INTRODUCTION.
IN turning from the Eclogues and Georgics to the Aeneid, we are no
longer confronted by the opinion which insists on Virgil's claims as a
strictly original poet. The days are past when Scaliger could compare
Virgil and Homer in detail, and pronounce that the scholar had in
almost every instance excelled his master; nor would a modern reader
easily tolerate even those less invidious parallels, such as were not infrequent
in the last century, where Virgil was measured against Homer
on the same principles on which Johnson has measured Pope against
Dryden, and with substantially the same results. It is hard to read
without a smile the apologetic tone in which Pope himself vindicates
Homer against the admirers of Virgil, pleading that the old Greek has
at all events the advantage of having written first; that if he had a less
cool judgment, he holds the heart under a stronger enchantment, and
that to endeavour to exalt Virgil at his expense is much the same as if
one should think to raise the superstructure by undermining the foundation1 . It is now the turn of the critic of the Aeneid to use the language
of extenuation and speak with bated breath. On the one side it
is admitted, as it is asserted on the other, that in undertaking the
Aeneid at the command of a superior Virgil was venturing beyond the
province of his genius, and that all we can expect to find is the incidental
success which could not fail to be obtained even on uncongenial
ground by the poet of the Georgics. I have elsewhere explained the
reasons which lead me to question the appropriateness of the special
praise usually given to Virgil's agricultural poetry, and conceded, though
with more hesitation, to his pastoral compositions, as if the true bent of
his mind were to be found in his sympathy with external nature, at the
same time that I have spoken as strongly as it was in my power to
speak of the marvellous grace and delicacy, the evidences of a culture
most elaborate and most refined, which shine out in the midst of a
thousand incongruities of costume and outward circumstance, and make
us forget that we are reading Bucolic poems of which line after line is to
be found in Theocritus, and precepts about husbandry which are far more
[p. 4]
intelligibly stated in Theophrastus or in the Geoponica. It is precisely
this measure which I would wish now to extend to the Aeneid. So far
it may seem that I am substantially at one with the opinion which I
have mentioned as that which is now generally entertained on Virgil's
claims as an epic poet. It is possible however that the habit of sharply
contrasting the characteristics of the several works of Virgil may have
led to an exaggeration on the one side, as I believe it has on the other,
that the Aeneid may have been brought too exclusively to the standard
of the Iliad and Odyssey, and that Virgil may have been blamed, as
Pope complains that Homer has been blamed, for not doing what he
never intended.
There can be little doubt that too much has been made of Virgil's
supposed disqualification or disinclination for epic poetry. We have his
own confession in the Sixth Eclogue that his early ambition was to sing
of kings and battles: and though Phoebus may have whispered in his
ear that such themes were too high for one so young, so humble, and so
unknown, we are not obliged to conclude that the aspiration was then
and there finally abandoned, or that as he rose naturally from short
pastorals to a long didactic poem, he may not have cherished the hope
of rising by an equally natural ascent to a still longer epic. If Pope's
epic poem of Alcander was the dream of his boyhood, when he fancied
himself the greatest poet that ever lived, his epic poem on Brutus was
no less the vision of his later years, when he had come, as he thought,
to take a just measure of his powers. That Augustus may have exercised
some pressure on Virgil, urging him to undertake heroic poetry,
is very possible; but Virgil's words in the Third Georgic, and the similar
language held by other poets, such as Horace and Propertius, would
lead us to agree with a recent German editor2 , that what the emperor
wished for was a direct celebration of his own actions; nor is there anything,
even in the apocryphal notices of the pseudo-biographer, to compel
us to any other conclusion. It was only natural that Augustus should
take an interest, as we know him to have done, in the progress of a
poem which, in grandeur of scope and compass, promised to transcend
any previous effort of the Roman muse, and so could not but reflect indirect
glory on his reign. We may observe, however, that in the only
words of Virgil on the subject which have come down to us3 the poet
expresses himself with considerable reserve, and is by no means forward
to gratify the imperial curiosity. Nor need we to lay any stress on the
story which, supported as it is by the authority of the elder Pliny4 , there
seems no reason to doubt, that Virgil himself, when dying, condemned
his Aeneid to the flames. Rightly understood, that story seems to contain,
[p. 5]
not a confession that he had mistaken his powers, but simply one
more instance of the fastidious and exacting nature of his self-criticism.
The words of the pseudo-biographer, who in this case at least is telling
a plausible tale, inform us distinctly that it was the uncorrected and
unfinished state of the work which made Virgil anxious that it should
not survive him, comburi iussit ut rem inemendatam imperfectamque5 .
The explanation is consonant to all that we know of Virgil's character,
as shown in his writings; and it can only be a private opinion which we
may ourselves entertain about the merit of the poem that would lead us
to seek for any other. The biographer tells us, and here again his story
is credible enough, that Virgil was overtaken by death at the time when
he was intending to spend three years in polishing and elaborating the
Aeneid: and we may imagine for ourselves what would be the value of
three years of correction in the judgment of a poet like Virgil, and how
abortive he might consider the work which had lost the advantage of so
long a gestation. We cannot, indeed, tell, except in a very few
obvious cases, such as the hemistichs, and perhaps also certain inconsistencies
in the narrative, of which I have spoken elsewhere6 , what
may have been the actual shortcomings of the poem as they appeared
to its author. He may have introduced verses, as the story says he
did, which were intended as mere temporary make-shifts7 , props to
stay the building until more solid supports should be forthcoming; but
modern criticism has not in general been very happy in pointing out
these weak places, and for the present we must be content to admit
that, as regards the execution of the poem, at any rate, our conceptions
of what is required fall infinitely short of Virgil's own; and that
though we may hope, in some measure, to appreciate what he has done,
we can form no notion of what he left yet to do. Such an admission
of ignorance is no more than the tribute which we pay, naturally and
cheerfully, to a consummate artist. In any case, we need not doubt
that the feeling which made Virgil wish to rob the world of his
greatest poem was simply the mortification of leaving in a state of
comparative imperfection a work which he had intended to be his
masterpiece. To imagine that he was sensible of the unreality which,
to a certain extent, characterizes the Aeneid, as compared with the
Homeric poems, is to imagine an anachronism and an impossibility, to
attribute to him a thought which is inconsistent with the whole tenor of
his writings, and must have been alien to the entire current of sentiment
among his contemporaries, whether admiring or adverse. He
seems never to have tormented himself with doubts that he had not
realized the rustic vigour of Theocritus, or the primitive simplicity of
[p. 6]
Hesiod. He appropriates their form boldly and openly, and does not
ask himself whether he has reproduced their spirit. To be the Roman
Homer; to write the sequel of the tale of Troy, not as an inferior, but
as an equal, not as a younger son of the victorious race, but as the heir
of those many ages which had lifted the conquered people to a height
far above their conquerors; to combine the glories of the heroic age
with the august antiquities of his own nation; this was an ideal which
might well captivate a mind like Virgil's, and which less partial voices
than those of an applauding court might have told him that he was able
to attain.
The chasm which separates the Aeneid from the Iliad and Odyssey is
undoubtedly one which is not easily spanned. It is true that sufficient
account has not always been taken of the numerous intervening objects
which break the distance and afford resting-places to the eye. The substance
of the Homeric poetry, the conduct of the action and the conception
of the actors, came to Virgil modified by the intermediate agency
of the Greek drama. His view of the form may have been similarly
affected by the example of those later Greek epics of which the poem of
Apollonius is the only surviving specimen, and by the precepts of that
critical fraternity of which the author of the Argonautics was no undistinguished
member. But the unsurpassed eminence of the two writers,
the bard or bards of pre-historic Greek and the poet of Augustan Rome,
will always make them prominent objects of comparison or contrast;
and the parallel is itself one which Virgil, far from avoiding, has done
his utmost to challenge. To a modern reader the exactness of the
parallel only serves to make the contrast deeper and more unmistakeable.
Mr. Gladstone says nothing which a critic, not sworn, like himself,
absolutely to the service of Homer, need hesitate to admit, when he
calls attention to the extraordinary amount of admitted imitation and
obvious similarity on the surface of the Aeneid, and pronounces nevertheless
that the poem stands in almost every fundamental particular in
the strongest contrast to the Iliad8 . Both features, the identity and
the diversity, are, as I have just said, sufficiently familiar to us; we
have seen them in Virgil's treatment of Theocritus and Hesiod, and we
shall not be surprised to meet them again in his treatment of Homer.
On the identity, indeed, there is but little for me to say which has not
been anticipated in what I have advanced in my Introduction to the
Eclogues. The diversity is a more complex question, and may well
occupy us somewhat longer.
The production of the Aeneid was part of that general burst of
[p. 7]
literary enthusiasm which distinguished the Augustan period. Roman
literature had always been imitative; Pacuvius and Attius had set
themselves to make the best they could out of Sophocles and Aeschylus9 ; and it was doubtless in his own judgment, as well as in that
of eulogistic critics, that Ennius appeared to be wise and brave, and a
second Homer10 . But the period which witnessed the establishment of
the empire generated new hopes and aspirations among the poets of
Rome. The fervour of an age, half revolutionary, half organic in its
character, had produced intellectual activities which the imperial system
was not slow to welcome and cherish. The writers of the new era saw
that Greece had as yet yielded but few of her spoils to her semibarbarous
invaders; and they planned fresh expeditions, which should
be undertaken under more exalted auspices, and return crowned with
greener and more luxuriant laurels. The ebullition of anticipated
triumph which opens the Third Georgic doubtless represents the real
feeling of the poet, though the vision which he there professes to see
does not correspond in its details with that which his better genius
afterwards revealed to him. Greece was to be conquered, and conquered
with her own weapons. The games were to be the veritable Olympic
games, transplanted to the banks of the Mincio, those games of which
the race and the caestus are the type; and the ceremonial of the day is
to be varied with the accessories of a Roman triumph. It was in this
spirit that he addressed himself to the task of reproducing Homer. The
imitation of externals was a thing not to be avoided or dexterously concealed,
but to be openly and boldly embraced; and it was the hitherto
unapproached excellence of the model which was held to constitute the
glory of the success. Even in his own day there appear to have been
critics, probably rival versifiers, who reproached him with having taken
so much from Homer; and the answer which he is said to have made
shows the light in which he wished his own labours to be regarded11 .
Let them try to steal for themselves as they say I have stolen for
myself, and they will find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his club than
to rob Homer of a single verse. It was an act of high-handed brigandage,
which, rightly appreciated, carried with it its own justification. In the
long hours of laborious days, paring down and refining the verses which
had been poured out in the exuberance of the morning12 , he had grappled
[p. 8]
with the Grecian Hercules, and had again and again wrested from
him that weapon which had so long been the terror of meaner freebooters13 . I have elsewhere remarked on Virgil's absolute silence about
Homer, who, throughout the Aeneid, is never named or even indicated;
but no one would interpret it as the silence of a writer anxious to ignore
or conceal his obligations. Even were epic narrative as favourable to
the introduction of personal notices as pastoral dialogue or didactic disquisition,
it would have been superfluous to mention Homer in a poem
which invites comparison with the Iliad and Odyssey in its whole
external form, and even in its very title, and contains an imitation or
translation from Homer in almost every page.
This avowed rivalry, I venture to think, should be borne in mind in
estimating, not only the similarity of the Homeric and Virgilian epics,
but their discrepancies. When we require that Virgil, drawing as he
does his characters from the circle of Homeric legend, should exhibit
them as they are exhibited in Homer, we are not only forgetting, what
Virgil could scarcely have forgotten if he would, the changes which
those characters underwent as they passed under the hands of Attic and
Alexandrian schools of poetry, but we are mistaking the whole attitude
assumed by Virgil with reference to his illustrious predecessor. Homer,
in his eyes, is not the father alike of history and of poetry, the sole
anthority for all our knowledge about the Greeks and the Trojans,
their ethnology, their polity, their moral relations to each other; he is
the rival poet of a rival nation, the party chronicler of a quarrel which
the Trojans had bequeathed to their successors, and those successors,
after many centuries, had pushed to a victorious issue. Was it likely
that a Trojan would have accepted the Homeric estimate of his nation
and his nation's cruel enemies? and was it to be expected that the heir
of the Trojans should dwarf his representation of Trojan worth and
Trojan valour to a Homeric standard? The lions had at last come to be
the painters; and though they could not represent their progenitor as
victorious over the man in that great legendary struggle, they could
portray it as a contest of fraud and cruelty with heroic endurance
and genuine bravery; they could poise the event more doubtfully in the
balance, and call down indignation on the crimes that stained the hour
of triumph; they could point to the retribution which fell, even within
the period of the legend, on the homes of those who had made others
homeless, and shadow forth in prophetic vision the yet more terrible
[p. 9]
recompense which history was to bring in the fulness of time. Aeneas
is drawn by Homer at a time when, from the nature of the case, he
could only play a secondary part in the action; yet Homer admits his
reputation among his countrymen, and grudgingly concedes his real
prowess, while he makes the Trojan hero's future the special concern of
destiny, provided for even by those gods who are the fiercest enemies of
Troy. Virgil takes up his story when he is left alone as the one surviving
protector of his country, the forlorn hope of those who sought to
resist, during the sack of the city, the recognized leader of the Trojan
migration. Worsted as he had been by Achilles, and even by Diomed,
it was no less true that he had been a terror to the Lords of the Danaans
and the armies of Agamemnon; nor was there any reason why he and
his Trojans should not prove too strong for the Italian nations, though
they had proved too weak for the forces of Greece. Even in Homer it
is easy to see that the character of Ulysses has more sides than one: he
is the prince of policy, because with him every species of fraud is lawful;
and it is natural that his stratagems should be differently estimated by
those in whose favour they are exercised and those to whom they
brought havoc, exile, and death. Virgil, it is true, represents his
Ulysses as engaging in crimes from which the Homeric Ulysses would
probably have shrunk; but we must not judge a poet as we should judge
a historian who were to invent actions in order to support a preconceived
theory of character. If the right of independent treatment be conceded,
it must be allowed to extend, not only to the interpretation of character,
but to the invention of incident. Regarding Homer as a party chronicler,
Virgil was not bound to assume that he has recorded all the actions
of his hero, any more than that he has given a true colour to those
actions which he has recorded. And so the poet of Troy, having taken
such a measure as it was in the nature of a Trojan to take of Troy's
subtlest enemy, might fairly avail himself of any post-Homeric tradition
which might serve the cause that he had to advocate, or even create for
himself new traditions, so long as they were plausible and consistent.
Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenientia finge. To be plausible
and consistent are a poet's sole historical duties; and in this instance
plausibility and consistency are to be estimated, not according to the
view which sets up Homer as the one record of historical truth, but
according to that which regards his poems as pieces of advocacy,
the answers to which have been lost. The image is indeed something
more than a mere metaphor. We know that in the Greek
schools of rhetoric attempts were frequently made to overturn the
verdict, not only of history, but of fable; and we may recall with a
smile the fact that it was not merely sophistical acumen, but real
sympathy with a friendly nation, which led Greek orators to rehabilitate
[p. 10]
Busiris, and purge Egypt from the stain of a legendary participation in
the guilt of human sacrifices. Virgil has obtained leave to reargue the
case of his countrymen; and all that is required of him is that his facts
and inferences should be such as would have been credible to a Trojan
warrior. Bearing this in mind, we may remember that if Aeneas calls
Ulysses fell, relentless, and the inventor of crime, it is when he
is speaking of the sack of Troy, or of the carrying off of the statue
which made Troy impregnable. If Sinon represents him as a treacherous,
artful glozer, it is when he is describing plots laid against his
friend's life and his own. If Deiphobus knows him only as the counsellor
of deeds of wrong, we may pardon the one-sided judgment of a
person who has been hewn by him as a carcase fit for hounds, and
continues mangled even in his ghostly body. Such men were not
likely to sympathize with the admiration expressed by the Homeric
Antenor, as, on the day that was to bring the war to a peaceful close,
he recalled the impression made on him by his illustrious guest in bygone
years, before the war began. Nor is it less perfectly in keeping
that the Rutulians should disparage the wiles of Ulysses in comparison
of their own more daring exploits, at the same time that it leads us
to admire the art of the poet, who has thus condemned the most
formidable enemies of Troy out of the mouth of other enemies, who were
destined to prove less formidable. As little could it be expected that
the Aeneas of Virgil should appreciate the lights and shades distributed
over the character of the Homeric Helen. How he regarded her during
the siege we are not told; he may have shared the mixed feeling of
admiration and disapproval which the old men on the wall express in
their hour of respite; he may have partaken of the sense of repulsion
with which, as she tells us in her wail over Hector, she was looked upon
by all in Troy; but as his eye fell upon her at the moment of the sack
of the royal palace, and the savage slaughter of the good old king,
thoughts of hatred and vengeance could hardly fail to be uppermost in
his mind; and he may well have needed a supernatural interposition to
teach him to distinguish between the authors of so terrible a ruin and
its wretched instrument. Let us once fix in our minds that Homer is
the poet of the Greeks, and that his action is laid during the siege, that
Virgil is the poet of the Trojans, and that his action is laid after the
burning of the city, and we shall not, I think, be disposed to charge
Virgil with mere wanton depravation of the Homeric characters.
The same notion of independent rivalry will explain Virgil's neglect
of Homeric traditions in other matters where patriotic feeling or dramatic
propriety was not concerned. Virgil doubtless held himself bound
to follow Homer's narrative only so far as that narrative had taken hold
of the popular mind of Rome. He was not the interpreter of an ancient
[p. 11]
record, bound to minute and painstaking accuracy; he was the reviver
of an old story, which in its broad features was familiar to all lovers of
poetry. The relative position of the various members of the royal family
of Troy, the distinctions of races among the hosts that respectively made
up the Greek and Trojan armies, the extent of the names Pergamus,
Ilion, and Dardania, the comparative importance of the Scamander and
the Simois, the geographical details of countries which few Romans had
ever visited,these were not points that interested the Roman readers
of the Iliad and Odyssey, nor were they likely to be scrutinized by
Roman readers of the Aeneid. The very care which Virgil has taken to
construct his own catalogue of the Italian forces, might naturally be
thought to absolve him from the duty of minutely studying catalogues
with which even an educated Roman felt he had no concern. The indifference
of the Romans to the history of other countries is a known
feature in their character14 ; curious about the antiquities of their own
nation, they had but little of that historical spirit which impels a student
to investigate records entirely unconnected with himself; and Virgil
was a type of his countrymen, alike in his learning and in his carelessness
or ignorance. Besides, the body of knowledge already existing at
Rome, and the habits of ordinary speech, would have been a serious
impediment to Virgil, even if he had wished to follow Homer faithfully.
As he was obliged to talk of Jupiter, Juno, and Mars, to a nation which
had agreed to identify the Greek gods with those whom they were themselves
worshipping daily, so he could hardly have avoided calling the
Greeks by that generic name by which the Romans knew them, though
it had no existence in Homer's time, and had never really belonged to
more than an infinitesimally small part of the Greek people. If we,
with our appreciation of historical criticism, find it impossible not to
talk of Greece and the Greeks, what would it have been to a Roman, to
whom the name was a contemporary fact, and who spoke of Graecia
and Graeci as we speak of Germany and Germans? With this
cardinal offence against history and ethnology staring him in the face,
Virgil would have found it in vain to affect or aim at accuracy. Accordingly,
he appeals indifferently to all the associations of his readers,
whether vague or exact. Here he takes advantage of an obscure tradition;
there, of a loose popular identification. He talks of Dorians
at a time when the Dorians were scarcely known, and confers on the
Trojans the name of their Phrygian neighbours. He generalizes from
a part to the whole, and then comes down from the whole to some other
part; just as where, in describing the Trojan horse, he first speaks of it
as pine-wood, then as maple, and lastly as oak; not, I think, from confusion
or forgetfulness, but as an assertion of the poet's privilege to
[p. 12]
represent, in as many ways as he pleased, the general notion of wood.
In short, he is an artist, an Italian antiquary, a Roman of the Augustan
period, speaking to the average educated intelligence of his own day;
he is anything rather than what modern admirers of Homer would wish
him to be, a hierophant of the inner Homeric world, an expounder of
primitive history, philosophy, policy, and religion15 , as contained in
Homer.
Such a course of independent rivalry, however, could hardly be pursued
without provoking the consequent Nemesis. A story of the heroic
time of Greece, treated in an essentially modern and Roman spirit, was
sure to leave a sense of incongruity on the mind, not only of a Homeric
student, but of a more popular reader. A reader of this sort might be
utterly unconscious of a thousand inaccuracies of costume; he might
feel the loss of primitive simplicity of manner to be compensated by the
greater stateliness of the modern heroic; but he could scarcely fail to
be struck with an essential want of consistency in the drawing of the
principal figures, which, being Homeric, must necessarily be old, and
being Virgilian, must as necessarily be new. It is this, I think, which
constitutes the secret of the dissatisfaction which is generally felt with
the character of Aeneas. To represent him, as some modern critics
have done, as simply mean and feeble, unmanly and unheroic, is unjust,
and even absurd. His appearances in Homer ought not to prejudice
our opinion about his appearances in Virgil; nor perhaps would they,
were it not for an error in judgment committed by the poet himself,
who, in his spirit of dramatic fair dealing towards his hero's enemies,
a spirit which will call for our notice again very shortly,makes them
taunt him with his Homeric escapes and evasions of danger, allowing
them, at the same time, to confound what Homer never would have
confounded, and identify a warlike Trojan with an effeminate Phrygian.
We are wearied, it must be confessed, by being continually reminded of
his piety; though that may be partly owing to our misapprehension of
the use of the epithet, which was doubtless intended to be a Homeric
one, attached to the name as a sort of prefix, and to be taken as a
matter of course; but his piety is not merely nominal; it shows itself in
his whole feeling and conduct to the gods, his father, and his son.
Heyne, who had a soul to admire and reverence both Homer and Virgil,
remarks on the dignity and beauty of Aeneas's address to Evander.
His faithfulness to the memory of Pallas is all the more noble, as apparently
being not, like that of Achilles to his dead friend, grounded on
strong personal affection, but rather the offspring of generous selfreproach
for his own involuntary failure to discharge a sacred trust.
[p. 13]
His long forbearance towards Lausus, and the revulsion of feeling when
he sees him dead, contrasts strangely with the genuine manliness with
which Turnus exults in the prospect of killing Pallas, and glories over
him when killed. But the greater the tenderness and grace of these
traits of character, the harsher the jar with which we find the hero of
the Aeneid exhibiting at other times the savage, indomitable spirit of
the hero of the Iliad. There is tenderness, deep tenderness, mingled
with the ferocity of Achilles; yet we are not surprised when, after receiving
Priam graciously, and losing his own sorrows in sympathy with
the poor old king, he is roused to momentary fury by a word spoken out
of season. But the temper of Aeneas is less impulsive, and his gentleness
more abiding and untroubled, so that our feelings are shocked
when we see him plunging his hands in blood as deeply as a Homeric
warrior, and reserving the sons of two families to be sacrificed alive on
the funeral pile of his friend. It is in keeping with the manners of the
heroic age; but it is not in keeping with the humanity with which the
poet's modern spirit has led him to invest the rest of the character. It
is this inconsistency between the heroic and the modern type which we
feel in Aeneas's treatment of Dido. Stripped of its accessories, the conduct
of Aeneas to Dido is not very unlike that of Ulysses to Calypso,
if not to Circe. He is thrown on her coast; he is treated hospitably;
he accepts the position of a husband; he leaves her that he may go to
his natural home. It can hardly be said that the deity of Calypso constitutes
an essential difference between her and Dido. If she is a goddess,
her words show that she feels the love and even the jealousy of a
woman; and the criticism16 which contrasts Ulysses's farewell to her
with the language of Aeneas to Dido might perhaps have been spared,
if it had been recollected that in Homer she herself receives the order
from the gods to part with Ulysses, while in Virgil the whole burden is
thrown upon Aeneas, who has not only to justify himself for going, but
to vouch for the supernatural compulsion under which he goes. But
for a hero to leave a mortal love was no novelty in the heroic age, as the
titles of Ovid's Heroic Epistles sufficiently show. The novelty is in the
interest which Virgil has excited in the situation and feelings of his
forsaken heroine. He has struck the chord of modern passion, and
powerfully has it responded; more powerfully, perhaps, than the minstrel
himself expected. Had Homer written of Dido, we should probably
have been called on to sympathize with her but little; our feelings
would have been with the hero whom she strove to keep from the home
whither he was bound. There were reasons which might have induced
Virgil to give a similar colour to his narrative. All his sympathies are
[p. 14]
Roman; and the breach between Dido and Aeneas is the symbol and
the prophecy of the quarrel of Carthage and Rome. It is hard, too, to
suppose that in sketching the Carthaginian queen, who endeavours to
keep Aeneas from his kingdom, he did not think again and again of the
Egyptian enchantress to whom Antony would have transferred the
sceptre of the western world, whose blandishments had prevailed over
the great Julius, and had been successfully resisted by Octavianus
alone. Circe might have supplied the legendary framework, Cleopatra
the animating historical spirit; and even though the Trojan Ulysses
had yielded to the allurements of the charmer, we might have hailed the
flash of his drawn sword, and sent our hearts along with him in his
journey from the enchanted shore. But Virgil has not chosen to paint
a picture like this. Following in the track of Apollonius, he has lavished
all his art on the presentation of a vivid portrait of female passion.
Dido's flame has been kindled, not from within, but from without, by a
supernatural power; the generosity of her nature has already shown
itself in the princely hospitality which she extends to Aeneas and his
shipwrecked comrades; but, after all, we sympathize with her simply as
a woman; it is the mere exhibition of the depths of a woman's heart
that stirs our own so powerfully. Other heroes have loved and left as
Aeneas does; few have had as strong a justification as he can plead for
his flight: but no one seems to us so traitorous as Aeneas, except it be
Jason; and the reason lies in the depth of colouring with which Virgil,
like Euripides, has painted the agonies of the abandoned queen.
The relation of Virgil to Homer, as I have said already, unquestionably
furnishes the most important point of view from which the Aeneid
can be regarded by one who wishes to estimate the surrounding circumstances
which told upon the genius of the Augustan poet. The expectation
of an unknown birth which should be greater than the Iliad was
doubtless the vision which illuminated the later years of Virgil's own
life, as we know it to have occupied the mind of his contemporaries.
But it was not simply by contemplating Homer, by studying him
intently and gradually appropriating his beauties, that Virgil hoped to
rival him; he was to be encountered principally indeed with his own
weapons, but partly also with those supplied to the hands of a younger
competitor by long centuries of subsequent culture. The extent and
variety of these appliances are only imperfectly known to us. Virgil
probably had access to the whole of what had been written by any
author of note from Homer's time to his own; in the remains that have
come down to us whole classes of composition are entirely wanting, and
those which we have exist only in specimens more or less numerous.
The cyclic poets and the other epic writers of Greece proper are mere
[p. 15]
shadowy figures to us, but to Virgil they had a real personal existence;
they may have modified the form of his poem; they must to a certain
extent have supplied the data from which he constructed his story. It
is not till we come to the Athenian drama that we are able to trace
definitely the operation of a really powerful agency upon Virgil's
genius. Even there our losses are neither few nor unimportant; we
know that a considerable number of the plays of the three great
tragedians embraced various parts of the tale of Troy, yet of these
we can only be said to possess the Ajax and the Philoctetes of
Sophocles, the Rhesus, the Troades, and the Hecuba of Euripides. Of
Sophocles especially we are told, that he so greatly delighted in the
epic cycle as to have borrowed whole dramas from its contents, and
there is reason to think that no less than three of his plays traversed
the ground occupied by Virgil in the second Aeneid; but of the Laocoon
we have only a brief outline of the plot, and thirteen lines, six of them
significant; of the Ξοανηφόροι, a bare indication of the subject, so bare
that it is a question whether it really points to a separate play; of the
Sinon, three unimportant words. Great, however, as our losses are,
we need not doubt that our gains are greater. That which constitutes
the main value of Greek tragedy as a step in intellectual progress can
be abundantly appreciated from the specimens that have come down to
us, and we are able distinctly to recognize its influence upon Virgil. I
have in some measure anticipated what I am going to say, in the
observations which I have ventured on Virgil's treatment of character,
as compared with Homer's: but the point is one which will well bear to
be explained and enforced further.
Mr. Grote has shown his characteristic insight in remarking17 that
the great innovation of the Athenian dramatists consisted in the
rhetorical, the dialectical, and the ethical spirit which they breathed
into their poetry. Of all this, he continues, the undeveloped germ
doubtless existed in the previous epic, lyric, and gnomic composition;
but the drama stood distinguished from all these by bringing it out into
conspicuous amplitude, and making it the substantive means of effect.
The structural exigencies of form must have combined with the intellectual
temper of the time in giving especial prominence to these kindred
features. A drama is shorter than an epic; it traverses not the whole of
a long history, but some special part of it; and the treatment of that
special part may evoke interests conflicting with those which would be
called out by the treatment of the whole. Had the plot of the
Agamemnon been merged in a longer narrative, we should not have been
led to pause on the character of Clytaemnestra, and examine as we now
[p. 16]
do the ground of her actions. The institution of the trilogy, apparently
contrived as a means of taking the hearer through the various stages of
a lengthened story, was frequently made to be directly subservient to
this conflict of interests, the first and second plays complicating a knot
which it was the business of the third to unravel. No more striking
instance of this can have existed than that furnished to us by the chance
which has robbed us of the first and third plays of the Promethean
trilogy and preserved the second. The grounds of Zeus's vengeance are
not set before us as clearly as they doubtless were in the opening
drama, nor have we more than the faintest glimpses of the terms of
reconciliation which were ratified in the third; we simply see the Titan
in the first agony of his suffering, we feel his wrongs, we hear of his
good deeds, we witness a display of his prophetic power, and our sympathies
are wholly on his side. Accident has allowed us to hear but one
part of the summing up, and we mistake it, as modern writers of genius
have mistaken it, for a piece of powerful advocacy. As the Greek
drama advanced, its rhetorical and dialectical aspects became still more
apparent. The chorus, gradually divested of its musical glories, yet
compelled as a general rule to continue on the stage, becomes a mere
moderator between disputants, interposing a couplet of common-place
at the end of the animated orations in which the various parties advocate
their competing views.
It is needless to dwell on the profound intellectual effect which such
a species of composition was calculated to produce. Many modern
readers will have experienced the same stimulus in reading contemporary
works of fiction; they will vividly remember the time when they came
to be interested, not so much in unexpected incidents or a skilfully
constructed plot, as in the evolution of character, and the statement or
solution of some complex moral problem. Not without a considerable
sacrifice of beauty of form, the modern prose fiction combines the depth
of tragedy with the breadth of epic poetry, and a modern reader under
the spell of some powerful analyst of character and motive may interpret
to himself many of the feelings of an Athenian spectator at the Great
Dionysia. Perhaps it would have been impossible for a poet writing
after the opening of this new fountain of human interest to return to
the simpler portraiture of the elder epic: at any rate there can be little
doubt that Virgil is strongly tinctured by the dramatic spirit, and that
he has sacrificed to it the general effect of his narrative. I do not say
that Virgil's conception of character is so consistent or so vivid as
Homer's; doubtless it is not: I only say that the dramatic feeling, the
drawing of character for character's sake, the delight in doing rhetorical
justice to the personages of the story, is more strongly shown in the
Aeneid than in the Homeric poems. One signal instance of this I have
[p. 17]
already noted in the character of Dido; the character of Turnus affords
another not less remarkable.
It has been ingeniously suggested that the reason for the enthusiasm
with which Virgil throws himself into the character of Turnus, is that
here at least he feels himself to be an Italian minstrel, singing to
Italians about an Italian hero18 . National feeling did undoubtedly
work in Virgil, but not, I think, national feeling of this kind. Like the
rest of his countrymen, he cared for Italy not independently of Rome,
but as the broad base on which Roman power was built. His creed as
a patriot would be expressed by the words of Varro, Licet omnia
Italica pro Romanis habeam. The Virgil of Dante's vision may talk
of that low Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus,
and Nisus died of wounds19 ; but with the poet himself the object of
the struggle is the establishment of Rome; and those who resisted the
Trojan invaders were not Italian patriots, but men deaf to the voices of
the gods, and blind to the course of destiny. Here again the secret
seems to be, that Virgil is impregnated with modern feeling, and that
Turnus occupies ground which, to modern feelings, appear unassailable.
As in the case of Dido, the fact that the gods are on the side of Aeneas
makes but little impression on us; we hear their dictates and their
warnings, but the note does not ring with the same awful clearness as
in the Homeric poems; our human feelings are roused, and our ears are
filled with other sounds. The words of the oracle are express, and we
feel that Amata's interpretation of them is a mere gloss; but it is good
enough for the purpose; it gives a verbal sanction to a course which
our hearts tell us to be the true one, and we are satisfied with it accordingly.
Aeneas is called the Phrygian freebooter, who comes to drive
peaceful inhabitants from their homes, and break the plighted engagements
of a royal house; and we sympathize with topics so well adapted
to conciliate modern readers. Homer would not have allowed us to feel
so; he would have given no space to the pleadings of the natives for
their rights, but would have thrown his whole strength on the case of
the invaders, as being perfectly conformable to the code of the heroic
age. Virgil must have sympathized with Aeneas, not only as realizing
the adopted type of heroic action, but as representing the undeviating
and relentless march of Roman greatness. But the modern spirit was
too strong for him; in describing Turnus as he conceived him to have
been, he was led, in fact, to advocate his cause, and to record a protest
[p. 18]
against heroic and Roman aggression alike. It is the spirit of the
drama allowing itself free play; and the result is the enlargement of
human sympathy, the vindication of the weaker as well as of the
stronger. In many respects, as I have intimated, the character of
Turnus does not command our approval; there is fierceness in it, and
blind fury, and, in the case of Pallas at least, savage cruelty. But this
barbarity is the outgrowth of weakness; it is the impotent beating of a
captive against the iron bars of destiny; and as an exhibition of weakness
we sympathize even with it. So it is weakness, rendered hopeless
and helpless, that engages our interest in the closing scene. It is
modelled, no doubt, on the fall of Patroclus, who is paralyzed and
disarmed by Apollo before he is killed by Hector; but the incidents
which, as we read them in Homer, touch us as we are touched by a fairy
tale, are wrought up by Virgil to a terrible moral significance. The
fates of the combatants have been balanced by Jupiter, and we know
that in a short time the only obstacle that keeps Aeneas from his
destined empire will be removed by Turnus's death. Yet that brief
space only serves to intensify our interest for the doomed man; our wishes
lend him wings as he is flying for his life, and calling by name on each
of his terrified comrades; and we echo the agonized prayer in which
he implores the gods of his native land to hold fast Aeneas's spear. The
strife of the Olympian deities is over; Juno herself has abandoned
Turnus, and is reconciled to the prospect of a Trojan empire without the
name of Troy; but we refuse to look so far into the future. We follow
Turnus through the few remaining stages of helpless effort, dreamy
bewilderment, and final overthrow, feeling that till he is dead we can
spare no thoughts for the conqueror and the fruits of his victory. All
this, I repeat, is simply the tribute we pay to the profound human
interest with which Virgil's dramatic power leads him to invest a person
for whom no minstrel of the heroic age would have claimed a tear.
If Virgil had been the poet of the Odyssey, it is possible that our
recollections of insolence, cruelty, and lawless sensuality would not
have wholly hindered us from feeling for the slaughter of the suitors.
The influence of the Greek drama is also to be observed in the
prominence given throughout the Aeneid to female characters. Mr.
Gladstone20 has remarked with justice, that while Homer's women are
uniformly feminine and retiring, Virgil's are slightly masculine and
generally of a pronounced type; they are agitated by violent passions
and meet with violent ends. This is ascribed by an able critic in a
weekly journal21 to Virgil's experience of his own age, when, for the first
[p. 19]
time in Roman history, women came upon the stage of public life: it
is, I think, no less due to the influence of the actual stage of Attica.
Whether or no women were admitted as spectators of theatrical representations
at Athens, in the stories that were represented they had to
bear as conspicuous a part as men: the exigencies of dramatic art
required it; and perhaps the fact that their parts were not only written
but acted by men, tended still further to give them an equality which
Homer would never have dreamed of, and which Athenian life did not
sanction. They are not only merged in the aggregate of a sympathizing
but subordinate chorus, accompanying the action as it were with an
under-song; they occupy individually a large portion of the drama,
sometimes, like Io or Electra, as sufferers, sometimes, like Clytaemnestra
or Hecuba, as actors rising to masculine importance. Virgil
may have had actual precedents, in history or fiction, for the characters
of Dido, Amata, Juturna, and Camilla; but even if he had not, his
recollections of Greek art must have been amply sufficient both to
suggest the thought and to guide the pencil.
Of Virgil's more palpable and measurable obligations to the writings
of the Greek tragedians there is less to be said. As I have already
intimated, several of the plays from which he is likely to have borrowed
are lost; and in the remainder the question is one rather of conjecture
and inference than of direct observation. There can be no doubt, however,
that the changes which the Homeric characters sustained in
passing through the hands of the dramatists, as well as in the wear and
tear of common tradition, had their full effect on Virgil's conception of
the personages who make up his gallery of the heroic age. The appearance
of Helen in the Troades of Euripides, where her more than
feminine logic is overpowered by the superior logic of Hecuba, intensified
by hatred, made it easier for Virgil to represent her as he has
done in the second and sixth books of the Aeneid, though that representation,
as I have said previously, was forced upon him by the circumstances
of his story, and is sufficiently justified by them. So it was
natural that Aeneas should be antipathetic to Ulysses; but the grounds
of antipathy are strengthened by the later Greek representations of the
wily Greek, who is made, by a substitution characteristic of an Athenian
writer during the Peloponnesian war, to exchange his part of a popular
counsellor for that of a mere mob orator, and whose nobler qualities are
transferred to a rival character, Palamedes, of whom he is the enemy
and the treacherous murderer. Probably, also, there are situations
which Virgil has conveyed from the Greek drama less directly and
openly. One such I seem to observe in the steps by which Dido
approaches the resolution of putting herself to death, talking freely and
wildly of the thought while it is only a thought, carefully concealing it
[p. 20]
when it has passed into a purpose. This appears to me to have been
suggested by that celebrated change of feeling in the Ajax of Sophocles,
who in one scene breathes nothing but self-destruction, and in the next
is won to a calmness which the subtlety of modern critics will not allow
to be altogether feigned. Of such slight matters as the actual appropriation
of phrases and forms of expression, this is not the place to
speak. They are far from numerous, and will be found noticed, so far
as I have observed them, in the notes. But it is not less true that
Virgil's debts for language and phraseology, to one at least of the
masters of Athenian tragedy, are real and great. That which is so
remarkable a feature of Virgil's style, his practice of employing combinations
of words so constructed as to remind the reader of other and
yet other combinations, could hardly be better illustrated than by a
comparison of the language of Virgil with the language of Sophocles22 .
The Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius would have their value for
the critic of the Aeneid, if only as the single representative which has
come down to us of the later epic poetry of Greece. A poet like Virgil,
studious to embody in himself all that was best in previous culture,
could not be wholly independent of writers whose conception of their
art was so far analogous to his own, that they strove to represent the
Homeric spirit under more modern forms: and the Alexandrian school
in particular must have had singular attractions for the chief poetical
artist of an era which itself displayed so many of the characteristics of a
period of renaissance. But the connexion between Virgil and Apollonius
is closer than could have been presumed from any mere general considerations.
After the Iliad and Odyssey, the Argonautics is the only poem
which the intelligent criticism of antiquity declares to have furnished an
actual model to the author of the Aeneid, and the similarity is one
which the reader of the two works does not take long to discover. Not
only is the passion of Medea in Apollonius' Third Book confessedly
the counterpart of the passion of Dido in Virgil's Fourth, but the
instances are far from few where Virgil has conveyed an incident from
his Alexandrian predecessor, altering and adapting, but not wholly
disguising it. The departure of Jason from his father and mother
resembles the departure of Pallas from Evander; the song of Orpheus is
contracted into the song of Iopas, as it had already been expanded into
the song of Silenus; the reception of the Argonauts by Hypsipyle is
like the reception of the Trojans by Dido, and the parting of Jason
from the Lemnian princess reappears, though in very different colours,
[p. 21]
in the parting of Aeneas from the queen of Carthage; the mythical
representations in Jason's scarf answer to the historical representations
which distinguished the shield of Aeneas from that of Achilles; the
combat of Pollux with Amycus is reproduced in the combat of Entellus
with Dares; the harpies of Virgil are the harpies of Apollonius, while
the deliverance of Phineus by the Argonauts may have furnished a hint
for the deliverance of Achemenides by the Trojans, an act of mercy
which has another parallel in the deliverance of the sons of Phrixus;
Phineus' predictions are like the predictions of Helenus; the cave of
Acheron in Asia Minor suggests the cave of Avernus in Italy; Evander
and Pallas appear once more in Lycus and Dascylus; Here addresses
Thetis as Juno addresses Juturna; Triton gives the same vigorous aid
in launching the Argo that he gives to the stranded vessels of Aeneas,
or that Portunus gives to the ship of Cloanthus in the Sicilian race.
Minor resemblances of thought or expression are easily detected by a
very cursory perusal of the Argonautics; I have myself noted at least
fifty of them, which will be found in their places in my notes on the
Aeneid. Altogether it might naturally be supposed that we possess
what every critic would admit to be an invaluable treasure, a poem
occupying a middle position between the Homeric epics and the Aeneid,
and making the transition from the one to the other intelligible.
Yet I am greatly mistaken if the reader of the Argonautics will find
any such expectations fulfilled in any adequate sense. The similarities
of detail are there, doubtless more than I have enumerated or discovered:
but the poem, taken as a whole, does not remind us of the
Aeneid, or enable us to understand the form under which Virgil has
chosen to represent Homer. Virgil resembles Homer far more strongly
than he resembles the supposed intermediary. It is a signal instance of
the kinship of genius asserting itself against the rival affinities of outward
condition and circumstance. The style of Apollonius is a literary
style, the epic language of Homer reproduced and modified by a modern
student: but though it is sometimes graceful and ingenious, compared
with the style of Virgil it is the mere jargon of a grammarian, seeking
to revive a mode of speech of which he had no living appreciation. His
treatment of his subject makes us think of the Iliad and the Aeneid,
but it is by way of contrast; where he is felicitous, the felicity is not of
an epic character, and the general tenor of the narrative is tedious and
uninteresting, and therefore neither Homeric nor Virgilian. A catalogue
of heroes is in itself a sufficiently epic thing, yet we feel that
neither Homer nor Virgil would have dreamed of commencing a poem
with it, as the reader must be made to sympathize in the object of the
muster before the muster-roll can have any meaning to him. The
incidents of the voyage have either no interest at all, or an interest
[p. 22]
unconnected with the main purpose of the poem. In the narratives of
the Odyssey and the Aeneid everything bears on the fortunes of
Ulysses and his crew, or on those of Aeneas regarded as the future
founder of the Trojan nation; the voyages are sufficiently diversified,
but the object of every event is to illustrate the action of the contending
powers whose strife keeps the prince of Ithaca from his home, the chief
of Troy from his destined kingdom. But in Apollonius there is little or
nothing of this; the voyage was part of his poem; it had to be made an
eventful one, and events are produced accordingly. We do not see the
object of the sojourn in Lemnos, or of the fight between Pollux and
Amycus; even Phineus seems to be introduced rather for his own sake
than for the aid which his prophecy affords to the voyagers. They lose
some of their comrades; but even the loss of Hercules scarcely impresses
itself on us, and that of Tiphys is more easily remedied than we should have
expected. The Third Book is the gem of the whole poem, and may beread
with real pleasure, even by those whose recollection of Virgil is fresh and
vivid. Virgil, indeed, has not chosen to contend directly with Apollonius;
he concentrates his strength on the picture of Dido in her abandonment
and despair, and touches more lightly the early approaches of the love
that was to undo her. The object of Apollonius is different; Medea,
the forsaken and desperate wife, formed no part of the argument of his
poem; his Medea is a maiden in her father's palace, and he has to paint
the steps by which, under the agency of the god of love, she resigns all
her feelings for home, and is delivered heart and soul to the power of
enchantments more mighty than her own. Accordingly, when she retires
to her chamber we have her thoughts and also her dreams; the
last not simply mentioned, like Dido's on the night after Aeneas's story,
but recounted. She goes to her sister, who is fortunately as excited as
she, though from a different cause; and even an arrangement which
gives her hope of binding Jason to herself does not prevent her from
passing the dreary midnight hours in an agony of hopeless longing,
which she is at one time nearly ending by swallowing a drug from her
own casket of poisons. Yet, though there is power and beauty here, it
is not the power and beauty of Virgil. Even the passage in which
Medea, with the casket lying open on her lap, is struck with a sudden
horror of death, and feels as she never felt before, that the light is
sweet, and it is a pleasant thing to behold the sun, deep as is its truth
and pathos, does not affect us as we expect to be affected by an incident
in an epic poem. It is too modern for Homer; Virgil might have
owned the feeling, but he would have been content to indicate it in two
or three lines. The conference of Here and Pallas, and their joint
visit to Aphrodite, are evidently imitated from Here's visit to Aphrodite
in the Fourteenth Book of the Iliad, and are as evidently Virgil's model
[p. 23]
in the scene between Venus and Cupid at the end of the First Aeneid,
and that between Juno and Venus at the beginning of the Fourth; but
they do not impress the reader as he is impressed by their Greek original,
or by their Latin copy; they are graceful, fanciful, in a word,
Ovidian; but they are not epic. The description of Love overreaching
Ganymede at dice, the boy-god erect and radiant, his playmate pouting
and pettish, is obviously made for painting; but the picture would not
find a place in a heroic gallery. Nor is Apollonius writing in the grand
style when he introduces Aphrodite playfully pinching her son's cheek,
and bribing him to attack Medea by a promise of the magic ball with
which Zeus played when a babe in his cavern-nursery of Ida. The interview
between Jason and Medea in the temple of Hecate is tender
and touching; but Virgil would never have descended to the prettiness
of the comparison of the two lovers, bashful and silent, to tall pine-trees
at first standing still in the calm, and then breaking into a rustle under
the agitation of the wind: a simile which Valerius Flaccus has to tone
down and render less graphic in order to adapt it to the genius of his
quasi-Virgilian imitation23 . When the voyage recommences, the poem
again ceases to interest us. The treacherous murder of Absyrtus is
narrated in a manner to excite pity and terror; but we have heard too
little of the youth to feel much personal concern in his fate. The ineffectual
appeal of Medea to the greater sorceress, Circe, is better in
conception than in execution. The adventures of the suppliants in
Phaeacia have rather the grotesqueness of romance than the dignity of
epic narrative. The other incidents of the homeward voyage, like those
of the voyage out, seem as if related for an emergency, not evolved by
the internal necessities of the story; and the few lines in which the heroes
are at last dismissed may perhaps show that the poet had come to be as
weary of the subject as his readers. The Homeric poems, according to
Longinus24 , contain many slips, the Argonautics none; yet, asks the
critic, who would not rather be Homer than Apollonius? It required
[p. 24]
but little confidence to put the question; but few, I imagine, would now
accept the previous judgment on which it is based. If Homer sometimes
nods, Apollonius may be said to be only occasionally awake,
though his long fits of somnolency are relieved by fanciful and even
attractive dreams.
Of the earlier epic poetry of Rome we know still less than of the later
epic poetry of Greece. We know, however, enough to assure us that
it had some influence on Virgil; enough also to warrant us in assuming
that its influence, could it be thoroughly estimated, would be found not
to have penetrated very far. To inquire into the influence of Naevius
and Ennius upon Virgil is, in fact, as unfruitful a subject as to inquire
into the influence of Chaucer and Spenser, or perhaps Cowley, upon
Pope. Incidents and external colouring may occasionally have been
borrowed; forms of expression and turns of rhythm may have been appropriated
by a writer of whom it might be said, as it has been said of
Pope, that there is scarcely a happy combination of words, or a phrase
poetically elegant, in his native language, which he has not inserted into
his poems25 ; but the use he made of his predecessors cannot have borne
any analogy to the use he made of Homer. In the one case it is an
ancient conqueror who, having overcome a veteran worthy of his steel,
converts his body into merchandise, and wears his armour as his own;
in the other case it is a despot, who walks through the houses of
his subjects, and takes away anything that strikes his fancy, for the
adornment of his own palace. The same tradition which, as we have
seen, makes Virgil speak of grappling with Homer as of attempting to
rob Hercules of his club, tells us that he talked of his appropriations
from Ennius as the gold which a man rakes from a dunghill26 . Almost
all that we know of the actual obligations of Virgil to the Punic War of
Naevius, is that in Naevius's poem, no less than in Virgil's, Aeneas is
supposed to be questioned about his departure from Troy, that Naevius
speaks of Dido and her sister Anna, from which it is inferred that the
questioner of Aeneas is the Carthaginian queen, and that the consolation
addressed by Aeneas to his crew in the First Aeneid and the discourse
between Venus and Jupiter in the same book are, as we are
told in words which must necessarily be understood with some latitude27 ,
[p. 25]
entirely taken from the old poet. It must be confessed that the two
or three lines quoted by Servius in exemplification of the hints which
Naevius gave to Virgil do not suggest the notion of any very close
imitation. When Naevius says of the wives of Anchises and Aeneas
Amborum uxores
Noctu Troiad exibant capitibus opertis
Flentes ambae abeuntes lacrimis cum multis,
we are not obliged to think that but for them Virgil could not have
written
Litora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo
Et campos ubi Troia fuit28 .
And we feel that the Virgilian Aeneas might have represented himself
as wondering at the multitude29 of those who followed his fortunes
animis opibusque parati, even if Naevius, speaking of the same gathering,
had not specified the three points of numbers, eorum sectam
sequuntur multi mortales, bravery, multi alii e Troia strenui viri,
and wealth, ubi foras cum auro illi exibant30 . Nor is it likely that
the Saturnian measure, the barbarous utterance of wood-gods and
bards, should have had more charms for Virgil, the perfecter of the
Latin hexameter, than it had for Ennius, who was the first to supplant
it by the stately Grecian exotic.
The identity of metre at once establishes a closer affinity between
Virgil and Ennius than can ever have existed between the poet of the
Aeneid and the poet of the Punic War. As a matter of fact we know
that many lines in the Aeneid are taken, more or less changed, from the
Annals; indeed, we owe the preservation of not a few of Ennius's
hexameters to the early critics who pointed out the imitations of them
in Virgil. Every reader of the Aeneid will remember lines resembling
Qui caelum versat stellis fulgentibus aptum, Teque pater Tiberine
tuo cum flumine sancto, Cum superum lumen nox intempesta teneret,
Ansatis concurrunt undique telis, Romani scalis summa nituntur
opum vi, Quis potis ingentis oras evolvere belli? Semianimesque
micant oculi lucemque requirunt; lines, some of which, when
[p. 26]
we meet them in Virgil, strike us with no want of smoothness or finish,
while others, though somewhat rougher, serve to vary the harmony which
they do not really interrupt. The Latin hexameter, under all its modifications,
has characteristics which distinguish it from the Greek; and as
Ennius was its originator, he may claim to be the author of Virgil's
versification, even in cases where nothing like imitation can be pretended.
Ennius did not naturalize his new importation until the language
into which it was introduced had lost some portion of its original
plasticity; he had accordingly, as has been ably shown by a German
writer31 , to adopt a certain conventionalism of expression, innovating
here, paraphrasing there, in order to avoid obvious words which happened
to be unsuitable to his metre; and though Virgil was not likely
to follow him in his harsher tours de force, his saxo cere- comminuit
-brum, or his replet te laetificum gau-, the same necessity which pressed
on the elder poet pressed on the younger also, making him fall into the
style of epic commonplace which already existed, and augment it by a
thousand new and ingenious devices of his own. All this we may admit,
as we have made similar admissions in the case of Apollonius; yet it
may still be true that Virgil's debt to Ennius is so trifling as to be
scarcely worth computation. We know too little of Ennius to be
able to estimate his merits as a narrator; hundreds of his verses have
come down to us, but very few passages which exceed three or four
lines, and of these scarcely any can be called pieces of narrative.
There is indeed a description of an invincible tribune in the Histrian
war, bathed in sweat and exposed to a hailstorm of javelins, which
Virgil doubtless had before him while painting Turnus at the end of the
ninth Aeneid; but the model is itself a copy from the single-handed
resistance of the Homeric Ajax in the sixteenth Iliad, which would
sufficiently account for Virgil's imitation if the fragment of the Annals
had never been preserved by Macrobius32 , while it leaves us no means of
judging how Ennius would have treated such a situation if he had not
had Homer to draw from. The account of Romulus and Remus waiting
for the augury, preserved by Cicero in the first book of his De Divinatione,
is not a very remarkable specimen of narrative power. Homer
would have introduced more details; Virgil would have treated those
which Ennius gives in a more artificial way, dwelling on one or two,
and hinting the rest; both would probably have thrown in some short
speech, directly or indirectly expressed, to show the feeling of the rival
brothers and the attendant multitude. But without venturing farther
on the precarious ground of hypothetical criticism, we need scarcely
[p. 27]
doubt that there was nothing in Ennius's conception of his art which
Virgil was likely to welcome as a help towards improving upon Homer.
Living in a pre-historic time, Homer (I use the name for convenience'
sake, not as taking a side in the controversy about his personality) is
the only poet who has attained the grace and finish of a literary period;
he is the only primeval poet so complete in himself that it might be
questioned whether it would have been an advantage to him to have
lived later. There may conceivably be one or two touches in Ennius
which appear to show a more modern feeling than Homer's, a keen
sense of colour33 , an appreciation of philosophy34 and literature as such;
for an age, even when relatively less advanced than some former age, is
yet in a certain sense the heir of all that have gone before it, and the age
of Ennius in particular possessed the rudiments of criticism and aspired
after culture; but, regarded in the gross, Homer is mature and articulate,
while Ennius is still crude and infantine, and it was not to be
expected that the large utterance of the divine foretime of Greece
should come mended to Virgil's ear when repeated by the stammering
lips of his Italian ancestors. Virgil may have believed, as Ennius did,
that the soul which dwelt in his own breast had once animated Homer;
but he probably would not have recognized Ennius as the intermediate
channel of its transmission.
It is needless to say anything of the rest of the early Roman epic
writers, who are indeed mere names to us; to speculate on the extent to
which Virgil's impressions of Apollonius' poem may have been modified
by the version of Varro Atacinus, of which five unimportant fragments
remain35 , or to inquire whether the Aeneid is likely to have benefited
by the example of Hostius' work, De Bello Histrico, in any other
respect than in the multiplication of the ten tongues of the second
Iliad into a hundred36 . As little necessity is there to speak of the
[p. 28]
possible effect of Roman tragedy on the Aeneid, as, though there are
evident proofs that Virgil did not disdain to imitate individual passages37 ,
his real obligations are not to Ennius, Pacuvius, or Attius, but to the
great Athenian masters whom they copied as Ennius copied Homer.
The result of our inquiry then is this. Virgil imitated Homer, but
imitated him as a rival, not as a disciple; his object was not to give a
faithful interpretation of his great master, but to draw forth his own
genius and satisfy the age in which he lived; and accordingly he
modified the Homeric story at his pleasure, according to the thousand
considerations that might occur to a poetical artist, a patriot, and a
connoisseur of antiquarian learning. Of later influences, the only one
which seems to have taken a really powerful hold of him is Greek
tragedy, which was in fact the only instance of a genius and culture
commensurate with his own, operating in a sphere analogous to his.
The epics of Alexandria and of early Rome may furnish occasional
illustrations to the commentator on the Aeneid; but his more continuous
studies will be better devoted to the poetry of Homer and to the
tragic drama of Greece.
THE subject of the Aeneid, as propounded in the opening lines, is the settlement of
Aeneas in Italy, after years of wandering, and a short but sharp final struggle. It is
however only of the events preceding the settlement that the poet really treats,of the
wanderings and the war. In that, as in other things, he follows Homer, who does not
show us Ulysses an idle king, matched with an aged wife, meting laws to a savage
race, but leaves him fresh from the slaughter of the suitors, from the first embrace of
his wife and father, and from the conquest of his disaffected subjects. Accordingly,
the poem divides itself into two parts, the wanderings being embraced by the first, the
Italian war by the second. But the two parts naturally involve different modes of
treatment, comprehending as they do periods of time widely differing in length, the
one seven years, the other apparently a few days. Here again the example of Homer
is followed. The long period of wanderings is taken at a point not far from its
conclusion; enough is told in detail to serve as a specimen of the whole, and the rest is
related more summarily by the help of an obvious expedient, the hero being made to
narrate his past adventures to the person whose relation to him is all the time forming
one adventure more. This peculiarity of the Homeric story is noticed by Horace in a
well-known passage of his Art of Poetry (vv. 146 foll.), and recommended to the
adoption of Epic writers generally; but he does not clearly indicate the reason of it,
which doubtless is the wish to avoid that fatal dryness which seems to be inseparable
from all narratives where the events of many years are told continuously in a short
compass.
The First Book of the Aeneid may be said to perform well the objects which it was no
doubt intended to accomplish,those of interesting us in the hero and introducing the
story. After a brief statement of the subject, we have a view of the supernatural machinery
by which it is to be worked out; and this, though imitated from Homer, where
the solitary rancour of Poseidon against Ulysses answers to the solitary rancour of Juno
against Aeneas, is skilfully contrived so as to throw a light on the subsequent history
of the Roman descendants of Aeneas, by the mention, even at that early time, of their
great enemy, Carthage. It is probable, as I have said in the general Introduction to
the Aeneid, that the merit of this thought may be due to Naevius, who seems to have
been the first to commit the felicitous anachronism of bringing Aeneas and Dido
together; but it must be allowed to be in strict accordance with the spirit of Virgil's
poem, which is throughout that of historical anticipation. Like Ulysses, Aeneas is
shipwrecked in the voyage which was to have been his last, the main difference being
that the Grecian hero is solitary, having long since lost all his companions, while the
Trojan is still accompanied by those who followed his fortunes from Troy. The
machinery by which the storm is allayed is perhaps managed more adroitly by Virgil
[p. 30]
than by Homer, as there seems to be more propriety in representing the inferior god of
the winds as counteracted by the superior god of the sea, than in making a sea nymph
rescue one whom the god of the sea is seeking to destroy. But if Virgil has obtained
an advantage over Homer, it is with the help of Homer's weapons, as the interview
between Juno and Aeolus obviously owes its existence to the interview between Here
and the God of Sleep. The dialogue of Venus and Jupiter appears to be another appropriation
from Naevius; but, as in the former case, Virgil seems to have established
his right to what he has borrowed by the perfect fitness with which a prophecy of the
destiny of Rome is introduced at the commencement of a poem intended to be a
monument of Roman greatness. The remaining incidents of the First Book need not
detain us much longer. As a general rule, they are borrowed from Homer; but we
may admire the skill with which Virgil has introduced varieties of detail, as where
Ulysses, listening to songs about Troy, reappears in Aeneas looking at sculptures or
paintings of Trojan subjects, and the art with which a new impression is produced by a
combination of old materials, in making the friendly power that receives Aeneas unite
the blaudishments of Calypso with the hospitality of Alcinous, and so engrafting a tale
of passion on a narrative of ordinary adventure. The suggestion of the employment of
Cupid by Venus was evidently taken from the loan of Aphrodite's cestus in Homer and
the assistance rendered by the God of Love in Apollonius; but the treatment of the
thought is original and happy; and the few lines which describe the removal of
Ascanius to Idalia might themselves suggest a subject for poetry to some Keats or
Shelley, in whose mind the seed casually dropped by Virgil should expand and
germinate.
I sing the hero who founded
the Trojan kingdom in Italy, his voyages
and his wars.