P. VERGILI MARONIS

AENEIDOS

LIBER SECUNDUS.

THE voice of criticism has unanimously fixed on this book, along with the Fourth and Sixth, as affording the best evidence of the true greatness of Virgil. Whether or no we believe the story told in Donatus' biography, that the poet himself chose these three books to read to Augustus as a specimen of his work, it indicates at any rate the judgment passed by antiquity; and modern opinion has not been slow to ratify the verdict.

The conception of the present book is eminently fortunate. Homer had made Ulysses tell the story of his wanderings to Alcinous, and so had supplied the canvas on which the younger artist might work: but the tale of Troy taken forms no part of the narrative of the Odyssey: it is briefly sung by a bard, whose strains move the tears of Ulysses, as the Trojan portraits at Carthage have moved those of Aeneas; but that is all. It was open to Virgil to make his hero tell the whole story of the destruction of Troy without trespassing on Homer's ground; and he seized the opportunity. The subject could not fail to be most impressive, and it is introduced with perfect propriety. Dido, it is true, knew the main incidents of the siege; but that was all the more reason why she should wish to hear them from the chief living witness on the side of Troy. Virgil too has shown his wisdom not only in what he has said, but in what he has left unsaid. Dido's curiosity would naturally extend over the whole ten years; but the poet knew that a detail of the siege, natural as it might be, would weary his readers. He tells us that the queen asked of Priam and Hector, of Diomedc and Achilles; but he does not require us to listen to Aeneas till he can concentrate our attention on the last agony of Troy, the one night in which the city was taken and sacked.

The taking of Troy was, as might be expected, a favourite subject with poets before Virgil. It formed part of the epic cycle; it was treated by the masters of the Greek drama. Of these works the only one that has come down to us is the Troades of Euripides; and even that has its scene laid after the catastrophe, which it deals with only by way of retrospect. We know enough of the others to be assured that the main incidents in Virgil's narrativethe story of the Trojan horse, the introduction of Sinon, the tragic death of Laocoonare taken from his predecessors. It would have been unnatural if it had not been so. Custom bound Virgil to follow the legend in its main bearings as he had received it, though it left him quite free, as I have contended in the general Introduction to the Aeneid, to vary minor details, and give his own colour to the whole. How far Virgil is original in the minuti of his treatment, we cannot tell. Macrobius indeed makes one of his interlocutors (Sat. 5. 2) speak of it as a fact known to every schoolboy, that the story of this book is taken almost word for word from one Pisander, who wrote a mythological history of the world in verse; but though the charge is circumstantially made, it is discredited by the silence of other [p. 108] authorities, whose ignorance contrasts strangely with this schoolboy knowledge; and Heyne, in his first Excursus to this book, has made it more than probable that the plagiarism of the poet is really the blunder of the critic, who is supposed to have confounded two Pisanders, one who lived before Virgil, but did not write the mythologicohistorical poem, and another who did write the poem, but lived after Virgil⁴⁰ . The little that we know from Servius and others about the treatment of the stories of Laocoon and Sinon by earlier writers points rather to difference from Virgil's version than to identity with it: and though we must not build so much on this, as it is the wont of such witnesses to dwell rather on points of dissimilarity than on points of agreement, we may take it as showing that Virgil did really exercise his privilege of varying the smaller circumstances of the narrative, especially as his successors, Quinctus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus, who are supposed to have been diligent copyists of the early writers, differ from him considerably in their manner of treatment. At any rate, whatever may have been Virgil's obligations to his predecessors for the incidents of his narrative, we cannot doubt that the golden thread which runs through the whole, the feeling of Aeneas himself, is substantially his own. The steps by which the hero comes to realize his position as an inhabitant of a captured city, a partisan of a cause against which the gods have finally declared,steps indicated with such subtlety that it is only of late that they have been fully recognized (see on vv. 322, 402),are not likely to have been transmitted by legend, while they bear in themselves the strongest marks of the poet's peculiar art.

Perhaps there is no better way of estimating the greatness of Virgil in this book than by glancing at the manner in which the subject has been treated by the three later poets, Smyrnaeus, Tryphiodorus, and Tzetzes. With his example before them, not to mention the other writers whom they probably followed, they have yet contrived to divest a most stirring and pathetic story of a large part of its interest. Smyrnaeus bestows two of his fourteen books, the twelfth and the thirteenth, on the capture of Troy. He goes over much the same ground as Virgil; but his narrative is flat and lifeless: the incidents do not flow out of each other, and sometimes, instead of incident, we are put off with the tedious generality of a mere historical abridgment. Calchas advises the Greeks to try stratagem rather than force: Ulysses on the moment strikes out the notion of the wooden horse with all its details: Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, like Milton's Moloch, are for open war, and attempt to lead their people to battle at once, but are checked by a thunderbolt from Zeus, which quite overawes them; an incident briefly despatched, and apparently introduced for no object whatever. Soon after we hear that the gods are at war with each other, as in the twentieth Iliad, hurling as missiles the hills of Ida; but we are expressly told that while all nature is convulsed, the human combatants are unconscious of what is going on, and even this invisible warfare is soon terminated by another thunderbolt from Zeus, so that, as before, we are at a loss to understand the relevancy of the incident. When the horse is made, Sinon is left with it, having expressed to the Greeks his willingness to undergo burning alive, or any torture that the Trojans may inflict. Accordingly, he stands silent while the enemy surrounds him, trying him first with mild words of inquiry, afterwards with the harsher methods of mutilation and burning: and then, having given this undoubted proof of his courage, he voluntarily tells his story. Laocoon, who disbelieves him, is struck blind on the spot, the state of his eyes being described with a sickening minuteness of detail; yet even in this condition he continues urging his countrymen to burn the horse, and so the serpents are sent to destroy his children by his side. Cassandra then takes his [p. 109] place in denunciation, but is gibed at by the Trojans: she tries herself to burn or break open the horse, but torch and weapons are wrested from her. A paragraph is spent in enforcing the statement that the Greeks suffered during the sack as well as the Trojans, and the modes of their deaths are enumerated with statistical particularity. Some, we are told, were hit by goblets, others by tables, others by torches and spits with meat adhering to them, others by hatchets: some have their fingers cut off in trying to ward off blows: some are bruised with stones, and some pierced with lances, which the Trojans were able to wield in spite of the wine they had drunk. We are told of Aeneas' escape, which it appears was owing partly, as in Virgil, to the protection of his mother, who warded off the weapons of the enemy, but partly also to a speech of Calchas to the Greeks, ordering them to spare him on account of his signal piety in taking his father and son with him rather than his treasure. But perhaps the greatest piece of flatness is found in Pyrrhus' speech to old Priam, who has been praying for death at his hands:
ὦ γέρον, ἐμμεμαῶτα καὶ ἐσσύμενόν περ ἀνώγεις:
οὐ γάρ σ' ἐχθρὸν ἐόντα μετὰ ζωοῖσιν ἐάσω:
οὐ γάρ τι ψυχῆς πέλει ἀνδράσι φίλτερον ἄλλο.

Tryphiodorus is a writer of a somewhat lower stamp, perhaps equal in power to Smyrnaeus, but inferior in taste and judgment. He concentrates himself chiefly on the wooden horse and the events immediately connected with it, fifty lines being given to a minute description of all its parts, from which it appears that it was a costly as well as elaborate performance,its eyes being made of beryl and amethyst, and its teeth of silver. Ulysses, as in Smyrnaeus, lays down the programme of operations: the heroes rise one after another, as at the challenge of Hector in the seventh book of the Iliad, and volunteer in the service; and when they are lodged in the horse, Pallas provides them with ambrosia; immediately after which they are aptly compared to beasts running down a rock to escape a winter torrent, and waiting in their den, famished with hunger. Sinon is left, mangled, like Ulysses in Helen's story in the fourth Odyssey, with stripes from his own hand, and tells a similar story to that in Virgil, except that he represents himself as having been scourged by his comrades because he refused to fly with them. The dragging of the horse into the city is detailed at tedious length, the agency of the gods, which duly appears later in the poem, being tastelessly anticipated, and Here being made to open the gates wider than usual, while Poseidon knocks down part of the stonework of the entrance. Cassandra protests, as in Smyrnaeus, and is severely upbraided by her father, who sends her to her chamber. Helen's story in Homer is again put under requisition, and the adulteress is made to address the Greeks within the horse in the tones of their respective wives; but the incident is an isolated one, and no attempt is made to harmonize it with the rest of the story. For the rest of the book the narrative proceeds more rapidly, the different events of the sack being despatched each in a few lines, without any attempt at pictorial narrative. The poet cannot, he says, tell all that happened on that night; that is a business for the Muses: he feels himself to be a chariot-driver nearing the goal. Tzetzes need hardly detain us a moment, as his narrative of the sack of Troy is utterly contemptible, with no pretension to poetry, and very little to style or metre. He is fortunately brief, and in fact presents a condensed rsum of the story as told by his various predecessors, Virgil included, the absence of detail enabling him in general to avoid the points in which they differ. There is however quite enough to distinguish him from them, or from any other writer professing to be a poet. When the heroes get into the horse, he takes the opportunity of telling us the personal characteristics of the leading Greeks, in lines like these: [p. 110]
Κάλχας μικρὸς ἔην, λεπτός, λευκός, δασυχαίτης,
κρᾶτα φέρων πολίην, ὁλόλευκον πρὸς δ' ἄρ' ὑπήνην.
Τυδείδης δ' ἄρα σώματι ἦεν τεσσαράγωνος,
εὐσχήμων, σίμος, στειναύχην, ξανθογένειος.

This he may have borrowed from Dares Phrygius, whose work, as we now have it, abounds in notices of the sort. But he is probably original when he says that he cannot tell what was the precise occasion on which Ulysses fell temporarily into the hands of the Trojans, his attention to the incident having been distracted by the cruel treatment he received from the crafty wife of Isaac, or when he censures Tryphiodorus for talking of the horse as crowned with flowers when it was the depth of winter, and professes that he, Tzetzes, had been taught by Orpheus never to tell a falsehood. But it is an insult to Virgil even to mention such absurdities in connexion with the Second Book of the Aeneid.

A curious critique of Virgil's narrative from a military point of view by Napoleon I. may be found in an abridged form in the Classical Museum, vol. i. pp. 205 foll. It is needless to say that the story does not stand a test which it was never meant to stand: much of the Emperor's censure however falls really, not on Virgil, but on the legend which, as we have seen, he necessarily followed.

Aeneas begins thus.