P. VERGILI MARONIS

AENEIDOS

LIBER SEXTUS.

THE celebrity of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid is one of those broad and acknowledged facts before which minute criticism is almost powerless. There is indeed no part of the work which more completely exemplifies the characteristics of Virgil as a poetical artist. He appears not only to reproduce Homer, but to absorb him. Aeneas sees all, or nearly all, that Ulysses sees, his parent, his friends, his enemies, and the heroes and heroines of previous legend: but he sees much more besides. The bare and shadowy outlines of the Homeric νεκυί̈α are filled in with details unquestionably elaborate and apparently precise. Instead of a place of simply ghostly existence, where suffering and doing seem to be the exceptions, and dreary, objectless being the rule, we have a territory mapped out and sharply divided; a neutral region for those who are unfortunate rather than blameworthy, a barred and bolted prison-house of torture for the bad, a heroic Valhalla for prowess, genius, and worth. All that later Greek religion and philosophy taught by legend, allegory, and symbol is pressed into the service of poetry, and made to contribute to the production of a grand and impressive picture. As a climax to the whole, the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration is invoked for the purpose of showing Aeneas the vision of the future, as he has already seen the vision of the past. He beholds the spirits that are to appear in each as actors in the great drama of Roman history, each even now wearing his historical form: and the line of worthies ends with the young hope of the nation, whose untimely death was still fresh in the memory of his countrymen when the poet wrote.

Yet, if we approach this wonderful production in detail, we meet with much that appears to us not only unaccountable or presumably wrong, but demonstrably inconsistent or confused. It is not merely, as Mr. Gladstone complains,⁴⁴ that the Inferno of Virgil has no consistent or veracious relation to any idea of the future or unseen state actually operative among mankind. To what extent this charge is true is, as we shall see, a difficult question; but admitting it not to be wholly groundless, we may urge that a mythological poem of the Augustan age could not have the same relation to the real beliefs or anticipations of its readers as the Odyssey, with its absence of philosophy and its comparative uniformity of legend. The defects I allude to are such as vitiate not so much the spirit of the work as that about which Virgil is generally more careful, the external structure. Some of these indeed are merely of the nature [p. 424] of those which we have already encountered in earlier parts of the poem. In the opening of the book, while we admire the description of the temple of Cumae and the ravings of the Sibyl, and confess that Virgil has there taken full and worthy advantage of a supposed form of the supernatural which in Homer's time was only in its infancy, we must yet feel the awkwardness with which the Homeric Elpenor is introduced first as Misenus above ground, then as Palinurus below, when a single drowned friend would have been sufficient both to delay Aeneas' descent and to meet him on the threshold of the shades. So again it is not clear whether it is to rapidity and indirectness of narrative or to carelessness that we are to impute the apparent inconsistency between the intimations that these rivers, one of them ninefold, had to be passed by any one wishing to penetrate into the infernal world, and the circumstantial detail which would lead us to suppose that Aeneas only crossed one, and that only once. But the inconsistency of treatment becomes more serious as we advance farther into the book. The lower world, as was said just now, is divided by Virgil into a neutral region, a place of torment, and a place of happiness. The two latter present no difficulty: the conception of the former is not so satisfactory. The general notion seems to be that it is the receptacle of those who, not having fulfilled their natural time of life, cannot be pronounced good or bad. This is Addison's view,⁴⁵ and it appears to satisfy the requirements of the passage as well as any that can be suggested: but it does not show the poet to have formed a consistent conception. Indeed, Virgil himself may be said to point out to us an incongruity in the picture he has drawn, when he introduces the class of persons who have suffered death by unjust sentences. We are ready at once to ask whether it is not the business of the tribunal of the other world to rectify the inequality of earthly judgments: and lest the thought should not occur to us, Virgil suggests it himself by telling us that the cases of these misjudged sufferers are reheard below. The natural conclusion would be that, after this rehearing, the spirits, now truly judged, are sent to Tartarus or Elysium: but of this not a word is said, and we are left to suppose that they remain in the dubious limbo where we first find them. But the doubt, once raised, extends farther, and we ask whether the infallible Minos could not pronounce on the real character of all who have been prematurely cut off. A further question arises as to the nature of premature death. Tartarus, as afterwards described, contains many who have died before their time by the visitation of heaven. Is it intended that the Mourning Fields should contain all who have suffered by human vengeance? Eriphyle is there; would Virgil have ventured to introduce Clytaemnestra? Again, what is to be said of the heroes, who occupy the extreme part of this neutral region? It is not expressly stated that they died in war: we merely hear of them as bello clari. The pale spectre of Adrastus happens to be the spirit of the only one of the Seven against Thebes who survived the expedition. But even if we suppose that Virgil's general conception is that of slain warriors, can we say that he is consistent with himself in placing slain warriors in a condition neither of torment nor of happiness? There are heroes in Elysium; there are those who suffered wounds in battle for their country. But among the heroes in the neutral region there are found not only the assailants of Troy, but its defenders. Was theirs not a patriotic cause? or are we to distinguish those who were merely wounded from those who were killed, and say that the former earned Elysium by their subsequent lives?

Such are some of the questions that may be raised about the earlier part of this Book. But they are as nothing to the grand difficulty which the poet has chosen to create by his philosophy of transmigration. The doctrine is a sublime one, and well [p. 425] adapted for poetry: but it is quite incompatible with the conception that pervades the rest of the description of the lower world. The neutral region, Tartarus, and Elysium, all dissolve before it. They exist on the assumption that departed spirits remain in a fixed state, each preserving its own individuality. The later doctrine takes all spirits alike as soon as they have been separated from the body, puts them through a thousand years' purgation, and then sends most of them to reanimate other frames. We hear not of good or bad lives, but of the necessary stains which the ethereal spirit contracts from its imprisonment in clay. According to this doctrine, Dido and Deiphobus, Salmoneus and the Lapithae, ought to have undergone a prolonged purification, with a prospect of resigning their identity and becoming other personages in later ages. Some indeed, of whom Anchises is the type, are apparently exempted from this general law, and made to inhabit Elysium immediately after their expiation: but the exemption seems to proceed from a different feeling from that which established the law, and at any rate it leaves the great majority of spirits involved in the migratory cycle. There is inconsistency also in the manner in which the picture of the migration is presented. While Virgil is expounding his doctrine he is clear: when he comes to paint it in its results he becomes confused. The spirits that are to be Romans are spirits that have inhabited other bodies. Why do we hear every thing about their future, nothing about their past? It may be said that they have drunk Lethe and left the past behind. This may hold good of Silvius and one or two others who are just on the threshold of a new life on earth: but does it accord with the presumable condition of the later Roman worthies, such as Augustus himself? They have had their thousand years of purgation: how are they to spend the remaining thousand years before they become living men? And what is to be the condition of Silvius and the earlier posterity of Aeneas after they have fulfilled their new term on earth? Will they reappear in successive generations as later Romans? These are inquiries which the Pythagorean doctrine suggests, and which, if treated in an independent manner, and not brought into connexion with beliefs with which it has nothing to do, it might perhaps have answered. After this, it is comparatively unimportant to notice the difficulty which many critics have felt about the two gates of sleep, their want of congruity with the topography of the rest of the book, and the absence of any reason why Aeneas and the Sibyl should be dismissed by the ivory gate. This last question is answered, though with some hesitation, by Gibbon and Heyne, who remark that corporeal visitants could not be dismissed by the horn gate, not being true shades. The reply is obvious, that if they are not true shades, neither are they false dreams, and that the inappropriateness of one mode of exit does not prove the appropriateness of the other, or excuse Virgil for having created so inopportune an alternative.

I must not conclude without saying a few words on Warburton's once celebrated hypothesis, that Aeneas' descent into the shades is an allegorical description of his initiation into the mysteries, a process which, it is contended, in pursuance of the argument of the Divine Legation, was part of the training of every heathen legislator, such as Aeneas is assumed to be. That hypothesis was controverted, as is well known, in a characteristic essay by Gibbon, who was probably repelled not more by the arrogant dogmatism of the untrained scholar than by the zeal of the ecclesiastic in proving that even pagan times witnessed to the alliance between religion and civil government. A reader of the present day will, I think, be induced to award the palm of learning and ingenuity to Warburton. He deals indeed largely in unproved assumptions, which his skilful adversary is not slow to expose; but he has succeeded in investing his theory with considerable plausibility, suggesting by its help explanations of points in Virgil's narrative which it is not easy to clear up otherwise. The theory in its totality is sufficiently alien from the spirit of modern criticism. No one who regards Virgil as my readers have, I trust, seen reason to regard him, will suspect him [p. 426] of intending an elaborate and sustained allegory in this book any more than in the whole poem. Aeneas is not an anticipation of Augustus, and the descent into the shades is not simply a poetical account of initiation. But Aeneas has many Augustan traits, and it is quite possible that several of Virgil's details, as Heyne admits, if not his general conception, may have been drawn from the mysteries. Gibbon is satisfied to argue that the mysteries being admitted to be a theatrical representation of all that was believed or imagined of the lower world, it is not surprising that the copy. was like the original: but that it still remains undetermined whether Virgil intended to describe the original or the copy. This argument really proceeds on an assumption as unwarranted as any of Warburton's, that there was a recognized doctrine on the subject which the mysteries copied faithfully in detail. As a matter of fact, no such authorized description of the state of the dead can be shown to have existed. Classical dictionaries have to compound their accounts of the state of belief on these question out of many different and indeed discordant materials. Homer says one thing, Pindar another; Plato differs from them both, even when speaking, like them, the language of fable, and the mythe in one of his dialogues differs from the mythe in another. The representation in the mysteries differs circumstantially from other mythical representations that have come down to us; and the question is whether Virgil may not have described the original after the manner of this particular copy. There is some reason to suspect that in certain instances this was actually the case. Virgil's Elysium, as Warburton has pointed out, is like that sketched by Aristophanes in the Frogs, and expressly identified by him with the happy state of the initiated. The inexplicable golden bough perhaps receives more light from the palma auro subtiliter foliata, which was carried in the mysteries of Isis, than from any other parallel that has been adduced. Nay, we may even believe with Warburton that in describing the descent of Aeneas Virgil may have thought of the initiation of Augustus, and that here as elsewhere, while adopting an incident from Homer, the poet may have had ulterior purposes of his own. The supposition is shadowy and conjectural; but the thought in itself is one which might not unnaturally have found place in that assemblage of antiquarian recollections, philosophical fancies, patriotic feelings, and courtly sentiments which acted as the motive power on Virgil's imagination. Gibbon objects that Aeneas is no legislator: but though he performs no acts of legislation in the Aeneid, his spirit is legislatorial throughout: he is the repository of traditions which are to be handed down to his posterity, and his destiny, as declared by Jupiter, is to found institutions as well as walls. Nor need we be concerned to defend Virgil from the charge of having made disclosures which would have led Horace to renounce his friendship. Warburton's thoroughgoing adherence to his theory obliged him to suppose that the poet of the Aeneid had actually been initiated, a supposition which Gibbon rightly rejects as resting on no evidence, and contradicted by the accounts of Virgil's biographer. But the circumstances connected with initiation were one thing, and the grand secret itself another: and while the latter has been so successfully preserved as to have perished with its depositaries, the former meet us openly in ancient literature, in allusion or in detail, so that we may be sure that they were perfectly at the service of any uninitiated poet who chose to avail himself of them to garnish and authenticate his narrative. [p. 427]

Aeneas lands at Cumae, and his crew prepare for a meal.