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.