idylls. It
is curious, also, that when society itself has been most artificial,
this affectation of pastoral simplicity seems to have been most in
vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who lavished their
applause and rewards upon Virgil when he read to them these lays of an
imaginary shepherd-life; how Galatæa was won by a present of a pair of
wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Melibœus thankfully went to
supper with his friend Tityrus on roasted chestnuts and goat-milk
cheese. Society in England had never less of the reality of pastoral
simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady chose to be
painted with a lamb or a crook--when the “bucolic cant,” as Warton
contemptuously terms it, was the fashionable folly of the day. So when
aristocratic life in France had reached a phase of corruption which was
only to be purged by a revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette, with her
ladies and gentlemen in waiting, were going about the farm at Trianon
with crooks in their hands, playing at shepherds and shepherdesses, on
the brink of that terrible volcano.
Of the ten Eclogues, the majority take the form of pastoral dialogue.
Frequently it is a singing-match between two rival shepherds--not always
conducted in the most amicable fashion, or with the most scrupulous
delicacy in the matter of repartee, the poetical “Arcadian” being in
this point a pretty faithful copy from nature. Most of the names, as
well as of the subjects and imagery, are taken, as has been said, from
the Greek Idylls of Theocritus. So closely has Virgil copied his model
that he even transplants the natural scenery of Sicily, employed by
Theocritus, to his pastoral dreamland, which otherwise would seem to be
localised on the banks of the Mincio, in the neighbourhood of his native
Mantua. This gives him an opportunity of touching upon subjects of the
day, and introducing, in the name and guise of shepherds, himself and
his friends. Sometimes we can see through the disguise by the help of
contemporary Roman history; more often, probably, the clue is lost to us
through our very imperfect modern knowledge. We know pretty well that
Tityrus,--who in the First Eclogue expresses his gratitude to the
“godlike youth” who has preserved his little farm from the ruthless
hands of the soldier colonists, while his poor neighbour Melibœus has
lost his all,--can be no other than the poet himself, who thus
compliments his powerful protector. So, too, in a later Eclogue, when
the slave Mœris meets his neighbour Lycidas on the road, and tells him
how his master has been dispossessed of his farm by the military
colonists, and has narrowly escaped with his life, we may safely trust
the traditional explanation, that in the master Menalcas we have Virgil
again, troubled a second time by these intruders, and compelled to renew
his application to his great friend at Rome. The traditional story was,
that the poet was obliged to take refuge from the violence of the
soldiers in the shop of a charcoal-burner, who let him out at a
back-door, and eventually had to throw himself into the river Mincio to
escape their pursuit. Lycidas, in the Pastoral, is surprised to hear of
his neighbour’s new trouble.
“LYC.--I surely heard, that all from where yon hills
Begin to rise, and gently slope again
Down to the stream, where the old beech-trees throw
Their ragged time-worn tops against the sky,[3]
Your poet-master had redeemed by song.
MŒR.--You heard, no doubt--and so the story went;
But song, good Lycidas, avails as much,
When swords are drawn, as might the trembling dove
When on Dodona swoops the eagle down.
Nay--had I not been warned of woes to come--
Warned by a raven’s croak on my left hand
From out the hollow oak--why then, my friend,
You had lost your Mœris and his master too.”
Honest Lycidas expresses his horror at the narrow escape of the
neighbourhood from such a catastrophe. What should they all have done
for a poet, if they had lost Menalcas? who could compose such songs--and
who could sing them? And he breaks out himself into fragmentary
reminiscences which he has picked up by ear from his friend. Then Mœris
too--who, being a poet’s farm-servant, has caught a little of the
inspiration--repeats a few lines of his master’s. “As you hope for any
blessings,” says Lycidas, “let me hear the rest of it.”
“So may your bees avoid the poisonous yew--
So may your cows bring full-swoln udders home--
If canst remember aught, begin at once. I too,
I am a poet, by the Muses’ grace: some songs
I have, mine own composing; and the swains
Call me their bard--but I were weak to heed them.
I cannot vie with masters of the art
Like Varius or like Cinna; my poor Muse
Is but a goose among the tuneful swans.”
Mœris can remember a scrap or two of his master’s verses. There was one
in particular, which Lycidas had heard him singing one moonlight night,
and would much like to hear again;--“I can remember the tune myself,” he
says, “but I have forgotten the words.” Mœris will try. The compliment
to Augustus with which the strain begins sufficiently marks the real
poet who here figures as Menalcas.
“Why, Daphnis, why dost watch the constellations
Of the old order, now the new is born?
Lo! a new star comes forth to glad the nations,
Star of the Cæsars, filling full the corn.”[4]
But Mœris cannot remember much more. They must both wait, he says, until
his master comes home again. So the pair walk on together towards Rome,
cheating the long journey with singing as they go; and thus closes this
pretty pastoral dialogue, the graceful ease of which, with its subdued
comedy, it would be impossible for any translator to render adequately.
Another of these Eclogues relates the capture of Silenus, one of the old
rural deities of very jovial reputation, by two young shepherds, while
he lay sleeping off the effect of yesterday’s debauch. He is commonly
represented--and he was rather a favourite subject with ancient
artists--as a corpulent bald-headed old man, riding upon an ass, in a
state of evident inebriety, carrying a capacious leather wine-bottle,
and led and followed by a company of Nymphs and Bacchanals. He had the
reputation, like the sea-god Proteus, of knowing the mysteries of nature
and the secrets of the future; and there was a current story, upon which
this Pastoral is founded, of his having been caught while asleep, like
him, by some shepherds in Phrygia, and carried to King Midas, to whom,
as the price of his release, he answered all questions in natural
philosophy and ancient history--just as Proteus unfolded to Menelaus,
under similar compulsion, the secret of his future fate.
The Pastoral into which Virgil introduces this story is addressed to his
friend Varus--a man evidently of high rank--and seems meant as an
apology for not complying with his request to write a poem on his
exploits.
“I thought to sing how heroes fought and bled,
But that Apollo pinched my ear, and said--
‘Shepherds, friend Tityrus, I would have you know,
Feed their sheep high, and keep their verses low.’”
Then he goes on to tell his story:--
“Two shepherd-youths, the story runs, one day
Came on the cave where old Silenus lay;
Filled to the skin, as was his wont to be,
With last night’s wine, and sound asleep was he;
The garland from his head had fallen aside,
And his round bottle hanging near they spied.
Now was their time--both had been cheated long
By the sly god with promise of a song;
They tied him fast--fit bonds his garland made--
And lo! a fair accomplice comes to aid:
Loveliest of Naiad-nymphs, and merriest too,
Æglè[5] did what they scarce had dared to do;
Just as the god unclosed his sleepy eyes,
She daubed his face with blood of mulberries.
He saw their joke, and laughed--’Now loose me, lad!
Enough--you’ve caught me--tying is too bad.
A song you want?--Here goes. For Æglè, mind,
I warrant me I’ll pay her out in kind.’
So he began. The listening Fauns drew near,
The beasts beat time, the stout oaks danced to hear.
So joys Parnassus when Apollo sings--
So through the dancing hills the lyre of Orpheus rings.”
Silenus’s strain is a poetical lecture on natural philosophy. He is as
didactic in his waking soberness as some of his disciples are in their
cups. He describes how the world sprang from the four original elements,
and narrates the old fables of the cosmogonists--the Deluge of
Deucalion, the new race of men who sprang from the stones which he and
Pyrrha cast behind them, the golden reign of Saturn, the theft of fire
by Prometheus, and a long series of other legends, with which he charms
his listeners until the falling shadows warn them to count their flocks,
and the evening-star comes out, as the poet phrases it, “over the
unwilling heights of Olympus”--loath yet to lose the fascinating strain.
Besides this Pastoral addressed to Varus, there are three inscribed to
other friends: one to Cornelius Gallus, and two to Caius Asinius Pollio,
who was among the most eminent men of his day alike as a statesman, an
orator, and a man of letters, and at that time held the high office of
consul at Rome. He had been the friend of the great Julius, as he was
afterwards of his nephew Octavianus (Augustus), and was probably the
person who preserved or restored to the poet his country estate. The
fourth in order of these poems, commonly known as the “Pollio,” is the
most celebrated of the whole series, and has given rise to a great
amount of speculation. Its exact date is known from the record of
Pollio’s consulship--40 before the Christian era. Its subject is the
expected birth of a Child, in whom the golden age of innocence and
happiness should be restored, and who was to be the moral regenerator of
the world. The date of the poem itself, approaching so closely the great
Birth at Bethlehem--the reference to the prophecy of the Cumæan Sibyl,
long supposed to be a voice from heathendom predictive of the Jewish
Messiah--and the remarkable coincidence of the metaphorical terms
employed by the poet with the prophetical language of the Old Testament,
have led many to the pious belief that the Roman poet did but put into
shape those vague expectations of a Great Deliverer which were current
in his day, and which were to have a higher fulfilment than he knew. The
“Pollio” may be familiar to many English readers who are unacquainted
with the original through Pope’s fine imitation of it in his poem of
“The Messiah,” first published anonymously in the ‘Spectator.’[6] But
as the Latin Eclogue itself is short, it may be well to attempt a
translation of it here, before remarking further upon its meaning.
“Muses of Sicily, lift me for once
To higher flight; our humble tamarisk groves
Delight not all; and though the fields and woods
Still bound my song, give me the skill to make
Fit music for a Roman consul’s ear.
“Comes the Last Age, of which the Sibyl sang--
A new-born cycle of the rolling years;
Justice returns to earth, the rule returns
Of good King Saturn;--lo! from the high heavens
Comes a new seed of men. Lucina chaste,
Speed the fair infant’s birth, with whom shall end
Our age of iron, and the golden prime
Of earth return; thine own Apollo’s reign
In him begins anew. This glorious age
Inaugurates, O Pollio, with thee;
Thy consulship shall date the happy months;
Under thine auspices the Child shall purge
Our guilt-stains out, and free the land from dread.
He with the gods and heroes like the gods
Shall hold familiar converse, and shall rule
With his great father’s spirit the peaceful world.
For thee, O Child, the earth untilled shall pour
Her early gifts,--the winding ivy’s wreath,
Smiling acanthus, and all flowers that blow.
She-goats undriven shall bring full udders home,
The herds no longer fear the lion’s spring;
The ground beneath shall cradle thee in flowers,
The venomed snake shall die, the poisonous herb
Perish from out thy path, and leave the almond there.
“But when with growing years the Child shall learn
The old heroic glories of his race,
And know what Honour means: then shall the plains
Glow with the yellow harvest silently,
The grape hang blushing from the tangled brier,
And the rough oak drip honey like a dew.
Yet shall some evil leaven of the old strain
Lurk still unpurged; still men shall tempt the deep
With restless oar, gird cities with new walls,
And cleave the soil with ploughshares; yet again
Another Argo bear her hero-crew,
Another Tiphys steer: still wars shall be,
A new Achilles for a second Troy.
“So, when the years shall seal thy manhood’s strength,
The busy merchant shall forsake the seas--
Barter there shall not need; the soil shall bear
For all men’s use all products of all climes.
The glebe shall need no harrow, nor the vine
The searching knife, the oxen bear no yoke;
The wool no longer shall be schooled to lie,
Dyed in false hues; but, colouring as he feeds,
The ram himself in the rich pasture-lands
Shall wear a fleece now purple and now gold,
And the lambs grow in scarlet. So the Fates
Who know not change have bid their spindles run,
And weave for this blest age the web of doom.
“Come, claim thine honours, for the time draws nigh,
Babe of immortal race, the wondrous seed of Jove!
Lo, at thy coming how the starry spheres
Are moved to trembling, and the earth below,
And widespread seas, and the blue vault of heaven!
How all things joy to greet the rising Age!
If but my span of life be stretched to see
Thy birth, and breath remain to sing thy praise,
Not Thracian Orpheus should o’ermatch my strain,
Nor Linus,--though each parent helped the son,
Phœbus Apollo and the Muse of Song:
Though in Arcadia Pan my rival stood,
His own Arcadia should pronounce for me.
How soon, fair infant, shall thy first smile greet
Thy happy mother, when the slow months crown
The heart-sick hopes that waited for thy birth?
Smile then, O Babe! so shall she smile on thee;
The child on whom no parent’s smile hath beamed,
No god shall entertain, nor goddess love.”
It would be out of place here to discuss the various conjectures of the
learned as to who the Child was, to whose birth the poet thus looks
forward. Whether it was a son of the Consul Pollio himself, who died in
his infancy; or the expected offspring of Augustus’s marriage with
Scribonia, which was, after all, a daughter--Julia--whose profligate
life and unhappy death were a sad contradiction of Virgil’s
anticipations; or a child of Octavia, sister of Augustus;--which of
these it was, or whether it was any one of them, neither ancient nor
modern commentators have been able to decide. “It is not certain,” says
Mr. Conington, “that the child ever was born; it is certain that, if
born, he did not become the regenerator of his time.” It is possible,
too, that the whole form of the poem may be strictly imaginary--that the
child had been born already, long ago, and that it was no other than
Octavianus Cæsar--and that Virgil does but use here the licence of
poetry to express his hopes of a golden age that might follow the peace
of Brundusium. And as to how far this very remarkable poem may or may
not be regarded as one of what Archbishop Trench has called “the
unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” would be to open a field of
inquiry of the highest interest indeed, but far too wide for these
pages. Yet it cannot be entirely passed over.
The Sibylline oracles, to which Virgil alludes in his opening lines,
whatever their original form, were so garbled and interpolated, both in
Christian and pre-Christian times, that it is impossible now to know
what they did or did not contain. But they were recognised, in the early
Church--by the Emperor Constantine, who is said to have attributed his
own conversion in great part to their study, and by St. Augustine,
amongst others--as containing distinct prophecies of the Messiah. The
recognition of the Roman Sibyl or Sibyls as bearing their testimony to
the truth of Christianity is still familiar to us in the ancient hymn,
“Dies Iræ,”--so often translated--
“Teste David cum Sibylla;”
and in an old Latin mystery-play of the eleventh century, when the
witnesses are summoned to give evidence as to the Nativity, there appear
among them, in company with the Hebrew prophets, Virgil and the Sibyl,
who both join in a general “_Benedicamus Domino_” at the end. St.
Augustine quotes twenty-seven Latin verses (which, however, seem very
fragmentary and unconnected) as actual utterances of the Sibyl of
Erythræ, which contain prophecies, more or less clear, of the great
Advent. The original, he says, was in Greek, and the initial letters of
each verse formed a sentence, “Jesus Christ the Son of God the
Saviour.”[7] Whatever truth there may be in any special predictions of
this nature as existing in the heathen world, it is at least certain
that there prevailed very largely, about the date of the Christian era,
a vague expectation of some personal advent which should in some way
regenerate society.
The new “cycle of centuries,” which the poet supposes to begin with the
birth of the Child, refers to the doctrine held by Plato and his
disciples (possibly of Etruscan origin) of an “Annus Magnus,” or Great
Year. It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long
intervals, in which the history of the world repeated itself.[8] A
curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his
live of Sulla.
“While the horizon was clear and cloudless, there was heard
suddenly the sound of a trumpet, shrill, prolonged, and as it were
wailing, so that all men were startled and awed by its loudness.
The Etruscan soothsayers declared that it foreboded the coming of a
new generation and the revolution of the world. For that there were
eight generations of man in all, differing from each other in
habits and ways of life, and each had its allotted space of time,
when heaven brought round again the recurrence of the Great Year,
and that when the end of one and the rise of another was at hand,
some wondrous sign appeared in earth or heaven.”--PLUTARCH, Sulla,
c. 7.
Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of the genius and
character of Virgil’s pastoral poetry. It laid the foundation of a
taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be
said to have now become obsolete. English poets were at one time
strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton, Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose
Phillips,--the last perhaps the most successful,--were all more or less
imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it would seem to require
a more than ordinary revolution in literature ever to bring such a style
into popularity again.
THE GEORGICS.
The Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed
imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod--“Works and
Days”--which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete
form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world,
with its five ages of the human race--the gold, the silver, the brazen,
“the age of heroes,” and the present--which last, with the cynicism or
melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament,
Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of
something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek
poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and
notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on
these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other
Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his
obligations are not so readily traced.
From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author
of the great didactic poem “On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as
largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the
very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both
his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings
which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to
have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either
of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout
these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the
farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some
practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of
nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country
gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really
composed with a view to their practical instruction.
He addresses his poem to his noble patron Mæcenas. And amongst the long
list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he
invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.
“Thou, Cæsar, chief, where’er thy choice ordain,
To fix ’mid gods thy yet unchosen reign--
Wilt thou o’er cities stretch thy guardian sway,
While earth and all her realms thy nod obey?
The world’s vast orb shall own thy genial power,
Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower;
Before thy altar grateful nations bow,
And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow.
O’er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail,
Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail?
Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves,
While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves?
Wilt thou ’mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise,
And, a new star, illume thy native skies?
Scorpius, e’en now, each shrinking claw confines,
And more than half his heaven to thee resigns.
Where’er thy reign (for not if hell invite
To wield the sceptre of eternal night,
Ne’er would such lust of dire dominion move
Thee, Cæsar, to resign the realm of Jove:
Though vaunting Greece extol th’ Elysian plain,
Whence weeping Ceres wooes her child in vain)
Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide,
O’er the rude swain’s uncertain path preside;
Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth,
And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth.”
--SOTHEBY.
The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is
recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times
over--advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially
agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and
not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist
had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his
modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small
birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly
English torment, the couch-grass,--squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is
variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep
wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,--he had
indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of.
The Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which
would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very
elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet,
would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few
hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for
prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the
sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first
division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to Cæsar as the
hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the
Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is
spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an
English ear:--
“Ye home-born deities, of mortal birth!
Thou, father Romulus, and mother Earth,
Goddess unmoved! whose guardian arms extend
O’er Tuscan Tiber’s course, and Roman towers defend;
With youthful Cæsar your joint powers engage,
Nor hinder him to save the sinking age.
O! let the blood already spilt atone
For the past crimes of curst Laomedon!
Heaven wants thee there; and long the gods, we know,
Have grudged thee, Cæsar, to the world below;
Where fraud and rapine right and wrong confound;
Where impious arms from every part resound,
And monstrous crimes in every shape are crowned.
The peaceful peasant to the wars is prest;
The fields lie fallow in inglorious rest;
The plain no pasture to the flock affords,
The crooked scythes are straightened into swords:
And there Euphrates her soft offspring arms,
And here the Rhine rebellows with alarms;
The neighbouring cities range on several sides,
Perfidious Mars long-plighted leagues divides,
And o’er the wasted world in triumph rides.
So four fierce coursers, starting to the race,
Scour through the plain, and lengthen every pace:
Nor reins, nor curbs, nor threat’ning cries they fear,
But force along the trembling charioteer.”
The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the vineyard, but
especially of the latter. The apple, the pear, the olive, all receive
due notice from the poet; but upon the culture of the vine he dwells
with a hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air
than those which he gives out upon other branches of cultivation. The
soil, the site, the best kinds to choose, the different modes of
propagation, are all discussed with considerable minuteness. It would
seem that in those earlier times, as now, the vintage had a more
poetical aspect than even the harvest-field. The beauty of the crop, the
merriment of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it has
gone through the usual process of conversion, gave, as is still the case
in all wine-producing countries, a holiday character to the whole course
of cultivation. All other important crops contribute in some way to
supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly
its enjoyments. And when, at the beginning of the book, the poet invokes
the god of wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough
heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however temperate his own
habits might be, he had not adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some
of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for
joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for “the
dark red wine:” they might have said the same of the writer of the
Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:--
“Come, Father Bacchus, come! thy bounty fills
All things around; for thee the autumn hills,
Heavy with fruit, blush through their greenery;
In the full vats the vintage foams for thee:
Come, Father Bacchus, come! nor yet refuse
To doff thy buskins, and with noble juice
To stain thy limbs, and tread the grapes with me.”
But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the
vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and
those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which
he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a
higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe
to Italy in this second book:--
“Colchian bulls with fiery nostrils never turned Italian field,
Seed of hydra’s teeth ne’er sprang in bristling crop of spear and shield;
But thy slopes with heavy corn-stalks and the Massic vine are clad,
There the olive-groves are greenest, and the full-fed herds are glad.
In thy plains is bred the war-horse, tossing high its crest of pride;
Milk-white herds, O fair Clitumnus, bathe them in thy sacred tide--
Mighty bulls to crown the altars, or to draw the conqueror’s car
Up the Sacred Way in triumph when he rideth from the war.
Here the spring is longest, summer borrows months beyond her own;
Twice the teeming flocks are fruitful, twice the laden orchards groan.
In thy plains no tigers wander, nor the lions nurse their young;
Evil root of treacherous poison doth no wretched gatherer wrong,
Never serpent rears its crest, or drags its monstrous coils along.
Lo! where rise thy noble cities, giant works of men of old,
Towns on beetling crags piled heavenward by the hands of builders bold--
Antique towers round whose foundations still the grand old rivers glide,
And the double sea that girds thee like a fence on either side.
* * * * *
Such the land which sent to battle Marsian footmen stout and good,
Sabine youth, and Volscian spearmen, and Liguria’s hardy brood;
Hence have sprung our Decii, Marii, mighty names which all men bless,
Great Camillus, kinsmen Scipios, sternest men in battle’s press!
Hence hast thou too sprung, great Cæsar, whom the farthest East doth fear,
So that Mede nor swarthy Indian to our Roman lines come near!
Hail, thou fair and fruitful mother, land of ancient Saturn, hail!
Rich in crops and rich in heroes! thus I dare to wake the tale
Of thine ancient laud and honour, opening founts that slumbered long,
Rolling through our Roman towns the echoes of old Hesiod’s song.”[9]
The Third Georgic treats of the herd and the stud. The poet’s knowledge
on these points must be strongly suspected of being but
second-hand--rather the result of having studied some of the Roman
“Books of the Farm,” than the experience of a practical stock-breeder.
Such a work was Varro’s ‘On Rural Affairs,’ which Virgil evidently
followed as an authority. From that source he drew, amongst other
precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays down in this
formula:--
“An ugly head, a well-fleshed neck,
Deep dewlaps falling from the chin,
Long in the flank, broad in the foot,
Rough hairy ears, and horns bent in.”
Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our modern judges of stock.
But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with
an eye to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow of the
present day would not be considered by us a handsome animal. Besides,
the object of the Roman breeder was to obtain animals which would be
“strong to labour,”--good beasts under the yoke; not such as would lay
on the greatest weight of flesh at the least possible cost, for the
purposes of the butcher. His points of a good horse are entirely
different, and approach more nearly our own ideal--“Fine in the head,
short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in the chest.” Bay and
dapple-grey he chooses for colour; white and chestnut he considers the
worst. He had not reached the more catholic philosophy of the modern
horse-dealer, that “no good horse was ever yet of a bad colour.”
The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows the poet to
indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of
pastoral life under the hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or
shepherd drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying with him
all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a campaign; and again of his
winter life in some vague northern region which he calls by the general
name of Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of
wine, as the southern poet compassionately phrases it) some kind of beer
or cider. But the most remarkable of these passages is that which closes
the book, and describes the ravages of some terrible pestilence which,
beginning with the flocks and herds, extended at last to the wild beasts
and to the birds, and even to the fish. There is no historical account
of such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that Virgil used
his licence as a poet to embellish with imaginary details some ordinary
epidemic, in order to present to his readers a companion picture to that
of the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by
his favourite model Lucretius.
There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the
Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were
evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than
they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the
sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are
now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of
saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the
habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil
devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they
would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There
appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject
among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to
have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil
certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees
were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they
are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they
had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee,
who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they
pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also--and
with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a
poet--minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the
carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from
air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a fact in natural
history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead
body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that
falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young
swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced
commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip
their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old
preliminary caution--“First _catch_ your bee:” but an experienced
bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if
needful.[10]
The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet
relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all
his discourse upon bee-keeping.
The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete
work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,--of
his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical
essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of
the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its
place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a
nobler kind--“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer
expresses it.[11] He compares its details, in more than one passage,
with those of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the
Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable
atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place
of all.
“First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven”--
is his instruction to his pupils--“From Jove all things begin.” His
motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days
adopted--“Ora et labora”--“Pray and work.” It has been commonly said
that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods
as beings who, in our English poet’s words,
“Lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind.”
But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the
case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he
had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers
which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to
Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean
alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and
beauties, as the “skirts” of a divine glory. In all his verse this
feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics.
It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of
Mæcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to
whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a
more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their farms. Whether
it had that result may well be doubted: the discharged soldier, however
heartily he might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as his
instructor. The practical influence of these treatises in any way is
equally doubtful. “It would be absurd to suppose,” says Dean Merivale,
“that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough,
or take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they
served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of
the olden time, and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the
Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyment.”[12]
THE ÆNEID.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.
The Æneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of Troy. The
fascination of that remarkable cycle of legend had not weakened after
the lapse of ten centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to
imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment, but he goes to him
for his subject. He even makes his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to
the Iliad--at least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject of this
latter poem is the wanderings and final establishment in his native
country of the Greek hero Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the
story of the escape of a Trojan hero from the ruin of his city, and the
perils by land and sea which he encountered, until his final settlement
in the distant west, in the land which the gods had promised him. Æneas,
like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes and sufferings; and
like him, though he has the justice and the deliberate counsels of
heaven all on his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permitted to
vex and thwart him for many long years. This Æneas--reputed son of the
goddess Venus by a mortal husband, Anchises--had played no unimportant
part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been told that King Priam had no
less than fifty sons, it might have been said that he stood very near
the throne. For he was the representative of the younger branch of the
house of Dardanus--the family of Assaracus--as Priam was of the elder
branch, that of Ilus.[13] A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round
him in the Iliad. He is there addressed as “counsellor of the Trojans;”
they honoured him, we are told, “equally with the godlike Hector;” and
Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has rejected the house
of Priam, but that “Æneas, and his sons, and his sons’ sons” should
hereafter reign over the Trojans.”[14] Some Homeric critics have even
fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer’s poem, a jealousy
between Æneas and the sons of Priam. But this surely arises from reading
Homer by the light of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of
events, when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam’s kingdom,
the prince of the house of Assaracus should rebuild the Trojan fortunes
on the far-off shores of Italy.
Like Homer, Virgil dashes at once into the heart of his story. This is
how he introduces his hero:--
“Arms and the man I sing, who first,
By fate of Ilian realm amerced,
To fair Italia onward bore,
And landed on Lavinium’s shore.”[15]
He tells us nothing, however, for the present, of the escape from Troy
and the embarkation of the fugitives, or of the guiding oracles in
obedience to which they had sailed forth in quest of this new home. He
only shows us Æneas on the sea, having just set sail from Sicily, where
the angry Queen of Heaven catches sight of him. Juno, we must
remember--Virgil, apparently, has no idea that any one could need
reminding of it--Juno has never forgotten or forgiven that scene upon
Mount Ida, where the Trojan Paris preferred the fascinations--or the
bribes--of Venus to her own stately charms. She had persuaded her royal
consort, the king of gods and men, to consent to the downfall of the
accursed race; and she persecutes this unhappy remnant, now on its
voyage, with unrelenting hate. Even the poet, who makes use of her
persecution as one of the mainsprings of his story, professes his
astonishment at its bitterness,--
“Can such deep hate find place in breasts divine?”[16]
She had another reason, too, for her present jealous feelings. The city
of Carthage, where she was especially honoured, she had hoped to make
the mistress of the world. And now--so the inexorable Fates have woven
it in their web--this new brood from Troy are to destroy it in the years
to come. Rome, and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey to his
readers, is to have this universal empire.
But they have not reached Latium yet, these hateful Trojans. They never
shall. The Queen of Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds,
where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of Æolia, controlling his
boisterous subjects:--
“They with the rock’s reverberant roar
Chafe blustering round their prison door:
He, throned on high, the sceptre sways,
Controls their moods, their wrath allays.
Break but that sceptre, sea and land
And heaven’s ethereal deep
Before them they would whirl like sand,
And through the void air sweep.”
At Juno’s request Æolus lets loose his prisoners. Out rush the winds in
mad delight.
“All in a moment, sun and skies
Are blotted from the Trojans’ eyes:
Black night is brooding o’er the deep,
Sharp thunder peals, live lightnings leap:
The stoutest warrior holds his breath,
And looks as on the face of death.
At once Æneas thrilled with dread;
Forth from his breast, with hands outspread,
These groaning words he drew:
‘O happy thrice, and yet again,
Who died at Troy like valiant men,
E’en in their parents’ view!
O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray,
Why passed I not the plain that day,
Yielding my life to you,
Where, stretched beneath a Phrygian sky,
Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon, lie:
Where Simois tumbles ’neath his wave
Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?’”
The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are cast on the
rocks; one goes down with all its crew before their leader’s eyes. But
Neptune, the sea-god, comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as
Juno is hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King of the
Winds in his dominions--he knows by whose instance he has dared this
outrage. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern
authority:--
“Back to your master instant flee,
And tell him, not to him but me
The imperial trident of the sea
Fell by the lot’s award;
His is that prison-house of stone,
A prison, Eurus, all your own;
There let him lord it to his mind,
The jailer-monarch of the wind,
But keep its portal barred.”
So the tempest is stilled, and Æneas, with seven ships, the survivors of
his fleet of twenty, runs into a land-locked harbour on the coast of
Carthage. The crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn, while
Æneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and kills deer to mend their
meal. Wine they have good store of--the parting gift from King Acestes,
late their host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to the
fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in words of good
cheer:--
“You that have seen grim Scylla rave,
And heard her monsters yell,--
You that have looked upon the cave
Where savage Cyclops dwell,--
Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;
This suffering may yield us yet
A pleasant tale to tell.”
Æneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council. His
goddess-mother Venus pleads with her father Jupiter to have pity on her
offspring. And Jupiter--very open to influence of this kind now, as in
Homer’s story--reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate. Æneas shall
reach Latium safely, and reign there three years. His son Iulus--or
Ascanius, as he is otherwise called--shall succeed him, and transfer the
seat of power from Lavinium to his own new-founded city, Alba Longa.
Three hundred years his race shall rule there, till in due course the
twin-brothers Romulus and Remus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and
the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome. To the glories of
this new capital the Father of the gods will assign neither limit nor
end. The wrongs of Troy shall be redressed. The sons of the East, in
their new home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.
“So stands my will. There comes a day,
While Rome’s great ages hold their way,
When old Assaracus’s sons
Shall quit them on the Myrmidons,
O’er Phthia and Mycenæ reign,
And humble Argos to their chain.
From Troy’s fair stock shall Cæsar rise,
The limits of whose victories
Are ocean, of his fame the skies;
Great Julius, proud that style to bear,
In name and blood Iulus’ heir.”
Thus, before he has concluded the first book of his great poem, the poet
has taken us into his counsels as to the purport of the song. It is not
a mere epic romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic deeds and
exciting adventures; it is, like some of our modern novels, a romance
with a purpose; and the purpose is the claiming for the great house of
Julius the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of the glories
of that house in the person of Augustus. And as the Iliad of Homer,
beyond the mere vocation of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike
audience by the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also--the
glorification of the Greek nation--so the Roman poet may be said to have
written a counter-Iliad, to extol the later fortunes of the royal house
of Troy in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them, of Iulus.
For any historic foundation of such a genealogy we may look in vain.
King Brute stands upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor
of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of Troy as the founder of
the Julian house and of Rome. But, for the present, we must be content
to assume his existence, and to follow the course of the narrative as
the poet wills. The claim of Trojan descent is not an invention of
Virgil’s, though he may have been the first to work it out so much in
detail. It was a claim in which his countrymen always delighted, and
there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also,
Virgil seems to have at heart. He does not care so much, after all, for
the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of
Rome. The empire of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough, and
more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his
nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the “Pollio.” To the
soul of the Roman poet--unlike his master Homer in this--war, and more
especially civil war, is absolutely hateful. He can describe it, when
needed for his purpose, and describe it well; but it is as the scourge
of nations, or at best the terrible remedy for greater evils;--not, as
the Greek poet calls it, “the strife which is the joy of men.”
Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she may, the counsels of
Jupiter. She puts into the heart of the Queen of Carthage, on whose
shores Æneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of pity and
compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also,
to comfort her son Æneas in his trouble. Attended by his faithful friend
Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader, the strange coast on
which he finds himself--
“When in the bosom of the wood
Before him, lo, his mother stood,
In mien and gear a Spartan maid,
Or like Harpalycè arrayed,
Who tires fleet coursers in the chase,
And heads the swiftest streams of Thrace.
Slung from her shoulders hangs a bow;
Loose to the wind her tresses flow;
Bare was her knee; her mantle’s fold
The gathering of a knot controlled.
And ‘Saw ye, youths,’ she asks them, ‘say,
One of my sisters here astray;
A silver quiver at her side,
And for a scarf a lynx’s hide;
Or pressing on the wild boar’s track
With upraised dart and voiceful pack?’”
There is in this description a happy reminiscence of an earlier legend.
In such guise--not with any of the meretricious attractions assigned to
the goddess of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain nymph--had
she won her mortal lover, the Trojan shepherd Anchises, from whom this
her dear son was born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she had
enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of the child’s birth,
nor to boast of the favour shown him by a goddess, but to bring the boy
up in the forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood-nymph. Anchises, in
his pride, had neglected or forgotten her warning, and was punished by
premature weakness and a helpless old age.
Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus replies to her son’s
questions as to the inhabitants of the land. They are a colony from
Tyre; their queen, Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false
brother Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichæus, had
possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she has escaped with her
husband’s wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa.
Æneas tells her in return his own sad story, and is comforted by the
assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are safe--all but one
unhappy vessel and her crew. Then, as she turns to leave him, the
disguised divinity becomes apparent.
“Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed;
Her falling robe her footsteps swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept.”
Æneas and his companion mount the crest of the hill, whence they look
down upon the half-finished walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of
workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that most essential
structure in a city of any pretension, an amphitheatre for public
spectacles, and building a magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist
of invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,--like Ulysses in the
court of Phæacia--the strangers enter the brazen gates of the temple.
All is magnificent and wonderful. But, marvel of marvels! both walls and
doors are sculptured with a history which Æneas knows only too well.
Even here is recorded, on this distant and unknown shore, the story of
stories--the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the Trojan chief
peruses the several groups, and identifies the various incidents. Here
the Greeks fly to their ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans:
there, again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in slaughter
before him. The death of young Troilus, hurled from his chariot, is
there; and, to match the picture, Hector dragged at Achilles’s
chariot-wheels round the city walls. Memnon the Ethiopian and the
amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst the foremost
combatants, Æneas can recognise himself.
While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates are reading this
sculptured history, the queen herself approaches. And while they admire
her majesty and grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the
missing comrades of Æneas make their appearance before her as
suppliants. They tell the story of their shipwreck on the coast: and
they think Æneas is lost, as he had thought they were. Then the mist in
which Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves, and the two
parties recognise and welcome each other. Dido, like all the world, has
heard of the name of Æneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy.
She can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience:
“Myself not ignorant of woe,
Compassion I have learnt to show.”
The sentiment has been adopted by modern writers in all languages. “She
had suffered persecution and learnt mercy,” says Sterne in a like case:
and even in Sterne’s mouth, the sentiment is natural and true.
The strangers are hospitably welcomed, and offered every facility for
refitting their fleet, and preparing for the continuance of their
voyage. Æneas sends down to his ships for presents worthy of so kind a
hostess: and, with a father’s pride, he sends also for his young son to
introduce him to the queen. The evening is devoted to feasting and
revelry. The royal bard--that indispensable figure in all courts, Trojan
or Tyrian or Greek--sings to the assembled guests. It is to be remarked
that his lay is not, as we might expect, of heroes and their deeds: it
is the song of Silenus, in the Pastorals, over again--the favourite
subject of the poet, the wonders of nature and creation.
“He sings the wanderings of the moon,
The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon;
Whence humankind and cattle came,
And whence the rain-spout and the flame,
Arcturus and the two bright bears,
And Hyads weeping showery tears;
Why winter suns so swiftly go,
And why the winter nights move slow.”
All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling
the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god
of love, who, at his false mother’s bidding, has assumed the shape of
Æneas’s young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted
sleep, by Venus’s machinations, in her bower in the far island of
Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the
passion which is to be her ruin. Æneas has already become an object of
tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on
Othello’s:--
“Much of great Priam asks the dame,
Much of his greater son;
Now in what armour Memnon came,
Now how Achilles shone.”
Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story--his escape and his
seven years’ wanderings. And Æneas begins; and, with an exact imitation
of Homer’s management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of
Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal night of Troy.