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 [pg 356]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 goddess558, 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 [pg 357]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 [pg 358]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; [pg 359]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 [pg 360]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 [pg 361]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, [pg 362]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 slaves559; 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 [pg 363]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 romance560. 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 Queen561:’ 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 [pg 364]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.

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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 disrepute562. 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 regina563.

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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 opus564.

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 unda565.

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

Desuper566.

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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 capit567.

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 enemy568. 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 sacravit569.

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Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced570 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—

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Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes571.

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 solet572—

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 deum573.

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 community574, 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, [pg 370]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 cieret575.

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 tueri576.

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 steterat577.

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

[pg 371]

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit578.

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 ciemus579.

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,

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Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno580?

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 ponto581.’

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 aras582.

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

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Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum583.

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, [pg 374]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 Manes584—

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 amorem585—

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 [pg 375]the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier586, 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 ‘porricio587’ and ‘porrigo’, and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs588,—‘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 turbet589.

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

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

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 deorum591,

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 [pg 377]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 permanence592.’ 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 legislator593. 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 habebit594.

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. [pg 378]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 mensis595.

The spectacle of the fall of Troy acquires new grandeur from the representation of Troy, not, as it appears in Homer, as a [pg 379]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 Troia596.

Urbs antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos597.

Haec finis Priami fatorum; his exitus illum

Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem

Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum

Regnatorem Asiae598.

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 vidi599.

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 [pg 380]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 filled600. 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 [pg 381]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 ursae601.

Evander receives him beneath his humble roof,

stratisque locavit

Effultum foliis et pelle Libystidis ursae602.

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 futuris603;

the picture of the great Temple of Juno—

Aerea cui gradibus surgebant limina nexaeque

Aere trabes, foribus cardo stridebat aenis604;

of the rich frescoes and bas-reliefs adorning it—

[pg 382]

Artificumque manus inter se operumque labores

Miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas

Bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem605;

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 vincunt606,

(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 [pg 383]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 casus607;

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

[pg 384]

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

Deponas letumque sinas pro laude pacisci.

Et nos tela, pater608, 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,

Turne609,—

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 referte610.

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 urbe611, etc.

The sea adventures of the Aeneid seem to be suggested [pg 385]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 mali612,

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 horrendum613—

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 [pg 386]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 ἀλεείνων614.

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 clamor615.

[pg 387]

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 fumum616.

Iamque rubescebat stellis Aurora fugatis,

Cum procul obscuros collis humilemque videmus

Italiam617.

Crebrescunt optatae aurae, portusque patescit

Iam propior, templumque apparet in arce Minervae618.

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 urbem619;

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 equorum620, 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 [pg 388]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 Chromimque621,

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 ἕκαστος622.

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—

[pg 389]

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 Mnestheus623;

though he can express a Roman contempt for death,—

Est hic, est animus lucis contemptor624,

and can sympathise with the energetic daring of his Italian heroes and heroine,—Turnus, Lausus, Pallas625, 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 vocant626.

Yet even in the incidents of his battle-pieces Virgil does not follow Homer slavishly. The warlike action of the poem is not [pg 390]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 [pg 391]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 odiis627.

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 amores628,’ and reappeared again in the deaths of Drusus and Germanicus—that compassion which dictates the words

si qua fata aspera rumpas

Tu Marcellus eris629,

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 auro630,

and

At vero, ut voltum vidit morientis et ora,

Ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris,

Ingemuit miserans graviter dextramque tetendit,

Et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago631,

[pg 392]

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 error632.

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 Olympum633.

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 prorumpit634—

the gathering of the Italian races from ‘mountainous Praeneste, from the tilled lands around Gabii, from the banks of the cool [pg 393]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 rauco635.

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 [pg 394]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.’

[pg 395]

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 mag[pg 396]nificence, 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,

Viximus636, 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 [pg 397]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 toros637.

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 est638.

His courage in battle springs from his confidence in his destiny—

Tum socios maestique metum solatur Iuli

Fata docens639.

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 ductori640.

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—

[pg 398]

Maxima res effecta, viri: timor omnis abesto641.

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 artus642.

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 ἀπηύρα643.

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 [pg 399]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 dieux644.’ 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 θυμός645,

[pg 400]

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 ἐφεστάμεν646.

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 rosa647,

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 [pg 401]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 spolior648;—

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 [pg 402]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—

[pg 403]

nunc coniugis esto

Quisque suae tectique memor: nunc magna referto

Facta, patrum laudes649.

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

Largior650.

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 Tolumnius651, 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, tollat652.

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 fate653’—

[pg 404]

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 avorum654.

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 hostis655.

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 [pg 405]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 [pg 406]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 sepulchro656.

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 quietem657.

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

Sollicitat658;

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,

[pg 407]

Omnibus umbra locis adero:—dabis, improbe, poenas:

Audiam, et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos659.

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 vires660.

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 carinae661.

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 mortis662.

[pg 408]

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 friend663,’ 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 amorem664.

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 [pg 409]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 [pg 410]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.