The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil

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Title: The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil
Author: Sellar, W. Y.
Language: English
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THE ROMAN POETS

OF THE

AUGUSTAN AGE:

VIRGIL.

W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D.

LATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

THIRD EDITION

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

IMPRESSION OF 1941
FIRST EDITION, 1877
THIRD EDITION, 1897

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO
E. L. LUSHINGTON, ESQ., D.C.L., LL.D., ETC.
LATE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW.

MY DEAR LUSHINGTON,

Any old pupil of yours, in finishing a work either of classical
scholarship or illustrative of ancient literature, must feel that he owes
to you, probably more than to any one else, the impulse which directed him
to these studies. It is with this feeling that I should wish to associate
your name with this volume. Many of your former pupils can confirm my
recollection that one of the happiest influences of our youth was the
admiration excited by the union, in your teaching, of perfect scholarship
with a true and generous appreciation of all that is excellent in
literature. The intimate friendship of many subsequent years has afforded
me, along with much else of still higher value, ample opportunities for
verifying these early impressions.

Ever affectionately yours,
W. Y. SELLAR.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This volume has been written in continuation of one which appeared some
years ago on the Roman Poets of the Republic. I hope in a short time to
bring out a new edition of that work, enlarged and corrected, and
afterwards to add another volume which will treat of Horace and the
Elegiac Poets. I have reserved for this later volume the examination of
the minor poems which have been attributed to Virgil, most of which belong
to the Augustan Age.

Besides the special acknowledgments of ideas or information derived from
various sources, which are made in notes at the foot of the page where an
occasion for them arises, I have to make a general acknowledgment of the
assistance I have received in my studies of the Augustan literature from
the earlier volumes of Dr. Merivale’s ‘History of the Romans under the
Empire,’ from the ‘History of Roman Literature’ by W. S. Teuffel, from M.
Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Étude sur Virgile,’ and from the Introductions and Notes
to Professor Conington’s edition of Virgil, and Mr. Munro’s edition of
Lucretius. In the account given of the Alexandrian literature in Chapter
I, I have availed myself of the chapters treating of that subject in
Helbig’s ‘Campanische Wandmalerei’; in treating of the estimation in which
Virgil was held under the Roman Empire, I have taken several references
from the work by Sr. Comparetti, ‘Virgilio nel Medio Evo’; and in
examining the order in which the Eclogues were composed, I have adopted
the opinions expressed in Ribbeck’s Prolegomena. I have also derived some
suggestions from the notes in the edition of Virgil by M. E. Benoist, and
from the work of M. G. Boissier, ‘La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux
Antonins.’ As the greater part of this volume was written before the
appearance of Dr. Kennedy’s Virgil, I have not been able to make so much
use of his notes as I should have wished: I have, however, profited by
them to correct or to illustrate statements made before I had seen his
work, and, in revising the Virgilian quotations for the press, I have
followed his text.

I did not read Mr. Nettleship’s valuable and original ‘Suggestions
Introductory to the Study of the Aeneid’ until I had finished writing all
I had to say about that poem. I have drawn attention in the text or in
notes at the foot of the page to some places in which I modified what I
had originally written after reading his ‘Suggestions,’ to others in which
my own opinions are confirmed by his, and to one or two points of
divergence in our views.

Since the third chapter was printed off, I have received what seems a
confirmation of the opinion expressed there as to the probable situation
of Virgil’s early home, from a friend who recently visited the district,
where I suppose it to have been. He writes of the country which he passed
through—‘The result of my observations perfectly confirms what you had
already supposed. The country south of the Lago di Garda for a distance of
at least twenty miles is of a gently undulating character, and is
intersected by long ranges of hills which gradually sink down towards the
lake and the Mincio. The loftiest of these hills may perhaps reach a
height of 1000 feet above the lake-level, but that is a point on which I
cannot say anything certain.’

EDINBURGH, _Nov. 1876_.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The only material change which I have made in this edition is that I have
added translations of the passages quoted, for the convenience of any
readers, who, without much knowledge of Latin, may yet wish to learn
something about Latin literature. In the translations from Virgil, I have
sometimes made use of expressions which I found in Conington’s prose
Translation and in Mr. Papillon’s recently published edition of Virgil. I
have also availed myself of Sir Theodore Martin’s Translation of the Odes
of Horace. In correcting or supplementing some statements made in the
first edition, I have occasionally profited by remarks made in criticisms
on that edition which appeared shortly after its publication.

EDINBURGH, _March, 1883_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
I. Relation of the Augustan Age to other Literary Epochs 1-8
Relation of the Augustan poetry to that of the 1
preceding Age
Parallel of the Augustan Age with other great literary 4
Epochs
---- especially with the Age of Louis XIV 5
Chief conditions modifying the poetry of the Augustan Age 7
II. Influence of the enthusiasm in favour of the Empire 8-21
General longing for peace 8
Revival of national sentiment and pride of Empire 10
Moral and religious reaction 13
Augustus the centre of the national enthusiasm 14
Deification of the Emperor in the poetry of the Age 15
---- illustrated by other extant works of art 19
Direction given to national sentiment by Augustus 20
III. Influence of Patronage on the Augustan Poetry 21-31
Poetry employed in the interest of the Government 21
Patrons of literature--Augustus 22
Personal influence of Maecenas 23
Pollio, Messala, Agrippa, Cornelius Gallus 26
Causes of the connexion between literature and social 28
eminence
Effects of this connexion on the tone of literature 29
IV. Influence of material conditions on Literature 31-37
Wealth and luxury of Rome in the Augustan Age 31
Liberality of Augustus and Maecenas to Virgil and Horace 33
Effects of this on the art of these poets 34
Reaction from the luxury of the Age apparent in literature 35
V. General condition of literary culture as affecting 37-54
the Augustan Poetry
Intellectual character of the last years of the 37
Republic and earlier years of the Empire
Distinction between the earlier and later periods 38
Appreciation of Greek art and literature in both 39
Alexandrine influences on the Augustan poetry 41
Characteristics of the Alexandrine poets 42
Their treatment of mythological subjects 43
Scientific and learned character of their poetry 44
Their treatment of the passion of love 45
Their treatment of external Nature 46
Pictorial art of the later Greeks 48
Superiority of the Augustan to the Alexandrine literature 49
Friendly relations among the poets of the Augustan Age 51
Influence of these relations on their art 52
Hostility of other literary coteries 53
VI. Causes of the special devotion to Poetry in the 54-58
Augustan Age
Effect of the Monarchy on the great forms of prose 55
literature
Poetry later in feeling the effects of Despotism 56
The Augustan literature the maturest development of 57
the national mind

CHAPTER II.
VIRGIL’S PLACE IN ROMAN LITERATURE.
Virgil’s pre-eminence acknowledged till recent times 59
Disparagement of his genius in the present century 60
I. Estimate of Virgil in former times 60-68
His former reputation as a great Epic Poet 61
Estimate of the Aeneid among the Romans 61
" " during the ‘Dark Ages’ 64
" " at the revival of letters 65
" " during the 17th and 18th centuries 67
II. Change in the estimate of Virgil in the present 68-77
century
Virgil’s alleged dissatisfaction with the Aeneid 69
Probable explanation of this 70
Adverse criticisms in the present century 71
Causes of these criticisms 74
Advance in Greek scholarship 74
Modern interest in remote antiquity 74
Literary reaction at the end of the 18th century 75
III. Virgil’s supreme importance as a representative 77-87
writer
Virgil a great representative of his country and age 78
" " of the idea of Rome 79
" " of the sentiment of Italy 80
" " of the political feeling of his age 81
" " of its ethical and religious
sensibility 83
" " of Roman culture and learning 84
" " of Roman art and style 85
The style of Virgil the maturity preceding decay 86
IV. Virgil’s claim to rank among the great Poets of 87-92
the World
Distinction between Greek, Latin, and modern imagination 87
Vividness and realism of feeling characteristic of the 89
Latin imagination
Modes in which this vividness and realism are 90
manifested by Virgil

CHAPTER III.
LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.
I. Sources of our knowledge of Virgil’s Life 93-99
Various sources of ancient literary biography 93
Direct personal statements of the authors 93
Indirect self-revelations in their works 94
Evidence of contemporaries 94
Works of ancient Grammarians, etc. 95
Remains of ancient art 95
Knowledge of Virgil derived from his works 95
Testimony of Horace 95
Biographies of Probus and Donatus 98
Their value as evidence of facts and character 98
II. Life of Virgil 99-121
His name and the year of his birth 99
His birth-place as affecting his genius 101
His birth-place as affecting his culture 103
" " " his political feeling 104
Characteristics of the class from which he sprang 105
His early years 107
His studies at Rome 109
His later life in his native district 113
Loss of his farm 115
Publication of the Eclogues and preparation of the Georgics 116
Testimonies of Horace as to his life during this time 117
The Georgics composed at Naples 119
His death and wish to destroy the Aeneid 120
III. Personal Characteristics 121-129
His recluse and studious life 122
His personal appearance and habits 123
Impression of his character derived from Horace 124
" " " from his own works 125
His indifference to political freedom 127
His devotion to his art 127

CHAPTER IV.
THE ECLOGUES.
I. The Eclogues examined in the order of their 130-152
composition
Character of the Eclogues indicated by expressions 130
used in them
Order and time of their composition 131
Imitative character of the second and third 132
The fifth founded on the death and apotheosis of 137
Julius Caesar
Purely Theocritean character of the seventh 138
The first and ninth Eclogues 139
Elements of interest in the sixth 143
The ‘Pollio’ 144
Questions discussed in connexion with that poem 146
The eighth and tenth Eclogues 148
II. Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral 152-160
Theocritean origin of Virgil’s Eclogues 152
Primitive pastoral poem among the Greeks 154
The ‘woes of Daphnis’ 155
The love of the Cyclops for Galatea 156
Origin of the pastoral dialogue 157
Artistic form given to these primitive elements by 157
Theocritus
Difference between the pastoral life of Sicily and 159
rural life of Italy
III. Truth of feeling in the Eclogues 161-173
Inferiority of the Eclogues in truth and vividness of 161
representation
Allusive personal references in the Eclogues 161
Mythological and geographical allusions 162
The sentiment of Nature in the Eclogues 164
The love of home and of the land 165
The passion of love 167
Style and rhythm of the Eclogues 168
Their Italian character 172

CHAPTER V.
MOTIVES, FORM, SUBSTANCE, AND SOURCES OF THE GEORGICS.
I. Original motives of the Poem 174-180
Desire to treat of rural life in the spirit of Hesiod 175
Influence of Maecenas on the choice of the subject 177
Virgil’s sympathy with the old class of husbandmen 178
II. Form of poetry adopted by Virgil 180-184
What forms of poetry available for Virgil’s purpose? 180
Character of didactic poetry among the Greeks 182
New type of didactic poetry introduced by Virgil 183
III. National interest and substance of the Poem 185-190
Italian character of the subject 185
Connexion of the subject with national history 187
Exceptional character of the concluding episode 189
IV. Sources of the Poem 190-198
Materials derived by Virgil from his own life 191
From Greek and Roman writers on agriculture 191
Relation of the Georgics to the ‘Works and Days’ 193
" " to the Alexandrine Metaphrastae 195

CHAPTER VI.
STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION OF THE POEM IN RELATION TO
THE POEM OF LUCRETIUS.
I. Personal affinities and contrast between Lucretius 199-204
and Virgil
Influence of Lucretius on the ideas, method, and style 199
of the Georgics
Virgil’s recognition of his relation to Lucretius 200
Identity of feeling in the two poets 201
Difference in position and sympathies 202
Difference between the philosophic poet and poetic artist 203
II. The Lucretian idea of Nature in the Georgics 204-214
Nature more fully revealed in Lucretius than in 204
earlier poetry
Idea of the struggle of man with Nature in Lucretius 205
Lesson drawn by him from this idea 207
Presence of the same idea in other Roman writers 207
Virgil’s sense of the life of Nature derived from 208
Lucretius
Idea of the struggle with Nature as ordained by 209
Providence
Prominence thus given to the duty of labour 211
Lesson inculcated in the Georgics 212
Scientific beliefs of Lucretius as adopted or rejected 213
by Virgil
III. Dedications and Invocations in the two Poems 214-228
Lucretius Virgil’s chief model in technical execution 214
Address to Maecenas compared with address to Memmius 215
Eulogy of Caesar compared with eulogy of Epicurus 216
Meaning of their Invocation of Supernatural aid 217
Varieties of religious feeling and belief in the 218
Augustan Age
Rustic Paganism of Italy 218
Religious conceptions embodied in Greek art 219
Religious elements in Greek speculative philosophy 221
National religion of Rome 222
Meaning of the Invocation of Caesar 224
Union of various modes of religious belief in the 225
Invocation
Proems to the other Books of the Georgics 227
IV. Comparison of Virgil with Lucretius in didactic 229-244
exposition and illustration
Method of science in Lucretius, of art in Virgil 229
Greater selection and elimination of materials in Virgil 230
Illustration of Virgil’s subject from his sense of beauty 231
---- from his sense of the life of Nature 232
---- from his sympathy with the life of animals 233
---- from his conception of human energy in conflict 234
with Nature
---- from literary and mythological associations 235
---- from astronomy, antiquity, religious usages 239
Inferiority of Virgil to Lucretius in the use of 240
imaginative analogies
More uniform excellence in diction and rhythm 241
Virgil more of a conscious artist 242
V. The Episodes in the Georgics 244-260
Purpose of the episodes in Lucretius and in the Georgics 244
The minor episodes in the Georgics 245
Episodes at the end of Books iii. and iv. 248
Episode of the omens accompanying the death of Julius 252
Caesar
Episode of the Glory of Italy 255
Episode at the end of Book ii. 256

CHAPTER VII.
THE GEORGICS A POEM REPRESENTATIVE OF ITALY 261-279
The Georgics an original work of Latin genius 261
Technical value of the poem as an exposition of 263
Italian husbandry
Relation of the illustrative matter to the cultivated 266
Italian mind
Feeling of the dignity of labour an Italian sentiment 267
Italian feeling and representation of Nature 268
Italian character of the religious sentiment of the poem 272
" " of its ethical and political sentiment 273
" " of its artistic execution 276

CHAPTER VIII.
THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL 280-294
Distinction between primitive and literary epic 280
Absence of primitive epics from Roman literature 281
The Roman epic originates in the imitation of the 282
Greek epic
New character given to the Roman epic from the 283
national sentiment and commemorative instinct
---- from admiration of great men 284
---- from capacity for works of massive execution 285
National characteristics of the poem of Naevius 286
Historical substance of the early Roman epic 287
Representative character of the Annals of Ennius 288
Later annalistic and panegyrical poems 289
New type of Roman epic introduced by Varro Atacinus 291
Type of historical epic rejected in the maturity of 292
Roman art

CHAPTER IX.
FORM AND SUBJECT OF THE AENEID.
I. Purpose of the Aeneid and motives determining the 295-300
form of the Poem
Literary motives of the poem 295
Motive originating in the state of public feeling 296
" " in the position of Augustus 297
New problem in literary art presented to Virgil 298
The Aeneid the epic of the national fortunes 299
II. Adaptation of the legend of Aeneas to Virgil’s 300-310
purpose
Adaptation of the legend of Romulus to a poem founded 300
on national sentiment
Deficiency of the legend of Aeneas in national and 301
human interest
Greek origin of the legend 301
Its late reception among the Romans 303
Vague and composite character of the legend 304
Grounds on which Virgil’s choice was justified 305
Connexion of the legend with the Homeric cycle of events 305
Its recognition by the State for more than two centuries 306
Connexion with the glory of the Julian family 308
Largeness of scope afforded by the vagueness of the legend 309
Adaptation to a poem representative of Rome in the 309
Augustan Age
III. Composite character of the Aeneid illustrated by 310-324
an examination of the Poem
Twofold purpose of Virgil in composing the Aeneid 310
Native and Greek sources employed by him 310
Prominence given to his double purpose in the 311
statement of the subject of the poem
This double purpose traced in the details of the action 313
" " " in the ‘Inferno’ and in the ‘Shield
of Aeneas’ 323
The Aeneid a new type of epic poetry 324

CHAPTER X.
THE AENEID AS THE EPIC OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
I. Modes of national Sentiment expressed in the Aeneid 325-335
Pride of Empire 325
Sense of national continuity 328
Patriotic Italian sentiment 330
Antagonism to other races 333
II. Influence of the Religious Idea of Rome on the 336-347
action of the poem
Roman belief in the ‘Fortuna Urbis’ 336
Idea of ‘Fate’ in the Aeneid 337
Compared with the same idea in Tacitus 339
Origin and meaning of the Roman idea of Fate 340
Influence of this idea on the religious motives of the poem 341
Ethical aspect of religion in the Aeneid 344
III. Place assigned to Augustus in the Aeneid 347-354
Augustus the typical embodiment of Roman imperialism 347
Meaning given by Virgil to his relation to Aeneas 349
Imaginative and ethical value of the idea on which the 352
Aeneid is founded

CHAPTER XI.
THE AENEID AS AN EPIC POEM OF HUMAN LIFE.
I. General character of the action as affected by the 355-364
Age in which the poem was written, and by the author’s
genius
Dignity of the circumstances treated in the poem 355
Distinction of the actors 356
Interest to Roman readers of the revival of Homeric life 357
" " " of the new romance of Italy 358
Virgil’s narrative power 359
Inferiority to Homer in exhibiting a vivid image of life 360
" " from causes personal to Virgil 360
" " from the character of his Age 361
Virgil’s representation an artistic compromise 363
Sources of creative power in Virgil’s genius 364
II. Supernatural Agencies, Observances, and Beliefs 365-374
in the Aeneid
Part played by the Olympian Divinities in the Aeneid 365
" by the Powers of the Italian mythology 369
Survivals of primitive religious worship in the Aeneid 369
Belief in local deities 370
Worship of the dead 371
Virgil’s ‘Inferno’ 373
His exact acquaintance with religious ceremonial 374
III. Political and Social Life, etc. as represented 376-394
in the Aeneid
Idea of a Paternal Government in the Aeneid 376
Sense of majesty attaching to Government 378
Relation of States to one another 379
Material civilisation 381
Social manners 382
Sea-adventure 384
Battle-scenes 388
Appeal to local associations 392
IV. Conception and Delineation of Character in the 395-408
Aeneid
Weakness of dramatic imagination in Virgil 395
Conception and delineation of Aeneas 396
The minor characters of the poem 400
Turnus 402
Mezentius 404
Dido 405
V. On the Style, etc. of the Aeneid 408-423
Virgil’s imagination oratorical rather than dramatic 408
Characteristics of the speeches in the Aeneid 409
Descriptive faculty 410
Illustrative imagery 413
Rhythm and diction of the poem 418
Greatness of its style 421

THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

The Augustan Age, regarded as a critical epoch in the history of the
world, extends from the date of the battle of Actium, when Octavianus
became undisputed master of the world, to his death in the year 14 A.D.
But the age known by that name as a great epoch in the history of
literature begins some years earlier, and ends with the death of Livy and
Ovid in the third year of the following reign. Of the poets belonging to
that age whose writings have reached modern times—Virgil, Horace,
Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—all were born, and some had reached
manhood, before the final overthrow of the Republic at the battle of
Philippi. The earlier poems of Virgil and Horace belong to the period
between that date and the establishment of the Empire. The age of the
Augustan poets may accordingly be regarded as extending from about the
death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. to the death of Ovid 17 A.D.

The whole of this period was one of great literary activity, especially in
the department of poetry. Besides the writers just mentioned, several
others were recognised by their contemporaries as poets of high
excellence, though there is no reason to doubt that the works which have
reached our time were the most distinguished by original genius and
finished execution. These works, though differing much in spirit and
character as well as in value, have some common characteristics which mark
them off from the literature of the Republic. It seems remarkable, if we
consider the short interval which divides the Ciceronian from the Augustan
Age, and the enthusiasm with which poetry was cultivated by the younger
generation in the years immediately preceding the battle of Pharsalia,
that so few of the poets eminent in that generation lived on into the new
era. The insignificant name of Helvius Cinna is almost the only poetic
link between the age of Catullus and the age of Virgil.(1) Perhaps, also,
the Quintilius whose death Horace laments in the twenty-fourth Ode of Book
I. may be the Varus of the tenth poem of Catullus. The more famous name of
Asinius Pollio also connects the two eras; but in Catullus he is spoken
of, not as a poet, but simply as ‘a youth of wit and graceful
accomplishments(2),’ and in his later career he was more distinguished as
a soldier, statesman, and orator than as a poet(3). It is remarked by Mr.
Munro that there are indications that the new generation of poets would
have come into painful collision with those of the preceding generation
had their lives been prolonged(4). This spirit of hostility appears in the
somewhat contemptuous notice of Calvus and Catullus in the Satires of
Horace:—

Quos neque pulcher
Hermogenes unquam legit, neque simius iste
Nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum(5).

But it is rather in their political feelings and relations, and in the
views of life arising out of these, than in the principles and practice of
their art, that the new poets are separated from, and antagonistic to, the
old. Had Calvus and Catullus survived the extinction of liberty, it would
have been impossible for them to have adopted the tone of the poets of the
following age. By birth, position, and all their associations and
sympathies, they belonged to the Senatorian party. If they could have
yielded an outward submission to the ascendency of Julius Caesar and
Augustus, they never could have become sincerely reconciled to the new
order of things, nor could they have employed their art to promote the
ideas of the Empire. On the other hand, L. Varius, the oldest among the
poets of the new era, seems first to have become famous by a poem on the
death of Julius Caesar. Virgil, in the poem placed first in order among
his acknowledged works, speaks of Octavianus in language which no poet of
the preceding generation could have applied to a living contemporary: ‘O
Meliboeus, it was a God that gave to me this life of ease.’ In the
Georgics, planned, and, for the most part, composed before the
establishment of the monarchy, the person of Caesar is introduced, not
only as the centre of power in the world, but as an object of religious
veneration; and the national and ethical teaching of that poem is entirely
in harmony with the objects of his policy. And, although Horace in the
Satires and Epodes, composed between the years 40 and 30 B.C., is so far
true to the cause of his youth as to abstain from any direct declaration
of adherence to the winning side, yet he attributes to his adviser
Trebatius the counsel ‘to celebrate the exploits of the invincible
Caesar(6);’ and his whole relation to Maecenas is one of the most
characteristic marks of the position in which the new literature stood to
the State and to its leading men.

Yet, while separated from the literature of the Republic in many of its
ideas, and in the personal and political feelings on which it is founded,
the poetry of the Augustan Age is, in form and execution, the mature
development of the efforts of the previous centuries. Much of its literary
inspiration is derived from the age immediately preceding it, and from
still older native sources. The thought of Lucretius acted upon the mind
of Virgil through the force both of sympathy and antagonism, as a strong
original nature acts upon one which is at once receptive of influence and
possessed of firm convictions of its own. The national sentiment of Ennius
and the censorious spirit of Lucilius reappeared in new forms in the
Augustan poetry; while the more humane and social feelings, and the
enjoyment of beauty in Nature and art, fostered by Greek studies, as well
as the taste for less elevated pleasures, stimulated by the life of a
luxurious capital, are elements which the poetry of the early Empire has
in common with that of the last years of the Republic.

But the poetry of the new era has also certain marked characteristics, the
result not so much of antecedent as of concomitant circumstances, which
proclaim its affinity with great literary epochs of other nations rather
than with any period of the national literature. By Voltaire the Augustan
Age at Rome is ranked with the Age of Pericles at Athens, that of Lorenzo
de Medici at Florence, and that of Louis XIV. in France, as one of four
epochs in which arts and letters attained their highest perfection. The
affinity between the Augustan Age and those of Pericles and Lorenzo is
more superficial than real. They were all indeed periods in which the
cultivation of the arts to the highest degree of perfection was fostered
by the enlightened patronage of the eminent men who have given their name
to their eras. But the position of Augustus, as an absolute ruler, acted
more directly and potently, as a modifying and restraining power, on the
thoughts and feelings expressed in his age, than that of the leading men
of a republic; and the unique position of Rome as the mistress and
lawgiver of the civilised world gives to the literature of the Augustan
Age an imperial character and interest, which the national literature of
no other city or country, even though superior in other respects, can
possess. Those who regard all Latin poetry as exotic and imitative have,
with some plausibility, attempted to establish a parallel between the
Alexandrine poetry of the third century B.C. and that of the Augustan Age.
Nor can it be denied that the relation of the Augustan poets to the
Emperor was somewhat parallel to that of the scholars and poets of
Alexandria to the Ptolemies. The Alexandrine science and literature were
also important factors in Roman culture; and the most eminent poets both
of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it, with the
exception of Horace and Lucretius, acknowledged, in the form as well as
the materials of their art, the influence of this latest development of
Greek poetry. The nature and amount of the debt incurred to the learned
school of Alexandria will be considered later, and it will be seen that it
does not seriously affect the originality of the best Roman writers. The
age of Queen Anne and of the first George, again, has been called the
Augustan Age of English literature. The parallel between the two eras
consists in the relation which poets and writers held to men eminent in
the State, and also in the finished execution and moderation of tone
common to both. The writers of England in our Augustan Age had the
advantage over those of Rome in the freedom with which they could express
their thoughts; but, even with this advantage, and with the still greater
advantage that the English race, in the long course of its literary
annals, has given proof of a richer poetical faculty than any other race
except the Hellenic, the blindest national partiality would scarcely claim
as general and as durable an interest for any poetical work of that era as
that claimed for the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and for the Odes and
Epistles of Horace.

On the whole the closest parallel, in respect not so much of the substance
and form of composition as of the circumstances and conditions affecting
the lives and tastes of poets and men of letters, is to be sought in the
age of Louis XIV. of France. The position and the policy of Augustus and
of Louis XIV. were alike in some important features. As absolute rulers,
the one over a great empire, the other over the most powerful and
enlightened nation then existing, they each played the most prominent part
in history during more than half a century. They were each animated by a
strong passion for national and personal glory, and encouraged art and
literature, not merely as a source of refined pleasure congenial to their
own tastes, but as the chief ornament of their reigns, and as important
instruments of their policy.

And not only the political but the purely literary conditions of the two
epochs were in some respects parallel. They were both times, not of
growth, but of maturity; not so much of the spontaneous inspiration of
genius, as of systematic effort directed in accordance with the principles
of art and the careful study of ancient models. In each time circumstances
and mutual sympathies brought men of letters into close and familiar
contact both with one another and with men of affairs and of social
eminence. And, while the relation of patronage to literature is not in any
circumstances favourable to original invention, and though, except under
most advantageous conditions, its tendency is to produce a tameness of
spirit, or even an insincerity of tone, yet it has its compensating
advantages. It imparts to literature the tone of the world—of the world
not only of social eminence, but of practical experience and conversance
with great affairs. The good taste, judgment, and moderation of tone which
have enabled the Augustan literature to stand successfully the criticism
of nineteen centuries, as well as its deficiency in the highest creative
power, when compared with such eras as the Homeric Age, the Age of
Pericles, and the Elizabethan Age in England, mark the limits of the good
influence which this relation between the great in worldly station and the
great in genius can exercise on literature.

A further parallel might be drawn between the material conditions of the
Augustan Age and those of the Age of Louis XIV. The aspect which the world
they lived in presented to the writers of the two eras was that of a rich,
luxurious, pleasure-loving city, the capital of a great empire or kingdom.
And this aspect of the world acts upon the susceptible nature of the poet
with both an attractive and a repellent force. He may feel the spell of
outward pomp and magnificence and the attractions of pleasure; or he may
be driven back on his own thought, and into communion with Nature, and to
an ideal longing for simpler and purer conditions.

But, instead of tracing these resemblances further, it is more important
to observe that, though the outward influences acting upon the poets of
the two eras were in many respects parallel, yet in form and substance the
poetry of the Augustan Age is quite different from that of the Age of
Louis XIV. However striking the parallel between any two periods of
history may at first sight appear, the points of difference between them
must be much more numerous than those of agreement: and, though outward
conditions have a modifying influence upon national temperament and
individual genius, yet these last are much the most important factors in
the creative literature of any age. The genius of ancient Italy was, in
point of imaginative susceptibility, very different from that of modern
France; and, though his countrymen recognise in Racine a moral affinity
with Virgil, yet the works these poets have left to the world are as
different as they well can be, in form, purpose, and character. The
conditions indicated in the comparison between the two periods are to be
studied as modifying, not as productive, influences. The forms which the
highest spiritual life in an age or an individual assumes, the power of
free and happy development which it obtains, or the limitations to which
it has to submit, can, to a very considerable extent, be explained by
reference, in the case of nations, to the political, social, and material
circumstances of the age, and, in the case of the individual, to his early
life and environment, his education and personal fortunes. But the quality
and intensity of that spiritual force which manifests itself from time to
time in the world, giving a new impulse to thought, a new direction to
feeling, and a new delight to life, are not to be explained by any
combination of circumstances. Yet, just as it is desirable to realise all
that can be known of the life and fortunes of an individual poet before
endeavouring to extract from his various works the secret of his power and
charm, so it is desirable, before entering on a separate study of the
various books which constitute the literature of any age, to take a
general survey of the most important conditions affecting the lives,
thoughts, and art of all who lived and wrote in that age. In the Augustan
Age these conditions may be classified under four heads: (1) the political
circumstances of the Empire and the state of moral and religious feeling
resulting from them; (2) the social relation of men of letters to men
eminent in the State; (3) the wealth, luxury, and outward splendour which
met the eye and gratified the senses, in the great city itself, and in the
villas scattered over the shores and inland scenes of central Italy; (4)
the intellectual culture inherited from the preceding age and modified by
the tastes and conditions of the new generation. These will be reviewed as
conditions acting on the imagination, and forming the intellectual
atmosphere in the midst of which the productions of poetical genius
expanded into various shapes and dimensions of beauty and stateliness.

II.

The battle of Actium marked the end of a century of revolution, civil
disturbances and wars, of confiscations of property, proscriptions and
massacres, such as no civilised state had ever witnessed before. The
triumph of Augustus secured internal peace and order for a century. The
whole world was, as Tacitus says(7), exhausted, and gladly consented to
the establishment of the Empire in the interests of peace. The generation
to which Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius belonged had passed
through one of the worst crises of this long period of suffering. The
victors of Philippi, so far from following the example of clemency set to
them by the great victor of Pharsalia, had emulated the worst excesses of
the times of Marius and Sulla(8). The poets whose works record the various
phases of feeling through which that age passed had in their own person
experienced the consequences of the general insecurity. Virgil, in
addition to the loss of his paternal farm, had incurred imminent danger
from the violence of the soldier to whom his land had been allotted. The
language of Horace indicates that his life had been more than once in
jeopardy—at the rout of Philippi, and in his subsequent wanderings by land
and sea(9)—till he found himself a needy adventurer, ‘humilem decisis
pennis,’ again at Rome. Tibullus lost the greater part of the estates
which his ancestors had enjoyed for generations(10). A similar calamity
befell Propertius(11). Their own experience must thus have deepened the
horror of prolonged war and bloodshed natural to men of humane and
unwarlike temper, as they all were; for Horace, who alone among them took
part in the civil war, describes himself, a few years later, as ‘weak and
unfit for war(12),’ and Tibullus pleads his effeminacy and timidity as a
justification of a life devoted to indolent enjoyment(13). The works of
that age, composed between the dates of the battles of Philippi and
Actium, express the deep longing of the world for rest: those written
later express the deep thankfulness for its attainment. In Virgil the
recoil from the cruel and violent passions of the time in which his early
manhood was cast draws forth his tender compassion for all human
suffering, and creates in his imagination the ideal of a life of
peace—‘far from the clash of arms,’ the vision of a place of rest after
toil and danger—‘where the fates hold out to us peaceful dwelling-places;’
just as the recoil from the political anarchy of his own age and from the
cruel memories of the Marian times deepens the sense of human misery in
Lucretius, and forces on his mind the ideal refuge from the storms of life
in ‘the high and serene temples well bulwarked by the learning of the
wise.’ In Horace the feeling of insecurity arising out of his early
experience confirms the lessons of Epicurean wisdom, and teaches him not
to expect too much from life, but to enjoy thankfully whatever good the
passing hour brought to him. In all of them the sense of the real miseries
from which the world had escaped, and of the real blessings which it
enjoyed after the battle of Actium, induces an acquiescence in the
extinction of liberty and in the establishment of a form of government
which had been for centuries most repugnant to Roman sentiment.

Another influence reconciling men to the great political change which took
place in that era was the restored sense of national union. With whatever
feelings Octavianus may have been regarded in the early years of the
Triumvirate, after the final departure of Antony from Rome he was looked
upon both as the main pillar of order and as the champion of the national
cause, the true representative of Italy, of the ‘Senatus Populusque
Romanus’ against the motley hosts of the East, arrayed under the standards
of Antony and his Egyptian queen:—

Hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar
Cum Patribus Populoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis.
* * * * * *
Hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis,
Victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro,
Aegyptum viresque Orientis et ultima secum
Bactra vehit, sequiturque, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx(14).

With the Romans in the later age of the Republic the feeling of the glory
and greatness, the ancient and unbroken tradition, of their State was a
more active sentiment than the love of political liberty. The care for the
‘Respublica Romana’ as a free commonwealth was in the last century of its
existence confined to the leaders of the Senatorian aristocracy; the pride
in the ‘Imperium Romanum’ was a feeling in which all classes could share,
and which could especially unite to Rome the people of Italy, who had been
admitted too late into citizenship, and were separated by too great a
distance from the capital, to make the exercise of the political franchise
an object of value in their eyes. They probably felt themselves more truly
in the position of equal citizenship after the establishment of the
monarchy than before it. This feeling of the pride of empire asserts
itself much more strongly in the poets of the Augustan Age than in the
writers of the preceding generation. It is scarcely, if at all, apparent
in Lucretius and Catullus. It is only in the idealising oratory of Cicero,
who, with all his devoted attachment to the forms of the constitution and
the traditions of political freedom, still had a strong sympathy with the
imperial spirit of Rome, that we find the expression of the same kind of
sentiment which suggested to Virgil such lines as

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento(15),

and inspired the national Odes of Horace.

The majesty of the State, moreover, impressed the imagination more
immediately and more deeply when it was visibly and permanently embodied
in a single person than when the administration of affairs and the
government of the Provinces were distributed for a brief tenure of office
among many competitors. By enabling them to realise the unity and vast
extent of their dominion, Augustus reconciled the prouder spirits of his
countrymen to his rule, as by restoring peace, order, and material
prosperity he enlisted their interests in his favour. At the same time the
success of his arms over the still unsubdued tribes of the West, and of
his diplomacy in wiping out the stain left on the Roman standards by the
disastrous campaign of Crassus, continued to gratify the passion for
military glory, without endangering the security and prosperity of Italy.
The national sentiment of Rome was further gratified by the maintenance of
the old forms of the constitution, by the revival of ancient usages and
ceremonies, and by the creation of a new interest in the early traditions
of the city, and in the ‘manners and men of the olden time(16).’ In his
brief summary of the glories of the Augustan Age, Horace specifies this
return to the ancient ways, ‘by which the Latin name and the might of
Italy grew great,’ as one of the best results of Caesar’s administration.
The revolution effected in the first century before our era, so far from
seeking, as other revolutions have done, abruptly to sever the connexion
between the old and the new, strove to re-establish the continuity of
national existence. The Augustan Age impressed itself on the minds of
those living under it as an era not of destruction but of restoration.
Though in the early part of his career Augustus availed himself of the
revolutionary passions of his time to overthrow the Senatorian oligarchy,
yet he sought to establish his own power on the conservative instincts of
society, and especially on the religious traditions intimately connected
with these instincts(17). The powerful hold which these instincts and the
feeling of the vital relation subsisting between the past and the present
had on the Roman nature was the secret of the great stability of the
Republic and Empire. We shall find how largely this sentiment enters into
the poetry of the age, how it is especially the animating principle of the
great national Epic, as it was of the national commemorative poem of
Ennius.

But the age witnessed a restoration of the past, not only in its action on
the imagination, but in a more direct influence on opinion and conduct.
Horace says of it, in the same passage as that referred to above,—‘It put
a curb on licence violating all the rules of order, and caused ancient
sins to disappear.’ The licence of the previous age in speculation, as in
life, had provoked a moral and religious reaction. The idea of a return to
a simpler and better life, and of a revived faith in the gods and in the
forms and ceremonies of religion, existed at least as an aspiration, if it
did not bear much fruit in action. This ideal aspiration finds its
expression not only in the two great poems of Virgil, whose whole nature
was in thorough harmony with it, who may be regarded almost as the prophet
of a new and purer religion, but in many of the Odes of the sceptical
disciple of Aristippus. It was part of the policy of Augustus, whether
from sincere conviction or as an instrument of social and political
regeneration, to revive religion and morality. Among the great acts of his
reign commemorated by himself he especially mentions the building and
restoration of the temples(18). The ‘Julian laws’ aimed also at a social
and moral restoration. There is no ground for attributing any hypocrisy to
Augustus, as a legislator, or to Horace, as his panegyrist, though neither
the life of the Emperor nor that of the poet showed a strict conformity
with the object of these laws. Yet, if it failed to re-establish the
ancient faith in the minds of the educated classes and to restore a
primitive austerity of life, this revival affected the best literature of
the time by the influence which it exercised on the deeper and more
serious feeling of Virgil and the manlier sympathies of Horace, and by
imposing at least some restraint on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid in the
record of their pleasures(19).

The poets with whom our enquiry is concerned, and especially the two most
illustrious of their number, thoroughly represent, as they helped to call
forth, the spirit in which the Roman world passed through the great change
from the Republic to the Empire. They give expression to the weariness and
longing for rest, to the revival of Roman and Italian feeling, to the
pride of empire, the charm of ancient memories and associations, the
aspiration after a better life and a firmer faith. But, further, the
expression of these feelings is made subordinate to the personal glory of
Augustus, who stands out as the central and commanding figure in all their
representations. He is celebrated as the restorer of the golden Saturnian
age(20); the closer of the gateway of Janus(21); the leader of the men and
the gods of Italy against the swarms of the East and her monstrous
divinities(22); the ‘father of his country(23);’ the ruler destined to
extend the empire, on which ‘the sun never set,’ ‘beyond the Garamantians
and Indians(24);’ the descendant and true representative of the mythical
author of the Roman State(25); the man in whom the great destiny of Rome
and the great labours of all her sons were summed up and fulfilled(26);
the conqueror who raised three hundred shrines to the gods of Italy(27);
the legislator who by his life and his laws had reformed the corrupt
manners of the State(28). The sense of gratitude for the rest and
prosperity enjoyed under Augustus, the admiration for the real power of
intellect and character which made him the most successful ruler that the
world has ever seen, the confidence in the unbroken good fortune which
marked all his earlier career, may account, without the necessity of
attributing any unworthy motive, for the eulogies bestowed upon him as a
ruler and organiser of empire. But the language of admiration goes beyond
these into a region in which modern sympathies can with difficulty follow
it. Modern criticism may partially explain, but it cannot enable us to
enter with sympathy into that peculiar phase of the latter days of
Paganism which first appears in the literature and the historical
monuments of the Augustan Age as the Deification of the Emperors. In the
pages of Tacitus the worship of the Emperor appears as an established
‘cultus,’ as the symbol and the instrument of Roman domination over
foreign nations(29). The cities of Spain vie with the cities of the
Asiatic Greeks in their desire to raise temples in honour of the living
Emperor. Tacitus seems to regard it as even something discreditable in
Tiberius that he disclaims divine attributes(30). The origin of this
‘cultus,’ as it first established itself in the Greek cities of Asia, may
be referred to a survival of the old Greek hero-worship, which led even in
the Republican times to the offering of divine honours to Roman Proconsuls
and to the excess of the monarchical sentiment among Asiatics, which had
led to the worship of the successors of Alexander, and had prompted
Alexander himself to claim a divine origin. This foreign vein of feeling
united with a native vein,—the strong Roman faith in a secret invisible
power watching over the destiny of the State, and revered as ‘Fortuna
Urbis.’ This secret invisible divinity became as it were incarnate in the
person of the supreme ruler of the world, wielding the whole power,
representing the whole majesty of Rome.

The feeling with which the contemporary poets attribute to Augustus a
divine function in the world, and anticipate for him a place and high
office among the gods after death, is something different from this
literal adoration of a living man as invested with the full power and
attributes of Deity. But it is difficult to find any rational explanation
of the tone adopted by them in such passages as Georg. i. 24–42, or
Horace, Ode iii. 3. 11–12. There is, however, a striking coincidence in
the manner in which Virgil and Horace suggest the blending of the mortal
with the immortal, which seems to imply a common source of inspiration.
Horace asserts the divinity of Augustus by claiming for him qualities and
services equal to, or greater than, those which raised Castor, Pollux,
Hercules, Bacchus, and Romulus to the dwelling-place of the gods(31).
Virgil, in one of the cardinal passages of the Aeneid, in which the action
is projected into his own age, claims, for the restorer of order then, a
vaster range of beneficent influence than that over which the civilising
labours and conquests of Bacchus and Hercules had extended(32). In another
passage Horace speaks of the Roman as worshipping the ‘numen’ of Caesar
along with the Lares, ‘even as Greece keeps Castor and mighty Hercules in
memory(33).’ In all these passages the idea implied is that, as great
services to the human race have in other times raised mortals from earth
to heaven, so it shall be with Augustus after the beneficent labours of
his life are over(34). Probably the earliest suggestion of the idea in its
manifestation at Rome came from the consecration of Julius Caesar after
his death. The ‘Iulium Sidus’—‘the star beneath which the harvest-fields
should be glad with corn’—is appealed to both by Virgil and Horace as a
witness of the mortal become immortal. As the office of the deified Julius
is to answer the prayers of the husbandman, such too will be the office of
Augustus; and it is in this relation that he is invoked in the first
Georgic among the deities whose function it is to watch over the fields.
Both poets recall also the divine origin of the Emperor,—‘Augustus Caesar,
of the race of heaven,’—as the descendant of Venus. Both too dwell on the
especial protection of which he was the object. The divine care which had
watched over Rome from its origin was now centred on him as the supreme
head of the State, the heir and adopted son of the great Julius.

But, although we cannot ascribe to Virgil and Horace the ignorant
superstition which raised temples to the living Emperor in the cities of
Asia and in the various provinces of the Empire, it is difficult to
extract from their language any germ of sincere conviction. And yet to
condemn them of a base servility and hypocrisy would be to judge them
altogether from a modern point of view. At such a time as the Augustan Age
the minds of men were very variously affected by the different modes of
religious belief, national and foreign, philosophical and artistic, which
had been inherited from the past.(35) It must have been difficult for any
one to be altogether unmoved by the innumerable symbols of religion
visible around him, suggestive of a constant and immediate action of a
supernatural power on all human, and especially all national, concerns:
and it must have been equally difficult for any one trained in Greek
philosophy to accept literally the incongruous fables of mythology, or to
attach a definite personality to the imaginary beings of which it was
composed. Horace and Virgil appear to stand at opposite extremes of
incredulity and faith. Horace, in his Odes, accepts the beings of the
Greek mythology as materials for his art, while, by his silence on the
subject in his Satires and Epistles, he clearly implies that this
acceptance formed no part of his real convictions. To Virgil, on the other
hand, the gods of mythology appear to have a real existence, as
manifestations of the divine energy, revealed in the religious traditions
which connect the actual world of experience with a supernatural origin.
So too Horace, in his Odes, treats the blending of the divine with the
human elements in Augustus artistically or symbolically—represents him as
drinking nectar between Pollux and Hercules, or as inspired with wisdom by
the Muses in a Pierian cave—in much the same spirit as the great painters
of the Renaissance introduced in their pictures living popes or patrons of
art into the company of the most sacred personages. Virgil, to whose mind,
in all things affecting either the State or the individual, the invisible
world of faith appears very near the actual world of experience, seems
sincerely to believe in the delegation of supernatural power and authority
on the Emperor, and in the favour of Heaven watching over him. The divine
energy diffused through all living things might appear to be united with
the human elements in Augustus as it was in no other man, so that while
still on earth he might be thought of, if not as a ‘praesens divus,’ yet
as acting ‘praesenti numine,’ as the representative and vicegerent of
omnipotence(36).

Some further light is thrown on this subject by considering the
manifestation of this same spirit in other forms of the art of that age.
The famous statue of the Emperor, found recently in the ruins of a villa
of the Empress Livia, and at present seen among the statues of the
_Braccio Nuovo_ in the Vatican, has been critically examined by an eminent
German scholar, as furnishing the best commentary on the language of the
Augustan poets. In this statue the Emperor appears as blending the
attributes of a Roman imperator with those of a Greek hero or demigod.(37)
Beside him a Cupid, symbolical of the Julian descent from Venus, appears
riding on a dolphin. The breast-plate represents, among other protecting
deities, those whom Horace addresses in the Carmen Saeculare, Phoebus and
Diana, and the Sun and Earth-goddess. In the centre there is a figure of
Mars attended by the wolf, receiving back the standards from the Parthian;
on either side are seen two figures, representative of races recently
conquered, probably the Celtiberians and the tribes of the Alps. From the
coincidence of its symbolism it may be inferred that the statue was
produced at the same time as the Carmen Saeculare was composed. Its object
is to impress on the minds of men the image of Augustus as at once a great
earthly conqueror and a being of divine descent and possessed of more than
mortal attributes: the especial object of care to the supreme God of
Heaven; to Apollo, whom, since the victory of Actium, he claimed as his
tutelary divinity; to the Earth-goddess, the giver of fruitfulness and
prosperity; to Mars, the second divine ancestor of the Roman race, in
whose honour the famous temple, of which the ruins are yet visible, had
been raised after the battle of Philippi. The statue is of Greek
workmanship; the Greek divinities are presented in the forms familiar to
Greek art; but the idea is purely Roman, and born of the immediate
circumstances of the age.

Other extant works of art illustrate the divine functions and attributes
claimed for Augustus. In one cameo he is seen throned beside the goddess
Roma, with the sceptre and lituus, symbolical of his secular and spiritual
function, and the eagle of Jupiter at his side. In others both the Emperor
himself and various members of his family are represented under the form
of gods, goddesses, and demigods. Thus, in one in which the figure of
Aeneas is introduced, the young C. Caesar (Caligula) appears as Cupid, and
in another Germanicus and Agrippina are represented as Triptolemus and
Ceres.(38) But still more important, as attesting not the idealising
fancies of contemporary Greeks, but the native feeling with which the
house of Caesar came to be regarded even in the early years of the Empire,
is the one great extant monument of that age, a monument of Roman
inspiration and Roman workmanship, the Pantheon, raised by Agrippa in
honour of the deities connected with the Julian race.

The prominence given to this representation of Augustus in the poetry and
in the art of his age is probably to be explained by his own character and
policy. He was animated in no ordinary degree by that love of fame and
distinction which very powerfully influenced the greatest Roman conquerors
and statesmen, orators and poets. The disdain of such distinctions and the
dislike of public spectacles are mentioned, in contrast to the tastes of
his predecessor, among the causes of the unpopularity of Tiberius. The
enumeration in the Ancyraean inscription of the honours and titles
bestowed on him, recorded with ‘imperial brevity’ and dictated by a proud
self-esteem, attests the strength of this ruling passion in the latter
years of the life of Augustus. The direct pressure which he brought to
bear on the most eminent poets of the time to celebrate his wars is
sufficiently indicated in many passages in the Odes and familiar writings
of Horace. Belonging by descent to the comparatively obscure families of
the Octavii and Atii, Augustus attached peculiar importance to the glories
of the Julian line, which he inherited through his great-uncle and
adoptive father. Even Julius Caesar, notwithstanding his Epicurean
disregard of the religious ideas of his age, had encouraged the belief in
his divine descent, as marking him out for the special favours of fortune.
There was moreover in Augustus, in contradistinction to Julius Caesar, a
strong vein of religious or superstitious sentiment. His personal courage
has been questioned, probably with injustice, but he appears to have been
in a marked degree liable to supernatural terrors(39). As happens not
unfrequently with men who have been invariably successful in great and
hazardous enterprises, along with a strong reliance in the resources of
his own mind, he seems to have had faith in a supernatural guidance and
assistance attending him. His politic understanding appreciated the use of
such a belief to secure a divine sanction for his rule, which rested
substantially on military force. He availed himself of the enthusiasm and
willing services of the poets of the age, who regarded him as at once the
saviour of the State and their own benefactor, to impress this idea of
himself on the imagination of the cultivated classes, and at the same time
to glorify the actual successes of his reign, to further his policy of
national regeneration, and to make men feel the security of a
divinely-appointed government, along with the pride of belonging to a
powerful imperial State.

III.

The political revolution which transformed the Republic into the Empire,
and the state of public feeling, which, arising spontaneously, yet
received direction from the will and policy of Augustus, thus appear to be
the most important conditions determining the character of the Augustan
literature, and distinguishing it from that of the previous age. Poetic
art was employed as it had never been in any former time as an instrument
of government. If anything could have made the new order of things
acceptable to the best representatives of the old Republican traditions,
the purity and elevation imparted to the idea of the Empire in the verse
of Virgil must have had this effect. The poetical imagination, susceptible
as it is in the highest degree of emotions produced by the spectacle of
ancient or powerful government or of a people nobly asserting its freedom,
has little prophetic insight into the working of political causes. Nor
need it be regarded as a sign of weakness or time-serving in the poets of
the Augustan Age that they did not foresee the gloom and oppression which
were destined to follow so soon after the prosperous dawn of the Roman
Empire.

The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the
personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and
the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most
part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their
merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the
same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the
last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families,
or men intimately associated with them; and they wrote to please
themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the
independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a
literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age
were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and
the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they
lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost
men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the
favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent
reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.

Among the names of the patrons of literature that of Maecenas has become
proverbial, but perhaps even more important than his patronage was that
exercised by the Emperor himself. Not only was he a man of great natural
gifts, but he had received a most elaborate education. He was a powerful
and accomplished orator, and a practised writer(40). As was not unusual
with men who had received a thorough rhetorical training, he attempted the
composition of a tragedy, and had the sense to treat his failure with
good-natured humour(41). He made other attempts in verse, and composed
several works in prose, chiefly turning on the history of his own times.
He showed in his composition an especial regard for purity and correctness
of style. Suetonius tells us that he allowed no composition to be written
on himself ‘except in a serious spirit and by the best writers.’ Horace
testifies to this fastidiousness in the line,—

Cui male si palpere, recalcitret undique tutus(42).

Suetonius testifies further to his liberal patronage of genius; ‘ingenia
saeculi sui omnibus modis fovit;’ a statement confirmed by Horace’s
account of his liberality to Virgil and Varius,—

Dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae(43).

We are told also that in literary works he especially regarded ‘the
inculcation of precepts and the exhibition of examples of a useful
tendency for the state and for private life,’ which may partly account for
the didactic and practical aim which the higher poetry of the age set
before itself. He corresponded in terms of intimacy with Virgil, and made
repeated advances, which were at first somewhat coldly received, to
Horace, with the wish to number him among his familiar friends. But there
was another side to the temper of Augustus, which those admitted to his
favour did well not to forget. If he could be a liberal patron and genial
companion, he could also be a hard and pitiless master. Literature, like
everything else, had to be at his command, obedient to his will, and in
harmony with his policy. The fate of Gallus, that of Iulus Antonius, and
that of Ovid, prove that neither brilliant genius nor past favours and
familiarity could procure indulgence for whatever thwarted his purpose or
offended his dignity.

The relation between Maecenas and the members of his literary circle was
one of more intimacy and unreserve. This circle included among its members
Virgil and Varius, Horace and Propertius. The great works with which the
name of Maecenas is inseparably associated,—the Georgics of Virgil, the
first three books of the Odes of Horace, and the first book of his
Epistles,—entitle him to be honoured as among the most enlightened and
fortunate of all the patrons of literature. Virgil addresses him in
language not only of loyal admiration, but of acknowledgment for the
encouragement and guidance which he owed to him: and that such an
influence may have been really exercised by the inferior over the superior
mind is shown by the testimony given by Goethe of the stimulus which his
genius derived from the encouragement of the Duke of Weimar(44). Horace
writes of Maecenas in the language not only of admiration and gratitude,
but of warm and disinterested affection; and the favour shown to
Propertius, a poet of a very opposite type, shows that his appreciation of
genius was not limited by a narrow partisanship. His character seems to
have left very different impressions on the minds of his contemporaries,
according as they knew him intimately or merely from the outside. It is a
proof of his capacity and his loyalty(45) that he was the one man
thoroughly trusted by Augustus in all affairs of state, as Agrippa was in
war: and that his qualities of heart were no less admirable appears not
only from the poetical eulogies in the Georgics, the Elegies of
Propertius, and the Odes of Horace, but also from the more natural tribute
to his worth as a man and his sincerity as a friend contained in Horace’s
Satires and Epistles. On the world outside his own immediate circle he
produced the impression of an effeminate devotion to pleasure. His love of
pleasure and his shrinking from death seem to be confirmed by the
testimony of Horace:—

Cur me querelis, etc.

The sketch of him by Velleius Paterculus presents the view of his
character suggested by the contrast between his ability as a statesman and
the apparent indolence of his private life: ‘A man, who, while in all
critical emergencies displaying sleepless vigilance, foresight, and
capacity for action, yet, during intervals of relaxation, was in his
indolent self-indulgence almost more effeminate than a woman(46).’ It is
remarkable that Tacitus ascribes a similar character to the man in whom,
after the death of Maecenas, Augustus most confided—Sallustius
Crispus(47). Perhaps the position of Maecenas, as the trusted confidant of
a jealous and imperious master, required him to begin his career by
playing a part which afterwards became habitual to him. Among the traits
of his character indicated by Horace are knowledge of men, reticence, and
indifference to the outward distinctions of birth and rank. Whatever
ambition he had was to exercise real power as the minister of Augustus,
not to enjoy official titles. He certainly used his position to direct the
genius both of Virgil and Horace to public objects. There is no reason to
doubt the fact noticed in the Life of Virgil, that he influenced him in
the choice of the subject of the Georgics with the view to revive the
chief among the ancient arts, ‘by which the Latin name and the strength of
Italy had grown great.’ But it was with Horace that he shared all his
public interests and private feelings, and it is not a very hazardous
conjecture to presume that many of the Odes and familiar writings of the
latter poet reflect the tastes and sentiments of Maecenas, perhaps give
back the very style and manner of his conversation. The alternation
observable in the Odes of Horace between an apparent devotion to the
lighter themes of lyrical poetry and the serious interest in great
affairs, the irony disclaiming all lofty and austere pretension, the
Epicurean taste for simplicity combined with the Epicurean love of
pleasure, the indifference to outward state, and the urbanity and
knowledge of the world, more conspicuous in Horace than in any other
ancient poet, are suggestive of habitual contact with the worldly wisdom,
the real power disguised under an appearance of carelessness, the refined
enjoyment of life, the genial social nature, which were not only a great
power in the State, a great charm in the life of a by-gone age, but have
through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and
beneficent influence on human culture.

Other names of men eminent among the ‘lights and leaders’ of the time are
also intimately connected with its literature. The earliest patron by whom
Virgil’s genius was recognised was not Maecenas but Asinius Pollio, who in
his early youth had lived in the gay circle of Catullus; who, as the
lieutenant of Antony, had governed the province of Cisalpine Gaul; who had
filled the office of Consul, commanded an army, and obtained a triumph;
who is mentioned by Horace in one of his early Satires as among the few
critics whose appreciation he valued; who in later life obtained great
distinction as an orator; to whose talent as a writer of tragedy both
Virgil and Horace bear witness; who undertook the composition of a work
the loss of which is one of the most irreparable gaps in historical
records—a contemporary History of the Civil Wars ‘ex Metello consule;’—and
who performed the important service to literature of being the first to
establish a public library at Rome, and the more questionable service of
instituting the practice of public recitations.

M. Valerius Messala, the next in importance among the patrons of letters,
unlike Maecenas and Pollio, who, though of old provincial families, were
‘novi homines’ at Rome, was a representative of one of the oldest and most
illustrious patrician houses. He had held high command in the Republican
army at Philippi, and was distinguished as an orator, an author, and
patron of literature. He became the centre of a literary circle the most
brilliant member of which was Tibullus; which, though living in friendly
relations with the circle of Maecenas, did not share with it the
enthusiasm for the new _régime_. Men like Pollio and Messala are important
as elements contributing to the general taste and culture of the age, but
not as determining the political or ethical character stamped upon the
literature.

No direct literary influence was exercised by Agrippa, who is described by
the elder Pliny as ‘A man, whose manners more nearly approached rustic
plainness than refinement of taste;’ but his military and naval successes,
and still more the great works of utility and beauty erected under his
superintendence, contributed to the same end as the poetry of Virgil and
Horace, that of perpetuating the spell of the name of Caesar upon the
imagination of the world.

Cornelius Gallus, like Pollio, was eminent both in action and in poetry,
but his brilliant and erratic career was cut short too soon to enable him
to obtain a foremost place either among poets or among literary patrons.
Yet an undying interest attaches to his name from the evidence afforded in
the Eclogues of his being the first and apparently the only one who
inspired in Virgil that affection, partly of the heart, partly of the
imagination, which fascinates and attaches the finer nature of the poet to
the stronger or bolder nature of one in whom it recognises some ideal of
heroism, combined with the qualities which unite men in friendship with
one another. It is of Gallus alone that Virgil writes in such a strain as
this:—

Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas
Quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus(48);

and it is to Gallus that he assigns the pre-eminence in his own especial
province of poetry,—as he represents the shepherd-poet Linus presenting
him with the reeds which the Muses had of old given to ‘the sage of
Ascra(49).’

The Odes of Horace, addressed to men of high official station and ancient
family, such as Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Aelius
Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, still further illustrate the close connexion
between the great world and the world of letters. His later Epistles, many
of which are addressed to young men of rank devoting themselves to
literary studies and pursuits, attest the continuance of the same tendency
as time went on. And in the following generation Ovid and his
contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men
and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he
complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the
names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection
and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas(50). The chief
cause of this close bond of union between social rank and literary genius
was the fact that the men who in a former age would, from their birth and
education, have had a great political career before them, were now
debarred from the highest sphere of active life; while they were not yet,
what they became under the systematic corruption of the later Caesars, too
enervated and demoralised to continue susceptible of the nobler kinds of
intellectual pleasure.

Probably in no other aristocratic or courtly society has there been so
large a number of men possessing the ability and knowledge, the
accomplishments and leisure, required for the appreciative enjoyment of a
literature based on so fine and elaborate a culture. There are some
circumstances which made the patronage of the earlier half of the Augustan
Age more favourable to letters than that of other periods in which the
same influence has been exercised. The chief literary patrons then were
men who had played a prominent part in a revolutionary era,—men indeed of
ancient birth or hereditary distinction, yet owing their pre-eminence to
their talent, energy, and aptitude for the time, and thus open to new
influences, and free from the prejudices of an old-established nobility.
They had the culture and careful education of an aristocratic class,
combined with the liberal tendencies of revolutionary leaders. The
distance which in the preceding age would have kept apart men born into a
high social and political position from men of genius of humble origin was
easily passed in a time immediately succeeding that in which the great C.
Julius had practically proclaimed the doctrine of ‘an open career to every
kind of merit.’ Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as
painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially
marked:—

Cum referre negas quali sit quisque parente
Natus, dum ingenuus(51).

The new men at the court of Augustus were naturally attracted to the new
men in literature, sprung from quite a different class from that to which
Lucretius, Catullus, or Calvus belonged, and yet, in respect of education,
refinement, and even early associations, in no respect their inferiors.

Another bond of union between them was that they were nearly all of the
same age, born with one or two exceptions between the years 70 B.C., and
60 B.C., and that several of them had studied under the same masters. The
distinguished men of the Ciceronian Age had passed away, with the
exception of one or two, such as Varro and Atticus, living in retirement,
and consoling themselves with their farms and libraries for the changes
they had witnessed. The leaders in action, as in literature, were all
young men, beginning their career together in an altered world, the
characters and destinies of which they were called upon to mould. One by
one they dropped away, most of them before passing the period of middle
life, leaving the Emperor almost the sole survivor among a younger
generation who had grown up under the new order of things, and, while
acquiescing in it as complacently, sharing neither in the energy nor in
the enthusiasm of the early years (from about 27 B.C. to about 10 B.C.)
during which the Empire left its greatest and happiest impression.

This relation of men of letters to the leaders of society under the Empire
could not but exercise a strong influence both for good and evil on the
literature of the age. Such a society,—able, versed in affairs,
accomplished, fond of pleasure,—whatever else it may be, is sure to be
characterised by good sense, a strong feeling of order and dignity, an
acute perception of propriety in conduct and manners, an urbanity of tone
restraining all arrogant self-assertion and violent animosity of feeling.
Such a society is the determined enemy of all pedantry, eccentricity, and
exaggeration, of all austerity or indecorum, of one-sided enthusiasm or
devotion to a single idea. The ‘aurea mediocritas’ in feeling, conduct,
thought, and enjoyment is the ideal which it sets before itself. Horace,
except in his highest and most thoughtful moods, is the true
representative of such a society; but its indirect influence may be noted
also in the moderation, the invariable propriety and dignity, both of
thought and language in Virgil, and in the tones of refinement with which
Propertius and Ovid record the experience and preach the philosophy of
pleasure. Yet literature probably lost as much from the limitation of
sympathy imposed upon it as it gained from this acquired dignity and
urbanity of tone. The Roman poets of this era, even while expressing
national sentiments and ideas, were not like Homer, Pindar, or Sophocles,
who, while putting a sufficiently high value on distinctions of birth and
fortune, and on the personal qualities accompanying these distinctions,
are yet, in a sense in which the poets of the Augustan Age are not, the
poets of a whole people. Horace introduces that series of his Odes which
most breathes a national spirit by disclaiming all sympathy with the
‘profanum vulgus.’ He looks upon it as one of the privileges of genius,
‘to scorn an ill-natured public.’ He did not wish his Satires to be
thumbed by the multitude or by men of the class of Hermogenes Tigellius.
He cared only for the appreciation of men belonging to the class in which
all culture and regard for the traditions of Rome were now centred. The
urban populace, as represented in literature, appears only as a
rabble,—and this is still more the case in the days of Juvenal,—which had
to be kept in order, fed, amused, and tended, like some dangerous wild
beast. The middle class, absorbed in money-making and commercial
adventure, supplies to Horace the representatives of the misers and
parvenus whom he painted in his Satires for the amusement of his
aristocratic readers. The tone of Virgil is equally anti-popular. The view
of society which he delights to present is that of a paternal ruler giving
laws to his people and caring for their welfare. His repugnance to the
influence of the ‘popularis aura’ on government is indicated in such
passages as the famous simile near the beginning of the Aeneid,

Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
Seditio, saevitque animis immobile vulgus(52),

and in his representation of ‘the good King Ancus’ as he is called by
Ennius and Lucretius, among the unborn descendants of Aeneas, as

iactantior Ancus
Nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris(53).

The encouragement and appreciation of the leaders of society involved on
the part of the poets a position of deference or dependence; the relation
between them had thus its limiting as well as its corrective effects; it
tended to make literature tamer in spirit and thought, perhaps also less
original in invention and more bounded in its range of human interest.

IV.

The great wealth and luxury of Rome, during the latter years of the
Republic and the early years of the Empire, exercised also an influence on
the life, the imagination, and the thoughts of the poets living in those
times. Through commerce and conquest Rome had entered into the possession
of the long accumulated wealth of the world, and, as generally happens in
eras of advanced civilisation, the enjoyment of these was very unequally
distributed. Nothing appears more remarkable in the social life of the
latter days of the Republic than the great riches possessed and expended
by a few individuals, such as Crassus, Hortensius, and the Luculli. One
proof of the immense accumulation of money at that time is the large price
which, as we learn from Cicero’s letters, was paid for the houses of the
leading men among the nobility. The number of villas possessed by Cicero
himself, the son of a provincial Eques, and debarred by stringent laws
(though probably they were evaded) from turning his pre-eminence as an
advocate to profit, and the sums spent by him in their adornment, suggest
to us to what an extent the soil of Italy, the works of Greek art, and the
natural and artificial products of the East, were at the disposal of the
ruling aristocracy of Rome. Still more is this thought forced on us when
we think of Proconsuls and Propraetors who came home glutted with the
spoils of their provinces, which they squandered in the coarsest luxury.
The change to the Empire, though it put a considerable check on this kind
of plunder, did little to distribute wealth more generally, or to limit
luxurious living. The appropriation during the Civil Wars of the sacred
treasures long accumulated in the temples of the gods(54), and the great
stimulus given to commerce by the establishment of peace, added largely to
the wealth available at Rome for purposes of munificence, of ostentation,
or indulgence. But the largest share in the disposal of the wealth of the
world had passed from the representatives of the old governing class to
the ruling powers of the new Empire, and this change was decidedly for the
public advantage. Augustus and his ministers possessed the old Greek
virtue of μεγαλοπρέπεια, and understood that immense wealth could be
better expended on great public objects than on beautifying their villas
and fish-ponds, or giving a more dangerous variety to their
entertainments. The policy of Augustus in restoring and building the
temples of the gods had an artistic as well as a religious purpose. He
wished to make his countrymen proud of the outward beauty of Rome, as
Pericles had made the Athenians proud of the beauty of Athens.

The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the
noble ruins of temples and theatres—the visible monuments preserved from
that age—is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the
liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of
his two great works nearly twenty years of ‘unhasting and unresting’
labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the
disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and
enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the
Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens
and streams of Tibur or by the bright shores of Baiae(55). To the
liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and
freedom from the ordinary cares of life(56), which allowed them to give
all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their
art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable
circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its
most distinctive charm to their poetry—the beauty of Italian Nature. It is
only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own
sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman
poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or
country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century.
Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and
more graceful words than these:—

Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae
Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile
Fessis vomere tauris
Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.(57)

Nor can any lines express better a real love for the actual beauty of
familiar scenes combined with an imaginative longing for the ideal beauty
consecrated by old poetic associations,—like to that which in modern times
has often driven our Northern poets and artists across the Alps,—than the

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes;
Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi
Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta, etc.(58)

of the Georgics.

The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of
England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each
literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and
didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of
Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in
outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of
the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and
seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and
moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of
their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease
combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in
addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high
among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of
Nature, latent in particular places, the only period of English literature
from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are
among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may
be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As
was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a
certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his
inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M.
Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à
notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque
uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’

The ease of their circumstances and the fact that they owed this ease to
others (‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’) have impressed themselves in other
ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is
certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the
enjoyment of Nature is a passive rather than an active enjoyment derived
from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there
is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner
forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then,
as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the
imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery(59). Horace expresses a
shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of
that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of
delight in the Odyssey.

The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a
spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in
the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By
contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by
it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger
sense of the purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and
intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the
simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their
actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace
this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement
antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse
expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as
they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no
doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with
more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of
the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great
wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not
express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the

Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce
Aequo animo(60)

of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had
his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life.
Experience had satisfied him that the ‘slight repast, and sleep on the
grass by a river’s side(61),’ contributed more to his happiness in later
life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave
him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to
involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of
simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of
experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems
at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the
latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a
feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and
simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The
more active and energetic temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced
them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and
they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice
of the topics treated in their poems.

The conditions hitherto considered enable us to appreciate the prominence
given to national and imperial ideas in the literature of the Augustan
Age, and also to understand the chief differences in tone and spirit
between that literature and the literature of the Ciceronian Age. Along
with these marked differences, obvious points of agreement are also
observable. The cultivated men of each time had the same refined enjoyment
in Nature, art, literature, and social life. And in turning to the
intellectual conditions affecting literary form and style, the later
period will be seen to be still more closely connected with the earlier.
The golden age of Latin poetry, commencing in the years preceding the
overthrow of the Republic, reaches its maturity in the earlier part of the
reign of Augustus, and then begins to decline, till under Tiberius the
last poetic voice is silenced. Though Latin prose-literature had yet to be
enriched by some of its greatest and most original works, yet neither the
glory of the Empire, the charm of the Italian life, nor the vivifying
ideas and creations of Greek genius were ever again able to revive the
genuine poetical inspiration which ancient Italy once, and once only,
enjoyed in abundant measure.

The half-century from about 60 B.C. to about 10 B.C. was, at once, one of
those rare and germinative epochs in the history of the world, in which a
powerful intellectual movement coincides with, influences, and is
influenced by a great movement and change in human affairs; and it was at
the same time a period of a rich and elaborate culture, in which the
inheritance of Greek genius, art, and knowledge came for the first time
into the full possession of the Romans. The earlier half of this period
was more distinguished by original force of mind, the latter half by more
complete and perfect culture. The age of Cicero was one of great energy in
the chief provinces of human activity—in war and politics, in oratory,
poetry, and philosophy. There is no intellectual quality so characteristic
of his own oratory, of the poetry of Lucretius, of the military and
political genius of Julius Caesar, as the ‘vivida vis,’—the energy, at
once rapid and enduring in its action, as of a great elemental force.
Among their contemporaries, though there was no man of high political
capacity, yet there was a many-sided intellectual activity manifesting
itself in the forum and senate-house, in social intercourse and
correspondence, and in varied literary and philosophical discourse. As a
result of this novel activity of mind, the Latin language developed then
for the first time all its resources as a powerful organ of literature,
inferior indeed to the language of Greece in the days of its purity, but
much superior as the instrument of poetry and oratory, history and
philosophy, to that language in its decay(62). The writers of the Augustan
Age received this language from their predecessors, in its most sensitive
period of growth, while able to present to the mind in unimpaired
freshness the immediate impressions from outward things and from the inner
world of consciousness, but still capable of more delicate and varied
combinations to fit it to become the perfectly harmonious organ of
sustained poetical emotion. This further development was given to it by
the Augustan poets, but not without some loss of native force and purity
of idiom. They too felt the influence of the strong intellectual movement
of the preceding age. But it came upon their minds with a less novel and
vehement impulse. They are greater in execution than in creative design.
They are more concerned with the results than with the processes of
thought. Virgil may have been as assiduous a student of philosophy as
Lucretius, but he does not feel the same need of consistency of view and
firmness of speculative conviction; he shares with Lucretius the strong
passion for poetry (‘dulces ante omnia Musae’), but neither he nor Horace,
though each recognises the supreme claims of philosophy, shows the passion
for enquiry which induced Lucretius

Noctes vigilare serenas,
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis(63);

so that even in his dreams he describes himself as ever busy with the
search after and exposition of truth,—

Nos agere hoc autem et naturam quaerere rerum
Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis(64).

The master-pieces of the Augustan literature were not the products of that
vivid and rapidly-working creative energy which marked the Ciceronian Age.
There never was an age in which great writers trained themselves so
carefully for their office, strove so much to conform to recognised
principles of art, reflected so much on the plan and purpose of their
compositions, or used more patient industry in bringing their conceptions
to maturity. The maxim ‘nonum prematur in annum’ illustrates the spirit in
which the great artists of that age worked. The cultivated appreciation of
Greek art and poetry—the essential condition of the creative impulse of
Italy—then reached its highest point, produced its supreme effect in a
national Roman literature of similar perfection of workmanship, and, after
that, rapidly declined and passed away from the Roman world as a source of
literary inspiration, leaving however the educating influence of this new
literature in its place. The Greek language had indeed been studied at
Rome for nearly two centuries before the Ciceronian Age. The earliest
Roman writers—Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, etc.—had used the epic and
dramatic poetry of Greece as a kind of quarry for their own rude
workmanship. The age of Laelius had imbibed much of the humanity and
wisdom of Greek speculation. But it was not till the age of Cicero and
Catullus that the long process of education and the largely increased
intercourse between the two nations had raised the Roman mind to a full
sense and enjoyment of artistic excellence, as revealed both to the eye
and to the mind. The men of that age, in the midst of all their active
pursuits, were moved by this foreign influence as the men of the
Renaissance were moved by the recovery of classical literature. In the
case of some among them the passion for accumulating books and works of
art became the absorbing interest in their lives. Though in some of the
orators and men of letters, e.g. Memmius, as we learn from Cicero, their
Greek tastes fostered an affected indifference to their own nationality,
yet on the best minds, such as those of Cicero himself, Lucretius, and
Catullus, this intimate contact with Greek genius acted with a vivifying
power by calling forth the native genius of Italy. It was the peculiarity
of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions
from other nations with whom it came in contact, without sacrifice of the
strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the
Italian soil, ‘that it is most responsive to the care bestowed on it,
since, through the energy of its cultivators, it has learned to yield the
products of nearly the whole world(65),’ might be said with equal truth of
the Italian mind. This adaptability to foreign influences, without loss of
native genius and character, enabled Rome to exercise spiritual supremacy
over the world for more than a thousand years after the loss of her
temporal supremacy. In the age of Cicero and the following age this
adaptability to another form of spiritual influence gave to Rome a great
national literature.

Virgil, Horace, and their immediate contemporaries devoted themselves to
Greek studies with even more ardour than their immediate predecessors.
Education and preparation for a career in literature was a more elaborate
process than it had ever been before, perhaps we might add, than it has
ever been since. Virgil was still an unknown student, carefully preparing
himself for the labour of his life almost till he reached the age at which
Catullus died. Horace at the age of twenty-three was, to use his own
words, still ‘seeking for the truth among the groves of Academus.’ The
taste for literary leisure was greatly developed among the educated
classes by the suppression of all active political life; while at the same
time the establishment of public libraries made the access to books more
easy and general. Women equally with men made themselves familiar with at
least the lighter fancies of the learned Greeks. There are none of his
Odes into which Horace is so fond of introducing his mythological
allusions as those in which some real or fictitious heroine, Galatea or
Asterie, Lyde or Phyllis, is addressed. The poems of Propertius which
celebrate his love for Cynthia could only be appreciated by the possessors
of much recondite learning.

Though the greatest poets of the Augustan Age drew much of their
inspiration from the purer sources of Greek genius, especially from Homer
and the early lyric poets, yet the period of Greek literature which was
most familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age was the Alexandrian. It
was nearest to them in point of time; it was most congenial to the taste
of the learned Greeks who now gathered from the widely-scattered centres
of Greek culture to Rome, as they had formerly done to Alexandria; it was
of all the forms of Greek literature the most cosmopolitan, or rather the
least national, in spirit, and thus most easily adopted by another race;
it was moreover, like that of the Augustan Age, the literature of a
courtly circle enjoying the favour and contributing to the glory of a
royal patron. The earliest imitators of this poetry were Catullus and the
other poets contemporary with him, such as Calvus, Caecilius, Cinna, and
Varro Atacinus, the author of the epic poem of Jason. In the Augustan Age
Gallus had not only obtained distinction as the author of original elegics
in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a
poem of Euphorion of Chalcis(66), whom Cicero holds up as the type of
effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius(67).
Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed
in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and
many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole
range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the
Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception
of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces
of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he
acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets
of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which
arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even
in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in
his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.

This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its
latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of
culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or
intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was
artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms,
from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of
scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante
curiosity:—

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.(68)

The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are
Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis,
Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax and Nicander of Colophon,
Apollonius of Rhodes(69), Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene,
from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of
Ephesus, a grammarian,—names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of
the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any
great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To
these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of
Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna,
although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of
Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine
writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology
and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which
they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility
to the beauty of Nature.

Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty
which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend,
poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has
reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human
mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the
present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the
romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology
was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the
mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek
literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology
and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and
personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal
background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and
interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied
beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of
which they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on
human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long
after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any
recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest
them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their
readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure.
They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more
appropriate form of ‘epyllia’ or epic idyls, to enable their readers to
escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of
action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially
to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of
the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,—the
childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες) which delights in hearing a story
told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy
distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.

The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and
scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially
encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to
natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East
which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the
kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in
the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The
spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers,
endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and
systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history,
botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects
of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of
the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in
results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the
earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and
of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the
imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science
combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new
kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature
in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this
didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described
as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination
characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were
cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the
Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that
he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The
description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines

Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo,
Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer(70),

indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine
models on which it was founded.

The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in
its treatment of the passion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of
Nature. These are, in unadventurous times and in eras of advanced
civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks
its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion
are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and
Tibullus(71). They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have
illustrated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to
the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The passion of Medea for
Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the
Argonautics of Apollonius, as the passion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by
it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the most
powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling
in its intensity the ‘burning passion set to the lyre by the Aeolian
maiden,’ is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of
which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim(72).

The love of Nature, though not then for the first time awakened,—for there
are clear indications of the powerful influence of this sentiment, though
in subordination to human interests, in the earlier epic, lyric, and
dramatic poetry,—came then prominently forward as an element of refined
pleasure in life, and as an inspiring influence both to poets and
painters. The cause of the growth of this sentiment has been sought(73)
partly in the rise of great cities, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Alexandria,
which by debarring men from that free familiar contact with the forms,
movement, and life of Nature enjoyed by the older Greeks, created an
imaginative longing for a return to this communion as to a lost paradise.
The longing to escape from the heat and confinement of a great southern
city to the fresh sights and free air of woods and mountains must have
been often felt by poets and artists who had exchanged their homes on the
shores and the islands of the Aegean for the dusty streets of Alexandria.
Probably the Metamorphoses of Ovid convey as good an idea as anything in
Latin literature of the various influences active in the Alexandrine
poetry; and the kind of scene which he takes most delight in painting in
that poem is that of a cool and clear stream hidden in the thick shade of
woods and haunted by the Nymphs. The taste for gardens within great
cities, first developed at this time and afterwards carried to an extreme
pitch of luxury in the early Roman Empire(74), further illustrates the
need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.

Other causes have been suggested for the growth of this sentiment, as, for
instance, the decay of the polytheistic fancies, which, by regarding each
natural object as identified with some spiritual being, made it less an
object of affection and curiosity for its own sake. The sudden growth of
this sentiment in ancient times in an age of great luxury and culture is
analogous to the great development and expansion of the feeling under
similar circumstances in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In
both cases the sentiment arose from the desire to escape from the tedium
of an artificial life. The love of Nature is not, as we might naturally
expect it to be, a feeling much experienced by those who live in constant
contact and conflict with its sterner forces, as by husbandmen, herdsmen,
and hunters; nor is it developed consciously in primitive times or among
unsophisticated races. It is the accompaniment of leisure, culture, and
refinement of life. Some races are more susceptible of this feeling than
others; and perhaps the Greek with his lively social temper, and the
tendency of his imagination to reduce all beautiful objects to a human
shape, was less capable of the disinterested delight in the sights and
sounds of the outward world than the Italian. It was apparently among
Siculians, the kindred of the people of Latium, and not among men living
in the mountains of Arcadia or Thessaly, that Theocritus found the
personages of his rustic idyl. Whether it was from the greater
susceptibility of their national temperament, or from the fact that they
lived in the later times of the world, to which the sentiment was more
congenial, the Roman poets of the Augustan Age and of that immediately
preceding it are the truest exponents of the love of Nature in ancient
times; though it may be that, without the originating impulse given by the
Greek mind in the Alexandrian period, and perpetuated by educated Greeks
living in Southern Italy, this love of natural beauty might never have
been consciously realised by them as a source of poetic inspiration.

The pursuit of literature in the Alexandrian Age was accompanied with
great activity in the other arts, especially in sculpture and painting.
These last continued to be carried on by Greeks in Italy after Rome had
succeeded to Alexandria as the centre of human culture. Sculpture and
carving on wood, works of art in bronze, and the graving on gems continued
to perpetuate an aesthetic half-belief in the Olympian deities and in the
other creations of the Greek theology. Painting seems to have treated the
same kind of subjects and to have aimed at satisfying the same class of
feelings as the poetry of the Alexandrian time. Many of its subjects it
seems to have drawn directly from the works of poets(75). The paintings
recovered from Pompeii, which may be presumed to have continued the
traditions of a somewhat earlier art, illustrate the same tastes which
were gratified by the poetical treatment of mythological subjects, of
landscape, and of the passion of love. The knowledge acquired by science
seems also to have been pressed into this service by the artist. The
frequent representations of wild animals originated in the same kind of
interest which animated Nicander to the composition of the Θηριακά(76).
Realistic reproductions from common life seem also to have been frequently
executed by ancient, as by modern, painters. If, as is not improbable, the
‘Moretum’ and the ‘Copa’ are translations or imitations of Greek
originals, they exemplify still further the close connexion between the
art of the poet and of the painter among the Alexandrian dilettanti.

The various kinds of art which bring human forms and scenes from outward
nature before the eye, and especially the art of the painter, must
accordingly be taken into account as means of making the creations of
Greek fancy and the objects of Greek sentiment vividly present to the
Roman imagination. They not only acted immediately on the mind of the poet
by suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent
illustrations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to
interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the
poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the
Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan
poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works
of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with
what was most perfect in form, noblest in thought, feeling, and expression
in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of
Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old
Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan
literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With
their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their
originality might have been altogether overpowered by an exclusive study
of the nobler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of
contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning,
and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine
poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour
of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of
their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the
blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in
the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has
been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and
Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, passions, and experience of a new
and more vigorous race.

One other circumstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the
culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the
time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works
have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each
in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of
their friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not
reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil,
first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to
Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the
personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably
originated with the ‘Scipio’ of Ennius, but it had been especially
cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which
Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the
contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of
Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he
resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry
with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was
represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for
this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces(77). This play
is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus.
Quintilian says of it, ‘it may be compared with any work of the Greeks:’
but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin
critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was
probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the
Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies
of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned
among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower
of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own
precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of
the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of
the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia,
written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and
Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom
he wished his Satires to be approved, and to whom he addresses some of his
Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace
maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men,
such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with
the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid
recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more
prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the
older poets and with those of his own standing(78). The Alexandrine
influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these
writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the
erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary
subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on
grammatical and rhetorical subjects(79).

There is no feature in the social life of the Augustan Age so pleasant to
contemplate as the brotherly friendship, free apparently from the
jealousies of individuals and the petty passions of literary coteries, in
which the most eminent poets and men of letters lived with one another.
The only exception to the general state of good feeling of which there is
any indication is an apparent coolness between Horace and Propertius. The
latter poet neither mentions nor alludes to his illustrious contemporary,
though both were friends of Maecenas and of Virgil; and Horace, though he
does not mention Propertius by name, as he does Tibullus and most of the
other distinguished poets of the time, probably alludes to him in a
passage which was not intended to be complimentary(80). But in general
what Plato says of the souls engaged in the pursuit and contemplation of
intellectual beauty—‘Envy stands aloof from the divine company’—was true
of the ‘divine company’ of poets in the Age of Augustus. And the sincere
and appreciative interest which they took in one another was not only a
source of great happiness in their lives, but was able to fulfil the
function of an enlightened and generous criticism. Poets were in the habit
of reading their works to their friends before submitting them to the
public. It is characteristic of the modesty of Virgil and of his unceasing
aim at perfection that he was in the habit of reading to his friends
chiefly those passages in his works of which he was himself distrustful.
The fastidious taste of Horace sometimes rebelled against the importunity
of those who desired to hear him read his own compositions. Yet the
well-known testimony of Ovid proves that he was not averse to gratify an
appreciative listener:—

Et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures,
Dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra(81).

The appreciation and criticism of cultivated friends, themselves authors
as well as critics, must have stimulated and corrected the taste of the
poets of the age. The genius which is most purely original in its
activity, and which communicates an altogether novel impulse to the world,
relies absolutely on itself, and may be little stimulated by sympathy or
affected by criticism. Of such a type Lucretius in ancient and Wordsworth
in modern times are probably the best examples, though Dante and Milton
seem to approach nearer to it than to the type of those whose genius is
equally great in receiving from, as in giving to, the world—the type of
genius of Homer, Sophocles, Shakspeare, and Goethe. The great qualities of
writers of the first type are force, independence, boldness of invention
and speculation, absolute sincerity. They are at the same time liable to
the defects of incompleteness, one-sidedness, disregard of the true
proportion of things. Their works do not produce the impression of that
all-pervading, perfectly-balanced sanity of genius, which the Greeks meant
when they applied the word σοφοί to their poets, and which makes the great
men of the second type not only powerful movers but also the wisest
teachers of the world. The best poetry of the Augustan Age, if wanting in
the highest mode of creative energy, is eminently free from the defects
which sometimes result from the intenser form of imagination; it is in a
remarkable degree pervaded and controlled by this sanity of genius. This
excellence of the Augustan literature may be partly, as was said before,
attributed to the familiar intercourse which men of letters enjoyed with
men of action and large social influence; partly, and probably to a
greater degree, to the cultivated and generous criticism which men of
genius and fine accomplishment imparted to and received from one another.

Outside of this friendly circle of men eminent in letters and social
position there were other literary and critical coteries hostile to them,
who seem to have chosen the merits of the old writers as the battle-ground
on which they engaged the new school of poetry and criticism. These
critical coteries Horace treats, as Catullus treats his ‘vile poets, pests
of the age,’ and as Pope treated Dennis and the other poetasters of his
time. He was evidently sensitive to the envy excited by his genius and by
the favour of Maecenas, and in his later years it afforded him pleasure to
be less exposed than he had been to carping criticism:—

Romae principis urbium
Dignatur soboles inter amabiles
Vatum ponere me choros,
Et iam dente minus mordeor invido(82).

But with the final establishment of his reputation his fastidiousness
suffered more from the pedantry and importunities of admirers and
imitators:—

O imitatores, servum pecus, ut mihi saepe
Bilem, saepe iocum vestri movere tumultus(83).

Even the ‘mitis sapientia’ of Virgil has condescended to immortalise the
names of Bavius and Maevius, as Pope has immortalised the heroes of the
Dunciad. The often quoted line of Horace,—

Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim(84),

marks the beginning of that ‘cacoethes scribendi’ which continued to
prevail till the days of Juvenal as a symptom of the ‘strenua inertia’ of
life under the Empire.

VI.

The almost exclusive devotion to poetry on the part of the meanest as well
as the greatest writers of the Augustan Age seems to demand some
explanation. The natural genius of Rome was more adapted to oratory,
history, and didactic exposition than to any of the great forms of poetry.
In the previous generation prose literature had reached the highest degree
of perfection. The style of Cicero is one of the most admirable and
effective vehicles for the varied purposes of passionate invective or
persuasive oratory, of familiar correspondence, and of popularising the
results of ethical, political, and religious reflection. In Caesar and
Sallust the record of great events in the national life had at last found
a power of clear, terse, and chastened diction, superior as a vehicle of
simple narrative to the style of the two great historians of later times,
if not so rich and varied in colouring and in poetical and reflective
suggestion. Of the prose literature of the Augustan Age we possess only
one great monument, the extant parts of ‘the colossal master-work of
Livy;’ and that was the product of the later and least brilliant period of
this epoch.

The cause of the sudden and permanent decline of Roman oratory was the
extinction of political life. Public speech could no longer be, as it had
been for nearly two centuries, a great power in the commonwealth. Under
the vigilant and judicious administration of Augustus there was not scope
even for that kind of oratory which flourished under his successors, and
became a very formidable weapon in the hands of the ‘delatores,’—that,
namely, which is employed in the prosecution and defence of men charged
with grave offences against the State. Neither was there scope or
inclination for philosophical or historical composition. Such freedom of
enquiry as Cicero allowed himself in his treatises De Legibus and De
Republica would scarcely have been tolerated under the monarchy; and the
world was in no mood for any severe strain of thought or any questioning
of the first principles of things. The new era desired ease, an escape
from care and the perplexities of thought, as well as peace and material
well-being. The spirit of the age was announced in the pastoral strain,
which celebrated its commencement in the apotheosis of Julius Caesar,
‘amat bonus otia Daphnis.’ Nor would it have been possible for any one to
have composed or at least to have published a candid history of the times;
and it may have been the discovery of this impossibility that induced
Asinius Pollio to leave his work unfinished. It would indeed have been a
gain for all time had a Roman Thucydides recorded the ‘movement in the
State’ from the Consulship of Metellus till the battle of Actium with the
accuracy and impartiality, the graphic condensation, the sober dignity,
the sensitive perception of the varying phases of passion and character in
states and individuals, the philosophical discernment of great political
principles destined to act in the same way ‘so long as the nature of man
remains the same,’ and the deep tragic pathos which make, even at the
present day, the record of ‘the twenty-seven years’ war of the
Peloponnesians and Athenians’ the most vividly interesting and permanently
instructive historical work which the world possesses. But even had the
genius of Rome been capable of producing a Thucydides, the circumstances
of the time would have reduced him to silence. Tacitus regards the
establishment of the Empire as equally fatal to the genius of the
historian, as it was to the genius of the orator:—‘Postquam bellatum apud
Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa
ingenia cessere. Simul veritas pluribus modis infracta, primum inscitia
rei publicae ut alienae, mox libidine assentandi(85).’

On the other hand, many circumstances contributed to give a great stimulus
to poetical literature in its most trivial and transitory as well as its
noblest and most enduring manifestations. It is remarked by a recent
French writer(86), that poetry is the last form of literature to wither
under a despotism. But it suffers from it most irretrievably in the end.
The poetic imagination is able to deceive itself by turning away from what
is painful and repulsive in the world, and by appearing to extract the
element of good, of vivid life, or impressive grandeur out of things evil
and fatal in their ultimate effects. Thus it is able to glorify the pomp
and state of imperialism, just as it is able to glorify the charm to the
senses or the attraction to the social nature afforded by the life of
passion and pleasure. But, in the long run, the decay in the higher
energies arising either from the loss of liberty or the loss of
self-control is more fatal to the nobler forms of art and poetry than to
any other products of intelligence.

Again, the mechanical difficulties of the art had been to a great extent
overcome, in the previous age. The discovery of the new and rich ore of
the Latin language, revealed and wrought into shapes of massive beauty and
delicate grace by Lucretius and Catullus, awakened and kept alive in the
great writers of this age the desire to perfect the work commenced by
their predecessors, and to develope all the majesty, beauty, and harmony
of which their native speech was capable. The education in grammar,
rhetoric, and Greek literature, which in the later years of the Republic
had trained men for the contests of public life, prepared them to
recognise and appreciate the perfection of style and of rhythm which was
now for the first time attained. But the attainment of this perfection was
a stumbling block to writers of an inferior order, and to all the poets
who came afterwards. The Augustan poets left to their successors, what
they had not themselves received, the fatal legacy of an established
poetical diction. The resources of the language for the highest purposes
of poetry seem to have been exhausted by the supreme effort of this epoch.
The golden perfection of the Augustan style gave place to the forced
rhetoric and the sensational extravagance of the Neronian age and to the
soberer but tamer imitations of the Flavian era.

In its inner inspiration, as well as its outward expression, the Augustan
poetry was the maturest development of the national mind. The inspiring
influences of Latin poetry were the idea of Rome, the appreciation of
Greek art, the genial Italian life. We have seen how the first
establishment of the Empire gave to the national idea a temporary
importance and prominence which it had not had since Ennius first awoke
his countrymen to the consciousness of their destiny. It was only in the
Augustan Age, or during the few years preceding it, that the taste of the
Romans was sufficiently educated to appreciate the perfect art of the
Greeks. The whole of Italy was now for the first time united in one
nation. A new generation had been born and grown to manhood since the
Social War. The pride in Rome and the love of the whole land might now be
felt by all men born between the Alps and the Straits of Sicily. The
districts far removed from the capital, ‘by the sounding Aufidus’ or ‘the
slow-winding Mincius,’ still kept alive the traditions of a severer
morality and the habits of a simpler and happier life(87). They were still
able to nourish the susceptible mind of childhood with poetic fancies(88).
In the following generation the idea of the empire was one no longer of
inspiring novelty, but rather of a dull oppression. The taste for Greek
literature had lost its freshness and quickening power. The natural
enjoyment of life, the susceptibility to beauty in art and nature, the
love of simplicity, were no longer possible to minds enervated and hearts
deadened by the unrelieved monotony of luxurious living.

CHAPTER II.

VIRGIL’S PLACE IN ROMAN LITERATURE.

Virgil is the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among
the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent
times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him
among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all
those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of
Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed
for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great
father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became
traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism.
For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in
Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age
of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended.
No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the
education of three out of the four chief representatives of European
culture—the Italians, the French, and the English—at various stages of
their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might
be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil
have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of
manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present
century.

Since that time, however, an undoubted reaction has set in against the
prestige once enjoyed by Latin poetry. And from this reaction Virgil has
been the chief sufferer. The peculiar gifts, social and intellectual, of
Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and
in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison
with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing
to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and
belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied
grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works.
But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a
place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for
a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism
has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not
of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of
the Latin civilisation(89). And in England, at the present time, the
estimate of his genius, expressed both by writers of acknowledged
reputation and in the current criticism of the day, is much more
favourable than it was some thirty years ago.

It would be neither desirable nor possible to enter on a critical
examination of the value of a writer, who has been so much admired through
so long a time, without taking some account of the prestige attaching to
his name. It may be of use therefore to bring together some of the more
familiar evidences of his reputation and influence in former times, to
show the existence of a temporary reaction of opinion and to assign causes
for it, and to indicate the grounds on which his pre-eminence as the
culminating point in Latin literature and his high position among the
poets of the world appear to rest.

It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action,
that he was most esteemed in former times. The Aeneid may not have been
regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but
it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which
Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such
expressions as ‘ludere quae vellem,’ ‘carmina qui lusi pastorum,’ ‘in
tenui labor(90),’ etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he
first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of
the glory of Augustus—

Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora(91)—

coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of
the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and
successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the
treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence
they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important
province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive
honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he
has been exposed in the present century.

The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance
of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was
destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with
which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the
Iliad:—

Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii:
Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade(92).

The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent
allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth book of the Odes of Horace.
The continuance of this influence is unmistakeable in Ovid, and there are
also many traces of Virgilian expression in the prose style of Livy(93).
The author of the dialogue ‘De Oratoribus’ testifies to the favour which
the poet enjoyed, even before the publication of his epic, both with the
Emperor and with the whole people, who ‘on hearing some of his verses
recited in the theatre rose in a body and greeted him, as he happened to
be present at the spectacle, with the same marks of respect which they
showed to the Emperor himself(94).’ He would thus appear, even in his
lifetime, to have thoroughly ‘touched the national fibre(95),’ and to have
gained that place in the admiration of his countrymen which he never
afterwards lost. By the poets who came after him his memory was cherished
with the veneration men feel for a great master, united to the affection
which they feel for a departed friend. Lucan indeed rather enters into
rivalry with him than follows in his footsteps; nor can there be any surer
way of learning to appreciate the peculiar greatness of Virgil’s manner
than by reading passages of the Aeneid alongside of passages of the
Pharsalia. The new poets under the Flavian dynasty, Valerius Flaccus,
Silius Italicus, and Statius, though they failed to apprehend the secret
of its success, made the Aeneid their model, in the arrangement of their
materials, in their diction, and in the structure of their verse. Statius,
in bidding farewell to his Thebaid, uses these words of acknowledgement:—

Vive, precor, nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,
Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora(96);

and Silius, having occasion to mention Mantua, celebrates it as—

Mantua, Musarum domus, atque ad sidera cantu
Evecta Aonio, et Smyrnaeis aemula plectris(97).

Martial, among many other tributes of admiration(98) scattered over his
poems, says of Virgil that he could have surpassed Horace in lyric, Varius
in tragic poetry, had he chosen to enter into rivalry with them(99). The
younger Pliny(100), speaking of the number of books, statues, and busts
possessed by Silius, adds these words: ‘of Virgil principally whose
birthday he kept with more solemnity than his own, especially at Naples,
where he used to visit his monument as if it were a temple.’ But the
greatest proof of Virgil’s influence on the later literature of Rome is
seen in many traces of imitation of his style in the language of the
historian Tacitus, the one great literary genius born under the Empire. So
great a master of expression would not have incurred this debt except to
one whom he regarded as entitled above all others to stamp the speech of
Rome with an imperial impress. In Juvenal there are many references and
allusions to familiar passages in the Aeneid(101): and it appears from him
that the works of Virgil and Horace had in his time become what they have
since continued to be, the common school-books of all who obtained a
liberal education. It is one of the hardships of the schoolmaster’s life,
described in his seventh Satire, to have to listen by lamplight to the
‘crambe repetita’ of the daily lesson,—

Quum totus decolor esset
Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni(102).

After the end of the first century A.D., even the imitative poets of Rome
become rare; but the pre-eminence still enjoyed by Virgil is attested by
the number of commentaries written on his works, the most famous of them
being the still extant commentary of Servius, belonging to the latter part
of the fourth century. The fortune of Virgil has in this respect been
similar to that of his great countryman Dante. From the time of his death
till the extinction of ancient classical culture, there was a regular
succession of rhetoricians and grammarians who lectured and wrote
treatises on his various poems. Among those who preceded Servius, the most
famous names are those of Asconius Pedianus, Annaeus Cornutus, the friend
of Persius, and Valerius Probus, in the first century A.D. These
commentators supplied materials to Suetonius for the life on which that of
Aelius Donatus, which is still extant, is founded. The frequent quotations
from Virgil in the desultory criticism of Aulus Gellius and the systematic
discussions in the Saturnalia of Macrobius attest the minute study of his
poems in the interval between the second and the fifth centuries. Similar
testimony to his continued influence is afforded by the early Christian
writers, especially by Augustine. And though there may be traced in them a
struggle between the pleasure which they derived from his poetry and the
alienation of their sympathies owing to his paganism, yet it is probable
that the favour shown to him and to Cicero during the first strong
reaction from everything associated with the beauty of the older religion,
was due as much to the pure and humane spirit of their teaching as to the
fascination of their style: nor perhaps was this teaching inoperative in
moulding the thought and giving form to the religious imagination of the
Latin Church. The number and excellence of the MSS. of Virgil, the most
famous of which date from the fourth and fifth centuries, confirm the
impression of the continued favour which his works enjoyed before and
subsequently to the overthrow of the Roman rule in the West. Wherever
learning flourished during the darkest period of this later time, the
poems of Virgil were held in special esteem. Thus we read in connexion
with the literary studies of Bede: ‘Virgil cast over him the same spell
which he cast over Dante: verses from the Aeneid break his narratives of
martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in
a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring(103).’ His works
were taught in the Church schools: and the feeling with which he was
regarded by the more tolerant minds of the mediaeval Church appears in a
mass sung in honour of St. Paul at the end of the fifteenth century:—

Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrimae;
Quem te inquit reddidissem
Si te vivum invenissem
Poetarum maxime(104)!

The traditional veneration attaching to his name, among the classes too
ignorant to know anything of his works, survived during the middle ages in
the fancies which ascribed to him the powers of a magician or beneficent
genius, appearing in many forms and at various times and places widely
separated from one another.

With the first revival of learning and letters in different countries, the
old pre-eminence of Virgil again asserts itself. In England ‘the earliest
classical revival’ (to quote again the words of Mr. Green) ‘restored
Cicero and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on
the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like
William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.’ One of the earliest works in
Scottish literature is the translation of the Aeneid by Gawain Douglas. It
is characteristic of the rudimentary state of learning at the time when
this translation appeared that the Sibyl is represented as a nun, who
directs Aeneas to tell his beads(105). But the greatest testimony to the
persistence of Virgil’s fame and influence in the western world is the
homage which the genius of Dante pays to the shade of his great
countryman. ‘May the long zeal avail me and the great love that made me
search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author. Thou art he from whom
I took the good style that did me honour(106).’ The feeling with which
Dante gives himself up to the guidance of Virgil through all the mystery
of the lower realms is like that under which Ennius evokes the shade of
Homer from the ‘halls of Acheron’ to interpret to him the secrets of
creation. Dante combines the reverence for a great master, which seems to
be more natural to the genius of Italy than to that of other nations, with
a high self-confidence and a bold and original invention. Lucretius
expresses a similar enthusiasm for Homer, Ennius, Empedocles, and
Epicurus; and by Virgil the same feeling is, though not directly
expressed, yet profoundly felt towards Homer and Lucretius. And in all
these cases the admiration of their predecessors is an incentive, not to
imitative reproduction, but to new creation. It was as the poet of ‘that
Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of
wounds’ that the poet of mediaeval Florence paid homage to the ancient
poet of Mantua. The admiration of Dante, like that of Tacitus, is the more
corroborative of the spell exercised over the Italian mind by the art and
style of Virgil from the difference in the type of genius and character
which these poets severally represent. The influence of Virgil was
exercised, with a power more over-mastering and injurious to their
originality, upon the later poets and scholars of Italy with whom the
Renaissance begins. The progress of modern poetry was for a long time
accompanied—and it would be difficult to say whether it was thereby more
obstructed or advanced—by a new undergrowth of Latin poetry, for the
higher forms of which Virgil served as the principal model. Petrarch
attached more importance to his epic poem of ‘Africa,’ written in
imitation of the rhythm and style of the Aeneid, than to his Sonnets. The
influence of Virgil on the later Renaissance in Italy is abundantly proved
in the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety
editions of his works are said to have been published before the year
1500(107). From Italy this influence passed to France and England, and was
felt, not by scholars and critics only, but by the great poets and
essayists, the orators and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. It was discussed as an open question whether the Iliad or the
Aeneid was the greater epic poem: and it was then necessary for the
admirers of the Greek rather than of the Latin poet to assume an
apologetic tone(108). Scaliger ranked Virgil above Homer and Theocritus.
His prestige was greatest during the century of French ascendency in
modern literature, that, namely, between the age of Milton and that of
Lessing. The chief critical law-giver in that century was Voltaire, and no
great critic has ever expressed a livelier admiration of any poem than he
has of the Aeneid. It is to him we owe the saying, ‘Homère a fait Virgile,
dit-on; si cela est, c’est sans doute son plus bel ouvrage(109).’ He
claims elsewhere for the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid a
great superiority over the works of all Greek poets(110). He says also
that the Aeneid is the finest monument remaining from antiquity. As
Spenser was called the ‘poet’s poet,’ so Virgil might be called the
orator’s poet. Even by a rhetorician of the second century the question
was discussed whether Virgil ‘was more a poet or an orator(111).’ Bossuet
is said to have known his works by heart(112). In the great era of English
oratory, no author seems to have been so familiarly known or was so often
quoted. We read in a recent sketch of the life of Burke(113), ‘Most
writers have constantly beside them some favourite classical author, from
whom they endeavour to take their prevailing tone.... Burke, according to
Butler, always had a ragged Delphin Virgil not far from his elbow.’ A
vestige of the attraction which his words had for an older school of
English politicians may be traced in the survival of Virgilian quotation
in some of the parliamentary warfare of recent times. The important place
which Virgil has filled in the teaching of our public schools—the great
nurses of our classic statesmen—has perhaps not been without some
influence in shaping our national history(114). It would be no
exaggeration to say that the poems of Virgil, and especially the Aeneid,
have contributed more than any other works of art in modern times, not
only to stamp the impression of ancient Rome on the imagination, but to
educate the sensibility to generous emotion as well as to literary beauty.
There is probably no author, even at the present day, of whom some
knowledge may be with more certainty assumed among cultivated people of
every nation.

II.

This unbroken ascendency of eighteen centuries, which might almost be
described in the words applied by Lucretius to the ascendency of Homer—

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus(115)—

is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer.
If any one ever succeeded in securing that which Tacitus says ‘should be
to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a
happy memory of himself(116),’ that may be truly said of Virgil. Though
his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its
lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could
have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some
catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained
accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of
the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of
his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that ‘he gave a new
direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a
critical period of the world’s history what the future would love.’

It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether
this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be
called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In
the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of
his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of
some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that
the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising
from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he
made to Varius, before leaving Italy, ‘that if anything happened to him he
should destroy the Aeneid.’ A letter written to Augustus is quoted by
Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work
of such vast compass ‘almost from a perversion of mind(117).’ No poet
could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great
poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was
not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority
which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor
even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an
abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical
self-disparagement of Horace.

The most obvious explanation of this passionate and pathetic desire that
the work to which he had given eleven years of his maturest power should
not survive him, is the unfinished state, in respect of style, in which
the poem was left. He had set aside three years for the final revision of
the work and the removal of those temporary ‘make-shifts,’ which had been
originally inserted with full knowledge of their inadequacy, in order not
to check the ardour of composition. After having devoted three years of
his youth to the execution of a work so slight in purpose and so small in
compass as the Eclogues, he might well feel depressed by the thought that
a work of such high purpose and so vast a scope as the Aeneid—and a work
of which such expectations as those expressed by Propertius were
entertained—should be given to the world before receiving the final touch
of the master’s hand.

Yet the words in the letter to Augustus,—‘that I fancy myself to have been
almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a
work’—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a
deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the
estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance
between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty
arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the
limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of
Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense
of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large
appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest
Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a
scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide
through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely
compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown
lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so
long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which
he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art,
which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a
new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various
minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible
that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of
perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the
pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious
effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in
the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others
feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national
poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the
glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his
immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the
precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national
glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To
describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the
fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among
modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other.
Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he
became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt
than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and
running streams among the valleys.’

As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek
epics is the probable explanation of Virgil’s own dissatisfaction with the
Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has
been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed
by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures,
was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil,
at the approach of death, wished ‘to destroy what in those solemn moments
he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false
reputation(118).’ In the latter he says, ‘The whole of the Aeneid, from
the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea.’ ‘Virgil is one of the
remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling.
His was lyric poetry.’ ‘It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the
very work which was but a failure(119).’

Although the service rendered to the study of antiquity by the historical
insight of Niebuhr is probably as great as that rendered by the genius of
any scholar of this century, yet the opinions expressed by him on
literature are often more arbitrary than authoritative. Still this verdict
on the merits of the Aeneid was in accordance with the most advanced
criticism of the time when it was written, both in Germany and England.
The writer by whom the critical taste of England was most stimulated and
enlarged about the same time was Coleridge; and in his ‘Table Talk’ such
disparaging dicta as this occur more than once: ‘If you take from Virgil
his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ The whole tone of the
criticism which arose out of the admiration of German thought and poetry
was thoroughly opposed to the spirit in which Latin literature had been
admired. Mr. Carlyle also expressed in one of his earliest works—the Life
of Schiller—an estimate of the value of Virgil, which was not uncommon
among younger scholars at the Universities some thirty years ago. ‘Virgil
and Horace,’ he writes, ‘he (Schiller) learned to construe accurately, but
is said to have taken no deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and
meek beauty of the first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of
the last, the matchless elegance of both would of course escape his
inexperienced perception; while the matter of their writings must have
appeared frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible.’ Even the warmest
admirers of Virgil about that time, such as Keble, are content to claim
for him high excellence as the poet of outward nature. The late Professor
Conington, while showing the finest appreciation of ‘the marvellous grace
and delicacy, the evidences of a culture most elaborate and most refined,’
in the poet to the interpretation of whose works he devoted the best years
of a scholar’s life, has questioned ‘the appropriateness of the special
praise given to Virgil’s agricultural poetry, and conceded though with
more hesitation to his pastoral compositions.’ He speaks also of it as an
admitted fact that ‘in undertaking the Aeneid at the command of a
superior, Virgil was venturing beyond the province of his genius.’ And he
describes this disparaging estimate as the opinion ‘which is now generally
entertained on Virgil’s claims as an epic poet(120).’ Mr. Keightley is
also quoted by him as speaking of Virgil as ‘perhaps the least original
poet of antiquity(121).’ It is certainly not in the spirit of an ardent
admirer that the author of Virgil’s life in the ‘Dictionary of Classical
Biography and Mythology’ approaches the criticism of his poetry. But it is
by German critics and scholars that Virgil’s claim to a high rank among
the poets of the world is at the present day most seriously impugned. Thus
to take two or three conspicuous instances of their disparaging criticism:
Mommsen in his History of Rome(122) speaks contemptuously of the
‘successes of the Aeneid, the Henriade, and the Messiad;’ Bernhardy in his
_Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur_ (1871) brings together a formidable
list of German critics and commentators unfavourable to the merits of the
Aeneid, in which the illustrious name of Hegel appears; Gossrau in his
edition of the Aeneid quotes from Richter (as a specimen of the
unfavourable opinions pronounced by many critics) the expression of a wish
that, with the exception of the descriptions and episodes, the rest of the
poem had been burned(123); and W. S. Teuffel, among other criticisms which
‘damn with faint praise,’ has the following: ‘Aber er ist zu weich und zu
wenig genial als dass er auf dem seiner Natur zusagendsten Gebiete hätte
beharren und darauf Ruhm ernten können.’

The chief, as well as the most obvious, cause of the revolt against
Virgil’s poetical pre-eminence, which, though yielding apparently to a
revived sentiment of admiration, has not yet spent its force, is the great
advance made in Greek scholarship in England and Germany during the
present century. Familiarity with Latin literature is probably not less
common than it was a century ago, but it is much less common relatively to
familiarity with the older literature. The attraction of the latter has
been greater from its novelty, its originality, its higher intrinsic
excellence, its profounder relation to the heart and mind of man. The art
of Homer and that of Theocritus are felt to be an immediate reproduction
from human life and outward nature; the art of Virgil seems, at first
sight, to be only a reproduction from this older and truer copy. The Roman
and Italian character of his workmanship, the new result produced by the
recasting of old materials, the individual and inalienable quality of his
own genius, were for a time obscured, as the evidences of the large debt
which he owed to his Greek masters became more and more apparent.

Again, the greater nearness of the Augustan Age, not in time only but in
spirit and manners, to our own age, which in the last century told in
Virgil’s favour in the comparison with Homer, tells the other way now. The
critics of last century were interested in other ages, in so far as they
appeared to be like their own. The rude vigour and stirring incident of
the Homeric Age or the Middle Ages had no attraction for men living under
the _régime_ of Louis XIV. and XV. or of Queen Anne and the first Georges.
What an illustrious living Frenchman says of the great representative of
French ideas in the last century might be said generally of its criticism.
‘Voltaire,’ says M. Renan, ‘understood neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor
Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle
Ages(124).’ And yet he was prepared to pronounce his judgment on them by
the light of that admirable common sense which he applied to the questions
of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over
former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The
imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature
civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The
scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken
interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all
civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of
modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human
culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new
direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly
enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the
primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in
the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation.
Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of
representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the
title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and
composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be
interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has
become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw
attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous
in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of
cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness,
and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of
intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.

Other causes connected with a great expansion of human interests acting on
the imagination, and with the revolt against the prevailing poetical
style, which arose about the beginning of the present century, have tended
to lower the authority of writers who formed the standard of taste to
previous ages. The desire of the new era was to escape from the exhausted
atmosphere of literary tradition, and to return again to the simplicity of
Nature and human feeling. The genius of Roman literature is more in
harmony with eras of established order, of adherence to custom, of
distinct but limited insight into the outward world and into human life,
than to eras of expansive energy, of speculative change, of vague striving
to attain some new ideal of duty or happiness. The genius of Greece
exercised a powerful influence on several of the great English and German
poets who lived in the new era. But neither Goethe nor Schiller, Byron nor
Scott, Shelley nor Keats were at all indebted, in thought, sentiment, or
expression, to the poets of the Augustan Age. Among the great poets of
this new era the only one known to have greatly admired Virgil, and who in
his poems founded on classical subjects was influenced by him, is the one
who most decidedly proclaimed his revolt against the artificial diction
and representation of the school of classical imitators,—the poet
Wordsworth.

The very perfection of Virgil’s art, combined with the calmness and
moderation of his spirit, was out of harmony with the genius of such a
time. He seemed to have nothing new to teach the eager generation which
regarded the world and speculated on its own destiny with feelings
altogether unlike to those of the generations that went before it. The
truth of his sentiment, its adaptation to the spiritual movement of his
own age, in which it gained ascendency like a new revelation, had caused
it to pass into the modes of thought and feeling habitual to the world.
This too may be said of the ethical feeling and common sense of Cicero’s
philosophical treatises. Moral speculation has been so long and so deeply
permeated by the thought expressed in these treatises that it now appears
trite and common-place. So too the moderation and unfailing propriety of
Virgil’s language had no attraction of freshness or novelty to stimulate
the imagination. The direct force of language in Homer or Lucretius never
can become trite or common-place. It affects the mind now as powerfully
and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of
rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste
immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to force
the reader’s admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or
tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested,
it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and
Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did
three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of
Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that
direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up
immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect.
As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of
successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of
sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital
force which it originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of
the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the
mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious
effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning
half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language.
The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long
reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word
‘meditari,’ applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process
through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In
apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility
of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by
a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation—‘iustissima
tellus.’ These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be
overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a
rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.

III.

Though some of the causes which tended to lower the estimation in which
Virgil was held were only temporary in their operation, yet it can hardly
be doubted that his claim to pre-eminence in Latin literature and to a
high rank among the greatest poets of all times must, if put forward at
all, be maintained on somewhat different grounds from those on which his
position formerly rested. He never again can enter into rivalry with Homer
as the inspired poet of heroic action. He cannot again enjoy the advantage
of being widely known, while access to his predecessor is confined to a
few scholars not much in sympathy with the poet of an age so far separated
from their own. The art of Virgil in so far as it is a copy of the art of
Homer has already produced all the effect on the culture of the world
which it is destined to produce. The life of the heroic age will continue
to be known to all future times as it was originally fashioned by the
creative mind of Homer, not as it was modified by the after-thought of
Virgil.

What charm Virgil had for his countrymen as the reviver of the early
poetry of Greece and as the first creator of the early romance of Italy,
what permanent value he has as one of the great interpreters of the secret
of Nature and of the meaning of human life, will appear in the course of
the detailed examination of his various poems. But there are some
considerations, from an historical point of view, which may be stated
provisionally as grounds for assigning to him the place of most importance
in Latin literature. He is, more than any other Latin writer, a
representative writer,—representative both of the general national idea
and of the sentiment and culture of his own age. One clear note of this
representative character is that he absorbs and supersedes so much of what
went before him, and that he anticipates and also supersedes much that
came after him. The interest which Rome and Italy have for all times, the
interest which the Augustan Age has as the epoch of the maturest
civilisation of ancient times and as a great turning-point in the history
of mankind, will secure the attention of the world to an author who sets
before it, in forms of pure art and with elaborate workmanship, the
idealised spectacle of the marvellous career of Rome, and best enables it
to feel the charm of natural beauty and ancient memories associated with
Italy; and who has interpreted, as no one else has done, the meaning and
tendency of his age, and of the change which was then preparing for the
human spirit and for the nations of the future.

(1.) The Aeneid brings home to us, in a way in which no other work of
Latin literature can do, all those elements in the idea of the destiny,
the genius, and character of Rome which most powerfully move the
imagination, while it enables us for a time to forget those elements of
hardness, unscrupulous injustice, and oppressive domination on which the
historian is forced to dwell, and which alienate the sympathies as much as
her nobler aspect compels the admiration of mankind. The grandeur and
dignity of the Imperial State appear softened and mellowed by Virgil’s
marvellous art and humane feeling. ‘The Aeneid,’ says Hallam, ‘reflects
the glory of Rome as from a mirror(125).’ ‘It remains,’ says Mr. Merivale,
‘the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation,
the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age
is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events and incidents(126).’
‘Virgile,’ writes M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘a été le poëte du Capitole(127).’
‘Dans ce poëme,’ writes M. de Coulanges of the Aeneid, ‘ils (les Romains)
se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs
croyances, leur Empire(128).’ M. Patin again describes the same poem as
‘expression de Rome, de Rome entière, de la Rome de tous les temps, de
celle des Empereurs, des Consuls, des Rois(129).’ He might have added that
it had anticipated the idea of the Rome of the Popes, in some at least of
its aspects. The type of character which Virgil has conceived in Aeneas is
more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome
than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual Consuls and
Imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of
the Roman State. It has been said of him by another Frenchman that he was
more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an Empire.
Virgil’s object is to make his readers believe in the mission of Rome, as
appointed by Divine decree, for the ultimate peace and good government of
the world. The work of Rome in the past, the present, and the future is
conceived by him as a manifestation of the Deity in his justice,
authority, and beneficence.

(2.) The spell which Rome exercises over the imagination is quite distinct
from the charm which the thought of Italy has for the hearts of men. The
love of Italy was a sentiment as deeply rooted in Virgil’s nature as his
pride in Rome. This sentiment pervades all his works and inspires some of
his noblest poetry. In his pastoral poems, under all the borrowed imagery
of the Greek idyl, it reveals itself in his sensibility to the beauty of
the Italian climate (‘caeli indulgentia’), to the charm of the various
seasons, to the distinctive graces of the plants and wild flowers native
to the soil, and in the expression of the deep attachment with which the
peasant-proprietor clung to his little plot of ground as the sphere alike
of his cares and of his happiness. In the Aeneid this patriotic feeling
shows itself, as a similar feeling shows itself in the poetry of Scott, in
the enthusiasm with which the martial memories of famous towns and tribes
are recalled in association with the picturesque features of the land. But
by no work of art, ancient or modern, is the complete impression, moral
and physical, of the old Italian land and people,—

Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae(130),—

produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the
Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the
poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry(131) as well as in her
warlike energy; that he should cherish for the whole land, now united as
one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of
that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source
of pleasure(132) to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek.
Some sympathy with the ‘Itala virtus’—the courage and discipline of the
Marsian and other Sabellian races—Ennius had already expressed in his
national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political
life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and
senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the
full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close
of one of his noblest passages,—

Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
Magna virum(133).

(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for
the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach
the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and
glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under
the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his
imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age,
were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems,
better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the
Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding
century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national
unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone
effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era
of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration.
The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the
work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new
organisation to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new
direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient
traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for
centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent
position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman
culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy,
Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems
that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively
recent period, continued to be the master-force in European
politics,—apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free
national life on a large scale,—finds its earliest expression. And the
loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is
regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious
acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine
will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present
than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a
lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil’s time faith
in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment
continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change
the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination
with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the
world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the
necessary bond of civil order and union.

(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is
the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls
the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his
own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future
faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of
equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the
native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the
younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane
and sympathetic emotions, expressed by the word ‘humanitas,’ continued to
prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to
the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil
Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in
Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt
against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other
hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word _pietas_,
as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our ‘piety’
and of our ‘pity.’ The Power above man is regarded by him not as an unreal
phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice
and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.

This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is
not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union
of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion
as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in
reconciling these various factors of belief. The ‘Fates,’ which are the
medium through which man’s happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes
stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They
accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings.
But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems,
in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human
sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling
and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction
of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority
to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on
the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin,
in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit
is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to
prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of
his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political
sentiment, ‘il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce qu’aimerait
l’avenir.’ If it was as a great national poet, the rival of Homer, Hesiod,
and Theocritus, that he exercised the most powerful spell over his
contemporaries, it was rather as the ‘pius vates,’ the prophetic teacher,
that, in spite of themselves, he gained ascendency over the cultivated
minds of the early Latin and the mediaeval Churches(134).

(5.) Though other periods of ancient history, and notably the fifth
century B.C. in Greece, were richer in genius and enjoyed a happier and
nobler life than the Augustan Age, yet this latter age, as the latest of
the great literary epochs of antiquity, inherited the science, wisdom,
power, and beauty stored up in all the art and writings of the past. The
Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of culture, and Virgil was
pre-eminently the most cultivated man belonging to the age. In early youth
he had learned from Greek masters all they could teach him in poetry and
rhetoric, in science and philosophy; and through all his life he combined
the productive labours of an artist with the patient diligence of a
student. He was familiar with the successive schools of Greek poetry, from
Homer and Hesiod down to the epic and didactic poets of Alexandria. He was
acquainted with all the physical sciences known in his time, especially,
it is said, with astronomy and medicine. His earlier writings show the
influence of the philosophical system of Epicurus, while his later
convictions are more in agreement with the Platonic philosophy. The
oratory of the later books of the Aeneid breathes the spirit of Stoicism.
We are told that he proposed to devote the years that might remain to him
after the completion of the Aeneid to the further study of philosophy,
perhaps with the view of writing a great poem, which might rival and
answer Lucretius. The extant fragments of Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius,
Attius, and Lucilius, and of later and obscurer writers such as Hostius
and Varro Atacinus, show that he had read their works, and could skilfully
adapt what he found in them to his own national epic. The Georgics, again,
show a careful study and assimilation of the thought and language of
Lucretius. And to the pursuits of a scholar he united the research of an
antiquary. He collected from many sources the myths and traditions
connected with the origin of ancient customs and ceremonies, or attaching
to the towns and tribes of Italy, famous in early times. He was especially
well versed in the ceremonial lore of the Priestly Colleges. Thus, in
addition to his higher claims on the admiration of his countrymen, his
poems were prized by them as a great repertory of their secular and sacred
learning. Many fancies and dim traditions of a remote antiquity, many
vestiges of customs and ceremonies which have disappeared from the world,
many thoughts and expressions of men who have left scarcely any other
memorial of themselves, still survive, because the mind of Virgil
discerned some element of interest in them which fitted them to contribute
to the representative character of the work to which his life was
dedicated.

(6.) Virgil’s pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical
expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to
illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds
in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study
and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate
culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the
Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into
a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the
generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and
style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and
Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the
sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater
result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil,
alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance
with which a long continuous poem, epic or didactic, could as a whole
gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance
with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive,
meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into
poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His
style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force
animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the
most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the
language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil’s influence
over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it
could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the
Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the
Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of
sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of
wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic
association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth,
tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical
style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in
Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of
accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in
vital force.

In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and
inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters,
having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best
worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to
their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to
gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth
expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative
poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious _littérateurs_ of the
Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion
between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of
man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought
and feeling. The representation thus established gains ascendency over the
future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art
becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of
interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the
evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius,
and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of
the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The
emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound
of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are
refreshed:—

Illa cadens raucum per levia murmur
Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(135).

The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus
renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either
the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of
Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the
appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.

IV.

Whether the gifts of intellect and feeling by which Virgil represented his
country and his age entitle him to a place among the greatest poets of the
world, will be answered variously according to the degree in which men
recognise in him the presence of that diviner faculty of imagination which
no analysis can explain. If we look to him for the original force of
creative imagination which we find in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles on
the one hand, and in the greatest poets of modern times on the other, we
shall fail to establish his equality with them. But as there have been
various types of philosophical intellect in the world, so there have been
various types of imaginative power. And among these types we may
distinguish those characteristic of the Hellenic, the Germanic, and the
Italian races. The genius of the ancient Latin race is further removed
from that of the modern Germanic race, than either is from the genius of
ancient Greece. The peculiar richness of our own poetic literature arises
from its combining some of the great characteristics of each type. While
Scott and Byron, for instance, are among the greatest representatives of
the purely modern imagination, the works of Pope and Gray are essentially
of the Latin type; and those of Dryden, Milton, and Spenser blend Roman
strength or the culture of Latin ideas with English boldness and modern
exuberance of fancy: while, again, Shelley, Keats, and all the greatest
among our living poets have received a powerful impulse from Greek art and
Greek ideas. It must be admitted by students of Latin literature that the
intellectual movement and sensibility of the present time has a closer
affinity with the ancient Greek than with the ancient Latin culture.
Students of Homer and Aeschylus, as well as those who have once felt the
spell of

‘Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force,’

of Wordsworth’s contemplative elevation and the impassioned ideality of
Shelley, find, in turning to Virgil, that their range of feeling and of
contemplation has become narrower. They no longer enjoy the same
illimitable prospect, they no longer breathe the same keen air, which
buoyed them up on the higher altitudes of poetry. Greek and modern works
of imagination manifest a profounder feeling, a more varied contemplation
of the mystery of life, than is compatible with the more realistic
tendencies of Latin poetry. And though the representation of the outward
world in Virgil is, in its serene beauty, suggestive of a secret unceasing
life which appeals to the human spirit in its more tranquil moods, yet it
does not move the mind to that profounder sense of an affinity between the
soul of man and the soul of Nature which the great modern poets awaken.
The charm and power of Latin poetry consists, for the most part, in the
vital strength of feeling with which it invests a limited and definite
range of interests. What the Roman poets cared for they cared for with all
their heart, and strength, and mind. They seem to have written from more
enduring, if less abundant, sources of affection than other poets. Their
hearts thoroughly realised what they idealised in imagination. This strong
realism and constancy of feeling explains the labour with which they
perfected their art, as the strong love of his small portion of land
explains the labour which the ideal husbandman of the Georgics bestows on
it. Through that vividness of feeling with which they cherished the
thought of what gave actual joy to their lives, Catullus and Horace were
able to invest the names of Sirmio, of Lucretilis and Digentia, with an
interest which attaches to the favourite residences of no other poets:
though perhaps future generations will find a similar classic charm
attaching to the homes of Wordsworth and of Scott, and to the hills,
dales, and streams which they have endowed with the wealth of their strong
affection. The human objects of their passionate love excited in several
of the Roman poets this same vital warmth of feeling. The ‘spirat adhuc
amor’ is still true of all the poetry which the love of Lesbia and of
Cynthia inspired. Even Ovid, whose want of seriousness and profound
feeling is the chief flaw in his poetic temperament, had the most vivid
sense of the pleasure and of the pain of his own existence. It is this
capacity in the imagination of being vitally interested in and possessed
by its object, which enabled Lucretius to breathe the breath of enduring
life into the dry bones of the atomic philosophy. And that this strong
realism of feeling is a characteristic of the race to which these poets
belonged is proved by the pathetic force of the numerous sepulchral
epitaphs of persons altogether undistinguished, preserved from the times
of the early Empire. It is owing to the power of producing a strong and
abiding impression that Latin has retained the function of being the
language of great epitaphs and of great inscriptions in modern times.

Virgil too possessed this gift of vividly realising the objects which
interested him; and his singularly receptive nature enabled him to feel a
much larger number of interests than the other poets of his country. What
his speculative system was to Lucretius in its power of concentrating on
itself all his capacity of feeling; what ‘Lesbia’ and ‘Sirmio’ and the few
objects associated with the happiness and pain of his life were to
Catullus; what the valley in the Sabine hills was to Horace(136); what
Cynthia in life and death was to Propertius; what the remembrance of past
joy in the midst of sorrow was to Ovid; that the thought of Rome and the
memories associated with it, the charm of the land and air of Italy, the
strength and sanctity of human affection, the mystery of the unseen world,
were to Virgil. The necessities of his art require him to introduce into
his poem materials which touch his own nature less deeply, and which come
to him through the reflex action of literary association; and these,
though he always treats them gracefully, he does not invest with the same
sense of reality. But when his imagination is moved by the thought of
Rome, of Italy, of a remote antiquity, of human affection, of the unseen
world, then his art becomes truly and vividly creative. The depth of
feeling with which these things affect him reveals itself in the blended
majesty and sweetness, the tenderness and pathos of his tones,
occasionally in some more solemn cadence and a kind of mystic yearning.

If a return to the high admiration once felt for Virgil involved any
detraction from the high admiration with which the great poets of Greece
and of the modern world are regarded, anything like his claims to his old
rank would generally be set aside. If for no other reason, yet because
they have more in common with the general ideas and movement of the modern
world, these last-named poets have a stronger hold on students of
literature in the present day. But, happily, the ‘sacrum litterarum
studium’—to use a phrase of Macrobius—the religion of the world of
letters, is not a jealous or intolerant faith. The object of that religion
is to keep alive the sentiment of reverence for every kind of excellence
which has appeared in the literature of the world. That Virgil was once
the object of the greatest reverence is a reason for not lightly putting
his claims aside now. In our study of the great writers of old, it is well
to realise the true lesson taught in the sad beauty of the lines,—

Οὐχ ἁμὶν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται εἶμεν
οἳ θνατοὶ πελόμεσθα τὸ δ’ αὔριον οὐκ ἐσορῶμες(137).

The course of time brings with it losses as well as gains in sensibility.
Though the thoughts of the Latin poet may not help us to understand the
spirit of our own era, they are a bond of union with the genius and
culture of Europe in other times. If poetry ever exercises a healing and
reconciling influence on life, the deep and tranquil charm of Virgil may
prove some antidote to the excitement, the restlessness, the unsettlement
of opinion in the present day. And as it is by the young especially that
the imaginative art of Virgil, in comparison with the imaginative art of
other great poets, is most questioned, they may be reminded that the words
of such a writer are best understood after long study and experience of
life have enabled us to feel ‘their sad earnestness and vivid
exactness(138).’ The wise and generous counsel of Burke should induce some
diffidence in their own judgment on the part of those to whom the power
and charm of this poet have been slow in revealing themselves.

‘Different from them are all the great critics. They have taught us one
essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge
as well as perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere
applied it or something like it in his own profession. It is this, that if
ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and
artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all
the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them
until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at
this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are
dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on(139).’

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.

The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great
writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the
works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But
besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent
Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times.
In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or
summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the
Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended
to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period
produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In
the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the
earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives
of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome,
in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus(140),’
mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as
authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the
precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De
Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the
lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians,
and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others
complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief
authority to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier
Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the
materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question
remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian,
is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two
centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on
the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to
his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of
credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and
scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have
been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other
hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to
the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general
innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular
poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from
contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In
the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there
was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is
no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who
immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem
concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate,
told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by
the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But
even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for
the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence
available to the former, and the sensational character of the story
itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting
this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is
no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some
details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest
ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.

In addition to these materials for the biography of Latin writers, in some
few cases the imagination is assisted in realising their character and
genius by the preservation from ancient times of their statues, busts,
images impressed on gems, or other kinds of portraiture. But in the case
of men of letters, it is not often that reliance can be placed on the
authenticity of such memorials, except in such instances as that of
Cicero, where a great name in literature was combined with prominence in
public life.

The data for a knowledge of the life, circumstances, and personal
characteristics of Virgil are supplied partly by direct statements
contained in his poems or inferences founded on them; partly by the
indirect impression of himself stamped on these poems; partly by casual
notices in the works of other poets, and especially of Horace; and partly
by statements in the Life of the poet originally prefixed to the
Commentary of Aelius Donatus,—a grammarian who flourished in the fourth
century A.D.,—and founded on, if not an actual reproduction of, the Life
originally contained in the work of Suetonius.

The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two
of the minor poems published among the Catalepton(141), which may without
hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus
has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of
the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to
philosophical studies(142). The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our
information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for
the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely
didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that
supplied by Horace, Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their
lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to
himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge
derived from other sources.

The Georgics and those parts of the Aeneid which are specially ethical and
didactic, as that part of Book VI. from line 264 to 751, throw most light
on Virgil’s spiritual nature and on his convictions on the questions of
most vital interest to man. But in these parts of his works Virgil has not
revealed himself with such distinctness and consistency as Lucretius has
done in his great philosophical poem. The personality of Lucretius was
simpler and more forcible: the passion to utter his strong convictions
prevailed in him over all considerations of art. The colouring of his own
heart and spirit, of his enthusiasm or melancholy, appears in Virgil
rather as a pervading and subtly interpenetrating influence, than as the
direct indication of his true self. His artistic taste enforced on him
reserve in expressing what was personal to himself; his nature was
apparently more open to varied influences of books and men than that of
Lucretius; he was endowed with the many-sided susceptibility of a poet,
rather than with the simpler, more energetic, but narrower consistency of
a philosophical partisan. Equally with Lucretius he throws his whole heart
and being into the treatment of his subject; but in Lucretius the two
streams of what is personal to himself and what is inherent in his subject
are still distinguishable. In Virgil the imaginative sentiment of the poet
and the strong tender heart of the man seem to be inseparably united. It
would be impossible to distinguish them by analysis,—to abstract from the
bloom of his poetry the delicate sweetness which may have pervaded his
performance of the common duties and his share in the common intercourse
of life.

Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the
most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with
whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the
clearness of his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the
intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike
Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to
his art had chosen

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae(143),

and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world,
enjoyed all that was illustrious, brilliant or genial, in the society of
his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier
years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger
men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed
to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political
position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus,
Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as
Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a
younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger
Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not
of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses
expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or
exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate associates he greets with
hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without assuming the
airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or
paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only
two—unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one
more to the number, Aelius Lamia—in connexion with whom he uses the
language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil.
Whatever may have been the date or circumstances connected with the
composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words ‘animae dimidium
meae’ establish the futility of the notion, that the subject of this Ode
is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the
twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice
for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine
of Cales.

Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one
originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of
the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important,
prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse,
written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted
to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have
accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later
MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval
fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has
successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life
based on that of Suetonius(144). What then were the materials available to
Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to
by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long
friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, entitled ‘De ingenio moribusque
Vergilii.’ Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the ‘memorials which the
friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.’
Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name
of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a
statement that ‘in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an
uneducated man’—a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison.
Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil
to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests
of the direction given to the poet’s genius in the choice of the subject
of the Georgics.

A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedianus,
born at the commencement of our era, who wrote ‘Contra obtrectatores
Vergilii.’ These ‘maligners,’ beginning with those whose names have been
condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had assailed the art
of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by
imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made
against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the
best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature
of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure
the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who
could have known anything about the matter(145).

The certainty that the biographical notices of Virgil and the accounts
transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary
sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main
statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice
of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while
it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius
have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the
authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline
Museum, or of the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different
from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil.

II.

The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek
rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of
the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be
known(146). Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to
change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature
into the unfamiliar _Vergil_. He was born on the 15th of October in the
year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans
attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of
their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death
to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festival(147). The year of
his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most
eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than
Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and
Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high
distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or
literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a
somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious
contemporaries.

This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and
disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the
commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or
security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the
Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of
these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of
the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his
imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life,
as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves
indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or
made desolate by them. Virgil’s childhood and early youth were passed in
the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of
the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world.
The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused
some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood;
but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no
scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of
which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries
of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:—

At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta
Una dies dabat exitio(148).

His birth-place was in the ‘pagus,’ or ‘township,’ of Andes in the
neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a
tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of
Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is
only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a ‘vicus,’ and there
it is said to be distant from Mantua ‘xxx milia passuum.’ The word
_pagus_, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be
used as equivalent to _vicus_, but as a ‘country-district,’ which might
include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any
particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry
with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional
scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction
from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the
characteristic features of Virgil’s early home. The immediate
neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the
first Eclogue,

Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae(149),

Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras(150),

can apply.

The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil’s early years appear to
have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he
recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics.
From the fact that the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan
land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems
obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side
nearest Cremona. The use of the word ‘depellere’ (Ecl. i. 21) might
perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was
situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation
of ‘driving our weaned lambs’ forbids our attaching much force to this
problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other
the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place
are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10:—

Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles
Incipiunt mollique iugum demittere clivo,
Usque ad aquam et veteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos,
Omnia carminibus vestrum servasse Menalcan(151).

There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for
introducing the hills gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the
actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the
neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which
for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di
Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond ‘the picturesque
hill and castle of Vallegio,’ about fifteen miles higher up the river than
Mantua. Eustace, in his Classical Tour, finds many of the features
introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though
the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A
walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds,
like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as

Tamen veniemus in urbem;
Aut si nox pluviam ne colligat ante veremur(152),—

seem inapplicable to the shorter distance between Pietola and Mantua.

The ‘sacri fontes’ which are spoken of in Eclogue I., the existence of
which is further confirmed by the

Non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina deerunt(153)

in the description from the Georgics (ii. 200), of the pastoral land which
Mantua lost, are more naturally to be sought in the more picturesque
environment of the upper reaches of the river than in the level plain in
the midst of which Mantua stands(154). The accurate description of the
lake out of which the Mincio flows—

Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino(155),—

the truth of which is attested by many modern travellers, Goethe among
others—may well be the reproduction of some actual impression made in some
of Virgil’s early wanderings not far distant from the home of his youth.
The passage in the Georgics just referred to, in which, speaking of the
land most suitable for rearing herds and flocks, he introduces the lines

Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum,
Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos(156),

proves the tender affection with which he recalled in later life the
memory of his early home.

Some analogy has been suggested between the quiet beauty of the scenery
which first sank into his soul, and the tranquil meditative cast of his
genius. And though it is easy to push such considerations too far, and to
expect a closer correspondence than ever exists between the development of
genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a
poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions,
whose days from childhood to death were closely bound ‘each to each by
natural piety,’ in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately
blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than
in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining
type.

The district north of the Po, of which Virgil was a native, had enjoyed
the ‘ius Latii’ since the end of the Social War, but did not obtain the
full rights of Roman citizenship till the year 49 B.C., when Virgil was in
his twenty-first year. The national poet of the early Empire, like the
national poet of the Republic, had thus in all probability no claim by
birth to be a member of the State of whose character and destiny his voice
has been the truest exponent. It may be doubted whether Virgil belonged by
birth to the purely Italian stock. He claims for Mantua a Tuscan
origin(157); but the Etruscan race in the region north of the Po had for a
long time previously given way before the settlements of the Gauls; and,
although Roman conquest had established several important colonies north
of the Po, the main stock between that river and the Alps must have been
of Celtic blood, although assimilated in manner of life and culture to the
purely Italian inhabitants of the Peninsula. Zeuss, in his Celtic Grammar,
recognises the presence of a Celtic root, which appears in other Gallic
names, and which he supposes to be the root also of _virgo_, and _virga_,
and _Vergiliae_, in the name Vergilius(158). Some elements in Virgil’s
nature and genius which seem to anticipate the developments of modern
feeling, as, for instance, his vague melancholy, his imaginative sense of
the mystery of the unseen world, his sympathy with the sentiment, as
distinct from the passion, of love, the modes in which his delight in
nature manifests itself, the vein of romance which runs through his
treatment of early times may perhaps be explained by some subtle
intermixture of Celtic blood with the firmer temperament of the old
Italian race. Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated
nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic
nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin
studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged.

It is to be noticed that, while in the Ciceronian Age the names of the men
eminent in literature belong, with one or two exceptions, either to the
pure Roman stock or to the races of central Italy which had been longest
incorporated with Rome, in the last years of the Republic and in the
Augustan Age Northern Italy contributed among other names those of
Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Quintilius Varus, Aemilius Macer, Virgil, and
the historian Livy to the roll of Latin literature. Since the concessions
which followed the Social War the whole people inhabiting the Peninsula
had become thoroughly united in spirit with the Imperial city, and Latin
literature as well as the service of the State thus received a great
impulse from the liberality with which Rome, at different stages in her
history, extended the privileges of her citizenship. The culture of which
Rome had been for two generations the centre became now much more widely
diffused; and as the privilege of citizenship, or of that modified
citizenship conferred by the ‘ius Latii,’ was more prized from its
novelty, so the attractions of literary studies and the impulses of
literary ambition were felt more strongly from coming fresh and
unhackneyed to a vigorous race. It was a happier position for Virgil and
for Horace, it fitted them not only to be truer poets of the natural
beauty of Italy, but also to feel in imagination all the wonder associated
with the idea of the great city, to have spent their earliest and most
impressible years among scenes of peace and beauty, remote from contact
with the excitement, the vices, the routine of city life, than if, with
the friend of Juvenal, they could have applied to themselves the
words—‘our childhood drank in the air of the Aventine.’

There is still one point to be noticed in connexion with the district in
which Virgil was born and passed his early youth. It was from Julius
Caesar that Gallia Transpadana received the full Roman citizenship. But
before he established this claim on their gratitude, the ‘Transpadani,’ as
we learn from Cicero’s letters, were thoroughly devoted to his cause(159),
and it was among them that his legions were mainly recruited. One of the
spiteful acts by which the aristocratic party showed its animosity to
Caesar was the scourging of one of the inhabitants of the colony of Novum
Comum (Como) by order of the Consul Marcellus,—an act condemned by Cicero
on the ground that the victim of this outrage was a ‘Transpadanus(160).’
Caesar was in the habit of passing the winters of his proconsulate in this
part of his province, especially at Verona, where he was the guest of the
father of Catullus. The name of Caesar must thus have become a household
word among this people. They must have soon recognised his greatness as a
soldier, and felt the fascination of his gracious presence. They must have
been grateful for his championship of the provinces against the oppressive
rule of the Senate, and for the protection afforded by his army from
dangers similar to those from which their fathers had been saved, after
many disasters, by his great kinsman, Marius. They did not share the
sentiments of distrust excited among the aristocracy at Rome by Caesar’s
early career, and had no reason to regard the permanent ascendency of one
man as a heavier burden than the caprices of their temporary governors.
From the favour which Virgil received from leaders of the Caesarean cause
before his fame was established, and from his intimacy with Varius the
panegyrist of Julius Caesar, it may be inferred that in adhering to the
cause of the Empire he was true to the early impressions of his boyhood.
He was one of the first to feel and make others feel the spell which the
name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world.

Latin literature in the Augustan Age drew its representatives not only
from a wider district than the preceding age, but also from a different
social class. The men eminent as poets, orators, and historians in the
last years of the Republic were for the most part members of the great
Roman or Italian families. They were either themselves actively engaged in
political life, or living in intimacy with those who were so engaged.
Whatever tincture of letters was found in any other class was confined to
freedmen or learned Greeks, such as Archias and Theophanes, attached to
the houses of the nobility. The fortunes of the two great poets of the
Augustan Age prove that no barrier of class-prejudice and no necessary
inferiority of early education prevented free-born men of very humble
origin from attaining the highest distinction, and living as the trusted
friends of the foremost men in the State. Virgil and Horace were the sons
of men who by the thrift and industry of a humble occupation had been able
to buy small farms in their native district. Virgil’s father had not
indeed, like the father of Horace, risen from a servile position. He is
said to have begun life as a hired assistant to one Magius, who, according
to one account, was a potter, according to another a ‘viator’ (or officer
whose duty it was to summon prisoners before magistrates). He married the
daughter of his master, being recommended to him, as is said by his
biographer, by his industry (ob industriam). The name of Virgil’s mother
was Magia Polla. His father is said to have increased his substance among
other things by keeping bees (silvis coemendis et apibus curandis),—a fact
which perhaps explains the importance given to this branch of rural
industry in the Georgics. Virgil thus springs from that class whose
condition he represents as the happiest allotted to man, and as affording
the best field for the exercise of virtue and piety. He and Horace, after
living in the most refined society of Rome, are entirely at one in their
appreciation of the qualities of the old Italian husbandmen or small
landowners,—a class long before their time reduced in numbers and
influence, but still producing men of modest worth and strong common sense
like the ‘abnormis sapiens’ of the Satires, and like those country
neighbours whose lively talk and homely wisdom Horace contrasts with the
fashionable folly of Rome; and true and virtuous women, such as may have
suggested to the one poet the lines—

Quod si pudica mulier in partem iuvet
Domum atque dulces liberos,
Sabina qualis aut perusta solibus
Pernicis uxor Appuli(161),

and to the other—

Interea longum cantu solata laborem
Arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas(162).

These poets themselves probably owe that stronger grain of character,
their large share of the old Italian seriousness of spirit (gravitas),
which distinguishes them from the other poets of their time, to the
traditions of virtue which the men of this class had not yet unlearned. It
is remarked by M. Sainte-Beuve how strong the attachment of such men
usually is to their homes and lands, inherited from their fathers or
acquired and enriched by their own industry. He characterises happily
‘cette médiocrité de fortune et de condition morale dans laquelle était né
Virgile, médiocrité, ai-je dit, qui rend tout mieux senti et plus cher,
parcequ’on y touche à chaque instant la limite, parcequ’on y a toujours
présent le moment où l’on a acquis et celui où l’on peut tout perdre.’ The
truest human feeling expressed in the Eclogues is the love which the old
settlers had for their lands, and the sorrow which they felt when forced
to quit them. The Georgics bear witness to the strong Italian passion for
the soil, and the pride in the varied results of his skill which made a
life of unceasing labour one of contentment and happiness to the
husbandman.

As has happened in the case of other poets and men of poetic genius,
tradition recorded some marvellous circumstances attending his birth,
which were believed to have portended his future distinction. These
stories may have originated early in his career from the promise of genius
afforded by his childhood: or, like the mediaeval belief in his magical
powers, they may be a kind of mythological reflection of the veneration
and affection with which his memory was cherished. The character of these
reported presages implies the impression produced by the gentleness and
sweetness of his disposition(163), as well as by the rapid growth and
development of his poetic faculty(164).

A more trustworthy indication of his early promise is afforded by the care
with which he was educated. Like Horace, he was fortunate in having
parents who, themselves of humble origin, considered him worthy of
receiving the best instruction which the world could give; and, like
Horace, he repaid their tender solicitude with affectionate gratitude. By
his father’s care he was from boyhood dedicated to the high calling which
he faithfully followed through all his life. At the age of twelve he was
taken to Cremona, an old Latin colony; and, from the lines in one of his
earliest authentic poems (the address to the villa of Siron)—

Tu nunc eris illi
Mantua quod fuerat, quodque Cremona prius(165)—

implying a residence at Cremona, it seems probable that his father may
have accompanied him thither, as Horace’s father accompanied him to Rome
for the same purpose. On his sixteenth birth-day—the day on which,
according to Donatus, Lucretius died—Virgil assumed the ‘toga virilis,’
and about the same time went to Milan, and continued there, engaged in
study, till he removed to Rome in the year 53 B.C., when he was between
sixteen and seventeen years of age. It was in this year of his life that
he is said to have written the ‘Culex.’ There are many difficulties which
prevent the belief that Virgil is the author of the poem which has come
down to us under that name. But the consideration of these must be
reserved for a later examination of the poem.

At Rome he studied rhetoric under Epidius, who was also the teacher of the
young Octavianus. As the future Emperor made his first public appearance
at the age of twelve, by delivering the funeral oration over his
grandmother Julia, it may have happened that he and Virgil were pupils of
Epidius at the same time, and were not unknown to each other even before
the meeting of ten years later which decisively affected Virgil’s fortunes
and determined his career. The time of his arrival at Rome was of critical
importance in literature. The recent publication of the poem of Lucretius,
the most important event in Latin literature since the appearance of the
Annals of Ennius, must have stimulated the enthusiasm of the younger
generation, among whom poetry and oratory were at that time conjointly
cultivated. Mr. Munro has shown the influence exercised by this poem on
the later style of Catullus, who collected and edited his own poems about
the time when Virgil came to Rome, and died shortly afterwards. One or two
of the minor poems among the Catalepton, attributed to Virgil with more
probability than the Culex, are parodies or close imitations of the style
of Catullus, and are written in a freer and more satiric spirit than
anything published by him in later years. But it is a little remarkable
that, while reproducing the language and cadences of both these poets in
his first acknowledged work, Virgil never mentions the name either of
Lucretius or Catullus. The poets mentioned by him with admiration in the
Eclogues are his living contemporaries, Varius and Cinna, Pollio and
Gallus. Is it on account of the Senatorian and anti-Caesarean sympathies
of the older poets that the poets of the new era thus separate themselves
abruptly from those of the previous epoch? If it was owing to the jealousy
of the new _régime_ that the two great Augustan poets, while paying a
passing tribute to the impracticable virtue of Cato, never mention the
greater name or allude to the fate of Cicero, there seems to have been
nothing in the political action or expressed opinions of Lucretius to call
for a similar reticence. If, on the other hand, the boldness of his attack
on the strongholds of all religious belief had the effect of cutting him
off for a time from personal sympathy, as similar opposition to received
opinions had in modern times in the case of Spinosa and Shelley, it did
not interfere with the immediate influence exercised by his genius on the
thought and art of Virgil.

The most interesting of the minor poems among the Catalepton is one
written at the time when the young poet entered on the study of philosophy
under Siron the Epicurean. This poem expresses the joy felt by him in
exchanging the empty pretension and dull pedantry of rhetorical and
grammatical studies for the real enquiries of philosophy:—

Ite hinc, inanes rhetorum ampullae,
Inflata rore non Achaico verba,
Et vos, Stiloque, Tarquitique, Varroque,
Scholasticorum natio madens pingui,
Ite hinc, inanis cymbalon iuventutis.
* * * * *
Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus,
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis,
Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura(166).

These lines are the earliest expression of that philosophical longing
which haunted Virgil through all his life as a hope and aspiration, but
never found its realisation in speculative result. The motive which he
professes for entering on the study,

Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura,

is the same as that which acted on Lucretius—the wish to secure an ideal
serenity of life. The same trust in the calming influence of the Epicurean
philosophy appears in the

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, etc.

of the second Georgic. But in different ways, by the deep feeling of
melancholy in the one, by the revolt and spiritual reaction in the other,
Lucretius and Virgil both show that these tenets could not secure to ‘the
passionate heart of the poet’ that calmness and serenity of spirit which
they gave to men of the stamp of Atticus, Velleius, or Torquatus. The
final lines of the poem express the lingering regret with which he bids a
temporary farewell to the Muses. These few lines, more than any other poem
attributed to Virgil, seem to bring him in his personal feelings nearer to
us. There is a touch of the graciousness of his nature, recalling the
cordial feeling of Catullus to all his young comrades, in the passing
notice of those who had shared his studies:—

Iam valete, formosi.

At a time when the poetry of the younger generation was universally free
and licentious in tone, the purity of Virgil’s nature reveals itself in
the prayer to the Muses to revisit his writings ‘pudenter et raro,’
chastely and seldom. The whole poem is the sincere expression of the
scholar and poet, even in youth idealising the austere charm of
philosophy, while feeling in his heart the more powerful attraction of
poetry. In the

Nam, fatebimur verum,
Dulces fuistis(167),

is the literal expression of that deep joy which afterwards moved him in
uttering the lines—

Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, etc.

and

Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis
Raptat amor(168);

and which sustained him stedfastly in the noble harmony of all his later
life.

Of the next ten years of his career nothing is known with certainty; but
the outbreak of the Civil War is likely to have interrupted his residence
at Rome, and he is next heard of living in his native district and engaged
in the composition of the Eclogues. He took no part in the war, nor ever
served as a soldier; and he seems to have appeared only once in the other
field of practical distinction open to a young Roman who had received so
elaborate an education—that of forensic pleading. He is said to have
wanted the readiness of speech and self-possession necessary for success
in such a career; and he was thus fortunate in escaping all temptation to
sacrifice his genius to the ambition of practical life, or to divide his
allegiance, as Licinius Calvus did, between the claims of poetry and of
oratory. His first literary impulse was to write an historical epic on the
early Roman or Alban history, and to this impulse, he himself alludes in
the lines of the sixth Eclogue,—

Cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
Vellit et admonuit(169).

He gave up the idea, feeling the unsuitable nature of the material for
poetic treatment,—‘offensus materia,’ as the Life of Donatus expresses it;
and he resolutely resisted the projects often urged upon him of giving a
poetical account of contemporary events, in celebration of the glory of
Pollio, Varus, or Caesar. But it is noticeable as a proof of the
persistence with which his mind continued to dwell on ideas once
projected, till they finally assumed appropriate shape, that in the Aeneid
he really combines these two purposes of vivifying the ancient traditions
of Rome and Alba, and of glorifying the great results of his own era. It
is by this capacity of forecasting some great work, and dwelling on the
idea till it clears itself of all alien matter and assimilates to itself
the impressions and interests of a life-time, that the vastest and most
enduring monuments of genius are produced.

In the year of the battle of Philippi, Virgil was living in his native
district, engaged in the composition of his pastoral poems. Of his mode of
life, taste, and feelings about this time we perceive only that he
continued to be a student of the Alexandrine literature, that he had, by
natural gift and assiduous culture, brought the technical part of his
art—the diction and rhythm of poetry—to the highest perfection hitherto
attained, that he enjoyed the favour and patronage of the Governor of the
province, Asinius Pollio, and that he was united by strong ties of
affection and warm admiration to Cornelius Gallus, who, while still in
early youth, had obtained high distinction in poetry and a prominent
position in public life. There are in the Eclogues notices of other poets
of the district, whose friendship he enjoyed or whose jealousy he excited.
The Mopsus of the fifth is said to be the didactic poet, Aemilius Macer.
The mention of Bavius and Maevius, the ‘iurgia Codri,’ and the allusion in
a later poem to Anser the panegyrist of Antony, are the nearest approaches
to anything like resentment or personal satire that Virgil has shown. It
may be that in the lines where Amaryllis and Galatea and other personages
of the poems are introduced he refers to some personal experiences; but as
compared with all the poets of this era, Virgil either observed a great
reticence, or enjoyed an exceptional immunity from the passions of youth.
The whole tone of the earlier poems, and numerous expressions in all of
them, such as ‘tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra,’ are suggestive of a somewhat
indolent enjoyment of the charm of books, of poetry, and of the softer
beauties of Nature.

The following year was the turning-point in his career, and gave a more
definite aim to his genius and sympathies. In that year his own fortunes
became involved in the affairs which were determining the fate of the
world. The Triumvirs, in assigning grants of land to their soldiers, had
confiscated the territory of Cremona, which had shown sympathy with the
Senatorian cause, and when this proved insufficient, an addition was made
from the adjoining Mantuan territory, in which the farm of Virgil’s father
was situated. The Commissioners appointed to distribute the land were
Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, all friendly to Virgil, and by their advice he
went to Rome, and obtained the restitution of his land by personal
application to Octavianus. On his return to his native district he found
that Varus had succeeded Pollio as Governor of the province. He appears to
have been unfriendly to the Mantuans, and was either unable or unwilling
to protect Virgil, who was forced at the imminent peril of his life to
escape, by swimming the river, from the violence of the soldier who had
entered on the possession of the land. Two of the Eclogues, the first and
the ninth, are written in connexion with these events. Though he still
adheres to an indirect and allusive treatment of his subject, these poems
possess the interest of being based on real experience. They give
expression to the sense of disorder, insecurity, and distress, which we
learn from other sources accompanied these forced divisions and
alienations of land. The first expresses also the gratitude of the poet to
‘the god-like youth’ to whom he owed the exceptional indulgence of being,
though only for a short time, reinstated in the possession of his land. It
is characteristic either of some weakness in Virgil’s nature, or of a
great depression among the peaceful inhabitants of Italy, that he had no
thought of resisting violence by violence, that he does not even express
resentment against the intruder, but only a feeling of wonder that any man
could be capable of such wickedness. To most readers the vehemence with
which the author of the ‘Dirae,’ under similar circumstances, curses the
land and its new owners, appears, if less sweet and musical, more natural
than this mild submission to superior force expressed by Virgil. But in
these personal experiences that strong sympathy with the national
fortunes, which henceforward animates his poetry, originates. Virgil may
thus in a sense be numbered among the poets who ‘are cradled into poetry
by wrong.’

After this second forcible expulsion from his old home, he took refuge,
along with his family, in a small country-house which had belonged to his
old teacher Siron. The poem numbered X. in the Catalepta,

Villula quae Sironis eras, et pauper agelle,
Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae(170),

was written at this time. It expresses anxiety and distress about the
state of his native district, to which, as in Eclogue i., he applies the
word _patria_, and affectionate solicitude for those along with him,
‘those with me whom I have ever loved,’ and especially for his father. His
own experience at this time may have suggested to him the feelings which
he afterwards reproduced in describing the flight of Aeneas from the ruins
of Troy.

He seems never after this time to have returned to his native district.
The liberality of Octavianus(171) compensated him for his loss, nor was
the even tenor of his life henceforward broken by any new dangers or
hardships. Through the gift of friends and patrons he acquired a fortune,
which at his death amounted to 10,000,000 sesterces (about £90,000); he
possessed a house on the Esquiline near the gardens of Maecenas, a villa
at Naples, and a country-house near Nola in Campania; and he seems to have
lived from time to time in Sicily and the South of Italy.

The Eclogues, commenced in his native district in the year 42 B.C., were
completed and published at Rome probably in the year 37 B.C. They were at
once received with great favour, and recited amid much applause upon the
stage. They established the author’s fame as the poet of Nature and of
rural life, as Varius was accepted as the poet of epic, Pollio of tragic
poetry:—

Molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae(172).

For a short time afterwards Virgil lived chiefly at Rome, as one of the
circle of which Maecenas was the centre, consisting of those poets and men
eminent in the State whom Horace (Sat i. 10) mentions as the critics and
friends whose approval he valued. Our knowledge of Virgil at this time is
derived from the first Book of the Satires of Horace. It was by Virgil and
Varius that Horace himself was introduced to Maecenas. They were all three
of the party who made the famous journey to Brundisium in 37 B.C. While
Horace starts alone from Rome, Virgil and Varius join him at Sinuessa.
Virgil may already have begun to withdraw from habitual residence in Rome
to his retirement in Campania, where he principally lived from this time
till his death. One line in this Satire confirms the account of the
weakness of his health which is given by his biographer,—the line, namely,
in which Horace describes himself and Virgil as going to sleep, while
Maecenas went to enjoy the exercise of the ‘pila’:—

Lusum it Maecenas, dormitum ego Vergiliusque,
Namque pila lippis inimicum et ludere crudis(173).

There is no notice of Virgil in the second Book of the Satires, written
between the years 35 and 30 B.C., at which time he had withdrawn
altogether from Rome, and was living at Naples, engaged in the composition
of the Georgics. Two of the Odes of Book I., however, the third and the
twenty-fourth, throw some light on his circumstances and character, and on
the relations of friendship subsisting between him and Horace. There is
some difficulty in determining the occasion that gave rise to the first of
these Odes. It is addressed to the ship which was to bear Virgil to
Attica. As we only know of one voyage of Virgil to Attica, that
immediately preceding his death, and as the first three Books of the Odes
were originally published some years before that date, we must suppose
either that this Ode refers to an earlier voyage contemplated or actually
accomplished by Virgil; or that the Virgil here spoken of is a different
person; or that the publication of the edition of the Odes which we
possess was of a later date than that generally accepted. The reason for
rejecting the second of these alternatives has been already given. Two
reasons may be given for rejecting the third,—first, the improbability
that one of the latest, if not the latest, in point of time among all the
Odes in the three Books should be placed third in order in the first Book,
among Odes that all refer to a much earlier period; and secondly, that
this Ode, in respect of the somewhat conventional nature of the thought
and the character of the mythological allusions, is clearly written in
Horace’s earlier manner. There is no improbability in accepting the first
alternative, that as Virgil travelled to and resided in Sicily, so he may
have made, or at least contemplated, an earlier voyage to Greece. One
object for such a voyage may have been the desire of seeing the localities
which he represents Aeneas as passing or visiting in the course of his
adventures between the time of leaving Troy and settling in Latium. The
Aeneid indicates in many places the tastes of a cultivated traveller; and
parts of the sea-voyage of Aeneas look as if they were founded on personal
reminiscences.

It may be noticed in several of the Odes of Horace how he adapts the vein
of thought running through them to the character or position of the person
to whom they refer. The revival of the old Hesiodic and theological idea
of the sin and impiety of that spirit of enterprise which led men first to
brave the dangers of the sea, and to baffle the purpose of the Deity in
separating nations from one another by the ocean,—an idea to which Virgil
himself gives expression in the fourth Eclogue,—

Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis,
Quae temptare Thetim ratibus, etc.(174),—

is not unsuited to the unadventurous disposition of the older poet.

The twenty-fourth Ode is addressed to him on the occasion of the death of
their common friend Quintilius Varus, probably the Varus of the tenth poem
of Catullus, and thus one of the last survivors of the friendly circle of
poets and wits of a former generation. While a high tribute to the pure
character of their lost friend, it is at the same time a tribute to the
pious and affectionate character of Virgil.

It is a delicate touch of appreciation that Horace dwells more on the
thought of the depth of Virgil’s sorrow for their common friend than on
his own. Both of these Odes give evidence of the strong affection which
Virgil inspired; the second affords further evidence of the qualities in
virtue of which he inspired that feeling. Similar proof of affection and
appreciation is afforded by the words in which Horace in the fifth Satire
of Book I. characterises Virgil (‘Vergilius optimus,’ as he elsewhere
calls him), and his two friends Plotius and Varius,—

Animae quales neque candidiores
Terra tulit, neque queis me sit devinctior alter(175).

The word ‘candidiores’ suggests the same qualities of a beautiful
nature,—the unworldly simplicity and sincerity, which are ascribed to
Quintilius in the words ‘pudor, incorrupta fides, nudaque veritas.’

The seven years from 37 B.C. to 30 B.C. were devoted by Virgil to the
composition of the Georgics, a poem scarcely exceeding 2000 lines in
length. His chief residence at this time was Naples:—

Me dulcis alebat
Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti(176).

He possessed also at this time a country-house or estate in the
neighbourhood of Nola; and the fourth Book affords evidence of some time
spent at or in the neighbourhood of Tarentum which is confirmed by the
lines in Propertius,—

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus(177),—

the region prized by Horace as second only to his beloved Tibur. In the
year 29 B.C. he read the whole poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia,
at the town of Atella. The reading occupied four days. Maecenas was of the
party, and relieved the poet in the task of reading.

The remaining years of his life were spent in the composition of the
Aeneid. One of the poems of the Catalepta (vi.) gives expression to a vow
binding the poet to sacrifice a bull to Venus if he succeeded in
accomplishing the task which he had imposed on himself. So early as the
year 26 B.C., Augustus while engaged in the Cantabrian war, had desired to
see some part of the poem. It was in answer to that request that Virgil
wrote the letter of which the fragment, quoted in the previous chapter,
has been preserved by Macrobius(178). At a later time, after the death of
the young Marcellus (23 B.C.), he read three Books to Augustus and the
other members of his family.

After spending eleven years on the composition of his great epic, he set
aside three more for its final correction. In the year 19 B.C. he set out
with the view of travelling in Greece and Asia. Meeting Augustus at
Athens, he was persuaded to abandon his purpose and return with him to
Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun he was seized with
illness. Continuing his voyage without interruption, he became worse, and
on the 21st of September, a few days after landing at Brundisium, he died
in the fifty-first year of his age. In his last illness he showed the
ruling passion of his life—the craving perfection—by calling for the cases
which held his MSS., with the intention of burning the Aeneid. It is in
keeping with the absence of self-assertion in his writings that his final
hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by
such confident assurances of immortality as other Roman poets have
expressed. In the same spirit of dissatisfaction with all imperfect
accomplishment, he left directions in his will that his executors, Varius
and Tucca, should publish nothing but what had been already edited by him.
This direction, which would have deprived the world of the Aeneid, was
disregarded by them in compliance with the commands of Augustus.

He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious
veneration and visited as a temple; and tradition has associated his name,
as that of a magician, with the construction of the great tunnel of
Posilippo, in its immediate neighbourhood.

III.

The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his
circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it
affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature
to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an
independent value as affording insight into social life and character,
irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no
separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and
intermingles with the even course of Virgil’s poetic career. And this may
have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic
adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike
that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic
faculty, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave
proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the
rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same
way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus
different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had
either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon,
or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and
Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The ‘inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae’ thus
betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been
named. Virgil’s life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption
in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his
career, from childhood to maturity, was an education, passive and active,
for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist
and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of
twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to
which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of
his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he
lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and
poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of
joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the
second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet
sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art: in later
life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy
exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by
which his poetical gifts were fostered—that of living and varying his
residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to
his happiness, viz. that he suffered during all his life from delicate or
variable health(179), was not unfavourable to the concentration of his
whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever
sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the pleasures in which his
contemporaries indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the
poets and artists of a southern land is powerfully attracted. The
abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the
fact recorded of him that he ‘took very little food and wine,’ must have
quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished.
Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit,
or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active
forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and
greater power in delineating varied types of character: but in combination
with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of
Virgil would have been lost.

He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion,
and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted
readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his
rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits
to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from
the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The ‘monstrari digito
praetereuntium’ was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that
gratification which Horace derived from it.

Both his parents lived till after the loss of his farm, when the poet was
in his twenty-ninth year. Two brothers died before him, one while still a
boy, the other after reaching manhood. To his half-brother Valerius
Proculus he left one half of his estate. Augustus, Maecenas, and his two
friends Varius and Tucca also received legacies. He was never married, nor
is there any record in connexion with him of any of those temporary
liaisons which the other poets of the Augustan Age formed and celebrated
in their verse. Some modern critics arguing from a single expression in
the Life by Donatus, and giving to a tradition connected with the subject
of the second Eclogue a meaning which, even if the tradition was
trustworthy, need not apply to it, have written of Virgil as if throughout
his whole life he yielded to a laxity of morals from which perhaps some of
his eminent contemporaries were not free, but which was condemned by the
manlier instincts of Romans, as of all modern nations. The expression of
Donatus is probably a mere survival of the calumnies against which
Asconius vindicated Virgil’s character. The statement of the same
biographer, that on account of his purity of speech and life he was known
in Naples by the name ‘Parthenias,’ is at least as trustworthy evidence as
that on which the imputations on his character have been revived. The
levity and mendacity with which such calumnies were invented(180), and the
attractions which they have for the baser nature of men in all times,
sufficiently explain both the original existence and the later revival of
these imputations. We are called upon not merely to disregard them as
unproved, or irrelevant to our estimate of the poet’s art, but to reject
them as incompatible with the singular purity and transparent sincerity of
nature revealed in all the maturer works of his genius(181).

The cordial and discriminating language both of the Satires and the Odes
of Horace confirms the impression of delicacy and simplicity of character
suggested by the general tone of Virgil’s writings. The appreciation of
Horace for Virgil reminds us of the touching tribute which the great comic
poet of Athens pays to her greatest tragic poet, where he speaks of him as
showing the same disposition among the Shades as he had shown in the world
above—

Ὁ δ’ εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ’, εὔκολος δ’ ἐκεῖ(182)—

and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellow-dramatist to our
own great poet, in the words ‘my gentle Shakespeare.’ The affection and
admiration of the greatest of his contemporaries, surviving in the
tradition handed on to future times, testify to Virgil’s exemption from
the personal frailties and asperities to which the impressible and mobile
temperament of genius is peculiarly liable.

His works do not present any single distinct impression of the poet
himself, in his own character and convictions, separable from his artistic
representation. Yet from the study of these works we are able to form a
general conception of the disposition, affections, and moral sympathies
which distinguish him from the other great writers of his country. We
might perhaps without undue fancifulness express the dominant ethical or
social characteristic—the ideal virtue or grace—of some of the great Roman
writers by some word peculiarly expressive of Roman character or culture,
and of frequent use in these writers themselves. Thus, in regard to
Cicero, the man of quick susceptibility to praise and blame, to sympathy
and coldness, who, except where his personal or political antagonism was
roused, had the liveliest sense of the claims of kind offices and kind
feeling which men have on one another, the word _humanitas_ seems to sum
up those qualities of heart and intellect which, in spite of the
transparent weaknesses of his character, gained for him so much affection,
and which, through the sympathy they enabled him to feel and arouse in
others, were the secret of his unparalleled success as an advocate. To
Lucretius we might apply the word _sanctitas_, in the sense in which he
applies the word _sanctus_ to the old philosophers, as expressive of that
glow of reverential emotion which animates him in his search after truth
and in his contemplation of Nature. His own words ‘_lepor_’ and
‘_lepidus_’ express the graceful vivacity, artistic and social rather than
ethical, which we associate with the thought of Catullus. The quality,
mainly intellectual and social, but still not devoid of ethical content,
of which Horace is the most perfect type, is ‘_urbanitas_.’ The full
meaning of the great Roman word ‘_gravitas_’—the vital force of ethical
feeling as well as the strength of character connoted by it, and by its
sister-qualities ‘dignity and authority’—is only completely realised in
the pages of Tacitus. And so it is only in Virgil, and especially in that
poem in which he deals with types of human character and motives
originating in human affection, that we understand all the feelings of
love to family and country, and of fidelity to the dead, and that sense of
dependence on a higher Power, sanctioning and sanctifying these feelings
and the duties demanded by them, which the Romans comprehended in their
use of the word ‘_pietas_.’

With this recognition of man’s dependence on a wise and beneficent Power
above him, is perhaps connected another moral characteristic strongly
indicated in many passages of the Aeneid, and mentioned among the personal
attributes of Virgil in some of the editions of Donatus’s Life, though it
does not appear in that accepted by the latest critics as resting on the
best MS. authority(183). This quality is the stoical power of endurance
which he attributes to his hero, but which in him is combined with nothing
either of the austerity or pedantry of Stoicism. The passage in the
biography, which, if an interpolation in the original Life, is one that is
at least ‘well invented,’ is to the following effect:—‘He was in the habit
of saying that there was no virtue of more use to a man than patience, and
that there was no fortune so harsh, that a brave man cannot triumph over
it by wisely enduring it.’ Mr. Wickham, in his edition of Horace, refers
to this passage as illustrating the maxims of consolation addressed by
Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius. Many lines in
the Aeneid, such as the

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est—
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis(184)—

indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace-loving
disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute
endurance.

The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is
that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of
independence and self-assertion that his character was deficient. It is to
the excess of his feeling of deference to power, and not to any
insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally—as in
the Invocation to the Georgics—transcending the limits of truth and
sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever
to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of
admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the
symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which
Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no
sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient
republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of
political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his
personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning
after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of
the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more
combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely
possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of
ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously
contributed little to human happiness. But the nobleness of Virgil’s
nature is not the nobleness of those qualities which make men great in
resistance to wrong, but the nobleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.

By no poet in any time has he been surpassed in devotion to his art. Into
this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling,
all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in
poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main
springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the
unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a
generous appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust
in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his
habits of composition confirm the impression of his assiduous industry. In
writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the
morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed
the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest
compass. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little
that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the
phrase ‘parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino’—‘that he produced verses
by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.’ The Aeneid was
first arranged and written out in prose: when the structure of the story
was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it,
as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of
reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the
true ἀοιδός, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious
artist. It is recorded on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he
read his own poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm (‘suavitate
tum lenociniis miris’), that verses which would have sounded commonplace
when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when ‘chanted to their
own music(185)’ by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given of the
effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some
among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This
large, musical, and impassioned utterance—the ‘os magna sonaturum’—is a
sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a
rhythmical expression for his thought.

It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius
with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that
Virgil established and for a long time retained his ascendency as one of
the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his
supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully
re-established, the examination of his various works will show that it was
not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the
dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of
the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but
to all time and to every people.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ECLOGUES.

The name by which the earliest of Virgil’s recognised works is known tells
us nothing of the subject of which it treats. The word ‘Eclogae’ simply
means selections. As applied to the poems of Virgil, it designates a
collection of short unconnected poems. The other name by which these poems
were known in antiquity, ‘bucolica,’ indicates the form of Greek art in
which they were cast and the pastoral nature of their subjects. Neither
word is used by Virgil himself; but the expressions by which he
characterises his art, such as ‘Sicelides Musae,’ ‘versus Syracosius,’
‘Musa agrestis’ and ‘silvestris,’ show that he writes in a pastoral
strain, and that he considered the pastoral poetry of Greece as his model.
He invokes not only the ‘Sicilian Muses,’ but the ‘fountain of Arethusa.’
He speaks too of Pan, and Arcadia, and the ‘Song of Maenalus.’ His
shepherd-poets are described as ‘Arcadians.’ The poets whom he introduces
as his prototypes are the ‘sage of Ascra,’ and the mythical Linus,
Orpheus, and Amphion. He alludes also to Theocritus under the name of the
‘Syracusan shepherd.’ The names of the shepherds who are introduced as
contending in song or uttering their feelings in monologue—Corydon,
Thyrsis, Menalcas, Meliboeus, Tityrus, etc.—are Greek, and for the most
part taken from the pastoral idyls of Theocritus. There is also frequent
mention of the shepherd’s pipe, and of the musical accompaniment to which
some of the songs chanted by the shepherds are set.

The general character of the poems is further indicated by the frequent
use of the word ‘ludere,’ a word applied by Catullus, Horace, Propertius,
Ovid, and others to the poems of youth, of a light and playful character,
and, for the most part, expressive of various moods of the passion of
love. Thus at the end of the Georgics Virgil speaks of himself thus:—

Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque iuventa,
Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi(186).

This reference shows further that the poem which stands first in order was
placed there when the edition of the Eclogues was given to the world. But
other references (at v. 86–87 and vi. 12) seem to imply that the separate
poems were known either by distinct titles, such as Varus, the title of
the sixth, or from their opening lines, as the ‘Formosum Corydon ardebat
Alexim,’ and the ‘Cuium pecus? an Meliboei?’ It has been also suggested,
from lines quoted in the ninth, which profess to be the opening lines of
other pastoral poems, that the ten finally collected together were actual
‘selections’ from a larger number, commenced if not completed (‘necdum
perfecta canebat’) by Virgil. But these passages seem more like the lines
attributed to the contending poets in the third and seventh Eclogues, i.e.
short unconnected specimens of pastoral song.

Nearly all the poems afford indications of the time of their composition
and of the order in which they followed one another; and that order is
different from the order in which they now appear. It is said, on the
authority of Asconius, that three years, from 42 B.C. to 39 B.C., were
given to the composition of the Eclogues. But an allusion in the tenth
(line 47) to the expedition of Agrippa across the Alps in the early part
of 37 B.C. proves that a later date must be assigned to that poem. The
probable explanation is that Virgil had intended to end the series with
the eighth, which celebrated the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini in 39
B.C.,—

A te principium, tibi desinet,—

but that his friendship for Gallus induced him to add the tenth, two years
later, either before the poems were finally collected for publication, or
in preparing a new edition of them. They were written at various places
and at various stages of the poet’s fortunes. They appear to have obtained
great success when first published, and some of them were recited with
applause upon the stage. The earliest in point of time were the second and
third, and these, along with the fifth, may be ascribed to the year 42
B.C. The seventh, which has no allusion to contemporary events and is a
mere imitative reproduction of the Greek idyl, may also belong to this
earlier period, although some editors rank it as one of the latest. The
first, which is founded on the loss of the poet’s farm, belongs to the
next year, and the ninth and sixth probably may be assigned to the same
year, or to the early part of the following year. The date of the fourth
is fixed by the Consulship of Pollio to the year 40 B.C.; that of the
eighth to the year 39 B.C. by the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini. The
opening words of the tenth show that it was the last of the series; and
the reference to the expedition of Agrippa implies that it could not have
been written earlier than the end of 38 B.C. or the beginning of 37 B.C.
The first, second, third, and fifth(187), were in all probability written
by the poet in his native district, the sixth, ninth, and perhaps the
seventh, at the villa which had formerly belonged to Siron (‘villula quae
Sironis _eras_’), the rest at Rome. The principle on which the poems are
arranged seems to be that of alternating dialogue with monologue. The
eighth, though not in dialogue, yet resembles the latter part of the
fifth, in presenting two continuous songs, chanted by different shepherds.
The poem first in order may have occupied its place from its greater
interest in connexion with the poet’s fortunes, or from the honour which
it assigns to Octavianus, whose pre-eminence over the other competitors
for supreme power had sufficiently declared itself before the first
collected edition of the poems was published.

In the earliest poems of the series the art of Virgil, like the lyrical
art of Horace in his earlier Odes, is more imitative and conventional than
in those written later. He seems satisfied with reproducing the form,
rhythm, and diction of Theocritus, and mingling some vague expression of
personal or national feeling with the sentiment of the Greek idyl. That
the fifth was written after the second and third appears from the lines v.
86–87, in which Menalcas, under which name Virgil introduces himself in
the Eclogues, presents his pipe to Mopsus:—

Haec nos ‘Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexin,’
Haec eadem docuit ‘Cuium pecus? an Meliboei(188)?’

From these lines also it may be inferred as probable that the second poem,
‘Formosum pastor Corydon,’ was written before the third, ‘Dic mihi,
Damoeta, cuium pecus? an Meliboei?’

A tradition, quoted by Servius and referred to (though inaccurately) by
Martial(189), attributes the composition of the second Eclogue to the
admiration excited in Virgil by the beauty of a young slave, Alexander,
who was presented to him by Pollio and carefully educated by him. A
similar story is told of his having received from Maecenas another slave,
named Cebes, who also obtained from him a liberal education and acquired
some distinction as a poet. It is not improbable that Virgil may have been
warmly attached to these youths, and that there was nothing blameable in
his attachment. Even Cicero, a man as far removed as possible from any
sentimental weakness, writes to Atticus of the death of a favourite slave,
a young Greek, and evidently, from the position he filled in Cicero’s
household, a boy of liberal accomplishments, in these words: ‘And, I
assure you, I am a good deal distressed. For my reader, Sositheus, a
charming boy, is just dead; and it has affected me more than I should have
thought the death of a slave ought to affect one(190).’ It remains true
however that in one or two of those Eclogues in which he most closely
imitates Theocritus, Virgil uses the language of serious sentiment, and
once of bantering raillery, in a way which justly offends modern feeling.
And this is all that can be said against him.

There are more imitations of the Greek in this and in the next poem than
in any of the other Eclogues(191). The scenery of the piece, in so far as
it is at all definite, combines the mountains and the sea-landscape of
Sicily with Italian woods and vineyards. Corydon seems to combine the
features of an Italian vinedresser with the conventional character of a
Sicilian shepherd. The line

Aspice aratra iugo referunt suspensa iuvenci(192)

applies rather to an Italian scene than to the pastoral district of
Sicily; and this reference to ploughing seems inconsistent with the
description of the fierce midsummer heat, and with the introduction of the
‘fessi messores’ in the opening lines of the poem. These inconsistencies
show how little thought Virgil had for the objective consistency of his
representation. The poem however, in many places, gives powerful
expression to the feelings of a despairing lover. There are here, as in
the Gallus, besides that vein of feeling which the Latin poet shares with
Theocritus, some traces of that ‘wayward modern mood’ of longing to escape
from the world and to return to some vague ideal of Nature, and to
sacrifice all the gains of civilisation in exchange for the homeliest
dwelling shared with the object of affection:—

O tantum libeat mecum tibi sordida rura
Atque humiles habitare casas, et figere cervos(193);

and again,

Habitarunt di quoque silvas
Dardaniusque Paris. Pallas quas condidit arces
Ipsa colat, nobis placeant ante omnia silvae(194).

The third Eclogue, which is in dialogue, and reproduces two features of
the Greek idyl, the natural banter of the shepherds and the more
artificial contest in song, is still more imitative and composite in
character. It shows several close imitations, especially of the fourth,
fifth, and eighth Idyls of Theocritus(195). In this poem only Virgil,
whose muse even in the Eclogues is almost always serious or plaintive,
endeavours to reproduce the playfulness and vivacity of his original. Both
in the bantering dialogue and in the more formal contest of the shepherds,
the subjects introduced are for the most part of a conventional pastoral
character, but with these topics are combined occasional references to the
tastes and circumstances of the poet himself. Thus in lines 40–42,

In medio duo signa ... curvus arator haberet,

allusion is made to the astronomical studies of which Virgil made fuller
use in the Georgics. In the line

Pollio amat nostram quamvis est rustica Musam,

and again,

Pollio et ipse facit nova carmina(196),

he makes acknowledgment of the favour and pays honour to the poetical
tastes of his earliest patron, whom he celebrates also in the fourth and
eighth Eclogues. The line

Qui Bavium non odit amet tua carmina, Maevi(197)

has condemned to everlasting notoriety the unfortunate pair, who have
served modern satirists as types of spiteful critics and ineffectual
authors. At lines 10–11 there is, as in Eclogue ii., an apparent blending
of the occupations of the Italian vinedresser with those of the Sicilian
shepherd. In the contest of song there is no sustained connexion of
thought, as indeed there is not in similar contests in Theocritus. These
contests are supposed to reproduce the utterances of improvisatori, of
whom the second speaker is called to say something, either in continuation
of or in contrast to the thought of the first. The shepherds in these
strains seek to glorify their own prowess, boast of their successes in
love, or call attention to some picturesque aspect of their rustic life.

The fifth Eclogue is also in dialogue. It brings before us a friendly
interchange of song between two pastoral poets, Mopsus and Menalcas.
Servius mentions that Menalcas (here, as in the ninth Eclogue) stands for
Virgil himself, while Mopsus stands for his friend Aemilius Macer of
Verona. Mopsus laments the cruel death of Daphnis, the legendary shepherd
of Sicilian song, and Menalcas celebrates his apotheosis. Various accounts
were given in antiquity of the meaning which was to be attached to this
poem. One account was that Virgil here expressed his sorrow for the death
of his brother Flaccus(198). Though the time of his death may have
coincided with that of the composition of this poem, the language of the
lament and of the song celebrating the ascent of Daphnis to heaven is
quite unlike the expression of a private or personal sorrow. There seems
no reason to doubt another explanation which has come down from ancient
times, that under this pastoral allegory Virgil laments the death and
proclaims the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. It is probable(199) that the
poem was composed for his birthday, the 4th of July, which for the first
time was celebrated with religious rites in the year 42 B.C., when the
name of the month Quintilis was changed into that which it has retained
ever since. The lines 25–26,

Nulla neque amnem
Libavit quadrupes nec graminis attigit herbam(200),

are supposed(201) to refer to a belief which had become traditional in the
time of Suetonius, that the horses which had been consecrated after
crossing the Rubicon had refused to feed immediately before the death of
their master(202). In the lines expressing the sorrow for his loss, and in
those which mark out the divine office which he was destined to fulfil
after death,—

Ut Baccho Cererique, tibi sic vota quotannis
Agricolae facient, damnabis tu quoque votis(203),—

as in the lines of the ninth, referring to the Julium Sidus,—

Astrum quo segetes gauderent frugibus, et quo
Duceret apricis in collibus uva colorem(204),—

allusion is made to the encouragement Caesar gave to the husbandman and
vine-planter in his lifetime, and to the honour due to him as their
tutelary god in heaven. And these allusions help us to understand the
‘votis iam nunc adsuesce vocari’ of the invocation in the first Georgic.

Nothing illustrates more clearly the unreal conceptions of the pastoral
allegory than a comparison of the language in the ‘Lament for Daphnis,’
with the strong Roman realism of the lines at the end of the first
Georgic, in which the omens portending the death of Caesar are described.
Nor can anything show more clearly the want of individuality with which
Virgil uses the names of the Theocritean shepherds than the fact that
while the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue represents the departed and deified
soldier and statesman, the Daphnis of the ninth is a living husbandman
whose fortunes were secured by the protecting star of Caesar,—

Insere, Daphni, piros, carpent tua poma nepotes(205).

The peace and tranquillity restored to the land under this protecting
influence are foreshadowed in the lines 58–61—

Ergo alacris ... amat bonus otia Daphnis;

and the earliest reference to the divine honours assigned in life and
death to the later representatives of the name of Caesar, is heard in the
jubilant shout of wild mountains, rocks, and groves to the poet—

Deus, deus ille, Menalca.

Although the treatment of the subject may be vague and conventional, yet
this poem possesses the interest of being Virgil’s earliest effort,
directed to a subject of living and national interest; and many of the
lines in the poem are unsurpassed for grace and sweetness of musical
cadence by anything in Latin poetry.

There is no allusion to contemporary events by which the date of the
seventh can be determined; but the absence of such allusion and the
‘purely Theocritean(206)’ character of the poem suggest the inference that
it is a specimen of Virgil’s earlier manner. Two shepherds, Corydon and
Thyrsis, are introduced as joining Daphnis, who is seated under a
whispering ilex; they engage in a friendly contest of song, which is
listened to also by the poet himself, who here calls himself Meliboeus.
They assert in alternate strains their claims to poetic honours, offer
prayers and vows to Diana as the goddess of the chase and to Priapus as
the god of gardens, draw rival pictures of cool retreat from the heat of
summer and of cheerfulness by the winter fire, and connect the story of
their loves with the varying aspect of the seasons, and with the beauty of
trees sacred to different deities or native to different localities.
Though the shepherds are Arcadian, the scenery is Mantuan:—

Hic viridis tenera praetexit harundine ripam
Mincius, eque sacra resonant examina quercu(207).

Meliboeus decides the contest in favour of Corydon:—

Haec memini, et victum frustra contendere Thyrsin.
Ex illo Corydon Corydon est tempore nobis(208).

These poems, in which the conventional shepherds of pastoral poetry sing
of their loves, their flocks and herds, of the beauty of the seasons and
of outward nature, in tones caught from Theocritus, or revive and give a
new meaning to the old Sicilian dirge over ‘the woes of Daphnis,’ may be
assigned to the eventful year in which the forces of the Republic finally
shattered themselves against the forces of the new Empire. There is a
strange contrast between these peaceful and somewhat unreal strains of
Virgil and the drama which was at the same time enacted on the real stage
of human affairs. No sound of the ‘storms that raged outside his happy
ground’ disturbs the security with which Virgil cultivates his art. But
the following year brought the trouble and unhappiness of the times home
to the peaceful dwellers around Mantua, and to Virgil among the rest. Of
the misery caused by the confiscations and allotments of land to the
soldiers of Octavianus, the first Eclogue is a lasting record. Yet even in
this poem, based as it is on genuine feeling and a real experience, Virgil
seems to care only for the truth of feeling with which Tityrus and
Meliboeus express themselves, without regard for consistency in the
conception of the situation, the scenery, or the personages of the poem.
Tityrus is at once the slave who goes to Rome to purchase his freedom, and
the owner of the land and of the flocks and herds belonging to it(209). He
is advanced in years(210), and at the same time a poet lying indolently in
the shade, and making the woods ring with the sounds of ‘beautiful
Amaryllis(211),’ like the young shepherds in Theocritus. The scenery
apparently combines some actual features of the farm in the Mantuan
district—

Quamvis lapis omnia nudus
Limosoque palus obducat pascua iunco(212),

with the ideal mountain-land of pastoral song—

Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae(213).

A further inconsistency has been suggested between the time of year
indicated by the ‘shade of the spreading beech’ in the first line, and
that indicated by the ripe chestnuts at line 81(214). The truth of the
poem consists in the expression of the feelings of love which the old
possessors entertained for their homes, and the sense of dismay caused by
this barbarous irruption on their ancient domains:—

Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit?
Barbarus has segetes? En quo discordia civis
Produxit miseros(215)!

Virgil’s feeling for the movement of his age, which henceforth becomes one
of the main sources of his inspiration, has its origin in the effect which
these events had on his personal fortunes, and in the sympathy awakened
within him by the sorrows of his native district.

The ninth Eclogue, written most probably in the same year, and in form
imitated from the seventh Idyl—the famous Thalysia—of Theocritus, repeats
the tale of dejection and alarm among the old inhabitants of the Mantuan
district,—

Nunc victi, tristes, quoniam fors omnia versat(216),—

and touches allusively on the story of the personal danger which Virgil
encountered from the violence of the centurion who claimed possession of
his land. The speakers in the dialogue are Moeris, a shepherd of
Menalcas,—the pastoral poet, who sings of the nymphs, of the wild flowers
spread over the ground, and of the brooks shaded with trees,—and Lycidas,
who, like the Lycidas of the Thalysia, is also a poet:—

Me quoque dicunt
Vatem pastores, sed non ego credulus illis.
Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores(217).

After the account of the fray, given by Moeris, and the comments of
Lycidas, in which he introduces the lines referred to in the previous
chapter, as having all the signs of being a real description of the
situation of Virgil’s farms—

qua se subducere colles incipiunt—

Moeris sings the opening lines of certain other pastoral poems, some his
own, some the songs of Menalcas. Two of these—‘Tityre dum redeo’ and ‘Huc
ades O Galatea’—are purely Theocritean. Two others—

Vare tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobis,

and

Daphni quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus(218)—

indicate the new path which Virgil’s art was striking out for itself.
There is certainly more real substance in this poem than in most of the
earlier Eclogues. Lycidas and Moeris speak about what interests them
personally. The scene of the poem is apparently the road between Virgil’s
farm and Mantua. There seem to be no conventional and inconsistent
features introduced from the scenery of Sicily or Arcadia, unless it be
the ‘aequor’ of line 57—

Et nunc omne tibi stratum silet aequor(219).

But may not that be either the lake, formed by the overflow of the river,
some distance above Mantua, or even the great level plain, with its long
grass and corn-fields and trees, hushed in the stillness of the late
afternoon?

The sixth Eclogue was written probably about the same time and at the same
place, the villa of Siron, in which Virgil had taken refuge with his
family. It is inscribed with the name of Varus, who is said to have been a
fellow-student of Virgil under the tuition of Siron. But, with the
exception of the dedicatory lines, there is no reference to the
circumstances of the time. Though abounding with rich pastoral
illustrations, the poem is rather a mythological and semi-philosophical
idyl than a pure pastoral poem. It consists mainly of a song of Silenus,
in which an account is given of the creation of the world in accordance
with the Lucretian philosophy; and, in connexion with this theme (as is
done also by Ovid in his Metamorphoses), some of the oldest mythological
traditions, such as the tale of Pyrrha and Deucalion, the reign of Saturn
on earth, the theft and punishment of Prometheus, etc., are introduced.
The opening lines—Namque canebat uti—are imitated from the song of Orpheus
in the first book of the Argonautics(220), but they bear unmistakable
traces also of the study of Lucretius. There seems no trace of the
language of Theocritus in the poem.

Three points of interest may be noted in this song: (1) Virgil here, as in
Georgic ii. 475, etc., regards the revelation of physical knowledge as a
fitting theme for poetic treatment. So in the first Aeneid, the ‘Song of
Iopas’ is said to be about ‘the wandering moon and the toils of the sun;
the origin of man and beast, water and fire,’ etc. The revelation of the
secrets of Nature seems to float before the imagination of Virgil as the
highest consummation of his poetic faculty. (2) We note here how, as
afterwards in the Georgics, he accepts the philosophical ideas of
creation, side by side with the supernatural tales of mythology. He seems
to regard such tales as those here introduced as part of the religious
traditions of the human race, and as a link which connects man with the
gods. In the Georgics we find also the same effort to reconcile, or at
least to combine, the conceptions of science with mythological fancies. In
this effort we recognise the influence of other Alexandrine poets rather
than of Theocritus. (3) The introduction of Gallus in the midst of the
mythological figures of the poem, and the account of the honour paid to
him by the Muses and of the office assigned to him by Linus, are
characteristic of the art of the Eclogues, which is not so much
allegorical as composite. It brings together in the same representation
facts, personages, and places from actual life and the figures and scenes
of a kind of fairy-land. In the tenth Eclogue Gallus is thus identified
with the Daphnis of Sicilian song, and is represented as the object of
care to the Naiads and Pan and Apollo. While Pollio is the patron whose
protection and encouragement Virgil most cordially acknowledges in his
earlier poems, Gallus is the man among his contemporaries who has most
powerfully touched his imagination and gained his affections.

The Eclogue composed next in order of time is the ‘Pollio.’ It was written
in the consulship of Pollio, B.C. 40, immediately after the reconciliation
between Antony and Octavianus effected by the treaty of Brundisium, and
gives expression to that vague hope of a new era of peace and prosperity
which recurs so often in the poetry of this age. In consequence of the
interpretation given to it in a later age, this poem has acquired an
importance connected with Virgil’s religious belief second only to the
importance of the sixth Aeneid. Early Christian writers, perceiving a
parallel between expressions and ideas in this poem and those in the
Messianic prophecies, believed that Virgil was here the unconscious
vehicle of Divine inspiration, and that he prophesies of the new era which
was to begin with the birth of Christ. And though, as Conington and others
have pointed out, the picture of the Golden Age given in the poem is drawn
immediately from Classical and not from Hebrew sources, yet there is no
parallel in Classical poetry to that which is the leading idea of the
poem, the coincidence of the commencement of this new era with the birth
of a child whom a marvellous career awaited.

The poem begins with an invocation to the Sicilian Muses and with the
declaration that, though the strain is still pastoral, yet it is to be in
a higher mood, and worthy of the Consul to whom it is addressed. Then
follows the announcement of the birth of a new era. The world after
passing through a cycle of ages, each presided over by a special deity,
had reached the last of the cycle, presided over by Apollo, and was about
to return back to the Golden or Saturnian Age of peace and innocence, into
which the human race was originally born. A new race of men was to spring
from heaven. The first-born of this new stock was destined hereafter to be
a partaker of the life of the gods and to ‘rule over a world in peace with
the virtues of his father.’ Then follow the rural and pastoral images of
the Golden Age, like those given in the first Georgic in the description
of the early world before the reign of Jove. The full glory of the age
should not be reached till this child should attain the maturity of
manhood. In the meantime some traces of ‘man’s original sin’ (‘priscae
vestigia fraudis’) should still urge him to brave the dangers of the sea,
to surround his cities with walls, and to plough the earth into furrows.
There should be a second expedition of the Argonauts, and a new Achilles
should be sent against another Troy. The romantic adventures of the heroic
age were to precede the rest, innocence, and spontaneous abundance of the
age of Saturn. Next the child is called upon to prepare himself for the
‘magni honores’—the great offices of state which awaited him; and the poet
prays that his own life and inspiration may be prolonged so far as to
enable him to celebrate his career.

There seem to be no traces of imitation of Theocritus in this poem. The
rhythm which in the other Eclogues reproduces the Theocritean cadences is
in this more stately and uniform, recalling those of Catullus in his
longest poem. The substance of the poem is quite unlike anything in the
Sicilian idyl. Though this substance does not stand out in the clear light
of reality, but is partially revealed through a haze of pastoral images
and legendary associations, yet it is not altogether unmeaning. The
anticipation of a new era was widely spread and vividly felt over the
world; and this anticipation—the state of men’s minds at and subsequent to
the time when this poem was written—probably contributed to the acceptance
of the great political and spiritual changes which awaited the world(221).

Two questions which have been much discussed in connexion with this poem
remain to be noticed; (1) who is the child born in the consulship of
Pollio of whom this marvellous career is predicted? (2) is it at all
probable that Virgil, directly or indirectly, had any knowledge of the
Messianic prophecies or ideas?

In answer to the first we may put aside at once the supposition that the
prediction is made of the child who was born in that year to Octavianus
and Scribonia. The words ‘nascenti puero’ are altogether inapplicable to
the notorious and unfortunate Julia, who was the child of that marriage.
If Virgil was sanguine enough to predict the sex of the child, we can
hardly imagine him allowing the words to stand after his prediction had
been falsified. We may equally dismiss the supposition that the child
spoken of was the offspring of the marriage of Antony and Octavia. Not to
mention other considerations adverse to this supposition(222), it would
have been impossible for Virgil, the devoted partisan of Caesar, to pay
this special compliment to Antony, even after he became so closely
connected with his rival. There remains a third supposition, that the
child spoken of is the son of Pollio, Asinius Gallus, who plays an
important part in the reign of Tiberius. This last interpretation is
supported by the authority of Asconius, who professed to have heard it
from Asinius Gallus himself. The objection to this interpretation is that
Virgil was not likely to assign to the child of one who, as compared with
Octavianus and Antony, was only a secondary personage in public affairs,
the position of ‘future ruler of the world’ and the function of being ‘the
regenerator of his age.’ Still less could a poem bearing this meaning have
been allowed to retain its place among Virgil’s works after the ascendency
of Augustus became undisputed. Further, the line

Cara deum suboles, magnum Iovis incrementum

(whatever may be its exact meaning(223)) appears an extreme exaggeration
when specially applied to the actual son of a mortal father and mother.
These difficulties have led some interpreters to suppose that the child
spoken of is an ideal or imaginary representative of the future race. But
if we look more closely at the poem, we find that the child is not really
spoken of as the future regenerator of the age; he is merely the
first-born of the new race, which was to be nearer to the gods both in
origin and in actual communion with them. Again, the words

Pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem(224)

would not convey the same idea in the year 40 B.C. as they would ten or
twenty years later. At the time when the poem was written the consulship
was still the highest recognised position in the State. The Consuls for
the year, nominally at least, wielded the whole power of the Empire. The
words ‘reget orbem’ remain as a token that the Republic was not yet
entirely extinct. The child is called upon to prepare himself for the
great offices of State in the hope that he should in time hold the high
place which was now held by his father. The words ‘patriis virtutibus’
imply that he is no ideal being, but the actual son of a well-known
father. Virgil takes occasion in this poem to commemorate the attainment
of the highest office by his patron, to celebrate the birth of the son
born in the year of his consulship, and at the same time to express, by
mystical and obscure allusions, the trust that the peace of Brundisium was
the inauguration of that new era for which the hearts of men all over the
world were longing.

In turning to the second question, discussed in connexion with this
Eclogue, the great amount and recondite character of Virgil’s learning,
especially of that derived from Alexandrine sources, must be kept in view.
Macrobius testifies to this in several places. Thus he writes, ‘for this
poet was learned with not only a minute conscientiousness, but even with a
kind of reserve and mystery, so that he introduced into his works much
knowledge the sources of which are difficult to discover(225).’ In another
place he speaks of those things, ‘what he had introduced from the most
recondite learning of the Greeks(226).’ And again he says, ‘this story
Virgil has dug out from the most recondite Greek literature(227).’ It is
indeed most improbable that Virgil had a direct knowledge of the
Septuagint. If he had this knowledge it would have shown itself by other
allusions in other parts of his works. But it is quite possible that,
through other channels of Alexandrine learning, the ideas and the language
of Hebrew prophecy may have become indirectly known to him. One channel by
which this may have reached him would be the new Sibylline prophecies,
manufactured in the East and probably reflecting Jewish as well as other
Oriental ideas, which poured into Rome after the old Sibylline books had
perished in the burning of the Capitol during the first Civil War.

Still, admitting these possibilities, we are not called upon to go beyond
classical sources for the general substance and idea of this poem. It has
more in common with the myth in the Politicus of Plato than with the
Prophecies of Isaiah. The state of the world at the time when the poem was
written produced the longing for an era of restoration and a return to a
lost ideal of innocence and happiness, and the wish became father to the
thought.

There still remain the eighth and tenth Eclogues to be examined. The
first, like the fourth, is associated with the name of Pollio, the second
with that of Gallus. The date of the eighth is fixed to 39 B.C. by the
victory of Pollio in Illyria and by his subsequent triumph over the
Parthini. The words

Accipe iussis
Carmina coepta tuis(228)

testify to the personal influence under which Virgil wrote these poems.
The title of ‘Pharmaceutria,’ by which the poem is known, indicates that
Virgil professes to reproduce, in an Italian form, that passionate tale of
city life which forms the object of the second idyl of Theocritus. But
while the subject and burden of the second of the two songs contained in
this Eclogue are suggested by that idyl, the poem is very far from being a
mere imitative reproduction of it.

Two shepherds, Damon and Alphesiboeus, meet in the early dawn—

Cum ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba(229),

(one of those touches of truthful description which reappear in the
account of the pastoral occupations in Georgic iii). They each sing of
incidents which may have been taken from actual life, or may have formed
the subject of popular songs traditional among the peasantry of the
district. In the first of these songs Damon gives vent to his despair in
consequence of the marriage of his old love Nysa with his rival Mopsus.
Though the shepherds who sing together bear the Greek names of Damon and
Alphesiboeus, though they speak of Rhodope and Tmaros and Maenalus, of
Orpheus and Arion, though expressions and lines are close translations,
and one a mistranslation, from the Greek (πάντα δ’ ἔναλλα γένοιτο being
rendered ‘omnia vel medium fiant mare’), and though the mode by which the
lover determines to end his sorrows,

Praeceps aerii specula de montis in undas
Deferar(230),

is more appropriate to a shepherd inhabiting the rocks overhanging the
Sicilian seas than to one dwelling in the plain of Mantua, yet both this
song and the accompanying one sung by Alphesiboeus approach more nearly to
the impersonal and dramatic representation of the Greek idyl than any of
those already examined. The lines of most exquisite grace and tenderness
in the poem,—lines which have been pronounced the finest in Virgil and the
finest in Latin literature by Voltaire and Macaulay(231),—

Saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala,
Dux ego vester eram, vidi cum matre legentem:
Alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus,
Iam fragiles poteram ab terra contingere ramos:
Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error(232)—

are indeed close imitations of lines of similar beauty from the song of
the Cyclops to Galatea:—

ἠράσθην μὲν ἔγωγα τεοῦς, κόρα, ἁνίκα πρᾶτον
ἦνθες ἐμᾷ σὺν ματρὶ θέλοισ’ ὑακίνθινα φύλλα
ἐξ ὄρεος δρέψασθαι, ἐγὼ δ’ ὁδὸν ἁγεμόνευον·
παύσασθαι δ’ ἐσιδών τυ καὶ ὕστερον οὐδ’ ἔτι πᾳ νῦν
ἐκ τήνω δύναμαι· τίν’ δ’ οὐ μέλει, οὐ μὰ Δί’ οὐδέν(233).

But they are so varied as to suggest a picture of ease and abundance among
the orchards and rich cultivated land of Italy, instead of the free life
and natural beauties of the Sicilian mountains. The descriptive touches
suggesting the picture of the innocent romance of boyhood are also all
Virgil’s own.

The song of Alphesiboeus represents a wife endeavouring to recall her
truant, though still faithful, Daphnis from the city to his home. Though
some of the illustrations in this song also are Greek, yet it contains
several natural references to rustic superstitions which were probably
common to Greek and Italian peasants; and the fine simile at line 85 (of
which the first hint is to be found in Lucretius(234)) suggests purely
Italian associations. The final incident in the poem, ‘Hylax in limine
latrat’ (though the name given to the dog is Greek), is a touch of natural
life, such as does not often occur in the Eclogues. On the whole, Virgil
seems here to have struck on a vein which it may be regretted that he did
not work more thoroughly. If, as has been suggested by Mr. Symonds, in his
account and translations of popular Tuscan poems, any of the Eclogues of
Virgil are founded on primitive love-songs current among the peasantry of
Italy, the songs of Damon and Alphesiboeus are those which we should fix
on as being the artistic development of these native germs.

The tenth Eclogue was the last in order of composition, probably an
after-thought written immediately before the final publication, or perhaps
before the second edition, of the nine other poems. In this poem Virgil
abandons the more realistic path on which he had entered in the eighth,
and returns again to the vague fancies of the old pastoral lament for
Daphnis, as it is sung in the first idyl of Theocritus. Nothing can be
more remote from actual fact than the representation of Gallus—the active
and ambitious soldier and man of affairs, at that time engaged in the
defence of the coasts of Italy—dying among the mountains of Arcadia, in
consequence of his desertion by Lycoris (a dancing-girl, and former
mistress of Antony, whose real name was Cytheris), and wept for by the
rocks and pine-woods of Maenalus and Lycaeus. Yet none of the poems is
more rich in beauty, and grace, and happy turns of phrase. As the
idealised expression of unfortunate love, this poem is of the same class
as the second, and as the song of Damon in the eighth. That vein of modern
romantic sentiment, already noticed in the second, the longing to escape
from the ways of civilised life to the wild and lonely places of Nature,
and to follow in imagination ‘the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,’
meets us also in the lines,

Atque utinam ex vobis unus vestrique fuissem
Aut custos gregis aut maturae vinitor uvae(235),—

and again in these,

Certum est in silvis, inter spelaea ferarum
Malle pati, tenerisque meos incidere amores
Arboribus(236).

II.

_Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral._

The review of the Eclogues in the order of their composition shows that
the early art of Virgil, like the lyrical art of Horace, begins in
imitation, and, after attaining command over the form, rhythm, and diction
of the type of poetry which it reproduces, gradually assumes greater
independence in the choice of subject and the mode of treatment. The
susceptibility of Virgil’s mind to the grace and musical sweetness of
Theocritus gave the first impulse to the composition of the Eclogues; but
this susceptibility was itself the result of a natural sympathy with the
sentiment and motives of the Greek idyl, especially with the love of
Nature and the passion of love. He found this province of art
unappropriated. He revealed a new vein of Greek feeling unwrought by any
of his countrymen. He gave another life to the beings, natural and
supernatural, of ancient pastoral song, and awoke in his native land the
sound of a strain hitherto unheard by Italian ears. The form of the Greek
idyl, whether in dialogue or monologue, suited his genius, as a vehicle
for the lighter fancies of youth, and for half-revealing, half-concealing
the pleasures and pains personal to himself, better than the forms of
lyrical and elegiac poetry adopted by Catullus and his compeers. In the
opening lines of the sixth Eclogue,

Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu
Nostra, neque erubuit silvas habitare Thalia(237),

Virgil acknowledges at once the source of his inspiration and the lowly
position which his genius was willing to assume. He may have consoled
himself for this abnegation of a higher ambition by the thought suggested
in the lines addressed to the ideal poet and hero of his imagination—

Nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poeta,
Et formosus ovis ad flumina pavit Adonis(238).

In order to understand the pastoral poetry of Virgil, both in its relation
to a Greek ideal and in its original truth of feeling, it is necessary to
remember the chief characteristics of its prototype in the age of Ptolemy
Philadelphus of Alexandria and in the early years of the reign of Hiero of
Syracuse. The pastoral poetry of Sicily was the latest creation of Greek
genius, born after the nobler phases of religious and political life, and
the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry which arose out of them, had passed
away. In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic
branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in
unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and
luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has
tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and
vaguely longing to breathe a freer air(239). But there was in ancient
times a primitive and popular, as well as a late and artistic pastoral. Of
the primitive pastoral, springing out of rustic gatherings and festivals,
or from lonely communion with Nature,

Per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia(240),

and transmitted, from generation to generation, in the mouth of the
people, no fragment has been preserved. Yet traces of the existence of
this kind of pastoral song, and of the music accompanying it, at a time
antecedent to the composition of the Homeric poems, may be seen in the
representation, on the Shield of Achilles, of the boy in the vineyard
‘singing the beautiful song Linus,’—a representation which is purely
idyllic,—and of the shepherds, in the Ambuscade, who appear τερπόμενοι
σύριγξι, as they accompany their flocks. The author of the Iliad absorbed
the spirit of this primitive poetry in the greater compass of his epic
creation, as Shakspeare has absorbed the Elizabethan pastoral within the
all-embracing compass of his representation. Much of the imagery of the
Iliad, several incidents casually introduced in connexion with the names
of obscure persons perishing in battle, some of the supernatural events
glanced at, as of the meeting of Aphrodite with Anchises while tending his
herds on the spurs of Ida,—a subject of allusion also in the Sicilian
idyl,—are of a pastoral character and origin. In the lines which spring up
with a tender grace in the midst of the stern grandeur of the final
conflict between Hector and Achilles—

οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης
τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠίθεός τε,
παρθένος ἠίθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλουν(241)—

the familiar cadences as well as the sweetest sentiment of pastoral song
may be recognised.

This primitive pastoral poetry may have been spread over all Greece and
the islands of the Aegean, from the earliest settlements of the Hellenic
race, or of that older branch of the family to which the name Pelasgic has
been vaguely given, and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though
with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and
herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest
writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and
the woods, and to have trained it to assume some form of art, was
Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth
century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at
Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

Some of the primitive modes of feeling which gave birth to the earliest
pastoral song still survive, though in altered form, in this later
Sicilian poetry. The song of the βουκόλοι, or herdsmen, like the song of
the masked worshippers of Bacchus (τραγῳδία), may be traced to that stage
in the development of the higher races in which Nature was the chief
object of worship and religious sympathy. Under the symbols of Linus,
Daphnis, or Adonis, the country people of early times lamented the decay
of the fresh beauty of spring, under the burning midsummer heat(242). This
primitive germ of serious feeling has perpetuated itself in that
melancholy mood which runs through the pastoral poetry of all countries.
From that tendency of the Greek imagination to give a human meaning to all
that interested it, this dirge over the fading beauty of the early year
soon assumed the form of a lament over the death of a young shepherd-poet,
dear to gods and men, to the flocks, herds, and wild animals, to the rocks
and mountains, among which he had lived. In the Daphnis of Theocritus, the
human passion of love produces that blighting influence on the life of the
shepherd which in the original myth was produced by the fierce heat of
summer on the tender life of the year. A still later development of the
myth appears in the lament over the extinction of youthful genius by early
death. It is not in any poem of Theocritus, but in the ‘Lament of
Bion,’—the work of a later writer, apparently an Italian-Greek,—

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι
Αὐσονικᾶς ὀδύνας μέλπω μέλος(243),—

that we find the finest ancient specimen of this later development. It is
from this new form of the old dirge of Linus or Daphnis that the fancies
and feelings of the ancient pastoral have been most happily adapted to
modern poetry, as in the Lycidas, the Adonais, and the Thyrsis of English
literature.

Another traditional theme of ‘pastoral melancholy,’ of which Theocritus
makes use, is the unrequited love of the Cyclops for Galatea. This too had
its origin in the personification of natural objects(244). But, unlike the
song of Daphnis, the myth of which it was the expression was purely local,
and confined to the shores of Sicily. It also illustrates the tendency of
all pastoral song to find its chief human motive in the passion of love.
While the original motive of the primitive lament for Daphnis or Linus was
the unconscious sympathy of the human heart with Nature, the most
prominent motive of artistic pastoral or idyllic poetry, from the ‘Song of
Songs’ to the ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ and ‘The Long Vacation Pastoral’ of
these later times, has been the passion of the human heart for the human
object of its affection, blending with either an unconscious absorption in
outward scenes or a refined contemplation of them(245).

But there is another very distinct mode of primitive feeling traceable in
Theocritus, which dictates the good-humoured, often licentious, banter
with which the shepherds encounter one another. As the pastoral monologue
continued to betray the serious character of the Lament out of which it
sprung, so this natural dialogue continued to bear traces of that old
licence of the harvest-home and the vintage-season, which

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit(246).

The ‘lusit amabiliter’ of Horace’s lines, which soon became inapplicable
to the biting and censorious Italian spirit, expresses happily the tone of
the dialogue in the fourth and fifth Idyls of Theocritus, which Virgil
attempts to reproduce in his third Eclogue. This source of rural poetry
was known to the ‘Ausonian husbandmen’ as well as to the country people of
Greece and Sicily: and its native force passed not only into the Greek
pastoral idyl, but into the Sicilian comedy of Epicharmus and the old
comedy of Athens, and, through a totally different channel, into Roman
satire. There is, however, another form in which the pastoral dialogue
appears both in Theocritus and Virgil, namely, of extemporaneous contests
in song. Probably these more artistic contests and the award of prizes to
the successful competitor had their origin in the bantering dialogue of
the shepherds; as the tragic contests at the Dionysian festivals had their
origin in the rivalry with which the masked votaries of Dionysus poured
forth their extemporaneous verses, in sympathy with the sufferings of
their god.

Such were the first rude utterances of the deeper as well as the gayer
emotions of men, living in the happy security of the country districts or
the ‘otia dia’ of the mountains in Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Southern
Italy, which the art of Theocritus and his successors cast into artistic
forms and measures suited to the taste of educated readers. How far, in
the manner in which he accomplished this, Theocritus had been anticipated
by ‘the grave muse of Stesichorus,’ and whether this wild product of the
mountains was of a native Siculian or an Hellenic stock, it is not
possible to determine. A citizen of Syracuse, in the palmy days of Hiero,
before there was any dream of Roman conquest; deeply susceptible of the
beauty of his native island, but, like a Greek, seeing this beauty in
relation to human associations; familiar with the songs and old traditions
of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life
in friendly association with his literary compeers, such as the
Alexandrine Aratus(247) and Nicias, the physician and poet(248),—he sought
to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-shore
with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and
grotesque superstitions of actual herdsmen should be found in union with
the refinement, the mythological lore, the keen sense of the beauty, not
unmixed with the melancholy, of life, characteristic of a circle of poets
and scholars enjoying their youth in untroubled and uneventful times. All
his materials, old and new, assumed the shape of pictures from human life
in combination with the representations of the sounds, sights, and living
movement of Nature. The essential characteristic both of his pastoral
Idyls and of those drawn from city-life, such as the second, fourteenth,
and fifteenth, is what has been well called the ‘disinterested
objectivity(249)’ of Greek art: and this is the chief note of their
difference from Virgil’s pastorals. Even where, as in the seventh, the
poet introduces himself on the scene, he appears as one, and not the most
important, of the personages on it. He does not draw attention to his own
feelings or fortunes, only to his playful converse and rivalry in song
with the young shepherd-poet Lycidas, ‘with the bright laughing eye and
the smile ever playing on his lip(250).’

It may be urged against these Idyls that, as compared with the best modern
Idyls, in prose or verse, they are, for the most part, wanting in incident
or adventure; and this charge is equally applicable to Virgil’s pastorals.
But there is always dramatic vivacity and consistency in the personages of
Theocritus, and this cannot equally be said of those introduced into the
Eclogues. It might be urged also against the representations of
Theocritus, and still more against those of Virgil, that the ‘vestigia
ruris’ have been too carefully obliterated. Yet, though not drawn
immediately from life, this picture of Sicilian shepherds and peasants,
possessed with the vivid belief in Pan and the Nymphs, singing the old
dirge of the herdsman Daphnis among the mountain pastures, or the
love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian
sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields(251), challenging
each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless tending
their flocks rather as a picturesque pastime than as a toilsome
occupation, and living a life of free social enjoyment in the open air,
was a genuine ideal of the Greek imagination, not perhaps, too far removed
from the actual reality.

Before the time of Virgil there had been no attempt to introduce this form
of art into Italy. Though the germ of a rude rustic poetry existed in the
‘Fescennine verses,’ no connexion can be traced between them and the
highly artificial pastoral of the Augustan Age. The Eclogues of Virgil are
in form and even in substance a closer reproduction of a Greek original
than any other branch of Latin literature, with the exception of the
comedy of Terence. The ‘Lament of Daphnis,’ the song of unrequited love,
the bantering dialogues of the shepherds and their more formal contests in
song, reappear in Latin tones and with some new associations of individual
and national life, but in such a manner as to recall the memory of the
Sicilian idyl rather than to suggest a new experience from life. And yet
Virgil is not satisfied, like the authors of Latin comedy, with presenting
to the imagination types of Greek life, Greek sentiment and manners, and
Greek scenes. He desires not only to reproduce in new words and music the
charm which had fascinated him in Theocritus, but to blend the actual
feeling and experience of an Italian living in the Augustan Age with this
ideal restored from a by-gone time. The result is something composite,
neither purely Greek nor purely Italian; not altogether of the present
time nor yet of a mythical foretime; but a blending of various elements of
poetic association and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the
Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of
classical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress along
with the fantastic shapes of mythological invention. The scenes and
personages of the Eclogues are thus one stage further removed from
actuality than those of the Greek pastoral. They do not reproduce, as
Keats has done, the Greek ideal of rural life, and they do not create a
purely Italian ideal. There was, indeed, latent in the Italian imagination
an ideal of a homely rustic life, finding its happiness in the annual
round of labour and in the blessing of a virtuous home, and that ideal
Virgil loved to draw with ‘magic hand;’ but that was altogether unlike the
ideal of the Greek imagination. The life of industry and happiness which
Virgil glorifies in the Georgics,—that of the ‘primitive, stout-hearted,
and thrifty husbandmen’ of Horace,—whose pride was in their ‘glad
harvests,’ their ‘trim fields,’ their ‘vineyards,’ and in the use which
they derived from their flocks, herds, and beehives, had nothing in common
with that of the ‘well-trimmed sunburnt shepherds’ whom Greek fancy first
created, and whom Keats has made live for us again, enjoying the fulness
of actual existence in union with the dreams of an ‘Elysian
idleness(252).’ Least of all could the pastoral life of Arcadia or Sicily
have been like the habitual ways of men in the rich plains of Mantua. The
district of Italy most like the scenes of the Greek idyl was Calabria,
where, among the desolate forest-glades, the herds and flocks of some rich
senator or eques were now tended by barbarous slaves, with whose daily
existence the ideal glories of pastoral song were not likely to
intermingle.

III.

It is easy for those who wish to depreciate the art of Virgil to point out
very many instances of imitation and artificial treatment in the Eclogues,
and to establish their manifest inferiority to the Greek idyl in direct
truth and vividness of representation. They are not purely objective, like
the Greek idyl, nor purely subjective as the Latin elegy generally is.
They are very much inferior to the Greek originals in dramatic power; and
the idyl is really a branch of dramatic poetry. Like the pure drama, it
depends on the power of living in the thoughts, situations, and feelings
of beings quite distinct from the poet himself. Some of the Eclogues,
those in which the passion of love and the Italian passion for the land
are the motives, are dramatic in spirit, though the conception of the
situation is not consistently maintained. But in most cases, where he is
not merely imitative, the dramatic form is to Virgil as a kind of veil
under which he may partially reveal what moved him most in connexion with
his own personal fortunes, and may express his sympathies with literature,
with outward nature, and with certain moods and sentiments of the human
heart. It is not in virtue of the originality and consistency of their
conception, but of their general truth of feeling and the perfection of
the medium through which that feeling is conveyed, that those who admire
the Eclogues must vindicate their claim to poetic honour.

The reserve with which all his personal relations are indicated, and the
allusive way in which the story of his fortunes is told, are in keeping
with the delicacy and modesty of Virgil’s nature. He tells us nothing
directly of his home-life or occupations, though his attachment to the
scenes familiar to him from childhood is felt in the language with which
Meliboeus felicitates Tityrus on the restitution of his land, and in that
in which Moeris and Lycidas discourse together. We know of no actual
Galatea or Amaryllis associated with the joy or the pain of his youth;
though his subtle perception of the various moods of the passion of love
can hardly be a mere poetic intuition, unenlightened by personal
experience. The eminent men with whom he was brought into contact,
Octavianus, Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, are not individualised; though the
different feelings of reverential or loyal respect, of colder deference,
or admiring enthusiasm, which they severally excited in him, can be
clearly distinguished. In the undesigned revelation of himself, which
every author makes in his writings, there are few indications of the
religious and moral feeling and of the national sentiment which are among
the principal elements in Virgil’s maturer poems: but we find abundantly
the evidence of a mind open to all tender and refined influences, free
from every taint of envy or malice, serious and pensive, and finding its
chief happiness in making the charm, which fascinated him in books, in
Nature, and in life, heard in the deep and rich music of the language, of
which he first drew out the full capabilities:—

Saepe ego longos
Cantando puerum memini me condere soles(253).

The Eclogues also present Virgil to us as not only a poet, but, as what he
continued to be through all his life, a student of the writings of the
past. Like Milton he was eminently a learned poet, and, like Milton, he
knew the subtle alchemy by which the duller ore of learned allusion is
transmuted into gold. The tales of the Greek mythology and the names of
places famous in song or story act on his imagination, not so much through
their own intrinsic interest, as through the associations of literature.
It is under this reflex action that he recalls to memory the tales of
Pasiphae, of Scylla and Nisus, of Tereus and Philomela; introduces
Orpheus, Amphion, and Linus as the ideal poets of pastoral song; and
alludes to Hesiod, Euphorion, and Theocritus in the phrases ‘the sage of
Ascra,’ ‘the verse of Chalcis,’ ‘the Sicilian Shepherd.’ It is in this
spirit that he associates the musical accompaniment of his song with the
names of Maenalus and Eurotas, of Rhodope and Ismarus; and that he speaks
of bees and thyme as ‘the bees and thyme of Hybla,’ of doves as ‘the
Chaonian doves,’ of vultures as ‘the birds of Caucasus.’ He also
characterises objects by local epithets, suggestive rather of the
associations of geographical science than of poetry. Thus he speaks of
‘Ariusian wine,’ of ‘Cydonian arrows,’ ‘Cyrnean yews,’ ‘Assyrian
spikenard,’ and the like. The interest in physical enquiries appears in
the allusion in Ecl. iii. 40,

In medio duo signa Conon, etc.,

and in the rapid summary of the Epicurean theory of creation at vi. 31,
etc.,

Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta, etc.

In these last passages it is not so much by the scientific or
philosophical speculations themselves, as by their literary treatment by
former writers, that Virgil appears to be attracted. Perhaps the frequent
recurrence of these localising epithets, where there is nothing in the
context to call up any thought of the locality indicated, may appear to a
modern reader an unfortunate result of his Alexandrine studies; yet the
grace with which old poetic associations are evoked and new associations
created by such lines as these,

Tum canit, errantem Permessi ad flumina Gallum
Aonas in montis ut duxerit una sororum,

or these,

Omnia quae Phoebo quondam meditante beatus
Audiit Eurotas, iussitque ediscere laurus,
Ille canit(254),

attests the cumulative force which ancient names, identified with the
poetic life of the world, gather in their transmission through the
literatures of different ages and nations.

In the Georgics and Aeneid, as well as in the Eclogues, Virgil shows a
great susceptibility to the beauty and power of Nature. But Nature
presents different aspects and awakens a different class of feelings in
these poems. In the Eclogues he shows a great openness and receptivity of
mind, through which all the softer and more delicate influences of the
outward world enter into and become part of his being. The ‘molle atque
facetum’ of Horace denotes the yielding susceptibility(255) to outward
influences, and the vivacity which gives them back in graceful forms. In
the Georgics, the sense of the relation of Nature to human energy imparts
greater nobleness to the conception. She appears there, not only in her
majesty and beauty, but as endowed with a soul and will. She stands to man
at first in the relation of an antagonist: but, by compliance with her
conditions, he subdues her to his will, and finds in her at last a just
and beneficent helpmate(256). In the Eclogues she takes rather the form of
an enchantress, who, by the charm of her outward mien and her
freely-offered gifts, fascinates him into a life of indolent repose. If
the one poem may in a sense be described as the ‘glorification of labour,’
the other might be described as the ‘glorification of the _dolce far
niente_’ of Italian life. The natural objects described by Virgil are
often indeed the same as those out of which the representation of
Theocritus is composed; but in Theocritus the human figures are, after
all, the prominent objects in the picture: the speakers in his dialogue,
though not unconscious of the charm proceeding from the scenes in which
they are placed, yet are not possessed by it; they do not lose their own
being in the larger life of Nature environing them. Theocritus shows
everywhere the social temperament of the Greeks. It is an Italian, not
perhaps without something of the Celtic fibre in his composition, who
utters his natural feelings in the lines,

ibi haec incondita solus
Montibus et silvis studio iactabat inani(257).

In Virgil’s representation neither the scenes nor the human figures are so
distinctly present to the eye; but there is diffused through it a subtle
influence from the outward world, bringing man’s nature into conformity
with itself. The genius in modern times, which shows most of this yielding
susceptibility to the softer aspects and motions of Nature, is that of
Rousseau; but in the manner in which he gives way to this sentiment there
is a want of restraint, a strain of excited feeling, suggestive of the
contrast between this transient intoxication of happiness and the abiding
unrest and misery of all his human relations. In reading Virgil there is
no sense of any such jarring discord; yet it is rather as a pensive
emotion, not unallied to melancholy, than as the joy of a sanguine
temperament, that his susceptibility to outward impressions is made
manifest.

The objects through which Nature exercises this spell are, as was said,
much the same as those out of which the landscape of Theocritus is
composed. Virgil, like Theocritus, enables us to feel the charm of ‘the
sparkling stream of fresh water,’ of ‘mossy fountains and grass softer
than sleep,’ of ‘the cool shade of trees,’ and of caves ‘with the gadding
vine o’ergrown.’ The grace and tender hues of wild flowers—violets,
poppies, narcissus, and hyacinth—and of fruits, such as the ‘cerea pruna’
and the ‘tenera lanugine mala,’—the luxuriant vegetation clothing the
rocks and the ideal mountain glades,—

Ille latus niveum molli fultus hyacintho(258),—

the plants and trees,—osiers and hazels, ilex and beech,—the woods, and
meadow-pastures, and rich orchards of his native district, have
communicated the soul and secret of their being to the mellow tones of his
language and the musical cadences of his verse. He makes us hear again,
with a strange delight, the murmur of bees feeding on the willow hedge,
the moan of turtle-doves from the high elm tree, the sound of the
whispering south wind, of waves breaking on the shore, of rivers flowing
down through rocky valleys, the song of the woodman plying his work, the
voice of the divine poet chanting his strain. By a few simple words he
calls up before our minds the genial luxuriance of spring, the freshness
of early morning, the rest of all living things in the burning heat of
noon, the stillness of evening, the gentle imperceptible motions of
Nature, in the shooting up of the young alder-tree and in the gradual
colouring of the grapes on the sunny hill-sides. If the labour of man is
mentioned at all, it is in the form of some elegant accomplishment or
picturesque task—pruning the vine or grafting the pear-tree, closing the
streams that water the pastures, watching the flocks and herds feeding at
their own will. The new era on which the world was about to enter is seen
by his imagination, like the vision of some pastoral valley, half hidden,
half glorified through a golden haze. The peculiar blessings anticipated
in that era are the rest from labour, the spontaneous bounty of Nature,
the peace that is to reign among the old enemies of the animal kingdom.

The human affections which mingle with these representations of Nature are
the love of home, and the romantic sentiment, rather than the passion, of
love. The common human feeling of the love of home Virgil realises more
intensely from his love of the beauty associated with his own home. Many
of the sayings of Tityrus and Meliboeus bear witness to the strong hold
which their lands and flocks had on men of their class:—

nos dulcia linquimus arva—
ergo tua rura manebunt, Et tibi magna satis—
Ille meas errare boves ut cernis—
Spem gregis a, silice in nuda conixa reliquit—
Ite meae, quondam felix pecus, ite capellae(259).

In the passage of the same Eclogue, from 68–79,

En unquam patrios ... salices carpetis amaras,

Virgil tells, in language of natural pathos and exquisite grace, of the
poor man’s sorrow in yielding his thatched hut, his well-trimmed fields,
his corn crops, his pear-trees and his vines, the familiar sight of his
goats feeding high up among the thickets of the rocks, to some rude
soldier, incapable either of enjoying the charm or profiting by the
richness of the land.

The three poems—the second, eighth, and tenth—of which love is the theme
are all of a serious and plaintive cast. There are few touches in Virgil’s
art descriptive either of the happier or the lighter and more playful
experiences of the passion, which are the common theme of Horace’s Odes.
Still less does he treat the subject in the style of Propertius and Ovid.
The sentiment of Virgil is more like that of Tibullus; only Virgil gives
utterance, though always in a dramatic form, to the real despair of
unrequited affection (indigni amoris), while the tone of Tibullus is
rather that of one yielding to the luxury of melancholy when in possession
of all that his heart desires. They each give expression to that modern
mood of passion, in which the heart longs to exchange the familiar life of
civilisation for the rougher life of the fields, and to share some humble
cottage and the daily occupations of peasant life with the beloved
object(260). In Virgil also there appears some anticipation of that
longing for lonely communing with Nature in her wilder and more desolate
aspects which we associate with romantic rather than with classical
poetry.

Though, unlike all other Latin poets, Virgil avoids all reference to the
sensual side of this passion, there is no ancient poet who has analysed
and expressed, with equal truth and beauty and with such a chivalrous
devotion, the fluctuations between hope and despair, the sense of personal
unworthiness, the sweet memories, the heart-felt longings, the
self-forgetful consideration and anxieties of an idealising affection. In
such lines as these, expressing at once the sense of unworthiness and the
rapid sinking of the heart from hope to despair—

Rusticus es Corydon, nec munera curat Alexis(261),

and again—

Tanquam haec sint nostri medicina furoris(262);

in the lines in which Damon traces back his love to its ideal source in
early boyhood—

Saepibus in nostris, etc.;

in the fine simile at viii. 85—

Talis amor Daphnim, qualis cum fessa iuvencum, etc.;

in the tender thought of the dying Gallus for the mistress who had
forsaken him—

A, tibi ne teneras glacies secet aspera plantas(263),—

there is a delicate and subtle power of touch not unworthy of the
master-hand which, with maturer art, delineated the queenly passion and
despair of Dido.

The supreme excellence of Virgil’s art consists in the perfect harmony
between his feeling and the medium through which it is conveyed. The style
of his longer poems has many varied excellences, in accordance with the
varied character of the thought and sentiment which it is called on to
express. But the strong and full volume of diction and rhythm and the
complex harmonies of the Georgics would have been an inappropriate vehicle
for the luxurious sentiment of the Eclogues. The attitude of the poet’s
mind in the composition of these earlier poems was that of a genial
passiveness rather than that of creative activity. There are few poems of
equal excellence in which so little use is made of that force of words
which imparts new life to things. A few such expressions might be quoted,
like that given by Wordsworth as ‘an instance of a slight exertion of the
faculty of imagination in the use of a single word’—

Dumosa _pendere_ procul de rupe videbo;

and we notice a similar exertion of the faculty in the line—

Hic viridis tenera _praetexit_ harundine ripam
Mincius(264).

But this actively imaginative use of language seldom occurs in these
poems. The general effect of the style is produced by the fulness of
feeling, the sweetness or sonorousness of cadence, with which words, used
in their familiar sense, are selected and combined. Such epithets as
‘mollis,’ ‘lentus,’ ‘tener’ are of frequent recurrence, yet the impression
left by their use is not one of weakness, or of a satiating luxury of
sentiment. The soft outlines and delicate bloom of Virgil’s youthful style
are as true emblems of health as the firmer fibre and richer colouring of
his later diction. What an affluence of feeling, what a deep sense of the
happiness of life, of the beauty of the world, of the glory of genius, is
conveyed by the simple use of the words _fortunatus_, _formosus_,
_divinus_ in the lines—

Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt—
Nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus—
Formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse—
Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta—
Ut Linus haec illi divino carmine pastor.

The effect he produces by the sound and associations of proper names is
like that produced by Milton through the same instrument. Thus, to take
one instance out of many, how suggestive of some golden age of pastoral
song are the following lines, vague and conventional though their actual
application appears to be in the passage where they occur:—

Non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus,
Nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit,
Orphei Calliopea, Lino formosus Apollo.
Pan etiam Arcadia mecum si iudice certet,
Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum(265).

More even in his rhythm than in his diction does Virgil’s superiority
appear, not only over all the poets of his country, but perhaps over all
other poets of past times, except Homer, Milton, and Shakspeare, in those
passages in which his dramatic art admits of a richly musical cadence. Our
ignorance of the exact pronunciation of Greek in the Alexandrian Age makes
a comparison between the effect that would have been produced by the
rhythm of Theocritus and the rhythm of the Eclogues in ancient times
difficult or impossible. Yet it may be allowed to say this much, that if
the rhythm of the Eclogues does not seem to us to attain to the natural
and liquid flow of the Greek idyl, yet its tones are deeper, they seem to
come from a stronger and richer source, than any which we can elicit from
the Doric reed. Rarely has the soothing and reviving charm of the musical
sounds of Nature and of the softer and grander harmonies of poetry been
described and reproduced more effectively than in these lines:—

Hinc tibi, quae semper, vicino ab limite saepes
Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta salicti
Saepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro;
Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras;
Nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes,
Nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo(266):

and in these which suggest the thought of that restorative power of genius
which a poet of the present day has happily ascribed to Wordsworth(267):—

Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta,
Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum
Dulcis aquae saliente sitim restinguere rivo(268):

and in these again, which give both true symbols and a true example of the
‘deep-chested music’ in which the poet gives utterance to the thought
which has taken shape within his mind:—

Quae tibi, quae tali reddam pro carmine dona?
Nam neque me tantum venientis sibilus austri,
Nec percussa iuvant fluctu tam litora, nec quae
Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles(269).

The objections often urged against the poetical value of the Eclogues may
be admitted. They are imitative in form. They do not reproduce scenes and
characters from actual life, nor are they consistent creations of the
imagination. They do not possess the interest arising from a contemplative
insight into the hidden workings of Nature, nor from reflection on the
problems of life. Their originality, their claim to be a representative
work of genius, consists in their truth and unity of sentiment and tone.
If it be said that the sentiment which they embody is but a languid and
effeminate sentiment, the admiration of two great poets, of the most
masculine type of genius that modern times have produced, is a sufficient
answer to this reproach. The admiration of Milton is proved by the
conception and workmanship of his ‘Lycidas,’ the most richly and
continuously musical even among his creations. Of Wordsworth’s admiration
there is more than one testimony,—this, from the recently published Memoir
of the daughter of his early friend and associate in poetry, perhaps the
most direct: ‘I am much pleased to see (writes S. Coleridge) how highly
Mr. Wordsworth speaks of Virgil’s style, and of his Bucolics which I have
ever thought most graceful and tender. They are quite another thing from
Theocritus, however they may be based on Theocritus(270).’ The criticism
which the same writer applies to ‘Lycidas’ suggests the true answer also
to the objections urged against Virgil’s originality. ‘The best defence of
Lycidas is not to defend the design of it at all, but to allege that the
execution of it is perfect, the diction the _ne plus ultra_ of grace and
loveliness, and that the spirit of the whole is as original as if the poem
contained no traces of the author’s acquaintance with ancient pastoral
poetry from Theocritus downwards.’ To the names of these two poets we can
now add the name of one of the most illustrious, and certainly one of the
least effeminate, among the critics and men of letters whom this century
has produced—Macaulay; who, after speaking of the Aeneid in one of his
letters, adds this sentence, ‘The Georgics pleased me better; the Eclogues
best,—the second and tenth above all(271).’

The appreciation of Wordsworth is a certain touchstone of the genuineness
of Virgil’s feeling for Nature. It is true that the sentiment to which he
gives expression in the Eclogues is only one, and not the most elevated,
of the many modes in which the spirit of man responds to the forms and
movement of the outward world. But the mood of the Eclogues is one most
natural to man’s spirit in the beautiful lands of Southern Europe. The
freshness and softness of Italian scenes are present in the Eclogues, in
the rich music of the Italian language, while it still retained the
strength, fulness, and majesty of its tones. These poems are truly
representative of Italy, not as a land of old civilisation, of historic
renown, of great cities, of corn-crops, and vineyards,—‘the mighty mother
of fruits and men;’—but as a land of a soft and genial air, beautiful with
the tender foliage and fresh flowers and blossoms of spring, and with the
rich colouring of autumn; a land which has most attuned man’s nature to
the influences of music and of pictorial art. As a true and exquisite
symbol of this vein of sentiment associated with Italy, the Eclogues hold
a not unworthy place beside the greater work—the ‘temple of solid
marble’—which the maturer art of Virgil dedicated to the genius of his
country, and beside the more composite but stately and massive monument
which perpetuates the national glory of Rome.

CHAPTER V.

MOTIVES, FORM, NATIONAL INTEREST, AND SOURCES OF THE GEORGICS.

The appearance of the Eclogues marked Virgil out among his contemporaries
as the poet of Nature and rural life. That province was assigned to him,
as epic poetry was to Varius and tragedy to Pollio. It is to the Eclogues
only that the lines in which Horace characterises his art can with
propriety be applied. These lines were written before the appearance of
the Georgics, and probably before any considerable part of the poem had
been composed(272). The epithets which admirably characterise the
receptive attitude of Virgil’s mind in the composition of his pastoral
poems are quite inapplicable to the solid and severe workmanship and the
earnest feeling of his didactic poem. The Eclogues are the poems of youth,
and of a youth passed in study and in contact with Nature rather than with
the serious interests of life. Though Virgil indicates in them the
ambition which was moving him to vaster undertakings, yet he shows at the
same time his consciousness of the comparative triviality of his art. The
class of poem to which the word _ludere_ is applied was, even when not of
a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such
as Cicero(273) for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being
among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of
the ‘Roman gravitas(274).’ The genuine Roman spirit demanded of its
highest literature, as of its native architecture, that it should either
have some direct practical use, or contribute in some way to enhance the
sense of national greatness.

The literary impulse directing Virgil to the composition of the Georgics
was probably the wish to be the Hesiod, as he had already been the
Theocritus, of Rome. The poets of the Augustan Age selected some Greek
prototype whose manner they professed to reproduce and make the vehicle
for the expression of their own thought and experience. Thus Horace chose
Alcaeus, Propertius chose Callimachus as his model. Virgil assigns to
Pollio the praise of alone composing poems ‘worthy of the buskin of
Sophocles.’ In the Georgics he professes to find his own prototype in
Hesiod:—

Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.

Propertius also recognises him as the disciple of the sage of Ascra:—

Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae,
Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo(275).

Though Hesiod can scarcely have taken the highest rank as a poet, yet a
peculiar reverence attached to his name from his great antiquity, and from
the ethical and theological spirit of his writings. As Virgil chose the
mould of Theocritus into which to cast the lighter feelings and fancies of
his youth, he naturally turned to ‘The Works and Days of Hesiod’ as a more
suitable model for a poem on rural life, undertaken with a more serious
purpose, and demanding a severer treatment.

The change in Virgil’s life between the composition of the Eclogues and
the Georgics had however much more influence in determining the difference
in the character of the two poems, than the mere artistic desire to enter
on a new path of poetry. During the composition of the earlier poems
Virgil was living in a remote district of Italy, associating with the
country-people or with a few young poets like himself, and coming in
contact with the great world of action and national interests only through
the medium of his intercourse with the temporary governors of the
province. Rome and its ruler and the powerful stream of events in which
his own fortunes were finally absorbed affect his imagination as they
might do that of one who heard of them from a distance, but who in his
ordinary thoughts and sympathies was living quite apart from them;

Urbem quam dicunt Romam Meliboee putavi
Stultus ego huic nostrae similem(276).

But before undertaking the task of writing the Georgics he had become an
honoured member of the circle of Maecenas, the intimate friend of Varius
and of Horace (who himself owed his introduction to that circle to the
kindly offices of the two older poets) and of others distinguished in
literature and public affairs. He had lived for a time near the centre of
the world’s movement, in close relations to the minds by which that
movement was directed. As the most genuine of his Eclogues had been
inspired by his personal share in the calamities of his country, it was
natural that he should, now when his own fortunes were restored through
the favour of those at the head of affairs, feel a stronger and more
disinterested sympathy with the public condition, at a crisis to which no
one capable of understanding its gravity could feel indifferent. It was
natural that his new relations and the impulse of the new ideas which came
to him through them should move him to undertake some work of art more
suited to his maturer faculty, his graver temperament, and the firmer
fibre of his genius. Nor is there any difficulty in believing that
Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a
subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which
he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the
literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of
more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve
indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social
reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote.
Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy
had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the
insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration
of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of
national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome,
had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from
the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the
Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the
restoration of security and abundance to the land:—

Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,
Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas(277),

and in the same Ode:—

Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,
Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores(278).

And in the brief summing up of the whole glories of the Augustan reign
contained in his latest Ode he begins with the words,—

Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes(279).

All Virgil’s early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify
himself with this object and with the interests and happiness of such
representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or
might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself
some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that
he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to
create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the
world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on
him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from
Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by
the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally
to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of
Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the
original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be
disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil
himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say
what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of
what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the
composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of
government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised
in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his
past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused
in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old
class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss
arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the
life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the
language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was
passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate
contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man
is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity
of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and
to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic
memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who aspired to fulfil the
office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his
idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas
gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and
learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national
sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the
poet’s own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of
being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns
it(280).

With such feelings as those which were moving the imagination of Virgil, a
modern poet might have shaped his subject into the form of a poetic idyl,
in which the joys and sorrows of men and women living during this national
crisis might have been represented in union with the varied aspects of the
scenery and the chief modes of rural industry in Italy. Such a form of art
would have enabled the poet to add the interest of individual character
and action to his abstract delineation of the ‘acer rusticus’ or the ‘duri
agrestes’ engaged in a hard struggle with the forces of Nature. And one or
two passages, containing some sketch drawn directly from peasant life, as
for instance i. 291–296,

Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.,

and iv. 125–146,

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis, etc.,

make us regret that the conditions of his art, as conceived by him, did
not encourage him to blend something more of idyllic representation with
the didactic and descriptive treatment of his subject. But the idyl which
treats the incidents of human life in the form either of a continuous poem
or of a tale in prose was unknown to the early art of Greece; and Roman
imagination was incapable of inventing a perfectly new mould into which to
cast its poetic fancies and feelings. Nor is it probable that a poem so
truly representative of Italy in all its aspects could have been produced
in the form of an idyl, of which the interest would have been concentrated
on some family or group of personages.

II.

There was only one form of literary art known to the Greeks or Romans of
the Augustan Age which was at all suitable for the treatment on a large
scale of such a subject as that which now filled the mind of Virgil. Next
after the epic poem of heroic action, the didactic epos was regarded at
Rome as the most serious and elaborate form of poetic art. It was more
suited than any other form to the Roman mind. It is the only form in which
the genius of Rome has produced master-pieces superior not only to
anything of the kind produced by Greece but to all similar attempts in
modern times. As Roman invention, stimulated by the practical sense of
utility, by the passion for vast and massive undertakings, and by the
strong perception of order and unity of design, devised a new kind of
architecture for the ordinary wants of life, so in accordance with the
national bent to reduce all things to rule, to impose the will of a master
on obedient subjects, to use the constructive and artistic faculties for
some practical end, if it did not create, it gave ampler compass, more
solid and massive workmanship, and the associations of great ideas to that
form of poetic art which had been the most meagre and unsubstantial of all
those invented by the genius of Greece.

Moreover, a new form, or rather a form of more ample capacity, was
required to embody the new poetical feelings and experience which now
moved the Roman and Italian mind. If less interest was felt at Rome in
following the course of individual destiny, the interest felt in
contemplating the outward aspect and secret movement of Nature was now
stronger than it had been in the great ages of Greek literature. Though
the vivid enjoyment of the outward world had unconsciously shaped the
tales of the early Greek mythology, and though this enjoyment had entered
directly, as a subordinate element, into the epic, lyric, and dramatic
poetry of Greece, and, more prominently, into the later poetry of
Alexandria, and although the phenomena and laws of Nature had aroused the
speculative curiosity of the early Greek philosophers, no poet before
Lucretius had treated of Nature, in the immensity of her range, in the
primal elements and living forces of her constitution, and, at the same
time, in her manifold aspects of beneficence and beauty, and of
destructive energy, as the subject of a great poem. The forms adopted by
the great masters of Greek poetry,—the epic, lyric, and dramatic
writers,—whose essential business it was to represent the actions and
passions of men, were inapplicable to the treatment of this new subject of
man’s environment. Lucretius accordingly had to take the outline of his
form from the early physiological writers, whom the Greeks scarcely ranked
among their poets at all, and who, though animated by the speculative
passion to penetrate to the secret of Nature, were not specially
interested in her aspects of beauty or power, or in her relation to the
life of man. If he cannot claim the title of an inventor in art, yet by
adding volume and majesty to the rudimentary type of these early writers,
he gave to the ancient world the unique specimen of a great philosophical
poem.

So too Virgil, penetrated with the feeling of Nature in her relation to
human wants and enjoyment, and desirous to give an adequate expression to
this feeling, could derive no guidance from the nobler genius of Greece.
To find a suitable vehicle, he had to turn to the earliest and latest
periods of her literature. The didactic, as distinct from the philosophic
or contemplative poem, was the invention of a time prior to the existence
of prose composition. It seems to have arisen out of the impulse to convey
instruction and advice on the management of life generally, and especially
on the best means of securing a livelihood from the cultivation of the
soil. The use of the language of poetry for a purpose essentially
practical and prosaic was justified, in that primitive time, not only by
the absence of any other organ of literary expression, but also by the
fact that, in such a time, all literary effort was the result of animated
feeling, and that the most common aspects of Nature, such as the changes
of the seasons or of night and day, and what seem now the most familiar
occupations of life, were apprehended by the lively mind of the Greek with
a fresh sense of wonder, which use deadens in eras of more advanced
civilisation. But while this sense of wonder imparts a poetical colouring
to the language of early didactic poetry, and while sufficient harmony was
secured for it by the training of the ear during centuries of epic song,
the form and structure of this kind of art was, as compared with the other
forms of Greek poetry, essentially rudimentary. The sole specimen which
has reached our times appears in the form of a personal address, treating
of a number of subjects not closely connected with one another,
interspersed with various episodes, and producing the impression of a
connected whole solely through the vivid personality of the writer.
Didactic poetry was absolutely rejected in the maturity of Greek genius,
after the rise of a prose literature had marked off clearly the separate
provinces of prose and poetry, and after Greek taste had become more
exacting in its demand of unity of impression and symmetry of form in
every work of art. It was revived again in the Alexandrian epoch, when the
creative impulse was lost, and life and its interests had become tamer,
while at the same time knowledge had greatly increased, and a kind of
literary dilettanteism was one of the chief elements in refined enjoyment.
By the Alexandrine writers the irregular and desultory treatment of Hesiod
was abandoned. The didactic poem was treated by them as one of the
recognised branches of poetical art. It still retained the general
character of a personal address, which accident may have first suggested
to Hesiod, and which either his example or their own taste had imposed on
the early philosophic poets. The Alexandrine type of poem differed from
that of Hesiod by professing to convey systematic instruction on some
definite branch of knowledge, instead of offering practical directions on
the best method of carrying on some occupation, combined with a medley of
precepts, moral, religious, and ceremonial. The change may be compared to
that which the Roman satire underwent, from the inartistic medley of
Ennius and Lucilius to the systematic treatment of some special subject in
the satire of Persius and Juvenal. The primary aim of such writers as
Aratus and Nicander was not to communicate ideas capable of affecting the
imagination, but to satisfy intellectual curiosity by communicating
interesting information. So soon as this information ceased to be
interesting, the value of their work was gone. Thus although accident has
handed down several specimens of the Alexandrine type of didactic poetry,
their chief literary use is to enable us, by contrast, better to
appreciate the genius which, by interfusing with the materials used by
them other elements deeply affecting the heart, the imagination, and the
moral sympathies, has given the world, instead of the temporary gift of a
little useful information, the κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί which it possesses in the
Georgics.

In that poem Virgil combines something of the spirit of the older or
primitive type of didactic poetry with the systematic treatment of their
subject employed by the Alexandrine Metaphrastae. He retains the old form
of a personal address, not only in the dedication of the poem to Maecenas,
but in the manner in which he inculcates his precepts on the husbandman,
or indicates what he himself would do in particular circumstances(281).
Yet he bears more resemblance to the poets of Alexandria in his systematic
treatment and arrangement of his materials. He aims, like them, at
communicating a large body of unfamiliar knowledge, as well as conveying
practical precepts founded on experience. By combining these two aims, but
much more by making the aims of conveying precept and instruction
altogether subsidiary to that of moving the imagination and the
affections, Virgil, if he has not created a new type of didactic poetry,
has at least produced almost the only specimen of it which the world cares
to read. He is apparently conscious of the difficulty of imparting to a
poem of this type a continuous poetical charm; as Lucretius, with more
reason, is conscious of the difficulty of securing a sustained poetical
interest for his argumentative processes and his investigations into the
first principles of things. Virgil’s difficulty is to maintain his subject
on the level of poetical feeling, while at the same time adhering to the
necessities of practical instruction. And this difficulty attaches to
every kind of didactic poetry. He had to associate with a poetic charm,
not only the fair results of the husbandman’s labour, the ‘heavy harvests
and the Massic juice of the vine,’ but the processes and mechanical
appliances through which these fair results were obtained. Although his
idea of his art did not demand an exhaustive treatment of all the
operations of rural industry, such as was demanded of the prose writers on
the subject, yet it did demand that, in making his selection, he should
regard the importance of each topic in connexion with the work of the farm
as well as its adaptation to poetic treatment. It cannot be denied that
this necessary infusion of prosaic matter deprives even the most perfect
specimen of didactic poetry of that purity of imaginative interest which
pervades the masterpieces of epic, lyrical, and dramatic genius: but it
is, on the other hand, a great triumph of art to have redeemed so much as
Virgil has done from the homely realities of life into the more sacred
ground of poetry, and that without sacrifice either of the truth of fact
or of the dignity and sobriety of expression.

III.

While the title ‘Georgica’ reminds us that the form of the poem, like the
form of the ‘Bucolica’ and the ‘Aeneis,’ was derived from the Greeks, the
subject of which it treats was one of peculiarly national interest. As the
Aeneid may be said to be inspired by the idea of Rome and her destiny, and
as the practical purpose of that poem was to confirm the faith of the
Romans in their Empire and in the ruler in whom that Empire was vested, so
the Georgics may be said to be inspired by the idea of Italy; and the true
aim of the poem was to revive and extend the love of the land, and to
restore the fading ideal of a life of virtue and happiness, passed in the
labours of a country life. But while much of the materials and of the
workmanship of the Aeneid is originally due to Greek invention, the
general substance of the Georgics and the most essentially poetical
passages are of native origin.

The chief modes of rural industry treated in the various books are those
which flourished in Italy,—the tillage of the land for various crops, the
cultivation of the vine and the olive, the breeding and rearing of cattle,
sheep, and horses, and the tending of bees. It is noticed by Servius that
the agricultural precepts of the poem apply only to Italy and not to other
lands: ‘Sane agriculturae huius praecepta non ad omnes pertinent terras,
sed ad solum situm Italiae.’ The frequent references to the products of
other lands serve to suggest by contrast the superiority of Italy in those
which are the special subject of the poem and which are most essential to
human well-being. Cato also is represented by Cicero(282) as resting the
charm of a country life in the contemplation of the same operations of
Nature as those indicated in the opening lines of the Georgics:—

Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram
Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites
Conveniat(283),—

The number of Roman writers who treated in prose of this subject, both
before and after Virgil, testifies further to the strong national interest
attaching to it. Among these writers, Varro, the immediate predecessor of
Virgil, associates the subject directly with the pride which the Romans
felt in their country. He introduces the speakers in his Dialogue as
holding their conversation in the Temple of Tellus, and examining a map or
painting of Italy on the wall. One of the speakers addresses the others in
these words, ‘You who have travelled over many lands, have you ever seen
any more richly cultivated than Italy? I, indeed, have never seen any so
richly cultivated.’ He especially characterises the excellence of its
corn-crops, its vines, olives, and fruit-trees: ‘What spelt shall I
compare to the Campanian? what wheat to the Apulian? what wine to the
Falernian? what oil to that of Venafrum? is not Italy planted with trees,
so that the whole of it seems an orchard(284)?’ Other authors, Virgil
himself among them(285), and Columella in the Introduction to his
treatise(286), testify to the pride which the Italians took in their breed
of horses and herds of cattle. And though the Italian bees and their
product were not so famous in poetry as the bees of Hymettus and ‘the
honey of Hybla,’ yet Horace speaks of the country near Tarentum as one
‘where the honey yields not to the honey of Hymettus;’ and in another Ode,
in which he contrasts his own moderate estate with the resources of richer
men, he mentions Calabrian honey along with the wine of Formiae and the
fleeces of Gallic pastures among the chief sources of wealth:—

Quanquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes
Nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora
Languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis
Crescunt vellera pascuis(287).

This branch of his subject moreover enables Virgil to celebrate the floral
beauties of Italy, and to exhibit on a small scale a picture of a
community at once warlike, politic, and industrious, such as had been
realised on the soil of Italy, and especially in the old Roman
Commonwealth, more completely than among any other people.

The subject was moreover intimately associated with the national history.
Several of the early legends, such as those of Cincinnatus, and, in more
historical times, of Atilius Regulus and Curius Dentatus, attest the
prominence which agriculture enjoyed among the pursuits of the foremost
men in the Republic. The surnames of many noble families, patrician and
plebeian, such as the Lentuli, Stolones, Bubulci, Pisones, Dolabellae, and
the name of the great Fabian Gens, are connected etymologically with
agricultural occupations, products, or implements, and afford evidence of
a time when the men who filled the great offices of the State lived on
their own lands(288), and were known for the success with which they
improved their farms. The passion to possess and subdue the land was, in
the early history of the Republic, the main motive power both of the
political and military history of Rome. Even down to the establishment of
the Empire there was no question which more divided the two great parties
in the State than that of the Agrarian laws. And though, after the
conquest of Italy, Roman wars were fought for dominion rather than for new
territory, yet the hope of owning land, if not on Italian yet on some
foreign soil, which he should hold by his sword as well as cultivate by
his plough, supported the Roman soldier, even under the Empire, through
the long years of his service. The Roman ‘colonies,’ the origin of so many
famous European cities, were settlements of ‘Coloni’ or cultivators of the
soil.

Thus in the selection of his subject Virgil appealed to old national
associations and living tastes in a way in which no Greek poet could have
done in choosing any mode of practical industry for poetic treatment. Even
the details of direct instruction would attract a Roman reader by
reminding him of labours which he may often have watched and perhaps have
shared. Though Virgil found new sources of attraction by references to
Greek mythology and science, and though he availed himself of the diction
of Greek poets much inferior to himself in their perception of beauty and
their power over language, yet his materials are mainly drawn either from
personal observation, or from Italian writers who had put on record the
results of what they had seen and done. There is a thoroughly Roman
character in the technical execution of the poem, in the command over
details, in the power of orderly arrangement with a view to convenience
rather than logical symmetry, and in the combined sobriety and dignity of
the workmanship. But it is in the longer episodes, in which the deeper
meaning of the poem is most brought out, that the intimate connexion
between the various topics treated in it and the national character and
fortunes becomes most apparent. There is indeed one marked exception to
the maintenance of this unity of impression. The long episode in Book iv,
from line 315 to 558, has no national significance. And this is an
undoubted blot on the artistic perfection of the work. This episode not
only adds nothing to its representative character, but it suggests fancies
and associations utterly alien from the Italy of the Augustan Age. The
space given to such a theme is opposed to the truer taste of the poet,
expressed in such lines as these—

Non hic te carmine ficto
Atque per ambages et longa exorsa tenebo.

and

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,
Omnia iam volgata(289).

But it is not the judgement of the poet, but the despotic will of the
Emperor, that is responsible for this imperfection. The fourth Book
originally ended with an episode which afforded scope for the expression
of personal feeling, for awakening an interest in that land which was now
of vast importance to the State, and which affected the imagination of
cultivated Romans as it does that of cultivated men in modern times(290),
and for illustrating the national greatness and the recent history of
Rome. In the first edition the mention of Egypt at line 287 had led Virgil
to celebrate the administration of that province under his early friend
Cornelius Gallus. When Gallus fell into disgrace and was forced to commit
suicide in 26 B.C., Virgil was required to re-edit the poem with a new
concluding episode(291). The subject treated in the earlier edition of the
poem would have enabled Virgil to give renewed expression to his
admiration and affection for the Gallus of the Eclogues, to tell the tale
of the downfall of Cleopatra, and to magnify the greatness of Rome in the
conquest and government of her provinces. The episode as it now stands is
a finished piece of metrical execution; it illustrates the attraction
which the Greek mythological stories had for educated Romans; it is
expressed in those tones of tender pathos of which Virgil was a master;
but it is at the same time a standing proof of the malign influence which
the Imperial despotism already exercised on the spontaneous inspiration of
genius, as well as on all sincere expression of feeling.

IV.

If the idea of the poem and of the national interests associated with it
arose in Virgil’s mind during his life in Rome, it was in his retirement
in Campania that he prepared himself for and executed his task. Like the
Aeneid it was a work of slow growth, the result of careful study and
meditation. Besides the great change of the concluding episode, there are
some slight indications that the poem was retouched in later editions; and
perhaps a very few lines added to the original work may have been either
left finally unadjusted to their proper place, or may have been transposed
in the copying of the manuscript(292). Although regard for his art was a
more prominent consideration in the mind of Virgil than of Lucretius, yet
he did not, any more than his predecessor, wish to separate the office of
a teacher from that of a poet. How far the experience of his early years
in the farm in the district of Andes or of his later residence on his land
near Nola may have contributed to his knowledge of his subject, we have no
means of knowing; but probably the delicacy of his health as well as his
devotion to study may have limited his experience to the observation of
the labours of others. But the power of vividly realising and enjoying the
familiar sights and work of the farm,—the life which he gives to the
notices of seed-time and harvest, of the growth of trees and ripening of
fruits, of the habits of flocks, herds, and bees, etc.,—the deep love for
his subject in all its details—

Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore(293)—

were gifts which could not come from any study of books. The poetry of
manhood is, more often perhaps than we know, the conscious reproduction of
the unconscious impressions of early years, received in a susceptible and
retentive mind. Virgil, in common with all great poets, retained through
life the ‘child’s heart within the man’s.’ Through this geniality of
nature he was able—

angustis hunc addere rebus honorem(294)—

to glorify trite and familiar things by the light reflected from the
healthy memories and the idealising fancies of boyhood and early youth.

But while his feeling is all his own,—the happy survival probably of the
childhood and youth passed in his home in the district of Andes,—he
largely avails himself of the observation, the thought, and the language
of earlier writers, both Greek and Roman. His poem is eminently a work of
learning as well as of native feeling. He combines in its varied and firm
texture the homely wisdom embodied in the precepts and proverbs of Italian
peasants (‘veterum praecepta’),—the quaint and oracular dicta of
Hesiod,—the scientific knowledge and mythological lore of Alexandrine
writers,—the philosophic and imaginative conceptions of Lucretius,—with
the knowledge of natural history contained in the treatises of Aristotle
and Theophrastus, and the systematic practical directions of the old prose
writers on rural economy, such as the Carthaginian Mago(295), whose work
had been translated into Latin,—Democritus and Xenophon among Greek prose
writers,—Cato, the two Sasernae, Licinius Stolo, Tremellius, and Varro
among Latin authors. The purely practical precepts of the Georgics were
apparently selected and condensed from these writers(296). But no literary
inspiration or ideas were likely to have come from any of these last-named
authors, unless the Invocation in the first Book may have been suggested
by the example of Varro, who begins his treatise with an invocation to the
XII Di consentes. The proverbial sayings or rustic songs embodying the
traditional peasant lore, such as the ‘Quid vesper serus vehit?’ and the
‘hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra, Camille, metes(297),’ which
add an antique and homely charm to the poem, may have become known to
Virgil from the book of the Sasernae, who are quoted by Varro as
authorities for many of the old charms used by the primitive husbandmen,
such as ‘Terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto,’ which is to be repeated
‘ter novies.’ Servius notes that the words ‘sulco attritus splendescere
vomer’ recall an old saying of Cato, ‘Vir bonus est, mi fili, colendi
peritus, cuius ferramenta splendent(298).’ The notices of ceremonial
observances, such as the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of
things that might lawfully be done on holy days(299), were probably
derived from the pontifical books and the sacred books of the other
priestly colleges, of which Virgil made large use also in the Aeneid. In
all the writers on practical farming, from Cato to Varro, he found that
strong appreciation of the supreme worth of rural industry and that strong
interest in its processes and results which justified him in identifying
his subject with the thought of the national life.

Among the sources of literary inspiration from which Virgil drew in the
Georgics, the oldest, and not the least abundant, was the ‘Works and Days’
of Hesiod. Yet a comparison of the two poems shows immediately that the
Georgics do not, either in form or substance, stand in that close relation
to their prototype, in which the Eclogues on the one hand, and the Aeneid
on the other, stand to the idyls of Theocritus and to the epic poems of
Homer. The immediate influence of Hesiod is most apparent in the first
Book of the Georgics, in which the subject is treated in connexion with
theological ideas; while in the second Book and in the later Books, in
which the philosophical conception of Nature, though in subordination to
the conception of a supreme Spiritual power, becomes more prominent, the
spirit of Hesiod gives place to the spirit of Lucretius. There is,
however, a real affinity between the primitive piety of the old Boeotian
bard and the attitude in which Virgil contemplated the world, though the
faith of Virgil has become more rational under the speculative teaching
and enquiry which had taken the place of earlier modes of thought among
the Greeks. Virgil is ever seeking to produce a poetical reconcilement
between primitive tradition and more enlightened views both of moral and
physical truth. Thus he introduces the old fable of the creation of the
present race of men in immediate juxtaposition with the assertion of the
‘laws and eternal conditions imposed by Nature on certain places.’ He
accepts the belief in a Golden Age and in the blight which fell on the
world under the dispensation of Jove; but he regards this blight as sent,
not in anger, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. He describes
the natural progress of the various arts of life under this stimulus, but
still leaves room for divine intervention in the more important
discoveries:—

Prima Ceres ferro mortalis vertere terram
Instituit(300).

Again, the teleological view of Nature, which appears in the Georgics in
antagonism to the teaching of Lucretius, in such passages as i. 231—

Idcirco certis dimensum partibus orbem, etc.,

and i. 351—

Atque haec ut certis possemus discere signis—

is in the spirit of Hesiod, though in advance of his conception of Zeus,
who appears in him not as a beneficent Providence, but rather as a jealous
task-master. So too the constant inculcation of prayer and ceremonial
observances—

Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
Agricolae—
Votisque vocaveris imbrem—
In primis venerare deos, atque annua magnae
Sacra refer Cereri(301)—

the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old
Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly
imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.

But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological
associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the
sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint _naïveté_ characteristic
of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as ‘_quo sidere_
terram Vertere,’—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being
regulated not by the Roman Calendar(302), with its prosaic divisions of
the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the
constellations,—the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in
the line

Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris(303),—

the use of such quaint expressions as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’—seem all
intended to remind the reader that the subject is one ‘antiquae laudis et
artis,’—the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,—that
too in which man’s dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above
Nature is most vividly realised(304). This infusion into the practical
realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder
and ‘freshness of the early world’ Virgil derives from the relation which
he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.

Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil’s debt to Hesiod is
greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the
Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of
Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as
‘Strymoniae grues,’ by reference to the products of distant lands—

nonne vides croceos ut Tmolus odores, etc.,—

by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the
substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for
the natural products which were supposed to be their gifts. But to several
special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233—

Quinque tenent caelum zonae, etc.,—

is copied from Eratosthenes. The account of the signs of the weather, from
i. 355 to 465, is taken from the Διοσημεῖα of Aratus, a work so popular at
Rome, that it was not only imitated and almost incorporated in his poem by
Virgil, but had been translated by Cicero in his youth, and was
subsequently translated by Germanicus. Again, the description at iii. 425,
of the dangerous serpent that haunts the Calabrian pastures, is closely
imitated from the extant Θηριακά of Nicander; nor can we doubt that there
were in the fourth Book imitations of the lost Μελισσουργικά of the same
author, who probably anticipated Virgil in the use which he made of
Aristotle’s observations on the habits of bees.

A comparison of the passages in the Georgics with those of which they are
imitations produces the impression not only of Virgil’s immense
superiority as a poet over the Alexandrine Metaphrastae, but of the
immense superiority of the Latin hexameter, as an organ for expressing the
beauty and power of Nature, over the exotic jargon and unmusical jingle
which those writers compounded out of their epic studies and their
scientific nomenclature. To take one or two instances of Virgil’s
imitations from these writers:—in the passage Georg. i. 233–246, Virgil
reproduces very closely scientific statements of Eratosthenes and Aratus.
But of the five lines which follow—

Illic, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox
Semper et obtenta densentur nocte tenebrae,
Aut redit a nobis Aurora diemque reducit;
Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis,
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper(305),—

where through the evanescent mists of early science we discern the
enduring substance of poetic creation, there is no trace in either of the
Greek writers. Again, in the passage at i. 410, imitated from Aratus—

Tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces, etc.,—

the mere natural phenomenon is given in greater detail in the original
passage; but the lines which communicate to it the touch of tender
sympathy—

iuvat imbribus actis
Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere nidos(306),—

and the following lines—

Haud equidem credo quia sit divinitus illis, etc.,—

which elevate the whole description into the higher air of imaginative
contemplation, are entirely Virgil’s own. So too in nearly all the
indications of stormy or bright weather, whether taken from natural
phenomena or the habits of animals, we find in the Latin poet some
suggestion of poetical analogy giving new life to the thing described, or
some touch of tender feeling, of which his original supplied him with no
hint whatever.

For the true poetry of the Georgics—the colour of human and sympathetic
feeling, the atmosphere of contemplative ideas, the ethical and national
associations with which the subject is surrounded—Virgil owes very little
to Greek inspiration. Much of this poetry is the mode in which his own
spirit interprets Nature and human life. But much also is due to the
genius of his great predecessor in Latin poetry, who, though ‘unnamed,’ is
‘not unowned,’ but felt to be a pervading presence in the thought and
feeling, the creative diction and the grander cadences, of the Georgics.
Yet this influence is perhaps as potent in the antagonism as in the
sympathy which it evokes. Virgil is no mere disciple of Lucretius, either
as regards his philosophy or his art. Though his imagination pays homage
to that of the older poet; though he acknowledges his contemplative
elevation; though he has a strong affinity with the deep humanity of his
nature; yet in his profoundest convictions and aspirations he proclaims
his revolt from him. The key to the secret of much in the composition of
the Georgics,—of the condition of mind out of which this work of genius
assumed the shape it has as a great literary possession,—is to be sought
in the collision between the force of thought, imagination, and feeling
which the active spirit of Lucretius stored up and left behind him as his
legacy to the world, and the nature, strongly susceptible indeed, but, at
the same time, firm in its own convictions, which first felt the shock of
that force, in its attractive, stimulating, and repellent power.

CHAPTER VI.

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

The influence, direct and indirect, exercised by Lucretius on the thought,
composition, and even the diction of the Georgics was perhaps stronger
than that ever exercised, before or since, by one great poet on the work
of another. This influence is of the kind which is oftener seen in the
history of philosophy than of literature. It was partly one of sympathy,
partly of antagonism. Virgil’s conception of Nature has its immediate
origin in the thought of Lucretius; his religious convictions and national
sentiment derive new strength by reaction from the attitude of his
predecessor. This powerful attraction and repulsion were alike due to the
fact that Lucretius was the first not only to reveal a new power, beauty,
and source of wonder in the world, but also to communicate to poetry a
speculative impulse, opening up, with a more impassioned appeal than
philosophy can do, the great questions underlying human life,—such as the
truth of all religious tradition, the position of man in the Universe, and
the attitude of mind and course of conduct demanded by that position.

Nor was it a poetical and speculative impulse only that Virgil received
from his predecessor. A new didactic poem, dealing largely with the same
subject-matter as that treated by Lucretius,—such as the earth, the
heavens, the great elemental forces, the growth of plants, the habits of
animals, and the like—contemplating, among other objects, that of
determining the relation of man to the sphere in which he is placed, and
seeking to invest the ordinary processes of Nature with an ideal
charm,—could not help assuming a somewhat similar mould to that which had
been originally cast for the philosophic thought and realistic observation
of the older poet.

Again, in regard to the technical execution of his work, rhythm and
expression, Virgil inherited the new wealth introduced into Latin
literature by Lucretius. Lucretius had given to the Latin Hexameter a
stronger and more unimpeded flow, a more sonorous and musical intonation
than it had before his time. He stamped the force of his mind on new modes
of vivid expression and of rhythmical cadence, which, though they might be
modified, could not be set aside in any future representation of the
‘species ratioque,’ the outward spectacle and the moving principle of
Nature.

Many circumstances conduced to bring Virgil, more powerfully than any
other Latin poet, under the spell of Lucretius. As is remarked by Mr.
Munro(307), when the poem of his predecessor first appeared Virgil was at,
or near, the age which is most immediately impressed and moulded by a
contemporary work of genius. The enthusiasm for philosophy, expressed in
the short poem written immediately before he began to study under Siron,
implies that he had been already attracted by the subject of which
Lucretius was the only worthy(308) Latin exponent; and his studies under
that teacher must have prepared his mind to receive the higher instruction
of the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ The song of Silenus in the sixth Eclogue and
many expressions and cadences in other poems of the series attest the
poetical, if not the speculative, impression thus produced. But the
clearest testimony of Virgil’s recognition of the influence of his
predecessor is found in that passage of the Georgics in which he speaks of
himself most from his heart,—

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

and in which he declares his first wish to be that the Muses should reveal
to him the secrets of Nature; but, if this were denied him, he next prays
that ‘the love of the woods and running streams in the valleys’ might be
his portion. He may not have meant the lines

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

to be taken as a description of the individual Lucretius, or those
containing the other picture, placed by its side,

Fortunatas et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores, etc.,—(II. 493.)

as a description of himself. Such direct personal references are not in
keeping with the allusive style in which he writes of himself and others.
He seems rather in these passages to set forth two ideal states of mind,
that of philosophic contemplation, on the one hand, that of the pure love
of Nature and conformity with the simple beliefs of country-people, on the
other, as equally capable of raising men above the vulgar passions and
pleasures of the world. But it is evident that he thought of Lucretius as
the poet who had held up the one ideal to the imagination and the severer
mood of his countrymen, and of himself as holding up the other to their
poetical feeling and their human affections.

He would thus seem to have looked on Lucretius with something of that
veneration with which Lucretius regards Epicurus, Empedocles, and Ennius,
and with which Dante long after regarded Virgil himself. The two greatest
among the Roman poets had many feelings in common,—the love of Nature, the
love of study, especially the study of ancient poetry and of science, a
natural shrinking from the pomp and luxury of city-life and from the
schemes of worldly ambition, an abhorrence of the crimes and violence of
civil war. They felt the charm of the same kind of outward scenes,—of
rivers flowing through green pastures, of meadow and woodland, of rich
corn-fields and vineyards. They had the same strong sympathy with the life
of animals associated with man’s labour, the same fellow-feeling with the
pain and the happiness of which human affection is the source. The
numerous passages in which phrases or cadences, thought or imagery in the
Georgics recall phrases or representation in the earlier poem(309), leave
no doubt that Virgil found in Lucretius a heart and spirit with which his
own largely receptive nature could in many ways sympathise, as well as
that he recognised in him a guide whom he could follow in imagination
‘among the lonely heights of Parnassus(310).’

Yet, on the other hand, it is quite true that both the character and
genius of Virgil are essentially of a different type from those of
Lucretius.—They are both thoroughly original representatives of different
elements in the Roman and Italian character.—So far as he represents the
mind and temper of Rome, Lucretius represents the old order which had
passed away. Though scarcely anything is known of the circumstances of his
life, yet his _gentile_ name (as is shown by Mr. Munro), his relation of
equality to Memmius, the stamp of his powerful personality impressed on
his poem, point to the conclusion that he was one of the old Roman
aristocracy, born into a time when many of its members had begun to retire
in disgust from active interest in the Republic, which they were no longer
able to govern. It was, as has been already remarked(311), to this class
among the Romans, almost exclusively, that the taste for literature was
confined in the last age of the Republic; and it was among men of this
class, such as the Luculli and Hortensius, and the Velleius and Torquatus
of Cicero’s Dialogues, that the Epicurean philosophy found its chief
adherents. The poem of Lucretius shows all the courage and energy, the
power of command, the sense of superiority and the direct simplicity of
manner emanating from it, which are the inheritance of a great governing
class. He is the one man of true genius for poetry whom that class gave to
Rome. His lofty pathos and tenderness of feeling are the graces of his own
nature, refined and purified by the most humanising studies. His profound
melancholy is a mood natural to one who looks on the passing away of a
great order of things, political, social, and religious, in the midst of
scenes of turbulence and violence, and takes refuge from an alien world in
the contemplation of another order of things, infinitely more majestic
than either the old social state which was shaken and tottering to its
fall, or the new which was yet ‘powerless to be born.’

There could scarcely be any greater contrast, in social relations and the
dispositions arising out of them, between any two men, than between the
representative of the old governing families of the Republic, and the
humbly-born native of the Cisalpine province,—delicate in health, modest
and self-distrustful, yet endowed with a deep consciousness of genius and
a resolution to follow that guidance only,—entering on manhood and
beginning his career as poet contemporaneously with the events which
determined the ascendency of the new order of things, and identified with
it through his personal relations to the leading men of the new Empire,—a
poet who derived from his birth and early nurture ‘the spirit of the ages
of Faith(312),’—one too who had been happy in his early home-affections
and in the friendships of his manhood, and who was able to dedicate his
mature years to his art under conditions of the greatest personal and
national security. In considering the influence of the ideas of Lucretius
on the mind of Virgil, we must accordingly make large allowance for the
medium of alien sympathies, personal, social, and political, through which
they were refracted. We must take into consideration also the wide
difference between the philosophic poet and the pure poetic artist. The
feeling of Virgil towards philosophy was apparently one of aspiration
rather than of possession. He shows no interest in the processes of
enquiry,—in tracing the operation of great laws in manifold phenomena,—in
investigating one obscure subject after another, with the confident
assurance that every discovery is a step towards the light and the
ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. Virgil recognises the source of
his own strength in the words

Flumina _amem_ silvasque.

It is the power of love which quickens his intuition and enables him to
perceive the tenderness and beauty revealed in the living movement of
Nature. He receives and applies the complete ideas of Lucretius, but he
does not follow them with the eagerness of their author through the
various phases of their development. Certain results of a philosophic
system affect his imagination, but he does not seem to feel how these
results necessarily exclude other conclusions which he will not abandon.
Hence arises his prevailing eclecticism,—the existence of popular beliefs
side by side in his mind with the tenets of Epicureans, Stoics, and
Platonists,—of some conclusions of the Lucretian science along with the
opposing doctrines expressed in the poetry of Alexandria. Even in the
arrangement of his materials and the grouping of his landscapes, some
chance association or rhythmical cadence seems to guide his hand, more
often than the perception of the orderly connexion of phenomena with one
another.

II.

The idea which Lucretius revealed to the world in fuller majesty and life
than any previous poet or philosopher, was the idea of Nature,
apprehended, not as an abstract conception, but as a power omnipresent,
creative, and regulative throughout the great spheres of earth, sky, and
sea, and the innumerable varieties of individual existence. The meaning
conveyed by the Greek word φύσις, as employed by Democritus, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, etc., is powerless to move the imagination or enlarge the
sense of beauty, when compared with the illimitable content of ‘Natura
daedala rerum’ as conceived by the Latin poet. Nature is to him the one
power absolutely supreme and independent in the Universe, too vast and too
manifold to be subject to any will but her own,—

Libera continuo dominis privata superbis.

Her independent existence is incompatible with that of the multitude of
beings, of limited power and intelligence, which the old mythologies
established as lords over the world and man. The gods, abiding in a state
of blessed ease and indifference, are themselves dependent on a power
infinitely transcending their own. But in what relation does man stand to
this power? He too is within her sphere, altogether subject to her, but no
special object of her regard. He exists only through compliance with and
resignation to her conditions. And these conditions are on the whole
unfavourable to him. He can gain only a scanty subsistence by a continual
struggle with reluctant and rebellious forces in the earth; and even after
all his toil and care, causes over which he has no control, such as the
inclemency of the skies and incalculable vicissitudes of heat and cold,
frustrate his endeavours.

Quod superest arvi _tamen id natura sua vi_
_Sentibus obducat_, ni _vis humana resistat_
Vitai causa valido consueta bidenti
_Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris_.
Si non fecundas _vertentes_ vomere glebas
_Terraique solum subigentes_ cimus ad ortus,
_Sponte sua nequeant liquidas_ existere in auras.
Et tamen interdum _magno quaesita labore_
Cum iam per terras frondent atque omnia florent,
Ant nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol
Aut subiti perimunt imbris gelidaeque pruinae,
Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant(313).

How deeply the thought expressed in these lines—the thought of the hard
struggle which man is forced to carry on with an unsympathetic Power—sank
into the mind of Virgil, is evident from the various passages in the
Georgics in which the phraseology as well as the idea expressed by
Lucretius is reproduced. These lines in which the struggle between the
‘vis humana’ impersonated in the husbandman, and the resistance offered by
Nature to his energetic labours, is vividly described, suggest whatever
there is of speculative thought in the Georgics. And though it would be
misleading to speak of that poem as, in any sense, a philosophical poem,
yet, as in all other great works of genius, some theory of life—of man’s
relation to his circumstances and of his place, either in a spiritual or
natural dispensation—pervades and gives its highest meaning to the
didactic exposition.

Lucretius further regards this state of things, so far from being
remediable by man, as necessarily becoming worse. Each new generation of
husbandmen and vinedressers finds its burden heavier:—

Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores(314), etc.

The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair
crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser(315), can now
scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of
men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it(316). The cause of this decay
in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the
elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more
rapid than the supply of new materials. ‘In the long warfare waged from
infinite time’—

Ex infinito contractum tempore bellum—

the destructive forces are gaining the superiority over the restorative
forces of Nature; and this process is hastening on the advent of that
‘single day’ which will overwhelm in ruin the whole framework of earth,
sea, and sky(317).

What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do?
Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of
Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and
reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the
poem, which Virgil also remembered(318), he did recognise the fact that
human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to
enrich and beautify the earth:—

Inde aliam atque aliam culturam dulcis agelli
Temptabant, fructusque feros mansuescere terram
Cernebant indulgendo blandeque colendo(319).

But he seems to have no idea of further progress. Though he contemplates
with imaginative sympathy the trials of the ‘grandis arator’ and the
‘vetulae vitis sator,’ he has no guidance to offer them. The lessons
taught by Lucretius are not those of active energy, applicable to every
condition of life, but the lessons of a resigned quietism and a
contemplative energy, adapted only to men of leisure, enjoying ample
resources for the gratification of their intellectual tastes.

That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth
made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact
that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea
of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such
subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer:
‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to
struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s mouth(320) the sentiment
that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of
man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance
which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the
didactic directions of the Georgics were given.

The Lucretian idea of Nature, both in its philosophical and poetical
significance, runs through the Georgics; but it is modified by other
considerations, and it is rather latent than prominent in the poetry and
in the practical teaching of the poem. The mind of Virgil is not
possessed, as the mind of Lucretius was possessed, by the thought of the
immensity of her sphere and the universality of her presence. He sees her
presence in the familiar scenes and objects around him. The idea adds
variety, grace, and liveliness to his description of every detail of rural
industry. A sense of the ministering agency of Nature is a more pervading
element in his poetry than that of her power and majesty. Objects are
still regarded by him as separate and individual. The conceptions of
Nature which created mythology contend in his mind with the
half-apprehended conceptions of universal law and of the interdependence
of phenomena on one another. Thus the poetical element in his descriptions
of the life of plants and trees, or of the forces of flood and storm, does
not spring from such deep sources in the imagination as the same element
in the descriptions of the older poet. But neither is it limited to the
perception of the ‘outward shows’ of things which gratify the eye, or the
sounds which delight the ear. Even in the Eclogues the intuition into
Nature is deeper than that. The study of Lucretius has enriched the
Georgics with the most pervading charm of the poem—the sense of a secret,
unceasing, tranquil power (like that ascribed by Wordsworth to May—

Thy help is with the weed that creeps
Along the barest ground, etc.),

communicating to outward things the grace and tenderness of human
sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.

But the Lucretian conception of Nature in its relation to human wants has
been greatly modified by the religious tendency of Virgil’s thought, his
respect for traditional opinion, his sense of man’s dependence on a higher
Spiritual Power. Nature he regards as no more independent in her sphere
than man is in his. The laws and conditions imposed on her have been
appointed with reference to the relation in which she stands to man. Where
these conditions are unfavourable, they have been appointed to quicken
man’s faculties and force him into the ways of industry. Lucretius dwells
on the fact that two-thirds of our globe are unsuited for human
habitation, as disproving the opinion of a Divine creation of the world
for the benefit of man(321): Virgil dwells on the fact that two temperate
regions have been assigned to weak mortals as a proof of Divine
beneficence(322). Virgil also accepts the idea that the earth once was
more productive than it is(323), but he accepts it in the spirit of Hesiod
rather than of Lucretius. In the Golden Age, under Saturn, the earth bore
all things spontaneously. It was Jove—or Providence—who imposed on man,
and continues to impose on him, the necessity of labouring for his
subsistence; and this he did, not, as Hesiod believed, in anger at the
deceit of Prometheus, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. The
poetical references to the Saturnian Age and the subsequent reign of Jove
need not imply a literal belief in the fables of mythology, any more than
the allusion at Georg. i. 62 to the fable of Pyrrha and Deucalion implies
the literal acceptance of the explanation there given of the existence of
the present race of men. But as that allusion seems meant to convey the
belief in a Divine creative act, so the former allusion seems to convey a
belief in a Divine moral dispensation. The idea of Providential guidance,
of a Supreme Father, wielding the forces of Nature, shaping the destinies
of man, acting for the most part by regular processes in order that man
may learn to understand his ways(324), but making his personal agency more
manifest from time to time, as after the death of Caesar, by signs and
wonders interrupting the order of Nature, supersedes or largely modifies
the conception of natural law. The other powers of the Greek Olympus and
of the Roman Pantheon are no longer, as the former are in the Iliad, at
war with one another, but all work in harmony with the Supreme Will. Like
the fables just referred to, the names of these deities seem to be
introduced symbolically, to signify the different modes of activity of the
one Supreme Spiritual Power, and the different forms under which he is to
be reverenced.

The speculative idea of the Georgics is thus rather a theological than a
philosophical idea. The ultimate fact which Virgil endeavours to set forth
and justify is the relation of man to Nature, under a Divine dispensation.
He too, as well as Lucretius, recognises the tendency of all things to
degenerate; but this tendency he attributes, not to natural loss of force,
but to the fiat of Omnipotence—

sic omnia fatis
In peius ruere.

He too recognises the liability to failure and loss from causes over which
man has no direct control,—the violence of storms, the inclemency of
seasons, etc.,—as well as from others which he is able to provide against
by constant vigilance. What resource has he against these untoward
conditions? First he is bound to watch the signs of impending change which
Providence has appointed, so as to leave as little as possible at the
mercy of the elements. Next he has the resource of prayer, and the power
of propitiating Heaven by customary rites and sacrifices, and by a life of
piety and innocence. The ethical precepts of the poem, as is said by a
distinguished French writer, may be summed up in the medieval maxim,
‘Laborare est orare(325).’

To inculcate the necessity of a constant struggle with the reluctant
forces of Nature, and to show how this struggle may be successfully
conducted by incessant labour, vigilance, propitiation of the Supreme Will
by prayer and piety, thus appears to be the main ethical teaching of the
Georgics. And this statement of Virgil’s aim is not inconsistent with the
interpretation of his meaning, first suggested by Mr. Merivale, and
accepted and admirably illustrated by Conington. But the phrase
‘glorification of labour’ suggests modern rather than ancient
associations. Labour is not glorified as an end in itself; it is
inculcated as a duty, as the condition appointed by Providence for
attaining the peace, abundance, happiness, and worth of the life of the
fields. As of old

Τῆς ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν,

so now they make the sweat of man’s brow the means through which the
‘divini gloria ruris’ can be realised. By the labour spent in drawing into
actual existence the glory and beauty of the land man best fulfils his
duty and secures his happiness. There is no truer source for him of
material and moral good, of simple pleasures, of contemplative delight.
Yet if we wish rightly to appreciate the purely didactic parts of the
poem, it is impossible, as has been fully shown by Conington in his
General Introduction to the Georgics, to overrate the stress which Virgil
puts on the ceaseless industry, foresight, vigilance, and actual
force(326) which must be put forth by the husbandman, as the condition of
success in the struggle in which he is engaged. The very style of the
Georgics bears the impress of this predominant idea. It is this idea which
seems to give Roman strength to the workmanship of the poem; as it is the
sense of the rich and tender life of Nature which gives to it the softness
of Italian sentiment, so marvellously blended with that Roman strength.
The imperial tone of conquest and command and civilising influence makes
itself heard in such lines as these:—

Exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis.
Tum denique dura
Exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentes.
In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur(327).

This idea of the need of a struggle with Nature, latent under all the
special precepts of the Georgics, is thus seen to arise out of the
philosophical thought of Lucretius. But the lesson inculcated by Virgil is
directly opposite to that state of quietism and pure contemplation in
which Lucretius finds the ideal of human life. Virgil’s teaching is that
best adapted to the strenuous temperament of his countrymen and to the
general condition of men in all times. And it will be found that this idea
of a hard struggle, ordained by Supreme Power, against adverse
circumstances, in which man receives Divine guidance by prayer and patient
interpretation of the will of Heaven, and through which he attains to a
state of final rest, runs through the Aeneid as well as the Georgics.
Virgil reaches a practical result opposed to that which Lucretius reaches,
by subordinating the Lucretian conception of man’s relation to Nature to
the Platonic belief in the supremacy of a Spiritual Will and in the moral
dispensation under which man is placed. It is this belief which appears to
underlie Virgil’s acceptance of the religious traditions of antiquity,
which might have been expected to have received, for all educated minds,
their death-blow at the hands of Lucretius.

The science of Lucretius, as distinct from his philosophy of Nature and
human life, is also partly accepted by Virgil, and partly rejected in
favour of the tenets of an opposite school. In such passages as i. 89–90,

Seu pluris calor ille vias et caeca relaxat
Spiramenta, novas veniat qua sucus in herbas(328), etc.,

i. 415–423,

Haud equidem credo, etc.,

iii. 242,

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, etc.,

we recognise the Lucretian explanation of the constitution of the earth,
of the material elements of the mind, of the physical influence of love.
Other passages again, such as i. 247, etc.,

Illic ut perhibent aut intempesta silet nox,

and iv. 219–227,

His quidam signis, etc.,

are in harmony with the Stoical doctrines and in direct opposition to the
Epicurean science. Some of these apparent inconsistencies of opinion may
be explained on the supposition that Virgil changed his allegiance from
one school to another during the composition of the Georgics. But probably
the truer explanation is that he was

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri(329),

and that he accepted certain results of science which impressed his
imagination, without caring for their consistency with others which he
equally accepts. There is a constant tendency in him to allow his belief
in the miraculous to interfere with his belief in natural law; as for
instance in the account he gives of the birth of bees (iv. 200), and again
of their spontaneous generation from the blood of slain bullocks (iv.
285). He has not the firm faith in natural agency which Lucretius had.
Phenomena are still regarded by him as isolated, not interdependent. The
ordinary course of Nature he supposes to be interrupted by marvels and
portents. The signs of coming things are represented, not as Lucretius
would have represented them, as natural antecedents or concomitants of the
things portended, but as arbitrary indications appointed for the guidance
of man.

III.

For the technical execution of his poem Virgil could gain little help from
his Greek models. The mass of materials which he had to reduce to order
was much larger and more miscellaneous than the special topics selected
for their art by the Alexandrians. The subject treated in the Georgics
would have afforded scope for several poems treated on the principle on
which Aratus and Nicander treated their subjects; and not only was the
mass of materials larger and more varied, but the whole purpose of the
Georgics was more complex. Virgil’s artistic aim was not only to combine
into one work the topics which he treats successively in the four books of
the Georgics, but to interweave with them the poetry of personal and
national feeling, of speculative ideas, of ethical and religious teaching,
of science, of the living world of Nature. In Lucretius, on the other
hand, he found an example of the systematic treatment of a vaster range of
topics,—a range so vast, indeed, that the principal topics of Virgil’s art
enter as subsidiary elements into one part of his representation.
Lucretius too had shown how to combine with the systematic exposition of
his abstract theme a strong personal interest and a strong ethical
purpose. He had shown how, out of the treatment of this abstract theme,
opportunities naturally arose for uttering the poetry and pathos of human
life, and for delineating in all its beauty and majesty the outward face
and revealing the inner secret of Nature. He thus supplied the general
plan which Virgil might follow, with modifications suited to his narrower
range of subject and his more purely didactic office. We see how Virgil
adopts this plan, modified to suit his own ideas, in the personal
dedication; in the Invocation and short introduction to his various books;
in his manner of arranging, connecting, and illustrating the successive
stages of his exposition; and, lastly, in the use which he makes of
episodes, chiefly at the end of various books, with the view of enabling
his readers to feel the intimate connexion of his subject with the most
valued interests of life,—with religion and morality, with family
affection, with peace, prosperity, and national greatness.

The first parallel to be noticed, in the comparison between the two poems,
is in the personal address. Maecenas stands in the same relation to the
Georgics as Memmius does to the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ But as Memmius in the
body of the poem is often merged in the ideal philosophical student, so
Virgil, after the lines of compliment at the opening of his various books,
for the most part directs his instructions to some imaginary husbandman.
In the tones in which Memmius and Maecenas are respectively addressed
there may be an equal sincerity of feeling. But a difference in the
relation in which the poets stand to those whom they address makes itself
felt in the contrast between such lines as these,

Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae,

and

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

In the one case we recognise the man, born into the equal relations of an
aristocratic Republic, who knows of no social superior in the world, and
is attracted to him whom he honours by his dedication solely by the charm
of friendship. In the other case, though the affection may not be less
sincere, there is the unmistakeable note of deference to a social
superior.

The difference between the position which the two poets occupied and of
the times in which they lived is still more manifest in the selection of
the person whom they each fix on as the object of their reverential
homage. Though the poem of Lucretius is inscribed to Memmius, it is really
dedicated to the glory of Epicurus. His image presides over the massive
temple raised to the Power of Nature. He is the great benefactor of the
world, exalted by his service to mankind, not only above all living men,
but above those whom the popular religion had in early times elevated to
the rank of gods—

deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi.

In every book of the poem his praises are repeated in language of
enthusiastic devotion. In the poem of Virgil the living Caesar occupies
the place of a tutelary deity—

In medio mihi Caesar erit, templumque tenebit.

He is ranked above all living men, and above the great men of the past by
whom Rome had been saved from her enemies: he is addressed as the
immediate object of care to the native gods of Italy, and as destined
after death to rank among the ruling powers of Heaven. Something is said
in his honour in every book of the poem. The lines near the end,

Caesar dum magnus ad altum
Fulminat Euphraten bello, victorque volentis
Per populos dat iura, viamque adfectat Olympo(331),

seem intended to leave the thought of his actual greatness as the abiding
impression on the mind of the reader; as the concluding lines of the
Invocation seem intended to make his presence felt as that of its
inspiring deity. While we cannot doubt that the admiration expressed by
Lucretius is the sincere and generous tribute of genius acknowledging a
great debt and unconsciously exaggerating the nobleness of its benefactor,
it is impossible to determine how far Virgil’s language is the expression
of sincere conviction, and how far it is dictated by the necessities of
his position.

But it is in their invocations of a Superior Power to aid them in their
task that we recognise the strongest contrast between the philosophic
poet, who, while denying all supernatural agency, is yet carried away by
his imagination to attribute consciousness, will, and passion to the great
creative Power of Nature,—the source of all life, joy, beauty, and
art,—and the ‘pius vates,’ influenced by the religious sense of man’s
dependence on a Spiritual Power, deeply feeling the poetical charm of the
old mythology, and striving to effect some reconcilement between the
fading traditions of Polytheism and the more philosophical conceptions
prevalent in his time. Lucretius for the moment adopts the symbolism of
ancient mythology, and probably the actual figures of pictorial art (which
elsewhere he speaks of as a great source of human delusion), to impart
visible presence, colour, and passion to his thought; but he leaves no
doubt on the reader’s mind that his representation is merely symbolical.
Virgil, on the other hand, appears in the opening lines of the Georgics to
attribute a distinct personality to the beings of that composite
Polytheism which had gradually grown up out of the union of Greek art and
Roman religion, but which it is difficult to comprehend as having any real
hold over the minds of men who had received any tincture of Greek
philosophy. In the divine office which he assigns to Caesar he adopts the
latest addition to this eclectic Pantheon; and this new divinity he
introduces in the midst of the old gods, just as he fancifully introduces
Gallus in the Eclogues amid the choir of Apollo and the Muses.

But in the Eclogues there is no feeling of doubt in our minds that the
representation is purely fanciful. The strain in the Georgics is
altogether too serious; the juxtaposition of Caesar with the gods of
Olympus and the protecting deities of the husbandman is too carefully
meditated to admit of our supposing the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to
‘adsuesce vocari’ to be intended to be taken as a mere play of fancy. We
cannot think of Lucretius, perhaps not even of Cicero, reading Virgil’s
Invocation, and especially the concluding lines of it, without a certain
feeling of scorn. We cannot help asking how far could the pupil of Siron,
the student of Epicurus and Lucretius, the enlightened associate of
Maecenas, Augustus, Pollio, Horace, etc., attach any serious meaning to
the words of this Invocation. How far was he simply complying with an
established convention of literature? how far using these mythological
representations as symbolism? how far was he identifying himself in
imagination with the beliefs of his ideal husbandman?

To answer these questions we must endeavour to realise the very composite
character which the Pagan religion, the accumulation of many beliefs from
the earliest and rudest fancies of primitive times to the studied
representations of Greek art and the later symbolical explanations of
philosophical schools, presented to men living in the Augustan Age. In
this Invocation and in the body of the poem we can trace three or four
distinct veins of belief, existing together, without producing any sense
of inconsistency, and combining into a certain unity for the purpose of
artistic representation.

Religion in the Augustan Age presented a different aspect to the dwellers
in the town and in the country; to the refined classes whose tastes were
formed by Greek art and poetry, and to men of the old school,—senators
like Cotta or antiquarians like Varro,—who sought to conform to the
ancient Roman traditions; to students of philosophy, who either, like the
Epicureans, denied all Divine agency, or like the Stoics, resolved the
many divinities of the popular belief into one Divine agency under many
forms. The peculiarity of Virgil’s mind is that his belief, at least as
expressed in his poetry, was a kind of syncretism composed out of all
these modes of thought and belief. Like Horace and Tibullus, he
sympathises in imagination with that rustic piety which expressed the
natural thankfulness of the human heart for protection afforded to the
flocks and the fruits of the field, by festivals and ceremonial
observances like the Palilia and Ambarvalia, by sacrifice of a kid to
Faunus, or offerings of flowers and fruit to the Penates. The feelings
connected with this vein of belief as they are represented in the poetry
of the Augustan Age,—

Faune nympharum fugientum amator, etc.,—

and again in Tibullus,

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

of a happy and generally of a genial and festive character, and not
altogether devoid of such elements of simple piety as find expression in
the

Caelo supinas si tuleris manus, etc.,

of Horace. Poetical sympathy with the beliefs and picturesque ceremonies
of the peasants among whom they lived enhanced the real enjoyment derived
from their country life by men of refined feeling like Horace and
Tibullus. But Virgil’s feeling in regard to the religious trust and
observances of the country people appears to be stronger than mere
poetical sympathy. He sees in them a class of men more immediately
dependent than others on the protection of some unseen Power, and thus
forced, as it were, into more immediate relation with that Power. The
modes in which they endeavoured to gain the favour of that Power or to
express their thankfulness for its protection were probably among the
influences which had moulded his own early belief and character in his
Mantuan farm. In the prayer

Dique deaeque omnes studium quibus arva tueri(332),

as in the later exclamation,

Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes(333),

he is identifying himself in imagination with a living mode of popular
belief, and one to which he may have been attracted by his early
associations as well as by poetical sympathy.

But the Invocation recognises the creations of Greek art along with the
ruder and simpler objects of Italian worship. The ‘Fauni Dryadesque
puellae’ assume to Virgil’s fancy the forms of Greek art and poetry. The
legend of Neptune producing the horse by the stroke of his trident
suggests the attributes of Ποσειδῶν ἵππιος, not of the Italian Neptunus.
It is not the Roman Minerva, but ἁ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθάνα, who is associated in
poetry and legend with the olive,—

Φύτευμ’ ἀχείρωτον αὐτόποιον
γλαυκᾶς παιδοτρόφου φύλλον ἐλαίας.

He calls upon Pan to leave his native groves and the woodland pastures of
Lycaeus, just as Horace describes him as passing nimbly from his Arcadian
haunt to the Sabine Lucretilis. These gods, nymphs, and satyrs of an alien
belief were now to Romans as to Greeks the recognised materials which art
and song had to shape into new forms. In the vigorous prime of Greek
poetry, so late even as the age of Sophocles and Herodotus, there was a
real belief in the personal existence and active agency of these
supernatural beings. This real belief first gave birth to, and was
afterwards merged in, the representations of art. Art, which owed its
birth to religious sentiment, superseded it. But after a time and under
new conditions the strong admiration for the beauty or significance of the
objects represented in art produces a strong wish to revive the belief in
their reality; and in minds peculiarly susceptible of such influences the
wish tends to fulfil itself.

Probably Virgil himself would not have cared to probe too deeply the state
of half-belief in which his heart and mind realised the bright existence
and kindly influence of beings consecrated to him by the most cherished
associations of living art and the poetry of the past. Even Lucretius,
while sternly rejecting all belief in their existence as absolutely
incompatible with truth, feels from time to time attracted by their
poetical charm. Horace, we can see, from the absence of anything in his
Satires, or Epistles, implying a real belief in the gods of mythology,
keeps his literary belief apart from his true convictions. In the case of
Virgil, it is not possible, at all events for a modern reader, distinctly
to separate them. The power of the old mythology over the fancy and the
weakness of scientific thought in ancient times to overthrow that power is
nowhere more visible than in his poetry.

But there was another mode of Greek influence acting on the educated minds
of Rome, stronger than that of the ancient mythology. That influence was
the religious speculations of the various philosophical schools(334).
There was, on the one hand, the Epicurean acceptance of an infinite number
of gods dwelling in the ‘Intermundia,’ enjoying a state of supreme calm,
apart from all concern with this world or the labours and pursuits of men.
They might be objects of pure contemplation, and pious reverence to the
human spirit; but they were capable neither of being propitiated nor made
angry by anything that men could do. The Stoic doctrine, on the other
hand, recognised the incessant agency and forethought of a Supreme
Spiritual Power over human life. It accepted the stories and beings of the
traditional religion, but explained them away. The various deities
worshipped by the people are the various manifestations and functions of
this one Supreme Spiritual Power, whether called by the name of Zeus, or
by the abstract name of Providence (πρόνοια). This is the Power addressed
in the famous hymn of Cleanthes, and that appealed to in the familiar τοῦ
γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν of Aratus. It is part of Virgil’s eclecticism to
combine the science of Epicurus with the theology of the more spiritual
schools. The Supreme Spiritual Power in the Georgics is generally spoken
of under the title of ‘Pater.’ It is noticeable that the word Iuppiter is
used either with a purely physical signification, as in

Iuppiter umidus austris—
Et iam maturis metuendus Iuppiter uvis—

or as in the phrases ‘sub Iove,’ ‘ante Iovem,’ in reference to the stories
of the ancient mythology. Even in this Invocation, the object of which
seems to be to assign function and personality to the gods of Olympus and
of Italy, the influence of the Stoic theology was recognised in ancient
times in the identification of the sun and moon—‘clarissima mundi
lumina’—with Liber and Ceres(335). The rhythm of the lines 5–7 can leave
no doubt whatever as to this identification, notwithstanding the appeal to
Varro’s example, who distinguishes the various deities whom he invokes. It
is characteristic of Virgil’s art to introduce such a variation in any
passage which he imitates, and also to suggest a thought which he does not
distinctly develope. In the lines 95–96,

neque illum
Flava Ceres alto nequiquam spectat Olympo(336),

he reproduces a thought which Callimachus had expressed in his hymn to
Artemis(337)—

Οὓς δὲ κεν εὐμειδής τε καὶ ἴλαος αὐγάσσηαι
κείνοις εὖ μὲν ἄρουρα φέρει στάχυν(338).

The ‘flava Ceres’ of Virgil’s description seems to call up before our mind
a picture of the harvest-moon looking down on the corn-fields of the
prosperous husbandman.

The national religion of Rome was something distinct both from the rustic
Paganism of Italy, and from that aesthetic amalgamation of Greek and Roman
beliefs and that semi-philosophical rationalism which art and literature
made familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age. The great symbol of that
national religion was the Temple of Jove on the Capitol(339).

That religion was based on the idea that the wide empire and eternal
duration of Rome had been appointed by Divine decree. As distinguished
from the national religion of Greece, which expressed itself in new and
varied forms of art, Roman religion was one which adhered to ancient rites
and expressed itself in the pomp of outward ceremonial and other
impressive symbols. It acted on the imagination through the sense of
vastness, pomp, stateliness, and solemnity; that of Greece through the
sense of life, joy, beauty, and harmony animating its ceremonial and
embodying itself in its symbols. The objects of Roman worship were almost
innumerable. In addition to the greater divinities which it shared with
the Greek worship, and besides the various native divinities common to it
with the religion of other Italian races, Roman religion had erected
temples to various abstract qualities, such as Peace, Faith, Concord, and
the like. This tendency to multiply their deities, to deify mere
abstractions, and to recognise a distinct deity as presiding over every
common act and process of life, weakened or destroyed the sense of the
personality of the gods, and thus indirectly promoted that advance to
Monotheism which philosophy had made in a different direction. While the
Greeks conceived of each local god or hero as a distinct person, endowed
with his own human qualities and his own visible shape, and thus naturally
adapted for the representations of dramatic poetry or plastic art, the
Romans worshipped rather one Divine impersonal power with many attributes
and functions. The need which the popular imagination feels of some
personal embodiment of the idea of Godhead probably explains the readiness
with which, in the dissolution of older faiths, the worship of the Emperor
became the chief symbol of the national faith.

So far as the conceptions of the national religion of Rome, which have a
powerful influence on the action of the Aeneid, enter into this
Invocation, it is in the recognition of the divinity of Caesar. But here
he is associated with the rural gods, who listen to the prayers of the
husbandman, rather than, as elsewhere both in Horace and Virgil, with the
majesty of the Roman State. The passage probably, as is suggested by
Ribbeck, owes its origin to the decree of the Senate in 36 B.C.,—after the
naval victory gained by Agrippa over Sextus Pompeius,—by which the worship
of Caesar, ‘inter municipales deos,’ was established. There is probably no
passage in Virgil, scarcely any in Latin poetry, which must strike the
modern reader as so unreal as this, or so untrue to the actual convictions
of educated men. There is none in which the language of adulation appears
so palpably, or in which the love of mythological allusion, as one of the
conventional ornaments of poetry, appears to exercise so unfortunate an
influence on the truthful feeling of the poet. It seems strange that a man
of the commanding understanding of Augustus should have derived any
pleasure from the supposition that he might become the son-in-law of
Tethys, from the statement that the glowing Scorpion was already beginning
to make room for him in the sky, or from the appeal made to him to resist
the ambition of supplanting Pluto as the future ruler of Tartarus. In
contrast with this state of feeling we learn to respect the masculine
sense and dignity with which Tiberius disclaims the attribution of divine
honours: ‘I, Conscript Fathers, call you to witness and desire posterity
to remember, that I am but a mortal, and am performing human duties, and
consider it enough if I fill the foremost place(340).’ But though it is
not possible that the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to ‘adsuesce vocari’ should
ever appear natural to us, or that we should ever read them without some
feeling that they are unworthy of the manliness of a great poet, we may
yet recognise some symbolical meaning in them beyond the mere expression
of overstrained eulogy. In such expressions as

Auctorem frugum tempestatumque potentem(341),

Virgil associates the idea of the power of Caesar with the main subject of
his poem; and probably, as is pointed out by Ribbeck, he suggests the
thought of the dependence of Rome and Italy for subsistence on the
vigilance of their ruler(342). In the mention of Tethys there is a
reference to recent naval successes; and in the ‘tibi serviat ultima
Thule’ there may be an allusion to the contemplated expedition to Britain,
and certainly, as in so many other passages of the poetry of the age,
there is a recognition of the wide empire of Rome. In the lines

Anne novum tardis, etc.,

we recognise the idea which connected the apotheosis of Julius Caesar with
the appearance of the ‘Iulium Sidus’ (see Ecl. ix); while the lines

Nam te nec sperant Tartara regem, etc.,

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

Hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo
Ne prohibete, etc.,

are evidently prompted by the conviction that the well-being and security
of the world are dependent on a single life.

In this apparent acceptance of new and old modes of belief,—in this
neopaganism of art,—it is difficult to say how far we are to recognise the
representations of fiction, conscious that it is fiction, as in the
mythological art of the Renaissance, or how far we are in the presence of
a temporary revival of a faith which satisfied a simpler time, in
inconsistent conjunction with incompatible modes of modern thought.
Probably not even the poets themselves, and least of all Virgil, could
have given an explanation of their real state of mind. The dreams of an
older faith were still haunting them, though its substance was gone. The
traditions of the Greek mythology survived, endowed with what, in the
absence of any new creed, might seem immortal life, in the pages of poets,
and in the paintings and other works of art which afforded a refined
pleasure to educated men. The national faith of Italy and Rome still kept
the outward show of life in many visible symbols, and still retained a
hold over the mass of the people. The herds and flocks were still believed
to flourish under the kindly protection of Pales and Faunus. The festive
pleasures of country life at the harvest-home or the vintage season were
enjoyed on old religious holidays, and formed part of ceremonies handed
down from immemorial antiquity. The pomp and ceremonial of what was
peculiarly the Roman worship still met the eye on all great occasions
within the walls of the city:—

Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges et maxima taurus
Victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro,
Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos(343).

The magnificent temples of deities blending the attributes of native
Italian gods with those of the gods of Olympus seemed to preside over the
tumult and active business of the Forum; and the majesty of the Capitoline
Jove was still recognised as the manifestation of the stability and power
of the State. But the Roman imagination was at the same time beginning to
be impressed by a new symbol of Divine agency, which was felt in all
national concerns. The ideal majesty of Jove was merging, as an object of
veneration, in the actual majesty of Caesar, regarded as the vicegerent of
the Supreme Power. All these phases of religious belief, Greek and
Italian, old and new, some appealing to the popular, some to the educated
mind, meet in the poetry of the Augustan Age, and nowhere in more close
conjunction than in this Invocation. They appear in still stranger
connexion with the later results of science and philosophic thought. It is
impossible to find any principle of reconcilement in accordance with which
their proper place in the reasonable intelligence of the age may be
assigned to each. They came together in Virgil as a composite result of
the union of his literary and philosophic tastes with his religious
feeling and national sympathies. So far as we can attach any truth of
meaning to this Invocation, we must look upon it as a symbolical
expression of Divine agency and superintendence in all the various fields
of natural production.

Virgil is much more sparing than Lucretius in the proems to his other
books. In the second book there is a brief invocation to Liber, who is
introduced, with rich pictorial colouring, as the special god of the
vintage; and at lines 39–46 there is an appeal to Maecenas, which
disclaims, perhaps not without some reference to the contrary practice of
Lucretius, all intention to detain his hearer ‘through digressions from
the main theme and long preambles.’ In the fourth there is again a brief
appeal to Maecenas, a statement of the subject, an admission of its homely
character,—‘In tenui labor,’—an expression of the hope that, even out of
these materials, great glory may ensue if Apollo hears the poet’s prayer
and no unpropitious powers impede the course of his song. The introduction
to the third book is more extended, and more interesting from the light
which it throws on the motives which determined Virgil to the choice of
the subject of his epic poem. Here, too, as in the first and second books,
there is an appeal to the tutelary deities of the herds and flocks, the
Italian Pales, and the ‘Pastor ab Amphryso,’—the Apollo νόμιος of Greek
legend and rural worship. The associations of Greek poetry are also evoked
in the reference to the woods and streams of Lycaeus, to the lowing herds
of Cithaeron, to the dogs that range over Taygetus, and to the famous
horses of the Argive plain. The choice of the subject is justified by the
contrast suggested between its novelty—‘silvas saltusque sequamur
Intactos’—and the hackneyed poems founded on mythological subjects which
his immediate predecessors in poetry had written in imitation of their
Alexandrine prototypes. But he indicates here, with a new application of
the words of Ennius, the aspiration to compose a great national epic in
celebration of the exploits of Caesar:—

temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora(344).

Under the allegory of the games which he proposed to celebrate, and the
marble temple which he proposed to raise on the banks of the Mincio, he
associates the thought of his early home with his ambition to rival the
great works of Greek genius (for this seems to be the meaning of the lines

Cuncta mihi, Alpheum linquens lucosque Molorchi,
Cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia cestu)(345),—

and to spread the fame of Caesar through distant ages. This invocation
must have been written later than the crowning victory of Actium, but
before the plan of the Aeneid had definitely assumed shape in the poet’s
mind. From the allegorical representations of the designs in gold, ivory,
and marble for the ornaments of the temple, and still more clearly from
the direct statement

Mox tamen ardentis accingar dicere pugnas
Caesaris(346),

it may be inferred that his first idea was to make the contemporaneous
events the main subject of his epic, and to introduce the glories of the
Trojan line as accessories. Under what influence he changed this purpose,
making contemporary events subsidiary and the ancient legend the main
argument of his poem, will be considered in the chapters devoted to the
examination of the Aeneid.

IV.

As affecting the arrangement and illustration of their materials, there is
this essential difference between the poems of Lucretius and Virgil, that
the one is a great continuous argument, the development of speculative
truths depending on one another; and its professed aim is purely
contemplative,—the production of a certain state of mind and feeling. The
other is the orderly exposition of a number of precepts, depending on
experience and special knowledge; its professed aim is the mastery over a
great practical occupation. Lucretius uses poetry as the vehicle of
science, Virgil as the instrument of a useful art. In the first we expect,
and we find, in so far as the poem was left completed, rigorous
concentration of thought, and an exhaustive treatment of the subject. In
the second we expect, and we find, an orderly and convenient arrangement,
and such a selection of topics as, while producing the impression of a
thorough mastery of the subject, leaves also much to be filled up by the
imagination or experience of the reader. Still, that Virgil regarded
Lucretius as his technical model may be inferred from the use which he
makes of several of his formulae, such as ‘Principio,’ ‘Quod superest,’
‘His animadversis,’ ‘Nunc age,’ ‘Praeterea,’ by which the framework of his
argument is held together. Virgil uses these more sparingly, and with a
more careful selection, so as, while producing the impression of
continuity of thought, not to impede the pure flow of his poetry with the
mechanism of logical connexion. He follows Lucretius also, who here
observed the practice of the Greek didactic poets, in maintaining the
liveliness of a personal address by the frequent use of such appeals as
these, ‘Nonne vides,’ ‘Contemplator,’ ‘Forsitan et ... quaeras,’ ‘Vidi,’
‘Ausim,’ etc.

In illustrating and giving novelty to his various topics Virgil has the
example of Lucretius to justify him in catching up and dwelling on every
aspect of beauty or imaginative interest which they are capable of
presenting. And it is here that the more careful art of Virgil, and the
fact that he attached more value to the perfection of his art than to the
knowledge he imparts, give him that technical superiority over the older
writer which, notwithstanding the tamer interest of his subject, and
perhaps the tamer character of his own genius, has made the Georgics a
poem much more familiar to the world than the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ Virgil,
for one thing, enjoys greater freedom of omitting any set of topics,—any
of those details on which Cato or Varro would have felt themselves bound
to be specially explicit,—which would detract unduly from the beauty and
general amenity of his exposition; or by a simple touch (such as the ‘Ne
saturare fimo pingui,’ etc.) he can suggest the necessity of attending to
such topics, while leaving their full realisation to the reader. He thus,
by greater selection and elimination of his materials, avoids the monotony
and the long prosaic interspaces between the grander bursts of poetry
which his vast argument imposes on Lucretius. But, further, he avails
himself of many more resources to give variety of interest and literary
charm to the topics which he successively deals with. Each and all of
these topics,—the processes of ploughing and sowing, the signs of the
weather, the grafting of trees and the pruning of the vine, the qualities
of horses and cattle, the tending of sheep and goats, the observation of
the habits of bees,—bring him into immediate contact with the genial
influences of the outward world. The vastness as well as the abstract
character of his subject forces Lucretius to pass through many regions
which seem equally removed from this genial presence and from all human
associations. It is only the enthusiasm of discovery—the delight in purely
intellectual processes—that bears him buoyantly through these dreary
spaces; and it is only the knowledge that from time to time glimpses of
illimitable power and wonder are opened up to him, and admiration for the
energy and clear vision of his guide, that compel the flagging reader to
accompany him. But Virgil leads his readers through scenes, tamer indeed
and more familiar, yet always bright and smiling with some homely charm,
or rich and glowing with the ‘pomp of cultivated nature,’ or fresh and
picturesque with the charm of meadow, river-bank, or woodland pasture.

The secret of the power of Lucretius as an interpreter of Nature lies in
his recognition of the sublimity of natural law in ordinary phenomena. The
secret of Virgil’s power lies in the insight and long-practised meditation
through which he abstracts the single element of beauty from common sights
and the ordinary operations of industry. Thus, to take one or two
instances of the way in which the charm of Nature is communicated to the
drudgery of rural labour:—what a sense of refreshment to eye and ear is
conveyed by the lines which describe the practical remedies by which the
farmer mitigates the burning drought of summer:—

Et cum exustus ager morientibus aestuat herbis,
Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam
Elicit; illa cadens raucum per levia murmur
Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(347).

Again, what a picture of rich woodland beauty is created out of the
occurrence, in the midst of practical directions, of some homely
traditional maxims, in accordance with which farmers judged of the
probable abundance of their crop:—

Contemplator item, cum se nux plurima silvis
Induet in florem et ramos curvabit olentis:
Si superant fetus, pariter frumenta sequentur,
Magnaque cum magno veniet tritura calore(348).

So too, in a technical account of the different varieties of soil, he
brings before the mind, by a single descriptive touch, a picture of
abundant harvest-fields,—

non ullo ex aequore cernes
Plura domum tardis decedere plaustra iuvencis(349);

and enables us to feel the charm of a rich pastoral country,—with its
lonely woodland glades, its brimming river flowing past mossy and grassy
banks, and the shelter and shade of its caves and rocks, in the midst of
homely directions for the care of mares before they foal:—

Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum
Flumina, muscus ubi et viridissima gramine ripa,
Speluncaeque tegant, et saxea procubet umbra(350).

In the inculcation of his practical precepts his aim is even more to exalt
the dignity and to exhibit the delight of rural labour, than to explain
its methods or inculcate its utility.

He imparts a peculiar vivacity, grace, and tenderness to his treatment of
many topics by the analogy which he suggests between the life of Nature
and of man. The perception of analogy originates in the philosophical and
imaginative thought of Lucretius; and it is in the second Book, in the
composition of which, as Mr. Munro has shown, Virgil’s mind was saturated
with the ideas, feelings, and language of his predecessor, that this
element of poetical interest is most conspicuous. The following examples,
occurring in the technical exposition of the growth and tending of trees,
are all taken from the second Book; and two of them, those marked _g_ and
_h_, are immediately suggested by Lucretius:—

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

_b._ tenero abscindens de corpore matrum.

_c._ Exuerint silvestrem animum.

_d._ Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma.

_e._ Mutatam ignorent subito ne semina matrem.

_f._ atque animos tollent sata.

_g._ Viribus eniti quarum et contemnere ventos
Adsuescant.

_h._ Ac dum prima novis adolescit frondibus aetas,
Parcendum teneris.

_i._ Ante reformidant ferrum.

_k._ Praecipue dum frons tenera imprudensque laborum.

Many more examples might be added from the other Books. The force of many
of the epithets applied to material objects, such as ‘ignava,’ ‘laeta et
fortia,’ ‘maligni,’ ‘infelix,’ etc., consists in the suggestion of a kind
of personal life underlying and animating the silent processes of Nature.

Virgil, too, like Lucretius, shows the close observation of a naturalist,
and a genuine sympathy with the pains and pleasures of all living things,
especially of the animals associated with the toil or amusement of men.
The interest of the third Book arises, to a great degree, from the truth
and vivacity of feeling with which he observes and identifies himself with
the ways and dispositions of these fellow-labourers of man,—with the pride
and emulation of the horse, the fidelity and companionship of the dog, the
combative courage of the bull and his sense of pain and dishonour in
defeat, the patience of the steer and his brotherly feeling for his
yoke-fellow in toil, and with the attachment of sheep and goats to their
offspring and to their familiar haunts(352). The interest of the fourth
Book, again, turns on the analogy implied between the pursuits, fortunes,
wars, and state-policy of bee-communities and of men. It is the sense of
this analogy that imparts a meaning deeper than that demanded by the
obvious force of the words—a more pathetic feeling of the vanity of all
earthly strife—to that final touch in the description of the combat in
mid-air between two hosts, led by rival chiefs:—

Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui iactu compressa quiescunt(353).

In thus relieving the dryness of technical detail, by availing himself of
every aspect of beauty associated with it, and by imparting the vivacity
of human relations and sensibility to natural objects, Virgil makes use of
the same resources as elicit springs of poetic feeling from many of the
dry and stony wastes through which the argument of Lucretius leads him.
There are others however employed by Virgil, which Lucretius uses more
sparingly or not at all. There are, in the first place, all those which
arise out of the conception of the ‘human force,’ impersonated in the
‘sturdy ditcher,’ the ‘farmer roused to anger,’ the ‘active peasant,’
contrasting with and conflicting with that other conception of the life of
Nature. And as in Lucretius the speculative ideas, penetrating through
every region of the wide domain traversed by him, elicit some poetic life
out of its barrenest places, so the two speculative ideas, of Nature as a
living force, and of man’s labour, vigilance, forethought in their
relation to that force, impart a feeling of imaginative delight to
Virgil’s account of the most common details of the husbandman’s toil. The
strength and vivacity thus imparted to the style has been well illustrated
by Professor Conington in his Introduction to the Georgics. It may be
noted however that, even in this imaginative recognition of the strength
and force of man in conflict with the force of Nature, Virgil is still
following in the tracks of Lucretius. Such expressions as

Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris—
ferro molirier arva—
magnos manibus divellere montes—

in the older poet first opened up this vein which was wrought with such
effectual results by his successor. But Conington has, in his notes, drawn
attention to another vein of feeling, which is all Virgil’s own, and which
enables him to give further variety and charm to these homely details. The
husbandman has not only his hard and incessant struggle—‘labor
improbus’—but he has the delight of success, the joy of contemplating the
new beauty and richness, created by the strength of his arm. This feeling
breaks out in the ‘Ecce’ of the line already quoted,—

Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam;

in the ‘iuvat’ of

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

and in the ‘canit’ of the line

Iam canit effectos extremus vinitor antes(355).

Another set of associations, interwoven with the rich and firm texture of
the poem, are those derived from earlier science and poetry. Of the
resources of learned allusion Lucretius makes a singularly sparing use.
The localising epithets and mythological names in which Virgil’s poem
abounds possessed no attraction for his austerer genius, nourished by the
severe models of an older time, and rejecting the ornaments and
distractions from the main interest familiar to Alexandrine literature.
Virgil had already shown in the Eclogues this tendency to overlay his
native thought with the spoils of Greek learning. Such phrases as
‘Strymoniae grues,’ ‘Pelusiacae lentis,’ ‘Amyclaeum canem,’ ‘Idumaeas
palmas,’—the references to the ‘harvests of Mysia and Gargarus,’ to the
‘vines of Ismarus,’ ‘Cytorus, waving with boxwood,’ etc. etc., must have
been charged, for Virgil’s contemporaries, in a way which they cannot be
for a modern reader, with the memories of foreign travel or of residence
in remote provinces, or with the interest attaching to lands recently made
known. To us their chief interest is that by their strangeness they
enhance the effect with which the more familiar names of Italian places
are used. Thus the contrasted pictures of the illimitable pastures of
Libya and of the wintry wastes of Scythia enable us to realise more
exquisitely the charm of that fresh(356) Italian pastoral scene
immediately preceding, the description of which combines the tender
feeling of the Eclogues with the deeper realism of the Georgics. Thus too
the great episode on the beauty and riches of Italy (ii. 136–176) is
introduced in immediate contrast to the account of the prodigal luxuriance
of Nature in the forests and jungles of the East. But even to a modern
reader such expressions as these—

Vos silvae amnesque Lycaei—
vocat alta voce Cithaeron—
O, ubi campi
Spercheusque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta, etc.,

seem to bear with them faint echoes from a far-off time, of some ideal
life of poetry and adventure in the free range and ‘otia dia’ of pastoral
scenes,—of some more intimate union of the human soul with the soul of
mountains and woodland than is granted to the common generations of men.
On Virgil himself, to whom the whole of Greek poetry and legend was an
open page, the spell which they exercised was of the same kind as that
exercised by the magic of classical allusion on the poets and painters of
the Renaissance.

The contrast between Lucretius and Virgil, as regards their relation to
the ancient mythology, has already appeared in the examination of the
Invocations to their respective poems. This contrast is still more brought
out by the large use which Virgil makes of mythological allusions in the
body of his poem, as compared with the rare, and generally polemical,
references to the subject in Lucretius. Virgil recalls the tales and
poetical representations of mythology sometimes by some suggestive
epithet, or other qualifying expression, as in speaking of ‘poppies
steeped in the sleep of Lethe,’ ‘Halcyons dear to Thetis,’ ‘the Cyllenian
star,’ ‘the slow-rolling wains of the Eleusinian mother,’ and the like.
More frequently however he does this by direct mention of some of the more
familiar, and occasionally of some of the more recondite, tales which had
supplied materials to earlier poets and painters. Thus, in connexion with
the topic of lucky and unlucky days, he hints at the tale of the war of
the Giants with the Olympian gods, at that of Scylla and Nisus in
connexion with the signs of the weather, at that of the Centaurs and
Lapithae—the ‘brawl fought to the death over the wine cup’—in the account
of the vine, at that of the daughter of Inachus tormented in her
wanderings by the vengeance of Juno in connexion with the plague of flies
with which cattle were afflicted, etc. etc. Less familiar stories, of
picturesque adventure or of a kind of weird mystery, are revived in the
passages—

Talis et ipse iubam cervice effudit equina
Coniugis adventu pernix Saturnus, et altum
Pelion hinnitu fugiens implevit acuto(357),

and

Munere sic niveo lanae, si credere dignum est,
Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit,
In nemora alta vocans; nec tu aspernata vocantem(358).

Such allusions came much more home to an ancient than to a modern reader.
They were familiar to him from the pages of poets, or from pictures
adorning the walls of his own town and country-houses, or seen in the
temples and other sacred places of famous Greek and Asiatic cities, and
forming great part of the attraction of those cities to travellers then,
as the pictures seen in the galleries, palaces, and churches of Rome,
Florence, and Venice do to travellers now. But though the colours of these
poetic fancies have faded for us, they are felt to be a legitimate source
of variety in the poem, and to be an element of interest connecting the
humbler cares of the country-people with the refined tastes of the
educated class. They are not introduced as a substitute for truthful
representation of fact, but rather as adding a new grace to this
representation. Neither do they, as in Propertius, overlay the main
subject of the poem by their redundant use. They probably produced the
same kind of impression on an ancient reader, as allusions from the works
of Latin or Italian poets in Spenser or Milton produce on a modern reader.
Occasionally they may seem weak and faulty from their incongruity with the
thought with which they are associated. Thus in the passage at i. 60,
etc.,—

Continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis
Imposuit natura locis, quo tempore primum
Deucalion vacuum lapides iactavit in orbem,
Unde homines nati, durum genus(359),

the mind is offended by the juxtaposition of the great thought, which
Lucretius had striven so earnestly to impress on the world, with one of
the most unmeaning fables that ever violated all possibilities of natural
law. So too the contrast between the artistic and recondite elegance of
the lines (iii. 549–550),

Quaesitaeque nocent artes; cessere magistri
Phillyrides Chiron, Amythaoniusque Melampus(360),

and the grand, solemn realism of the parallel passage in the account of
the Plague of Athens,—

Mussabat tacito medicina timore(361),—

makes us feel how unapproachable by all the resources of art and learning
is that direct force of insight united to fulness of feeling with which
Lucretius was endowed above nearly every poet, ancient or modern.

Equally remote from the practice of Lucretius is the use made by Virgil of
that amalgamation of mythological fancy with the rudiments of science
which assigned names, personality, and a poetical history to the various
constellations:—

Pleiadas, Hyadas, claramque Lycaonis Arcton.

But Virgil’s practice is in accordance with that of all the Greek poets
from Homer and Hesiod down to the latest Alexandrine writers. He thus
enriches the treatment of his subject with the interest of early science,
and with the associations of the open-air life of hunters, herdsmen, and
mariners in primitive times. Lucretius is impressed by the splendour,
wonder, and severe majesty of the stars as they actually appear to
us,—‘aeterni sidera mundi,’ ‘caeli labentia signa,’ ‘noctis signa
severa,’—without any superadded association of mythology or antiquity.
Neither does he use that other resource, by which Virgil adds an antique
lustre to his subject—the introduction of quaint phrases and turns of
speech, derived from Hesiod, such as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’ ‘laudato
ingentia rura, Exiguum colito,’ or those derived from the traditional
peasant-lore of Italy,—‘hiberno laetissima pulvere farra,’—which Virgil
intermingles with the classic elegance of his style. Still less could
Lucretius appeal to the associations of the popular religion. Such
expressions as ‘fas et iura sinunt,’ ‘hiemes orate serenas,’ ‘nulla
religio vetuit,’ and the mention of old religious ceremonies and practices
prevalent in the country districts, such as that at i. 345,

Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges(362),

and at ii. 387,

Et te, Bacche, vocant per carmina laeta, tibique
Oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu(363),

not only afford a legitimate relief to the inculcation of practical
precepts in the Georgics, but impress on the mind the dignity imparted to
the most ordinary drudgery by the sense of its association with the
religious life of man.

On the other hand, it is to be noticed how sparingly Virgil uses one of
the grandest resources in the repertory of Lucretius,—that of imaginative
analogies, through which familiar or unseen phenomena are made great or
palpable by association with other phenomena which immediately affect the
imagination with a sense of wonder and sublimity. The apprehension of
these analogies between great things in different spheres proceeds from
the inventive and intellectual faculty in the imagination,—that by which
intuitions of vast discoveries are obtained before observation and reason
can verify them; and in this faculty of imaginative reason Lucretius is as
superior to Virgil, as Virgil is to him in artistic accomplishment. One of
the few ‘similes’ in the Georgics is that often-quoted one, in which the
difficulty which man has in holding his own against the natural
deterioration of things is compared to the difficulty which a rower has in
holding his own against a strong adverse current (i. 201–203):—

Non aliter, quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum
Remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit
Atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni(364).

There is suggestiveness and verisimilitude in this image. But it does not
make us feel the enlargement of mind and the poetic thrill of the thought
which are produced by many of the great illustrative images in Lucretius.
Virgil too is much inferior to the older poet, and much less original, in
the general reflections on life which he occasionally introduces,—such as
that at iii. 66,—

Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
Prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus(365).

In so far as the thought here expressed is true, the truth cannot be said
to be either new or profound.

The inferiority of Virgil to Lucretius, in that faculty of imagination,
which perceives an inner identity between great forces in the material and
in the spiritual world, is apparent also from a comparison of their
respective diction. There is often a creativeness, a boldness of invention
and insight into the deepest nature of things, in the language of
Lucretius, such as did not reappear again in Italian poetry till more than
thirteen centuries had passed, and which makes us feel how much nearer he
was in many ways than any other Latin poet to our modern modes of thought
and feeling. There is, on the other hand, scarcely any great poem from
which so few striking and original images can be quoted as from the
Georgics. The figurative language arising out of the perception of the
analogy between the vital processes of Nature and various modes of human
sensibility is rather like that unconscious identification of Nature with
humanity out of which mythology arose, than the conscious recognition of
some common force or law operating in totally distinct spheres. And even
this identity or analogy between the life of Nature and of man is not
conceived with such power and passion in Virgil as in Lucretius. But if
Virgil’s language is inferior to that of his predecessor not only in vivid
creative power, but in clearness and idiomatic purity, it is much superior
in the uniform level of poetical excellence which it maintains. In this
respect Virgil compares favourably with some of the greatest masters of
style among English poets, for example with Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Byron. There is nothing redundant or monotonous in the style of the
Georgics, nothing trivial or mean; while always rich and pregnant with
suggestion, it is never overstrained or overloaded; while always elevated
to the pitch of poetry, it never seems to soar too far above the familiar
aspects of the world. Nothing shows the perfect sanity of Virgil’s genius
more clearly than his entire exemption from the besetting sin of our own
didactic poetasters of last century—a sin from which even Wordsworth
himself is not altogether free—that of calling common things by pompous
names, and of dignifying trifles by applying heroic phrases to them. If he
seems sometimes to deviate from this habitual temperance of manner in the
account of his bee communities, he does so purposely, to convey through
this gentle vein of irony something of that pensive meditativeness of
spirit which is produced in him by reflection on the transitory passions,
joys, and vicissitudes of our mortal life.

The general superiority of Virgil’s art to that of Lucretius is equally
apparent in his rhythm. The powerful movement of spirit which Lucretius
feels in the presence of the sublimer spectacle of Nature and of the more
solemn things of human life does indeed produce isolated effects of
majestic speech and sonorously rhythmical cadence, swelling above the
deep, strong, monotonous flow of his ordinary verse, which neither Virgil
nor any other poet has surpassed. But in variety, equable smoothness and
grandeur, in that tempered harmony of sound which never disappoints and
never burdens the ear, it may be doubted whether the musical art of any
poet has maintained such a uniform level of excellence as that maintained
in the Georgics. Virgil produces more varied effects than Lucretius can do
even in his more finished passages, while at the same time binding himself
by stricter laws in the composition of his verse. This he does by the
greater variety and greater frequency of his pauses, by uniformly placing
the words of strength and emphasis in the strong positions of the line,
and by a skilful regulation of the succession of long and short, of
accentuated and unaccentuated syllables, and of lines of a more rapid or
slower movement. The result is that the feeling of his rhythm becomes a
main element in the realisation of his meaning.

The principal resources by which Virgil, in the didactic exposition of his
subject, avoids that monotony of effect which was likely to arise from the
strong Roman concentration of purpose with which his work was executed,
and, without deviating from the true perception of facts, is able to
invest a somewhat narrow range of interests with charm and dignity,—

angustis hunc addere rebus honorem,—

are thus seen to be, first his feeling of Nature, of man’s relation to it,
of his joy in the results of his toil, and, secondly, the associations of
strange lands, of mythology, of antiquity, and of religious custom. The
instruments by which these resources are made available are the careful
choice and combinations of words and the well-practised melody of his
verse. These resources and instruments have been considered in relation to
and contrast with those employed by Lucretius. There is, moreover, this
difference between the method of the two poets, that Virgil is much more
of a conscious artist, that he seems to go more in search of illustrations
and the means of artistic embellishment, that he endeavours to make for
himself a wreath, ‘undique decerptam;’ while the occasional accessions of
a more powerful poetic interest to the ordinary exposition of Lucretius
arise naturally in the process of his argument, from the habit of his mind
to observe the outward world, the ways of all living things, and the
condition of man in their intimate connexion with the great speculative
ideas of his philosophy. His modes of varying the interest of his subject
and adorning it are thus more simple and homogeneous; they work more in
harmony with the purpose of his poem, so as to produce a pervading unity
of sentiment and impression. The variety of resources used by Virgil
gives, at first sight, a composite character to his art. But there is,
deeper than this apparent composite character, an inner unity of tone and
sentiment pervading the whole work. The source of this unity is the deep
love and pride which he feels in every detail of his subject, from the
great human interests with which these details are associated in his mind.
What these human interests are is brought out prominently in the episodes
of the poem, which still remain to be considered.

The finest poetry in the didactic poems of Lucretius and of Virgil and the
thoughts which give the highest interest to their respective poems are
contained in passages of considerable length, rising out of the general
level or undulations of the poem into elevations which at first sight seem
isolated and unconnected with one another. It may be doubted whether even
the power of thought and style in Lucretius could have secured immortality
to a mere systematic exposition of the Atomic philosophy; nor could the
mere didactic exposition of the precepts of agriculture, though varied by
all the art and resources of Virgil, have gained for the Georgics the
unique place that poem holds in literature. It is in their episodes that
each poet brings out the moral grandeur, and thereby justifies the choice
of his subject. In Lucretius, these passages are introduced sometimes in
the ordinary march of his argument, more often at the beginning or
completion of some important division of it, and are intended both to add
poetical charm to the subject and to show man’s true relation to the
Universe, and the attitude of mind which that relation demands of him. The
object of Virgil in some of his minor and in one or two of his larger
episodes may be merely to relieve the dryness of exposition by some
descriptive or reflective charm. But even these passages will in general
be found to draw attention to the religious, ethical, or national bearing
of his subject.

Some of these passages have been suggested by parallel passages either in
Hesiod or Lucretius. The largest of all the episodes, that with which the
poem concludes, has, for reasons already considered, only a slight and
external relation to the great ideas and interests with which the poem
deals. But the three most important passages, those of most original
invention and profound feeling, viz. those at Book I. 466 to the end of
the Book, Book II. 136 to 177, and also from line 458 to the end, serve
like those great cardinal passages in the Aeneid, in which the action is
projected from a remote legendary past into the actual present, to bring
into light the true central interest of the poem,—the bearing of the whole
subject on the greatness and well-being of the Italian race.

Any of the passages which are not needed for the special practical purpose
of the poem may be regarded as episodical, such, for instance, as that
thoroughly Lucretian passage in Book I. in which the feelings of rooks are
explained on purely physical principles, or that passage of Book IV.
inspired by the teaching of an opposite school, in which the theory of a
divine principle pervading the world—the same theory as that accepted as
his own by Virgil in Aeneid VI.—is enunciated as a probable explanation of
the higher instinct of the bees. And it is characteristic of the
eclecticism of Virgil’s mode of thought, and also of the lingering regret
with which he regards the evanescent fancies of the old mythology, that he
not only combines these tenets of the most materialistic and most
spiritualistic philosophies in the same poem, but that the philosophic or
theosophic solution of Book IV. 219, etc. comes shortly after a passage in
which the same phenomenon is accounted for on the ground of the service
rendered by bees in feeding the infant Jove in the cavern of Mount Dicte.
Another passage of a scientific rather than a philosophic character is
that at Book I. 233, etc., in which the five zones girding the heaven and
the earth are described in language closely translated from Eratosthenes.
Besides the scientific interest which this passage must have had to the
poet’s contemporaries, it serves to draw forth Virgil’s antagonism to the
religious unbelief of Lucretius, in the expression

Munere concessae divom,

and also to imply his dissent from the emphatic denial which Lucretius
gives, at Book I. 1065, to the Stoical belief in the existence of the
Antipodes:—

Illi cum videant solem, nos sidera noctis
Cernere, et alternis nobiscum tempora caeli
Dividere, et noctes parilis agitare diebus(366).

Another passage of a semi-philosophical character is that at Book III.
242–283, in which the Lucretian idea of the all-pervading influence of the
physical emotion of love over all living things in sea, earth, and air,—an
idea in which Lucretius was anticipated by Euripides(367) and by other
earlier Greek poets,—appears in combination with the purely mythological
conception of the direct personal agency of Venus, and with the legend of
‘the mares of Glaucus of Potniae.’

More important than these, as illustrative of the main ideas and feelings
of the poem, but still subsidiary to the greater episodes, are the
following: Book I. 121–159, Book II. 323–345; and in the same class may be
included III. 339–383, and IV. 125–148. The first of these, ‘Pater ipse
colendi,’ etc., is immediately suggested by Hesiod’s account of the Golden
Age; but the greater part of it, the account of the progress of the
various arts of life, is simply a summary of the long account of human
progress at the end of the fifth Book of Lucretius. The idea of the
purpose with which Providence has imposed labour on man is Virgil’s own;
and this thought contributes much of its ethical meaning to the poem. The
passage ‘Ver adeo frondi nemorum,’ etc., in which all the glory of Nature
as she unfolds herself in the exuberant life of an Italian spring is
described in lines of surpassing beauty and tenderness, is thoroughly
Lucretian in feeling, idea, and expression. The charm of climate, of
vegetation, and of life is in complete harmony with the specially Italian
character of the second Book. The digression at Book III. 339, ‘Quid tibi
pastores Libyae,’ containing the elaborate picture of a Scythian winter,
suggested by the winter scene in Hesiod, also serves through the effect of
contrast to heighten the charm of the fresh pastoral life of Italy
described in the lines immediately preceding.

The actual description of winter has been criticised unfavourably, and not
altogether without justice, by one of the most independent and at the same
time most scholarly of English critics(368), who compares it with a
corresponding passage in Thomson. It is inferior in simplicity and direct
force of representation to the corresponding picture in Hesiod. Virgil’s
imagination seems to require that even where the objects or scenes he
describes are taken from books, they should be such that he could verify
them in his own experience. It is this apparent verification, where the
subject is not originally suggested by his own observation, that imparts
the marvellous truthfulness to his art. Such lines as those—

Aeraque dissiliunt volgo—

Stiriaque impexis induruit horrida barbis—(369)

convey a less real impression of winter than the single line—an idealised
generalisation from many actual winters—which ends the description of the
various occupations and field-sports which an Italian winter offers to the
husbandman:—

Cum nix alta iacet, glaciem cum flumina trudunt(370).

Perhaps none of the minor episodes recurs to the mind so often with so
keen a feeling of delight as the passage at IV. 125 to 148, beginning
‘Namque sub Oebaliae,’ etc. Virgil here introduces himself in his own
person, and draws a picture of one whom he had known, and who had
interested him as actually realising that life of labour and of happiness
in the results of his labour, which in the body of the poem is held up as
an abstract ideal. The scene of this vivid reminiscence,—the district

Qua niger umectat flaventia culta Galaesus(371),—

seems to have had peculiar attraction both for Virgil and Horace. It is
there—

umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi—

that Propertius pictures to himself Virgil meditating his Aeneid and still
conning over his earlier Eclogues—

Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus.

It is to ‘that nook of earth’ that Horace looks, if the unkind Fates
forbid his residence at his favourite Tibur, for a resting-place for his
‘age to wear away in.’ But it is not only to the local charm that
attention is drawn, and to the beauty of plant, flower, and fruit, created
by the labour of love which the old Cilician gardener—some survivor
probably from the Eastern wars of Pompey—bestowed on his neglected spot of
ground. Here also the true moral of the poem is pointed, that in the life
of rural industry there is a deep source of happiness altogether
independent of wealth, and which wealth cannot buy:—

Regum aequabat opes animis, seraque revertens
Nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis(372).

A more prominent place is assumed by the two episodes with which the third
and fourth Books close. In the first of these, which extends from line 478
to 566, and which describes a great outbreak of cattle-plague among the
Noric Alps and the district round the Timavus,—a locality which seems to
have had a special attraction to Virgil’s imagination(373),—he aims at
painting a rival picture to that of the plague at Athens with which the
poem of Lucretius ends. It would be unfair to compare the unfinished piece
of the older poet, overcrowded as it is with detail and technical
phraseology, with an elaborate specimen of Virgil’s descriptive power,
exercised on a kind of subject in which the speculative genius of the one
poet gave him no advantage over the careful and truthful art of the other.
Yet, as has been already pointed out(374), there are here and there
strokes of imaginative power in the larger sketch, and marks of insight
into human nobleness, roughly indeed expressed, as at 1243–6—

Qui fuerant autem praesto, contagibus ibant
Atque labore, pudor quem tum cogebat obire
Blandaque lassorum vox mixta voce querellae.
Optimus hoc leti genus ergo quisque subibat(375)—

in which the sincerity of the older master still asserts itself. There is
great beauty however of pastoral scene, of pathos and human sympathy, of
ethical contrast between the simple wants of the lower animals and the
artificial luxury of human life, in Virgil’s description. In the lines
520–522 one of those scenes in which he most delighted is brought before
the imagination:—

Non umbrae altorum nemorum, non mollia possunt
Prata movere animum, non qui per saxa volutus
Purior electro campum petit amnis(376).

The last element in the picture suggests at once the ‘Saxosas inter
decurrunt flumina valles’ of the Eclogues, and the lines earlier in the
book—

Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum
Flumina.

And the whole feeling of the passage is in harmony with that in Lucretius,
ii. 361:—

Nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes
Fluminaque illa queunt summis labentia ripis
Oblectare animum, sumptamque avertere curam(377).

And in thorough harmony both with the pathos and the ethical feeling in
Lucretius are the following:—

it tristis arator,
Maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum(378):

and

Quid labor aut benefacta iuvant? quid vomere terras
Invertisse gravis? atqui non Massica Bacchi
Munera, non illis epulae nocuere repostae:
Frondibus et victu pascuntur simplicis herbae,
Pocula sunt fontes liquidi atque exercita cursu
Flumina, nec somnos abrumpit cura salubris(379).

If the space assigned to the different episodes is to be regarded as the
measure of their importance, the long episode at the end of the fourth
Book, from line 315 to 558, would have to be regarded as of nearly equal
value to all the others put together. And yet, notwithstanding the
metrical beauty of the passage, it must be difficult for any one who is
penetrated by the pervading sentiment of the Georgics to reach this point
in the poem without a strong feeling of regret that the jealousy of
Augustus had interfered with its original conclusion. As a Greek fable,
composed after some Alexandrine model, mainly concerned with the fortunes
of Orpheus and Eurydice,—for the shepherd Aristaeus, the

cultor nemorum cui pinguia Ceae
Ter centum nivei tondent dumeta iuvenci(380),

really plays altogether a secondary part in the episode,—it has little to
do with rural life, and nothing at all to do with Italy. Its professed
object is to give a fabulous explanation of an impossible phenomenon,
though one apparently accepted both by Mago and Democritus. To enrich this
episode with a beauty not its own, Virgil has robbed his Aeneid—on the
composition of which he must have been well advanced when he was called
on, after the death of Gallus in 26 B.C., to provide a substitute for the
passage written in his honour—of some beautiful lines which are more in
keeping with the larger representation and profounder feeling of the epic
poem, than with the transient interest attaching to this recast of a
well-known story. Even regarded simply as an epyllion or epic idyl, it may
be questioned whether the Pastor Aristaeus is of an interest equal to that
of the epic idyl of Catullus, ‘Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus,’
etc. There is this coincidence between the poems, that they each contain
one story or idyllic representation within another, and in each case it is
to the secondary representation that the most pathetic and passionate
interest belongs.

Opinions may differ as to whether the passion of Ariadne or the sorrow of
Orpheus is represented with most skill. There seems this difference
between the two, that in the one we feel we are reading a fable, that the
situation is altogether remote from experience, that it is one suited for
a picture or a poem of fancy. The beautiful picture of Ariadne, on the
other hand, appears like one drawn from the life, and her passionate
complaint is like that of a living woman. But still more undoubted is the
superiority of Catullus in pictorial or statuesque reproduction seen in
that part of his poem in which the original subject, the marriage of
Peleus and Thetis, is described. Catullus, above all other Latin poets,
except perhaps Ovid, can bring a picture from human life or from outward
nature before the inward eye; and this power is, much more than Virgil’s
power of suggesting deep and delicate shades of feeling, appropriate to
the more limited compass of the idyl. It is no disparagement to Virgil to
say that in this kind of art he is inferior to Catullus. Catullus, though
a true Italian in temperament, largely endowed with and freely using the
biting raillery—‘Italum acetum’—which ancient writers ascribe to the race,
had in his genius, more than any Roman writer, the disinterested delight
in art, irrespective of any personal associations, characteristic of the
Greek imagination. Virgil’s art, on the other hand, produces its deepest
impressions only when his heart is moved. Even in the Eclogues this is for
the most part true. Something must touch his personal sympathies, his
moral or religious nature, or his national feeling, before he is roused to
his highest creative effort.

In the three cardinal passages which remain to be considered, in the
composition of which the deeper elements of Virgil’s nature were
powerfully moved, the impression which the changing state of the national
fortunes produced upon him is vividly stamped. The first of these (i. 464
to the end) was written in the years of uncertainty and alarm preceding
the outbreak of the last of the great Civil Wars. The unsettlement all
over the Empire, from its eastern boundary to its furthest limits in
Europe,—the agitation and impetuous sweep of the river before plunging
into the abyss,—is described and symbolised in the concluding lines of the
Book:—

Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum;
Vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
Arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe:
Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
Addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens
Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas(381).

This state of alarm is shown to be connected with the great national crime
which Rome was still atoning,—the murder of Julius Caesar. The episode
arises immediately out of the enumeration of the signs of the weather,
which, from their importance to the husbandman, are treated of at
considerable length in the body of the poem. As the sun is the surest
index of change in the physical, so is he said to be in the political
atmosphere. The eclipse which occurred soon after the murder of Caesar is
regarded as a sign of compassion for his fate and of abhorrence of the
crime. Then follows an enumeration of other omens which accompanied or
preceded that event,—some of them violations of natural law, such as those
which occur in the narrative of Livy, when any great disaster was
impending over the Roman arms,—

pecudesque locutae,
Infandum—
Et maestum inlacrimat templis ebur, aeraque sudant(382):—

others arising out of a great sympathetic movement among the spirits of
the dead,—

Vox quoque per lucos volgo exaudita silentis
Ingens, et simulacra modis pallentia miris
Visa sub obscurum noctis(383);

others showing themselves in ominous appearances of the sacrifices, or in
strange disturbance of the familiar ways of bird and beast,—

Obscenaeque canes importunaeque volucres
Signa dabant—
Et altae
Per noctem resonare lupis ululantibus urbes(384);

others manifesting themselves through great commotion in the kingdom of
Nature,—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, great floods,—

‘The noise of battle hurtling in the air,’

lightnings in a clear sky, and the blaze of comets portending doom. These
all succeed one another in Virgil’s verse according to no principle of
logical connexion, but as they might be successively announced to the
awe-struck citizens of Rome. The whole passage is pervaded by that strong
sense of awe before an invisible Power—the ‘religio dira’—by which the
Roman imagination was possessed in times of great national calamity. The
issue of all these portents appeared in the second great battle in which
Roman blood fattened the Macedonian plains. Then by a fine touch of
imagination, and looking far forward into the future, the poet reminds us
of the contrast, indicated in other passages of the poem, between the
peaceful and beneficent industry of the husbandman and the cruel
devastation of war:—

Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis
Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,
Exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila,
Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis,
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris(385).

Next follows the prayer to the national gods of Italy to preserve the life
of him who could alone raise the world out of the sin and ruin into which
it had fallen, and alone restore their ancient glory to the fields, which
now lay waste from the want of men to till them:—

Non ullus aratro
Dignus honos, squalent abductis arva colonis,
Et curvae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem(386).

In the second of the great episodes this sorrow for the past and
foreboding for the future has entirely cleared away. The feeling now
expressed is one of pride and exultation in Italy, as a land of rich crops
and fruits, of vines and olives, a land famous for its herds and flocks
and breed of horses, for its genial climate, for the beauty of the seas
washing its coasts, for its great lakes and rivers, its ancient cities and
other mighty works of men; famous too for its hardy, energetic, and
warlike races,—

Haec genus acre virum Marsos pubemque Sabellam,
Adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos
Extulit(387),—

for its great men and families who had fought for it in old times, and for
one greater still, who was then in the furthest East defending Rome
against her enemies,—

Haec Decios magnosque Camillos,
Scipiadas duros bello, et te, maxime Caesar,
Qui nunc extremis Asiae iam victor in oris
Imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum(388).

This passage, introduced as a counter-picture to the description of the
rank luxuriance of Nature in the vast forests and jungles of the East,
concentrates in itself the deepest meaning and inspiration of the poem.
The glory of Italy is declared to be the motive for the revival of this
ancient theme—

_Tibi_ res antiquae laudis et artis
Ingredior(389).

As Varro represents his speakers as looking on the great picture of Italy
in the Temple of Tellus while they discuss the various ways of tilling and
improving the soil, so Virgil in the midst of his didactic precepts holds
up this ideal picture of the land to the love and admiration of his
countrymen. By a few powerful strokes he combines the characteristic
features and the great memories of Italian towns in lines which recur to
every traveller as he passes through Italy,—

Adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem,
Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros(390).

No expression of patriotic sentiment in any language is more pure and
noble than this. It is a tribute of just pride and affection to the land
which, from its beauty, its history, its great services to man, is felt to
be worthy of the deep devotion with which Virgil commends it to the heart
and imagination of the world.

In the last of the great episodes which remains to be considered, all the
higher thoughts and feelings by which beauty, dignity, and moral grandeur
are given to the subject are found concurring; and the presence of
Lucretius is again felt as a pervading influence, though modified by
Virgil’s own deepest convictions and sympathies. The charm of peaceful
contemplation, of Nature in her serenest aspect and harmony with the human
soul, of an ethical idea based on religious belief and national
traditions, of a life of pure and tranquil happiness, remote from the
clash of arms and the pride and passions of the world, is made present to
us in a strain of continuous and modulated music, which neither Virgil
himself nor any other poet has surpassed. Virgil creates a new ideal of
happiness for the contemplation of his countrymen by combining the old
realistic delight in the husbandman’s life with the imaginative longing
for the peace and innocence of a Saturnian Age, and with that new delight
in the living beauty of the world and in the charm of ancient memories
which it was his especial office to communicate. This ideal is contrasted,
as is the older poet’s ideal of ‘plain living and high thinking,’ with the
pomp and magnificence of city life,—

Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis
Mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam—

Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
Lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris(391),—

and, as in the older poet also, with the distractions, the restless
passions, and the crimes of ambition. Virgil, as in other passages,
compresses into a few lines the thought which Lucretius with simpler art
follows through all its detail of concrete reality. Thus the

Gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum(392)

of Virgil is intended to recall and be explained by the more fully
developed representation of the old cruelties of the times of Marius and
Sulla, contained in the lines—

Sanguine civili rem conflant divitiasque
Conduplicant avidi, caedem caede accumulantes;
Crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris;
Et consanguineum mensas odere timentque(393).

In their protest against the world both poets are entirely at one. But the
ideal of Virgil’s imagination, on its positive side, is more on the
ordinary human level than that of lonely contemplation in accordance with
which Lucretius lived and wrote. The Virgilian ideal, like that of
Lucretius, recognised a heart at peace and independent of Fortune as a
greater source of happiness than any external good. But this peace the one
poet sought for in a superiority to the common beliefs of men; the other
rather in a more trusting acceptance of them. Some other elements in
Virgil’s ideal Lucretius too would have ranked among the supreme sources
of human happiness. The lines

Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati,
Casta pudicitiam servat domus(394),

beautiful as the thought and picture is, are not more true to human
feeling, scarcely touch the heart and imagination so vividly, as the lines
which suggested them—

Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor
Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere(395).

Other elements in Virgil’s ideal Lucretius would have sympathised with, as
he did with all natural human pleasure; but the elements of social
kindliness expressed in the lines—

Ipse dies agitat festos, etc.

could mix only as an occasional source of refreshment with his lonely
contemplation. The great difference between the two men is that Virgil’s
ordinary feelings and beliefs are in unison with the common ways of life;
he has a more active sympathy with the toils and pleasures of simple men;
and, above all, he regards it as the highest good for man, not to secure
peace of mind for himself, but to be useful in supporting others, in
contributing to the well-being of his country, of his family, even of the
animals associated with his toil:—

hinc patriam parvosque Penates
Sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos(396).

This ideal Virgil seems to regard as one that might be attained by man, if
he only could be taught how to appreciate it(397); nay, that has been
attained by him in happier times when the land was cultivated by free men,
each holding his own plot of ground. This was the life of the old Italian
yeomen, the life by which Etruria waxed strong and brave, the life to
which Rome herself owed the beginning of her greatness(398). It is the
life which the national imagination, in its peaceful mood, and yearning to
return into the ways of innocence and piety, discerned in that distant
Golden Age, when all men lived in contentment and abundance under the rule
of the old god, from whom the land received the well-loved name ‘Saturnia
tellus(399).’

Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,
Hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit
Scilicet, et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,
Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.
Ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante
Impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis,
Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat;
Necdum etiam audierant inflari classica, necdum
Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses(400).

CHAPTER VII.

THE GEORGICS AS THE REPRESENTATIVE POEM OF ITALY.

The consideration of the motives which influenced Virgil to undertake the
composition of the Georgics, of the form of art adopted by him, of the
national interest attaching to his subject, of the materials used by him
and the sources from which he derived them, of the author who most
influenced him in speculative idea and in the general manner of treating
his subject, leads to the conclusion that, in its essential
characteristics, the poem is a genuine work of Italian art and
inspiration. If the original motive influencing him was the ambition to
treat of rural life in the serious spirit of Hesiod, as he had done in the
lighter vein of Theocritus, that motive was soon lost in the strong
impulse to invest with charm and dignity the kind of life in which the
Italian mind placed its ideal of worth and happiness. By thus identifying
himself with a great national object Virgil raised himself to a higher
level of art than that attained by poets whose interests are purely
personal and literary.

Next to satire, there was no form of poetry which had more of a Roman
character than didactic poetry. By becoming a province of Roman art, this
form acquired all its dignity and capacity of greatness. And though the
Georgics, being a work of Italian culture as well as of Italian
inspiration, could not escape some relation, not in form only but in
materials and mode of expression, to Greek originals, there is no great
work of Latin genius, except the Satires and Epistles of Horace, in which
the debt thus incurred is so small. And not only is the debt small in
quantity, but it is incurred to authors much inferior to Virgil in
creative power and poetical feeling. In using borrowed materials he makes
the mind of Greece tributary to his own national design. But his most
valuable materials are derived either from personal observation, or from
Latin authors who had put on record the results of their observation: and
his largest debt, in imaginative feeling and conception, is incurred not
to any Greek author, but to the most powerful and original of Roman poets
and thinkers. The speculative idea, which gives something of philosophical
consistency to the poem, was, if not one of pure Italian conception, yet
made more truly real and vital through the experience of the force and
endurance exercised by the strong men of Italy in subduing the earth to
their will, and in constructing their great material works (‘operum
laborem’), such as their roads, baths, aqueducts, harbours, encampments,
and great draining works, by which they provided the comforts of life
(‘commoda vitae’) and defended themselves against their enemies or the
maligner influence of the elements.

The language of Virgil himself and the testimony of ancient commentators
confirm the impression, that the object of which he was most distinctly
conscious in the composition of the poem was the ‘glorification of
Italy,’—of the land itself in its fertility and beauty, and of the life
most congenial to Italian sentiment. Even to a greater extent than he may
have intended, Virgil, through the national mould in which his thought was
cast and the national colour of his sympathies, fulfils this
representative office. Where the poem seems to a modern reader to fail in
human interest, the interest which it had for the poet’s countrymen is
revived by dwelling in thought on this representative character. When the
associations appealed to are of Greek rather than of Italian origin, we
have to remember that the poem was addressed to a highly educated class of
readers, at the time when the Roman mind had been most enlarged and
enriched, but had not yet been satiated by Greek studies. Yet this kind of
appeal is quite subsidiary to that made to the native sensibilities of the
Romans. It is to commend to their love and admiration a purely Italian
ideal that Virgil employs the resources of Greek learning, as well as all
the strength and delicacy of his own genius.

A rapid review of the tastes, sympathies, and affections on the part of
his readers to which Virgil appeals, both in the body of his poem and in
its finer episodes, will show that they all contribute to produce this
representative character. Where some of the details of the poem seem to
fail in poetic interest, they still have the interest of being
characteristic of the Italian mind.

1. The poem professes to impart practical instruction on the best method
of cultivating the land, of propagating trees, of breeding cattle, horses,
etc., of profiting by the industry of bees:—

Quare agite, O, proprios generatim discite cultus,
Agricolae(401).

This is the obvious and ostensible purpose of the poem; and the truth and
accuracy of the instruction were important elements in the estimate which
the countrymen of the poet formed of its value. Columella and Pliny, while
controverting him on a few minor points(402), attest his practical
knowledge as an agriculturist and a naturalist. Similar testimony is given
by some modern writers competent to speak with authority on these
subjects(403). Neither ancient nor modern critics regard him as free from
liability to mistake, and the tendency of his mind to believe in
marvellous deviations from natural law exposed him to errors into which
less imaginative writers were not likely to fall; but the substantial
accuracy of his observations and acquired knowledge seems to be attested
both by positive and negative evidence. It is not a question as to whether
the operations described in Virgil satisfy the requirements of skilled or
even of unskilled farming in the present day, or whether he does not fall
into mistakes in natural history which a modern reader, with no scientific
knowledge of the subject, may easily detect; but whether he has adequately
represented the methods of ancient Italian agriculture, and whether he is
a trustworthy exponent of the scientific beliefs of his age, and an
accurate observer of those phenomena which were as accessible to an
ancient as to a modern enquirer. On these points he satisfied the best
critics among his countrymen. The general truth of his observation is
further attested by the survival in Southern Europe, into comparatively
recent times, of some of the processes described by him, which seem most
remote from our ordinary experience(404). It is attested also by the
accuracy of his description of the unchanging phenomena of Nature, and of
the habits of animals.

A modern reader may think the value of his poetry little, if at all
enhanced, by the rank which he may claim among the ‘scriptores rei
rusticae.’ It may seem matter for regret that so much of the faculty,
which should have given permanent delight to the world, should have been
employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the
office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it
satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their
lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct
from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to
the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the
great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in
this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock
of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the
preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results
have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and
intellectual feeling,—whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or
philosophic dialogue,—may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold
over the imagination than it originally possessed(405). In the didactic
poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses
permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,—in so far
as we recognise the passion or affection by which the poet was stirred in
acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as
the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his
argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,—as an
Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder,—

Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto(406),—

writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a
fascination unintelligible to us,—brightens with the gleam of human and
poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of
Italian husbandry. The position of a teacher assumed by him,—a position
which no great Greek or English poet could gracefully maintain,—impresses
us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober
practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of
teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from
the Greek genius:—

Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae
Crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido(407).

It adds to our sense of Virgil’s thoroughness as an artist to know that he
faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his
undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical,
unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place
addressed.

2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the
frequent illustrations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much
less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet
they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of
the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the
past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are
reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,—a
feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes,
Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms
had made the products of the whole world—the ‘saffron dye of Tmolus,’ the
‘ivory of India,’ the ‘spices of Arabia,’ the ‘iron of the Chalybians,’
the ‘medicinal drugs of Pontus,’ the ‘brood-mares of Epirus(408)’—part of
the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans
and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and
that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he
imparts(409). The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the
constellations, on the other hand, help to remind us that the art and
science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had
now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of
intellectual culture.

3. It was seen how assiduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates
the necessity and duty of labour. And though the ‘glorification of labour’
was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main
current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the
mind of Virgil this assiduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so
congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had
a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of
the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of
intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell
on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and
divine approval,—and this is another point of affinity between him and
Virgil,—but the line in which he claims consideration for work,

Ἔργον δ’ οὐδὲν ὄνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος(410),

is apologetic in tone; and, moreover, Hesiod can hardly be regarded as a
typical Greek. There seems to be no word in the Greek language equivalent
to the grave Roman word ‘industria.’ Perhaps it is owing to the disesteem
in which labour was held by Greek writers that industry is scarcely ranked
among virtues, nor idleness among vices, even by modern moralists. When
long after the time of Homer a new poet arose in Greece, appealing to a
great popular sentiment, it was in their passion for the great public
games that he found the point of contact with the hearts of his
countrymen. The Romans, on the other hand, show a great capacity for
labour in every field of exertion,—in war and the government of men, in
law and literature, in business transactions, in the construction of vast
works of utility, and in cultivating the land. And of these, next to war
and government, the last was most congenial to the national mind. The land
was to the Romans the chief field of their industry and the original
source of their wealth, as the sea was the scene of occupation and
adventure to the Greeks, and, through the outlet which it gave to the
results of their artistic ingenuity, the great source of their prosperity.
The Odyssey is a poem inspired, in a great degree, by the impulse which
first sent the Greek nation forth on its career of maritime and colonising
enterprise. The Georgics are inspired by that impulse which first started
the Latin race on its career of conquest, and which continued to animate
the struggle with the reluctant forces of Nature, as it had animated the
struggle with the other races of Italy for the possession of the soil.

4. Again, we find that the poem is pervaded by the poetical feeling of
Nature. And Virgil, more than any other poet, presents that aspect of
Nature in which the outward world appeared to the educated Italian mind.
The personality and individual life attributed to natural objects, such as
trees, rivers, winds, etc., belongs to a stage of conception between the
Greek anthropomorphism and the recognition by the imagination of universal
law and interdependence of phenomena. Modern poets consciously personify
natural objects with more boldness and varied sympathy than Virgil. His
conception of the life and personal attributes of natural objects appears
to be less a conscious creative effort of the imagination, than an
unconscious impression from outward things; an impression produced in a
state of passive contemplation, rather than of active adventure; and an
impression produced by qualities of a serene and tender beauty, rather
than by those of a bolder or sublimer aspect. In all these respects Virgil
represents a stage in the culture of the imagination between that of the
early Greek poets and artists, and that of the most imaginative poets and
painters of modern times. The familiar beauty of the outward world, as it
was felt by a Roman or Italian, was expressed in the Latin word ‘amoenum.’
Thus Horace describes his retreat among the Sabine hills, as not only dear
to him personally, but as beautiful in itself:—

Hae latebrae dulces, etiam, si credis, amoenae(411).

And it is to the attributes summed up in that word that Virgil imparts the
ideal life of the imagination.

But not only is the feeling of Nature in the Georgics characteristic of
the highest culture of the Italian mind, but the spectacle of Nature,—

‘The outward shows of sky and earth’

brought before us,—is that which still delights the eye and moves the
imagination in the various districts of Italy. The description of Spring
at Georg. ii. 323–345,

Ver adeo frondi nemorum, ...
... exciperet caeli indulgentia terras,

is one of which (though we can always feel its beauty) we cannot often
verify the accuracy in our more northern latitudes. It is to an Italian
spring, more than to any season in any other European country, that the
words of the third Eclogue ‘nunc formosissimus annus,’ are applicable. The
varied pastoral beauty of the long summer day described at Georg. iii.
323–338,—from the early dawn when the fields are fresh beneath the
morning-star; through the gathering warmth of the later hours, when the
groves are loud with the chirping of the grasshoppers and the herds
collect around the deep water-pools; through the burning heat of midday,
from which the shade of some huge oak or some grove of dark ilexes affords
a shelter; till the coolness of evening tempers the air, and the moon
renews with dew the dry forest-glades,—is a beauty quite distinct from the
charm of freedom and solitude,—yet not too remote from human
neighbourhood,—of the changing aspects of the sky, and of the picturesque
environment of hill, river, and moorland, which abides in the pastoral
regions of our own and other northern lands. The ‘sweet interchange of
hill and valley(412),’ mountain range and rich cultivated land, which
northern and central Italy exhibits, must have made such scenes as that
described at ii. 186–188,

Qualem saepe cava montis convalle solemus
Despicere(413), etc.,

and again the opening scene of the poem, at i. 43,

Vere novo gelidus canis cum montibus umor
Liquitur, et Zephyro putris se glaeba resolvit(414),

familiar to Roman readers. And while the ‘caeli indulgentia’
characteristic of the Italian climate is felt as a pervading genial
presence through the various books of the poem, the sudden and violent
vicissitudes to which that climate is especially liable form part of the
varied and impressive spectacle presented to us. The passage i. 316–321,

Saepe ego cum flavis ... stipulasque volantis,

records a calamity to which the labours of the Italian husbandman were
peculiarly exposed. In the description of the storm of rain, immediately
following, the words ‘collectae ex alto nubes’ remind us, like the
description of a similar storm in Lucretius (vi. 256–261), that Virgil, as
Lucretius may have done, must often have watched such a tempest gathering
over the sea that washes the Campanian shores. The inundation of the Po is
described among the omens accompanying the death of Caesar, in lines which
may have been suggested by some scene actually witnessed by the poet, and
which with vivid exactness represent for all times the destructive forces
put forth by the great river that drains the vast mountain-ranges of
Northern Italy:—

Proluit insano contorquens vertice silvas
Fluviorum rex Eridanus, camposque per omnes
Cum stabulis armenta tulit(415).

And while the general representation of Nature, in the freshness or serene
glory of her beauty and in her destructive energy, is true to that aspect
which she presents in Italian scenery, the characteristic features and
products of particular localities in the various regions of Italy are
recalled to memory with truthful effect. The love of Nature in Lucretius
appears apart from local associations. In Horace this feeling seems to
link itself to places dear to him from the memories of childhood, or from
the personal experience of later years. In Virgil the feeling is both
general as in Lucretius, and combined with attachment to or interest in
particular places as in Horace. But Virgil is able to feel enthusiasm not
only for places dear to him through personal association, but for all
which appeal to his sentiment of national pride. As was seen in the last
chapter, the episode, which perhaps more than any other brings out the
inspiring thought of the poem, is devoted to a celebration of the varied
beauties of the land; and the names of Clitumnus, of Larius, and Benacus
are still dearer to the world because they are for ever intermingled with
‘the rich Virgilian rustic measure(416).’ In the body of the poem also we
find many local references to the northern, central, and southern regions
of Italy. The light bark, hollowed out of the alder, is launched on the
rapid flood of the Po; the starwort, out of which wreaths are made to
adorn the altars of the gods, is gathered by shepherds by the winding
banks of the Mella (a river in Northern Italy mentioned also by Catullus);
the meadow-land which unfortunate Mantua lost is adduced as a type of the
best kind of pasture, and the land in the neighbourhood of Capua and the
region skirting Mount Vesuvius as that most suitable for corn-crops. We
read also of the rose-beds of Paestum,—of the olives clothing the sides of
the Samnian Taburnus,—of the woodland pastures of Sila,—of those by the
banks of the Silarus, on Alburnus green with ilexes, and by the dry
torrent-bed of the Tanager,—and of the yellow cornfields through which the
dark Galaesus flows. The Aeneid affords further testimony of the interest
which Virgil awakens in the region which forms the distant environment of
Rome. But the sentiment of the Georgics is a sentiment of peace inspired
by the land, quite different from that inspired by the Imperial City, and
from the memories of war and conquest with which the neighbourhood of Rome
is associated. And though the aspect which Nature generally presents in
the poem is that of her nobler mood, yet that air of indolent repose which
characterises her presence in the Eclogues is not altogether absent from
the severer poem. The sense of rest after toil—‘molles sub arbore
somni,’—the quiet contemplation of wide and peaceful landscapes,—‘latis
otia fundis,’—relieve the strain of strenuous labour which is enforced as
the indispensable condition of realising the glory of the land.

5. The religious and ethical thought of the poem is also in accordance
with what was happiest and best in the old Italian faith and life. The
poetical belief in many protecting agencies—

Dique deaeque omnes studium quibus arva tueri(417)—

watching over the labours of the husbandman, and present at his simple
festival and ceremonies, is in accordance with the genial character of the
rustic Paganism of Italy and with the attributes of the great gods of the
land, Faunus and Saturnus. Human life appeared to Hesiod as well as to
Virgil to be in immediate dependence on the gods. But the graver aspect of
Virgil’s faith is purer and happier than that of Hesiod; as the trust in a
just and beneficent father is purer and happier than the fear of a jealous
task-master. But on the other hand, the faith of Virgil is less noble than
that of Aeschylus and of Sophocles. It is more of a passive yielding to
the longing of the human heart and to the impulses of an aesthetic
emotion, than that union of natural piety with insight into the mystery of
life which no great poets, Pagan or Christian (unless it may be Dante),
exhibit in equal measure with the two great Athenian dramatists. In the
religious spirit of Virgil, which accepts and does not question, which
finds its resource in prayer rather than in reverent contemplation and
searching out of the ways of God, we may recognise a true note of his
nationality,—a submissive attitude in presence of the Invisible Power,
derived from the race whose custom it was to veil the head in sacrifice
and in approaching the images of their gods(418).

6. Equally true to the national character is the ethical ideal upheld in
the Georgics. The negative elements in that ideal were seen to be
exemption from the violent passions and pleasures of the world. And in
these negative elements the ideal of the Georgics coincides with that of
Lucretius. But, on the positive side, Virgil’s ideal implies the active
performance of duties to the family and to the State. One has only to
remember the low esteem in which women were held and the indifference to
family ties in the palmiest days of Athenian civilisation, or to recall
the ideal State of Plato’s imagination, to perceive how true to Italian,
and how remote from Greek sentiment, are the pictures presented in such
passages as these—

Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati;
Casta pudicitiam servat domus—

and this—

Interea longum cantu solata laborem
Arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas(419).

Friendship among men, and even the social friendliness which makes life
more pleasant and manners more humane, were ranked among the virtues by
Greek philosophy; and the first is treated by Aristotle, not only as a
single virtue, but as the condition under which all virtue can best be
realised: but natural affection is regarded as a mere instinct, and the
duties of family life do not fall under any of those conditions with which
ethical philosophy concerns itself. On the other hand, the legendary
history of the early Republic, and many great examples, in the midst of
the corruption of the later Republic and of the Empire, prove that the
ideal of domestic virtue and affection among the Romans was no mere
passing fancy or dream of an age of primitive innocence, but was in
harmony with the national conscience throughout the whole course of their
history.

In devotion to the good of the State no superiority can be claimed for the
Romans over the Athenians of the times of Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and
Pericles. And while each people, in its best days, was equally ready to
serve the Republic in war and by the performance of public duties, and
while the Roman perhaps more than the Athenian regarded the labour of his
hands as a service due from him(420), the Athenian freely gave the higher
energy of his genius to make the life of his fellow-citizens brighter and
nobler. And it is the peculiar glory of the Athenians of the fifth century
B.C.,—the glory claimed for them in one of the speeches attributed to
their great Statesman by their great Historian,—that they combined this
devotion to the common good with a high development of all personal
excellence. But in Athens this union of national and individual energy and
virtue was of very brief duration. On the other hand, the lasting
greatness of the Roman Commonwealth was purchased by the sacrifice of the
energies and accomplishments which add to the grace and enjoyment of
individual existence. The greatness and permanence of the race, not the
varied development of the individual, was the object aimed at and attained
in the vigorous prime of the Roman Republic(421).

If this aspect of national life is not directly brought before us by
Virgil in the Georgics, it is brought into strong light in the
representation of his mimic commonwealth—the

Mores et studia et populos et proelia(422)

of the community of bees. It scarcely needs the reminder of

ipsae regem parvosque _Quirites_
Sufficiunt(423)

to convince us that, in this representation of an industrious and warlike
community, earnest in labour from the love of the objects on which it was
bestowed and from pride in its results—

Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis(424),—

resolute and unconquerable in battle, sacrificing life rather than
abandoning the post of duty, inspired with more than Oriental devotion to
their head, Virgil was teaching a lesson applicable to the Roman
Commonwealth under its new government. While labour is shown to be a
condition of individual happiness, or at least contentment, it is not in
individual happiness, but in the permanent greatness of the community that
its ultimate recompense is to be sought. Though the individual life may be
short and meagre in its attractions, and generation after generation may
spend itself in an unceasing round of toil,

At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos
Stat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum(425).

The training and discipline for the attainment of these virtues are to be
sought in plain and frugal living, in hardy pastime as well as hardy
industry(426), in obedience to parents and reverent worship of the gods—

Illic saltus et lustra ferarum,
Et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus,
Sacra deum sanctique patres(427),—

and in abstinence from the luxurious indulgence, the anxious business, and
the enervating pleasures of a corrupt civilisation(428). While the grace
and beauty of the poem arise out of the feeling of the life of Nature, the
dignity and sanctity with which the subject is invested are due to the
sense of the intimate connexion between the cultivation of the land and
the moral and religious life of the Italian race.

7. The poem may be called a representative work of genius in respect also
of its artistic execution. It is the finest work of Italian art, made
perfect by the long education of Greek studies. More than any work in
Latin literature the Georgics approach to the symmetry of form, the
harmony of proportion, the unity of design and tone, characteristic of the
purest art of Greece. But it is not in any sense a copy formed after any
Greek pattern. It was seen that out of the more rudimentary attempts of
Greek literature in this particular form of poetry Virgil created a new
and nobler type, which never has been, and probably never will be,
improved on. The execution of the poem is characterised by the genial
susceptibility and enthusiasm of the Italian temperament, by the firm
structure of all Roman work and the practical moderation and dignity of
the Roman mind, and by a kind of meditative and pensive grace peculiar to
the poet himself. The thought of the poem is not separable from the
sentiment pervading it. And in this respect there is a marked difference
between the genius of Virgil and of Lucretius. However much the
speculative activity of Lucretius is charged with feeling, yet the thought
stands out, clearly defined, through the atmosphere surrounding it. The
melancholy of Lucretius, though it was the result partly of
disposition,—the reaction perhaps of a strongly passionate
temperament,—and partly of his relation to his age, was yet a state of
mind for which he could assign definite grounds. That of Virgil was
probably also in a great measure the result of temperament; but it seems
to be a mood habitual to one who meditated much inwardly on the misery of
the world, who was moved by compassion for all sights of sorrow or
suffering(429), and was yet unable to shape this sense of ‘the burthen of
the mystery’ into articulate thought. The atmosphere of the poem has
become one with its substance. The fusion of meditation and feeling
derived from the individual genius of the poet imparts a distinctively
original charm to the style of the Georgics.

The style is thus, in a great degree, Virgil’s own, and owes little to the
borrowed beauties of Greek expression. Though the language of the
Alexandrine poets is sometimes reproduced, yet the beauty of those
transferred passages arises from the grace given to them, not from that
borrowed from them. The same may be said of the use sometimes made of the
quaint diction of Hesiod. In one or two striking passages, such as that

Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis, etc.,

Virgil has adopted the language of the Iliad(430); and though it is
impossible to improve on that, yet there is no slavish imitation of it;
only a new picture is painted, recalling, by some vivid touches, a former
piece by the great master. If detraction is to be made from the
originality of expression in the Georgics, the debt due by Virgil was
incurred to his own countryman. In adopting modes of expression from
Lucretius, Virgil brings down the bold creativeness of his original to a
tone more suited to the habitual sobriety of the Italian imagination. He
often fixes into the form of some general thought what appears in
Lucretius as a living movement or individualised action. And this tendency
to abstract rather than concrete representation is in accordance with the
Roman mould of mind. We notice also how much more sparingly he uses such
compound words as ‘navigerum,’ ‘silvifragis,’ etc., by which the earlier
poets endeavoured to force the harder metal of the Latin language into the
flexibility of Greek speech. Virgil felt that these innovations were
unsuited to the genius of the Latin tongue, and endeavoured to enlarge its
capacities by novel constructions and by using old words with a new
application rather than by novel formations of words. But this gain was
perhaps more than compensated by the loss which the language suffered in
idiomatic purity and clearness.

In rhythmical movement the poem exhibits the highest perfection of which
Latin verse is capable. Of Homer’s verse it has been happily said that it
has ‘a tranquil deep strength, reminding us of his own line,

Ἐξ ἀκαλαρρείταο βαθυρρόου ὠκεανοῖο(431).

The movement of Virgil’s verse reminds us rather of his own river—

qui per saxa volutus
Purior electro campum petit(432).

Occasionally we catch the sound of some more rapid rush and impetuous
fall, as in the hurry and agitation and culminating grandeur of these
lines—

Continuo, ventis surgentibus, aut freta ponti
Incipiunt agitata tumescere, et aridus altis
Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe
Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur(433);—

but generally the stream flows on, neither in rapid torrent nor with
abrupt transitions, but ‘with a tranquil deep strength,’ fed by pure and
abounding sources of affection, of contemplation, of moral and religious
feeling, of delight from eye and ear, from memory and old poetic
association.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL.

The distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic
has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. The two kinds of
narrative poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they
are also the products of very different national temperaments and
faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are
richest in literary epics—the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the
English—are those which possess few or no native poems either of the type
realised in the Nibelungen-Lied, the Song of Roland, and poems of that
class, or of the type realised in the Iliad and Odyssey; nor is there, in
connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race,
that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have
their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost
implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of
concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those
which produced the vast historical work of Livy and ‘The Decline and Fall’
of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the _naïveté_, the rapidity of
conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and
people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of
popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece,
that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not
only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of
intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of
imagination in union with a clearness and sanity of judgment, which the
most advanced eras of other literatures scarcely equal. Thus the two great
Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest
degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under
neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the
outward world in ‘the first intention,’—man in the energy and buoyancy of
the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she
makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,—they are at
the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national
mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of
such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and
reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a
predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.

We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the
earlier type of epic poetry is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race
failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient
length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be
given to the question excepting that the Latin race had not sufficient
creative force to produce such a work,—which is simply another way of
stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from
a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They
seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and
family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of
strong human interest(434), which only want the ‘vates sacer’ to be
converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own
traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of
illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to
the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of
these traditions were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and
chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these
ancestral lays—if we may apply that word to them—survived till the time of
Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus(435), though no actual
trace of them appears to have existed even in the age of the elder Cato.
But the influence of these rude germs of poetry—if they exercised any
influence on Latin literature at all—was confined to the structure of
Roman history. An enquiry into the origin and growth of Roman epic poetry
need not concern itself with them.

Neither is it necessary here to go back into the vexed and probably
insoluble question of the genesis of the Homeric poems. That these stand
in most intimate relation with the Virgilian epic is a patent fact; and
the nature of this intimate relation will be examined in some of the
subsequent chapters. But they first began to act on the Roman imagination
and art many centuries after they assumed their present form. The Romans
accepted them as they did the lyrical and dramatic poetry of Greece, and
were absolutely unconcerned with the questions as to their origin which
interest modern curiosity. For the adequate understanding of the form and
substance of the Roman epic as it was shaped by its greatest master, a
competent knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey must be presupposed; but it
is unnecessary in a work on Latin literature to discuss the origin and
character of the epic poetry of the Greeks on the same scale on which
their idyllic and didactic poetry has been discussed in previous chapters.

But just as historical composition, regarded as a branch of art, though
originating in the imitation of Greek models, has assumed in the works of
Livy and Tacitus a distinctively Roman type, in conformity with certain
characteristics of the race and with the weight of new matter which it has
to embody, so, too, the type of epic poetry realised by Virgil has
acquired a distinctive character as a vehicle of Roman sentiment and
material. To appreciate the native, as distinct from the foreign element
in the mould in which Virgil’s representation is cast, it is necessary to
attend to certain instincts and tendencies which were calculated strongly
to affect any form of narrative poetry amongst the Romans, and also to
take a rapid survey of the history of their narrative poetry from the
beginning of their literature to the Augustan Age.

In the first place, the strong national sentiment of Rome was a feeling
which could not fail to be appealed to in any works which aimed at
securing both general and permanent interest. The heroic story of Greece
was indeed able for a time to attract general attention at Rome from the
novelty of the dramatic representations in which it was introduced. But
even Roman tragedy, to judge from the testimony of Cicero and others,
seems to have owed more of its popularity to the grave spirit by which it
was animated and the Roman strength of will exhibited in its personages,
than to the legitimate sources of interest in a drama, viz. the play of
human motives and the vicissitudes of human fortunes. But to sustain the
interest of a long narrative, as distinct from a dramatic poem, it was
necessary to act on some deep and general feeling. Not only did the
hearers require to be thus moved to attention, but the poet himself could
only thus be inspired and sustained in the unfamiliar task of literary
composition. Now, looking to other manifestations of Roman energy, we see
that whatever force was not employed on present necessities, was given,
not as among the Greeks to ideal creation, but to the commemoration of
events of public importance, and to the transmission of the lessons as
well as of the history of the passing time. The connexion between the past
and the future was maintained by monuments of different kinds, by public
inscriptions, written annals, fasts, or festivals recording some momentous
experience in the history of the State. All that we know and can still see
of Roman work suggests the thought of a people who had an instinctive
consciousness of a long destiny; who built, acted, and wrote with a view
to a distant future. A national history was the legitimate expression of
this impulse; but before the language was developed into a form suited for
a continuous work in prose, it was natural that the tendency to realise
the past and hand down the memory of the present should find an outlet for
itself in various forms of narrative poetry.

Again, the Romans had a strong personal feeling of admiration for their
great men. They were animated by that generous passion to which, in modern
times, the term hero-worship has been applied. And corresponding with this
feeling on the part of his countrymen, there was in the object of it a
strong love of glory, a strong passion to perpetuate his name. Through the
whole course of Roman history we recognise this motive acting powerfully
on the men most eminent in war, politics, and literature, and on no one
more powerfully than on the Emperor Augustus. The memory of the great men
of Rome and of their actions was kept alive by monuments, statues, coins,
waxen images preserved in the atrium of the family house, by the poems
sung and speeches delivered among funeral ceremonies, by inscriptions on
tombs (such as that still read on the tomb of Scipio Barbatus), by family
names (such as that of Africanus) derived from great exploits, and, under
the Empire, by the great triumphal arches and columns which still excite
the admiration of travellers. The Roman passion for glory received its
highest gratification in the triumph which celebrated great military
exploits. The culmination of the tendency to glorify actual living men, or
men recently dead, is witnessed in the deification of the Emperors. With
the development of literature we find, as we should expect, this tendency
of the imagination allying itself with poetry, from the time when Ennius
devoted one work to the celebration of Scipio down to the panegyrists of
Augustus, Messala, or Agrippa(436) under the early Empire. A new direction
and a new motive were thus given to narrative poetry—a direction and
motive which had no inconsiderable influence in determining Virgil to the
choice of the subject of the Aeneid.

Another characteristic of the race was likely to impress itself on the
form and execution of their narrative poetry, viz. their love of works of
large compass and massive structure. Vastness of design and solid
workmanship are as distinctive properties of Roman art, as harmony of
proportion and beauty of form are of the works of Greek imagination. To
compose a literary work which should be representative of the genius of
Rome, it was necessary that the author should be not only imbued with
Roman sentiment and ideas, but also endowed with the Roman capacity for
patient and persevering industry. Concentration of purpose on works
conceived and executed on a great scale, with a view both to immediate and
permanent results, was an essentially Roman quality. The Romans built
their aqueducts and baths for the commonest needs of life, and constructed
their roads and encampments, in such a way as to astonish the world after
the lapse of nearly two thousand years. With similar energy and
persistence of purpose they built up their greatest literary works. This
characteristic favoured the growth among them of a type of epic poetry as
distinct from that of Greece as the Coliseum was from the Parthenon.

If Roman epic poetry was not to be a mere imitation of the Greek epic, we
should accordingly expect that it should exhibit some or all of these
characteristics,—that it should seek that source of interest which secures
permanent attention to a long narrative poem in national sentiment; that
it should strive to restore the memory of the past history and traditions
of the State and at the same time to give expression to the ideas of the
present time; that it should magnify the greatness of eminent living men
or of those who had served their country before them; and that it should
be conceived on a large scale, and be executed perhaps with rude, but
certainly with strong and massive workmanship. The first original
narrative poem in Latin literature—the Punic War of Naevius—treated of a
subject of living interest, and at the same time glorified the mythical
past of Rome; and, while rude in design and execution, it was conceived
and executed on a scale of large dimensions. The example was thus given of
a Roman epic based on a legendary foundation, but mainly built out of the
materials of contemporary history. We can imagine that, at the time when
this poem was composed, a more vivid interest would be felt in the
fictitious connexion between Rome and Troy from the fact that it was in
the First Punic War that this connexion appears first to have been
generally recognised. The legend had not as in Virgil’s time the prestige
of two centuries, but it had the force of novelty to recommend it for
poetic purposes. At the same time the great struggle between Rome and
Carthage, on which the attention of the world was fixed at the time when
Naevius wrote, must have given a peculiar meaning to the early relations
between the two imperial States, as they were first represented in his
poem.

The poem of Naevius gave the germinative idea and some of the materials to
the first and fourth Books of the Aeneid; it established also the
principle of combining in one work a remote mythical past with a subject
of strong contemporary interest. At the same time it gave the example,
followed by the Roman national epic, before the time of Virgil, of taking
the main subject of the poem from the sphere of actual history. This
confusion between the provinces of poetry and prose had been avoided by
the instinct of Greek taste. Among the large number of Greek epic writers
from the age of Homer to that of Nonnus, we hear of only one or two who
treated of actual historical events. The general neglect of those poems
which in ancient and modern times have treated of historical events and
characters in the forms of epic poetry shows that the Greek instinct in
this, as in all other questions of art, was unerringly right. The choice
and treatment of such a subject are equally fatal to the truth and
completeness of historical representation and to the ideality and unity of
a work of art. Though the objection does not equally apply to dramatic
art, yet the modern instinct, which selects for that mode of
representation subjects remote from our own times, confirms the judgment
in accordance with which the Athenians fined their tragic poet for
reminding them of a too recent sorrow.

The Roman writers recognised the analogy between epic and historic
narrative,—and the way in which they apprehended the alliance between them
was as injurious to the truthfulness of their history as to the symmetry
of their early poetry,—but they did not before the time of Virgil
recognise the artistic distinction between them. The Roman epic and Roman
history originated in the same feeling and impulse—the sentiment of
national glory, the desire to perpetuate the great actions and the career
of conquest, which were the constituent elements of that glory. The
impulse both of poets and historians was to build up a commemorative
monument; not, as among the Greeks, to present the spectacle of human life
in its most animated, varied, and noble movements. To a Roman historian
and to a Roman poet the character and the fate of individuals derived
their chief interest from their bearing on the glory and fortune of the
State. In the Greek epic, on the other hand, the interest in Achilles and
Hector is much more vivid than that felt in the success of the Greek or
Trojan cause. In Herodotus the interest felt in the most important
historical crisis through which the world has ever passed is inseparably
blended with that felt in a great number of individual men, among the
enemies of Greece, no less than among Greeks themselves. In the History of
Livy we do not expect to find truthful delineation or sagacious analysis
of the characters of the leading men of Rome; still less do we expect to
find impartial and sympathetic delineation of the enemies of Rome; but we
seek in his pages the image of the nation’s life in its onward career of
conquest and internal change, as pride and affection shaped it on the
tables of the national memory. The idea of Rome, as the one object of
supreme interest to gods and men, in the past, present, and future,
imparts the unity of sentiment, tone, and purpose which is characteristic
of the type of Roman epic poetry and of Roman history.

Naevius in selecting for his epic poem the subject of the First Punic War,
and in connecting that war with the events which were supposed to connect
the Roman State immediately with a divine origin and destiny, was the
first Roman who was moved to write by this powerful impulse. But the man
who first gave full expression to the national idea and feeling, who first
made Rome conscious of herself, and who was the true founder of her
literature, was Ennius. The title which he gave to his
epic—Annales—perhaps the most prosaic title ever given to a work of
genius, indicates the character of his work and his mode of treatment. The
inspiration under which it was written is more truly indicated by the
other name—Romais—by which, according to the testimony of an ancient
grammarian(437), it was sometimes known. He took for his subject the whole
career of Rome, from its mythical beginning in the events which followed
the Trojan war onward to the latest events in his own day. The work was
recognised as a great epic poem, and at the same time fulfilled the part
of a contemporary chronicle. It was a true instinct of genius to feel that
the only material suitable for a Roman epic was to be sought in the idea
of the whole national life. That alone could supply the essential source
of epic inspiration, the sympathy between the poet and those to whom his
poem is addressed, by which the epic poet receives from, as well as gives
back to, his audience. But on the other hand, while he has the true poetic
impulse,—the ‘vivida vis’ and the strong conceptions of a poet,—he came
too soon to acquire the tact and delicacy of conception and execution
equally essential to the creation of works destined for immortality. The
subject was too vast to be treated within the compass of a poem, which
demands to be read as a whole, and to be contemplated as one continuous
mental creation. The treatment of a long series of actions in
chronological order is incompatible with artistic effect; the treatment of
contemporary history is incompatible with the ideality of imaginative
representation. The workmanship of the poem, as exhibited in many
fragments, is powerful, but at the same time rude and unequal. Yet Ennius
was a true representative writer. He appealed powerfully to the national
sentiment; he revived the mythical and historic fame of the past; he
perpetuated the memory and interpreted the meaning of his own time; he
enhanced the glory of the great men and the great families of Rome; and he
produced a work of colossal proportions and massive execution. Till his
place was taken by a successor who united the fervour of a national poet
to the perfect workmanship of an artist, he was justly regarded as the
truest representative in literature of Roman character, sentiment, and
ideas.

Other narrative and historical poems were known by the name of ‘Annales;’
one in three Books, written by Accius, the tragic poet; another written by
A. Furius of Antium, which extended to a greater length, as Macrobius (ii.
1. 34(438)) quotes from the tenth and the eleventh Books lines
appropriated by Virgil,—one of many proofs of the manner in which the
genius of Virgil, acting upon great reading, absorbed the thoughts and
diction of his predecessors. The most important of the historical poems
which continued the mistake of treating recent history in the form of a
metrical chronicle appears to have been the Istrian War of Hostius, the
grandfather of the Cynthia of Propertius, and alluded to by him in the
line,

Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo.

This poem was written early in the first century B.C., in three Books, and
took up the treatment of Roman history where the Annals of Ennius ended.

In the earlier part of the Ciceronian Age, the decay of public spirit, and
the strong tendency which had set in of advancing individual claims above
the interest of the State, and of looking to individual leaders rather
than to established institutions, gave a new direction to narrative verse.
The passion for personal glory became the principal motive of those poems
which treated of recent or contemporary history. Eminent families and
individuals secured for themselves the services of poets, native or Greek.
Even before this time, Accius, as we learn from Cicero(439), was closely
associated with D. Brutus, and it seems not unlikely that the choice of
the subject of one of his tragedies,—Brutus,—was made as a compliment to
his friend and patron. The Luculli and Metelli retained the services of
Archias, as their panegyrist,—a fact referred to by Cicero in one of his
letters to Atticus, not without a slight touch of jealousy(440). Pompey
was served in the same way by Theophanes of Mitylene. The patronage of the
great to men of letters was thus by no means so disinterested as our first
impressions might lead us to suppose. Cicero himself with his
extraordinary literary activity wrote in his youth a poem on his townsman
Marius, and failing to find any other Greek or Roman to undertake the
task, composed a poem in three Books on his own Consulship(441), with a
result not fortunate to his reputation either for modesty or good taste.
In a letter to his brother Quintus, we find him encouraging him to the
composition of a poem on the Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. The
passage is worth attending to as indicating the materials out of which
those poems which aimed at celebrating contemporary events were
framed:—‘What strange scenes, what opportunities for describing things and
places, what customs, tribes, battles. What a theme too you have in your
general himself(442)!’ This passage may be compared with two passages in
Horace, showing that the same kind of thing was expected from a poetical
panegyrist under Augustus. The first of these is from Sat. ii. 1, lines 11
etc., where Trebatius advises Horace,

Caesaris invicti res dicere—

to which advice the poet answers,

Cupidum, pater optime, vires
Deficiunt: neque enim quivis horrentia pilis
Agmina, nec fracta pereuntes cuspide Gallos,
Aut labentis equo describat vulnera Parthi(443).

The other passage from Horace (Epistles, ii. 1. 250) has a closer
resemblance to the passage in Cicero:—

Nec sermones ego mallem
Repentes per humum quam res componere gestas,
Terrarumque situs et flumina dicere, et arces
Montibus impositas, et barbara regna, tuisque
Auspiciis totum confecta duella per orbem(444), etc.

Horace expresses his contempt for this style of poem in other passages of
his Satires, as (ii. 5. 41),

seu pingui tentus omaso
Furius hibernas cana nive conspuet Alpes(445);

and also (Sat. i. 10. 36–37),

Turgidus Alpinus jugulat dum Memnona, dumque
Defingit Rheni luteum caput(446).

The most prolific writer of epics in the latter half of the Ciceronian Age
was Varro Atacinus, the first Transalpine Gaul who appears in Roman
literature; the same who is mentioned by Horace as having made an
unsuccessful attempt to revive the satire of Lucilius:—

Hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino(447), etc.

He had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul, and wrote a poem on the war
against the Sequani in the traditional form. He also opened up to his
countrymen that vein of epic poetry which had been wrought by the
Alexandrians. The most famous poem of this kind in the literature of the
Republic was the Jason of Varro, imitated probably from the Argonautics of
Apollonius. Propertius speaks of this poem in a passage where he classes
Varro also among the writers of amatory poetry before his own time, such
as Catullus, Cinna, Gallus, and Virgil in his Eclogues:—

Haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro,
Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae(448).

He is thus as a writer of epic poems, on the one side, of the native
school of Ennius and the Annalists; on the other, he is the originator of
that other type of Roman epic which appears under the Empire in the
Thebaid and Achilleid of Statius and the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus.

The two great poets of the later Ciceronian era introduced a great change
into Roman poetry,—the practice of careful composition. They are the first
artistic poets of Rome. The rapidity of composition which characterised
all the earlier writers was, in the rude state of the language at that
time, incompatible with high accomplishment. We read of Cicero writing
five hundred hexameters in a night, and of his brother Quintus writing
four tragedies in sixteen days. The true sense of artistic finish first
appeared in Lucretius, and to a greater degree in Catullus, and the
younger men of the Ciceronian Age, Licinius Calvus, Helvius Cinna, etc.
The contempt with which the younger school regarded the old fashion of
composition appears in Catullus’ references—neither delicate nor
complimentary—to the ‘Annales Volusi,’ the ponderous annalistic epic of
his countryman (conterraneus) Tanusius Geminus(449). But in this younger
school, poetry separated itself entirely from the national life, or dealt
with it only in the form of personal epigrams on the popular leaders and
their partisans. The dignity of the hexameter was reserved by them for
didactic or philosophic poetry and short epic idyls treating of the heroic
legends of Greece. Didactic poetry, directing the attention to
contemplation instead of action, established itself as a successful rival
to the old historical epic, in the province of serious literature.

The latter, however, still found representatives in the following
generation. Thus Anser, the panegyrist of Antony, is familiarly known,
owing to one of the few satiric allusions which have been attributed to
Virgil:—

Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores(450).

Varius, with whom he is by implication contrasted in those lines, is
characterised by Horace as ‘Maeonii carminis ales,’ at a time when Virgil
was only famous as the poet of rural life. He was the author of a poem on
the death of Julius Caesar. We hear also of other specimens of the
contemporary epic produced in the Augustan Age, one by Cornelius Severus
treating of the Sicilian Wars, one by Rabirius treating of the Battle of
Actium, and one by Pedo Albinovanus treating of the voyage of Germanicus
‘per oceanum septentrionalem(451).’

We find Horace repeatedly excusing himself with self-disparaging irony,
while exhorting younger poets to the task of directly celebrating the wars
of Augustus,—e.g. Epist. i. 3. 7:—

Quis sibi res gestas Augusti scribere sumit?
Bella quis et paces longum diffundit in aevum(452)?

Horace does indeed celebrate some of the military as well as the peaceful
successes of the Augustan Age, in the only form in which contemporary or
recent events admit of being poetically treated, viz. lyrical poetry. But
considering how eager Augustus was to have his wars celebrated in verse
and how strong in him was the national passion for glory, and considering
that Virgil and Horace were pre-eminently the favourite poets of the time
and the special friends both of the Emperor himself and his minister, it
is remarkable how they both avoid or defer the task which he wished to
impose on them. This reluctance arose from no inadequate appreciation of
his services to the world, but from their high appreciation of what was
due to their art. Virgil had been similarly importuned in earlier times by
Pollio and Varus, and had gracefully waived the claim made on him by
pleading the fitness of his own muse only for the lighter themes of
pastoral poetry. He seems to have hesitated long as to the form which the
celebration of the glories of the Augustan Age should take. How he solved
the problem, how he sought to combine in a work of Greek art the
inspiration of the national epic with the personal celebration of
Augustus, will be treated of in the following chapter.

CHAPTER IX.

FORM AND SUBJECT OF THE AENEID.

The motives and purpose influencing Virgil to undertake the composition of
the Aeneid are to be sought partly in his own literary position, partly in
the state of public feeling at the time when he commenced his task, and
partly in the direction given to his genius by the personal influence of
Augustus. As the author of the Georgics he had established his position as
the foremost poetic artist of his time. He had achieved a great success in
a great and serious undertaking. He had entered into competition with
Greek poets of acknowledged reputation, and had surpassed them in their
own province. He had accomplished all that could be accomplished by him as
the poet of the peaceful charm of country life. But while in his two
earlier works he limits himself to that field assigned to him by
Horace,—that over which the ‘gaudentes rure Camenae’ presided,—the
stirring of a larger ambition is observable in both poems:—

Si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae:

and again:—

Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora(453).

He had yet to find a fuller expression for his sympathy with his age,
which had deepened with the deepening significance of the times, and for
that interest in the contemplation of human life which becomes the
dominant influence in all great poets whose faculty ripens with advancing
years. He might still aspire to be the Homer, as he had proved himself to
be the Theocritus and the Hesiod of his country. The rudeness of the work
of Ennius, the limited and temporary scope of the works of Varius—his only
competitor in epic song,—left that place still unappropriated. Virgil’s
whole previous career prepared him to be the author of a poem of sustained
elevation and elaborate workmanship. The composition of the Georgics had
trained his faculty of continuous exposition and of massing together a
great variety of details towards a common end. It had given him a perfect
mastery over the only vehicle suitable to the dignity of epic poetry. He
had indeed still to put forth untried capacities—the faculties of dealing
with the passions and movement of human life as he had dealt with the
sentiment and movement of Nature, of expressing thought and feeling
dramatically and oratorically, and of imparting living interest to the
actions and fortunes of imaginary personages. But he was now in the
maturity of his powers. He had long lived with the single purpose of
perfecting himself in art and knowledge. He had no other ambition but to
produce some great work, which should perpetuate his own fame, and be a
monument of his country’s greatness.

The completion of the Georgics and the first conception of the Aeneid
coincided in point of time with the event which not only established a
sense of security in the room of the long strain of alarm and anxiety and
a sense of national unity in the room of internecine strife in the Roman
world, but which, to those looking back upon it after nineteen centuries,
appears to be one of the most critical turning-points in all history. The
enthusiasm of the moment found expression by the voice of Horace:—

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
Pulsanda tellus.

But Virgil represents more truly the deeper tendencies of his age than the
poet who has most faithfully painted its social aspects. He looks beyond
the temporary triumph and sense of relief, and sees in the victory of
Actium the culminating point of all the past history of Rome and the
starting point of a greater future. There had been no time since the final
defeat of Hannibal so calculated to re-awaken the sense of national life,
of the mission to subdue and govern the world assigned to Rome, and of the
divine guardianship of which she was the object. As the joy of a great
success had found a representative voice in Ennius in the age when the
State, relieved from all overwhelming danger, started on its career of
foreign conquest, so it found as deep and true a voice in Virgil at the
time when the relief, if not from as imminent a danger, yet certainly from
a much longer strain of anxiety, left Rome free to consolidate her many
conquests into a vast and orderly Empire.

In both the Eclogues and Georgics it was seen that Virgil allows his
genius to be in some measure directed by others in the choice of his
subjects, while he follows his own judgment in his mode of treating them.
In the earlier poems he acknowledges the direction given to him both by
Varus and by Pollio,—

Non iniussa cano—
Accipe iussis
Carmina coepta tuis,—

while at the same time he excuses himself from directly celebrating their
actions. In the Georgics he describes his task as being commanded by
Maecenas—‘tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa.’ The desire of Augustus,
whether openly expressed or not, to commemorate his success and to add
lustre to his rule by associating them with the noblest art of his age,
must have acted with more imperious urgency on the will of Virgil than the
wishes of any of his earlier patrons. His patriotic and personal feeling
to the saviour of the State and his own benefactor must have made the task
imposed on him a service of love as well as of obligation. But in
undertaking this task he desired to make it subservient to the purpose of
producing a work which should emulate the greatest poetical works of the
Greeks, and which should, at the same time, be a true symbol of Rome at
the zenith of her fortunes.

Virgil had now found in his own age a motive for the composition of that
epic poem which it had been his boyish ambition to attempt,—

Cum canerem reges et proelia.

He could appeal as Ennius, or even as Homer had done, to hearers animated
by the same feeling which moved himself. The two great conditions of a
work of art which should gain the ear of the world immediately, and which
should interest it permanently, were prepared for him in the enthusiasm of
the moment, and in the enduring interest attaching to the career of Rome.
His highly-trained faculty, already proved and exercised in other works,
was a guarantee for the artistic execution of any design which he should
undertake. But two questions remained for him to solve,—what form should
his epic poem assume? should he follow absolutely the precedent of Homer,
or of Ennius, or endeavour to surpass the contemporary panegyrists like
Varius by a direct celebration of the events of his age? And if he adopted
the Homeric type, what subject should he adopt so as to impart the
interest of personal fortunes and human character to a poem the inspiring
motive of which was the national idea?

The problem which Virgil set before himself was really one altogether new
in literature. The Alexandrian Age had endeavoured to revive an interest
in the heroic adventure of early or mythical times. It had recognised the
principle that this distant background was essential to a poem of heroic
action, and that events of contemporary or recent history were not capable
of epic treatment. But it had not discerned the necessary supplement to
that principle, that if such a poem, on a large scale, is to gain a
permanent place in literature, it must bear some immediate relation to the
age in which it is written, and be associated with some ethical and
religious truths or some political cause of vital importance to the world.
The epic poet of a cultivated age can maintain his place as a great artist
only by being something more than an artist. He must feel more strongly
than others, and give expression to the deepest tendencies of his own
time. His subject must be charged with the force of the present, and not
be mere material for the exercise of his imitative faculty. Virgil might,
merely as an artist, have easily surpassed the Jason of Varro, or the
Thebaid of Statius; but no technical skill in form, diction, and rhythm
could have given to his treatment of such subjects the immediate
attraction or the enduring spell which belongs to the Aeneid.

Both Ennius and Naevius had set the example of connecting a continuous
narrative of the events of their own time with the mythical glories and
the traditional history of Rome. And the Introduction to the third Georgic
indicates that some idea of this kind at one time hovered before the
imagination of Virgil. But while moved by the same patriotic impulses as
these older poets, Virgil must have felt as strongly as Horace did that
they were examples to be avoided in the choice of form and mode of
treatment. He and Horace acknowledged the Greeks alone as their masters in
art. He aspires not only to surpass Ennius and Naevius in the office they
fulfilled, but to enter into rivalry with Homer,—to perform for the Romans
of the Augustan Age a work analogous to that which Homer performed for the
Greeks of his age. To do this, it was necessary to select some single
heroic action from the cycle of mythical events, and to connect that with
the whole story of Rome and Italy and with the events of the Augustan Age.
The action had in some way to illustrate or symbolise the thoughts,
memories, and hopes with which public feeling was identified at the time
when the poem was written. Thus the original motive of the Virgilian epic
was essentially different from that of the Homeric poems. The Iliad and
the Odyssey have their origin in the pure epic impulse. The germ of the
poems is the story; their purpose is to satisfy the curiosity felt in
human action and character. The ‘wrath of Achilles,’ the ‘return of
Odysseus,’ are, as they profess to be, the primary sources of interest in
the poems founded on them; the representative character of the poems, like
the representative character of Shakspeare’s historical dramas, is
accidental and undesigned. The germ of the Aeneid, on the other hand, is
to be sought in the national idea and sentiment, in the imperial position
of Rome, in her marvellous destiny, and in its culmination in the Augustan
Age. The actions and sufferings of the characters that play their part in
the poem were to be only secondary objects of interest; the primary object
was to be found in the race to whose future career these actions and
sufferings were the appointed means. The real key-note to the poem is not
the ‘Arma virumque’ with which it opens, but the ‘Tantae molis erat
Romanam condere gentem(454)’ with which the exordium closes. The choice
and conduct of the action were the mechanical difficulties to be overcome
by the poet, not the inspiring motives of his genius. This is the main
cause of the comparative tameness of the Aeneid in point of human
interest. Actors and action did not spring out of the spontaneous movement
of the imagination, but were chosen by a refined calculation to fulfil the
end which Virgil had in view. What Aeneas and his followers want in
personal interest, is supposed to accrue to them as instruments in the
hands of destiny. A new type of epic poetry is thus realised. The Iliad
and the Odyssey are essentially poems of personal, the Aeneid is the epic
of national fortunes.

II.

Had Virgil’s sole object been to write a national epic which should
satisfy popular sentiment, we can imagine several reasons why the tale of
Romulus should have been chosen as its subject in preference to that of
Aeneas. Though the traditional account of the founder of the city owes
some of its features to Greek invention, yet it has a much more _naïve_
and indigenous character than that of the Trojan settlement in Latium. It
was more firmly rooted in the popular mind. It was still celebrated, as we
learn from Dionysius, in national hymns. It had been commemorated in a
famous work of art, the bronze she-wolf still extant, at a time antecedent
to the origin of Roman literature. It formed the chief subject of the
first book of the Annals of Ennius, which, as dealing with the mythical
portion of his theme, seems to have had more of an epic character than the
later books. It was also a subject which by its relation to famous
localities and memorials of the past,—such as the oldest city-wall, the
Ruminal fig-tree, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the Palatine and Aventine
hills,—and with the religious and social organisation of the State,
admitted easily of being connected with the present time. It might have
been so treated as to magnify the glory of the Emperor, who desired to be
regarded as the second founder of the city, and is said to have debated
whether he should not assume the title of Romulus, before deciding on
taking that of Augustus. A poet of bolder and more original invention, and
one more capable of sympathising with the purely martial characteristics
of his hero, might have been attracted by this story of indigenous growth
rather than by the exotic legend on which Virgil has bestowed such
enduring life.

That legend seems, at first sight, to fail in the elements both of
national and human interest. It was mainly of Greek invention. It seems to
have been received by the Romans at a later stage in their development
than that in which religious or legendary beliefs strike deep root in the
popular imagination. It existed in vague and indistinct shape, and was
associated with no marked individuality of personages or incidents. It was
of composite growth, made up of many incongruous elements, the product
rather of antiquarian learning and reflexion than of creative imagination.

The Greek germ out of which the legend arose, and the acceptance of this
explanation of their origin by the Romans from the beginning of their
literary history, are clearly ascertained. But there is great uncertainty
as to the connecting link between these two stages in the development of
the legend. The continuance of the line of Aeneas after the destruction of
Troy is announced by the mouth of Poseidon in the twentieth Book of the
Iliad (307–308):—

Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει
καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται(455).

If an historical character may be assigned to any passages in the Iliad,
it may be presumed that the author of these verses knew of a line of
princes ruling over some remnant of the Trojans, and claiming Aeneas as
their ancestor. But these verses do not imply any removal to a distant
settlement. The Cyclic poet, Arctinus, next spoke of Aeneas as retiring to
Mount Ida and founding a city there. The earliest traditions accordingly
point to the Troad as the scene of the rule of his descendants: other
traditions however, which must have been known to Virgil, brought him to
Thrace, to various places on the Aegean, and to Buthrotum in Epirus. The
origin of these traditions is believed to be the connexion of Aeneas with
the worship of Aphrodite, which was widely spread over the Mediterranean,
probably as a survival of early Phoenician settlements. This connexion in
worship is supposed to have arisen from a confusion between the Trojan
hero and the title Αἴνεας, denoting one of the attributes of the goddess.
But the writer who first gave the idea of a Trojan settlement in Italy is
said to have been Stesichorus, the lyrical poet of Himera in Sicily, who
flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. One of the
representations in the Ilian table in the Capitoline Museum exhibits the
figures of Aeneas, of his son Ascanius, of the trumpeter Misenus, and of
Anchises carrying the sacred images, just as they are on the point of
embarking on board their ship. The following inscription is written under
these figures,—

Αἰνήας σὺν τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀπαίρων εἰς τὴν Ἑσπερίαν(456),—

and the Ἰλίου πέρσις of Stesichorus is quoted as the authority for the
representation(457). The motive actuating Stesichorus was probably the
desire to connect the newly-discovered localities in Italy and Sicily with
the cycle of Homeric narrative. But Stesichorus apparently knew nothing of
a Trojan settlement in Latium; Siris in Oenotria seems to have been fixed
on by him as the place of refuge for the Palladium and the Penates of
Troy. It was after the destruction of Siris that the fancy of the Greeks
fixed on Lavinium, where there was a worship similar to that established
at Siris, as the ultimate resting-place of Aeneas. The first definite
statement connecting Rome with Troy was made by Cephalon of Gergis in the
Troad (about 350 B.C.), who ascribed the foundation of the city to Romus a
son of Aeneas. In the course of the next half century this appears to have
become the prevailing belief among the Greeks, whose attention was now
attracted by the growing ascendency of Rome in Italy. About the beginning
of the third century Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, is said to have
shaped the legend into the form adopted by Naevius(458).

It is obvious that there is a great gap in our knowledge of the stages in
the development of the legend between Stesichorus, a poet of the sixth
century, and Cephalon, an historian of the fourth. And the question
suggests itself whether, in the interval between them, the Romans
themselves had accepted any similar explanation of their origin. The early
connexion between Rome and Cumae renders it not impossible that the Romans
had formed some idea of their Trojan descent, before the wars of Pyrrhus
brought them into more intimate connexion with the Greeks. It was by the
Greek colonists of Cumae that the Isles of the Sirens, the Kingdom of the
Laestrygones, and the abode of Circe were localised near Sorrento, the
ancient town of Formiae, and the promontory of Circeii. It seems probable
that to them also may be ascribed the mythical connexion established
between the promontories of Caieta, Misenum, and Palinurum, in their own
immediate neighbourhood, with the names of the household or followers of
Aeneas. The mythical traditions which assign a Greek origin to various
important Latin towns, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Praeneste, and to the
earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill, probably owe their invention to
the same source. Alba Longa, as the chief city of the old Latin
confederacy, must have been an object of greater interest to the Cumaeans
than Tibur or Tusculum, and if we could be sure of the existence of the
belief in the Trojan settlement in Latium before the destruction of Alba,
we might infer with probability the great antiquity of the legend which
ascribed the foundation of that town to the son of Aeneas. This belief
might easily have passed to Rome; and Cephalon may have received it, in a
somewhat distorted form, from native sources. But it is impossible to take
any step in these conjectures without feeling the extreme uncertainty of
our ground. We really know nothing of the acceptance of this account of
their origin by the Romans before the time of the First Punic War; it is
not easily reconcileable with the indigenous belief which certainly struck
much deeper roots in the national history: the story as told by Cephalon
appears to exclude the connexion between Rome and Alba as an intermediate
link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable
that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek
invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not
known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus(459).

But besides the foreign and prosaic origin of the story, there is great
vagueness and indistinctness in the incidents and personages connected
with it. Homer indeed has supplied a definite, though not a marked,
outline to the character of Aeneas; and Stesichorus, in shaping the family
group of Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius flying from Troy with their
household-gods, may have suggested to Virgil the leading characteristic of
his hero. But these were nearly all the elements in the legend derived
from primitive poetical sources. There was no individuality of character
attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early
imaginative invention associated with the dim tradition of his wanderings.
The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite
growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,—some supplied by poetical
invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of
prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, some
suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome,
some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the
traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such
indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly
consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character.

But, on other grounds, the judgment of Virgil may be justified in the
choice of this legend, vague, composite, and unpoetical as it was, as most
adapted to his own genius and to the purpose of his epic poem. It was the
only subject, of national significance, connected with the Homeric cycle
of events. Not only the epic and dramatic poets of Greece, but the Roman
tragic poets had recognised the heroic legends of Greece as the legitimate
material for those forms of poetry which aimed at representing human
action and character with seriousness and dignity. The personages and
events connected with the Trojan War had especially been made familiar to
the Romans by the works of their early dramatic poets. The Romans
themselves had no mythical back-ground, rich in poetic associations, to
their own history. It was impossible for a poet of a literary age to
create this back-ground. But it was possible for him to give substance and
reality to the shadowy connexion, existing in legend and in the works of
older national writers, between the beginnings of Roman history and this
distant region of poetry and romance. Virgil’s imagination, as was seen in
the examination of the Georgics, was peculiarly susceptible of the
impressions produced by a remote antiquity and by old poetic associations.
If he was deficient in spontaneous invention, he possessed a remarkable
power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the
invention of a new world of wonder and adventure,—a work most difficult of
accomplishment in a late stage of human development,—the most attractive
aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving,
under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of
his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the
wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell
again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to
present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to
awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial passions of an
earlier and ruder age.

Although there is no evidence that the connexion of Rome with Troy had
sunk deeply into the popular mind before the time of Virgil, yet it had
been recognised in official acts of the State for more than two centuries.
So early as the First Punic War the Acarnanians had applied to the Romans
for assistance against the Aetolians, on the ground that their ancestors
alone among the Greeks had taken no part in the Trojan War. The Senate had
offered alliance and friendship to King Seleucus on condition of his
exempting the people of Ilium, as kinsmen of the Romans, from
tribute(460). T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the
conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the
Aeneadae(461). In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word
Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans:—

Amnem Troiugena Cannam Romane fuge(462).

So early as the time of Timaeus, i.e. before the First Punic War, the
connexion of Aeneas with the worship of the Penates at Lavinium had been
recognised. His own worship also established itself in the religion of the
State by his identification with Jupiter Indiges, who seems to have had a
temple on the banks of the river Numicius. Many families among the Roman
aristocracy, as for instance the Cluentii, Sergii, Memmii(463), claimed to
be descended from the followers of Aeneas. From the time of Naevius this
account of the origin of the Romans had been the accepted belief in all
Latin literature. Ennius begins his annals from the date

Quum veter occubuit Priamus sub Marte Pelasgo(464).

The poet Accius had written a tragedy called Aeneadae. The Roman annalists
started with the tradition as an accepted fact. Thus Livy in reference to
this belief uses the expression ‘it is sufficiently established.’ The
great antiquarian Varro wrote a treatise on the Trojan origin of Roman
families. Cicero in his Verrine orations (act. ii. 4. 33) speaks of the
relationship of the people of Segesta in Sicily, which claimed to be a
colony founded by Aeneas, with the Roman people. Even Lucretius, who
stands apart from the general traditional beliefs of his countrymen,
begins his poem with the words ‘Aeneadum genetrix.’ Virgil’s poem appealed
not to the popular taste, but to the national, religious, aristocratic,
and literary sympathies of the cultivated classes. The legend of Aeneas,
if less ancient and less popular, assigned a more august origin to the
Roman race than the tale of the birth of Romulus:—

Ab Iove principium generis, Iove Dardana pubes
Gaudet avo; rex ipse Iovis de gente suprema
Troius Aeneas, etc(465).

These considerations may have recommended this subject to Virgil, as the
most suitable symbol of the idea of Rome, from both a national and
religious point of view. But the circumstance which must have absolutely
determined his choice was the claim which the Julian gens made to be
directly descended from Iulus, Aeneas, and the goddess Venus. This claim
Virgil had already acknowledged in the line (Ecl. ix. 47),

Ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum,

and again (Georg. i. 28),

cingens materna tempora myrto(466).

Even Julius Caesar had shown the importance which he attached to it by
taking the words ‘Venus Victrix’ for his watchword at the battle of
Pharsalia. A greater tribute was paid to the qualities of Augustus, a more
august consecration was conferred on his rule, by representing that rule
as a prominent object in the counsels of Heaven a thousand years before
its actual establishment, than could have been bestowed on him by the most
detailed and ornate account of his actual successes. The personal, as
distinct from the national motive of the poem, is revealed in the
prophetic lines attributed to Jupiter,

Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,
Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris,
Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo(467).

While the vagueness of the tradition and the absence of definite incident
and individual character associated with it were conditions unfavourable
to novelty and vividness of representation, yet they allowed to Virgil
great latitude in carrying out his purpose of giving body and substance to
all that unknown and shadowy past, which survived only in names, customs,
and ceremonies. He was not limited to any particular district or period.
His plan enabled him to embrace in the compass of his epic the dim
traditions connected with the ‘origins’ of the famous towns and tribes of
Central Italy and of several of the great Roman families; it enabled him
to imagine the primitive state of places which had a world-wide celebrity
in his own time; to invoke, as an element of poetic interest, the
veneration paid to the ancient rites of religion; and to cast an
idealising light on events, personages, families, or customs familiar to
his own age, by associating them with the sentiment of an immemorial past.
One great excellence of the Aeneid, as a representative poem, is the large
prospect of Roman and Italian life which it opens up before us. The vague
outlines of the story which he followed enabled Virgil to enlarge his
conception with an ampler content of local and national material, than if
he had been called upon to recast a more definite and more vital
tradition. The want of individuality in the personages of his story
justified him in exhibiting their character in accordance with his own
ideal; in conceiving of Aeneas as the type of antique piety combined with
modern humanity, and of Turnus as the type of the haughty and martial
spirit, animating the old Italian race.

Even the composite character of the legend and the heterogeneous elements
out of which it was composed, if unfavourable to unity of impression and
simplicity of execution, conduced to the poet’s purpose of concentrating
in one representation, of a Roman vastness of compass, whatever might
enhance and illustrate the greatness of Rome and of its ruler. The Rome of
the Augustan Age no longer exhibited the political and religious unity of
an old Italian republic; it was expanding its limits so as to embrace in a
much wider unity the various nations that had played their part in the
past history of the world. As the glory and wealth of Asia, Greece,
Carthage, etc. had all gone to swell the glory and wealth of Rome, so all
the traditions, historic memories, and literary art of the past were to be
made tributary to her national representative poem. The first great epic
poem of the ancient world is buoyant with the promise of the mighty life
which was to be; the last great epic is weighty with the accumulated
experience of all that had been. The stream of epic poetry shows no longer
the jubilant force and purity of waters—‘exercita cursu flumina’—which
rise in the high mountain-land separating barbarism from civilisation; it
moves more slowly and less clearly through more level and cultivated
districts; its volume is swollen and its weight increased by tributaries
which have never known the ‘bright speed(468)’ of its nobler sources.

III.

_Composite character of the Aeneid illustrated by an examination of the
poem._

These considerations lead to the conclusion that the legend of Aeneas was
better suited than any other which he could have selected for the two
objects which Virgil had before his mind in the composition of the Aeneid;
first, that of writing a poem representative and commemorative of Rome and
of his own epoch, in the spirit in which some of the great architectural
works of the Empire, such as the Column of Trajan, the Arches of Titus and
of Constantine, were erected; and, secondly, that of writing an imitative
epic of action, manners, and character which should afford to his
countrymen an interest analogous to that which the Greeks derived from the
Homeric poems. The knowledge necessary to enable him to fulfil the first
purpose was contained in such works as the ceremonial books of the various
Priestly Colleges, the ‘Origines’ of Cato, the antiquarian treatise of
Varro, and perhaps the ‘Annales’ and ‘Fasti(469)’ which preserved the
record of national and family traditions. In giving life to these dry
materials his mind was animated by the spectacle of Rome, and the thought
of her wide empire, her genius, character, and history; by the visible
survivals of ancient ceremonies and memorials of the past; by the sight of
the great natural features of the land, of old Italian towns of historic
renown, or, where they had disappeared, of the localities still marked by
their name:—

locus Ardea quondam
Dictus avis; et nunc magnum tenet Ardea nomen(470).

As poetic sources of inspiration for this part of his task Virgil had the
national epic poems of Naevius and Ennius; and of both of these he made
use: of the first, in his account of the storm which drives Aeneas to
Carthage and of his entertainment there by the Carthaginian Queen; of the
second, by his use of many half-lines and expressions which give an
antique and stately character to the description of incidents or the
expression of sentiment. For Virgil’s other purpose, his chief materials
were derived from his intimate familiarity with the two great Homeric
poems: but he availed himself also of incidents contained in the Homeric
Hymns, in the Cyclic poems, in the Greek Tragedies, as for instance the
lost Laocoon of Sophocles, and in the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius.
His own experience of life, and still more the insight which his own
nature afforded him into various moods of passion, affection, and
chivalrous emotion, enabled him to impart novelty and individuality to the
materials which he derived from these foreign and ancient sources.

A minute examination of the various books of the poem would bring out
clearly that these two objects, that of raising a monument to the glory of
Rome and of Augustus, and that of writing an imitative epic reproducing
some image of the manners and life of the heroic age, were present to the
mind of Virgil through his whole undertaking. It will be sufficient in
order to show this two-fold purpose to look at the first book, and at some
of the more prominent incidents in the later books.

In the opening lines of the poem—

Arma virumque ... multa quoque et bello passus—

we find, as in the Odyssey—

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε ... πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν—

an announcement of a poem of heroic adventure, of vicissitudes and
suffering by sea and land, determined by the personal agency of some of
the old Olympian gods (‘vi superum’). The scope of the Aeneid as explained
in these lines is however wider than that of the Odyssey, as embracing the
warlike action of the Iliad as well as a tale of sea-adventure. But in the
statement of the motive of the poems a more essential difference between
the two epics is apparent. The wanderings of Odysseus have no other aim
than a safe return for himself and his companions. He acts from the
simplest and most elemental of human instincts and affections, the love of
life and of home,—

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

Aeneas, like Odysseus, starts on his adventures after the capture of
Troy,—

Troiae qui primus ab oris—
ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν

but he starts, ‘fato profugus,’ on no accidental adventure, but on an
enterprise with far-reaching consequences, determined by a Divine purpose.
While actively engaged in the personal object of finding a safe settlement
for himself and his followers in Italy, he is at the same time a passive
instrument in the hands of Providence, laying the foundation, both secular
and religious, of the future government of the world:—

Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
Inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum
Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae(471).

The difference in character of the two epics is perceptible in the very
sound of their opening lines. While the Latin moves with stateliness and
dignity and is weighty with the burden of the whole world’s history, the
Greek is fluent and buoyant with the spirit and life of the ‘novitas
florida mundi.’ The greatness of Aeneas is a kind of ‘imputed’ greatness;
he is important to the world as bearing the weight of the glory and
destiny of the future Romans—

Attolens humero famamque et fata nepotum.

Odysseus is great in the personal qualities of courage, steadfastness of
purpose and affection, loyalty to his comrades, versatility, ready
resource; but he bears with him only his own fortunes and those of the
companions of his adventure; he ends his career as he begins it, the chief
of a small island, which derives all its importance solely from its early
association with his fortunes.

The double purpose of the Aeneid, and its contrast in this respect with
the Homeric poems, is further seen in the statement of the motives
influencing the Divine beings by whose agency the action is advanced or
impeded. As in the opening paragraph Virgil had the opening lines of the
Odyssey in view, in the second, which announces the supernatural motive of
the poem—

Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso—

he had in view the passage in the Iliad beginning with the line—

τίς τ’ ἄρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;

In the Iliad the supernatural cause of the action is the wrath of Apollo,
acting from the personal desire to avenge the wrong done to his priest
Chryses: in the Odyssey, it is the wrath of Poseidon acting from the
personal desire to avenge the suffering of his son whom Odysseus blinded:—

ἀλλὰ Ποσειδάων γαιήοχος ἀσκελὲς αἰεί
Κύκλωπος κεχόλωται, ὃν ὀφθαλμοῦ ἀλάωσεν(472).

The gods in both cases act from personal passion without moral purpose or
political object. So too the powers which befriend Odysseus act from
personal regard to him and acknowledgment of his wisdom and piety:—

ὃς περὶ μὲν νόον ἐστὶ βροτῶν, περὶ δ’ ἱρὰ θεοῖσιν
ἀθανάτοισιν ἔδωκε, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν(473).

In the Aeneid, Juno, by whose agency in hindering the settlement of Aeneas
in Italy the events of the poem are brought about, acts from two sets of
motives; the first bringing the action into connexion with one of the
great crises in the history of Rome, the second bringing it into connexion
with the Trojan traditions. Prominence is given to the first motive, in
the announcement of which the deadly struggle between Rome and Carthage,
‘when all men were in doubt under whose empire they should fall by land
and sea(474),’ is anticipated:—

Urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
Karthago ...
hoc regnum dea gentibus esse,
Si _qua fata sinant_, iam tum tenditque fovetque.
Progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
Audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;
_Hinc populum late regem belloque superbum_
Venturum excidio Libyae; sic volvere Parcas(475).

In two other passages of the Aeneid this great internecine contest for the
empire of the world, which left so deep an impression on the Roman memory,
is seen foreshadowing itself, viz. in the dying denunciation and prayer of
Dido,—

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,—

and in the speech of Jupiter in the great council of the gods in the tenth
book—a passage imitated from Ennius:—

Adveniet iustum pugnae, ne arcessite, tempus,
Cum fera Karthago Romanis arcibus olim
Exitium magnum atque Alpes inmittet apertas(476).

But to this motive are added other motives, both political and
personal,—the memory of her former enmity to Troy arising out of her love
to Argos, of the slight offered to her beauty by the judgment of Paris,
and of the occasion given to her jealousy by the honour awarded to
Ganymede:—

manet alta mente repostum
Iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
Et genus invisum et rapti Ganymedis honores(477).

These two sets of motives bring out distinctly the two-fold character of
the action of the poem, its inner relation to the future fulfilment of the
Roman destiny, its more immediate dependence on the past events forming
the subject of the Homeric poems. The prominence in Virgil’s mind of the
Roman over the Greek influences, in which his epic had its origin, is
indicated by the position and weight of the line of cardinal significance—

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem;

just as the dominant influence under which Lucretius wrote his poem is
indicated by the position and weight of the line—

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

In entering on the detailed narrative, which forms the main body of the
poem, Virgil at once attaches himself to Homer. The action, like the
action of the Odyssey, is taken up at that stage immediately preceding the
events of most critical interest, after which it advances steadily to the
final catastrophe. The slower movement of the story in the years between
the fall of Troy and the departure from Sicily is presupposed, and, like
the adventures of Odysseus before his departure from the Isle of Calypso,
the adventures of Aeneas are subsequently narrated by the principal actor
in them. The storm which drives the Trojan fleet to the Carthaginian coast
was an incident in the epic of Naevius; but the original suggestion and
the actual description of it are due to the account of the storm raised by
Poseidon in the fifth book of the Odyssey. Juno, in availing herself of
the instrumentality of Aeolus, bribes him by a promise similar to that
made to Sleep in the fourteenth book of the Iliad. The description of the
harbour in which the Trojan ships find refuge is imitated from that of the
harbour to which the Phaeacian ship brings Odysseus; and the success of
Aeneas in the chase is suggested by two passages in the Odyssey, ix. 154
_et seq._ and x. 104 _et seq._

The speech of Aeneas (198–207) again reminds us of the ultimate object of
all the vicissitudes and dangers which he encounters:—

Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum
Tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas
Ostendunt(478).

Immediately afterwards we come upon one of the three great passages of the
poem in which the action is prophetically advanced into the Augustan Age.
These three passages (i. 223–296, vi. 756–860, viii. 626–731), like the
greater episodes of the Georgics, draw attention directly to what is the
most vital and most permanent source of interest in the Aeneid. They
serve, along with the opening lines of the poem, better than any other
passages to bring out the relation both of dependence on the Homeric epic
and of contrast with it which characterise the Virgilian epic.

The passage before us, the interview between Jupiter and Venus, owes its
original suggestion to the scene in the first book of the Iliad in which
Thetis intercedes with Zeus, to avenge the wrong done to her son. The
object of this intercession is a purely personal one; the result of it is
the whole series of events which culminates in the death of Hector. The
object which Venus claims of Jupiter is the fulfilment of his promise that
a people should arise from the blood of Teucer—

Qui mare, qui terras omni dicione tenerent(479);

the result of her prayer is that Jupiter reveals to her not only the
immediate future of Aeneas and the founding of Lavinium and of Alba, but
the birth of Romulus, the building of Rome, the ultimate triumph of the
house of Assaracus over Pthia, Mycenae, and Argos, the peaceful reign on
earth and the final acceptance into heaven of the greatest among the
descendants of Aeneas, who is there called, not by his later title of
Augustus, but by the earlier name which he inherited from his adoptive
father—

Iulius a magno demissum nomen Iulo(480).

In this passage we note (1) Virgil’s relation to the earlier poem of
Naevius, who had sketched the outline of the scene which is here filled
up; and also the reproduction of the diction of Ennius in the passage—

Despiciens mare velivolum terrasque iacentis
Litoraque et latos populos(481);

and in this—

Olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum
Voltu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat(482);

and (2) we note a reference to the closing of the gate of Janus in the
line—

Claudentur Belli portae;

and apparently to some symbolical representation in the art of the
Augustan Age in the words which follow—

Furor impius intus,
Saeva sedens super arma et centum vinctus aenis
Post tergum nodis, fremet horridus ore cruento(483).

After this digression the action proceeds according to Homeric precedents.
Mercury is sent to Dido, as Hermes is sent to Calypso in the fifth book of
the Odyssey. Then follows the meeting of Venus with Aeneas and Anchises,
the picturesque and poetical features of which scene are suggested by a
passage in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, describing the meeting of the
goddess with Anchises. The Trojan heroes pass on to Carthage concealed in
a mist as Odysseus makes his way to the city of the Phaeacians. The
pictorial representation of the events of the Trojan war on the walls of
the temple of Juno is suggested partly by the pictorial art of the
Augustan Age, and partly by the song of the bard in the eighth book of the
Odyssey, celebrating the

νεῖκος Ὀδυσσῆος καὶ Πηλείδεω Ἀχιλῆος.

So too the later banquet in the palace of Dido is suggested partly by the
feast in the hall of Alcinous, partly by the magnificence of Roman
entertainments in the Augustan Age, such as those referred to in the lines
of Lucretius—

Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes, etc.

Finally, the device by which Venus substitutes Cupid for Ascanius is
borrowed from the Argonautics of Apollonius; the introduction of the
various suitors of Dido is suggested by the part which the suitors of
Penelope play in the Odyssey; and the request of Dido to Aeneas to recount
his past adventures owes its origin to the similar request made by
Alcinous to Odysseus.

It is in the first book that Virgil adheres most closely to his Greek
guides; yet even in it we observe many traces of modern invention, which
give a new character to the representation. The thought of Italy in the
immediate future—

Est locus, Hesperiam Graii cognomine dicunt,
Terra antiqua, potens armis atque ubere glaebae;
Oenotri coluere viri; nunc fama, minores
Italiam dixisse ducis de nomine gentem(484)—

and the remoter vision of the ‘altae moenia Romae’ remind us that we are
contemplating no mere recast of a Greek legend, but a great national
monument of the race which during the longest period of history has played
the greatest part in human affairs. The old gods of Olympus appear on
earth once more, and now with all the attributes of Roman state, as
‘principalities and powers’ contending for the empire of the world, and as
instruments in the hands of destiny for the furthering of the great work
which was only fully accomplished by Augustus.

In the recital of the fall of Troy, which occupies the second book, Virgil
is said by Macrobius to have adhered almost verbally(485) to the work of a
Greek poet, Pisander, the author of a poetical history of the world from
the marriage of Jupiter and Juno down to the events contemporary with the
poet himself. There seem to have been three Greek poets of that name, and
the only one of them who was likely to have treated at any length of the
events of that single night recorded in the second Aeneid is said to have
lived after the time of Virgil. It seems impossible that any earlier poet
could have assigned so much space as that demanded by the statement of
Macrobius to the personal adventures of Aeneas. We are on surer ground in
recognising the debt which Virgil owed to the account of the wooden horse
in the Odyssey, to some of the lost plays of Sophocles, which told the
tale of the treachery of Sinon and of the tragic fate of Laocoon, and to
some of the lost Cyclic poems and the Ἰλίου πέρσις of Stesichorus. The
vision of Hector to Aeneas reminds us of that of Patroclus to Achilles;
but in this resemblance we recognise also the difference between the poem
founded on personal and that founded on national fortunes. The care which
summons the shade of Patroclus to the couch of his friend is the care for
his own burial; the care which brings Hector back to earth is the care for
the salvation of the sacred relics of Troy in view of the great destiny
which awaited them. There is more of human pathos in the vision of
Patroclus; more of a stately majesty in that of Hector. And as in other
passages where Virgil wishes to produce this effect, we note that he
avails himself here of the language of Ennius,—

Hei mihi, qualis erat.

So too, near the end of the book, where the shade of Creusa gives to
Aeneas the first intimation of his settlement in a western land,—

Et terram Hesperiam venies, ubi Lydius arva
Inter opima virum leni fluit agmine Thybris(486),—

the same antique associations are appealed to(487). So also in describing
the destruction of the palace of Priam, Virgil is said to have imitated
the description by Ennius of the destruction of Alba(488). And that
feeling of ancient state and majesty with which the memory of Troy is
invested in such lines as

Urbs antiqua ruit multos dominata per annos(489),

had been first expressed in the ‘Andromache’ of the older poet.

Among the sources which Virgil used in the third book were probably the
prose accounts of the late Greek historians, who rationalised the
traditions of the various settlements of Aeneas which grew out of his
association with the worship of Aphrodite. But the whole suggestion of
sea-adventure, and still more of the incidents arising out of the visit to
the land of the Cyclops, is due to the Odyssey, while the events connected
with the landing in Thrace and in Epirus owe their origin to the Hecuba
and Andromache of Euripides. But, on the other hand, the exact
geographical knowledge displayed in it imparts a thoroughly modern
character to the book; and one passage at least (as has been shown by a
writer in the Journal of Philology)—the description of the voyage round
the eastern and southern shores of Sicily—is so minutely accurate in
detail as to give clear indication of being drawn from the personal
experience of the author. Again, the frequent mention of Italy in the
book, the speech of Helenus which announces the old traditional omen of
the white sow, the direction as to the mode of performing religious
ceremonies which the Romans should observe in all future times,—

Hac casti maneant in religione nepotes,—(490)

and the trophy raised by Aeneas on the shores of Actium, help to remind us
of the modern meaning which Virgil desired to impart to his representation
of antique manners.

The fourth book, in which Virgil deserts the guidance of Homer for that of
the Alexandrine epic, is intended to give the most passionate human, as
distinct from the pervading national, interest to the poem. But the tragic
nature of the situation arises from the clashing between natural feeling
and the great considerations of State by which the divine actors in the
drama were influenced. The death of Dido gives moreover a poetical
justification for the deadly enmity which animated the struggle between
Rome and her most dangerous antagonist. The fifth book follows the old
tradition—as old at least as the time of Thucydides—which represented
Trojan settlements as established in Sicily. The account of the foundation
of Segesta by the followers of Aeneas, and the story of the burning of the
ships by the Trojan women, may have been told by Timaeus; and it was
natural to ascribe to her son the building of the famous temple of Venus
Erycina. But the greater part of the book is occupied with an account of
the funeral games in honour of Anchises, which, with modifications to suit
the changed locality, reproduce the games which Achilles celebrated in
honour of Patroclus. But the account of these games serves the purpose of
giving some individuality to three of the most shadowy personages in the
poem by establishing their connexion with three illustrious Roman
families, and to flatter Augustus by assigning an ancient origin to the
Ludus Troiae,—a kind of bloodless tournament of noble youths exhibited in
the early years of his reign,—and also, by the invention of a fabulous
ancestor, to add distinction to the provincial family of the Atii, which
was more truly ennobled by the great personal qualities of the Emperor’s
mother, Atia.

With the landing in Italy the narrative assumes greater independence. The
various localities introduced and the traditions connected with them, the
usages or ceremonies peculiar to Italy which admit of being referred to an
immemorial past, the mere Italian names of Latinus and Turnus, Mezentius
and Camilla, are able to evoke national and sometimes modern associations.
Thus the introduction of the Cumaean Sibyl into the narrative affords the
opportunity of reminding the Romans of the importance assigned to the
Sibylline prophecies in their national counsels; and the impressive
ceremony of the opening of the gates of war enables the poet to appeal to
the patriotic impulses of his own age, in the lines—

Sive Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum
Hyrcanisve Arabisve parant, seu tendere ad Indos
Auroramque sequi Parthosque reposcere signa(491).

But many of the warlike incidents in the later books—as for instance the
night foray of Nisus and Euryalus, the treacherous wounding of Aeneas, the
withdrawal by supernatural agency of Turnus from the battle, the death of
Pallas and the effect which that event has on Aeneas, and the final
conflict between Turnus and Aeneas—show that Virgil was still following in
the footsteps of his original guide. The passages, however, which bring
out most clearly both this relation of Virgil to Homer and his point of
departure from him are those which give an account of the descent into
hell and describe the shield of Aeneas. The sixth book of the Aeneid owes
its existence to the eleventh book of the Odyssey: but the shadowy
conceptions of the Homeric ‘Inferno,’ suggested by the impulses of natural
curiosity and the yearnings of human affection, are enlarged and made more
definite, on the one hand, by thoughts derived from Plato, and, on the
other, by the proudest memories of Roman history, from the legends of the
Alban kings to the warlike and peaceful triumphs of the Augustan Age. The
shield of Achilles presents to the imagination the varied spectacle of
human life—sowing and reaping, a city besieged, a marriage festival, etc.;
the shield of Aeneas presents the spectacle of the most momentous crises
in the annals of Rome, culminating in the great triumph of Augustus. We
note too in the latter passage the enhancement of patriotic sentiment by
the use of the language and representation of Ennius, as at lines 630–634,
and the lesson taught of the dependence of national welfare on the
observance of religious traditions and of the duties of life sanctioned by
religion, in the lines which describe the processions of the Salii and
Luperci, and which indicate the punishment awarded to the sin of rebellion
and disloyalty in the person of Catiline, and the recognition of civic
virtue, even when exercised in defence of a losing cause, in the position
assigned to Cato in the nether world—

Secretosque pios, his dantem iura Catonem(492).

The Iliad and the Odyssey are thus seen to be essentially epics of human
life; the Aeneid is essentially the epic of national glory. The Iliad
indeed is the noblest monument of the greatness, as it is of the genius,
of the Greeks. And the Aeneid is much more than a monument of national
glory. It is full of pathetic situations and stirring incidents which move
our human compassion or kindle our sympathies with heroic action. But if
we ask what are the most powerful sources of interest in the Greek and in
the Roman epic respectively, the answer will be that in the first these
spring immediately out of human life; in the second they spring out of the
national fortunes. And this distinction is generally recognisable in the
art, literature, and history of the two nations. This predominance of
national interest and the presence of a large element of living modern
interest in the treatment of an ancient legend separate the Aeneid still
further from the Alexandrine epic and its later Roman imitations. The
compliance with the conditions of epic poetry, as established by Homer and
confirmed by the great law-giver of Greek criticism, equally separates it
from the rude attempts of Ennius and Naevius, and from the poems which
treat of historical subjects of a limited and temporary significance, such
as the Pharsalia of Lucan and the Henriade of Voltaire. Though Virgil may
be the most imitative, he is at the same time one of the most original
poets of antiquity. We saw that he had produced a new type of didactic
poetry. By the meaning and unity which he has imparted to his Greek,
Roman, and Italian materials through the vivifying and harmonising agency
of permanent national sentiment and of the immediate feeling of the hour,
he may be said to have created a new type of epic poetry—to have produced
a work of genius representative of his country as well as a masterpiece of
art.

CHAPTER X.

THE AENEID AS THE EPIC OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

The Aeneid, like the Annals of Ennius, is a poem inspired by national
sentiment, and expressive of the idea of Rome. But the ‘Res Romana(493),’
the growth of which Ennius witnessed and celebrated, had become greatly
extended and had assumed a new form since the epic of the Republic was
written. Yet the sentiment of national glory was essentially the same in
the age of the elder Scipio and in the age of Augustus, though in the
first it may be described as still militant, in the second as triumphant.
In each time the Romans had a firm conviction of their superiority over
all other nations, and a firm trust in the great destiny which had
attended them since their origin, and still, as they believed, awaited
them in the future. The ground on which their national self-esteem rested
was their capacity for conquest and government; the result of that
capacity was only fully visible after the empire over the world was
established.

The pride of empire is thus the most prominent mode in which the national
sentiment asserts itself in the poetry of the Augustan Age. In that series
of Odes in which the art of Horace becomes the organ of the new government
this sentiment finds expression by the mouth of the old enemy of the Roman
race, the goddess Juno:—

Horrenda late nomen in ultimas
Extendat oras, qua medius liquor
Secernit Europen ab Afro,
Qua tumidus rigat arva Nilus.
* * * *
Quicunque mundi terminus obstitit,
Hunc tanget armis, visere gestiens
Qua parte debacchentur ignes,
Qua nebulae pluviique rores(494).

And while it animates even the effeminate tones of the elegiac poets to a
more manly sound, this pride of empire is the dominant mode of patriotic
enthusiasm in the Aeneid. Thus, in the very beginning of the poem, Virgil
describes the people destined to spring from the remnant of the Trojans as

populum late regem belloque superbum.

To them Jupiter himself promises empire without limit either in time or
place:—

His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono,
Imperium sine fine dedi(495).

In the same passage he sums up their greatness in the arts of war and
peace in the line

Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam(496).

The earliest oracle given to Aeneas in the course of his wanderings
contains the promise of universal dominion:—

Hic domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris,
Et nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis(497).

The sacred images of the gods who are partners of his enterprise make a
similar announcement to him:—

Nos tumidum sub te permensi classibus aequor,
Idem venturos tollemus in astra nepotes,
Imperiumque urbi dabimus(498).

In the fourth book Jupiter, who appears rather as contemplating the future
course of affairs than as actively influencing it, speaks of Aeneas in
these words:—

Sed fore, qui gravidam imperiis belloque frementem
Italiam regeret, genus alto a sanguine Troiae
Proderet, ac totum sub leges mitteret orbem(499).

In the famous passage in the sixth book the mission of Rome is summed up,
in contrast to the artistic glories of Greece, in the lines—

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque inponere morem,
Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos(500).

The oracle of Faunus thus announces to Latinus the great future which
awaited the race destined to arise from the union of the Trojans and
Italians:—

Externi venient generi, qui sanguine nostrum
Nomen in astra ferant, quorumque ab stirpe nepotes
Omnia sub pedibus, qua Sol utrumque recurrens
Aspicit Oceanum, vertique regique videbunt(501).

In the ninth book Virgil for once breaks through the impersonal reserve of
the epic singer to claim for Nisus and Euryalus an eternity of fame,—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit(502).

In several of these passages it is not merely the pride of conquest and
dominion which is expressed, but the higher and humaner belief that the
ultimate mission of Rome is to give law and peace to the world. Thus the
initiation of Iulus into war is accompanied by the declaration put into
the mouth of Apollo—

iure omnia bella
Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident(503).

In this way Virgil softens and humanises the idea of the Imperial State,
representing her as not only the conqueror but the civiliser of the
ancient world, and the transmitter of that civilisation to the world of
the future. And while he invests the thought of ancient and powerful
sovereignty with imaginative associations, and describes acts of heroism
with the glow of martial enthusiasm, yet the crowning glory which he
ascribes to the Romans is the piety inherited from their Trojan ancestors.
The final appeasement of the rancour of Juno is secured by the declaration
of Jupiter—

Hinc genus Ausonio mixtum quod sanguine surget,
Supra homines, supra ire deos pietate videbis,
Nec gens ulla tuos aeque celebrabit honores(504).

The national idea of Rome was associated also with the thought of the
divine origin, the great antiquity, the unbroken tradition, and the
eternal duration of the State. Universal empire, uninterrupted continuity
of existence, were the claims of the ancient Imperial as of the modern
Ecclesiastical Rome. And this idea, by the strong hold which it had on the
minds first of the Romans themselves and afterwards of other nations, went
far to realise itself. The confidence of the Romans in themselves was
intimately connected with their belief in their origin. Ennius had
impressed on their minds the belief in the miraculous birth of their
founder and in his miraculous elevation after death, and in the protection
afforded by the ‘augustum augurium’ by which the building of their city
had been consecrated. Among no people did ancient customs and ceremonies,
of which in many cases the origin was altogether forgotten, survive with
such vitality. In no other people did the memory of their past history,
whether of triumph or disaster, exercise so potent an influence on the
present time. In no Republic have the pride of birth and the reverence
felt to ancestors been so powerful and prevailing sentiments: no State has
ever been more loyal to the memory of the men who at successive crises in
its history had served it or saved it from its enemies: and no great
secular power ever felt so strong an assurance of an unbroken ascendency
in the future, and of the dependence of the fate of the world on that
ascendency.

The Aeneid appealed to all these sentiments even with more power than the
epic of the Republic and than the various national histories in which
Roman literature was peculiarly rich. Virgil, while still leaving to his
countrymen the pride of their descent from Mars, made them feel the charm
of their relation to a more gracious divinity, and even the hereditary
claim which they had to regard themselves as special objects of care to
the Supreme Ruler of Heaven(505). The association of their destiny with
the fortunes of Aeneas enabled them to look back to a remoter and more
famous epoch of antiquity than the legends of their origin which had
satisfied the fancy of the older Romans. Various passages in the poem
enable Virgil to invest impressive ceremonies, existing in his own time,
with the associations of an immemorial past. The three great prophetic
passages in the first, sixth, and eighth books enable him to revive, as
Ennius had done, the thought of the great men and families of Rome, and of
the great events both of earlier and more recent history. The march of
Roman conquest during one hundred and fifty momentous years enabled the
younger poet to evoke greater, though in some respects less happy,
memories than those evoked by his predecessor. And the security of the
Empire established in his day justified him in looking forward to the
future with even a more assured confidence, though perhaps in a less
sanguine spirit.

The national sentiment manifesting itself in the pride of empire and
deeply rooted in the past, was combined with strong local attachments and
the attribution of a kind of sanctity to the great natural features of the
land or to spots associated with historic memories which had impressed
themselves on the hearts of successive generations. Virgil was, as we saw
in examining the Georgics, peculiarly susceptible of such impressions.
There is no passage in any ancient writer which makes us feel so vividly
the ‘religio loci’ which has for more than two thousand years invested the
very site of Rome as that in the eighth book of the Aeneid, in which
Evander conducts Aeneas over the ground destined to be occupied by the
temples and dwellings of Rome. The feeling which the sight of the
Capitoline hill and of the Tarpeian rock calls forth is one rather of
religious awe than of any more familiar sentiment. The feeling, on the
other hand, with which the Tiber is introduced—

Caeruleus Thybris, caelo gratissimus amnis—

is one rather of proud affection than of religious veneration. The aspect
of the great city itself awed the imagination rather than called forth the
affections of her citizens. But these affections were given to the rivers
and streams, the lakes, and mountain-homes of Italy. Patriotism in the
Augustan Age was as much an Italian as a Roman sentiment. The military
greatness of Rome was even more identified with the discipline and courage
of the Marsian and Apulian(506) soldier than with that of the Latin
race(507). Her moral greatness is more often identified by the poets with
the virtues of the old Sabellian stock than with those of the ‘populus
Romanus Quiritium.’ While the Georgics celebrate the peaceful glory and
beauty of Italy, the Aeneid evokes the memory of its old warlike renown—

quibus Itala iam tum
Floruerit terra alma viris, quibus arserit armis(508).

The first omen(509) which meets the Trojans on approaching Italy marks it
out as a land ‘mighty in arms’ as well as ‘in the richness of its soil.’
The speech of Remulus in the ninth book identifies the ancient rural life
of Italy with the hardihood and warlike aptitude of the people, as the
Georgics identify it with their virtue and happiness:—

Durum ab stirpe genus natos ad flumina primum
Deferimus saevoque gelu duramus et undis;
Venatu invigilant pueri, silvasque fatigant;
Flectere ludus equos et spicula tendere cornu.
At patiens operum parvoque adsueta iuventus
Aut rastris terram domat, aut quatit oppida bello.
Omne aevum ferro teritur, versaque iuvencum
Terga fatigamus hasta; nec tarda senectus
Debilitat vires animi mutatque vigorem:
Canitiem galea premimus, semperque recentis
Comportare iuvat praedas et vivere rapto(510).

In the account of the gathering of the Italian clans in the seventh book,
and of the Etruscans and the Northern races in the tenth, the warlike
sentiment of the land is appealed to in association with the names of
ancient towns, mountain districts, lakes, and rivers:—

Quique altum Praeneste viri, quique arva Gabinae
Iunonis gelidumque Anienem et roscida rivis
Hernica saxa colunt, quos dives Anagnia pascit,
Quos, Amasene pater(511);

and again:—

Qui Tetricae horrentis rupes montemque Severum
Casperiamque colunt Forulosque et flumen Himellae;
Qui Tiberim Fabarimque bibunt, quos frigida misit
Nursia, et Hortinae classes populique Latini;
Quosque secans infaustum interluit Allia nomen(512);

and also:—

Qui saltus, Tiberine, tuos, sacrumque Numici
Litus arant, Rutulosque exercent vomere collis,
Circaeumque iugum, quis Iuppiter Anxurus arvis
Praesidet et viridi gaudens Feronia luco;
Qua Saturae iacet atra palus, gelidusque per imas
Quaerit iter vallis atque in mare conditur Ufens(513).

This union of patriotic sentiment with the love of Nature and with the
romantic associations of the past, Virgil has in common with the most
distinctively national of the poets of the present century, from whom in
the other characteristics of his art and genius he is widely removed.

The national sentiment to which Virgil and the other contemporary poets
give expression is thus seen to be the sentiment of the Italian race(514).
For two centuries the principal members of that race had looked to Rome as
their chief glory, rather than as their old rival and antagonist. The
thought of Rome as their head had become to the other Italian tribes their
basis of union with one another and the main ground of their self-esteem
in relation to other nations. To that self-esteem and sense of superiority
Virgil was fully alive. He is not altogether free from the narrowness of
national prejudice. He has not the largeness of soul which enables Homer,
while never losing his sense of the superiority of the Greeks over the
Trojans, yet to awaken feelings of admiration and of generous pity for
Hector and Sarpedon, for Priam and Andromache. Yet if Virgil has not this
largeness of soul he has the tenderness of human compassion:—

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt(515).

He might have maintained a stronger sympathy for his hero, and have
gratified a sentiment still fresh in the minds of his countrymen, by
attributing to Dido the shameless licence as well as the dangerous
fascination of Cleopatra; or he might have painted the Carthaginians in
traditional colours of cruelty and treachery, in which Roman writers
represented the most formidable among the enemies of Rome. But Virgil’s
artistic sense or his humaner feeling saved him from this ungenerous
gratification of national prejudice. Yet while more just or tolerant than
other Roman writers to the Carthaginians, and especially to the memory of
their greatest man, he indicates something like antipathy to the Greeks.
The triumph of Rome over her Greek enemies is made prominent in the
announcement of her future glories:—

Veniet lustris labentibus aetas,
Cum domus Assaraci Phthiam clarasque Mycenas
Servitio premet ac victis dominabitur Argis(516);

and again:—

Eruet ille Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas,
Ipsumque Aeaciden, genus armipotentis Achilli(517).

The bitterness of national animosity is especially apparent in his
exhibition of the characters of Ulysses and Helen. The superiority of the
Greeks in the arts and sciences is admitted not without some touch of
scorn (‘credo equidem’) in contrast with the superiority of Rome in the
imperial arts of conquering and governing nations. It may appear strange
that the only race to which Virgil is unjust or ungenerous is the one to
which he himself, in common with all educated Romans, was most deeply
indebted. But it is to be remembered that there was a dramatic propriety
in the expression of this hostility in the mouth of Aeneas and of
Anchises. The championship of the cause of Troy demanded an attitude of
antagonism to her destroyer. The Greek tragedians had themselves set the
example of a degraded representation of two of the most admirable of
Homer’s creations; and Virgil’s mode of conceiving and delineating
character is much nearer to that of Euripides than to that of Homer. The
original error of Helen and the craft in dealing with his enemies, which
is one of many qualities in the versatile humanity of Odysseus, gave to
these later artists the germ, in accordance with which the whole character
was conceived. They did not adequately apprehend that the most interesting
types of nobleness and beauty of character as imagined by the greatest
artists are also the most complex, and the least capable of being squared
with abstract conceptions of vices or virtues. The full truth of Homer’s
delineations of character was apparently not recognised by the most
cultivated of his Roman readers. It is enough for Virgil that Ulysses is
‘fandi fictor,’ as it is for Horace that Achilles is ‘iracundus,
inexorabilis, acer:’ although the worldly wisdom of the last-named poet
makes him comprehend better Homer’s ideal of intelligent than his ideal of
emotional heroism:—

Rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixem(518), etc.

Juvenal exhibits the virulence of national animosity towards the Greeks of
his time, as well as a well-founded scorn of the moral baseness of
character exhibited by many of them. The contempt of Tacitus is shown for
their intellectual frivolity, combined with their assumption of
intellectual superiority (‘qui sua tantum mirantur(519)’) based on the
renown of their ancestors. The deference which Virgil and Horace might pay
to the genius of early Greece was not due to the shadow of that genius as
it existed in their own time. But the contemporary Greek _littérateurs_
were not likely to resign their claim of precedence in favour of their new
rivals. Neither Greek art(520) nor Greek criticism seems ever to have made
any cordial recognition of the literary genius of Italy. The light in
which Virgil represents the Greek character may thus perhaps owe something
to the wish to repay scorn with scorn.

II.

The confidence which the Romans felt in the continued existence of their
Empire and in their superiority over all other nations was closely
connected with their religious feeling and belief(521). Horace has
expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and
conciseness in the single line,

Dis te minorem quod geris imperas(522).

And it was Virgil’s aim in the Aeneid to show that this edifice of Roman
Empire, of which the enterprise of Aeneas was the foundation, on which the
old Kings of Alba and of Rome and the successive generations of great men
under the Republic had successively laboured, and on which Augustus placed
the coping-stone, was no mere work of human hands, but had been designed
and built up by divine purpose and guidance. The Aeneid expresses the
religious as it does the national sentiment of Rome. The two modes of
sentiment were inseparable. The belief of the Romans in themselves was
another form of their absolute faith in the invisible Power which
protected them. This invisible Power was sometimes recognised by them
under the name of ‘Fortuna Urbis,’—the spiritual counterpart of the city
visible to their eyes. The recognition of this divinity was not only
compatible with, but involved the recognition of, many other divinities
associated with it in this protecting office. But to these numerous
divinities no very distinct personality was attached. It was the awe of an
ever-present invisible Power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs,
exacting jealously certain definite observances, capable of being
alienated for a time by any deviation from these observances, and of being
again appeased by a right reading of and humble compliance with its will,
and working out its own purposes through the agency of the Roman arms and
the wisdom of Roman counsels, that was the moving power of Roman religion.
The Jove of the Capitol in early times, the living Emperor under the
Empire, were the visible representatives of this mysterious Power. But its
influence was acknowledged throughout all Roman history in the importance
attached to the great priestly offices, and especially to that of Pontifex
Maximus, which became inseparably united to the office of Emperor; in the
scrupulous regard paid to the auspices through which this Power was
believed to communicate its will; in the ominous interpretation put on all
appearances of departure from the ordinary course of Nature; and in the
reference to the Sibylline books in all questions of difficulty. This
impersonal Power is to the Romans both the object of awe and the source of
their confidence. They seem never to distrust the steadfastness of its
favour. They rather feel themselves its willing instruments, co-operating
with it, blindly sometimes and sometimes remissly, and for every failure
of intelligence or vigilance, punished by temporal calamities.

The word by which Virgil recognises the agency of this impersonal, or
perhaps we should rather say undefined, Power, is ‘Fatum,’ or more often
in the plural, ‘Fata.’ It is by the ‘Fates’ that the action is set in
motion and directed to its issue. The human and even the divine actors in
the story are instruments in their hands; some more, some less conscious
of the part they are performing. Even Jupiter is represented rather as
cognisant of the Fates than as their author. Sometimes indeed they are
spoken of as ‘Fata Iovis;’ and to the assurance given by him to Venus
‘manent immota tuorum Fata tibi,’ he adds the words ‘neque me sententia
vertit(523).’ But again, while his will is suspended in a great crisis of
the action, their operation is persistent and inevitable:—

Rex Iuppiter omnibus idem:
Fata viam invenient(524).

The original relation between this impersonal agency and the deliberate
purpose of Jupiter is left undefined. But there is no collision between
them. While the prayers of men are addressed to a conscious personal
being, ‘Iuppiter omnipotens,’ the sovereignty of an impersonal Power over
the fortunes of nations is acknowledged, as in the line—

Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum(525).

Every reader of the Aeneid must feel the predominance of this idea in the
poem, and the constantly recurring and even monotonous expression of it.
In the first three books, for instance, the word ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ occurs
more than forty times. Aeneas starts on his wanderings ‘fato profugus.’
Juno desires to secure the empire of the world to Carthage ‘Si qua fata
sinant.’ She struggles against the conviction of her powerlessness to
prevent the Trojan settlement in Italy, ‘Quippe vetor fatis.’ Aeneas
comforts his companions by the announcement of the peaceful settlements
awaiting them,—

sedes ubi fata quietas
Ostendunt.

Venus consoles herself for the destruction of Troy by the thought of the
destiny awaiting Aeneas, ‘fatis contraria fata rependens.’ Jupiter
reassures her after the storm with the words ‘manent immota tuorum Fata
tibi;’ and he reveals to her one page in their secret volume,—‘fatorum
arcana movebo.’ Mercury is sent to prepare the reception of Aeneas in
Carthage,

ne fati nescia Dido
Finibus arceret.

Aeneas describes himself as starting from Troy ‘data fata secutus.’ A
hundred more instances might be given of the dominating influence of this
idea in the poem. It is the ‘common-place’ of the Virgilian epic. While it
adds impressiveness to the historical significance of the poem, it
detracts largely from the personal interest by the limits which it imposes
on the free agency of the divine and human actors playing their part in
it.

The same idea is often expressed by Tacitus, but it does not in him
dominate so absolutely over human will, nor is it asserted with the same
firmness of conviction. His conception of the regulating power over all
human, or at least over all national existence, seems to waver between
this idea of some unknown power steadily working out its purpose, of an
element in human affairs baffling all calculation—the παράλογος of
Thucydides and the ‘Fortuna saevo laeta negotio’ of Horace—and of the gods
generally as personal avengers of crime, and sometimes as the kind
protectors of the State. Thus in the Germania(526) the earliest foreboding
of the danger which threatened and ultimately overthrew the fabric of the
Empire is indicated in the words ‘urgentibus imperii fatis:’ in the
Agricola the result of the invasion of Britain under Claudius is summed up
in the words ‘domitae gentes, capti reges, et monstratus fatis
Vespasianus(527):’ in the Histories the grounds of confidence on the part
of the Vespasians in taking arms against the Vitellians are summed up in
the words ‘dux Mucianus et Vespasiani nomen ac nihil arduum fatis(528).’
But elsewhere he speaks of ‘ludibria rerum humanarum(529),’ in language
reminding us of Lucretius, and, in almost the very words of Horace, of
‘instabilis fortunae summaque et ima miscentis(530).’ Like Horace, he
seems to acknowledge the supremacy of chance or an ironical spirit over
individual fortunes, and, like Virgil, that of Fate over the national
destiny. But in the Annals, his latest work, he seems to incline more to
the belief in the personal agency of the gods, and especially in their
agency as the avengers of guilt. Thus he opens the passage of the deepest
tragic gloom in all his sombre record with the words, ‘Noctem sideribus
illustrem quasi convincendum ad scelus dii praebuere(531).’ So too he
speaks of appealing to the ‘avenging gods(532);’ and of the ‘fear of the
wrath of heaven(533).’ Occasionally indeed he speaks of ‘the kindness of
the gods(534),’ but more often of their wrath or their indifference. Thus
he attributes the ascendency of Sejanus not to any superior ability on his
own part, but to ‘the wrath of the gods against the Roman
commonwealth(535);’ and, in recounting a number of omens which followed on
the murder of Agrippina, he makes the sarcastic comment, ‘quae adeo sine
cura deum eveniebant, ut multos post annos Nero imperium et scelera
continuaverit(536).’ In a writer like Tacitus it is impossible to
distinguish with certainty between the pure expression of his convictions
and the rhetorical and poetical colouring of his style. Yet both the
frequency with which such passages recur, and the earnestness of their
tone even when they seem most ironical, leave no doubt that, like
Thucydides, he was not indifferent to these questions, although ‘perplexed
in the extreme’ by the apparent absence, or at least uncertainty, of any
steadfast moral order in the award of happiness and calamity to men.

The ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ of Virgil can scarcely be said to act with the aim
of establishing right in the world, or of punishing wrong. Their action is
purely political, neither ethical, though its ultimate tendency is
beneficent, nor personal. Yet in the prominence which is given to this
determining element in national affairs Virgil is expressing the strongest
and most abiding belief of the Roman people, just as the Greek poets and
historians of the fifth century B.C., in the prominence they give to the
element of uncertainty in the world,—the irony in human affairs, or the
Nemesis of the gods excited against great prosperity even when not misused
or gained by crime,—expressed the dominant idea in the minds of their
contemporaries. Mr. Grote traces the origin of this last idea to the
experience of the rapid vicissitudes from one extreme of fortune to the
other, brought about by the great prosperity of the Greek states on the
one hand and their incessant wars and political feuds on the other. The
origin of the other idea is to be found in the almost unbroken success of
Rome in all her enterprises, from the burning of the city by the Gauls
till the full establishment of empire. There is no history in which chance
plays so small a part, and in which so little is episodical. The ‘good
fortune of the Roman people’ will be found to be explained either by the
traditional policy of never making a new enemy until they had well
disposed of the old, or by the magnanimity (as compared at least with the
policy of other States(537)) by which they converted the nations
successively conquered by them into fellow-citizens or obedient allies, or
by the indomitable resolution which never knew to yield to defeat. No
important event in their history is isolated; each serves as a link in the
chain which connects their past with their future. The unvarying result of
their national discipline and policy, and of the force accumulated through
centuries before they became corrupted by the gains of conquest, might
well appear to a race, gifted with little speculative capacity, to be
determined and accomplished by an Omnipotent Power behind them.

This idea determines the general conduct of the action in the Aeneid. The
actors in the story either oppose the irresistible tendency of things and
suffer defeat or perish in their resistance; or, with gradually increasing
knowledge, they co-operate with and become the instruments of this
tendency. And as it is by faith in the divine assistance and guidance that
the latter are able to act their part successfully, the religious motives
of the representation assume a prominence at least equal to that of its
national and political motives. Thus the object of all the hero’s
wanderings is not only to found a city, but to introduce a new worship
into Italy—‘inferretque deos Latio.’ When Hector appears to Aeneas in a
vision he commits into his care the sacred symbols and images of Troy with
the words

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates,
Hos cape _fatorum comites_(538).

Aeneas is represented as starting on his enterprise

Cum sociis gnatoque, _Penatibus et magnis Dis_(539);

as his descendant is represented in the enterprise which is crowned with
the victory of Actium(540). Finally, in the treaty with Latinus, while the
secular and imperial power is left with the Italians, the religious
predominance is claimed for Aeneas,—

Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinus habeto,
Imperium sollemne socer(541).

The influence of the religious idea of the poem is seen also in the
leading characteristic of the hero—‘insignem pietate virum.’ His piety
appears in the faith which he has in his mission, and in the trust which
he has in divine guidance. Prayer is his first resource in all
emergencies; sacrifice and thanksgiving are the accompaniments of all his
escapes from danger and difficulty. This characteristic deprives the
representation of Aeneas of the interest springing from energetic resource
or spontaneous feeling. But as much as the character loses in human
interest, it gains in the impression produced of a fitting instrument to
carry out the purpose of a Power working secretly for a distant end.

The effect of the same idea is apparent in the way in which the action is
furthered by special revelations, visions, prophecies, omens, and the
like. These intimations of the future are, for the most part, altogether
of an unpoetical and unimaginative character. The omens by which the Fates
make their will known, such as the omen of the cakes and of the white sow
with her litter, are, like those that occur so often in the pages of Livy,
of an essentially prosaic type: not like those in Homer, striking sights
or sounds acting on the imagination with the force of divine warning.
Occasionally Virgil’s own invention, or perhaps the guidance of some Greek
predecessor, suggests signs of a less trivial significance—such as that of
the meteor or line of light marking out the way from the burning city to
Mount Ida—

Illam, summa super labentem culmina tecti,
Cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva,
Signantemque vias(542);

but for the most part the formal, superstitious, prosaic element in the
Roman religion—the same element which made their generals before some
decisive battle allow themselves to draw their auguries from the mode in
which chickens ate their food,—is present in the religious guidance of the
action. The Roman belief in the supernatural was arrested and stunted at a
primitive stage of religious development. So far from elevating the
thought and enlarging the imagination, that belief tended to repress all
speculation, lofty contemplation, and poetry. Even Virgil’s idealising art
fails to conceal the triviality of the media through which the invisible
Power made its will and purpose manifest.

The mythological machinery of the poem also, although borrowed from the
repertory of Homer, yet moves in obedience to this silent, impersonal,
uncapricious Power. Juno endeavours to strive against it, till forced to
confess her impotence. Venus by her intrigues serves to further its
purposes. Yet both these Olympian divinities are but puppets ‘in some
unknown Power’s employ,’ which makes for its own end alike through their
furtherance and antagonism. The gods who take part in the action are of
Greek invention, but the Power which even they are obliged to obey, if not
Roman in original conception, is yet essentially Roman in significance.

This thought of an unseen Power, working by means of omens and miracles on
the mind of the hero of the poem, with the distant aim of establishing
universal empire in the hands of a people, obedient to divine will and
observant of all religious ceremonies, may be said to be the theological
or speculative idea of the poem. It is the doctrine of predestination in
its hardest form. It is a thought much inferior both in intellectual
subtlety and in ethical value to that of the Fate of Greek tragedy in
conflict with human will. Yet there is a kind of material force and
greatness in Virgil’s conception, and a consistency not with ideal truth
but with visible facts. The ideal truth of Sophocles—the idea of final
purification and reconcilement of a noble human nature with the divine
nature—is not manifest in the world: it is only in harmony with the best
hopes and aspirations of men. Virgil’s idea was the shadow of the great
fact apparent in his age,—the vast, inevitable, omnipotent, unsympathetic
power of the Roman empire.

But there is another personal and humane religious element, not so
prominent and not so influential on the action, but pervading the poem
like an atmosphere, purifying it, and making it luminous with the light of
a higher region. This is the element of religious faith or hope, personal
to Virgil and yet catholic in its significance, and in harmony with the
convictions of religious men of all times. The rigid, formal, and narrow
conceptions of the Roman religion came into collision both with the belief
in gods of like passions with men, revealed in the art and poetry of the
Greeks, and with the development of ethical feeling and especially of the
sentiment of humanity fostered by Greek philosophy. Virgil’s temperament,
patriotic, imaginative, and humane, was in accord with all these modes of
religious conception. If national destiny and some portions of the destiny
of individuals are shaped by an inflexible power—

Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando(543),—

yet the personal agency of Beings, in immediate relation with man, who are
not only ‘mindful of the righteous and unrighteous(544),’ but who also
‘pios respectant,’ is devoutly acknowledged—

Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam iustitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
Praemia digna ferant(545).

Their relation to man is expressed by the same word, _pietas_, which
expresses man’s relation to them—

Iuppiter omnipotens, si nondum exosus ad unum
Troianos, si quid pietas antiqua labores
Respicit humanos(546).

They are, like the gods of Tacitus, avengers of wrong as well as rewarders
of righteousness: but their avenging wrath against the strong springs from
their mercy to the weak—

Di, si qua est caelo pietas, quae talia curet,
Persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant
Debita, qui nati coram me cernere letum
Fecisti et patrios foedasti funere voltus(547).

This close personal relation between men and an invisible Being or Beings,
like to man in feelings and moral attributes, but infinitely greater in
power and knowledge, exists in the Aeneid side by side with the doctrine
of the omnipotence of Fate, crushing, if necessary, human wishes and human
happiness under its iron determinations. But in the final award of
happiness or misery after death, revealed in the sixth book, the agency of
Fate gives place to that of a moral dispensation awarding to men their
portions according to their actions. The way in which Virgil indicates his
belief in the spiritual life after death is analogous to, as well as
suggested by, the myths in the Gorgias and in the tenth book of the
Republic of Plato. While there is a certain vagueness and uncertainty in
his view of the condition in which the souls of ordinary men pass the
thousand years of purification before drinking of the waters of Lethe and
entering again on a mortal life, the class of sinners to whom eternal
punishment is awarded, and that of holy men who dwell for ever in Elysium,
are indicated with great definiteness and beauty. In the first class are
those whom the old Roman world regarded as impious or unnatural,—those who
have violated the primal sanctities of life, who have dealt treacherously
with a client or the master of their household, who have risen in
rebellion against their country, who have sacrificed their human
affections and their duty as citizens to their greed of grain—

Hic, quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat,
Pulsatusve parens et fraus innexa clienti;
Aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis,
Nec partem posuere suis, quae maxima turba est;
Quique ob adulterium caesi, quique arma secuti
Impia, nec veriti dominorum fallere dextras,
Inclusi poenam expectant....
* * * * *
Vendidit hic auro patriam, dominumque potentem
Imposuit: fixit leges pretio atque refixit:
Hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos:
Ausi omnes immane nefas ausoque potiti(548).

In the other class are those who have died in battle for their native
land, who have lived pure and holy lives as priests or poets, who have
served mankind by great discoveries, or have left memorials of themselves
in good deeds done to their fellow-men—

Hic manus, ob patriam pugnando volnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,
Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,
Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo(549).

III.

The imperial and the religious ideas of Rome, as embodied in the Aeneid,
find their fullest realisation in the position assigned to Augustus. The
pride of empire, the loyalty to the State, the religious trust, which in
the age of Ennius attached themselves to the ‘Respublica Romana,’ found,
in the age of Virgil, a new centre of attraction in the person of the
Emperor. A poem, which should express the dominant idea and sentiment of
that age, could not fail to bring into prominence the change through which
the government not of Rome only but of the whole civilised world was then
passing. The relations of the great poets of the time to the men at the
head of affairs made them the fittest exponents of this new tendency. They
used their art with the view of giving to public sentiment a permanent
direction in favour of the new order of things. The political object of
glorifying the personal rule of Augustus and of surrounding it with the
halo of a divine sanction associated itself with the artistic, the
patriotic, and the religious objects of Virgil. And although the excess of
eulogy and some modes of its manifestation offend the modern, as they
would have offended a more ancient sentiment of personal dignity, there is
no reason to question the disinterested sincerity of Virgil’s panegyric.
The permanence of the change introduced by Augustus attests the fact that
his policy not only kindled the enthusiasm of the moment, but met the most
deeply-felt needs of the world. And though his personal qualities and the
great things accomplished by him do not touch the imagination or awaken
the sentiment of admiration in modern times, like those of his immediate
predecessor in power, yet he was pre-eminently the man suited to his age,
as an age of restoration and re-organisation, and he was pre-eminently a
Roman of the Romans. The great C. Julius, in his genius and qualities,
‘towers’ not only above his own nation but, ‘like Hannibal, above all
nations.’ The perfect success of Augustus was due to the fact not only
that he was the man wanted by his epoch, but that he was the complete
embodiment of the great practical talents and character of Rome. He not
only monopolised in his own person all the chief functions, but in his
administration he displayed all the best and most varied capacities of the
Roman magistracy. In his government and in his legislation he exercised
the influence formerly exercised by Censor and Chief of the Senate, by
Consul and Proconsul, by Praetor and Aedile. To the aptitudes for these
various duties he added those that fitted him at least to fill the place
of ‘Imperator’ at the head of the Roman armies, and to give new importance
and efficacy to the office of Pontifex Maximus. He possessed also in a
remarkable degree the personal qualities of industry, vigilance, practical
sagacity, authority, dignity, and urbanity, which are of most importance
in the government of men. If his character falls below both the ancient
and the modern ideal of heroism, it is thoroughly conformable to a Roman
ideal of practical power and usefulness. He is the representative man of
the brighter side of Roman imperialism, as Tiberius (till his final
retirement from Rome),—in his strength of body and mind, his military and
administrative capacity, his unrelieved application to business(550), his
unsympathetic impartiality, his suspicious and ruthless policy in
suppressing opposition, his callous indifference to suffering,—is of its
more sombre side. It is a great enhancement of the representative
character of Virgil’s national epic, that it is associated with the name
and acts of one who was not only the founder, but was the most typical
embodiment of the Roman empire.

Although the choice of the subject of the Aeneid was determined, in a
great measure, by its adaptability to the personal and political object of
Virgil, no attempt is made to exhibit either the character or the actions
of Aeneas as symbolical of those of Augustus. Still less are we to look
for any modern parallels to the other personages of the poem, such as
Turnus or Dido, Latinus or Lavinia, Drances or Achates. Yet the position
assigned to Aeneas, as a fatherly ruler over his people, their chief in
battle, their law-giver in peace, and their high-priest in all spiritual
relations, may have been intended as a kind of symbol of the new monarchy.
The Roman imagination acknowledged two ideals of a ruler of men,—the ideal
of a Romulus and that of a Numa. In Aeneas both are combined with the
characteristics of a new ideal which rather anticipated a future, than
reproduced any older type of character. Augustus too might be regarded as
at once the Romulus and the Numa of the new empire; and thus the parts
played by Aeneas, as chief in battle and legislator in peace(551), might
be regarded as a kind of foreshadowing of those which were afterwards
played by Augustus on the real stage of human affairs. But it would be no
compliment either to the intellectual power of Augustus or to the
discernment of Virgil, to suppose that the personal attributes of Aeneas
were intended to have any resemblance to the strong and self-reliant
character of the Emperor. The relation to Aeneas adds to the personal
glory of Augustus by the ancestral distinction thus conferred upon him,—a
distinction at all times highly prized among the Romans, and especially
prized by the Caesars as helping to reconcile a proud aristocracy to their
ascendency. In the immediate successors of Augustus, the obscurity of the
Octavii and Atii was forgotten in the combined lustre of the Julian and
Claudian families. And on one of those occasions, in which the sentiment
of family pride was most powerfully appealed to,—the funeral of Drusus,
son of Tiberius,—we read in Tacitus—‘funus imaginum pompa maxime inlustre
fuit, cum origo Iuliae gentis Aeneas omnesque Albanorum reges, et conditor
urbis Romulus, post Sabina nobilitas, Attus Clausus, ceteraeque Claudiorum
effigies, longo ordine spectarentur(552).’ In thus throwing the halo both
of a remote antiquity and of a divine ancestry around Augustus, Virgil
helped to recommend his rule to the sentiment of his countrymen.

In seeking to enhance the greatness of a living ruler by associating him
with the actions of a remote legendary ancestor, the panegyric of Virgil
does not transcend the limits which Pindar allows himself in evoking the
mythical glories of the past in honour of his patrons. But Virgil seeks to
establish a closer connexion between the past and the present, than that
established by Pindar. The connexion between the living man, who wins a
victory in the games, and his heroic ancestor, is adduced as a proof of
the inheritance by the descendant of the personal qualities which first
gave distinction to his race. But the connexion between Aeneas and
Augustus is the connexion between means and end. The actions of Aeneas are
not held up as a mere example which his descendant might emulate: they are
the first links in the long chain of events which reached from the siege
of Troy to the victory of Actium and the establishment of the empire. The
distant vision of the glory awaiting the greatest of his descendants is,
more than any immediate or personal end, the motive which animates both
the divine and human actors in the enterprise. It is after a vivid picture
of the martial and peaceful glories of the Augustan reign that the
stirring appeal is made—

Et dubitamus adhuc virtutem extendere factis,
Aut metus Ausonia prohibet consistere terra(553)?

The means through which the vision of this distant future is revealed, are
the voice of Jove himself in unfolding the volume of the fates to Venus,
that of the beatified shade of Anchises in exhibiting the spectacle of his
unborn descendants to Aeneas, and the art of Vulcan in framing the ‘fabric
of the shield surpassing all description.’

The glory attributed to Augustus in the shield of Aeneas is that of a
great warrior and conqueror, the champion, not, like C. Julius, of the
popular against the aristocratic party in the State, of the Provinces
against the Senate, but of the nation against its old enemies, the
monarchies of the East. He appears as celebrating a mighty triumph, and
dedicating three hundred temples to the gods of Italy in thankful
acknowledgment of his victory. The glory announced in the prophecy of
Jupiter is that of the establishment by Augustus of an Empire of Peace, as
the completion of his warlike triumph—

Aspera tum positis mitescent saecula bellis:
Cana Fides et Vesta, Remo cum fratre Quirinus
Iura dabunt(554).

And in the revelation of Anchises, Augustus is spoken of as—

Augustus Caesar, Divi genus: aurea condet
Saecula qui rursus Latio, regnata per arva
Saturno quondam(555).

He is there proclaimed to be greater in the extent of his conquests and
civilising labours than Hercules and Bacchus. And, though less prominently
than in the Invocation to the Georgics, divine honours and the function of
answering prayer are promised to him by the mouth of Jupiter—

Hunc tu olim caelo, spoliis Orientis onustum,
Accipies secura: vocabitur hic quoque votis(556).

The personal figure of the Emperor is thus encompassed with the halo of
military glory, of beneficent action on the world, of a divine sanction,
and of an ultimate heritage of divine honours.

The Aeneid considered as a representative work of genius is thus seen to
be the expression or embodiment of an idea of powerful meaning for the age
in which the poem was written, for the centuries immediately succeeding
that age, and, through the action of historical associations, for all
times. As the great poem of Dante gained both immediate and permanent
attention by the human interest which it imparted to the spiritual idea on
which mediaeval Europe based its life; as the inspiration of Milton’s
great Epic was drawn from his passionate sympathy with the intensest form
of religious and political life in his age; so the quality of Virgil’s
genius which secured for him the most immediate and the most lasting
consideration was his sympathetic comprehension of the imperial idea of
Rome in its secular, religious, and personal significance. This idea he
has ennobled with the associations of a divine origin and of a divine
sanction; of a remote antiquity and an unbroken continuity of great deeds
and great men; of the pomp and pride of war, and of the majesty of
government: and he has softened and humanised the impression thus produced
by the thought of peace, law, and order given to the world. In his stately
diction we are reminded only of the power, glory, majesty, and civilising
influence with which the idea of Rome is encompassed. There is nothing to
obtrude the thought of the spirit, in which life, freedom, and
individuality were crushed out of the world. And this idea, of which
Virgil’s poem is the glorified representation, was one actually realised,
one which influenced the lives of generations of men, and which was an
important element in moulding the whole subsequent history of the world.
Yet the idea is one more adapted to be the inspiring influence of a great
historical work, like the national history of Livy, or ‘The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire,’ than of a great poem, which must satisfy the
human and moral sympathies of men as well as their sense of power.
Material greatness and civilisation, and the qualities of mind and
character through which these effects are produced, exercise a great spell
over the imagination and the masculine sympathies of the world. But the
highest art does more than this—it enlarges man’s sense of a spiritual
life, it purifies his notions of happiness, it deepens his conviction of a
righteous government of the world. Through the imagination it speaks to
the soul. The idea of imperial Rome is rather that of the enemy than of
the promoter of the spiritual life or of individual happiness: it
impresses on the mind the thought of a vast and orderly, but not of a
moral and humane government. The idea of the Roman Republic, as it shines
through the rude fragments of the Annals of Ennius in such utterances as
these—

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque(557),—

is suggestive of a nobler energy of character, of more abundant public and
private virtue, than the idea pervading and animating the polished verse
of the Aeneid. The thought of the Rome of Ennius is associated in our
minds with the free political life of the Forum and the Campus Martius,
and with the grave deliberations of the Senate, as well as with the
exercise of military force and administrative sovereignty. The idea of
Italy pervading the Georgics has everything to attract and nothing to
repel our sympathies: and thus notwithstanding the inferior opportunities
for awakening human interest which necessarily attach to a didactic when
compared with an epic poem, the charm exercised by that poem is more
unmixed and unchanging than that of the poem which evokes the proud
memories of the Capitol. In the Aeneid, Virgil is really the panegyrist of
despotism under the delusive disguise of paternal government. In so far as
there is any conflict between right and wrong in the Aeneid, the wrong
appears to be the ‘victrix causa’ ‘which pleases the gods.’ The religious
idea of the Fates is invested with none of the ethical mystery with which
the analogous idea in Greek poetry is invested. They act in a hard, plain,
arbitrary way, irrespective of right and wrong, regardless of personal
happiness or suffering. The actors in the poem who move our sympathies are
those who perish in blind resistance to, or blind compliance with, their
decrees—Dido, Pallas, Turnus, and Lausus. The opposition between natural
human feeling and the ‘divom inclementia’ is reverently accepted and
acquiesced in by Virgil in the person of his hero.

The conclusion at which we arrive as to the value of the Aeneid as an epic
poem representative of the Roman Empire, is that Virgil has given a true,
adequate, and noble expression to an idea which actually has exercised a
greater spell over the imagination and a greater influence over the daily
lives of men, than any other which owed its origin to their secular
interests: but that this idea, regarded from its political, religious, and
personal side, is one which does not touch the heart, or enlighten the
conscience: and this is an important drawback to the claim which the
Aeneid may have to the highest rank as a work of art.

CHAPTER XI.

THE AENEID AS AN EPIC POEM OF HUMAN LIFE.

The national, religious, and political ideas which form the central
interest of the poem have been considered in the previous chapter. We have
seen how Virgil was moved by an impulse similar to that which acted on
Ennius in a ruder age, and in what way he strove to express the meaning
which the idea of Rome has for all times, and to find an adequate symbol
of the dominant sentiment of his own time. It remains to consider how far
the poem sustains by its command over our sympathies the interest thus
established in its favour; and to ascertain what value the Aeneid, as a
poem of action, unfolding a spectacle of human life, manners, character,
and passion, possessed for the Romans and still possesses for ourselves.

The action of the poem, apart from its bearing on the destinies of the
world, has a grandeur and dignity of its own. It is enacted on a great
theatre, developes itself by incidents giving free play to the highest
modes of human energy and passion, and through the agency of personages
already renowned in legend and poetry. In that mythical age which the poet
recalls to life no spectacle could be imagined more deserving to fix the
attention of the world than the fall of Troy, the building of Carthage,
and the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome. Whatever else may be
said of the personages of the story, they are conceived of as playing no
common part in human affairs. In following their fortunes we breathe the
air of that high poetic region which forms the undetermined border-land
between mythology and history. We look back on the ruined state of the
greatest city of legendary times, and we mark the first beginnings of the
two Imperial cities which in historical times disputed the empire of the
world. The poem evokes the associations, ancient and recent, attaching to
the various scenes through which the action passes,—Troy, Carthage,
Sicily, the shores of Latium, the Tiber, and the hills on which Rome was
built. The vagueness of the time in which the action is laid enables the
poet to connect together, in a most critical position of human affairs,
the fortunes of the chief powers of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The spheres
of man’s activity in which the action moves—war and sea-adventure in
search of undiscovered lands—give the fullest scope to energetic
representation. In his conception of the voyage of Aeneas and of a great
war determining the issue of his enterprise, Virgil followed the greatest
epic examples, and found a subject to which he could impart the interest
of adventurous incident and heroic achievement. In his conception of the
part played in the action by the passion of love, he introduced a more
familiar and modern phase of life which the examples of the Greek
tragedians and of the Alexandrine epic had proved to be capable of
idealising treatment.

The actors moreover who play their part in these critical events are not
‘common or mean.’ The crisis is conceived of as one so momentous, from the
issues involved in it, as to call forth the passions and the energies of
the old Olympian Powers. But even the human personages of the story appear
with a prestige of glory and sanctity, and yet are sufficiently unfamiliar
to excite new expectations. Aeneas, as the son of a mightier goddess(558),
is distinguished in the Iliad by the honours of a higher lineage than
Achilles. He is brave in war, the comrade of Hector, a hero deemed worthy
to encounter Achilles himself as well as Diomede in battle. He is
especially dear to the gods, and is marked out by prophecy as destined to
bear, and transmit to his descendants, the rule over the remnant of the
Trojans. To Anchises attaches the sanctity of one enjoying a closer
communion with the immortals, of one at once favoured and afflicted above
others, and elevated, like Oedipus, out of weakness and suffering here,
into honour and influence beyond the grave. Iulus receives a reflected
glory from the transcendent greatness of the Julian house. Dido or Elissa
was a name famous in Phoenician legend, and associated with the ancient
renown of Tyre. Evander is illustrious from his Arcadian origin, from his
relation to Hercules, from the fame of his mother as one of the Italian
Camenae. Even the mere ethnical names of Latinus and Turnus receive
individuality by being introduced in the line of old Italian dynasties,
and in direct connexion with Faunus, Picus, and other beings of the native
mythology.

It may therefore be said that in the choice of the time and the scenes in
which his action is laid, in the character of the action itself, and in
the eminence of the personages taking part in it, Virgil fulfils all the
conditions of his art which reflexion on the models of the past and on the
circumstances in life most capable of interesting the imagination could
teach him. The care with which he prepared himself for his task is as
remarkable as the judgment with which he conceived its main conditions.
The conduct of his story shows the most intimate familiarity with the
incidents and adventures contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Cyclic
poems and the dramas founded on them, in the Homeric hymns and the
Alexandrine epic. It shows how Virgil so combines and varies the details
thus suggested, as to recall many features of the Homeric age, and at the
same time to produce the impression of something new in literary art. The
revived image of that age must have affected the contemporaries of the
poet in a manner different from its effect on us. To us both the Iliad and
the Aeneid are ancient and unfamiliar: the one comes before us as an
original picture of manners, the other as a copy taken in a long
subsequent age. But to a Roman of the time of Augustus the life of the
Homeric age must have appeared almost as remote as it does to us. The
direct imitations of Homer in the Aeneid might produce on his mind the
same mixed impression of novelty and familiarity which is produced on a
modern reader by the reproduction and recasting of the doctrines,
incidents, and language of the Bible in the two epic poems of Milton. The
fascination of this world of supernatural agency and personal adventure,
brought home to him for the first time in the most elevated tones of his
own language, may have charmed the Roman reader in the same way as the
revival of mediaeval romance in the literary languages of modern Europe
charmed the readers of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first
part of the nineteenth centuries. And if such were the first impressions
produced by the poem, a closer examination of it must have shown that the
imagination of Virgil had out of ancient materials built up something new
in the world. If his representation of the heroic age wants the vivid
truth and _naïveté_ of Homer’s representation, yet it is impressive with
the dignity of antique associations, and rich with the colouring of his
own human sensibilities.

But the Aeneid not only revives the romance of the Greek heroic age: it
creates the romance of ‘that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus,
and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.’ It bestows the colour and warmth of
human life on dim traditions, on vague names, on the memories of early
warfare clinging to ancient towns, and on the origins of immemorial
customs and ceremonies. The task of giving poetic life to the dry prose of
Cato, to the dust of antiquarian learning, and to the rigid formalism of
the old Roman ceremonial must have taxed the poet’s powers more than that
of reawakening the interest in the old Homeric life. Virgil accomplishes
this result through his power of living at the same time in the past and
in the present; of feeling powerfully the associations of a remote
antiquity, and the immediate action of all that was most impressive to
thought and imagination in the age in which he lived.

The earlier works of Virgil had proved his strength in descriptive and
didactic poetry, and in the expression of personal feeling, of national
sentiment, and of ethical contemplation; but they had given no indication
of epic, and little of dramatic genius. Although the episode of the
‘Pastor Aristaeus’ is a specimen of succinct, animated, and pathetic
narrative, it must be remembered that this was a late addition to the
Georgics, and was probably written after considerable way had been made in
the composition of the Aeneid. An epic poet, over and above his purely
poetic susceptibility, must possess the art and faculty of a prose
historian. Homer has in an unequalled degree the clearness, vividness, and
movement in telling his story, which characterise such writers as
Herodotus. The account given of Virgil’s mode of composition proves that
he took great pains both with the plan and the execution of his narrative.
He is said to have arranged the first draught of his story in prose, and
then to have worked on the various parts of it as they interested him at
the time of composition. There are clear indications that the books were
not written in the order in which they stand; and a few inconsistencies of
statement between the earlier and later books were left uncorrected at the
time of the author’s death. The poem, in the careful arrangement of its
materials, bears the stamp of the manner in which it was composed. Like
that of every other great Roman, the genius of Virgil was thoroughly
orderly and systematic. But along with the power of order Virgil had what
many Roman writers want, the power of variety. The narrative of the Aeneid
is full of movement, succinct or ample according to the prominence
intended to be given to its different parts. The various streams of action
are kept separate, yet not too far apart to cause any confusion or
forgetfulness when the time comes to unite them. There is at once weight
and energy in the movement of the main current: it neither hurries nor
flags, but advances for the most part steadily, ‘quadam intentione
gravitatis.’ If it wants the buoyancy and vivacity of the narrative of
Herodotus, it shows the concentrated energy which distinguishes the works
of the great Roman historians. It brings before us rather a series of
grave events, bearing on a great issue and following an inevitable course,
than the vicissitudes of individual fortunes and the play of human
passions and impulses: and in this it is in accordance both with the
actual history of Rome, and with the record of it contained in literature.

Virgil cannot be said to have failed either in the conception of his
subject, in the collection and preparation of his materials, or in the art
and faculty demanded for impressive narrative. Yet all feel that the
Aeneid is much inferior to the Homeric poems in natural human interest, as
it is much inferior in reflective interest to the greatest extant dramas
of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poem, as a whole, produces the impression
rather of careful construction than of organic growth. The reflexion
employed on it is rather that of a critic applying artistic principles to
impart unity to many heterogeneous materials, than that of an imaginative
thinker, seeing his story unfold itself before him in the light of some
great intuition into the secret meanings of life.

His inferiority to Homer in the power of making his story at once vividly
real and nobly ideal arises partly from an inferiority in his own temper,
and partly from the inferior adaptability of the life of his own age to
imaginative treatment. There is no trace in Virgil of that keen enjoyment
of personal adventure and bodily activity which is present in every page
of the Homeric poems. Virgil’s materials are gathered from study and
reflexion, not from strong and many-sided contact with life. Though he
writes of ‘arma virumque’ with a Roman sense of the duty of disregarding
danger and death, he has none of the ‘delight of battle’ which animates
the Iliad and the poetical and prose romances of Scott. Neither does he
make us feel that elevation of spirit in the presence of the danger of the
sea, which the author of the Odyssey among ancient, and Byron among modern
poets, communicate to their readers.

But the vast difference in manners, feelings, and modes of thought,
between an early and a late age—between the spring and the autumn of
ancient civilisation—presented still more insuperable obstacles to Virgil
in his attempt to accomplish the work of Homer. In the first period
imagination is the ruling faculty of life, the great impeller to action
and discovery, the chief prompter both of hope and fear: and thus the
movement and impulses of such an age readily yield themselves to
imaginative treatment. Poets and dramatists of a later time who desire to
represent life in its most energetic phase endeavour to reproduce some
image of this early time by a constructive act of imagination. A dramatist
may take the mere outline of some ancient legend and fill it with modern
thought and sentiment. He is not called on for that realistic reproduction
of manners and usages which an epic poet is expected to exhibit on his
larger canvas. The difficulty which the latter has to meet is that of
verifying by anything in his own experience the impression which he forms
from the study of ancient art and records. Homer alone, by living the
imaginative life of an earlier time, was able to represent that life in
its truth, its fulness of being, its vivid sense of pleasure and pain. The
age mirrored in the Homeric poems is the true age of romance and personal
enterprise, when the individual acquires ascendency through his own
qualities of strength, beauty, courage, force of mind, natural eloquence;
when the world is regarded as the scene of supernatural agencies
manifesting themselves in visible shape; when men live more in the open
air than in houses and cities, and have to procure subsistence, comfort,
and security by energy of body and the inventive resources of their minds;
and when their hearts are alive to every natural emotion, not deadened by
routine or enervated by excess of pleasure. Hence it is that all Homer’s
accounts of war and battles, of sea-adventure, of debates in the council
of chiefs or in the assemblies of the people, of games and contests of
strength, are so full of living interest. Hence too comes the vivacity
with which all the details of procuring food, the enjoyment of eating and
drinking and sinking to sleep, the arming or clothing of heroes, the
management of a ship at sea, the ordinary occupations of the hunter or the
herdsman are described. To the same cause is due the truth and
appropriateness of all the descriptions from Nature,—of the dawn and
sunrise, of storms, of the gathering of clouds, of the constellations, of
the stillness of night, of the habits of wild animals, of the more violent
forces of the elements, of the omens which suddenly appear to men engaged
in battle or assembled in council in the open air and awaiting a sign for
their guidance.

An image of this Homeric life Virgil has to reproduce from the midst of a
state of society utterly unlike it. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an
age of order and material civilisation, in which great results were
produced, not by individual force, but by masses and combinations of men
directed by political sagacity and secret council; in which the life of
the richer class was passed in great cities and luxurious villas; in which
the comforts of life were abundantly supplied through the organisation of
commerce and the ministrations of a multitude of slaves(559); in which the
outward world was enjoyed as a beautiful spectacle rather than as a field
of active exertion and personal adventure; in which the belief in the
supernatural was fixed in imposing outward symbols, but was no longer a
fresh source of wonder and expectation; an age too, in which the natural
emotions of the heart and imagination were becoming deadened by satiety
and the ‘strenua inertia’ of luxurious living.

The art of Virgil is thus powerless to produce a true image of the life
and manners of the Homeric age. Yet he does surround the actors in his
story with an environment of religious belief and observances, of
political and social life, of material civilisation, of martial movement
and sea-adventure, formed partly out of his poetical and antiquarian
studies, partly out of the familiar spectacle of his own age, partly out
of his personal sympathies and convictions. And this representation,
though it necessarily wants the vital freshness and vigour of Homer’s
representation, has a peculiar dignity and charm of its own. It must be
accepted as an artistic compromise, and not as the idealised picture of
any life that has ever been realised in the world. It is one of the
earliest and most interesting products of that kind of imagination which
has in modern times created the literature of romance(560). The work in
English poetry which comes most near to the Aeneid in the union of modern
ethical and political feeling with the spectacle of the martial life and
the ideas of the supernatural belonging to a much earlier time, is ‘The
Faery Queen(561):’ though the allegorical meaning of that poem is as
different as possible from the solid basis of fact—the marvellous career
of Rome—on which the Aeneid is founded. Virgil produces much more than
Spenser the illusion of a kind of life not absolutely withdrawn from
mundane experience. The scenes through which he guides the personages of
his story are the familiar places of central Italy, of Sicily, of the
Greek islands, of the shores of Africa. These personages are engaged in
important transactions, such as make up the actual history of early
nations,—wars, alliances, intermarriages, and the like. Even the
supernatural element in the poem produces the illusion, if not of
conformity with the belief of men in the age in which the poem was
written, yet of conformity with that stage in the whole growth and
decomposition of ancient beliefs which, through the works of art and
poetry, has made the deepest impression on the world. Thus if Virgil’s
representation of scenes, persons, incidents, modes of life, supernatural
belief, etc. wants both the freshness and _naïveté_ of Homer and the
ideality and exuberance of fancy characteristic of Spenser, it is yet a
solid creation of the classical mind, exercised for the first time on a
great scale in bodying forth an imaginary foretime, peopling it with the
personages of earlier art or of the poet’s fancy, and filling up the
outlines of tradition with the sentiment, the interests, and the ideas of
the age in which the poem was written.

In addition to his great knowledge of antiquity and his gift of living in
the creations of earlier art and poetry, Virgil possessed in his own
imaginative constitution elements of power which enabled him to give
solidity and beauty to the world of his invention. Among these elements of
power his feeling of religious awe, his sense of majesty investing the
forms of government, his veneration for antiquity, his susceptibility to
the associations attaching to particular places, are conspicuous. His
sympathy with the primary human affections suggests to him the details of
many pathetic situations. He has a Roman admiration for courage,
endurance, and magnanimous bearing. His refined perceptions, perfected by
a life of studious culture and by familiarity with the social life of men
inheriting the traditions of a great governing class, enable him to make
the various actors on his stage play their parts with grace and dignity.

By some of these sources of imaginative power Ennius also was moved in the
composition of his epic. In that which is Virgil’s strength, sympathy with
the primary human affections, it would have been impossible for any poet
who came after them to have surpassed Homer, Sophocles, or Lucretius. But
in Homer this sympathy is combined with a sterner, in Sophocles with a
severer mood. In Lucretius the feeling is identified with the general
melancholy of his thought. The feeling of humanity in Virgil is as
original and pervading as the feeling with which Nature affects him. From
all these elements of inspiration, his imagination is able to body forth
the world of his creation in the remote border-land of history and
mythology, and to impart to it not only solidity and self-consistency, but
also grandeur of outline and beauty of detail.

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately
after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting
in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or
furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element
in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light
beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the
presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And
even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the
purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and
energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active
amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to
attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as
regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of
Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to
Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into
disrepute(562). He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning;
that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if
through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But
the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the
lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated
in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of
an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by
personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of
bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos
Et vera incessu patuit dea.
* * * * *
Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina(563).

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by
women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire;
as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the
pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of
device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the
ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many
extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character.
The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of
majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the
part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet
sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast
attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter
Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus
Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis
Hoc virtutis opus(564).

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the
earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to
Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves
towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect
made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto
Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda(565).

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of
the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo
Desuper(566).

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears
in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit
of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,
Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella
Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:
Nec te Troia capit(567).

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla
introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate.
Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign
enemy(568). Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers
between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the
few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation
of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the
same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave
birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna
alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in
the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek
imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin
reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that
doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the
Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,
Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris
Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem
Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit(569).

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced(570) in
accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency
guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in
accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin
mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of
kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the
ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take
part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or
Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in
the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the
story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa,
and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may
have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and
the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those
not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are
inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible
world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which
enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets
of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the
passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror
inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance
of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus
till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black
torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description
of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the
solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis
Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso
Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes(571).

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces
the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself
to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri
Caelicolis et quanta solet(572)—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the
reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and
Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae
Numina magna deum(573).

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and
practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the
Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The
religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each
family into one community(574), had been transmitted in popular beliefs
and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the
establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of
the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older
spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain
places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some
visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all
the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in
the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, identified with the
continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that
passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the
Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis
Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.
Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,
Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum
Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem
Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret(575).

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view
seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the
‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is
committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old
Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the
unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed
in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,
Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri(576).

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities
pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the
despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy
within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis
Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat(577).

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

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem
Ipse trahit(578).

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’
for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous
wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods
is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of
the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the
sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their
reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs.
It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that
we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and
of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,
Sanguinis et sacri pateras, _animamque sepulchro_
_Condimus_, et magna supremum voce ciemus(579).

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and
the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the
strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of
these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost
of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and
gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old
affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of
Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!
Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris
Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum
Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,
Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos
Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno(580)?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in
the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,
Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,
‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:
Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:
Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra
Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.
Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:
Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,
Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto(581).’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence,
Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and
altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona
Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,
Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat
Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem
Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras(582).

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

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum
Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,
Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum(583).

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of
view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is
justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the
Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative
invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which
awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book
entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato
among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in
transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the
‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to
the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead
do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an
unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more
august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The
spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus
than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less
austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole
humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of
the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the
primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices
transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form
a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the
various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which
he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent
picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, mystical, and
philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single
representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry
further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with
the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious
reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or,
perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl
by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes(584)—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that
sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges
that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is
unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of
Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human
imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an
object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of
moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his
recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness
and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the
profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that
trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi
Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem(585)—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and
follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the
account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact
acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and
Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of
a religious epic, that the commencement and completion of every enterprise
are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M.
Gaston Boissier(586), following Macrobius, has pointed out the special
propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of
such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of
the ritual application of the words ‘porricio(587)’ and ‘porrigo’, and of
the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs(588),—‘Aenea,
vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander
of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred
symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the
ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that
in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of
veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,
Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,
Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;
Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum
Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet(589).

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and
its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the
peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of
Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,
Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo
Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem
Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna(590).

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief,
and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong
suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the
importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the
dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer
or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to
the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the
changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the
religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws
of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of
superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum(591),

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened
convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his
other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it
embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity,
and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects
of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

III.

While the various religious elements in Virgil’s nature find ample scope
in the representation of the Aeneid, his apathy in regard to active
political life is seen in the tameness of his reproduction of that aspect
of human affairs. In the Homeric βουλή and ἀγορά we recognise not only the
germs of the future political development of the Greeks, but the germs out
of which all free political life unfolds itself. To the form of government
exhibited in the Aeneid, the words which Tacitus uses of a mixed
constitution might be more justly applied,—‘it is one more easily praised
than realised, or if ever it is realised, it is incapable of
permanence(592).’ And even if the Virgilian idea could be realised in some
happy moment of human affairs, it does not contain within itself the
capacity of any further development. The difficulties of the problem of
government are solved in Virgil by the picture which he draws of passive
and loyal submission on the part of nobles and people to a wise,
beneficent, and disinterested ruler and legislator(593). The idea of the
ruler in the Aeneid is the same as that of the ‘Father.’ It is under such
a rule, exercised from Rome as its centre, that the unchanging future of
the world is anticipated—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit(594).

The case of Mezentius does indeed show that Virgil recognised the ultimate
right of rebellion when the paternal king passed into the tyrannical
oppressor; but such an instance affords no scope for representing the
manifestation of political passions and virtues. The free play of
conflicting forces in a community has no attraction for Virgil’s
imagination. He suggests no thought either of the popular liberty realised
in the best days of the Roman commonwealth, or of the sagacity and
steadfast traditions of the Roman Senate. The only trace of discussion and
opposition appears in the debate within the court of Latinus. But the
antagonism between Drances and Turnus is one of personal rivalry, not of
political difference; and the only limit to the sovereignty of Latinus
lies in his own weakness of will and in the opposition of his household.

But besides the ideals of popular freedom and senatorian dignity which
were realised in the Republic, the Roman mind was impressed by another
political ideal, the ‘Majesty of the State.’ The one political force that
remained unchanged, amid the various changes of the Roman constitution
from the time of the kings to the time of the emperors, was the power of
the executive. And this power depended not on material force, but on the
sentiment with which the magistrate was regarded as the embodiment for the
time being of that attribute in the State which commanded the reverence of
the people. The greatest political offence which a Roman could commit
under the Republic was a violation of the ‘majesty of the Commonwealth;’
under the Empire ‘of the majesty of the Emperor.’ The sentiment out of
which this idea arose was felt by Virgil in all its strength. Thus
although the actual government of Latinus is exhibited as a model neither
of wisdom nor of strength, it is invested with all the outward semblance
of powerful and ancient sovereignty—

Tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis,
Urbe fuit summa, Laurentis regia Pici,
Horrendum silvis et religione parentum.
Hic sceptra accipere et primos attollere fasces
Regibus omen erat; hoc illis curia templum,
Hae sacris sedes epulis; hic, ariete caeso,
Perpetuis soliti patres considere mensis(595).

The spectacle of the fall of Troy acquires new grandeur from the
representation of Troy, not, as it appears in Homer, as a city with many
allies, but as the centre of a wide and long-established empire—

Postquam res Asiae Priamique evertere gentem
Inmeritam visum Superis, ceciditque superbum
Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia(596).

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

Haec finis Priami fatorum; his exitus illum
Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem
Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum
Regnatorem Asiae(598).

The tragic splendour of Dido’s death is enhanced by her proud sense of a
high destiny fulfilled and of queenly rule exercised over a great people—

Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum Fortuna, peregi:
Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.
Urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi(599).

Thus although the necessities of his position and his own ‘inscitia
reipublicae’ prevented Virgil, in his representation, from appealing to
the generous political emotions of a free people, he was able not only to
gratify the pride of empire felt by his countrymen, but to sustain among
them the sense of imaginative reverence with which the sovereignty of the
State over its individual members deserves to be regarded.

But there is another class of political facts which interest the mind as
much as those which arise out of the play of conflicting forces within a
free commonwealth,—viz. the relations of independent powers with one
another. And of this class of facts both Homer and Virgil make use in
their representations. In Homer we see the spectacle, never realised in
actual Grecian history at least till the days of Alexander, of the many
independent Greek powers united under one leader in a common enterprise,
and of the various powers of the western shores of Asia combined in
defence of their leading State. The antagonism between the Greeks and
Trojans is, in point of general conception, more like the hostile
inter-relations of nations in modern times, than like the wars of city
against city, with which the pages of later Greek history are filled(600).
The union of the Italian tribes and cities under the command of Turnus,
and that of Trojans, Arcadians, and Etrurians—all foreigners recently
settled in Italy—under Aeneas, may be compared to the union of independent
Greek powers under Agamemnon, and that of ‘the allies summoned from afar,’
who, while following their own princes, yet submitted to the command of
Hector. Yet in Virgil’s conception of the great powers of the world, and
even of cities most remote from one another, as having an intimate
knowledge of each other’s fortunes,—in the idea of what in modern times
would be called a ‘foreign policy’ and ‘the balance of power,’ which
dictates the mission of Turnus to Diomede, and the appeal of Aeneas to the
Etrurians to take part with him in averting the establishment by the
Rutulians of a sovereignty over the whole of Italy,—we meet with a
condition of international relations and policy, which, if based on the
experience of any period of ancient history, might have been suggested by
the memory of the time when Hannibal’s great scheme of combining the fresh
vigour of the western barbarians, the smouldering elements of resistance
in Italy, and the military power and prestige of the old monarchies of
Macedonia and Syria, was defeated not more by the irresolution and
disunion among those powers, than by the traditional policy through which
Rome had made her dependent allies feel that her interest was identified
with their own. But this aspect of the world, though an anachronism from
the point of view either of the time when the poem was written, or of that
in which the events represented are supposed to happen, enhances the
dignity of the action, by exhibiting the enterprise of Aeneas as a
spectacle attracting the attention and involving the destinies of the
great nations of the world.

The state of material civilisation exhibited in the Aeneid must be
regarded also as a poetical compromise between the simplicity and rude
vigour of primitive civilisation and the splendour and refinement of the
age in which the poem was written. Thus Acestes, the friendly king and
Sicilian host of Aeneas, welcomes him on his return from Carthage in the
rough dress of some primitive hunter—

Horridus in iaculis et pelle Libystidis ursae(601).

Evander receives him beneath his humble roof,

stratisque locavit
Effultum foliis et pelle Libystidis ursae(602).

The Arcadian prince is roused in the morning by the song of birds under
the eaves, and proceeds to visit his guest accompanied by two watchdogs
which lay before his door. On the other hand the description, in the
account of the building of Carthage, of the foundation of the great
theatre—

hic lata theatris
Fundamenta petunt alii, immanisque columnas
Rupibus excidunt, scaenis decora alta futuris(603);

the picture of the great Temple of Juno—

Aerea cui gradibus surgebant limina nexaeque
Aere trabes, foribus cardo stridebat aenis(604);

of the rich frescoes and bas-reliefs adorning it—

Artificumque manus inter se operumque labores
Miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas
Bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem(605);

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

media testudine templi, etc.;

the description of the Temple of Apollo at Cumae,—the account of the
banquet in the palace of Dido with its blaze of ‘festal light’—

dependent lychni laquearibus aureis
Incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt(606),

(a picture partly indeed, like that in Lucretius—

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

suggested by the imaginative description of the banquet in the Palace of
Alcinous)—appear to owe their existence to the impression produced on the
mind of Virgil by some of the great architectural works of the Augustan
Age—such as the Theatre of Marcellus, the Pantheon, the Temple of the
Palatine Apollo, and by the spectacle of profuse luxury which the houses
and banquets of the richer classes at Rome exhibited.

The class from which the personages of the Aeneid are taken is almost
exclusively that of those most elevated in dignity and influence. Virgil
does not attempt to bring before us the rich variety of social grades,
which adds vivacity and verisimilitude to the spectacle of life and
manners presented by Homer, Chaucer, and Shakspeare. It does not enter
into Virgil’s conception of epic art to introduce types of the class to
which Thersites, Irus, Eumaeus, Phemius, and Eurycleia belong. If he makes
any exception to his general practice of limiting his representation to
the class of royal and noble personages, it is in the glimpse which he
affords of devoted loyalty in the person of Palinurus and of affection and
grief in that of the bereaved mother of Euryalus. Where, after the example
of Homer, he introduces various figures belonging to the same class, he
fails to distinguish them from one another by any individual trait of
character or manners. Thus Dido has her suitors as well as Penelope; but
the former produce no life-like impression of any kind, like that produced
by the careless levity and gay insolence of Antinous and Eurymachus.

As a painter of manners Virgil adopts the stately and conventional methods
of Greek tragedy rather than the vivid realism of Homer. The intercourse
of his chief personages with one another is conducted with the dignity and
courtesy of the most refined times. Homer’s personages indeed act for the
most part with a natural dignity and courtesy of bearing,—proceeding from
the commanding character which he attributes to them, as well as from the
lively social grace of their Greek origin,—which can neither be surpassed
nor equalled by any conventional refinement. But these social virtues can
be rapidly exchanged for vehemence of passion and angry recrimination. In
the manners of Virgil’s personages we recognise the influence of refined
traditions, and of the habits of a dignified society. His personages show
not only courtesy but studied consideration for each other. Thus while
Latinus addresses Turnus in words of courteous acknowledgment—of which the
original suggestion may be traced to a tragedy of Attius—

O praestans animi iuvenis! quantum ipse feroci
Virtute exsuperas, tanto me impensius aequum est
Consulere, atque omnis metuentem expendere casus(607);

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

Quam pro me curam geris, hanc precor, optime, pro me
Deponas letumque sinas pro laude pacisci.
Et nos tela, pater(608), etc.

The element of self-command amid the deepest movements of feeling and
passion enhances the stately dignity of manners represented in the poem.
Thus in the greatest sorrow of Evander, when he is recalling with fond
pride the youthful promise of Pallas—

Tu quoque nunc stares immanis truncus in armis,
Esset par actas et idem si robur ab annis,
Turne(609),—

he remembers that he is detaining the Trojans, who had come to pay the
funeral honours to his son—

sed infelix Teucros quid demoror armis?
Vadite et haec memores regi mandata referte(610).

The queenly courtesy of Dido springs from deeper elements in human nature
than conformity to the standard of demeanour imposed by elevated rank—

Solvite corde metum, Teucri, secludite curas.
Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt
Moliri et late finis custode tueri.
Quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem
Virtutesque virosque, aut tanti incendia belli?
Non obtunsa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,
Nec tam aversus equos Tyria Sol iungit ab urbe(611), etc.

The sea adventures of the Aeneid seem to be suggested rather by the
experience of travellers in the Augustan Age, than by the spirit of wonder
and buoyant resistance with which Odysseus and his companions encounter
the perils of unexplored seas and coasts. The fabulous portents of
legendary times appear in the shape of the Harpies, the Cyclops, the
sea-monster Scylla, etc., but they do not produce that sense of novelty
and vivid life which the same or similar representations produce in the
Odyssey. The description of the Harpies is grotesque rather than
imaginative. There is a touch of pathos in the introduction of the
Cyclops—

Lanigerae comitantur oves: ea sola voluptas
Solamenque mali(612),

reminding us of the κριὲ πέπον, etc. of the Odyssey; and the picture of
his assembled brethren—

Cernimus adstantis nequiquam lumine torvo
Aetnaeos fratres, caelo capita alta ferentis,
Concilium horrendum(613)—

is conceived with a kind of grim power, showing that the imagination of
Virgil does not merely reproduce, but endows with a new life the figures
which he borrows most closely from his original. But the life-like
realism, the combined humour and terror of Homer’s representation, are
altogether absent from the Aeneid. These marvellous creations appear
natural in the Odyssey, and in keeping with the imaginative impulses and
the adventurous spirit of the ages of maritime discovery: but they stand
in no real relation to the feelings and beliefs with which men encountered
the occasional dangers and the frequent discomforts of the Adriatic or the
Aegean in the Augustan Age.

In his conception of these real dangers of the sea, which have to be met
in the most advanced as well as the most primitive times, Virgil’s
inferiority to Homer, both in general effect and in lifelike detail, is
very marked. The wonderful realism of the sea adventures in the fifth Book
of the Odyssey produces on the mind the impression that the poet is
recalling either a peril that he himself had encountered, or one that he
had heard vividly related by some one who had thus escaped ‘from the issue
of death:’ and that there was in the poet too the genuine delight in
danger, the spirit

‘That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine,’

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

Odysseus, like Aeneas, feels his limbs and heart give way before the
sudden outburst of the storm; but, though swept from the raft and
overwhelmed for a time under the waves, he never loses his presence of
mind or his courage—

ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὣς σχεδίης ἐπελήθετο τειρόμενός περ,
ἀλλὰ μεθορμηθεὶς ἐνὶ κύμασιν ἐλλάβετ’ αὐτῆς,
ἐν μέσσῃ δὲ καθῖζε τέλος θανάτου ἀλεείνων(614).

The poet of the Odyssey may have encountered such storms as are described
in the passage here referred to, and we cannot doubt that in such case he
bore his part bravely, ‘redeeming his own life and securing the safe
return of his comrades.’ If Virgil in some unadventurous voyaging ever
happened to be ‘caught in a storm in the open Aegean,’ it probably was in
the position of a helpless sufferer that he contemplated the wild
commotion of the elements.

On the other hand he shows a keen enjoyment of the pleasure of sailing
past famous and beautiful scenes with a fair wind and in smooth water—

Linquimus Ortygiae portas pelagoque volamus
Bacchatamque iugis Naxon, viridemque Donysam,
Olearon, niveamque Paron, sparsasque per aequor
Cycladas, et crebris legimus freta consita terris.
Nauticus exoritur vario certamine clamor(615).

The first sight of land from the sea is vividly brought before the eye in
such passages as these—

Quarto terra die primum se attollere tandem
Visa, aperire procul montis, ac volvere fumum(616).

Iamque rubescebat stellis Aurora fugatis,
Cum procul obscuros collis humilemque videmus
Italiam(617).

Crebrescunt optatae aurae, portusque patescit
Iam propior, templumque apparet in arce Minervae(618).

The disappearance of the shores left behind, and the opening up of new
scenes in the rapid onward voyage, leave on the mind a fresh feeling of
novelty and life in such passages as—

Protinus aerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces,
Litoraque Epiri legimus, portuque subimus
Chaonio, et celsam Buthroti accedimus urbem(619);

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

Apparet Camarina procul, campique Geloi,
Immanisque Gela, fluvii cognomine dicta.
Arduus inde Acragas ostentat maxima longe
Moenia, magnanimum quondam generator equorum(620), etc.

These and similar passages—such as that describing the moon-light sail
past the enchanted shores of Circe—remind us of the great change which had
come over the world between the age of the Odyssey and that of the Aeneid.
The one poem is pervaded by the eager curiosity of the youthful prime of
the world, attracting the most daring and energetic spirits to the
discovery and peopling of new lands; the other by that more languid
curiosity, awakened by the associations of the past,—by the longing for
some change to break the routine of a too easy life,—and by the refined
enjoyment of beauty, urging men to encounter some danger and more
discomfort for the sake of visiting scenes famous in history, rich in
natural charms, or in works of art, the inheritance from more creative
times.

In his scenes of battle, Virgil is as inferior to the poet of the Iliad as
he is to the poet of the Odyssey in those of sea adventure. In the details
of single fights, in the account of the wounds inflicted on one another by
the combatants, in the enumeration of the obscurer warriors who fall
before the champions of either side—

his addit Amastrum
Hippotaden, sequiturque incumbens eminus hasta
Tereaque Harpalycumque et Demophoönta Chromimque(621),

he follows closely in the footsteps of Homer. He is, however, more sparing
of these details, so as to avoid the monotony of Homer’s battle-fields and
single combats. The Iliad was originally addressed to a people of
warriors—

οἶσιν ἄρα Ζεὺς
ἐκ νεότητος ἔδωκε καὶ ἐς γῆρας τολυπεύειν
ἀργαλέους πολέμους, ὄφρα φθιόμεσθα ἕκαστος(622).

And although through the mouth of the wisest of his heroes, Homer
expresses some sense of weariness of the

‘war and broils, which make
Life one perpetual fight’—

αἶψα τε φυλόπιδος πέλεται κόρος ανθρώποισι—

yet all accepted this life as their destiny; and those who first listened
to the song of the poet would feel no satiety in the details of battle and
records of martial prowess, glorifying perhaps the reputed ancestors of
those chiefs whom they themselves followed to the field or to the storming
of cities. To Virgil’s readers, the record of such a time as that
described in the Iliad would come like echoes from an alien world. In so
far as the Romans of the Augustan Age had any vital passion corresponding
to the interest with which Homer’s Greeks must have witnessed in
imagination the spectacle of wounds and death in battle, it was in the
basest form which the lust of blood has ever assumed among civilised
men,—the passion for the gladiatorial shows. It is clear that Virgil
himself, though he can feel and inspire the fire of battle at some
critical moment—

ingeminant hastis et Troes et ipse
Fulmineus Mnestheus(623);

though he can express a Roman contempt for death,—

Est hic, est animus lucis contemptor(624),

and can sympathise with the energetic daring of his Italian heroes and
heroine,—Turnus, Lausus, Pallas(625), and Camilla,—yet shares the
sentiment with which his hero looks forward to peace as the crown of his
labours, and regards the wars which he was compelled to wage as a hated
task imposed on him by the Fates—

Nos alias hinc ad lacrimas, eadem horrida bella,
Fata vocant(626).

Yet even in the incidents of his battle-pieces Virgil does not follow
Homer slavishly. The warlike action of the poem is not a mere succession
of single combats, or a confused _mêlée_ of battle, surging ‘this way and
that,’ between the rampart that guards the ships and the walls of the
city. It is said that the greatest soldier of modern times, in the
enforced leisure of his last years, condescended to express a criticism,
not indeed a favourable one, on Virgil’s skill as a tactician; and it is
an element of novelty in the representation of the Aeneid that it suggests
at least some image of the combined operations of modern warfare. But it
is in the play which Virgil gives to the other human emotions of his
personages, tempering and counteracting the blind rage of battle, that the
poet of a more advanced era most conspicuously appears. The ancient world
at its best, whether we judge of it from the representations of its poets,
or the recorded acts of its greatest men and most powerful and enlightened
States, did not rise to that height of chivalrous generosity which scorns
to take an enemy at a disadvantage, or to wipe away the memory of defeat
or disaster by a cruel revenge. Achilles in his treatment of Hector,
Caesar in his treatment of Vercingetorix, the Spartans in dealing with
Plataeae, the Syracusans with the remnant of the defeated Athenians, the
Athenians themselves with the helpless defenders of Melos, the Romans with
the Samnites who spared their lives at the Caudine Forks,—all alike fall
below the standard of nobleness which men of temper inferior to that of
the great men and nations of antiquity often reached in mediaeval times.
Those who appear to come nearest this standard in ancient times,—who could
at least honour courage in an enemy or refuse to press too heavily upon
him in his defeat,—are the Carthaginian Hannibal and his not unworthy
conqueror. Virgil cannot be said, in this respect, to rise altogether
superior to the spirit of the old Greek and Roman world. In the Aeneid it
is thought no shame, but rather a glory, for soldiers to slay defenceless
or wounded men in battle or in the dim confusion of a night foray. Yet the
sentiments of his warriors engaged in battle are more tempered with
humanity than those of the heroes of the Iliad. There is no word of
throwing the bodies of the slain to dogs and vultures. There is no such
deadly struggle over the bodies of Lausus or Pallas as over that of
Patroclus. Turnus and Aeneas alike act on the principle expressed in the
request of the dying champion of Italy,—

Ulterius ne tende odiis(627).

Not only is the warlike passion less cruel in the Aeneid, but the feeling
of the sanctity which invests the dead is stronger. The only passage in
the Aeneid which might have exposed Virgil to the reproach of Lucretius,
as forgetting in the supposed interests of religion the certain claims of
humanity, is that in which Aeneas, following the example of Achilles, sets
aside the captive youths for immolation to the Manes of Pallas.

But the chief source of interest in the Virgilian battle-pieces is the
pathetic sympathy awakened for the untimely death of some of the nobler
personages of the story. The tender compassion called forth by the blight
which fell in his own time upon the earliest of the ‘breves et infaustos
populi Romani amores(628),’ and reappeared again in the deaths of Drusus
and Germanicus—that compassion which dictates the words

si qua fata aspera rumpas
Tu Marcellus eris(629),

appears in his description of the fates of Pallas and Lausus, of Euryalus
and Camilla. The reverence for the purest of human affections which shines
through the lines

Transiit et parmam mucro levia arma minacis,
Et tunicam, molli mater quam neverat auro(630),

and

At vero, ut voltum vidit morientis et ora,
Ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris,
Ingemuit miserans graviter dextramque tetendit,
Et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago(631),

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

Vos etiam, gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in arvis,
Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles,
Indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error(632).

The emotions awakened by the deaths of Mezentius and of Turnus are of a
sterner character. So too the poet’s compassion for the heroine of his
later books, Camilla, falling by the hand of an ignoble antagonist, is
mixed with a sense of scornful satisfaction at the retribution which
immediately followed—

Extemplo teli stridorem aurasque sonantis
Audiit una Arruns haesitque in corpore ferrum.
Illum expirantem socii atque extrema gementem
Obliti ignoto camporum in pulvere linquunt;
Opis ad aetherium pinnis aufertur Olympum(633).

Virgil’s susceptibility to local associations and to impressions of a
remote antiquity must also be taken into account as supplying materials
and stimulus to his inventive faculty. No poet so often appeals to the
imaginative interest attaching to the earlier condition of places or
things of old renown or famous in the later history of the world. Thus the
building of Carthage, the first view of the Tiber—

Hunc inter fluvio Tiberinus amoeno
Verticibus rapidis et multa flavus harena
In mare prorumpit(634)—

the gathering of the Italian races from ‘mountainous Praeneste, from the
tilled lands around Gabii, from the banks of the cool Anio, and the
rivulets sparkling among the Hernican hills,’—the contrast between the
primitive pastoral aspect of the Tarpeian Rock and the Capitol, of the
site of the Forum and the Carinae, and the familiar spectacle of outward
magnificence which they presented in the Augustan Age,—are brought before
the mind with a more stimulating power than the experiences of storm or
battle through which the hero of the poem is conducted. The local
associations of Mount Eryx, of the lake of Avernus, of the fountain
Albunea, of the valley of Amsanctus, of the Arician grove, of the site of
Ardea, are evoked with impressive effect. The names of the promontories
Palinurum, Misenum, and Caieta are invested with an interest derived from
their connexion with the imaginary incidents and personages of the poem.
The ritual observances and the legend connected with the Ara Maxima
suggest the description of ceremonies and the narrative of events in the
earlier half of Book viii.; and the custom—so ancient that its original
meaning was forgotten—of opening the gateway of Janus Quirinus on the rare
occasions when a state of war arose out of a state of unbroken peace, is
traced back to a time antecedent to the existence either of Rome or Alba—

Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes
Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum
Roma colit, etc.
* * * * *
Ipse Quirinali trabea cinctuque Gabino
Insignis reserat stridentia limina Consul;
Ipse vocat pugnas, sequitur tum cetera pubes,
Aereaque adsensu conspirant cornua rauco(635).

Perhaps the most original and not the least impressive of those personages
whom Virgil introduces into his composite representation—the Sibyl—is
conceived under the strong sense of the mystery and sanctity which
invested the oracles of the Sibylline books.

The personal and national susceptibilities of Virgil’s imagination and the
circumstances of the age in which he lived are thus seen largely to modify
that representation of life and manners of which the main outlines are
suggested by the Homeric poems, and of which many of the details are
derived from the Cyclic poems, from the Greek tragedies founded on the
events which followed on the death of Hector, and from the Italian
traditions and aetiological myths which Cato had preserved in his
‘Origines,’ and Varro and other writers in their works on antiquities.
Virgil’s power as an epic poet does not consist in original invention of
incident or action, but in combining diverse elements into a homogeneous
whole, and in imparting poetic life to old materials, many of them not
originally conceived in a poetic spirit. The interest which he thus
imparts to his narrative is different from, and inferior to, that
attaching to the original representation in the Homeric poems. Had
Virgil’s representation been as faithfully drawn from the life as that of
Homer, it still would have been less interesting, from the fact that
ancient Romans are less interesting in their individuality than the Greeks
of the great ages of Greek life, and from the fact also that the manners
of an advanced age do not affect the imagination in the way in which those
of a nation’s youth affect it. Not only was Virgil’s own genius much less
creative than that of Homer, his materials possessed much less plasticity.
There is no need of any act of reconstructive criticism to enable us to
feel the immediate power of the Iliad and the Odyssey. To do justice to
the power of the Aeneid we must endeavour to realise in imagination the
state of mind of those who received the poem in all the novelty of its
first impression,—at once ‘rich with the spoils of time,’ and ‘pregnant
with celestial fire.’

IV.

The most important element in the Aeneid, regarded as a poem of heroic
action, remains still to be considered, viz. the conception and
delineation of individual character. The greatest of epic poets in ancient
times was also endowed with the most versatile dramatic faculty. And this
faculty was displayed not only in the conception of a great variety of
noble types of character, but also in the modes in which these conceptions
were embodied. The Greek language is greatly superior to the Latin in its
adaptability to natural dialogue. In this respect Cicero’s inferiority to
Plato is as marked as Virgil’s inferiority to Homer. The language of Homer
and the language of Plato are equally fitted for the expression of the
greatest thoughts and feelings, and for the common intercourse of men with
one another. Neither that of Virgil nor of Cicero adapts itself easily to
the lively play of emotion or to the rapid interchange of thought. The
characters of Homer, like the characters of Shakspeare, reveal themselves
in their complete individuality, as they act and re-act on one another in
many changing moods of passion and affection. The personages of Virgil are
revealed by the poet, partly in his account of what they do, and partly
through the medium of set speeches expressive of some particular attitude
of mind. Virgil’s imagination is the imagination of the orator rather than
of the dramatist. It is not a complete and complex man, liable to various
moods, and standing in various relations to other men, but it is some
powerful movement of the θυμός in man, that the oratorical imagination is
best fitted to express. Milton also, like Virgil, reveals the characters
of his personages with the imaginative power of an orator rather than with
that of a dramatist. But he possesses another resource in the analytical
power with which he makes his chief personage reveal his inmost nature and
most secret motives in truthful communing with himself. It is through the
soliloquies in the ‘Paradise Lost’ that we can best realise the whole
conception of Satan, in his ruined magnificence, and in his lost but not
forgotten capacity of happiness and nobleness. The soliloquies of these
personages perform for the epic poet the part performed by the elaborate
introspection and discussion of motives in modern prose fiction. Homer
also avails himself frequently of the soliloquy, as he does of natural
dialogue and more formal oratory. In the Aeneid the chief personage is
often introduced, like the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey,

‘This way and that dividing the swift mind;’

but the process generally ends in the adoption, without any weighing of
conflicting duties or probabilities, of the obvious course indicated by
some supernatural sign. The soliloquies of Dido are to be regarded rather
as passionate outbursts of prayer to some unknown avenging power than as
communings with her own heart. The single soliloquy, if it may be called
such, which brings the speaker nearer to us in knowledge and sympathy, is
the proud and stately address in which Mezentius seems to make the horse,
which had borne him victorious through every former war, a partaker of his
sorrow and his forebodings—

Rhaebe, diu, res si qua diu mortalibus ulla est,
Viximus(636), etc.

But not only are the media through which Virgil brings his personages
before us less varied and flexible than those of Homer, but the characters
themselves are more tamely conceived, and less capable of awakening human
interest. And this is especially true of the character of Aeneas as
contrasted with those of Achilles and of Odysseus. The general conception
of Aeneas is indeed in keeping with the religious idea of the Aeneid. He
is intended to be an embodiment of the courage of an ancient hero, the
justice of a paternal ruler, the mild humanity of a cultivated man living
in an age of advanced civilisation, the saintliness of the founder of a
new religion of peace and pure observance, the affection for parent and
child, which was one of the strongest instincts in the Italian race. A
life-like impersonation of such an ideal would have commanded the
reverence of all future times. Yet at no time has the character of Aeneas
excited any strong human interest. No later poet or moralist set it up, as
Horace sets up the characters of Achilles and of Ulysses, as a subject of
ethical contemplation. Ovid in the deepest gloom of his exile retains
enough of his old levity to jest at his single lapse from saintly
perfection—

Et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor
Contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros(637).

As compared with the hero of the Odyssey, Aeneas is altogether wanting in
energy, spontaneity, intellectual resource, and insight. The single
quality in which he is strong is endurance. The principle which enables
him to fulfil his mission is expressed in the line—

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est(638).

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

Tum socios maestique metum solatur Iuli
Fata docens(639).

One of the few touches of nature which redeem his character from tameness
is the momentary feeling of the rage of battle roused by the resistance of
Lausus—

saevae iamque altius irae
Dardanio surgunt ductori(640).

The occasion in which he seems most worthy of his place as a leader of men
is after the death of Mezentius, where the self-restraint of his address
contrasts favourably with the intemperate ardour expressed in some of the
speeches of Turnus—

Maxima res effecta, viri: timor omnis abesto(641).

He appears as a passive recipient both of the devotion and of the
reproaches of Dido. He undergoes no passionate struggle in resigning her.
The courtesy and kindliness of his nature elicit no warmer expression of
regret than the words—

nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae,
Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus(642).

The only exercise of thought required of him is the right interpretation
of an omen, or the recollection of some dubious prediction at some
critical moment. Even the strength of affection which he feels and which
he awakens in the hearts of his father and son does not move us in the way
in which we are touched by the feelings which unite Odysseus to Penelope
and Telemachus, to Laertes and the mother who meets him in the shades, and
tells him that she had ‘died neither by the painless arrows of Artemis nor
by wasting disease’—

ἀλλά με σός τε πόθος σά τε μήδεα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ,
σή τ’ ἀγανοφροσύνη μελιηδέα θυμὸν ἀπηύρα(643).

The failure of Aeneas to excite a lively personal interest is not to be
attributed solely to a failure of power in the poet’s imagination. In the
part he plays he is conceived of as one chosen by the supreme purpose of
the gods, as an instrument of their will, and thus necessarily unmoved by
ordinary human impulses. In the words of M. de Coulanges, ‘Sa vertu doit
être une froide et haute impersonnalité, qui fasse de lui, non un homme,
mais un instrument des dieux(644).’ The strength required in such an
instrument is the strength of faith, submission, patience, and endurance;
and it is with this strength that Aeneas encounters the many dangers and
vicissitudes to which he is exposed, and withdraws from the allurements of
ease and pleasure. The very virtues of his character act as a check rather
than as a stimulus to those natural impulses out of which the most living
impersonations are formed. To compare great things in art with what are
not so great, the impression produced by the superiority of Aeneas to
ordinary passion is like the impression produced by the superior tolerance
and enlightenment of some of Scott’s heroes, when contrasted with the more
animated impulses and ruder fanaticism of the other personages in his
story. That he is, on the one hand, the passive receptacle of Divine
guidance, and, on the other, the impersonation of a modern ideal of
humanity, playing a part in a rude and turbulent time, are the two main
causes of the tame and colourless character of the protagonist of the
Aeneid. And as loyalty to a leader is the sole form of political, as
distinct from patriotic virtue which Virgil acknowledges, the other Trojan
chiefs—the faithful Achates, the speaker Idomeneus, the more martial
figures of Mnestheus and Serestus—do little more than play the part of the
ἄγγελος or of the κωφὰ πρόσωπα in a Greek tragedy. The interest awakened
by Anchises arises solely from the halo of sacred associations investing
him. Iulus, as the eponymous ancestor of the Iulii, seems to be a
favourite of the author; yet he fails to interest us as a youth of high
spirit and promise. Telemachus we know and sympathise with in his rising
rebellion against the insolence of the suitors—

νῦν δ’ ὅτε δὴ μέγας εἰμί, καὶ ἄλλων μῦθον ἀκούων
πυνθάνομαι, καὶ δή μοι ἀέξεται ἔνδοθι θυμός(645),

in his longing for the return of his father to redress his wrongs, in his
kindly hospitality, and sense of the outraged honour of his house—

νεμεσσήθη δ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ
ξεῖνον δηθὰ θύρῃσιν ἐφεστάμεν(646).

That Iulus fails to awaken a similar interest, that we do not share his
ardour in the chase or the glow of pride with which he lays his first
enemy low, is due to the fact that the poet’s imagination fails in the
vital realisation of his conception.

Most of the minor characters who appear in the Aeneid require no analysis.
Creusa, Anna, and Andromache are vague impersonations of womanly
tenderness and fidelity of affection. Lavinia, the shadowy Helen of the
story, appears only for a moment, and though she is described by images
suggestive of beauty and of a delicate nurture—

mixta rubent ubi lilia multa
Alba rosa(647),

we are left without the knowledge by which to measure the extent of the
wrong done to her and Turnus by the enforced severance of their
affections. Amata exhibits the blind animal rage of a mother whose
affections have been outraged, but her figure wants the firm outlines and
substance of the Hecuba of the Iliad. The prophetic office of Helenus
enables him to advance the action of the story by preparing the mind of
Aeneas for his immediate future: the jealous interference of Iarbas
accelerates the doom of Dido: Acestes performs the part of a kindly host
to the Trojans in Sicily. But of any individual traits of character they
exhibit no trace whatever. Drances serves as a vehicle of impassioned
oratory, and as a kind of foil to the generous impulsiveness of
Turnus—just as the timid craft of Arruns is a foil to the splendid
rashness of Camilla;—and perhaps he is not much less real to our
imaginations than Polydamus, who is the only personage of the Iliad that
we think of rather as the embodiment of an abstract
quality,—moderation,—than as a living man. But in the delineation of
Drances there is no sign of that power which, by a few graphic strokes of
description and the force of dramatic insight, has made Thersites stand
forth for all times as the type of an envious and ignoble demagogue.
Though there is more effort of thought in the delineation of Latinus as
swayed to and fro by his religious sense of duty and the influence of
others, and though there is true pathos in the words with which he allows
the declaration of war to be made—

Nam mihi parta quies, omnisque in limine portus:
Funere felici spolior(648);—

yet he does not live before us as Priam lives in the scene with Helen on
the walls of the town, and he has no power to move our hearts with the
awful compassion which the grief of Priam awakens in the last books of the
Iliad. Perhaps the most impressive of the secondary personages in the
Aeneid is Evander, as he appears in the dignity of his simple state in the
eighth Book, and in the dignity of his great sorrow in the eleventh.
Pallas and Lausus, Nisus and Euryalus, afford occasions for pathetic
situations, rather than perform any part affording scope for the display
of character. The romantic career of Camilla interests us; and she has the
further attraction to modern readers of reminding them of a martial
heroine of actual history: but we scarcely recognise in the vivid
delineation of her deeds those complex elements which in their union form
a whole character for our imaginations, whether in the representations of
literature or in our experience of life.

The chief personal interest of the story is centred in those whose
fortunes and action bring them into antagonism with the decrees of Fate,
and who perish in consequence,—in Turnus, Mezentius, and Dido. Patriotism,
courage, and passion are exhibited in a fatal but not ignoble struggle
with the purposes and chosen instruments of Omnipotence. The tragic
interest of this antagonism stimulates the imagination of the poet to a
more energetic delineation of character. And in the representation of this
struggle it is quite true, as has been well shown by Mr. Nettleship, that
Virgil’s own sympathies go with the ‘victrix causa’ which ‘pleased the
gods,’ not with the ‘victa’ which pleases our modern sensibilities. He
professes not to question but

‘To justify the ways of God to men.’

The death of Mezentius satisfies poetical as well as political justice.
Turnus brings his doom upon himself by the intemperate vehemence and
self-confidence with which he asserts his personal claims. Though Aeneas
and Dido are both represented as ‘forgetful of their better name,’ yet, as
happens in real life more generally than in fiction, it is the woman only
who suffers the penalty of this forgetfulness. Yet though in all these
cases the doom of the sufferers is brought about in part through their own
fault, Virgil does not, as an inferior artist might do, endeavour to
augment the sympathy with his chief personage, by an unworthy detraction
from his antagonist. No scorn of treachery or cowardice, no indignation
against cruelty, mingles with the feeling of admiration which the general
bearing of Turnus excites. The basis of his character seems to be a
generous vehemence and proud independence of spirit. If Aeneas typifies
the civilising mission of Rome and is to be regarded as an embodiment of
the qualities which enabled her to give law to the world, Turnus typifies
the brave but not internecine resistance offered to her by the other races
of Italy, and is an embodiment of their high and martial spirit—of that
‘Itala virtus’ which, when tempered by Roman discipline, gave Rome the
strength to fulfil her mission. The cause which moves Turnus to resist the
Trojans is no unworthy one, either on patriotic grounds or on grounds
personal to himself. If the Greeks were justified in making war against
the Trojans on account of Helen, the Italians may be justified in making
war against the same people on account of Lavinia. His appeals to his
countrymen are addressed to the most elemental of patriotic impulses—

nunc coniugis esto
Quisque suae tectique memor: nunc magna referto
Facta, patrum laudes(649).

He slays his enemy in fair battle, and though he shows exultation in his
victory, yet he does not sully it by any ferocity of act or demeanour—

qualem meruit Pallanta remitto,
Quisquis honos tumuli, quidquid solamen humandi est
Largior(650).

After his hopes of success are shaken by the first defeat of the Latins,
and by the failure of the mission to Diomede, and when the timidity of
Latinus and the envy of Drances urge the abandonment of the struggle, he
still retains a proud confidence in his Italian allies—

Non erit auxilio nobis Aetolos et Arpi,
At Messapus erit, felixque Tolumnius(651), etc.

He is ready, like an earlier Decius, to devote his life in single combat
against the new Achilles, armed with the armour of Vulcan—

vobis animam hanc soceroque Latino
Turnus ego, haut ulli veterum virtute secundus,
Devovi: ‘Solum Aeneas vocat.’ Et vocet oro:
Nec Drances potius, sive est haec ira deorum,
Morte luat, sive est virtus et gloria, tollat(652).

He sees ‘the inspiring hopes of triumph disappear, but the austerer glory
of suffering remains, and with a firm heart he accepts that gift of a
severe fate(653)’—

Usque adeone mori miserum est? Vos o mihi Manes
Este boni, quoniam Superis aversa voluntas:
Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
Descendam, magnorum haut unquam indignus avorum(654).

In the final encounter he yields, not to the terror inspired by his
earthly antagonist, but to his consciousness of the hostility of Heaven—

di me terrent et Iuppiter hostis(655).

His last wish is that the old age of his father, Daunus, should not be
deprived of the consolation of his funeral honours. Although the headlong
vehemence of his own nature, no less than his opposition to the beneficent
purposes of Omnipotence, seems to justify his fate, yet, as in the Ajax of
Sophocles, the αὐθαδία in Turnus is rather the flaw in an essentially
heroic temper, than his dominant characteristic. The poet’s sympathy with
the high spirit of youth, as manifested in love and war, and his pride in
the strong metal out of which the Italian race was made, have led him,
perhaps involuntarily, to an embodiment of those chivalrous qualities,
which affect the modern imagination with more powerful sympathy than the
qualities of a temperate will and obedience to duty which he has striven
to embody in the representation of Aeneas.

The vigorous sketch of Mezentius, as he appears in Book x., has received
from some critics more admiration than the sustained delineation of Turnus
through all the vicissitudes of feeling and fortune through which he
passes. Chateaubriand says, that this figure is the only one in the Aeneid
that is ‘fièrement dessinée.’ Landor describes him as ‘the hero
transcendently above all others in the Aeneid.’ And there is certainly a
vague grandeur of outline in this conception of the ‘contemptor divom’ and
oppressor of his people, who is ‘not only the most passionate in his grief
for Lausus, but likewise gives way to manly sorrow for the mute companion
of his warfare,’ indicative of a bolder invention than that which is
usually ascribed to Virgil. It is remarkable that poets whose spirit is
most purely religious,—both in the strength of conviction and the
limitation of sympathy produced by the religious spirit—Aeschylus, Virgil,
and Milton—seem to be moved to their most energetic creativeness by the
idea of antagonism to the supreme will on the part of a human, or
superhuman but limited will: and that they cannot help raising in their
readers a glow of admiration as well as a sense of awe in their embodiment
of this clash between finite and infinite power. The sketch of Mezentius
cannot indeed be compared with two of the most daring conceptions and
perfected creations of human genius,—the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the
Satan of Milton,—yet, if it does not enlist our ethical sympathies like
the former of these, like the second it receives the tribute of that
involuntary admiration, which is given to courage, even when allied with
moral evil, so long as it is not absolutely divorced from the capability
of sympathetic and elevated emotion.

In the part which Dido plays in the poem, Virgil finds a source of
interest in which he had not been anticipated by Homer. And although the
passion of love, unreturned or betrayed, had supplied a motive to the
later Greek tragedy and to the Alexandrine epic, it was still not
impossible for a new poet to represent this phase of modern life with more
power and pathos than any of his predecessors. It was comparatively easy
to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of
Apollonius. But the Dido of Virgil may compare favourably with the
creations of greater masters,—with the Deianeira of Sophocles, with the
Phaedra and the Medea of Euripides. And Virgil’s conception is at once
more impassioned than that of Sophocles, and nobler and more womanly than
those of Euripides. Her character, as it is represented before the
disturbing influence of this new passion produced by supernatural
artifice, is that of a brave and loyal, a great and queenly, a pure,
trusting, and compassionate nature. The most tragic element in the
development of her love for Aeneas is the struggle which it involves with
her high-strung sense of fidelity to the dead—

Ille meos primus qui me sibi iunxit amores
Abstulit: ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro(656).

The first feeling awakened in her mind by Aeneas is compassion for his
sufferings, and the desire to make the Trojans sharers in the fortune
which had attended her own enterprise. When by the unsuspected agency of
the two goddesses she has been possessed by the fatal passion, it is to no
ignoble influence that she succumbs. It is the greatness and renown of one
whom she recognises as of the race of the gods, which exercise a spell
over her imagination—

Multa viri virtus animo, multusque recursat
Gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore voltus
Verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem(657).

No weakness, no unwomanly ferocity mingles with the reproaches which she
utters on first awakening to the betrayal of her trust. A feeling of
magnanimous scorn makes her rise in rebellion against the plea that her
desertion was the result of divine interposition—

Scilicet is Superis labor est! ea cura quietos
Sollicitat(658);

and a lofty pathos animates her trust in a righteous retribution, the
knowledge of which will comfort her among the dead—

Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
Supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido
Saepe vocaturum. Sequar atris ignibus absens,
Et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,
Omnibus umbra locis adero:—dabis, improbe, poenas:
Audiam, et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos(659).

The awe inspired by supernatural portents, by restless visions in the
night, by the memory of ancient prophecies, by the voice of her former
husband summoning her from the chapel consecrated to his Manes, confirms
her in her resolution to die. Her passion goes on deepening in
alternations of indignation and recurring tenderness. It reaches its
sublimest elevation in the prayer for vengeance, answered long afterwards
in the alarm and desolation inflicted upon Italy by the greatest of the
sons of Carthage—

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,
Qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos,
Nunc, olim, quocunque dabunt se tempore vires(660).

In her last moments she finds consolation in the great memories of her
life—

Urbem praeclaram statui: mea moenia vidi:
Ulta virum, poenas inimico a fratre recepi:
Felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum
Nunquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae(661).

Her latest prayer is that, even though no outward retribution overtake her
betrayer, yet the bitterness of his own heart may be her avenger—

moriemur inultae,
Sed moriamur, ait: sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.
Hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto
Dardanus, et secum nostrae ferat omina mortis(662).

Once more she appears among the Shades, and maintains her lofty bearing
there as in the world above. No sympathy with his hero makes the poet here
forget what was due to her. She listens in scornful silence to the tearful
protestations of her ‘false friend(663),’ and passes on without any sign
of forgiveness or reconciliation—

Tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit
In nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi
Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem(664).

That the passion of Dido is powerfully conceived and delineated, that it
satisfies modern feeling more legitimately than the representation of the
unhallowed impulses of Phaedra, or of the cruel and treacherous rancour of
Medea, will scarcely be questioned. Yet perhaps it is doing no injustice
to the genius of Virgil to say that his power in dealing with human life
consists generally in conceiving some state of feeling, some pathetic or
passionate situation, rather than in the creation and sustained
development of living characters. How the great impersonations of poetry
and prose fiction, which are more real to our imaginations than the
personages of history or those whom we know in life, come into being, is a
question which probably their authors themselves could not answer. Though
reflexion on human nature and deliberate intention to exemplify some law
of life may precede the creative act which gives them being, and though
continued reflexion may be needed to sustain them in a consistent course,
yet no mere analytic insight into the springs of action can explain the
process by which a great artist works. The beings of his imagination seem
to acquire an existence independent of the experience and of the
deliberate intentions of their author, and to inform this experience and
mould these intentions as much as they are informed and moulded by them.
Virgil’s imagination in the creation of Dido seems to be possessed in this
way. She grows more and more real as her passion deepens. Virgil’s
intention in this representation may have been to show the tragic
infatuation of a woman’s love—

furens quid femina possit:

but his sympathetic insight into this passion—an insight already shown in
the Eclogues—stimulates the forces of his imagination to a nobler as well
as a more vital creation than in any other of his impersonations. Dido
ranks for all times as one of the great heroines of poetry. So long as she
appears on the scene the interest in the exhibition of her nature
overpowers all other interests. But this is not the case with Virgil’s
other personages. We are more interested in what they say and in what
happens to them than in what they are. In other words, it is by his
oratorical and descriptive, rather than by his dramatic faculty, that he
secures the attention of his readers. As oratory was one of the most
important powers in ancient life, so it became a prominent element in
ancient epic and dramatic poetry,—in Homer, Ennius, and Virgil, as well as
in Sophocles, Euripides, and the Roman tragedians. The oratory of the
Aeneid shows nothing of the speculative power—of the application of great
ideas to life—which gives the profoundest value not only to many speeches
in Sophocles, but also to some of those in the Iliad, and notably to such
as proceed from the mouth of Odysseus. It cannot equal the vivid
naturalness of the speeches of Nestor, nor the impassioned grandeur of
those of Achilles. Neither is it characterised by the subtle psychological
analysis which is the most interesting quality in the rhetoric of
Euripides. On the other hand, it is not disfigured by the forensic special
pleading and word-fencing which is an occasional flaw in the dramatic art
of Sophocles, and a pervading mannerism in that of the younger poet. The
impression of grave political deliberation is left on the mind by some of
the fragments of Ennius more effectually than by anything uttered in the
councils of gods or men in the Aeneid. But it is in the greatest of modern
epics that the full force of intellect and feeling animating grave
councils of state is most grandly idealised. The speeches in Virgil,
though they want the intellectual power and the majestic largeness of
utterance of those in Milton, are, like his, stately and dignified in
expression; they are disfigured by no rhetorical artifice of fine-spun
argument or exaggerated emphasis; they are rapid with the vehemence of
scorn and indignation, fervid with martial pride and enthusiasm, or,
occasionally, weighty with the power of controlled emotion. They have the
ring of Roman oratory, as it is heard in the animated declamation of Livy,
and sometimes seem to anticipate the reserved force and ‘imperial brevity’
of Tacitus. They give a true voice to ‘the high, magnanimous Roman mood,’
and to the fervour of spirit with which that mood was associated. And this
effect is sometimes increased by the use which the polished poet of the
Augustan Age makes of the grave, ardent, but unformed utterances—‘rudes et
inconditae voces’—of the epic and tragic poets of the Republic.

The descriptive faculty of Virgil is quite unlike that of Homer, but yet
it has great excellences of its own. In the Iliad and Odyssey man appears
‘vigorous and elastic such as poetry saw him first, such as poetry would
ever see him(665);’ and the outward world is described in the clear forms
and the animated movement which impress themselves immediately on the
sense and mind of men thus happily organised. Virgil too presents to us
the varied spectacle of human life and of the outward world under many
impressive aspects. But these aspects of things do not affect the mind
with the immediate impulse which the natural man receives from them, and
of which he retains the vivid picture in his mind. As in his pastoral
poems and in the Georgics Virgil seems to abstract from the general aspect
of things the characteristic sentiment which Nature inspires in particular
places and at particular times, and to see the scene which he describes
under the influence of that sentiment, so in the Aeneid various human
‘situations’ are conceived under the influence of some sense of awe or
wonder, of beauty or pathos, of local or antique association; and the
whole description is so presented as to bring this central interest into
prominent relief. The thought of the whole situation, not the sequence of
events in time or causal connexion, is what determines the grouping and
subordination of details.

Thus in the description of the storm in Book i., the dominant feeling by
the light of which the circumstances are to be realised is that of sudden
and overwhelming power in the elements and of man’s impotence to contend
against them. In the description of the harbour in which the ships of
Aeneas find refuge we feel the sense of calm and peace after storm and
danger. In the interview between Venus and her son the impression left on
the mind is that of a mysterious supernatural grace enhancing the charm of
human beauty, such as is produced by the pictorial representations of
religious art. We seem to look on the rising towers and dwellings of
Carthage with that joyful sense of wonder and novelty with which the
thought of the beginning of great enterprises, or of the discovery of
unknown lands, and the first view of ancient and famous cities, such as
Rome or Venice, appeal to the imagination. In the second Book the effect
of the whole representation is enhanced by the sentiment of awe and
mystery with which night, and darkness, and the intermittent flashes of
light which break the darkness, impress the mind. Thus as a prelude to the
terrible and tragical scenes afterwards represented, the apparition of
Hector comes before Aeneas in the deepest stillness of the night—

Tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris
Incipit(666).

Then follow the confused sights and sounds of battle, like those of the
νυκτομαχία in the seventh Book of Thucydides and of that in the Vitellian
war of Tacitus,—the spectacle revealed by the light of the burning city—

Sigaea igni freta lata relucent(667);

the vivid gleams in which the death of Priam, the cowering figure of
Helen, the majestic forms of the Olympian gods taking part in the work of
destruction, are for a moment disclosed out of the surrounding darkness,
the alarm and bewilderment of the escape from the house of Anchises and of
the vain attempt of Aeneas to recover the lost Creusa—

Horror ubique, animos simul ipsa silentia terrent(668).

The third Book is pervaded by the feeling of the sea,—not as in the
Odyssey of its buoyant and inexhaustible life, nor yet of the dread which
it inspired in the earliest mariners,—but in that more modern mood in
which it unfolds to the traveller the animated spectacle of islands and
coasts famous for their beauty or their historic and legendary
associations. In the fifth Book, as is pointed out by Chateaubriand, the
effect of the limitless and monotonous prospect of the open sea in
producing a sense of weariness and melancholy, such as that expressed in
‘The Lotus-eaters’—

‘but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam,’

is profoundly felt in the passage—

At procul in sola secretae Troades acta
Amissum Anchisen flebant cunctaeque profundum
Pontum adspectabant flentes; ‘heu tot vada fessis
Et tantum superesse maris,’ vox omnibus una(669).

It was seen how the sense of supernatural awe adds to the tragic grandeur
of the despair and death of Dido, as in the lines, which bear some trace
of a vivid passage in Ennius—

agit ipse furentem
In somnis ferus Aeneas: semperque relinqui
Sola sibi, semper longam incomitata videtur
Ire viam, et Tyrios deserta quaerere terra(670).

Thus too the mind is prepared for the spectacle revealed in the Descent
into Hell by the awful sublimity of the Invocation—

Di quibus imperium est animarum umbraeque silentes(671).

The description of the funeral rites of Pallas produces that complex
impression of sadness and solemnity mixed with proud memories and thoughts
of the pomp and circumstance of war which affects men in the present day,
when witnessing the spectacle of the funeral of some great soldier who has
died full of years and honour—

Post bellator equus positis insignibus Aethon
It lacrimans guttisque umectat grandibus ora.
Hastam alii galeamque ferunt, nam cetera Turnus
Victor habet. Tum moesta phalanx Teucrique sequuntur
Tyrrhenique omnes et versis Arcades armis(672).

In the employment of illustrative imagery Virgil is much more sparing than
Homer. The varied forces of Nature and of animal life supplied materials
to the Greek poet by which to enhance the poetical sense of the situation
which he describes; and all these forces are apprehended by him with a
vivid feeling of wonder, and presented to the imagination with a truthful
observation of outward signs, and with a sympathetic insight into their
innermost nature. Virgil is not only more sparing in the use of these
figures; he is also tamer and less inventive in their application. In
those drawn from the life of wild animals he, for the most part,
reproduces the Homeric imagery, though we note as one touch of realism in
them that the wolf, familiar to Italy, frequently takes the place of the
lion, which was probably still an object of terror in Western Asia at the
time when Homer lived. Another class of images reproduced from Homer is
that of those in which a mortal is compared to an immortal, as at i. 498—

Qualis in Eurotae ripis, aut per iuga Cynthi,
Exercet Diana choros, etc.,

though in this some variations are introduced from a simile in Apollonius.
Another passage of the same kind is immediately derived from the
Alexandrine poet—

Qualis, ubi hibernam Lyciam Xanthique fluenta(673), etc.

There is, however, another class of ‘similes’ used by Virgil in his epic,
after the example of the Alexandrines, which can scarcely be said to
fulfil the function of a poetical analogy, but merely to give a realistic
outward symbol of some movement of the mind or passions, without any
imaginative enhancement of the situation. Such, for instance, is the
comparison at vii. 377, etc. of the mind of Amata to a top whipped by boys
round an empty court,—a comparison suggested by a passage in
Callimachus(674); and that again at viii. 22, etc. of the variations of
purpose in the mind of Aeneas, produced by the surging sea of cares
besetting him, to the variations of light reflected from the water in a
copper cauldron,—a comparison directly imitated from Apollonius (iii. 754,
etc.). There are others again of what may be called a somewhat
conventional cast, which acquire individuality from the colour of local
associations, such as the introduction (at xii. 715) of two bulls battling
together (as they are also described in the Georgics)—

ingenti Sila, summove Taburno;

the comparison (at xii. 701 etc.) of Aeneas, towering in all his warlike
power, to Athos or Eryx—

aut ipse, coruscis
Cum fremit ilicibus, quantus, gaudetque nivali
Vertice se attollens, pater Appenninus ad auras(675);

and that at ix. 680, etc., in which the two sons of Alcanor are likened to
two tall oaks growing—

Sive Padi ripis Athesim seu propter amoenum(676).

But there are other comparisons in Virgil indicative of more original
invention, observation, and reflexion, which serve the true purpose of
imaginative analogies, viz. that of exalting the peculiar sentiment with
which the poet desires the situation he is describing to be regarded. In
the perception of these analogies it is not merely intellectual curiosity
that is gratified by the apprehension of the τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο in the
phenomena; but the imagination is enlarged by the recognition of analogous
forces operating in different spheres, which separately are capable of
producing a vivid and noble emotion. As an instance of this perception of
the analogy between great forces in different spheres, the one of human,
the other of natural activity, we may take the comparison of the Italian
host advancing in orderly march after its tumultuous gathering from many
quarters, to the movement of mighty rivers when their component waters
have found their appointed bed—

Ceu septem surgens sedatis amnibus altus
Per tacitum Ganges, aut pingui flumine Nilus
Cum refluit campis et iam se condidit alveo(677).

Others again show the vivid interest mixed with poetical wonder which
animated Virgil’s power of observation in his Georgics—as for instance
that at i. 430 of the busy workers in Carthage to bees in early summer
toiling among the flowery fields—an image ennobled also by Milton, who
characteristically describes the bees as ‘conferring their state-affairs,’
while it is not to their political, but to their industrial, martial, and
social or domestic aptitudes,

(cum gentis adultos
Educunt fetus)

that Virgil draws attention. Of the same class is the comparison at iv.
404, etc., of the Trojans preparing to leave the shores of Carthage to the
movement of ants engaged in gathering together some heap of corn for their
winter’s store—

It nigrum campis agmen, etc.

Others again are suggested by his subtle and sympathetic discernment of
the conditions of inward feeling; as the comparison at iv. 70, etc. of
Dido to the hind, which, unsuspecting of danger, has received a mortal
wound from a hand ignorant of the harm which it has inflicted—

haeret lateri letalis harundo.

The awe and mystery of the unseen world suggest the comparison of the
crowd of shades pressing round Charon’s boat to innumerable leaves falling
in the woods, or to flocks of birds driven across the sea by the first
cold of autumn—

Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto
Quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus
Trans pontum fugat et terris inmittit apricis(678).

The point of comparison in this simile is not merely the obvious one of
the number of leaves falling or birds flying across the sea in autumn, but
rather the inner likeness between the passive helplessness with which the
leaves have yielded to the chill touch of the year, and that with which
the shades—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα—have yielded to the chill touch of death.
Nor perhaps is it pressing the language of Virgil too far to suppose that
in the words ‘terris inmittit apricis’ he means to leave on the mind a
feeling of some happier possibilities in death than the certainty of ‘cold
obstruction.’ One of the most characteristically Virgilian similes—that at
vi. 453—

qualem primo qui surgere mense
Aut videt, aut vidisse putat per nubila Lunam—

is almost a translation of the lines of Apollonius (iv. 1447)—

τὼς ἰδέειν, ὥς τίς τε νέῳ ἐνὶ ἤματι μήνην
ἢ ἴδεν, ἢ ἐδόκησεν ἐπαχλύουσαν ἰδέσθαι(679),—

but the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of
the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form
of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower
world. Other images are suggested by the poet’s delicate sense of grace in
flower or plant, combined with his tender compassion for the beauty of
youth perishing prematurely. Such are those which enable us more vividly
to realise the pathos of the death of Euryalus and of the burial of
Pallas. Yet though these images are characteristically Virgilian, they
also bear unmistakeable traces of imitation. The lines—

Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo
Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur(680);

and again—

Qualem, virgineo demessum pollice, florem,
Seu mollis violae, seu languentis hyacinthi,
Cui neque fulgor adhuc, nec dum sua forma recessit;
Non iam mater alit tellus, viresque ministrat(681)—

recall not only the thought and feeling of Homer—

μήκων δ’ ὣς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν etc.,

but the cadences and most cherished illustrations of Catullus, in whose
imagination the grace of trees and the bloom of flowers are ever
associated with the grace and bloom of youth and youthful passion.

Had Virgil lived to devote three more years to the revisal of his work,
there is no reason to suppose that he would have added anything to its
substance. Some inconsistencies of statement, as, for instance, that
between iii. 256 and vii. 123, would have disappeared, and some
difficulties would have been cleared up. But the chief part of the ‘limae
labor’ would have been employed in bringing the rhythm and diction of the
poem to a more finished perfection than that which they exhibit at
present. The unfinished lines in the poem would certainly have been
completed and more closely connected with the passages immediately
succeeding them. There is no indication that these lines were left
purposely incomplete in order to give emphasis to some pause in the
narrative. Virgil was the last poet likely to avail himself of so
inartistic an innovation to give variety to his cadences. For the most
part they appear to be weak props (‘tibicines’(682)) used provisionally to
fill up the gap between two passages, and indicating but not completing
the thought that was to connect them.

What more of elegance, of compact structure, or of varied harmony Virgil
might have imparted to his rhythm, it is impossible to determine. We might
conjecture that his aim would have been, as regards both expression and
metrical effect, to act on the maxim ‘ramos compesce fluentes,’ than to
give them ampler scope. In a long narrative poem like the Aeneid that
perfect smoothness and solidity of rhythmical execution which characterise
the Georgics—in which poem the position and weight of each single word in
each single line is an element contributing to the whole effect—is hardly
to be expected. A narrative poem demands a more easy, varied, and even
careless movement than one of which the interest is contemplative, and
which requires to be studied minutely line by line and paragraph by
paragraph, before its full meaning is realised. If the movement in the
Aeneid appears in some place rougher, or less compact, or more languid
than in others, this may be explained not only by the imperfect state in
which the poem was left, but by the difficulty or impossibility of
maintaining the same uniform level of elevation in so long a flight. Yet
it cannot be said that there is any loss of power, any trace of
contentment with a lower ideal of perfection in the general structure of
the verse of the Aeneid. The full capacities of the Latin hexameter for
purposes of animated or impressive narrative, of solemn or pathetic
representation, of grave or impassioned oratory, of tender, dignified, or
earnest appeal to the higher emotions of man, are realised in many
passages of the poem. Virgil’s instrument fails, or, at least, is much
inferior to Homer’s, in aptitude for natural dialogue or for bringing
familiar things in the freshness of immediate impression before the
imagination. The stateliness of movement appropriate to such utterances as

Ast ego quae Divom incedo regina(683)

does not readily adapt itself to the description of the process of
kindling a fire or preparing a meal—

Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates,
Suscepitque ignem foliis atque arida circum
Nutrimenta dedit rapuitque in fomite flammam(684).

To English readers the verse of the Aeneid may appear inferior in majesty
and fulness of volume to that of Milton in his passages of most sustained
power; but it is easier and less encumbered and thus more adapted to
express various conditions of human life than the ordinary movement of the
modern epic. It flows in a more varied, weighty, and self-restrained
stream than the more homogeneous and overflowing current of Spenser’s
verse. The Latin hexameter became for Virgil an exquisite and powerful
medium for communicating to others a knowledge of his elevated moods and
pensive meditativeness, and for calling up before their minds that
spectacle of a statelier life and a more august order in the contemplation
of which his spirit habitually lived.

The last revision would also have removed from the poem some redundancies,
obscurities, and weakness of expression. There is a greater tendency to
use ‘otiose’ epithets than in the Georgics, and a minute criticism has
taken note of the number of times in which such words as ‘ingens’ and
‘immanis’ occur in the poem. Though the interpretation of the meaning of
the Aeneid as a whole is probably as certain as that of any other great
work of antiquity, yet there are passages in it which still baffle
commentators in deciding which of two or three possible meanings was in
the mind of the poet, or whether he had himself finally resolved what turn
he should give his thought. As there are lines left incomplete, so there
are lame conclusions to lofty and impassioned utterances of feeling. Such
for instance is the prosaic and tautological conclusion of the passage in
which Lausus is brought on the scene—

dignus, patriis qui laetior esset
Imperiis et cui pater haud Mezentius esset(685).

But it is only a microscopic observation of the structure of the poem that
detects such blemishes as these. In the Aeneid Virgil’s style appears as
great in its power of reaching the secrets of the human spirit, as in the
Georgics it proved itself to be in eliciting the deeper meaning of Nature.
He combines nearly all the characteristic excellences of the great Latin
writers. His language appears indeed inferior not only to that of
Lucretius and Catullus but even to that of Ennius in reproducing the first
vivid impressions of things upon the mind. The phrases of Virgil are
generally coloured with the associations and steeped in the feeling of
older thoughts and memories. Yet if he seems inferior in direct force of
presentation, he unites the two most marked and generally dissociated
characteristics of the masters of Latin style,—the exuberance and vivacity
of those writers in whom impulse and imagination are strong, such as
Cicero, Livy, and Lucretius,—the terseness and compactness of expression,
arising either from intensity of perception or reflective condensation, of
which the shorter poems of Catullus, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the
writings of Sallust, and the memorial inscriptions of the time of the
Republic and of the Empire afford striking examples. Virgil’s condensation
of expression often resembles that of Tacitus, and seems to arise from the
same cause, the restraint imposed by reflexion on the exuberance of a
poetical imagination. By its combination of opposite excellences the style
of the Aeneid is at once an admirable vehicle of continuous or compressed
narrative, of large or concentrated description, of fluent and
impassioned, or composed and impressive oratory. It possesses also the
power, which distinguishes the older Latin writers, of stamping some grave
or magnanimous lesson in imperishable characters on the mind—

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.
Disce puer virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis.
Aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum
Finge deo(686).

But Virgil is not only great as a Latin writer. The concurrent testimony
of the most refined minds of all times marks him out as one of the
greatest masters of the language which touches the heart or moves the
manlier sensibilities, who has ever lived. A mature and mellow truth of
sentiment, a conformity to the deeper experiences of life in every age, a
fine humanity as well as a generous elevation of feeling, and some magical
charm of music in his words, have enabled them to serve many minds in many
ages as a symbol of some swelling thought or over-mastering emotion, the
force and meaning of which they could scarcely define to themselves. A
striking instance of this effect appears in the words in which Savonarola
describes the impulse which forced him to abandon the career of worldly
ambition, which his father pressed on him, in favour of the religious
life. It was the voice of warning which he ever heard repeating to him the
words—

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum(687).

And while his tenderness of feeling has made Virgil the familiar friend of
one class of minds, his high magnanimous spirit has equally gained for him
the admiration of another class. The words of no other poet, ancient or
modern, have been so often heard in the great debates of the English
Parliament, which more than any other deliberations among men have
reproduced the dignified and masculine eloquence familiar to the Roman
Senate. One of the greatest masters of expression among living English
writers has pointed, as characteristic of the magic of Virgil’s style, to
‘his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines giving utterance,
as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of
better things which is the experience of her children in every time(688).’
It is in the expression of this weariness and deep longing for rest, in
making others feel his own sense of the painful toil and mystery of life
and of the sadness of death, his sense too of vague yearning for some
fuller and ampler being, that Virgil produces the most powerful effect by
the use of the simplest words in their simplest application.

‘O passi graviora—’
‘Vobis parta quies—’
‘Dis aliter visum—’
‘Di, si qua est caelo pietas—’
‘Heu vatum ignarae mentes—’
‘Iam pridem invisus superis et inutilis annos
Demoror—’
‘Si pereo hominum manibus periisse iuvabit—’
‘Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis—’
‘Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda—’
‘Impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum—’
‘Quod te per caeli iucundum lumen et auras—’
‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore—’
‘Securos latices et longa oblivia potant—(689)’

these and many other pregnant sayings affect the mind with a strange
potency, of which perhaps no account can be given except that they make us
feel, as scarcely any other words do, the burden of the mystery of life,
and by their marvellous beauty, the reflexion, it may be, from some light
dimly discerned or imagined(690) beyond the gloom, they make it seem more
easy to be borne.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

1 Eclog. ix. 35.

2 ‘Leporum
Disertus puer ac facetiarum.’ Catullus xii. 8.

3 The name of Trebatius also, though one associated with law rather
than literature, may be added as a connecting link between the
friends of Cicero and of Horace.

4 Munro’s Lucretius, Introduction to Notes, ii. page 305.

5 ‘These writers your fine Hermogenes never reads, nor that ape, whose
whole art is to repeat the songs of Calvus and Catullus.’ Hor. Sat.
i. 10. 17–19.

6 Hor. Sat. ii. 1. 11.

7 Ann. i. 1; Hist. i. 1.

8 Cf. Juv. ii. 28: In tabulam Sullae si dicant discipuli tres.

9 Od. iii. 4. 28.

10 Cf. Eleg. i. 41–42:—

Non ego divitias patrum fructusque requiro
Quos tulit antiquo condita messis avo.

11 Cf. v. 1. 129–130:—

Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci
Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.

12 ‘Imbellis et firmus parum.’ Ep. i. 16.

13 Eleg. i. 1; i. 10.

14 ‘On the one side Augustus leading the Italians into battle with the
Senate and people, the Penates and the great Gods—on the other
Antonius with a barbaric and motley host, advancing in triumph from
the peoples of the dawn and the shore of the Red Sea, bears with him
Egypt, and the might of the East, and furthest Bactria, and
following in his train,—sin accursed!—an Egyptian bride.’ Aen. viii.
678 _et seq._

15 ‘Be it thine, O Roman, to govern the nations with thy imperial
rule.’

16 ‘Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.’ Ennius.

17 In the Ancyraean inscription we find the following passage (Bergk’s
reading): ‘Legibus novis latis multa revocavi exempla maiorum
exolescentia iam ex nostra civitate,’ etc.

18 Cf. Ancyraean inscription: ‘Templum Apollinis in Palatio cum
porticibus, aedem Divi Iulii, Lupercal,’ etc. (where we notice the
recognition of the divinity of Julius Caesar, along with the old
Olympian and national gods, Apollo, Jupiter Tonans and Feretrius,
Quirinus, the Lares and Penates, and with the deified abstractions
Libertas and Juventas).

19 A similar influence is attributed by M. Sainte-Beuve to Louis XIV.
After speaking of the freedom and licence of French literature under
the patronage of Fouquet, he adds, ‘Le jeune roi vint, et il amena,
il suscita avec lui sa jeune littérature; il mit le correctif à
l’ancienne, et, sauf des infractions brillantes, il imprima à
l’ensemble des productions de son temps un caractère de solidité, et
finalement de moralité, qui est aussi celui qui règne dans ses
propres écrits, et dans l’habitude de sa pensée.’

20 Aen. vi. 795.

21 Hor. Od. iv. 15. 9.

22 Aen. viii. 678 _et seq._

23 Hor. Od. i. 2. 50.

24 Aen. i. 287; vi. 796; Hor. Od. iv. 15. 15.

25 Aen. i. 288.

26 Georg. ii. 170.

27 Aen. viii. 716.

28 Hor. Od. iv. 5. 20; Ep. ii. 1. 2.

29 ‘Ad hoc templum divo Claudio constitutum quasi arx aeternae
dominationis aspiciebatur.’ Tac. Ann. xiv. 31.

30 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

31 Od. iii. 3. 9, etc.; Ep. ii. 1. 5.

32 Aen. vi. 801.

33 Od. iv. 5.

34 These comparisons may be more naturally referred to Roman
‘Euhemerism,’ than to the survival of the spirit of hero-worship,
which, although still active in Greece, was a mode of feeling alien
to the Roman imagination.

35 Cp. infra, chap. vi.

36 The belief in the divinity of the genius attending on each
individual, and also the custom of raising altars to some abstract
quality in an individual, such as the ‘Clemency of Caesar,’ help
also to explain this supposed union of the god and man in the person
of the Emperor. The language of Virgil in Eclogue IV. also throws
light on the ideas possible as to the union of the divine with human
nature.

37 This is indicated by the bare feet.

38 The substance of these remarks is taken from the late O. Jahn’s
‘Höfische Kunst und Poesie unter Augustus,’ published in his
‘Populäre Aufsätze.’ The account of the cameos is given solely on
his authority. Several ideas on the whole subject of the deification
of the Emperors are derived from the same source.

39 Sueton. De Vita Caesarum, ii. 90 _et seq._

40 ‘Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia ab aetate prima et cupide et
laboriosissime exercuit.’ Sueton. ii. 84.

‘Augusto prompta ac profluens, quaeque deceret principem, eloquentia
fuit.’ Tac. Ann. xiii. 3.

41 ‘Aiacem tragoediam scripserat, eandemque, quod sibi displicuisset,
deleverat. Postea L. Varius tragoediarum scriptor interrogabat eum,
quid ageret Aiax suus. Et ille, “in spongium,” inquit, “incubuit.”’
Macrob. ii. 4. 2.

42 Sat. ii. 1. 20.

43 Ep. ii. 1. 248.

44 Essays Literary and Theological, by R. H. Hutton.

45 Cf. Propert. El. iv. 9. 34:—

Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides.

Do. ii. 1. 36:—

Et sumta et posita pace fidele caput.

46 Velleius ii. 88.

47 Tac. Ann. iii. 30: ‘Ille quamquam prompto ad capessendos honores
aditu, Maecenatem aemulatus sine dignitate senatoria multos
triumphalium consulariumque potentia anteiit, diversus a veterum
instituto per cultum et munditias, copiaque et affluentia luxu
propior: suberat tamen vigor animi ingentibus negotiis par, eo
acrior quo somnum et inertiam magis ostentabat.’

48 ‘Gallus for whom my love grows from hour to hour even as the green
alder-tree shoots up in the early spring.’

49 Eclog. vi. 70, etc.

50 Sat. vii. 93, 94.

51 ‘When you say it makes no matter what a man’s father was, provided
he is of free-birth.’ Sat. i. 6. 7–8.

52 ‘And as when often in a mighty multitude discord has arisen and the
base rabble storms with passion.’

53 ‘Ancus, unduly vain, even already delighting too much in the veering
wind of the people’s favour.’

54 Cp. Merivale’s Roman Empire.

55 Vester, Camenae, vester in arduos
Tollor Sabinos; seu mihi frigidum
Praeneste, seu Tibur supinum,
Seu liquidae placuere Baiae. Od. iii. 4. 21–24.

56 Cf. the lines of Juvenal, vii. 66–68, in especial reference to
Virgil:—

Magnae mentis opus nec de lodice paranda
Attonitae, currus et equos, faciesque Deorum
Aspicere, et qualis Rutulum confundat Erinnys, etc.

57 ‘’Gainst flaming Sirius’ fury thou
Art proof, and grateful cool dost yield
To oxen wearied with the plough,
And flocks that range afield.’ Martin.

58 ‘May my delight be in the fields and the flowing streams in the
dales; unknown to fame may I love the rivers and the woods. O to be,
where are the plains, and the Spercheos, and the heights, roamed
over in their revels by Laconian maidens, the heights of Taygetus.’

59 Cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 470: ‘Mollesque sub arbore somni.’
Hor. Ep. i. 14. 35: ‘Prope rivum somnus in herba.’
Virg. Eclog. ii. 40: ‘Nec tuta mihi valle reperti.’
Hor. Ep. i. 11. 10: ‘Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem.’

60 ‘It is great riches for a man to live sparingly with a contented
mind.’

61 Ep. i. 14. 34–35.

62 Compare Munro’s Lucretius, p. 306 (third edition).

63 ‘To be sleepless through the calm nights, searching by what words
and verse I may succeed in holding a bright light before your mind,
by which you may be able to see thoroughly things hidden from view.’

64 ‘While I seem ever to be plying this task, to be searching into the
nature of things, and revealing it, when discovered, in writings in
my native speech.’

65 iii. 8.

66 Virg. Eclog. vi. 72; x. 50.

67 Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

68 ‘All other themes which might have charmed the idle mind in song,’
etc.

69 Born at Alexandria, but afterwards settled at Rhodes. He ultimately
returned to Alexandria.

70 ‘Often did Macer, now advanced in years, read to me his poem on
birds, and of the serpent whose sting is deadly, and of the herb
that heals.’ Trist. iv. 10. 43–44.

71 Sueton. De Viris Illustribus.

72 ‘Lead him home from the city, my strain, lead Daphnis home.’

73 Woermann, Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und
Römer; Helbig, Campanische Wandmalerei.

74 Cf. ‘Senecae praedivitis hortos.’ Juv. ‘Pariterque hortis inhians,
quos ille a Lucullo coeptos insigni magnificentia extollebat.’ Tac.
Ann. xi. 1.

75 The substance of these remarks is derived from Helbig’s Campanische
Wandmalerei.

76 Cf. Plautus, Pseudolus, i. 2. 14:—

Neque Alexandrina beluata conchuliata tapetia.

77 Scholium quoted by W. S. Teuffel in his account of L. Varius.

78 Tristia, iv. 10. 41, etc.

79 W. S. Teuffel.

80 Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius: ille meo quis?
Quis nisi Callimachus? Si plus adposcere visus,
Fit Mimnermus, et optivo cognomine crescit. Ep. ii. 2. 99.

Propertius may have been dead at the time when these lines were
published; but we may remember that the famous lines on ‘Atticus’
did not see the light till after the death of Addison.

81 ‘And the musical voice of Horace charmed my ears, while he makes his
polished song resound on the Ausonian lyre.’

82 Od. iv. 3. 13. 16:—

‘At Rome, of all earth’s cities queen,
Men deign to rank me in the noble press
Of bards beloved of man: and now, I ween,
Doth envy’s rancorous tooth assail me less.’ Martin.

83 Ep. i. 19. 19–20.

‘O servile crew! how oft your antics mean
Have moved my laughter, oh, how oft my spleen.’ Martin.

84 Ep. ii. 1. 117.

‘’Tis writing, writing now is all the rage.’ Martin.

85 ‘After the result of the campaign of Actium, when the interests of
peace demanded that supreme power should be conferred on one man,
those great geniuses disappeared. Truth too suffered in many ways,
at first from ignorance of public life, as a matter with which men
had no concern, and soon from the spirit of adulation.’ Hist. i. 1.

86 E. Quinet.

87 Traditum ab antiquis morem. Hor. Sat. i. 4. 117.

88 Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, etc. Hor. Od. iii. 4. 9.

89 ‘Virgile depuis l’heure où il parut a été le poëte de la Latinité
tout entière.’ Sainte-Beuve.

90 ‘To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,’ ‘who sang the idle songs
of shepherds,’ ‘my task is on a lowly theme.’

91 ‘I must strive to find a way by which I may raise myself too above
the ground, and speed to and fro triumphant through the mouths of
men.’

92 ‘Give place, all ye Roman writers, give place, ye Greeks: some work,
I know not what, is coming to the birth, greater than the Iliad.’
Eleg. iii. 32, 64–65.

93 Cf. Wölflin in the Philologus, xxvi, quoted by Comparetti.

94 Tac. De Oratoribus, ch. xiii.

95 ‘Si Virgile faisait aux Romains cette illusion d’avoir égalé ou
surpassé Homère, c’est qu’il avait touché fortement la fibre
Romaine.’ Sainte-Beuve.

96 ‘Live then, I pray, yet rival not the divine Aeneid, but follow it
from afar, and ever reverence its track.’ Thebaid xii. 816.

97 ‘Mantua, home of the Muses, raised to the stars by Aonian song, and
rival of the music of Smyrna.’ Silius, Punic. viii. 595.

98 E.g. iv. 14. 14; xii. 4. 1; xiv. 186; v. 10. 7; viii. 56, etc.

99 viii. 18. 5–9.

100 Ep. iii. 7.

101 E.g. i. 162; iii. 199; v. 45, 138, vi. 434, etc.; vii. 66, 226, 236,
etc.

102 ‘When the whole Horace had lost its natural colour, and the soot was
sticking to the blackened Virgil.’ vii. 226.

103 Green’s History of the English People, p. 37.

104 Quoted by Comparetti; and also in Bähr’s Römische Literatur.

105 Works of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, by John Small, M.A., vol.
i. p. cxlv.

106 Carlyle’s Translation of the Inferno.

107 Mr. Small, in his account of the writings of Bishop Gavin Douglas,
says, ‘The works of Virgil passed through ninety editions before the
year 1500.’

108 See Conington’s Introduction to the Aeneid.

109 Appendix to the Henriade.

110 Dict. Philos., art. Epopée.

111 Quoted by Comparetti.

112 Sainte-Beuve, ‘Causeries du Lundi.’

113 By Mr. Payne, in the Clarendon Press Series.

114 ‘Who shall say what share the turning over and over in their mind,
and masticating, so to speak, in early life as models of their Latin
verse, such things as Virgil’s

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,

or Horace’s

Fortuna saevo laeta negotio,

has not had in forming the high spirit of the upper class in France
and England, the two countries where Latin verse has most ruled the
schools, and the two countries which most have had, or have, a high
upper class and a high upper class spirit?’ High Schools and
Universities in Germany, by M. Arnold.

115 ‘Add too the companions of the Muses of Helicon, amongst whom Homer,
the peerless, after holding the sceptre—.’

116 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

117 i. 24. 11.

118 Vol. i. p. 197, Hare and Thirlwall’s translation.

119 Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii. p. 131 _et seq._ (London,
1855.)

120 Conington’s Virgil, Introduction to vol. ii.

121 Introduction to Eclogue v.

122 Book iii. chap. xiv.

123 He adds the comment, ‘Equidem dubito num legerit. Nam et philologos
ita iudicare audivi de Virgilio ut non legisse eos appareret.’

124 Questions Contemporaines. L’Instruction Supérieure en France.

125 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v.

126 Roman Empire, chap. xli.

127 Étude sur Virgile.

128 La Cité antique.

129 Études sur la Poésie latine.

130 ‘A land of old renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil.’

131 ‘Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini
Quirites atavique Romani,’ etc. Columella.

132 Cf. Lucretius, iii. 105–106:

Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum
Cum redeunt felusque ferunt variosque lepores.

133 ‘Hail mighty mother of harvests, Saturnian land, mighty mother of
men.’

134 ‘Virgile fut en effet une des âmes les plus chrétiennes du
Paganisme. Quoique attaché de tout son cœur à l’ancienne religion,
il a semblé quelquefois pressentir la nouvelle, et un Chrétien pieux
pourrait croire qu’il ne lui manqua pour l’embrasser que de la
connaître.’ Gaston Boissier.

135 ‘As it falls it awakens a hoarse murmur among the smooth stones, and
with its bubbling waters cools the parched fields.’

136 It is in the poems connected with this theme that Horace writes most
from the heart; yet even where he writes chiefly from the head he
imparts the same vital realism to the results of his reflection.

137 ‘We are not the first to whom things of beauty appear beautiful,—we
who are mortal men, and behold not the morrow.’

138 Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman.

139 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

140 Quoted by Reifferscheid in his Suetonii Reliquiae.

141 For the name _Catalepton_ cp. Professor Nettleship’s _Vergil_ in
_Classical Writers_, p. 23.

142 ‘Sed tanta inchoata res est, ut paene vitio mentis tantum opus
ingressus mihi videar, cum praesertim alia quoque studia ad id opus
multoque potiora impertiar.’ Macrob. Sat. i. 24. 11. The ‘potiora
studia’ seem clearly to mean the philosophical studies, to which his
biographer says he meant to devote the remainder of his life after
publishing the Aeneid.

143 ‘A way remote from the world and the path of a life that passes by
unnoticed.’

Cp. ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.’

144 Cf. Reifferscheid, Quaestiones Suetonianae, p. 400. Hagen, De
Donatianae Vergilii vitae Codicibus, prefixed to his edition of the
Scholia Bernensia. De vita et scriptis P. Vergili Maronis narratio,
prefixed to Ribbeck’s text in the Teubner edition of Virgil.

145 Ribbeck, Prolegomena, cap. viii.

146 Gossrau, in his edition of the Aeneid (1876), argues and quotes
authorities in favour of retaining the older form _Virgilius_.

147 Cf. Pliny, Ep. iii. 7. Martial, xii. 67:—

Octobres Maro consecravit Idus.

148 ‘But no single day used then to give to their doom many thousands of
men marshalled under their standards.’ Lucret. v. 999.

149 ‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

150 ‘From here, under some high rock, the song of the woodsman will rise
into the air.’

151 ‘I had indeed heard that from the spot where the hills begin to draw
themselves away from the plain, sinking down with a gentle slope, as
far as the river and the old beeches, with their now withered tops,
your Menalcas had saved all his land by his songs.’

152 ‘Yet we shall reach the town: or if we fear that night may first
bring the rain—’

153 ‘The herds will not lack their clear springs, nor their pasture.’

154 Cf. Eustace, vol. i. chap. v. Compare also the following
characteristic passage quoted from Dickens by Mr. Hare in his Cities
of Northern and Central Italy: ‘Was the way to Mantua as beautiful
when Romeo was banished thither, I wonder? Did it wind _through
pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams_, and
dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees? _Those purple mountains
lay on the horizon_, then, for certain.’ Dickens certainly was not
looking for Virgilian reminiscences in writing this description.

155 ‘And thou, Benacus, uprising with waves and roar like that of the
sea.’

156 ‘And such a plain as ill-fated Mantua lost, a plain which fed its
snow-white swans on its weedy river.’

157 Aeneid, x. 204.

158 ‘Vergilius—nomen vix dubiae originis Gallicae. Cf. Vergiliae
(stellae), Propert. i. 8. 10, Plin. fq. Οὐεργιλία (Oppid. Hispan.),
Ptol. 2. 5. Radix vetust. Camb. _guerg._ (efficax) gl. Ox. extat
etiam in vetusto nomine apud Caes.’ Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica, p.
11, edit. altera: Berol. 1871.

159 Cic. Epp. ad Att. vii. 7; ad Fam. xvi. 12.

160 Cic. Epp. ad Att. v. 2.

161 ‘But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,
His cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,
Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride
Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills.’ Martin.

162 ‘Meanwhile, cheering her long task with song, his wife runs over the
web with her sounding shuttle.’

163 Ferunt infantem, cum sit editus, neque vagisse, et adeo miti vultu
fuisse, ut haud dubiam spem prosperioris geniturae jam tunc
indicaret.

164 Siquidem virga populea more regionis in puerperiis eodem statim loco
depacta ita brevi evaluit tempore ut multo ante satas populos
adaequasset, quae arbor Virgilii ex eo dicta atque etiam consecrata
est summa gravidarum ac fetarum religione.

The resemblance of the name to the word virga is probably at the
root of this story.

165 ‘You will now be to him what Mantua and Cremona were before.’

166 ‘Hence, away, empty phrases of the Rhetoricians, words swollen with
water not from a Greek source, and you, ye Stilos, and Tarquiti, and
Varros, tribe of grammarians oozing over with fat, away hence
tinkling cymbal of our empty youth.... I shape my course to the
blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siron, and
will redeem my life from every care.’

167 ‘For, I shall own the truth, ye were dear to me.’

168 ‘But me a passionate delight hurries along over the lonely heights
of Parnassus.’

169 ‘When I would sing of kings and battles, Apollo pulled my ear and
warned me.’

170 ‘Cottage that belonged to Siron, and poor plot of ground, although
deemed great riches by your former owner.’

171 Hor. Ep. ii. 1. 246.

172 ‘Tenderness and grace have been granted to Virgil by the Muses who
delight in the country.’

173 ‘Maecenas goes to play at fives, Virgil and I to sleep, for that
game does not agree with those suffering from dyspepsia and weak
eyes.’

174 ‘Yet there will remain some vestiges of the ancient sin, which will
induce men to tempt the sea in ships.’

175 ‘No more sincere souls has the earth ever borne, nor any to whom
there is a more devoted friend than I.’

176 ‘I then had my home in sweet Parthenope, happy in the pursuits of an
inglorious idleness.’

177 ‘You sing, beneath the pine-woods of the shaded Galaesus, Thyrsis
and Daphnis on your well-worn reeds.’

178 Cf. supra, p. 69.

179 ‘Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat,
sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.’ Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle:
‘Il lui était utile même d’avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la
bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.’

180 Cp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem
of Catullus.

181 The German historians of Roman literature are more just in their
judgment of Virgil’s character than of his genius. Thus W. S.
Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous
remark—‘Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen
Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer
amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an
Vergil unbegreiflich war.’

182 ‘He was gentle here on earth, and is gentle there.’ Aristoph. Frogs,
82.

183 Cf. Reifferscheid, p. 67.

184 ‘Whatsoever it shall be, every fortune must be mastered by bearing
it.’
‘Learn, my son, from me to bear yourself like a man and to strive
earnestly, from others learn to be fortunate.’

185 Compare the lines of Coleridge on hearing ‘The Prelude’ read aloud
by Wordsworth:—

‘An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.’

186 ‘I, the idle singer of a pastoral song, who in the boldness of youth
made thee, O Tityrus, beneath the shade of the spreading beech, my
theme.’

187 The lines of Propertius—

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus,

might suggest the inference that the seventh was composed at the
time when Virgil was residing in the neighbourhood of Tarentum. But,
at the time when Propertius wrote, Virgil was engaged in the
composition of the Aeneid, not of the Eclogues. The present ‘canis’
seems rather to mean that Virgil, while engaged with his Aeneid, was
still conning over his old Eclogues. Yet he must have strayed
‘subter pineta Galaesi’ some time before the composition of the last
Georgic. It has been remarked by Mr. Munro that the ‘memini’ in the
line

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis

looks like the memory of a somewhat distant past. Could the villa of
Siron have been in the neighbourhood of Tarentum? (a question
originally suggested by Mr. Munro); may it have passed by gift or
inheritance into the possession of Virgil, and was he in later life
in the habit of going to it from time to time? or was the distance
too great from Mantua for him to have transferred his family
thither?

188 ‘This taught me “the fair Alexis was loved by Corydon,” this too
taught me “whose is the flock? is it the flock of Meliboeus?”’

189 viii. 56. 12.

190 Ep. ad Att. i. 12.

191 Dr. Kennedy refers to no less than seventeen parallel passages from
Theocritus, many of them being almost literal translations from the
Greek poet.

192 ‘Look, the steers are drawing home the uplifted ploughs.’

193 ‘O that it would but please you to dwell with me among the “homely
slighted” fields and lowly cottages, and to shoot the deer.’

194 ‘The Gods too were dwellers in the woods, and Dardanian Paris. Leave
Pallas to abide in the towers which she has built; let our chief
delight be in the woods.’

195 Dr. Kennedy refers to twenty-seven parallels from Theocritus.

196 ‘Pollio loves my song, though it is but a shepherd’s song.’ ‘Pollio
himself too is a poet.’

197 ‘Who hates not Bavius may he be charmed with thy songs, O Maevius!’

198 ‘Menalcas Vergilius hic intelligitur, qui obitum fratris sui Flacci
deflet, vel, ut alii volunt, interfectionem Caesaris.’ Comment. in
Verg. Serviani (H. A. Lion, 1826).

199 See Conington’s Introduction to this Eclogue.

200 ‘No beast either tasted the river or touched a blade of grass.’

201 Compare M. Benoist’s note on the passage.

202 ‘Proximis diebus equorum greges, quos in traiciendo Rubicone flumine
consecrarat ac vagos et sine custode dimiserat, comperit
pertinacissime pabulo abstinere ubertimque flere.’ Sueton. lib. i.
c. 81.

203 ‘As to Bacchus and to Ceres so to thee shall the husbandmen annually
make their vows; thou too wilt call on them for their fulfilment.’

204 ‘The star beneath which the harvest-fields should be glad in their
corn-crops, and the grapes should gather a richer colour on the
sunny hill-sides.’

205 ‘Graft your pears, Daphnis: your fruits will be plucked by those who
come after you.’

206 Kennedy.

207 ‘Here the green Mincio fringes its bank with delicate reeds, and
swarms of bees are buzzing from the sacred oak.’

208 ‘This I remember, and that Thyrsis was beaten in the contest: from
that time Corydon is all in all with us.’

209 Cf.

Ergo _tua_ rura manebunt—
Ille _meas_ errare boves—
Multa _meis_ exiret victima saeptis.

210 Candidior postquam tondenti barba cadebat—
Fortunate senex.

211 See Kennedy’s note on the passage.

212 ‘Though all your land is choked with barren stones or covered with
marsh and sedge.’—P.

213 ‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

214 M. Benoist.

215 ‘Shall some unfeeling soldier become the master of these fields, so
carefully tilled, some rude stranger own these harvest-fields? see
to what misery fellow-countrymen have been brought by civil strife!’

216 ‘Now in defeat and sadness, since all things are the sport of
chance.’

217 ‘Me too the shepherds call a bard, but I give no ear to them; for as
yet my strain seems far inferior to that of Varius and of Cinna, and
to be as the cackling of a goose among tuneful swans.’ Compare the
lines which Theocritus applies to Lycidas:—

Καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν Μοισᾶν καπυρὸν στόμα, κἠμὲ λέγοντι
πάντες ἀοιδὸν ἄριστον· ἐγὼ δέ τις οὐ ταχυπειθής,
οὐ Δᾶν· οὐ γάρ πω κατ’ έμὸν νόον οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλόν
Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω, οὐδὲ Φιλητᾶν
ἀείδων, βάτραχος δὲ ποτ’ ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω.
Theoc. vii. 37–41.

218 ‘Varus, thy name provided only Mantua be spared to us.’ ‘Daphnis,
why gazest thou on the old familiar risings of the constellations?’

219 ‘And now you see the whole level plain [sea?] is calm and still.’

220 i. 496.

221 Compare Gaston Boissier, La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins:
‘Il y a pourtant un côté par lequel la quatrième églogue peut être
rattachée à l’histoire du Christianisme; elle nous révèle un certain
état des âmes qui n’a pas été inutile à ses rapides progrès. C’était
une opinion accréditée alors que le monde épuisé touchait à une
grande crise et qu’une révolution se préparait qui lui rendrait la
jeunesse.... Il regnait alors partout une sorte de fermentation,
d’attente inquiète et d’espérance sans limite. “Toutes les créatures
sonpirent,” dit Saint Paul, “et sont dans le travail de
l’enfantement.” Le principal intérêt des vers de Virgile est de nous
garder quelque souvenir de cette disposition des âmes.’

222 Any child born of this marriage in the year 40 B.C. must have owed
its birth, not to Antony, but to Marcellus, the former husband of
Octavia.

223 The application of the words ‘magnum Iovis incrementum’ by the
author of the Ciris (398) to Castor and Pollux suggests a doubt as
to Mr. Munro’s interpretation of the words, accepted by Dr. Kennedy;
though at the same time there is nothing improbable in the
supposition that Virgil gave a meaning to the words which was
misunderstood by his imitator.

224 ‘And will rule the world in peace with his father’s virtues.’

225 Fuit enim hic poeta, ut scrupulose et anxie, ita dissimulanter et
clanculo doctus, ut multa transtulerit quae, unde translata sint,
difficile sit cognitu. Sat. v. 18.

226 Quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset. Ib. 22.

227 De Graecorum penitissimis literis hanc historiam eruit Maro. Ib. 19.

228 ‘Receive a song undertaken at your command.’

229 ‘When the dew on the tender blade is most grateful to the flock.’

230 ‘I shall hurl myself headlong into the waves from the high
mountain’s crag.’

231 ‘But I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those
five which begin—

Saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala.

I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that
Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil.’ Life
and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol. i. pp. 371, 372.

232 ‘It was within our orchard I saw you, a child, with my mother
gathering apples, and I was your guide: I had but then entered on my
twelfth year. I could just reach from the ground the fragile
branches: the moment I saw you how utterly lost I was, how borne
astray by fatal passion.’

233 ‘I loved you, maiden, when first you came with my mother wishing to
gather hyacinths from the mountain, and I guided you on the way: and
since I saw you, from that time, never after, not even yet, can I
cease loving you; but you care not, no, by Zeus, not a whit.’

234 Compare 85–86 with Lucret. ii. 355, etc.:—

At mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans.

235 ‘And would that I had been one of you, and had been either shepherd
of your flock or the gatherer of the ripe grape.’

236 ‘I am resolved rather to suffer among the woods, among the wild
beasts’ dens, and to carve my loves on the tender bark of the
trees.’

237 ‘First my Muse deigned lightly to sing in the Sicilian strain, and
blushed not to dwell among the woods.’

238 ‘Nor need you be ashamed of your flock, O Godlike poet; even fair
Adonis once fed his sheep by the river-banks.’

239 Compare the following passage from one of the prose idyls of G.
Sand: ‘Depuis les bergers de Longus jusqu’à ceux de Trianon, la vie
pastorale est un Éden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du
tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier. L’art, ce grand
flatteur, ce chercheur complaisant de consolations pour les gens
trop heureux, a traversé une suite ininterrompue de _bergeries_. Et
sous ce titre, _Histoire des bergeries_, j’ai souvent désiré de
faire un livre d’érudition et de critique où j’aurais passé en revue
tous ces différents rêves champêtres dont les hautes classes se sont
nourries avec passion.’ François le Champi.

240 ‘Among the lonely haunts of the shepherds and the deep peace of
Nature.’

241 ‘One may not now hold converse with him from a tree or from a rock,
like a maid and youth, as a maid and youth hold converse with one
another.’

242 Compare the account of the origin of pastoral poetry in Müller’s
Literature of the Greeks.

243 ‘But I attune the plaintive Ausonian melody.’ Incertorum Idyll. 1.
100–101. (Ed. Ahrens.)

244 Compare Symonds’ Studies of Greek Poets, First Series, The
Idyllists.

245 Wordsworth’s great pastoral ‘Michael’ is a marked exception to this
general statement. So, too, love can hardly be called the most
prominent motive in Tennyson’s ‘Dora.’

246 ‘Poured forth its rustic banter in responsive strains.’

247 Idyl vii. 97, vi. 2.

248 Idyl xi. 2–6, xiii. 2.

249 Preface to Poems by M. Arnold, First Series.

250 vii. 19, 20:—

καί μ’ ἀτρέμας εἶπε σεσαρώς
ὄμματι μειδιόωντι, γέλως δέ οἱ εἴχετο χείλευς.

251 x. 41:—

θᾶσαι δὴ καὶ ταῦτα τὰ τῶ θείω Λιθυέρσα.

252 ‘Next well-trimm’d
A crowd of shepherds, with as sunburnt looks
As may be read of in Arcadian books;
Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o’erflowing die,
In music, through the vales of Thessaly.’

And again:—

‘He seem’d,
To common lookers on, like one who dream’d
Of idleness in groves Elysian.’
Keats, Endymion.

253 ‘Often, I remember, when a boy I used to pass in song the long
summer days till sunset.’

254 ‘Then he tells in song how Gallus as he strayed by the streams of
Permessus was led by one of the sisters to the Aonian mount.’

‘All those strains, which when attuned by Phoebus, Eurotas heard,
enraptured, and bade his laurels learn by heart, he sings.’

255 Compare for this use of _mollis_ in the sense of ‘impressible’
Cicero’s description of his brother Quintus (Ep. ad Att. i. 17):
‘Nam, quanta sit in Quinto fratre meo comitas, quanta iucunditas,
quam mollis animus et ad accipiendam et ad deponendam iniuriam,
nihil attinet me ad te, qui ea nosti, scribere.’

256 ‘Fundit humo facilem victum _iustissima_ tellus.’

257 ‘There all alone he used to fling wildly to the mountains and the
woods these unpremeditated words in unavailing longing.’

258 ‘He, his snow-white side reposing on the tender hyacinth,—’

259 ‘We leave the dear fields’—‘Therefore you will still keep your
fields, large enough for your desires’—‘He allowed my herds to
wander at their will, even as you see’—‘Ah! the hope of all my
flock, which she had just borne, she left on the bare flint
pavement’—‘Go on, my she-goats, once a happy flock, go on.’

260 This is the tone of the whole of the first Elegy of Tibullus, e.g.

Ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites
Rusticus et facili grandia poma manu.
Nec tamen interdum pudeat tenuisse bidentem, etc.

261 ‘You are but a clown, Corydon, Alexis cares not for gifts.’

262 ‘As if this could heal my madness.’

263 ‘Ah! may the rough ice not cut thy tender feet.’

264 ‘Shall I see you from afar hang from some bushy rock.’
‘Here green Mincio forms a fringe of soft reeds along his bank.’

265 ‘I shall not yield in song either to Thracian Orpheus or to Linus,
though he be aided by his mother, he by his father, Orpheus by
Calliope, Linus by the fair Apollo. Even Pan, should he strive with
me with all Arcadia as umpire, even Pan would say that he was
vanquished, with Arcadia as umpire.’

266 ‘On this side, with its old familiar murmur, the hedge, your
neighbour’s boundary, on all the sweets of whose willow blossom the
bees of Hybla have fed, will often gently woo you to sleep; on that
from the foot of a high rock the song of the woodman will rise to
the air; nor meanwhile will your darlings, the hoarse wood-pigeons,
cease to coo, nor the turtle-dove to moan from the high elm-tree.’

267 Poems by Matthew Arnold. Memorial Verses:—

‘He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round,’ etc.

268 ‘Such charm is in thy song for us, O Godlike poet, as is to weary
men the charm of deep sleep on the grass, as, in summer heat, it is
to quench one’s thirst in a sparkling brook of fresh water.’

269 ‘What gifts shall I render to you, what gifts in recompense of such
a strain: for neither the whisper of the coming south wind gives me
such joy, nor the sound of shores beaten on by the wave, nor of
rivers hurrying down through rocky glens.’

270 Coleridge’s Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 411.

271 Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 371.

272 From the similarity between the lines in Hor. Sat. i. 1. 114,

Ut cum carceribus missos,

and those at the end of Georg. i. 512,

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,

it has been argued that Georgic i, at all events, must have appeared
before the first Book of the Satires. Ribbeck supposes that the
lines of the Georgics may have been seen or heard by Horace before
the appearance of the poem, and imitated by him. But is it likely
that Horace would have appropriated an image from an _unpublished_
poem? Is it not as probable that Virgil was the imitator here, as in
other passages where he uses the language of contemporaries, e.g. of
Varius, Ecl. viii. 88?

273 Compare the contrast drawn by him between Ennius and the
contemporary ‘Cantores Euphorionis,’ Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

274 Cf. also W. F. Teuffel’s History of Roman Literature, chap. i. note
1.

275 ‘You sing the lore of the old poet of Ascra, of the field on which
the corn, the hill on which the grape grows.’ iii. 32. 77–78.

276 ‘The city which is called Rome, O Meliboeus, I thought, in my folly,
was like this city of ours.’

277 ‘For safe the herds range field and fen,
Full-headed stand the shocks of grain.’

278 ‘Now each man basking on his slopes
Weds to the widowed trees the vine.’

279 ‘Thy era, Caesar, which doth bless
Our plains anew with fruitfulness.’ Martin.

280 Compare Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire, chap.
xli. ‘The tradition that Maecenas himself suggested the composition
of the Georgics may be accepted, not in the literal sense which has
generally been attached to it, as a means of reviving the art of
husbandry and the cultivation of the devastated soil of Italy; but
rather to recommend the principles of the ancient Romans, their love
of home, of labour, of piety, and order; to magnify their domestic
happiness and greatness, to make men proud of their country on
better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and the extent of its
conquests. It would be absurd to suppose that Virgil’s verses
induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or to take from his
bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served
undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of
the olden time, and perpetuated, amidst the vices and corruptions of
the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyments, of
which, as we journey onward, we shall rejoice to catch at least
occasional glimpses.’

281 E.g.

Aus_im_ vel tenui vitem committere sulco;

and again,

Neve _tibi_ ad solem vergant vineta cadentem, etc.

282 De Senectute, xv. xvi.

283 ‘What makes the cornfields glad, beneath what constellation,
Maecenas, is right to turn up the soil, and wed the vine to the
elms,’—

284 De Re Rustica, i. 2.

285 Georg. ii. 145, etc.; Aen. iii. 537.

286 ‘Nec dubium quin, ut ait Varro, ceteras pecudes bos honore superare
debeat, praesertim autem in Italia, quae ab hoc nuncupationem
traxisse creditur, quod olim Graeci tauros Ἰταλοὺς vocabant.’

287 ‘Although neither Calabrian bees produce honey for me, nor does my
wine grow mellow in a Formian jar, nor fleeces grow rich in Gallic
pastures.’ Compare too

Ego apis Matinae
More modoque, etc.

The importance of honey as a source of wealth is referred to by
Mommsen in his History of Rome, book v. chap. xi. ‘A small
bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-garden, not larger
than an acre, in the neighbourhood of Falerii, honey to an average
annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces (100_l._).’

288 ‘Illis enim temporibus proceres civitatis in agris morabantur.’
Columella.

289 ‘I shall not here detain you with any tale of fancy, and winding
digressions and long preambles.’

‘The other themes that might have charmed the vacant mind, are all
hackneyed now.’

290 Cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 59–61: ‘M. Silano, L. Norbano consulibus
Germanicus Aegyptum proficiscitur _cognoscendae antiquitatis_.’ The
whole account of the tour of Germanicus illustrates the cultivated
taste for foreign travel among the Romans of the later Republic, the
Augustan Age, and early Empire, and also the mysterious interest
which has attached to Egypt from the earliest times known to
history.

291 This is distinctly stated by Servius in two places, his introductory
comments on Eclogue x, and on Georgic iv, and seems sufficiently
attested. Besides, the introduction into the Georgics of such an
episode as the ‘Pastor Aristaeus’ requires some explanation.

292 Both the nexus of the sense and the rhythm condemn the latitude of
transposition which Ribbeck allows himself. Perhaps the only
alteration which is absolutely demanded is at iv. 203–205. The lines
there, as they stand, clearly interrupt the sense, and are more in
place either after 196 or after 218. The strong line,

Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis,

is a fitting conclusion for the fine paragraph beginning

Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse, etc.

Either of these places seems more suitable for the lines than that
after 183. It is possible that the conjecture which Ribbeck adopts
from Wagner, ‘absoluto iam opere in marginem illos versus a poeta
coniectos esse,’ may give the true explanation of the misplacement
of the lines, though this does not seem to apply to any other
passage in the poem. Such bold changes as those introduced by
Ribbeck at ii. 35–46, and again at iii. 120–122, are not required by
the sense, and are condemned by rhythmical considerations. The line
119,

Exquirunt calidumque animis et cursibus acrem,

is weak for the concluding line of the paragraph, which ends much
more naturally with that transposed from 122 to 99,

Neptunique ipsa deducat origine gentem,

as it is Virgil’s way to introduce his mythological illustrations
after his real observations are finished. The paragraph of four
lines, Quare agite o proprios ... Taburnum, stands bald and bare in
the position Ribbeck assigns it, between 108 and 109. The minor
changes for the most part disturb old associations and throw no new
light on the poet’s thought.

293 ‘While charmed with the love of it, we travel round each detail.’

294 ‘To invest these poor interests with a new glory.’

295 Cf. Col. iii. 15: ‘Ut Mago prodit, quem secutus Vergilius tutari
semina et muniri sic praecepit,’ etc.

296 Cf. Col. iv. 9: ‘Nam illam veterem opinionem non esse ferro
tangendos anniculos malleolos quod aciem reformidant, quod frustra
Vergilius et Saserna, Stolonesque, et Catones timuerunt,’ etc. Also
ix. 14: ‘Ceterum hoc eodem tempore progenerari posse apes iuvenco
perempto Democritus et Mago nec minus Vergilius prodiderunt.’ As a
trace of Virgil’s imitation of Varro, compare the passage where,
after speaking of the injury done by goats to the vine, Varro says,
‘Sic factum ut Libero Patri repertori vitis hirci immolarentur,’
with Georgic ii. 380, ‘Non aliam ob culpam,’ etc.

297 ‘From dust in winter, from mud in spring time, you will reap great
crops, Camillus.’

298 ‘He, my son, is a worthy man, and a good farmer, whose implements
shine brightly.’

299 i. 269.

300 ‘Ceres first taught mortals to turn up the earth with iron.’

301 ‘Pray, farmers, for wet summers and dry winters’—‘And may have
called forth the rain by vows’—‘Especially worship the Gods, and
offer the yearly sacrifices to mighty Ceres.’ Cf. Ἔργ. καὶ Ἡμ. 463:—

Εὔχεσθαι δὲ Διὶ χθονίῳ Δημήτερί θ’ ἁγνῇ.

302 The great confusion into which it had fallen before its reformation
by Julius Caesar may have made this return to the primitive
‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ familiar to Virgil’s youth.

303 ‘When the white bird, abhorred by the long snakes, has come.’ Cf.
Ἔργ. καὶ Ἡμ. 448:—

Φράζεσθαι δ’ εὖτ’ ἂν γεράνου φωνὴν ἐπακούσῃς.

304 The same suggestion of the ancient and unchanging nature of this art
is vividly conveyed in the Chorus of the Antigone:—

Θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν Γᾶν
ἄφθιτον ἀκαμἀταν ἀποτρύεται,
ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος, ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων.

305 ‘There, as they say, there is either the silence of midnight, and a
thicker darkness beneath the canopy of night, or else the dawn
returns to them from us and brings back the day; and when the
morning sun breathes on us with the first breath of his panting
steeds, there the glowing star of evening is lighting up her late
fires.’

306 ‘They are glad, now that the rains are over, to revisit their young
brood and their dear nests.’

307 Introduction to Notes, ii. p. 315.

308 Compare the contemptuous expressions used by Cicero, Tusc. Disp. ii.
3, of those who had written on the Epicurean philosophy in Latin. It
seems strange, if he had any hand in editing his poems, that he
makes no exception there in favour of Lucretius.

309 Compare Munro’s notes _passim_, and specially the note on Lucret.
iii. 449.

310 Compare Georg. iii. 291 with Lucret. i. 926.

311 Chap. iii. p. 109.

312 Merivale’s Roman Empire.

313 ‘What remains of tilled land, even that Nature by its own force
would overgrow with briars did not the force of man resist it,
inured, for the sake of living, to ply, with pain and labour, the
stout mattock, and to split up the new earth with the deep-sunk
ploughs: did not we, by turning up the fruitful clods with the
plough-share, and subduing the soil of the earth, call forth the
seeds to the birth, they could not of their own impulse come forth
into the clear air. And after all, sometimes the products of much
toil, when they are already in blade and in beauty over the earth,
either the Sun in heaven scorches with excessive heat, or sudden
rains and chill frosts ruin them, and the blasts of the winds in
wild hurricane make them their sport.’ Lucret. v. 206–217 (See
Munro’s note on the passage). Cf. Georg. ii. 411; i. 198; i. 208;
ii. 237; ii. 47; i. 197. Compare also Virgil’s use of _subigere_ and
_vertere_ as applied to the soil.

314 ‘And now the aged peasant, shaking his head, often sighs forth the
complaint, that the labour of his hands has come to naught.’ Lucret.
ii. 1164, etc.

315 v. 932. etc.

316 ii. 1160, etc.

317 ii. 1146; v. 95.

318 Compare Lucret. v. 1367–1369 with Georg. ii. 36. Compare also
Virgil’s use of _indulgere_ and _indulgentia_.

319 ‘After that they essayed now one, now another, mode of tilling the
dear plot of ground, and they saw that the earth made wild fruits
into fruits of the garden, by a kindly and caressing culture.’

320 De Senectute, xv.

321 v. 204, etc.

322 Georg. i. 237–8.

323 Ib. 128.

324 Cf. Georg. i. 351–353:—

Atque haec ut certis possemus discere signis,
Aestusque pluviasque et agentis frigora ventos,
Ipse Pater statuit, quid menstrua Luna moneret.

325 ‘Travailler et prier, voilà la conclusion des Georgiques.’ From an
article in the Revue des Deux Mondes (vol. 104), called Un Poëte
Théologien, by Gaston Boissier.

326 Compare, among many other similar instances, such expressions as
these:—

Labor actus in orbem
Agricolis redit.
Omnia quae multo ante memor provisa repones.
Quae vigilanda viris.
Continuo in silvis magna vi flexa domatur, etc.

327 ‘And is incessantly drilling the land, and exercising command over
the fields’—‘Then at length exercise a stern command, and restrain
the wild luxuriance of the branches’—‘They will, with no reluctant
obedience, adopt any ways you bid them.’

328 ‘Whether it is that the heat opens up various ways of access and
relaxes the secret pores, where the sap may enter into the young
plants.’

329 ‘That he owed allegiance to no master.’

330 ‘But your excellence and the hope of the delightful enjoyment of
your friendship.’ ‘O my pride, O thou, to whom I justly ascribe the
greatest share of my renown.’

331 ‘While mighty Caesar is hurling the thunder-bolts of war by the deep
Euphrates, and, a conqueror, issues his laws among willing subjects,
and is already on the way which leads to Heaven.’

332 ‘Gods or Goddesses whose task it is to watch over the fields.’

333 ‘Blessed too was he who knew the Gods of the country.’

334 Compare the first book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.

335 Servius has the following note on the passage:—‘Stoici dicunt non
esse nisi unum deum, et unam eandemque (esse) potestatem, quae pro
ratione officiorum nostrorum variis nominibus appellatur. Unde
eundem Solem, eundem Liberum, eundem Apollinem vocant. Item Lunam,
eandem Dianam, eandem Cererem, eandem Iunonem, eandem Proserpinam
dicunt; secundum quos, pro Sole et Luna, Liberum et Cererem
invocavit.’

336 ‘Nor is it without good result that golden-haired Ceres beholds him
from Heaven on high.’

337 Quoted by M. Benoist.

338 ‘But on whom she gazes with bright and favourable aspect, for them
the field bears the ear of corn abundantly.’

339 Cf. ‘Incolumi Iove et urbe Roma.’ Hor. iii. 5. 12. Cf. also iii. 3.
42; iii. 30. 8.

Cf. also ‘Sedem Iovis Optimi Maximi auspicato a maioribus pignus
imperii conditam,’ etc. Tac. Hist. iii. 72; and ‘Sed nihil aeque
quam incendium Capitolii, ut finem imperio adesse crederent,
impulerat,’ iv. 54.

The Capitol is the symbol of the eternal duration of the Empire to
Virgil also:—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.
Aen. ix. 448–9.

340 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

341 ‘Giver of fruits, and lord over the seasons.’

342 Cf. Tac. Ann. iii. 54. ‘At Hercule nemo refert quod Italia externae
opis indiget, quod vita populi Romani per incerta maris et
tempestatum cotidie volvitur.... Hanc, Patres Conscripti, curam
sustinet princeps, haec omissa funditus rem publicam trahet.’

343 ‘From this land thy white herds, Clitumnus, and the bull, most
stately victim, after bathing often in thy sacred stream, have led
the procession of the Roman triumphs to the temples of the Gods.’

344 ‘I too must try to find some way by which I may rise aloft, and be
borne triumphant through the mouths of men.’

345 ‘I shall have all Greece to quit Alpheus and the groves of
Molorchus, and to contend before me in the race and with the cestus
of raw hide.’

346 ‘Soon I shall gird myself up to celebrate the fiery battles of
Caesar.’

347 ‘And when the parched field is all hot and its blades of corn are
withering, look! from the brow of its sloping channel he tempts
forth the rushing stream: it as it falls awakens a hoarse murmur
among the smooth stones, and with its bubbling waters cools the
tilled land.’ i. 107–110.

348 ‘Mark too, when in the woods, the walnut, in great numbers, clothes
itself in blossom and weighs down the fragrant branches, if there is
abundance of fruit, the corn crops will likewise be in abundance,
and there will come a great threshing with a great heat.’ i.
187–190.

349 ‘There is no other land of plain from which you will see more wains
wending their way home with the lagging steers.’ ii. 205–206.

350 ‘They let them feed in lonely pastures, and by the bank of brimming
rivers, where moss abounds and the grass is greenest, and where
caves give shelter, and the shadow of some rock is cast far in
front.’ iii. 143–145.

_ 351 a._ ‘The young plant shoots up under the mighty shadow of its
mother.’
_b._ ‘Rending them from the loving body of their mother.’
_c._ ‘Will cast off their woodland spirit.’
_d._ ‘And marvels at its strange leaves and fruits not its own.’
_e._ ‘Lest the plants through the sudden change should fail to
recognise their mother.’
_f._ ‘And the plants will lift up their hearts.’
_g._ ‘By their strength they may become accustomed to mount aloft
and despise the winds.’
_h._ ‘And while they are still in the first stage of growth or their
leaves are new, you must spare their infancy.’
_i._ ‘Before that they shrink from the steel.’
_k._ ‘Especially while the leaf is still tender, and all unwitting
of its trials.’

352 As an instance of the last, cf. iii. 316, 317:—

Atque ipsae memores redeunt in tecta, suosque
Ducunt.

353 ‘These passions of their hearts and these desperate battles are all
stilled to rest, by the check of a little handful of dust.’ Compare
Horace’s line, Od. i. 28. 3:—

_Pulveris exigui_ prope litus parva Matinum
Munera.

354 ‘What joy to plant Ismarus with the vine, or to clothe the mighty
sides of Taburnus with the olive.’

355 ‘And now the last vintager sings with joy at completing all his
rows.’

356 iii. 321–338.

357 ‘So too looked even Saturn, when with nimble movement, at the
approach of his wife, he let the mane toss on his neck, and, as he
sped away, made high Pelion ring with his shrill neighing.’

358 ‘So with the snowy gift of wool, if one may believe the tale, did
Pan, the God of Arcadia, charm and beguile thee, O Luna, calling
thee into the deep groves; nor didst thou scorn his call.’

359 ‘These laws and everlasting covenants were at once established by
Nature for particular places, from the time when Deucalion first
cast stones into the empty world, whence men, a hard race, were
born.’

360 ‘The resources of art prove baneful: its masters retired baffled,
Chiron, son of Philyra, and Melampus, son of Amythaon.’

361 ‘The healing art muttered in speechless fear.’

362 ‘Thrice let the auspicious victim pass around the young crops.’

363 ‘And invoke thee, Bacchus, in their joyous chants, and in honour of
thee hang soft faces waving in the wind from the high pine tree.’

364 ‘Just as happens to the rower who scarcely keeps his boat against
the stream, if he slackens his stroke, and has it swept headlong
down the channel of the river.’

365 ‘The best days of life are those which fly first from unhappy
mortals: then disease steals on, and sad old age.’

366 ‘When they behold the Sun, that we see the stars of night, and that
they share alternately with us the divisions of the sky, and pass
their nights parallel to our days.’

367 The passage in the Georgics may be compared with those passages
which Mr. Munro quotes in his note to Lucret. i. 1.

368 W. Savage Landor.

369 ‘And their brazen vessels constantly split asunder, and the rough
icicle froze on their unkempt beards.’

370 ‘When the snow lies deep, when the rivers force the masses of ice
slowly down.’

371 ‘Where dark Galaesus waters the yellowing cornfields.’

372 ‘In his heart he enjoyed wealth equal to the wealth of kings; and as
he returned late at night he loaded his board with a feast
unbought.’

373 Cf. Ecl. viii. 6; Aen. i. 244.

374 Cf. supra, p. 239.

375 ‘Those who ministered to them, came into close contact and bore the
labour, which a feeling of honour compelled them to undergo, and the
appealing voice of the weary sufferers, mingling with the voice of
their complaining. It was in this way accordingly that the best men
died.’

376 ‘Neither the shade of the high groves, nor the soft meadows can
rouse any feeling, nor the river which rolling over stones in a
stream purer than amber hurries to the plain.’

377 ‘Nor can the tender willows and the grass fresh with dew, and the
rivers gliding level with their banks, delight her heart, and banish
her sorrow.’

378 ‘The ploughman goes sadly on his way, separating the sorrowing steer
from his dead brother.’ The truth of this picture is confirmed by a
modern writer, who, in her idyllic stories from the rural life of
France, seems from time to time, better than any modern poet, to
reproduce the Virgilian feeling of Nature. ‘Dans le haut du champ un
vieillard, dont le dos large et la figure sévère rappelaient celui
d’Holbein, mais dont les vêtements n’annonçaient pas la misère,
poussait gravement son _areau_ de forme antique, traîné par deux
bœufs tranquilles, à la robe d’un jaune pâle, véritables patriarches
de la prairie, hauts de taille, un peu maigres, les cornes longues
et rabattues, de ces vieux travailleurs qu’une longue habitude a
rendus _frères_, comme on les appelle dans nos campagnes, et qui,
privés l’un de l’autre, se refusent au travail avec un nouveau
compagnon et se laissent mourir de chagrin. Les gens qui ne
connaissent pas la campagne taxent de fable l’amitié du bœuf pour
son camarade d’attelage. Qu’ils viennent voir au fond de l’étable un
pauvre animal maigre, exténué, battant de sa queue inquiète ses
flancs décharnés, soufflant avec effroi et dédain sur la nourriture
qu’on lui présente, les yeux toujours tournés vers la porte, en
grattant du pied la place vide à ses côtés, flairant les jougs et
les chaînes que son compagnon a portés, et l’appelant sans cesse
avec de déplorables mugissements. Le bouvier dira: “C’est une paire
de bœufs perdue: son frère est mort, et celui-là ne travaillera
plus. II faudrait pouvoir l’engraisser pour l’abattre; mais il ne
veut pas manger, et bientôt il sera mort de faim.”’ La Mare au
Diable. G. Sand.

The famous picture in Lucret. ii. 355–366,

At mater viridis ... notumque requirit,

shows a similar observation of the strength of bovine affection.

379 ‘What avail all their toil or their services to man? what that they
have upturned the heavy earth with the plough-share? and yet they
have received no harm from Massic vintages or luxurious banquets;
their food is leaves and simple grass, their drink is the water of
fresh springs, and rivers kept bright by their speed; and no care
breaks their wholesome sleep.’

380 ‘The guardian power of the groves, for whom three hundred snow-white
steers browse in the rich thickets of Cea.’

381 ‘On the one side Euphrates, on the other Germany sets war afoot:
neighbouring cities, breaking their compacts, are in arms against
each other; Mars, in unhallowed rage, is abroad over all the world;
even as when the chariots have burst forth from the barriers, they
bound into the course, and the charioteer, vainly pulling the reins,
is borne along by his steeds, and the chariot no longer obeys his
guidance.’

382 ‘And the cattle spoke, horror unutterable’—‘And the images of ivory
within the temples weep in sorrow, and the images of bronze sweat.’

383 ‘A voice too was heard by many through the silent groves, speaking a
mighty sound, and ghosts, wondrous pale, were seen in the dusk.’

384 ‘And dogs of ill omen and dire birds gave signs’—‘and mountain-built
cities echoed through the night with the howl of wolves.’

385 ‘Doubtless too the time will come when in those lands the
husbandman, as he upheaves the earth with his crooked plough, will
find javelins eaten away by rough rust, or with his heavy mattock
will strike on empty helmets, and marvel at the huge bones in their
tombs, now dug open.’

386 ‘There is no due honour now to the plough, the fields are desolate,
and those who tilled them are gone, and the crooked pruning-hooks
are forged into the stiff sword.’

387 ‘This land has reared a valiant race of men, the Marsi and Sabellian
youth, the Ligurian trained to hardship, and the Volscian spearmen.’

388 ‘This too bore the Decii and the great Camilli, the Scipios, men of
iron in war, and thee, great Caesar, who now, ere this victorious in
the furthest coasts of Asia, art turning away the unwarlike Indian
from the hills of Rome.’

389 ‘It is in thy honour that I enter on the task of treating an art of
ancient renown.’

390 ‘Besides many famous cities, with their massive workmanship, many
towns piled by the hand of man on steep crags, and rivers gliding
beneath walls that have been from of old.’

391 ‘Though no lofty mansion with proud portals pours forth from all its
chambers its wave of those who pay their court in the morning.’—
‘Though there are no golden statues of youths through their
chambers, holding blazing torches in their right hands.’

392 ‘They revel in the bloodshed of their brethren.’

393 ‘By the bloodshed of their fellow-citizens they amass an estate, and
covetously double their riches, heaping murder upon murder: they
take a cruel joy in the sad death of a brother; and hate and fear
the board of their kinsmen.’ Lucret. iii. 70–73.

394 ‘Meantime his dear children hang with kisses round his lips; a pure
household keeps well all the laws of chastity.’

395 ‘Soon no longer shall thy home receive thee with glad greeting, nor
thy most excellent wife, nor thy dear children run to meet thee to
snatch the first kiss.’

The most classical of our own poets seems to combine both
representations with the thought and representation of an earlier
passage of the Georgics

(Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.)

in the familiar stanza—

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to meet their sire’s return,
And climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

396 ‘Hence he supports his country and his humble home, hence his herds
of cattle, and his well-deserving steers.’

397 Cp. ‘Le mot triste et doux de Virgile: “O heureux l’homme des
champs, s’il connaissait son bonheur” est un regret, mais, comme
tous les regrets, c’est aussi une prédiction. Un jour viendra où le
laboureur pourra être aussi un artiste, si non pour exprimer (ce qui
importera assez peu alors) du moins pour sentir le beau.’ G. Sand.

398 Virgil rightly connects this greatness with the site of Rome in the
line,

Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.

It was from the necessities imposed by that site that Rome at an
early period became the largest urban community in Italy, and was
forced, in consequence of the contiguous settlements of other races,
to begin that incorporating and assimilating policy which ultimately
enabled her to establish universal empire. Cp. ‘Rome herself, like
other cities of Italy, Gaul, and elsewhere, grew out of the
primitive hill-fortresses; the distinction between Rome and other
cities, the distinction which made Rome all that she became, was
that Rome did not grow out of a single fortress of the kind, but out
of several.’ Historical and Architectural Sketches, by E. A.
Freeman, D.C.L., etc.—Walls of Rome, p. 160.

399 Cf. ‘Itaque in hoc Latio et Saturnia terra, ubi Dii cultus agrorum
progeniem suam docuerunt.’ Columella.

400 ‘Such was the life that the old Sabines lived long ago, such the
life of Remus and his brother; thus in truth brave Etruria grew
strong and Rome became the glory of the world, and though a single
city enclosed seven hills within her wall. Nay, even before the
Sovereign-lord, born on Dicte, wielded the sceptre, and an unholy
generation feasted on slaughtered steers, this was the life of
Saturn on earth in the golden age. Not yet had men heard the blare
of the war-trumpet, not yet had they heard the clang of the sword on
the hard anvil.’

401 ‘Come then, ye tillers of the soil, learn the special modes of
husbandry, each according to its kind.’

402 E.g. Col. iv. 9: ‘Nam illam veterem opinionem damnavit usus non esse
ferro tangendos anniculos malleolos, quod aciem reformidant, quod
frustra Vergilius, et Saserna, Stolonesque et Catones timuerunt.’
Virgil is there quoted along with the recognised authorities on
agriculture. This is often done in matters on which Columella agrees
with him, e.g. i. chap. 4: ‘Si verissimo vati velut oraculo
crediderimus dicenti.’

403 Cp. Gisborne’s ‘Essays on Ancient Agriculture,’ and ‘Forest Trees
and Woodland Scenery,’ by W. Menzies, Deputy Surveyor of Windsor
Forest and Parks. The following extracts from the last-named work—a
work which combines thorough practical knowledge with true poetical
feeling—support the statement in the text: ‘All the methods, both
natural and artificial, of propagating trees are described in
graphic language. Virgil also fully describes the self-sowing of
trees, artificial sowing, propagating by transplanting of suckers,
propagating by pegging down the branches till they strike root at
the point of contact with the earth, and propagating by simply
cutting off a small branch from the top and placing it in the moist
warm earth. All these are correct. Indeed, the art is little
advanced since the time of Virgil,’ p. 46. Mr. Menzies suggests an
ingenious explanation of Virgil’s mistake as to what trees could be
grafted on one another. In speaking of the Aeneid he bears further
testimony to the accuracy of Virgil’s observation: ‘The poet was
equally great and observant of the details of woodcraft, and must
have watched keenly the details of the foresters around him,’ p. 50.
This remark reminds us of the fact that one of his father’s means of
livelihood was ‘silvis coemendis.’ At p. 53 Mr. Menzies draws
special attention to the description of the mistletoe in Book vi,
and of the aged elm under which the Shades are described as resting.

404 Cp. Holdsworth’s Remarks and Dissertations on the Georgics.

405 Compare the distinction drawn out by De Quincey, and originally
suggested by Wordsworth, between the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power.

406 ‘A Venetian born of peasant parents, reared in a rough woodland
country.’ Macrobius, v. 2.

407 ‘To listen to their elders, to point out to younger men the ways by
which their substance might be increased, the passions that lead to
ruin be weakened.’ Ep. ii. 1. 106–107.

408 Georg. i. 56–59.

409 E.g. iii. 408:—

Aut impacatos a tergo horrebis Hiberos.

410 Ἔργ. κ. Ἡμ. 310.

411 ‘This retreat—charming to me, nay, if you believe me, even beautiful
in itself.’

412 ‘Sweet interchange
Of hill and valley, rivers, woods, and plains.’
Paradise Lost, Book ix. II. 115–116.

413 ‘Such as we often look down on in some mountain dale.’

414 ‘In early spring when chill waters are streaming down from the hoary
sides of the hills, and the clod breaks up and crumbles beneath the
west wind.’

415 ‘Whirling whole forests in its mad eddies, Eridanus, monarch of
rivers, swept them before it, and bore over all the plains herds of
cattle with their stalls.’

416 The lines,

‘And now we passed
From Como, when the light was gray,
And in my head for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure
Of Lari Maxume, all the way,
Like ballad-burthen music, kept,’ etc.,

are so familiarly known that they hardly need to be quoted in
support of this statement. But among other testimonies to the power
of Virgilian associations, one may be quoted from another great
poet, whose mind was less attuned to Latin than to Greek and English
poetry. Goethe, in his ‘Letters from Italy,’ mentions, on coming to
the Lago di Garda, that he was reminded of the line,

Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens, Benace, marino.

He adds this remark: ‘This is the first Latin verse, the subject of
which ever stood visibly before me, and now, in the present moment,
when the wind is blowing stronger and stronger, and the lake casts
loftier billows against the little harbour, it is just as true as it
was hundreds of years ago. Much, indeed, has changed, but the wind
still roars about the lake, _the aspect of which gains even greater
glory from a line of Virgil_.’

417 ‘All gods and goddesses whose task it is to watch over the fields.’

418 Cp. Mommsen, book i. chap. 2: ‘As the Greek when he sacrificed
raised his eyes to Heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the
prayer of the former was vision, that of the latter reflection.’ Cf.
also Lucret. v. 1198:—

Nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri
Vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras;

and Virg. Aen. iii. 405–409:—

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu.
* * * * *
Hunc socii morem sacrorum, hunc ipse teneto;
Hac casti maneant in religione nepotes.

419 ‘Meanwhile cheering her long task with song his wife runs over her
web with shrill-sounding shuttle.’

420 Compare the double meaning of ‘moenia’ and ‘munia,’ as illustrated
by Mommsen.

421 Cp. Mommsen, book i. chap. 2.

422 ‘The characters and tasks and hosts and battles.’

423 ‘They themselves supply the sovereign and tiny citizens of the
community.’

424 ‘So great is their passion for flowers, so great is their pride in
producing honey.’

425 ‘But the stock remains eternal, and through long years the fortune
of the house stands steadfast, and the grandsires of grandsires are
counted up.’

426 Compare with this the character of the Italian race given in the
speech of Remulus, Aen. ix. 603, etc.:—

Venatu invigilant pueri, etc.

427 ‘There are forests and the lairs of wild beasts, a youth inured to
hardship and accustomed to scanty fare, worship of the gods and
reverence yielded to parents.’

428 This abstinence is indirectly inculcated and illustrated in such
passages as iii. 209, 524, iv. 197, etc.

429 It is among the blessings of the countryman’s lot enumerated in the
passage ‘O fortunatos,’ etc., that he is removed from the painful
sight of the contrasts between poverty and riches which the life of
a great city presents—

neque ille
Aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti.

430 Il. xxi. 257–262.

431 ‘Out of the tranquil deep current of ocean.’ Professor Lushington’s
Inaugural Lecture delivered to the Students of the Greek Classes in
the University of Glasgow, November, 1838.

432 ‘Which rolling over rocks in stream purer than amber makes for the
plain.’

433 ‘Forthwith as the winds are rising, either the channels of the sea
begin to boil and swell, and a dry crashing sound to be heard on the
lofty mountains, or the shores to echo far with a confused noise,
and the uproar of the woods to wax louder.’ G. i. 356–9.

434 E.g. those of Lucretia, Virginia, Coriolanus, Brutus, T. Manlius,
etc.

435 Cf. Annals, iii. 5, ‘Veterum instituta ... meditata ad virtutis
memoriam carmina,’—quoted by Teuffel.

436 Cf. Horace’s Ode, ‘Scriberis Vario,’ etc., which shows at least that
Agrippa desired to have a poem written in honour of his exploits.

437 Diomedes, quoted by Teuffel.

438 Rumoresque serit varios ac talia fatur. Aen. xii. 228.
Furius in decimo:
Rumoresque serunt varios et multa requirunt.
Nomine quemque vocans reficitque in proelia pulsos. Aen. xi.
731.
Furius in undecimo:
Nomine quemque ciet; dictorum tempus adesse
Commemorat.
Deinde infra:
Confirmat dictis simul atque exuscitat acres
Ad bellandum animos reficitque ad proelia mentes.

439 Pro Arch. 11.

440 Ep. ad Att. i. 16: ‘Epigrammatis tuis, quae in Amaltheo posuisti,
contenti erimus, praesertim quum et Chilius nos reliquerit, et
Archias nihil de me scripserit; ac vereor, ne, Lucullis quoniam
Graecum poema condidit, nunc ad Caecilianam fabulam spectet.’

441 Also one on his exile.

442 Epist. ad Q. Fratrem, lib. ii. 16.

443 ‘Though anxious to do so, worthy father, I have not strength enough;
for it is not every one who can describe the lines bristling with
pikes, nor the Gauls dying in the fight with broken spear point, or
the wounded Parthian falling from his horse.’

444 ‘Nor should I choose rather to write prosaic discourses than to
treat of historic deeds, and to describe the scenes of other lands
and rivers and castles perched on mountains, and barbarous realms,
and the wars brought to an end over the whole world under thy
auspices.’

445 ‘Or whether gorged with rich tripe (_al._ with huge paunch
distended) Furius will spit his white snows over the Alps in
winter-time.’ The ‘Furius’ mentioned here is supposed to be M.
Furius Bibaculus, the reputed author of a poem on the Gallic War, as
well as of the Epigrams, ‘referta contumeliis Caesarum,’ of which
Tacitus speaks (An. iv. 34).

446 ‘While blustering Alpinus strangles Memnon, and disfigures and
bemires the source of the Rhine by his description.’

447 Sat. i. 10. 46.

448 ‘Such love songs Varro too composed after finishing his Jason,
Varro, the great passion of his own Leucadia.’

449 Schwabe, Quaestiones Catullianae, p. 279.

450 ‘For my strain seems not yet to be worthy of Varius or Cinna, but to
be as the cackling of geese amidst the melody of swans.’

451 Mentioned by W. S. Teuffel. Perhaps the best known poem in our own
literature of this type is ‘The Campaign’ of Addison.

452 ‘Who takes on himself to write the story of Augustus’ deeds, who
perpetuates to distant ages the memory of wars waged and the peace
concluded?’

453 ‘If our song be of the woods, let the woods be worthy of a consul.’

‘I must essay a way by which I too may be able to rise above the
ground, and to speed triumphant through the mouths of men.’

454 ‘So vast a toil it was to build up the Roman people.’

455 ‘And now the mighty Aeneas shall rule over the Trojans, and his
children’s children who may be born hereafter.’

456 ‘Aeneas with those belonging to him starting for Hesperia.’

457 Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 298.

458 The account here given of the development of the legend is taken
from Schwegler, Römische Geschichte.

459 The growth of this legend is discussed with learning and ability by
Professor Nettleship in his ‘Vergil,’ pp. 46–61.

460 Suetonius says of the Emperor Claudius, ‘Iliensibus, quasi Romanae
gentis auctoribus, tributa in perpetuum remisit, recitata vetere
epistula Graeca Senatus populique Romani Seleuco regi amicitiam et
societatem ita demum pollicentis, si consanguineos suos Ilienses ab
omni onere immunes praestitisset.’ For these and other official
recognitions of the connexion between Rome and Ilium, see Schwegler,
Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 305 et seq.

461 Mommsen (book iii. ch. 14) quotes these two lines from an Epigram
composed in the name of Flamininus:—

Αἰνεἀδας Τίτος ὕμμιν ὐπέρτατον ὤπασε δῶρον
Ἑλλήνων τεύξας παισὶν ἐλευθερίαν.

462 Livy, xxv. 12.

463 Aen. v. 117–123.

464 ‘When old Priam fell beneath the Pelasgian host.’

465 ‘From Jove is the origin of our race: in Jove, as their fore-father,
the Dardan youth exults; our king himself the Trojan Aeneas is of
the high lineage of Jove.’ Aen. vii. 219–221.

466 ‘Lo the star of Caesar sprung from Dione hath advanced’—‘wreathing
his brows with the myrtle sacred to his mother.’ Cf. Sic fatus velat
materna tempora myrto. Aen. v. 72.

467 ‘There shall be born of an illustrious line a Trojan Caesar,
destined to make ocean the boundary of his empire, the stars the
boundary of his fame, Julius, a name handed down from mighty Iulus.’
Aen. i. 286–288.

468 ‘Oxus forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere.’
Sohrab and Rustum.

469 Cf. Hor. Od. iii. 17. 2–4:—

Quando et priores hinc Lamias ferunt
Denominatos, et nepotum
Per memores genus omne fastos, etc.

470 ‘The place was called Ardea long ago by our fathers: and now Ardea,
a name of might, haunts the spot.’

471 ‘And after suffering much in war too, before he could found a city,
and find a home for his gods in Latium—from whom is the Latin race,
and the lords of Alba, and the walls of lofty Rome.’

472 ‘Nay, but it is Poseidon, the girdler of the earth, that hath been
wroth continually with quenchless anger for the Cyclops’ sake whom
he blinded of his eye.’ Butcher and Lang.

473 ‘Who in understanding is beyond mortals and beyond all men hath done
sacrifice to the deathless gods who keep the wide heaven.’ Butcher
and Lang.

474 Lucret. iii. 836.

475 ‘There was a city of old, dwelt in by settlers from Tyre,
Carthage,—that this should hold the empire of the world, if by any
means the fates should allow, is even then the fond desire and
purpose of the goddess. Yet she had heard that a new race was
issuing from Trojan blood, destined hereafter to overthrow the
Tyrian towers,—and from them should spring a people, wielding wide
sway, and of proud prowess in war, who should come to lay waste
Libya—so did the Parcae roll on the circling events.’

476 ‘There shall come a fitting time for fight, seek not to hasten it
on, when fierce Carthage shall hurl against the Roman towers a
mighty ruin, through the open gateways of the Alps.’

477 ‘There remains deeply rankling in her heart the memory of the
decision of Paris, and of the wrong of her slighted beauty, of the
hated family, and the honours of the ravished Ganymede.’

478 ‘Through varied accidents, through so many perils, we hold our
course to Latium, where the Fates reveal to us a peaceful
settlement.’

479 ‘Who should hold sea and land in universal sway.’

480 ‘Iulius a name handed down from mighty Iulus.’

481 ‘Looking down on the sail-winged sea, and low-lying lands, and the
coasts and wide nations.’

482 ‘Smiling on her with that look with which he clears the sky and the
storms, the father of men and gods,’—

483 ‘Within unhallowed Rage, seated on a heap of cruel arms, and bound
with a hundred knots of brass behind his back, will chafe wildly
with blood-stained lips.’ Cf. the note on the passage in Servius:
‘In foro Augusti introeuntibus ad sinistram fuit bellum pictum et
furor sedens super arma aenis vinctus, eo habitu quo poeta dixit.’

484 ‘There is a place named by the Greeks Hesperia, a land of old
renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil—the Oenotrians
dwelt in it. Now the story is that their descendants have called the
nation Italia from the name of their leader.’

485 Sat. v. 2. 4.

486 ‘And you will come to the land Hesperia, where Lydian Tiber flows
between rich fields of men with tranquil stream.’

487 The line

Quod per amoenam urbem leni fluit agmine flumen

occurs among the fragments of Ennius, and has been imitated also by
Lucretius (v. 271).

488 Serv. Comment. on line 486.

489 ‘An ancient city, that held empire through long years, is falling in
ruins.’

490 ‘Let their descendants piously observe this ceremony.’

491 ‘Whether they are preparing to bring all the woes of war on the
Getae, or the Hyrcanians, or the Arabs, or to hold their way to the
Indians, and to go on and on towards the dawn, and to claim back the
standards from the Parthians.’

492 ‘And the good apart, and Cato giving to them laws.’

493 Audire est operae pretium procedere recte
Qui rem Romanam Latiumque augescere vultis.

494 ‘Yes, let her spread her name of fear,
To farthest shores; where central waves
Part Africa from Europe, where
Nile’s swelling current half the year
The plains with plenty laves.
* * *
Let earth’s remotest regions still
Her conquering arms to glory call
Where scorching suns the long day fill,
Where mists and snows and tempests chill,
Hold reckless bacchanal.’ Martin.

495 ‘To them I assign no goal to their achievements, no end,—I have
given empire illimitable.’ i. 278–9.

496 ‘The Romans, lords of the world, and the people clad in the gown.’
i. 282.

497 ‘Here the house of Aeneas shall rule in all coasts, and their sons’
sons, and they who shall be born from them.’ iii. 97–8.

498 ‘We, who under thy protection have traversed the heaving sea in thy
fleet, we shall raise to the stars thy descendants in days to come,
and shall give empire to thy city.’ iii. 157–9.

499 ‘But that he should be one to rule over Italy the mother of empire,
echoing with the roar of war, who should transmit a race from the
high line of Troy, and bring the whole world beneath his laws.’ iv.
229–31.

500 ‘Thine be the task, O Roman, to sway the nations with thy imperial
rule—these shall be thy arts—to impose on men the law of peace, to
spare those who yield, and to quell the proud.’ vi. 852–4.

501 ‘Strangers shall come as thy sons-in-law, destined by mingling their
blood with ours to raise our name to the stars—whose descendants
shall see all things, where the Sun beholds either Ocean in his
course, overthrown beneath their feet and governed.’ vii. 98–101.

502 ‘While the house of Aeneas shall dwell by the Capitol’s immoveable
rock, and a Roman lord hold empire.’ ix. 448–9.

503 ‘Rightly shall all the wars destined to come hereafter subside in
peace beneath the line of Assaracus.’ ix. 642–3.

504 ‘The race that mixed with Ausonian blood shall arise from them, thou
shalt see transcend men, nay even gods in piety; nor shall any
people equally pay homage to thee.’ xii. 838–40.

505 vii. 219, etc.

506 Hor. Od. iii. 5. 9.

507 The Latin name seems rather associated with the thought of the other
great distinguishing characteristic of the Romans, their capacity
for law. Cf. Hor. Od. iv. 14. 7, ‘Quem legis expertes Latinae,’ etc.
Virgil may intend to indicate this peaceful attribute of the Latins,
in contradistinction to the warlike energy of the other Italian
races, in the line (Aen. vii. 204),—

Sponte sua veterisque dei se more tenentem.

508 ‘The men in whom even then the Italian land rejoiced as her sons,
and their fiery spirit in war.’ vii. 643–4.

509 iii. 539:—Bellum, O terra hospita, portas.

510 ‘A hardy stock, we bear our new-born sons to the rivers, and harden
them with the chill cold; as boys they ply the chase and give the
woods no rest: it is their pastime to rein the steed and aim their
arrows from the bow. But our warrior youth, patient in toil and
inured to scanty fare, either subdues the soil with the harrow or
makes towns shake by their assault. Each period of life wears away
in arms, and with the butt end of the spear we goad the steer; nor
does the lethargy of age impair our spirit or change our vigour: our
hoary hairs we press with the helmet, and it is our joy ever to
gather fresh booty and to live by foray.’ ix. 603–613.

511 ‘The men who dwell in high Praeneste and the tilled land where Gabii
worships Juno, and the Hernican rocks, sparkling with streams, they
whom rich Anagnia and thou, father Amasenus, feedest.’ vii. 682–5.

512 ‘They who dwell among the crags of grim Tetrica, and the mount
Severus, and Casperia and Foruli and the river of Himella; they who
drink of the Tiber and Fabaris, whom cold Nursia sent, and the hosts
of Horta and the Latin tribes; and those whom Allia, name of ill
omen, divides with its stream flowing between them.’ vii. 713–7.

513 ‘They who plough thy glades, Tiberinus, and the hallowed shore of
Numicius, and work the Rutulian hills with the ploughshare, and the
ridge of Circeii, the fields of which Jove of Anxur is guardian, and
Feronia glorying in her green grove—where the black marsh of Satura
lies, and where with cold stream through the bottom of the vales
Ufens gropes his way and hides himself in the sea.’ vii. 797–802.

514 This view of Virgil’s pride in the qualities of the Italians is not
incompatible with the fact to which Mr. Nettleship has drawn
attention (Suggestions Introductory to a Study of the Aeneid, pp. 13
et seq.), that Virgil represents their earlier condition as one of
turbulent barbarism. Virgil seems to have regarded ‘the savage
virtue of his race,’ although requiring to be tamed by contact with
a higher civilisation, as the ‘incrementum’ out of which the martial
virtue and discipline of the later Italians was formed:—

Sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago.

515 ‘Tears to human sufferings are due, and hearts are touched by the
common lot.’

516 ‘There will come a time as the years glide on, when the house of
Assaracus will reduce to bondage Phthia and famous Mycenae, and lord
it over vanquished Argos.’ Aen. i. 283–5.

517 ‘He shall overthrow Argos and the Mycenae of Agamemnon, and the king
himself of the line of Aeacus, descendant of the puissant Achilles.’
vi. 839–40.

518 ‘Again he has set before us in Ulysses a profitable example of the
power of courage and wisdom.’ Ep. i. 2. 17, etc.

519 Annals, ii. 88.

520 It is remarked by Helbig, in his ‘Campanische Wandmalerei,’ that
among the many paintings found at Pompeii dealing with mythological
and similar subjects, only one is founded on the incidents of the
Aeneid.

521 Cp. Mr. Nettleship’s Suggestions, etc., p. 10, and the passages from
Cicero there quoted.

522 ‘Thou rulest the world by bearing thyself humbly towards the Gods.’

523 ‘The destinies of thy descendants remain unchanged, nor does my
purpose make me waver.’

524 ‘King Jove is impartial to all: the Fates will find their own way.’
x. 112–3.

525 ‘All-powerful fortune and fate from which there is no escape.’

526 ‘As the doom of the empire was pressing on to its accomplishment.’
i. 33.

527 ‘Nations were subdued, kings were taken prisoners, and Vespasian
made known to the fates.’ Agric. 13.

528 ‘The leadership of Mucianus, the name of Vespasian, and the fact
that nothing was too difficult for the fates to accomplish.’ Hist.
ii. 82.

529 ‘The irony of human affairs.’ Ann. iii. 18; cf. the lines of
Lucretius. v. 1233–5:—

Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
Opterit et pulchros fascis saevasque secures
Proculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.

530 ‘The instability of fortune, which confounds the highest with the
lowest.’ Hist. iv. 47; Hor. Od. i. 34. 12.

531 ‘A night bright with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the
crime, was granted by the gods.’ Ann. xiv. 5.

532 Ann. iv. 28.

533 Ib. i. 30.

534 Ib. xii. 43.

535 Ib. iv. 1.

536 ‘All which events happened with such entire indifference on the part
of the gods, that Nero continued his career of empire and crime for
many years afterwards.’ Ann. xiv. 12.

537 Cf. Tac. Ann. xi. 24: ‘Quid aliud exitio Lacedaemoniis et
Atheniensibus fuit, quamquam armis pollerent, nisi quod victos pro
alienigenis arcebant?’ etc.

538 ‘Her sacred emblems and her gods Troy commits to thy care—take these
as the companions of thy fates.’

539 ‘With his comrades and his son, the Penates and the great gods.’

540 Aen. viii. 679.

541 ‘The rites of religion and the new Gods shall come from me—let the
power of arms be with my father-in-law Latinus—let him keep his
established rule.’ Aen. xii. 192–3.

542 ‘We mark it gliding above the topmost roof of the house, hide itself
in a bright stream in the forest of Ida, marking out the way.’ Aen.
ii. 695–7.

543 ‘Cease to hope that the determinations of the Gods can be turned
aside by prayer.’

544 i. 543.

545 ‘May the gods, if any Powers regard the merciful, if righteousness
and a pure conscience avail aught anywhere, bring to thee a worthy
recompense.’ i. 603–5.

546 ‘Almighty Jove, if thou hast not yet utterly hated the Trojans to
the last man, if thy mercy as of old still regards human troubles.’
v. 687–9.

547 ‘May the gods, if there is any pity in heaven to take heed of such
things, thank thee as thou deservest and make due recompense to thee
who hast made me to behold my son slain before my face, and hast
stained a father’s countenance with the pollution of death.’ ii.
536–9.

548 ‘Here they by whom their brethren were hated, while life was with
them, or a father struck, or a client dealt with treacherously, or
who brooded alone over some discovered treasure and assigned no
share to their kindred—and they are the greatest multitude—and they
who were put to death as adulterers, and they who followed to war an
unholy standard, and they who feared not to be false to the fealty
they owed their lords, imprisoned await punishment.... Here is one
who sold his country for gold, and made it subject to a powerful
master; another made and unmade laws for a bribe; another violated a
daughter’s bed in forbidden wedlock—all men who dared some monstrous
deed of sin, and enjoyed its fruits.’ vi. 608–14, 621–4.

549 ‘Here a company, who received wounds fighting for their country, and
they who were pure priests, while life was with them, and they who
were holy bards and who spoke in strains worthy of Phoebus, or they
who improved life by their discoveries, and who by their good deeds
made others keep them in memory.’ vi. 660–4.

550 Cf. At Tiberius, nihil intermissa rerum cura, negotia pro solatiis
accipiens. Tac. Ann. iv. 13.

551 iii. 132–7:—

Ergo avidus muros optatae molior urbis
Pergameamque voco, et laetam cognomine gentem
Hortor amare focos, arcemque attollere tectis,—
* * * * *
Iura domosque dabam.

552 ‘The funeral was most remarkable for the display of ancestral
images, as the founder of the Julian house, Aeneas and all the Alban
kings, and Romulus founder of the city, and after them the Sabine
lords, Attus Clausus, and the other images of the Claudii, in a long
line passed before the eyes of the spectators.’ Ann. iv. 9.

553 ‘And do we still hesitate to find by our deeds a wider field for our
valour, or does fear hinder us from establishing ourselves on
Ausonian soil?’ vi. 807–8.

554 ‘Then the ages of cruel strife will become gentle, and war be laid
aside: hoary faith, and Vesta, Quirinus with his brother Remus,
shall give laws.’ i. 291–3.

555 ‘Augustus Caesar, of descent from a god: who shall establish again
the golden age of Latium over fields where Saturn once reigned.’ vi.
793–5.

556 ‘Him hereafter, laden with the spoils of the East, thou shalt
welcome in heaven and feel no fear longer; he too will be invoked
with prayers.’ i. 289–90.

557 ‘By the manners of the olden time and its men the Roman State stands
firm.’

558 Il. xx. 105.

559 For an instance of the number of slaves in a single household in the
reign of Nero compare the speech of C. Cassius in Tac. Ann. xiv. 43:
‘Quem numerus servorum tuebitur, cum Pedanium Secundum quadringenti
non protexerint?’ The simplicity of the old Roman life which Virgil
idealises in the Georgics, as compared with the luxurious indulgence
of the later Republic and the Empire, was in a great measure due to
the comparative rarity of slavery in the earlier ages of Roman
history.

560 Cf. ‘Virgil’s Aeneis war der früheste Versuch in dieser künstlichen
oder phantastischen Fassung des Epos, das erste romantische
Heldengedicht, und machte den Uebergang zu den gleich zwitterhaften
Epen der modernen Zeit.’ Bernhardy, Grundriss der Römischen
Litteratur.

561 It is probably too early to institute a comparison between the epic
of Virgil and any recent work of imagination, but not too early to
indicate adherence to those critics who find a parallel not in art
and genius only, but in the simplicity and sincerity of nature
revealed in their works, between the author of the Aeneid and the
author of the ‘Idylls of the King.’

562 This intention was well brought out in an article in Fraser’s
Magazine, which has since been republished by Mr. Froude in his
‘Short Studies on Great Subjects.’

563 ‘Her robe flowed down to her feet, and she was revealed by her
movement as indeed a goddess.’ ‘But I who move in state as the queen
of the gods.’

564 ‘To each man his own day is appointed: brief and irrecoverable is
the time of life to all; but to spread one’s name widely by
achievements, this is the work of valour.’ Aen. x. 467–9.

565 ‘Looking forth from the deep he raised his calm head from the
surface of the wave.’ Cf. Weidner’s Commentary on the First Two
Books of the Aeneid.

566 ‘Apollo of Actium, marking this, was bending his bow from above.’

567 ‘Speed well, O boy, in thy young valour; such is the way to the
stars, thou child of the gods and sire of gods to be: rightly shall
all the wars that are destined to be, cease under the sway of the
line of Assaracus: nor is Troy wide enough to hold thee.’ Aen. ix.
641–4.

568 ix. 717.

569 ‘Forthwith she thus addressed the sister of Turnus, she a goddess,
her a goddess of the meres and sounding rivers; such the hallowed
office that Jove, high king of Heaven, bestowed on her as the price
of her love.’ Aen. xii. 138–41. This passage, with its monotonous
and rhyming endings—sororem—sonoris—honorem,—is probably one of
those which Virgil would have altered had he lived to give the
‘limae labor’ to his work.

570 vii. 81, etc.

571 ‘Then the queen of the Gods gliding from Heaven, with her own hand
pushed the lingering gates, and, as the hinge moved, she, with the
might of Saturn’s daughter, bursts open the iron-fastened doors of
War.’ vii. 620–2.

572 ‘In her true semblance as a Goddess, in form and size as she is wont
to appear to the dwellers in Heaven.’

573 ‘The awful forms become visible and the mighty majesty of the Gods
hostile to Troy.’

574 Cp. De Coulanges, La Cité Antique.

575 ‘Even then the dread solemnity of the spot awed the frightened
peasants: even then they trembled before the wood and rock. This
grove, he says, this hill with leafy summit, some God—what God we
know not—inhabits: the Arcadians believe that they have beheld even
Jove himself, when oft-times he shook the blackening aegis in his
right hand, and summoned the storm clouds.’ viii. 349–54.

576 ‘That it may not be able to be received within the gates or drawn
within the walls, nor to guard the people beneath its ancient
sanctity.’ ii. 187–8.

577 ‘Quitting shrines and altars, all the Gods by whom this empire stood
fast, have departed.’ ii. 351–2.

578 ‘With his own hand he bears the sacred emblems and the defeated Gods
and drags his little grandson.’ ii. 320–1.

579 ‘We bear bowls foaming with warm milk, and saucers of sacred blood,
and lay his spirit to rest in the tomb, and call him for the last
time with a loud voice.’ Aen. iii. 66–8. The passage is referred to
by M. de Coulanges in one of the early chapters of ‘La Cité
Antique.’

580 ‘O light of the Dardan land, most trusted hope of the Trojans, why
hast thou tarried so long? from what shores, Hector, dost thou, the
object of much longing, come? how, after many deaths of thy kinsmen,
after manifold shocks to the city and to those who dwell within it,
do we, in our utter weariness, behold thee? what cruel cause hath
marred thy calm aspect, or why do I behold these wounds?’ ii. 281–6.

581 ‘He makes no reply, nor detains me by answer to my idle questions,
but with a deep groan from the bottom of his breast, “Ah fly,” he
says, “Goddess-born, and wrest thyself away from these flames: the
enemy holds the walls; Troy falls in ruins from its lofty summit;
enough has been granted to my country and to Priam; could Pergama
have been defended by any single hand even by this it should have
been defended. Troy commits to thee her sacred emblems and household
Gods: take them as companions of thy destinies, seek a fortress for
them, which thou shalt raise of mighty size after thy wide
wanderings over the deep are over.”’

582 ‘At a time when Andromache, in a grove in front of the city by the
stream of Simoeis—not the true Simoeis—happened to be bringing the
yearly offering of food, a melancholy gift to the dead, and to be
calling his Manes to the tomb of Hector—the empty mound of green
turf which she had hallowed with the two altars, which gave food for
her tears.’ iii. 301–5.

583 ‘Besides there was within the palace a marble chapel in memory of
her former lord, which she cherished with marvellous reverence,
wreathing it with snow-white fillets and festal leaves.’ iv. 457–9.

584 ‘The Manes send unreal dreams to the world above.’

585 ‘Where her former husband Sychaeus sympathises with all her sorrows
and loves her with a love equal to her own.’

586 Cp. ‘Un Poëte Théologien,’ in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

587 Cf. Aen. v. 236:—

Vobis laetus ego hoc candentem in litore taurum
Constituam ante aras, voti reus, extaque salsos
Porriciam in fluctus, et vina liquentia fundam.

viii. 273:—

Quare agite, O iuvenes! tantarum in munere laudum
Cingite fronde comas et pocula porgite dextris.

588 Created out of his ships.

589 ‘Nay when thy fleet, after crossing the seas, shall have come to
anchor, and, after raising altars, thou shalt pay thy vows upon the
shore, then veil thy head with a purple robe, lest, while the
consecrated fires are burning in the worship of the Gods, the face
of some enemy may meet thee, and confound the omens.’ iii. 403–7.

590 ‘Highest of Gods, Apollo, guardian of holy Soracte, in whose worship
we are foremost, in whose honour the heaped-up pinewood blazes,
while we, thy worshippers, with pious trust, even through the midst
of the flame plant our steps deep in the embers.’ xi. 785–8. Cp. the
Beltane fires which are said to be still kept up among remote Celtic
populations, and which seem to be a survival of a primitive
Sun-worship.

591 ‘Idle superstition, which knows not the ancient Gods.’

592 Ann. iv. 33.

593 It is true, as Gibbon remarks in his Dissertation on the Sixth Book
of the Aeneid, that the expression ‘dare iura’ is only once applied
to Aeneas—but it is the regular expression used of a ruler of a
settled community, as for instance of Dido. It is applied at the end
of the Georgics to Augustus, ‘per populos dat iura.’

594 ‘While the house of Aeneas shall dwell by the steadfast rock of the
Capitol, and the fatherly sway of a Roman shall endure.’ Cp. the
application of ‘pater’ as an epithet of Aeneas, and Horace’s line in
reference to Augustus—

Hic ames dici pater atque princeps.

595 ‘A palace, august, vast, propped on one hundred columns, stood in
the highest place of the city, the royal abode of Laurentian Picus,
inspiring awe from the gloom of woods and old ancestral reverence.,
Here it was held auspicious for kings to receive the sceptre and
first to lift up the fasces: this temple was their senate-house,
this the hall of their sacred banquets; here after sacrifice of a
ram the fathers used to take their seats at the long unbroken
tables.’ vii. 170–6.

596 ‘After the Powers on high determined to overthrow the empire of Asia
and the nation of Priam that deserved no such fate, and proud Ilium
fell, and Troy built by Neptune is reduced utterly to ashes.’ iii.
1–3.

597 ‘An ancient city, that held empire through many years, is falling in
ruins.’ ii. 363.

598 ‘Such was the final doom of Priam; this the end allotted to him,
while he saw Troy on fire and its citadel in ruins,—Troy that
formerly held proud sway in Asia over so many peoples and lands.’
ii. 554–7.

599 ‘I have lived, and finished the course that fortune gave me; and now
my shade shall pass in majesty beneath the earth; I have founded a
famous city, I have seen my own walls arise.’ iv. 653–5.

600 The Peloponnesian war, which united the Dorian and oligarchical
States of Greece under the lead of Sparta against Athens and her
allies, admits, as is indicated by Thucydides in his Introduction,
of the best parallel to the Trojan war, as represented by Homer.

601 ‘In rough guise, armed with javelins and wearing the skin of a
Libyan bear.’

602 ‘And seated him on a couch of leaves and the skin of a Libyan bear.’

603 ‘Here others lay the broad foundations for theatres, and hew out
from the rocks huge columns, the high ornaments of a future stage.’
i. 427–9.

604 ‘Bronze was the threshold with its rising steps, bronze-bound the
posts, of bronze the doors with their grating hinges.’ i. 448–9.

605 ‘And marvels at the skill of the artists working together and the
toil with which their works are done, he sees the whole series of
the battles fought at Troy and the war whose fame was already noised
through all the world.’ i. 455–7.

606 ‘Burning lamps hang from the roof of fretted gold, and torches with
their blaze banish the night.’

607 ‘Youth of surpassing spirit, the higher thou risest in thy towering
courage, the more fit is it that I take earnest counsel and weigh
anxiously every chance.’ xii. 19–21.

608 ‘The care thou hast for my sake, I pray thee, Sire, for my sake to
lay aside, and allow me to hazard my life for the prize of honour. I
too,’ etc.

609 ‘Thou too, O Turnus, would’st now be standing a huge trunk with thy
arms upon thee, were but thy age equal to his and the strength
derived from years the same.’ xi. 173–4.

610 ‘But why, in my misfortune, am I detaining the Trojans from deeds of
arms—go, and mindful bear these commands to your king.’ i. 561, etc.

611 ‘Banish fear from your hearts, ye Trojans, lay aside your cares, our
hard lot and my new rule force me to take such anxious measures, and
to guard my realm on all its wide frontiers. Who cannot have heard
of them who follow Aeneas and of the city Troy, its men and manful
prowess, or the fires that raged in that mighty war? Not so dull are
the hearts of us the people of Phoenicia, nor is it so far away from
our Tyrian city that the Sun yokes his horses.’

612 ‘His woolly sheep follow him; this is his sole joy and solace of his
suffering.’ iii. 660–1.

613 ‘We see standing by him, all of no avail, the stern-eyed brothers
dwelling on Etna, bearing their heads high in air, a grim assembly.’
iii. 677–9.

614 ‘But not even thus though hard-bestead did he forget the raft, but
springing after it laid hold of it among the waves, and sat down in
the middle, thus escaping the issue of death.’

615 ‘We leave the harbours of Ortygia and scud over the open sea, and
skirt the coasts of Naxos, on whose ridges the companies of Bacchus
revel, and green Donysa, Olearos, and snow-white Paros, and the
Cyclades spread over the sea, and the narrow waters studded with
frequent isles. The mariner’s cheer arises with varying rivalry.’
iii. 124–8.

616 ‘On the fourth day for the first time the land at length appeared to
rise up, to open up the view of its distant mountains, and to send
its rolling smoke on high.’ iii. 205–6.

617 ‘And now the stars had disappeared, and in the first blush of dawn
we see far off the dim outline of the hills and the low land of
Italy.’ iii. 521–3.

618 ‘The longed-for breezes blow stronger, and the harbour now nearer
opens up, and the temple of Minerva comes into sight on the cliff.’
iii. 530–1.

619 ‘Soon we leave out of sight the airy heights of the Phaeacians, and
skirt the shores of Epirus and draw near the Chaonian harbour, and
approach the lofty city of Buthrotum.’ iii. 291–3.

620 ‘Camarina comes into sight far away, and the plains of the Gela, and
vast Gela called from the name of the river—after that high Acragas
shows its mighty walls afar—in old days the breeder of high-mettled
steeds.’ iii. 701–4.

621 ‘To these he adds Amaster son of Hippotas, and follows plying them
with his hurled spear Tereus and Harpalycus and Demophoon and
Chromis.’ Aen. xi. 673–5.

622 ‘To whom Zeus gave from youth even to old age the grievous task of
war, till we each should die.’ Il. xiv. 85–7. The fascination which
the poem has even for modern readers is due, in no slight degree, to
the spell which some aspects of war exercise over the imagination in
all times.

623 ‘They ply their spears with redoubled force, both the Trojans and
Mnestheus himself with the flash of lightning.’

624 ‘There is here, here a spirit that recks not of life.’

625 Cf. viii. 510:—

ni, mixtus matre Sabella,
Hinc partem patriae traheret.

626 ‘Us the fates summon hence to other scenes of woe, to the same grim
wars.’ xi. 96–7. Cf. the epithet ‘lacrimabile,’ which he applies to
war.

627 ‘Press not further in thy hate.’

628 ‘The short-lived and ill-starred loves of the Roman people.’

629 ‘If in any way thou canst break the cruel bonds of fate, thou too
shalt be a Marcellus.’

630 ‘And the sword-point pierced through the shield, slight defence in
his menacing onset, and the tunic which his mother had interlaced
with threads of gold.’ x. 817–8.

631 ‘But then, when he beheld the look and face of the dying youth, he,
the son of Anchises, that face so wondrous pale, he uttered a deep
groan in his pity, and held out his hand, and the thought of all his
love for his father came over his mind.’ x. 821–4.

632 ‘Ye too fell in the Rutulian fields, Larides and Thymber, twin sons
of Daucis, most like to one another, indistinguishable to your own
family, and a most pleasing cause of confusion to your parents.’ x.
390–2.

633 ‘Immediately the whiz of the arrow and the sound of the air were
heard by Arruns at the same moment as the iron fixed in his body.
Expiring and uttering his last groan, forgotten by his comrades, he
is left on the unheeded dust of the plain; while Opis flies aloft to
high Olympus.’ xi. 863–7.

634 ‘Between it Tiberinus with his fair stream, in rapid eddies and
yellow with much sand bursts forth into the sea.’

635 ‘There was a custom in Hesperian Latium which from that time onward
the Alban cities observed, and now Rome, mistress of the world,
observes.... With his own hand, arrayed in the robe of state of
Quirinus, his toga girt with the Gabian girding, the Consul unbars
the creaking gates: with his own voice he calls for battle; the rest
of the warlike youth echo him, and the brazen horns combine with
their hoarse accompaniment.’ vii. 601–15.

636 ‘Rhaebus, we have lived long, if aught is long to mortals,’ etc.
Aen. x. 861, etc.

637 Trist. ii. 533–4.

638 ‘Whate’er it be, every fortune must be conquered by endurance.’

639 ‘Then he cheers his comrades and soothes the fears of sad Iulus,
telling them of their destinies.’

640 ‘And now higher rises the fierce rage of the Trojan leader.’

641 ‘A great deed has been done, my warriors,—let all fear be banished.’
This contrast was suggested by Mr. Nettleship’s interpretation of
the character of Turnus (‘Suggestions,’ etc., pp. 15 _et seq._). As
will appear later, I am inclined to think that he insists too
exclusively on the ‘violentia,’ which is undoubtedly a strong
element in the character of the Italian hero. The antagonism of
Turnus to Aeneas, as of the Italians to the Trojans, he justly
regards as an instance of the strife of passion with law. If the
Greek drama suggested the ethical aspect of this strife, a
comparison with Horace, Ode iii. 4, of which Ode the leading idea is
the superiority of the ‘vis temperata’ over the ‘vis consili
expers,’ as illustrated in the wars of the Olympian Gods with the
Titans, and in the triumph of Augustus over the elements of disorder
opposing him, suggests that the political inspiration of the idea
came from ‘the stately mansion on the Esquiline’—

‘Molem propinquam nubibus arduis.’

642 ‘Nor shall it irk me to remember Elissa, while I can remember my own
self, while breath animates my frame.’

643 ‘But my longing for thee, the thought of all thy cares, noble
Odysseus, and of all thy gentleness bereft me of sweet life.’

644 La Cité Antique.

645 ‘And now that I am a man, and know it from the lips of others, and
feel my spirit wax strong within me.’

646 ‘And his spirit was wroth that the stranger tarried long at the
door.’

647 ‘Where the white lilies blush with the mingling of many roses.’

648 ‘For my rest is assured, my haven is close at hand—it is of happy
funeral rites that I am bereft.’

649 ‘Now be each mindful of wife and home: recall now the mighty deeds,
your fathers’ renown.’

650 ‘I give back Pallas even as was due to him; whatever respect there
is to a tomb, whatever comfort in burial, I freely bestow.’ Cp. the
contrast:—

ἦ ῥα καὶ Ἕκτορα δῖον ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα.

651 ‘The Aetolian and Arpi will not aid us, but Messapus will and
fortunate Tolumnius.’

652 ‘For you and my father-in-law Latinus, I, Turnus, second to none of
the men of old in valour, have devoted this my life: “me only Aeneas
challenges”—ay, let him challenge me; nor let Drances rather, if
this is the anger of Heaven, pay the penalty by his death, or if it
is a call to valour and glory, let the valour and glory be his.’
Aen. xi. 440, etc.

653 Napier’s Peninsular War, Death of Sir John Moore.

654 ‘Is death then so sad a doom? Be ye merciful to me, spirits of the
dead, since the favour of the Powers above is turned from me; a
spirit, pure and untainted by that shame, I shall pass to you, never
dishonouring my mighty ancestors.’ Aen. xii. 644–8.

655 ‘It is the Gods that terrify me, and the enmity of Jove.’

656 ‘He who first won my love has taken it with him: let him keep it and
treasure it in his tomb.’

657 ‘Often his own heroic spirit, often the glory of his race, recur to
her mind: his looks remain deep-printed in her heart, and his words,
nor does her passion allow her to rest.’

658 ‘That forsooth is the task of the Powers above; this trouble vexes
their tranquil state.’

659 ‘I trust indeed, if the pitiful Gods avail aught, that among the
rocks in mid sea thou shalt drink deep of the cup of retribution,
and often call on Dido by name; I, from far away, will follow thee
with baleful fires, and when chill death has separated my spirit
from my frame, my shade will haunt thee everywhere; heartless, thou
shalt suffer for thy crime: I shall hear of it, and this tale will
reach me among the spirits below.’

660 ‘Arise thou, some avenger, out of my bones, who with brand and sword
mayest chase the settlers from Troy, now, hereafter, whensoever
there shall be strength to bring thee forth.’

661 ‘I have built a famous city: I have seen my own walls arise:
avenging my husband, I exacted retribution from an unkind brother;
fortunate, alas! too fortunate, had not the Trojan keels ever
touched our shore.’

662 ‘I shall die unavenged,’ she says, ‘still let me die—it is thus,
thus, I fain would pass to the shades: may the cruel Trojan drink in
with his eyes the sight of this fire from the deep, and carry along
with him the omen of my death.’

663 ‘Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood,
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend’s approach in Hades, turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.’
The Scholar Gipsy, by Matthew Arnold.

664 ‘At length she started away and fled unforgiving into the shades of
the forest, where her former husband, Sychaeus, feels with all her
sorrows and loves her with a love equal to her own.’

665 Landor’s Pentameron.

666 ‘It was when their first sleep begins to weary mortals.’

667 ‘The broad waters of Sigaeum reflect the fire.’

668 ‘There is dread on every side, while the very silence awes the
mind.’

669 ‘But some way off in a lonely bay the Trojan women apart were
weeping for their lost Anchises, and as they wept were gazing on the
deep—“Ah, to think that so many dangerous waters, so vast an expanse
of sea remained still for them, the weary ones!” was the cry of
all.’

670 ‘In her dreams Aeneas himself fiercely drives her before him in her
frenzy; and she seems ever to be left all alone, ever to be going
uncompanioned on a long road, and to be searching for her Tyrians on
a desert land.’

671 ‘Powers whose empire is over the spirits of the dead, and ye silent
shades.’

672 ‘Behind his war-horse Aethon, with all his trappings laid aside,
goes weeping, wetting his face with great drops. Others bear his
spear and shield—the rest of his armour Turnus keeps—then follow in
mournful array the Trojans, and all the Tyrrhenian host, and the
Arcadians with arms reversed.’

673 iv. 143, etc. Referred to in the ‘Parallel Passages’ in Dr.
Kennedy’s notes.

674 Referred to by M. Benoist.

675 ‘Or with the grandeur of father Appenninus himself, when he makes
his waving ilexes heard aloud, and is glad as he towers with snowy
summit to the sky.’

676 ‘Either on the banks of the Po, or by the fair Adige.’

677 ‘As Ganges swelling high in silence with its seven calm streams, or
the Nile when with its fertilising flood it ebbs from the plains,
and has already subsided within its channel.’ ix. 30–2.

678 ‘As many as the leaves that fall in the woods at the first cold
touch of autumn, or as many as the birds which are gathered to the
land from the deep, when the chill of the year banishes them beyond
the sea, and wafts them into sunny lands.’ vi. 309–312.

679 ‘Like the moon when one sees it early in the month, or fancies he
has seen it rise through mists.’

‘So to see, as when one sees or fancies he has seen the dim moon in
the early dawn.’

680 ‘As when a purple flower cut down by the plough pines and dies, or
as poppies droop their head wearily, when weighed down by the rain.’

681 ‘Like a delicate violet, or a drooping hyacinth, when plucked by a
maiden, from which the bloom and the beauty have not yet
departed—but the earth does not now nourish it and supply its
forces.’

682 ‘Ac ne quid impetum moraretur quaedam imperfecta transmisit, alia
levissimis versibus veluti fulsit, quos per iocum pro tibicinibus
interponi aiebat ad sustinendum opus, donec solidae columnae
advenirent.’ Donatus, quoted by Ribbeck in the Life prefixed to his
smaller edition of Virgil.

683 ‘But I the stately Queen of the Gods.’

684 ‘And first Achates struck a spark from a flint, and caught the light
in some leaves, and cast dry sticks about them to feed them, and
blew the spark within the fuel into a flame.’

685 ‘Worthy to be happier in a father’s command and to have another
father than Mezentius.’

686 ‘Yield not thou to thy hardships, but advance more boldly against
them.’

‘Learn from me, my child, to bear thee like a man and to strive
strenuously, from others learn to be fortunate.’

‘Have the courage, stranger, to despise riches, and mould thyself
too to be a fit companion of the God.’

687 ‘Ah! fly that cruel land, fly that covetous coast.’ Mentioned by Mr.
Symonds in his History of the Renaissance in Italy.

688 Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman, D.D.

689 To attempt to translate these ‘pathetic half-lines’ etc., apart from
their context, would only be to spoil them, without conveying any
sense of the feeling latent in them.

690 Aut videt, aut vidisse putat.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

The author’s footnotes have been moved to the end of the volume.

In Chapter V on page 180, the printer has missed the section heading “II.”
It has been restored; the two following section headings were changed from
“II.” to “III.” (page 185) and “III.” to “IV.” (page 190), matching the
Table of Contents. In the Table of Contents, several page references were
corrected: “61” changed to “60”, “294” changed to “295”, “354” changed to
“355”, “364” changed to “365” (twice).

The last footnote on page 232 and the first footnote on page 232 have been
combined, since the only reason for the separate notes was a page break in
the original edition.

The following typographical errors were corrected:

page 2, period added after “Catullum”
page 52, “of” added between “testimony” and “Ovid”
page 65, “inuenissem” changed to “invenissem”
page 91, “nfluence” changed to “influence”
page 132, “neighborhood” changed to “neighbourhood”
page 145, quote added after “âmes.”
page 244, period added after “V”
page 322, “Hyrcansive” changed to “Hyrcanisve”
page 363, “Gründriss” changed to “Grundriss”

Unusual spellings (“develope”, “ascendency”), spelling variations (“Garda”
and “Guarda”; “Aeneis” and “Aeneid”, “steadfast” and “stedfastly”,
“acknowledgment” and “acknowledgement”, “judgement” and “judgment”,
“unmistakable” and “unmistakeable”, “medieval” and “mediaeval”) and
variations in hyphenation (“background” and “back-ground”, “birthday” and
“birth-day”, “commonplace” and “common-place”, “cornfields” and
“corn-fields”, “lawgiver” and “law-giver”, “lifelike” and “life-like”,
“lifetime” and “life-time”, “masterpiece” and “master-piece”,
“ploughshare” and “plough-share”, “reorganisation” and “re-organisation”)
are retained.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil" ***

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