sentation thus established gains ascendency over the future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius, and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are refreshed:—

[pg 185]

III.

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

The chief modes of rural industry treated in the various books are those which flourished in Italy,—the tillage of the land for various crops, the cultivation of the vine and the olive, the breeding and rearing of cattle, sheep, and horses, and the tending of bees. It is noticed by Servius that the agricultural precepts of the poem apply only to Italy and not to other lands: ‘Sane agriculturae huius praecepta non ad omnes pertinent terras, sed ad solum situm Italiae.’ The frequent references to the products of other lands serve to suggest by contrast the superiority of Italy in those which are the special subject of the poem and which are most essential to human well-being. Cato also is represented by Cicero282 as resting the charm of a country life in the contemplation of the same operations of Nature as those indicated in the opening lines of the Georgics:—

Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram

Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites

Conveniat283,—

[pg 186]

The number of Roman writers who treated in prose of this subject, both before and after Virgil, testifies further to the strong national interest attaching to it. Among these writers, Varro, the immediate predecessor of Virgil, associates the subject directly with the pride which the Romans felt in their country. He introduces the speakers in his Dialogue as holding their conversation in the Temple of Tellus, and examining a map or painting of Italy on the wall. One of the speakers addresses the others in these words, ‘You who have travelled over many lands, have you ever seen any more richly cultivated than Italy? I, indeed, have never seen any so richly cultivated.’ He especially characterises the excellence of its corn-crops, its vines, olives, and fruit-trees: ‘What spelt shall I compare to the Campanian? what wheat to the Apulian? what wine to the Falernian? what oil to that of Venafrum? is not Italy planted with trees, so that the whole of it seems an orchard284?’ Other authors, Virgil himself among them285, and Columella in the Introduction to his treatise286, testify to the pride which the Italians took in their breed of horses and herds of cattle. And though the Italian bees and their product were not so famous in poetry as the bees of Hymettus and ‘the honey of Hybla,’ yet Horace speaks of the country near Tarentum as one ‘where the honey yields not to the honey of Hymettus;’ and in another Ode, in which he contrasts his own moderate estate with the resources of richer men, he mentions Calabrian honey along with the wine of Formiae and the fleeces of Gallic pastures among the chief sources of wealth:—

Quanquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes

Nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora

Languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis

Crescunt vellera pascuis287.

[pg 187]

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

The subject was moreover intimately associated with the national history. Several of the early legends, such as those of Cincinnatus, and, in more historical times, of Atilius Regulus and Curius Dentatus, attest the prominence which agriculture enjoyed among the pursuits of the foremost men in the Republic. The surnames of many noble families, patrician and plebeian, such as the Lentuli, Stolones, Bubulci, Pisones, Dolabellae, and the name of the great Fabian Gens, are connected etymologically with agricultural occupations, products, or implements, and afford evidence of a time when the men who filled the great offices of the State lived on their own lands288, and were known for the success with which they improved their farms. The passion to possess and subdue the land was, in the early history of the Republic, the main motive power both of the political and military history of Rome. Even down to the establishment of the Empire there was no question which more divided the two great parties in the State than that of the Agrarian laws. And though, after the conquest of Italy, Roman wars were fought for dominion rather than for new territory, yet the hope of owning land, if not on Italian yet on some foreign soil, which he should hold by his sword as well as cultivate by his plough, supported the Roman [pg 188]soldier, even under the Empire, through the long years of his service. The Roman ‘colonies,’ the origin of so many famous European cities, were settlements of ‘Coloni’ or cultivators of the soil.

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

Non hic te carmine ficto

Atque per ambages et longa exorsa tenebo.

[pg 189]

and

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,

Omnia iam volgata289.

But it is not the judgement of the poet, but the despotic will of the Emperor, that is responsible for this imperfection. The fourth Book originally ended with an episode which afforded scope for the expression of personal feeling, for awakening an interest in that land which was now of vast importance to the State, and which affected the imagination of cultivated Romans as it does that of cultivated men in modern times290, and for illustrating the national greatness and the recent history of Rome. In the first edition the mention of Egypt at line 287 had led Virgil to celebrate the administration of that province under his early friend Cornelius Gallus. When Gallus fell into disgrace and was forced to commit suicide in 26 B.C., Virgil was required to re-edit the poem with a new concluding episode291. The subject treated in the earlier edition of the poem would have enabled Virgil to give renewed expression to his admiration and affection for the Gallus of the Eclogues, to tell the tale of the downfall of Cleopatra, and to magnify the greatness of Rome in the conquest and government of her provinces. The episode as it now stands is a finished piece of metrical execution; it illustrates the attraction which the Greek mythological stories had for educated Romans; it is expressed in those tones of tender pathos of which Virgil was a master; but it is at the same time a standing proof of the malign [pg 190]influence which the Imperial despotism already exercised on the spontaneous inspiration of genius, as well as on all sincere expression of feeling.

storms of life in ‘the high and serene temples well bulwarked by the learning of the wise.’ In Horace the feeling of insecurity arising out of his early experience confirms the lessons of Epicurean wisdom, and teaches him not to expect too much from life, but to enjoy thankfully whatever good the passing hour brought to him. In all of them the sense of the real miseries from which the world had escaped, and of the real blessings which it enjoyed after the battle of Actium, induces an acquiescence in the extinction of liberty and in the establishment of a form of government which had been for centuries most repugnant to Roman sentiment.

cherish for the whole land, now united as one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source of pleasure

temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice of the topics treated in their poems.

nificence, and in his lost but not forgotten capacity of happiness and nobleness. The soliloquies of these personages perform for the epic poet the part performed by the elaborate introspection and discussion of motives in modern prose fiction. Homer also avails himself frequently of the soliloquy, as he does of natural dialogue and more formal oratory. In the Aeneid the chief personage is often introduced, like the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey,

is a step towards the light and the ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. Virgil recognises the source of his own strength in the words

pense is to be sought. Though the individual life may be short and meagre in its attractions, and generation after generation may spend itself in an unceasing round of toil,

his contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas

and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes

through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and beneficent influence on human culture.

The Aeneid may not have been regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such expressions as ‘ludere quae vellem,’ ‘carmina qui lusi pastorum,’ ‘in tenui labor

feeling with the pain and the happiness of which human affection is the source. The numerous passages in which phrases or cadences, thought or imagery in the Georgics recall phrases or representation in the earlier poem

give to the element of uncertainty in the world,—the irony in human affairs, or the Nemesis of the gods excited against great prosperity even when not misused or gained by crime,—expressed the dominant idea in the minds of their contemporaries. Mr. Grote traces the origin of this last idea to the experience of the rapid vicissitudes from one extreme of fortune to the other, brought about by the great prosperity of the Greek states on the one hand and their incessant wars and political feuds on the other. The origin of the other idea is to be found in the almost unbroken success of Rome in all her enterprises, from the burning of the city by the Gauls till the full establishment of empire. There is no history in which chance plays so small a part, and in which so little is episodical. The ‘good fortune of the Roman people’ will be found to be explained either by the traditional policy of never making a new enemy until they had well disposed of the old, or by the magnanimity (as compared at least with the policy of other States

scarcely equal. Thus the two great Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the outward world in ‘the first intention,’—man in the energy and buoyancy of the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,—they are at the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.

I.

The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times. In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome, in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus140,’ mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief authority [pg 94]to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate, told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence available to the former, and the sensational character of the story itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.

[pg 95]

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

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

The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two of the minor poems published among the Catalepton141, which may without hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to philosophical studies142. The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that supplied by Horace, [pg 96]Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge derived from other sources.

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

Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the clearness of [pg 97]his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to his art had chosen

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae143,

and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world, enjoyed all that was illustrious, brilliant or genial, in the society of his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate associates he greets with hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without assuming the airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only two—unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one more to the number, Aelius Lamia—in connexion with whom he uses the language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil. Whatever may have been the date or circumstances connected with the composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words ‘animae dimidium meae’ establish the futility [pg 98]of the notion, that the subject of this Ode is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine of Cales.

Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important, prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse, written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life based on that of Suetonius144. What then were the materials available to Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, entitled ‘De ingenio moribusque Vergilii.’ Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the ‘memorials which the friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.’ Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a statement that ‘in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an uneducated man’—a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison. Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests of the direction given to the poet’s genius in the choice of the subject of the Georgics.

[pg 99]

A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedianus, born at the commencement of our era, who wrote ‘Contra obtrectatores Vergilii.’ These ‘maligners,’ beginning with those whose names have been condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had assailed the art of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who could have known anything about the matter145.

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

[pg 365]

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute562. He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning; that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

Et vera incessu patuit dea.

*   *   *   *   *

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina563.

[pg 366]

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character. The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus564.

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto

Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda565.

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper566.

[pg 367]

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,

Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:

Nec te Troia capit567.

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate. Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy568. Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,

Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris

Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem

Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit569.

[pg 368]

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced570 in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

[pg 369]

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes571.

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri

Caelicolis et quanta solet572—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae

Numina magna deum573.

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each family into one community574, had been transmitted in popular beliefs and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, [pg 370]identified with the continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis

Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.

Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem

Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret575.

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the ‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,

Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri576.

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat577.

When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—

[pg 371]

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit578.

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’ for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs. It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,

Sanguinis et sacri pateras, animamque sepulchro

Condimus, et magna supremum voce ciemus579.

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!

Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris

Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum

Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,

[pg 372]

Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno580?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,

Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,

‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:

Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:

Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:

Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,

Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto581.’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence, Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona

Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,

Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat

Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem

Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras582.

Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus—

[pg 373]

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum583.

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the ‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, [pg 374]mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes584—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem585—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of a religious epic, that [pg 375]the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier586, following Macrobius, has pointed out the special propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of the ritual application of the words ‘porricio587’ and ‘porrigo’, and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs588,—‘Aenea, vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,

Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;

Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum

Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet589.

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum591,

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

to write by this powerful impulse. But the man who first gave full expression to the national idea and feeling, who first made Rome conscious of herself, and who was the true founder of her literature, was Ennius. The title which he gave to his epic—Annales—perhaps the most prosaic title ever given to a work of genius, indicates the character of his work and his mode of treatment. The inspiration under which it was written is more truly indicated by the other name—Romais—by which, according to the testimony of an ancient grammarian

expression of sincere conviction, and how far it is dictated by the necessities of his position.

in the vital strength of feeling with which it invests a limited and definite range of interests. What the Roman poets cared for they cared for with all their heart, and strength, and mind. They seem to have written from more enduring, if less abundant, sources of affection than other poets. Their hearts thoroughly realised what they idealised in imagination. This strong realism and constancy of feeling explains the labour with which they perfected their art, as the strong love of his small portion of land explains the labour which the ideal husbandman of the Georgics bestows on it. Through that vividness of feeling with which they cherished the thought of what gave actual joy to their lives, Catullus and Horace were able to invest the names of Sirmio, of Lucretilis and Digentia, with an interest which attaches to the favourite residences of no other poets: though perhaps future generations will find a similar classic charm attaching to the homes of Wordsworth and of Scott, and to the hills, dales, and streams which they have endowed with the wealth of their strong affection. The human objects of their passionate love excited in several of the Roman poets this same vital warmth of feeling. The ‘spirat adhuc amor’ is still true of all the poetry which the love of Lesbia and of Cynthia inspired. Even Ovid, whose want of seriousness and profound feeling is the chief flaw in his poetic temperament, had the most vivid sense of the pleasure and of the pain of his own existence. It is this capacity in the imagination of being vitally interested in and possessed by its object, which enabled Lucretius to breathe the breath of enduring life into the dry bones of the atomic philosophy. And that this strong realism of feeling is a characteristic of the race to which these poets belonged is proved by the pathetic force of the numerous sepulchral epitaphs of persons altogether undistinguished, preserved from the times of the early Empire. It is owing to the power of producing a strong and abiding impression that Latin has retained the function of being the language of great epitaphs and of great inscriptions in modern times.

fortunes, wars, and state-policy of bee-communities and of men. It is the sense of this analogy that imparts a meaning deeper than that demanded by the obvious force of the words—a more pathetic feeling of the vanity of all earthly strife—to that final touch in the description of the combat in mid-air between two hosts, led by rival chiefs:—

separate the office of a teacher from that of a poet. How far the experience of his early years in the farm in the district of Andes or of his later residence on his land near Nola may have contributed to his knowledge of his subject, we have no means of knowing; but probably the delicacy of his health as well as his devotion to study may have limited his experience to the observation of the labours of others. But the power of vividly realising and enjoying the familiar sights and work of the farm,—the life which he gives to the notices of seed-time and harvest, of the growth of trees and ripening of fruits, of the habits of flocks, herds, and bees, etc.,—the deep love for his subject in all its details—

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

century, from whom in the other characteristics of his art and genius he is widely removed.

of one whom he had known, and who had interested him as actually realising that life of labour and of happiness in the results of his labour, which in the body of the poem is held up as an abstract ideal. The scene of this vivid reminiscence,—the district

of his skill which made a life of unceasing labour one of contentment and happiness to the husbandman.

II.

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

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus

Sceptra potitus115—

is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer. If any one ever succeeded in securing that which [pg 69]Tacitus says ‘should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a happy memory of himself116,’ that may be truly said of Virgil. Though his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that ‘he gave a new direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a critical period of the world’s history what the future would love.’

It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he made to Varius, before leaving Italy, ‘that if anything happened to him he should destroy the Aeneid.’ A letter written to Augustus is quoted by Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work of such vast compass ‘almost from a perversion of mind117.’ No poet could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical self-disparagement of Horace.

[pg 70]

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

Yet the words in the letter to Augustus,—‘that I fancy myself to have been almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a work’—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art, [pg 71]which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other. Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and running streams among the valleys.’

As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek epics is the probable explanation of Virgil’s own dissatisfaction with the Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures, was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil, at the approach of death, wished ‘to destroy what in those solemn moments he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false reputation118.’ In the latter he says, ‘The [pg 72]whole of the Aeneid, from the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea.’ ‘Virgil is one of the remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling. His was lyric poetry.’ ‘It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the very work which was but a failure119.’

Although the service rendered to the study of antiquity by the historical insight of Niebuhr is probably as great as that rendered by the genius of any scholar of this century, yet the opinions expressed by him on literature are often more arbitrary than authoritative. Still this verdict on the merits of the Aeneid was in accordance with the most advanced criticism of the time when it was written, both in Germany and England. The writer by whom the critical taste of England was most stimulated and enlarged about the same time was Coleridge; and in his ‘Table Talk’ such disparaging dicta as this occur more than once: ‘If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ The whole tone of the criticism which arose out of the admiration of German thought and poetry was thoroughly opposed to the spirit in which Latin literature had been admired. Mr. Carlyle also expressed in one of his earliest works—the Life of Schiller—an estimate of the value of Virgil, which was not uncommon among younger scholars at the Universities some thirty years ago. ‘Virgil and Horace,’ he writes, ‘he (Schiller) learned to construe accurately, but is said to have taken no deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and meek beauty of the first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of the last, the matchless elegance of both would of course escape his inexperienced perception; while the matter of their writings must have appeared frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible.’ Even the warmest admirers of Virgil about that time, such as Keble, are content to claim for him high excellence as the poet of outward nature. The late Professor Conington, while showing the finest appreciation of ‘the marvellous grace and delicacy, the evidences of a culture most elaborate and most refined,’ in the poet to the [pg 73]interpretation of whose works he devoted the best years of a scholar’s life, has questioned ‘the appropriateness of the special praise given to Virgil’s agricultural poetry, and conceded though with more hesitation to his pastoral compositions.’ He speaks also of it as an admitted fact that ‘in undertaking the Aeneid at the command of a superior, Virgil was venturing beyond the province of his genius.’ And he describes this disparaging estimate as the opinion ‘which is now generally entertained on Virgil’s claims as an epic poet120.’ Mr. Keightley is also quoted by him as speaking of Virgil as ‘perhaps the least original poet of antiquity121.’ It is certainly not in the spirit of an ardent admirer that the author of Virgil’s life in the ‘Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology’ approaches the criticism of his poetry. But it is by German critics and scholars that Virgil’s claim to a high rank among the poets of the world is at the present day most seriously impugned. Thus to take two or three conspicuous instances of their disparaging criticism: Mommsen in his History of Rome122 speaks contemptuously of the ‘successes of the Aeneid, the Henriade, and the Messiad;’ Bernhardy in his Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur (1871) brings together a formidable list of German critics and commentators unfavourable to the merits of the Aeneid, in which the illustrious name of Hegel appears; Gossrau in his edition of the Aeneid quotes from Richter (as a specimen of the unfavourable opinions pronounced by many critics) the expression of a wish that, with the exception of the descriptions and episodes, the rest of the poem had been burned123; and W. S. Teuffel, among other criticisms which ‘damn with faint praise,’ has the following: ‘Aber er ist zu weich und zu wenig genial als dass er auf dem seiner Natur zusagendsten Gebiete hätte beharren und darauf Ruhm ernten können.’

[pg 74]

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

Again, the greater nearness of the Augustan Age, not in time only but in spirit and manners, to our own age, which in the last century told in Virgil’s favour in the comparison with Homer, tells the other way now. The critics of last century were interested in other ages, in so far as they appeared to be like their own. The rude vigour and stirring incident of the Homeric Age or the Middle Ages had no attraction for men living under the régime of Louis XIV. and XV. or of Queen Anne and the first Georges. What an illustrious living Frenchman says of the great representative of French ideas in the last century might be said generally of its criticism. ‘Voltaire,’ says M. Renan, ‘understood neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle Ages124.’ And yet he was prepared to pronounce his judgment on them by the light of that admirable common [pg 75]sense which he applied to the questions of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation. Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness, and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.

Other causes connected with a great expansion of human interests acting on the imagination, and with the revolt against the prevailing poetical style, which arose about the beginning of the present century, have tended to lower the authority of writers who formed the standard of taste to previous ages. The desire of the new era was to escape from the exhausted atmosphere of literary tradition, and to return again to the simplicity of Nature and human feeling. The genius of [pg 76]Roman literature is more in harmony with eras of established order, of adherence to custom, of distinct but limited insight into the outward world and into human life, than to eras of expansive energy, of speculative change, of vague striving to attain some new ideal of duty or happiness. The genius of Greece exercised a powerful influence on several of the great English and German poets who lived in the new era. But neither Goethe nor Schiller, Byron nor Scott, Shelley nor Keats were at all indebted, in thought, sentiment, or expression, to the poets of the Augustan Age. Among the great poets of this new era the only one known to have greatly admired Virgil, and who in his poems founded on classical subjects was influenced by him, is the one who most decidedly proclaimed his revolt against the artificial diction and representation of the school of classical imitators,—the poet Wordsworth.

The very perfection of Virgil’s art, combined with the calmness and moderation of his spirit, was out of harmony with the genius of such a time. He seemed to have nothing new to teach the eager generation which regarded the world and speculated on its own destiny with feelings altogether unlike to those of the generations that went before it. The truth of his sentiment, its adaptation to the spiritual movement of his own age, in which it gained ascendency like a new revelation, had caused it to pass into the modes of thought and feeling habitual to the world. This too may be said of the ethical feeling and common sense of Cicero’s philosophical treatises. Moral speculation has been so long and so deeply permeated by the thought expressed in these treatises that it now appears trite and common-place. So too the moderation and unfailing propriety of Virgil’s language had no attraction of freshness or novelty to stimulate the imagination. The direct force of language in Homer or Lucretius never can become trite or common-place. It affects the mind now as powerfully and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to [pg 77]force the reader’s admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested, it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect. As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital force which it originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language. The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word ‘meditari,’ applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation—‘iustissima tellus.’ These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.

to the national mind. The land was to the Romans the chief field of their industry and the original source of their wealth, as the sea was the scene of occupation and adventure to the Greeks, and, through the outlet which it gave to the results of their artistic ingenuity, the great source of their prosperity. The Odyssey is a poem inspired, in a great degree, by the impulse which first sent the Greek nation forth on its career of maritime and colonising enterprise. The Georgics are inspired by that impulse which first started the Latin race on its career of conquest, and which continued to animate the struggle with the reluctant forces of Nature, as it had animated the struggle with the other races of Italy for the possession of the soil.

writer, may be summed up in the medieval maxim, ‘Laborare est orare

They assert in alternate strains their claims to poetic honours, offer prayers and vows to Diana as the goddess of the chase and to Priapus as the god of gardens, draw rival pictures of cool retreat from the heat of summer and of cheerfulness by the winter fire, and connect the story of their loves with the varying aspect of the seasons, and with the beauty of trees sacred to different deities or native to different localities. Though the shepherds are Arcadian, the scenery is Mantuan:—

past and hand down the memory of the present should find an outlet for itself in various forms of narrative poetry.

down from ancient times, that under this pastoral allegory Virgil laments the death and proclaims the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. It is probable

meaning of his own time; he enhanced the glory of the great men and the great families of Rome; and he produced a work of colossal proportions and massive execution. Till his place was taken by a successor who united the fervour of a national poet to the perfect workmanship of an artist, he was justly regarded as the truest representative in literature of Roman character, sentiment, and ideas.

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

[pg 336]

II.

The confidence which the Romans felt in the continued existence of their Empire and in their superiority over all other nations was closely connected with their religious feeling and belief521. Horace has expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and conciseness in the single line,

Dis te minorem quod geris imperas522.

And it was Virgil’s aim in the Aeneid to show that this edifice of Roman Empire, of which the enterprise of Aeneas was the foundation, on which the old Kings of Alba and of Rome and the successive generations of great men under the Republic had successively laboured, and on which Augustus placed the coping-stone, was no mere work of human hands, but had been designed and built up by divine purpose and guidance. The Aeneid expresses the religious as it does the national sentiment of Rome. The two modes of sentiment were inseparable. The belief of the Romans in themselves was another form of their absolute faith in the invisible Power which protected them. This invisible Power was sometimes recognised by them under the name of ‘Fortuna Urbis,’—the spiritual counterpart of the city visible to their eyes. The recognition of this divinity was not only compatible with, but involved the recognition of, many other divinities associated with it in this protecting office. But to these numerous divinities no very distinct personality was attached. It was the awe of an ever-present invisible Power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain definite observances, capable of being alienated for a time by any deviation from these observances, and of being again appeased by a right reading of and humble compliance with its will, and working out its own purposes through the agency of the Roman arms and the wisdom of Roman counsels, that was the moving power of Roman religion. The Jove of the [pg 337]Capitol in early times, the living Emperor under the Empire, were the visible representatives of this mysterious Power. But its influence was acknowledged throughout all Roman history in the importance attached to the great priestly offices, and especially to that of Pontifex Maximus, which became inseparably united to the office of Emperor; in the scrupulous regard paid to the auspices through which this Power was believed to communicate its will; in the ominous interpretation put on all appearances of departure from the ordinary course of Nature; and in the reference to the Sibylline books in all questions of difficulty. This impersonal Power is to the Romans both the object of awe and the source of their confidence. They seem never to distrust the steadfastness of its favour. They rather feel themselves its willing instruments, co-operating with it, blindly sometimes and sometimes remissly, and for every failure of intelligence or vigilance, punished by temporal calamities.

The word by which Virgil recognises the agency of this impersonal, or perhaps we should rather say undefined, Power, is ‘Fatum,’ or more often in the plural, ‘Fata.’ It is by the ‘Fates’ that the action is set in motion and directed to its issue. The human and even the divine actors in the story are instruments in their hands; some more, some less conscious of the part they are performing. Even Jupiter is represented rather as cognisant of the Fates than as their author. Sometimes indeed they are spoken of as ‘Fata Iovis;’ and to the assurance given by him to Venus ‘manent immota tuorum Fata tibi,’ he adds the words ‘neque me sententia vertit523.’ But again, while his will is suspended in a great crisis of the action, their operation is persistent and inevitable:—

Rex Iuppiter omnibus idem:

Fata viam invenient524.

The original relation between this impersonal agency and the [pg 338]deliberate purpose of Jupiter is left undefined. But there is no collision between them. While the prayers of men are addressed to a conscious personal being, ‘Iuppiter omnipotens,’ the sovereignty of an impersonal Power over the fortunes of nations is acknowledged, as in the line—

Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum525.

Every reader of the Aeneid must feel the predominance of this idea in the poem, and the constantly recurring and even monotonous expression of it. In the first three books, for instance, the word ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ occurs more than forty times. Aeneas starts on his wanderings ‘fato profugus.’ Juno desires to secure the empire of the world to Carthage ‘Si qua fata sinant.’ She struggles against the conviction of her powerlessness to prevent the Trojan settlement in Italy, ‘Quippe vetor fatis.’ Aeneas comforts his companions by the announcement of the peaceful settlements awaiting them,—

sedes ubi fata quietas

Ostendunt.

Venus consoles herself for the destruction of Troy by the thought of the destiny awaiting Aeneas, ‘fatis contraria fata rependens.’ Jupiter reassures her after the storm with the words ‘manent immota tuorum Fata tibi;’ and he reveals to her one page in their secret volume,—‘fatorum arcana movebo.’ Mercury is sent to prepare the reception of Aeneas in Carthage,

ne fati nescia Dido

Finibus arceret.

Aeneas describes himself as starting from Troy ‘data fata secutus.’ A hundred more instances might be given of the dominating influence of this idea in the poem. It is the ‘common-place’ of the Virgilian epic. While it adds impressiveness to the historical significance of the poem, it detracts largely from the personal interest by the limits which it imposes on the [pg 339]free agency of the divine and human actors playing their part in it.

The same idea is often expressed by Tacitus, but it does not in him dominate so absolutely over human will, nor is it asserted with the same firmness of conviction. His conception of the regulating power over all human, or at least over all national existence, seems to waver between this idea of some unknown power steadily working out its purpose, of an element in human affairs baffling all calculation—the παράλογος of Thucydides and the ‘Fortuna saevo laeta negotio’ of Horace—and of the gods generally as personal avengers of crime, and sometimes as the kind protectors of the State. Thus in the Germania526 the earliest foreboding of the danger which threatened and ultimately overthrew the fabric of the Empire is indicated in the words ‘urgentibus imperii fatis:’ in the Agricola the result of the invasion of Britain under Claudius is summed up in the words ‘domitae gentes, capti reges, et monstratus fatis Vespasianus527:’ in the Histories the grounds of confidence on the part of the Vespasians in taking arms against the Vitellians are summed up in the words ‘dux Mucianus et Vespasiani nomen ac nihil arduum fatis528.’ But elsewhere he speaks of ‘ludibria rerum humanarum529,’ in language reminding us of Lucretius, and, in almost the very words of Horace, of ‘instabilis fortunae summaque et ima miscentis530.’ Like Horace, he seems to acknowledge the supremacy of chance or an ironical spirit over individual fortunes, and, like Virgil, that of Fate over the national destiny. But in the Annals, his latest work, he seems to [pg 340]incline more to the belief in the personal agency of the gods, and especially in their agency as the avengers of guilt. Thus he opens the passage of the deepest tragic gloom in all his sombre record with the words, ‘Noctem sideribus illustrem quasi convincendum ad scelus dii praebuere531.’ So too he speaks of appealing to the ‘avenging gods532;’ and of the ‘fear of the wrath of heaven533.’ Occasionally indeed he speaks of ‘the kindness of the gods534,’ but more often of their wrath or their indifference. Thus he attributes the ascendency of Sejanus not to any superior ability on his own part, but to ‘the wrath of the gods against the Roman commonwealth535;’ and, in recounting a number of omens which followed on the murder of Agrippina, he makes the sarcastic comment, ‘quae adeo sine cura deum eveniebant, ut multos post annos Nero imperium et scelera continuaverit536.’ In a writer like Tacitus it is impossible to distinguish with certainty between the pure expression of his convictions and the rhetorical and poetical colouring of his style. Yet both the frequency with which such passages recur, and the earnestness of their tone even when they seem most ironical, leave no doubt that, like Thucydides, he was not indifferent to these questions, although ‘perplexed in the extreme’ by the apparent absence, or at least uncertainty, of any steadfast moral order in the award of happiness and calamity to men.

The ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ of Virgil can scarcely be said to act with the aim of establishing right in the world, or of punishing wrong. Their action is purely political, neither ethical, though its ultimate tendency is beneficent, nor personal. Yet in the prominence which is given to this determining element in national affairs Virgil is expressing the strongest and most abiding belief of the Roman people, just as the Greek poets and historians of the fifth century B.C., in the prominence they [pg 341]give to the element of uncertainty in the world,—the irony in human affairs, or the Nemesis of the gods excited against great prosperity even when not misused or gained by crime,—expressed the dominant idea in the minds of their contemporaries. Mr. Grote traces the origin of this last idea to the experience of the rapid vicissitudes from one extreme of fortune to the other, brought about by the great prosperity of the Greek states on the one hand and their incessant wars and political feuds on the other. The origin of the other idea is to be found in the almost unbroken success of Rome in all her enterprises, from the burning of the city by the Gauls till the full establishment of empire. There is no history in which chance plays so small a part, and in which so little is episodical. The ‘good fortune of the Roman people’ will be found to be explained either by the traditional policy of never making a new enemy until they had well disposed of the old, or by the magnanimity (as compared at least with the policy of other States537) by which they converted the nations successively conquered by them into fellow-citizens or obedient allies, or by the indomitable resolution which never knew to yield to defeat. No important event in their history is isolated; each serves as a link in the chain which connects their past with their future. The unvarying result of their national discipline and policy, and of the force accumulated through centuries before they became corrupted by the gains of conquest, might well appear to a race, gifted with little speculative capacity, to be determined and accomplished by an Omnipotent Power behind them.

This idea determines the general conduct of the action in the Aeneid. The actors in the story either oppose the irresistible tendency of things and suffer defeat or perish in their resistance; or, with gradually increasing knowledge, they co-operate with and become the instruments of this tendency. And as it is by faith in the divine assistance and guidance that [pg 342]the latter are able to act their part successfully, the religious motives of the representation assume a prominence at least equal to that of its national and political motives. Thus the object of all the hero’s wanderings is not only to found a city, but to introduce a new worship into Italy—‘inferretque deos Latio.’ When Hector appears to Aeneas in a vision he commits into his care the sacred symbols and images of Troy with the words

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates,

Hos cape fatorum comites538.

Aeneas is represented as starting on his enterprise

Cum sociis gnatoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis539;

as his descendant is represented in the enterprise which is crowned with the victory of Actium540. Finally, in the treaty with Latinus, while the secular and imperial power is left with the Italians, the religious predominance is claimed for Aeneas,—

Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinus habeto,

Imperium sollemne socer541.

The influence of the religious idea of the poem is seen also in the leading characteristic of the hero—‘insignem pietate virum.’ His piety appears in the faith which he has in his mission, and in the trust which he has in divine guidance. Prayer is his first resource in all emergencies; sacrifice and thanksgiving are the accompaniments of all his escapes from danger and difficulty. This characteristic deprives the representation of Aeneas of the interest springing from energetic resource or spontaneous feeling. But as much as the character loses in human interest, it gains in the impression produced [pg 343]of a fitting instrument to carry out the purpose of a Power working secretly for a distant end.

The effect of the same idea is apparent in the way in which the action is furthered by special revelations, visions, prophecies, omens, and the like. These intimations of the future are, for the most part, altogether of an unpoetical and unimaginative character. The omens by which the Fates make their will known, such as the omen of the cakes and of the white sow with her litter, are, like those that occur so often in the pages of Livy, of an essentially prosaic type: not like those in Homer, striking sights or sounds acting on the imagination with the force of divine warning. Occasionally Virgil’s own invention, or perhaps the guidance of some Greek predecessor, suggests signs of a less trivial significance—such as that of the meteor or line of light marking out the way from the burning city to Mount Ida—

Illam, summa super labentem culmina tecti,

Cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva,

Signantemque vias542;

but for the most part the formal, superstitious, prosaic element in the Roman religion—the same element which made their generals before some decisive battle allow themselves to draw their auguries from the mode in which chickens ate their food,—is present in the religious guidance of the action. The Roman belief in the supernatural was arrested and stunted at a primitive stage of religious development. So far from elevating the thought and enlarging the imagination, that belief tended to repress all speculation, lofty contemplation, and poetry. Even Virgil’s idealising art fails to conceal the triviality of the media through which the invisible Power made its will and purpose manifest.

The mythological machinery of the poem also, although borrowed from the repertory of Homer, yet moves in obedience to this silent, impersonal, uncapricious Power. Juno endea[pg 344]vours to strive against it, till forced to confess her impotence. Venus by her intrigues serves to further its purposes. Yet both these Olympian divinities are but puppets ‘in some unknown Power’s employ,’ which makes for its own end alike through their furtherance and antagonism. The gods who take part in the action are of Greek invention, but the Power which even they are obliged to obey, if not Roman in original conception, is yet essentially Roman in significance.

This thought of an unseen Power, working by means of omens and miracles on the mind of the hero of the poem, with the distant aim of establishing universal empire in the hands of a people, obedient to divine will and observant of all religious ceremonies, may be said to be the theological or speculative idea of the poem. It is the doctrine of predestination in its hardest form. It is a thought much inferior both in intellectual subtlety and in ethical value to that of the Fate of Greek tragedy in conflict with human will. Yet there is a kind of material force and greatness in Virgil’s conception, and a consistency not with ideal truth but with visible facts. The ideal truth of Sophocles—the idea of final purification and reconcilement of a noble human nature with the divine nature—is not manifest in the world: it is only in harmony with the best hopes and aspirations of men. Virgil’s idea was the shadow of the great fact apparent in his age,—the vast, inevitable, omnipotent, unsympathetic power of the Roman empire.

But there is another personal and humane religious element, not so prominent and not so influential on the action, but pervading the poem like an atmosphere, purifying it, and making it luminous with the light of a higher region. This is the element of religious faith or hope, personal to Virgil and yet catholic in its significance, and in harmony with the convictions of religious men of all times. The rigid, formal, and narrow conceptions of the Roman religion came into collision both with the belief in gods of like passions with men, revealed in the art and poetry of the Greeks, and with the development [pg 345]of ethical feeling and especially of the sentiment of humanity fostered by Greek philosophy. Virgil’s temperament, patriotic, imaginative, and humane, was in accord with all these modes of religious conception. If national destiny and some portions of the destiny of individuals are shaped by an inflexible power—

Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando543,—

yet the personal agency of Beings, in immediate relation with man, who are not only ‘mindful of the righteous and unrighteous544,’ but who also ‘pios respectant,’ is devoutly acknowledged—

Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid

Usquam iustitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,

Praemia digna ferant545.

Their relation to man is expressed by the same word, pietas, which expresses man’s relation to them—

Iuppiter omnipotens, si nondum exosus ad unum

Troianos, si quid pietas antiqua labores

Respicit humanos546.

They are, like the gods of Tacitus, avengers of wrong as well as rewarders of righteousness: but their avenging wrath against the strong springs from their mercy to the weak—

Di, si qua est caelo pietas, quae talia curet,

Persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant

Debita, qui nati coram me cernere letum

Fecisti et patrios foedasti funere voltus547.

This close personal relation between men and an invisible [pg 346]Being or Beings, like to man in feelings and moral attributes, but infinitely greater in power and knowledge, exists in the Aeneid side by side with the doctrine of the omnipotence of Fate, crushing, if necessary, human wishes and human happiness under its iron determinations. But in the final award of happiness or misery after death, revealed in the sixth book, the agency of Fate gives place to that of a moral dispensation awarding to men their portions according to their actions. The way in which Virgil indicates his belief in the spiritual life after death is analogous to, as well as suggested by, the myths in the Gorgias and in the tenth book of the Republic of Plato. While there is a certain vagueness and uncertainty in his view of the condition in which the souls of ordinary men pass the thousand years of purification before drinking of the waters of Lethe and entering again on a mortal life, the class of sinners to whom eternal punishment is awarded, and that of holy men who dwell for ever in Elysium, are indicated with great definiteness and beauty. In the first class are those whom the old Roman world regarded as impious or unnatural,—those who have violated the primal sanctities of life, who have dealt treacherously with a client or the master of their household, who have risen in rebellion against their country, who have sacrificed their human affections and their duty as citizens to their greed of grain—

Hic, quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat,

Pulsatusve parens et fraus innexa clienti;

Aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis,

Nec partem posuere suis, quae maxima turba est;

Quique ob adulterium caesi, quique arma secuti

Impia, nec veriti dominorum fallere dextras,

Inclusi poenam expectant....

*   *   *   *   *

Vendidit hic auro patriam, dominumque potentem

Imposuit: fixit leges pretio atque refixit:

Hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos:

Ausi omnes immane nefas ausoque potiti548.

[pg 347]

In the other class are those who have died in battle for their native land, who have lived pure and holy lives as priests or poets, who have served mankind by great discoveries, or have left memorials of themselves in good deeds done to their fellow-men—

Hic manus, ob patriam pugnando volnera passi,

Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,

Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,

Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,

Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo549.

poetry of the third century B.C. and that of the Augustan Age. Nor can it be denied that the relation of the Augustan poets to the Emperor was somewhat parallel to that of the scholars and poets of Alexandria to the Ptolemies. The Alexandrine science and literature were also important factors in Roman culture; and the most eminent poets both of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it, with the exception of Horace and Lucretius, acknowledged, in the form as well as the materials of their art, the influence of this latest development of Greek poetry. The nature and amount of the debt incurred to the learned school of Alexandria will be considered later, and it will be seen that it does not seriously affect the originality of the best Roman writers. The age of Queen Anne and of the first George, again, has been called the Augustan Age of English literature. The parallel between the two eras consists in the relation which poets and writers held to men eminent in the State, and also in the finished execution and moderation of tone common to both. The writers of England in our Augustan Age had the advantage over those of Rome in the freedom with which they could express their thoughts; but, even with this advantage, and with the still greater advantage that the English race, in the long course of its literary annals, has given proof of a richer poetical faculty than any other race except the Hellenic, the blindest national partiality would scarcely claim as general and as durable an interest for any poetical work of that era as that claimed for the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and for the Odes and Epistles of Horace.

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

of human sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.

[pg 365]

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute562. He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning; that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

Et vera incessu patuit dea.

*   *   *   *   *

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina563.

[pg 366]

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character. The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus564.

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto

Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda565.

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper566.

[pg 367]

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,

Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:

Nec te Troia capit567.

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate. Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy568. Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,

Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris

Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem

Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit569.

[pg 368]

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced570 in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

[pg 369]

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes571.

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri

Caelicolis et quanta solet572—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae

Numina magna deum573.

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each family into one community574, had been transmitted in popular beliefs and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, [pg 370]identified with the continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis

Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.

Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem

Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret575.

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the ‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,

Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri576.

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat577.

When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—

[pg 371]

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit578.

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’ for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs. It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,

Sanguinis et sacri pateras, animamque sepulchro

Condimus, et magna supremum voce ciemus579.

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!

Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris

Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum

Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,

[pg 372]

Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno580?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,

Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,

‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:

Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:

Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:

Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,

Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto581.’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence, Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona

Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,

Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat

Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem

Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras582.

Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus—

[pg 373]

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum583.

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the ‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, [pg 374]mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes584—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem585—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of a religious epic, that [pg 375]the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier586, following Macrobius, has pointed out the special propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of the ritual application of the words ‘porricio587’ and ‘porrigo’, and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs588,—‘Aenea, vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,

Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;

Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum

Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet589.

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum591,

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

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

or didactic, could as a whole gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive, meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil’s influence over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth, tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in vital force.

but they had given no indication of epic, and little of dramatic genius. Although the episode of the ‘Pastor Aristaeus’ is a specimen of succinct, animated, and pathetic narrative, it must be remembered that this was a late addition to the Georgics, and was probably written after considerable way had been made in the composition of the Aeneid. An epic poet, over and above his purely poetic susceptibility, must possess the art and faculty of a prose historian. Homer has in an unequalled degree the clearness, vividness, and movement in telling his story, which characterise such writers as Herodotus. The account given of Virgil’s mode of composition proves that he took great pains both with the plan and the execution of his narrative. He is said to have arranged the first draught of his story in prose, and then to have worked on the various parts of it as they interested him at the time of composition. There are clear indications that the books were not written in the order in which they stand; and a few inconsistencies of statement between the earlier and later books were left uncorrected at the time of the author’s death. The poem, in the careful arrangement of its materials, bears the stamp of the manner in which it was composed. Like that of every other great Roman, the genius of Virgil was thoroughly orderly and systematic. But along with the power of order Virgil had what many Roman writers want, the power of variety. The narrative of the Aeneid is full of movement, succinct or ample according to the prominence intended to be given to its different parts. The various streams of action are kept separate, yet not too far apart to cause any confusion or forgetfulness when the time comes to unite them. There is at once weight and energy in the movement of the main current: it neither hurries nor flags, but advances for the most part steadily, ‘quadam intentione gravitatis.’ If it wants the buoyancy and vivacity of the narrative of Herodotus, it shows the concentrated energy which distinguishes the works of the great Roman historians. It brings before us rather a series of grave events, bearing on a great issue and following an inevitable course, than the vicissitudes of individual fortunes [pg 360]

incline more to the belief in the personal agency of the gods, and especially in their agency as the avengers of guilt. Thus he opens the passage of the deepest tragic gloom in all his sombre record with the words, ‘Noctem sideribus illustrem quasi convincendum ad scelus dii praebuere

I.

The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times. In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome, in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus140,’ mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief authority [pg 94]to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate, told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence available to the former, and the sensational character of the story itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.

[pg 95]

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

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

The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two of the minor poems published among the Catalepton141, which may without hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to philosophical studies142. The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that supplied by Horace, [pg 96]Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge derived from other sources.

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

Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the clearness of [pg 97]his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to his art had chosen

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae143,

and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world, enjoyed all that was illustrious, brilliant or genial, in the society of his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate associates he greets with hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without assuming the airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only two—unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one more to the number, Aelius Lamia—in connexion with whom he uses the language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil. Whatever may have been the date or circumstances connected with the composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words ‘animae dimidium meae’ establish the futility [pg 98]of the notion, that the subject of this Ode is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine of Cales.

Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important, prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse, written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life based on that of Suetonius144. What then were the materials available to Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, entitled ‘De ingenio moribusque Vergilii.’ Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the ‘memorials which the friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.’ Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a statement that ‘in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an uneducated man’—a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison. Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests of the direction given to the poet’s genius in the choice of the subject of the Georgics.

[pg 99]

A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedianus, born at the commencement of our era, who wrote ‘Contra obtrectatores Vergilii.’ These ‘maligners,’ beginning with those whose names have been condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had assailed the art of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who could have known anything about the matter145.

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

the Roman State. It has been said of him by another Frenchman that he was more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an Empire. Virgil’s object is to make his readers believe in the mission of Rome, as appointed by Divine decree, for the ultimate peace and good government of the world. The work of Rome in the past, the present, and the future is conceived by him as a manifestation of the Deity in his justice, authority, and beneficence.

and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and the woods, and to have trained it to assume some form of art, was Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent illustrations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with what was most perfect in form, noblest in thought, feeling, and expression in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their originality might have been altogether overpowered by an exclusive study of the nobler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning, and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, passions, and experience of a new and more vigorous race.

rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The ‘inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae’ thus betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been named. Virgil’s life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his career, from childhood to maturity, was an education, passive and active, for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art: in later life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by which his poetical gifts were fostered—that of living and varying his residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to his happiness, viz. that he suffered during all his life from delicate or variable health

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

with difficulty follow it. Modern criticism may partially explain, but it cannot enable us to enter with sympathy into that peculiar phase of the latter days of Paganism which first appears in the literature and the historical monuments of the Augustan Age as the Deification of the Emperors. In the pages of Tacitus the worship of the Emperor appears as an established ‘cultus,’ as the symbol and the instrument of Roman domination over foreign nations

that he had read their works, and could skilfully adapt what he found in them to his own national epic. The Georgics, again, show a careful study and assimilation of the thought and language of Lucretius. And to the pursuits of a scholar he united the research of an antiquary. He collected from many sources the myths and traditions connected with the origin of ancient customs and ceremonies, or attaching to the towns and tribes of Italy, famous in early times. He was especially well versed in the ceremonial lore of the Priestly Colleges. Thus, in addition to his higher claims on the admiration of his countrymen, his poems were prized by them as a great repertory of their secular and sacred learning. Many fancies and dim traditions of a remote antiquity, many vestiges of customs and ceremonies which have disappeared from the world, many thoughts and expressions of men who have left scarcely any other memorial of themselves, still survive, because the mind of Virgil discerned some element of interest in them which fitted them to contribute to the representative character of the work to which his life was dedicated.

Greeks, and which should, at the same time, be a true symbol of Rome at the zenith of her fortunes.

ruling faculty of life, the great impeller to action and discovery, the chief prompter both of hope and fear: and thus the movement and impulses of such an age readily yield themselves to imaginative treatment. Poets and dramatists of a later time who desire to represent life in its most energetic phase endeavour to reproduce some image of this early time by a constructive act of imagination. A dramatist may take the mere outline of some ancient legend and fill it with modern thought and sentiment. He is not called on for that realistic reproduction of manners and usages which an epic poet is expected to exhibit on his larger canvas. The difficulty which the latter has to meet is that of verifying by anything in his own experience the impression which he forms from the study of ancient art and records. Homer alone, by living the imaginative life of an earlier time, was able to represent that life in its truth, its fulness of being, its vivid sense of pleasure and pain. The age mirrored in the Homeric poems is the true age of romance and personal enterprise, when the individual acquires ascendency through his own qualities of strength, beauty, courage, force of mind, natural eloquence; when the world is regarded as the scene of supernatural agencies manifesting themselves in visible shape; when men live more in the open air than in houses and cities, and have to procure subsistence, comfort, and security by energy of body and the inventive resources of their minds; and when their hearts are alive to every natural emotion, not deadened by routine or enervated by excess of pleasure. Hence it is that all Homer’s accounts of war and battles, of sea-adventure, of debates in the council of chiefs or in the assemblies of the people, of games and contests of strength, are so full of living interest. Hence too comes the vivacity with which all the details of procuring food, the enjoyment of eating and drinking and sinking to sleep, the arming or clothing of heroes, the management of a ship at sea, the ordinary occupations of the hunter or the herdsman are described. To the same cause is due the truth and appropriateness of all the descriptions from Nature,—of the dawn and sunrise, of storms, [pg 362]

of contemporary history. We can imagine that, at the time when this poem was composed, a more vivid interest would be felt in the fictitious connexion between Rome and Troy from the fact that it was in the First Punic War that this connexion appears first to have been generally recognised. The legend had not as in Virgil’s time the prestige of two centuries, but it had the force of novelty to recommend it for poetic purposes. At the same time the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, on which the attention of the world was fixed at the time when Naevius wrote, must have given a peculiar meaning to the early relations between the two imperial States, as they were first represented in his poem.

I.

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

Nor was it a poetical and speculative impulse only that Virgil received from his predecessor. A new didactic poem, dealing largely with the same subject-matter as that treated by Lucretius,—such as the earth, the heavens, the great elemental forces, the growth of plants, the habits of animals, and the like—contemplating, among other objects, that of determining the relation of man to the sphere in which he is placed, and seeking to invest [pg 200]the ordinary processes of Nature with an ideal charm,—could not help assuming a somewhat similar mould to that which had been originally cast for the philosophic thought and realistic observation of the older poet.

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

Many circumstances conduced to bring Virgil, more powerfully than any other Latin poet, under the spell of Lucretius. As is remarked by Mr. Munro307, when the poem of his predecessor first appeared Virgil was at, or near, the age which is most immediately impressed and moulded by a contemporary work of genius. The enthusiasm for philosophy, expressed in the short poem written immediately before he began to study under Siron, implies that he had been already attracted by the subject of which Lucretius was the only worthy308 Latin exponent; and his studies under that teacher must have prepared his mind to receive the higher instruction of the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ The song of Silenus in the sixth Eclogue and many expressions and cadences in other poems of the series attest the poetical, if not the speculative, impression thus produced. But the clearest testimony of Virgil’s recognition of the influence of his predecessor is found in that passage of the Georgics in which he speaks of himself most from his heart,—

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

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

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

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

Fortunatas et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,

Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores, etc.,—(II. 493.)

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

He would thus seem to have looked on Lucretius with something of that veneration with which Lucretius regards Epicurus, Empedocles, and Ennius, and with which Dante long after regarded Virgil himself. The two greatest among the Roman poets had many feelings in common,—the love of Nature, the love of study, especially the study of ancient poetry and of science, a natural shrinking from the pomp and luxury of city-life and from the schemes of worldly ambition, an abhorrence of the crimes and violence of civil war. They felt the charm of the same kind of outward scenes,—of rivers flowing through green pastures, of meadow and woodland, of rich corn-fields and vineyards. They had the same strong sympathy with the life of animals associated with man’s labour, the same fellow-[pg 202]feeling with the pain and the happiness of which human affection is the source. The numerous passages in which phrases or cadences, thought or imagery in the Georgics recall phrases or representation in the earlier poem309, leave no doubt that Virgil found in Lucretius a heart and spirit with which his own largely receptive nature could in many ways sympathise, as well as that he recognised in him a guide whom he could follow in imagination ‘among the lonely heights of Parnassus310.’

Yet, on the other hand, it is quite true that both the character and genius of Virgil are essentially of a different type from those of Lucretius.—They are both thoroughly original representatives of different elements in the Roman and Italian character.—So far as he represents the mind and temper of Rome, Lucretius represents the old order which had passed away. Though scarcely anything is known of the circumstances of his life, yet his gentile name (as is shown by Mr. Munro), his relation of equality to Memmius, the stamp of his powerful personality impressed on his poem, point to the conclusion that he was one of the old Roman aristocracy, born into a time when many of its members had begun to retire in disgust from active interest in the Republic, which they were no longer able to govern. It was, as has been already remarked311, to this class among the Romans, almost exclusively, that the taste for literature was confined in the last age of the Republic; and it was among men of this class, such as the Luculli and Hortensius, and the Velleius and Torquatus of Cicero’s Dialogues, that the Epicurean philosophy found its chief adherents. The poem of Lucretius shows all the courage and energy, the power of command, the sense of superiority and the direct simplicity of manner emanating from it, which are the inheritance of a great governing class. He is the one man of true genius for poetry whom that class gave to Rome. His lofty pathos and tenderness of feeling are the graces of his own nature, refined and purified by the most [pg 203]humanising studies. His profound melancholy is a mood natural to one who looks on the passing away of a great order of things, political, social, and religious, in the midst of scenes of turbulence and violence, and takes refuge from an alien world in the contemplation of another order of things, infinitely more majestic than either the old social state which was shaken and tottering to its fall, or the new which was yet ‘powerless to be born.’

There could scarcely be any greater contrast, in social relations and the dispositions arising out of them, between any two men, than between the representative of the old governing families of the Republic, and the humbly-born native of the Cisalpine province,—delicate in health, modest and self-distrustful, yet endowed with a deep consciousness of genius and a resolution to follow that guidance only,—entering on manhood and beginning his career as poet contemporaneously with the events which determined the ascendency of the new order of things, and identified with it through his personal relations to the leading men of the new Empire,—a poet who derived from his birth and early nurture ‘the spirit of the ages of Faith312,’—one too who had been happy in his early home-affections and in the friendships of his manhood, and who was able to dedicate his mature years to his art under conditions of the greatest personal and national security. In considering the influence of the ideas of Lucretius on the mind of Virgil, we must accordingly make large allowance for the medium of alien sympathies, personal, social, and political, through which they were refracted. We must take into consideration also the wide difference between the philosophic poet and the pure poetic artist. The feeling of Virgil towards philosophy was apparently one of aspiration rather than of possession. He shows no interest in the processes of enquiry,—in tracing the operation of great laws in manifold phenomena,—in investigating one obscure subject after another, with the confident assurance that every discovery [pg 204]is a step towards the light and the ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. Virgil recognises the source of his own strength in the words

Flumina amem silvasque.

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

kid to Faunus, or offerings of flowers and fruit to the Penates. The feelings connected with this vein of belief as they are represented in the poetry of the Augustan Age,—

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

most powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling in its intensity the ‘burning passion set to the lyre by the Aeolian maiden,’ is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his

to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate, told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence available to the former, and the sensational character of the story itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.

of the notion, that the subject of this Ode is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine of Cales.

which he cast over Dante: verses from the Aeneid break his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring

gives way to manly sorrow for the mute companion of his warfare,’ indicative of a bolder invention than that which is usually ascribed to Virgil. It is remarkable that poets whose spirit is most purely religious,—both in the strength of conviction and the limitation of sympathy produced by the religious spirit—Aeschylus, Virgil, and Milton—seem to be moved to their most energetic creativeness by the idea of antagonism to the supreme will on the part of a human, or superhuman but limited will: and that they cannot help raising in their readers a glow of admiration as well as a sense of awe in their embodiment of this clash between finite and infinite power. The sketch of Mezentius cannot indeed be compared with two of the most daring conceptions and perfected creations of human genius,—the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Satan of Milton,—yet, if it does not enlist our ethical sympathies like the former of these, like the second it receives the tribute of that involuntary admiration, which is given to courage, even when allied with moral evil, so long as it is not absolutely divorced from the capability of sympathetic and elevated emotion.

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II.

The confidence which the Romans felt in the continued existence of their Empire and in their superiority over all other nations was closely connected with their religious feeling and belief521. Horace has expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and conciseness in the single line,

Dis te minorem quod geris imperas522.

And it was Virgil’s aim in the Aeneid to show that this edifice of Roman Empire, of which the enterprise of Aeneas was the foundation, on which the old Kings of Alba and of Rome and the successive generations of great men under the Republic had successively laboured, and on which Augustus placed the coping-stone, was no mere work of human hands, but had been designed and built up by divine purpose and guidance. The Aeneid expresses the religious as it does the national sentiment of Rome. The two modes of sentiment were inseparable. The belief of the Romans in themselves was another form of their absolute faith in the invisible Power which protected them. This invisible Power was sometimes recognised by them under the name of ‘Fortuna Urbis,’—the spiritual counterpart of the city visible to their eyes. The recognition of this divinity was not only compatible with, but involved the recognition of, many other divinities associated with it in this protecting office. But to these numerous divinities no very distinct personality was attached. It was the awe of an ever-present invisible Power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain definite observances, capable of being alienated for a time by any deviation from these observances, and of being again appeased by a right reading of and humble compliance with its will, and working out its own purposes through the agency of the Roman arms and the wisdom of Roman counsels, that was the moving power of Roman religion. The Jove of the [pg 337]Capitol in early times, the living Emperor under the Empire, were the visible representatives of this mysterious Power. But its influence was acknowledged throughout all Roman history in the importance attached to the great priestly offices, and especially to that of Pontifex Maximus, which became inseparably united to the office of Emperor; in the scrupulous regard paid to the auspices through which this Power was believed to communicate its will; in the ominous interpretation put on all appearances of departure from the ordinary course of Nature; and in the reference to the Sibylline books in all questions of difficulty. This impersonal Power is to the Romans both the object of awe and the source of their confidence. They seem never to distrust the steadfastness of its favour. They rather feel themselves its willing instruments, co-operating with it, blindly sometimes and sometimes remissly, and for every failure of intelligence or vigilance, punished by temporal calamities.

The word by which Virgil recognises the agency of this impersonal, or perhaps we should rather say undefined, Power, is ‘Fatum,’ or more often in the plural, ‘Fata.’ It is by the ‘Fates’ that the action is set in motion and directed to its issue. The human and even the divine actors in the story are instruments in their hands; some more, some less conscious of the part they are performing. Even Jupiter is represented rather as cognisant of the Fates than as their author. Sometimes indeed they are spoken of as ‘Fata Iovis;’ and to the assurance given by him to Venus ‘manent immota tuorum Fata tibi,’ he adds the words ‘neque me sententia vertit523.’ But again, while his will is suspended in a great crisis of the action, their operation is persistent and inevitable:—

Rex Iuppiter omnibus idem:

Fata viam invenient524.

The original relation between this impersonal agency and the [pg 338]deliberate purpose of Jupiter is left undefined. But there is no collision between them. While the prayers of men are addressed to a conscious personal being, ‘Iuppiter omnipotens,’ the sovereignty of an impersonal Power over the fortunes of nations is acknowledged, as in the line—

Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum525.

Every reader of the Aeneid must feel the predominance of this idea in the poem, and the constantly recurring and even monotonous expression of it. In the first three books, for instance, the word ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ occurs more than forty times. Aeneas starts on his wanderings ‘fato profugus.’ Juno desires to secure the empire of the world to Carthage ‘Si qua fata sinant.’ She struggles against the conviction of her powerlessness to prevent the Trojan settlement in Italy, ‘Quippe vetor fatis.’ Aeneas comforts his companions by the announcement of the peaceful settlements awaiting them,—

sedes ubi fata quietas

Ostendunt.

Venus consoles herself for the destruction of Troy by the thought of the destiny awaiting Aeneas, ‘fatis contraria fata rependens.’ Jupiter reassures her after the storm with the words ‘manent immota tuorum Fata tibi;’ and he reveals to her one page in their secret volume,—‘fatorum arcana movebo.’ Mercury is sent to prepare the reception of Aeneas in Carthage,

ne fati nescia Dido

Finibus arceret.

Aeneas describes himself as starting from Troy ‘data fata secutus.’ A hundred more instances might be given of the dominating influence of this idea in the poem. It is the ‘common-place’ of the Virgilian epic. While it adds impressiveness to the historical significance of the poem, it detracts largely from the personal interest by the limits which it imposes on the [pg 339]free agency of the divine and human actors playing their part in it.

The same idea is often expressed by Tacitus, but it does not in him dominate so absolutely over human will, nor is it asserted with the same firmness of conviction. His conception of the regulating power over all human, or at least over all national existence, seems to waver between this idea of some unknown power steadily working out its purpose, of an element in human affairs baffling all calculation—the παράλογος of Thucydides and the ‘Fortuna saevo laeta negotio’ of Horace—and of the gods generally as personal avengers of crime, and sometimes as the kind protectors of the State. Thus in the Germania526 the earliest foreboding of the danger which threatened and ultimately overthrew the fabric of the Empire is indicated in the words ‘urgentibus imperii fatis:’ in the Agricola the result of the invasion of Britain under Claudius is summed up in the words ‘domitae gentes, capti reges, et monstratus fatis Vespasianus527:’ in the Histories the grounds of confidence on the part of the Vespasians in taking arms against the Vitellians are summed up in the words ‘dux Mucianus et Vespasiani nomen ac nihil arduum fatis528.’ But elsewhere he speaks of ‘ludibria rerum humanarum529,’ in language reminding us of Lucretius, and, in almost the very words of Horace, of ‘instabilis fortunae summaque et ima miscentis530.’ Like Horace, he seems to acknowledge the supremacy of chance or an ironical spirit over individual fortunes, and, like Virgil, that of Fate over the national destiny. But in the Annals, his latest work, he seems to [pg 340]incline more to the belief in the personal agency of the gods, and especially in their agency as the avengers of guilt. Thus he opens the passage of the deepest tragic gloom in all his sombre record with the words, ‘Noctem sideribus illustrem quasi convincendum ad scelus dii praebuere531.’ So too he speaks of appealing to the ‘avenging gods532;’ and of the ‘fear of the wrath of heaven533.’ Occasionally indeed he speaks of ‘the kindness of the gods534,’ but more often of their wrath or their indifference. Thus he attributes the ascendency of Sejanus not to any superior ability on his own part, but to ‘the wrath of the gods against the Roman commonwealth535;’ and, in recounting a number of omens which followed on the murder of Agrippina, he makes the sarcastic comment, ‘quae adeo sine cura deum eveniebant, ut multos post annos Nero imperium et scelera continuaverit536.’ In a writer like Tacitus it is impossible to distinguish with certainty between the pure expression of his convictions and the rhetorical and poetical colouring of his style. Yet both the frequency with which such passages recur, and the earnestness of their tone even when they seem most ironical, leave no doubt that, like Thucydides, he was not indifferent to these questions, although ‘perplexed in the extreme’ by the apparent absence, or at least uncertainty, of any steadfast moral order in the award of happiness and calamity to men.

The ‘Fatum’ or ‘Fata’ of Virgil can scarcely be said to act with the aim of establishing right in the world, or of punishing wrong. Their action is purely political, neither ethical, though its ultimate tendency is beneficent, nor personal. Yet in the prominence which is given to this determining element in national affairs Virgil is expressing the strongest and most abiding belief of the Roman people, just as the Greek poets and historians of the fifth century B.C., in the prominence they [pg 341]give to the element of uncertainty in the world,—the irony in human affairs, or the Nemesis of the gods excited against great prosperity even when not misused or gained by crime,—expressed the dominant idea in the minds of their contemporaries. Mr. Grote traces the origin of this last idea to the experience of the rapid vicissitudes from one extreme of fortune to the other, brought about by the great prosperity of the Greek states on the one hand and their incessant wars and political feuds on the other. The origin of the other idea is to be found in the almost unbroken success of Rome in all her enterprises, from the burning of the city by the Gauls till the full establishment of empire. There is no history in which chance plays so small a part, and in which so little is episodical. The ‘good fortune of the Roman people’ will be found to be explained either by the traditional policy of never making a new enemy until they had well disposed of the old, or by the magnanimity (as compared at least with the policy of other States537) by which they converted the nations successively conquered by them into fellow-citizens or obedient allies, or by the indomitable resolution which never knew to yield to defeat. No important event in their history is isolated; each serves as a link in the chain which connects their past with their future. The unvarying result of their national discipline and policy, and of the force accumulated through centuries before they became corrupted by the gains of conquest, might well appear to a race, gifted with little speculative capacity, to be determined and accomplished by an Omnipotent Power behind them.

This idea determines the general conduct of the action in the Aeneid. The actors in the story either oppose the irresistible tendency of things and suffer defeat or perish in their resistance; or, with gradually increasing knowledge, they co-operate with and become the instruments of this tendency. And as it is by faith in the divine assistance and guidance that [pg 342]the latter are able to act their part successfully, the religious motives of the representation assume a prominence at least equal to that of its national and political motives. Thus the object of all the hero’s wanderings is not only to found a city, but to introduce a new worship into Italy—‘inferretque deos Latio.’ When Hector appears to Aeneas in a vision he commits into his care the sacred symbols and images of Troy with the words

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates,

Hos cape fatorum comites538.

Aeneas is represented as starting on his enterprise

Cum sociis gnatoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis539;

as his descendant is represented in the enterprise which is crowned with the victory of Actium540. Finally, in the treaty with Latinus, while the secular and imperial power is left with the Italians, the religious predominance is claimed for Aeneas,—

Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinus habeto,

Imperium sollemne socer541.

The influence of the religious idea of the poem is seen also in the leading characteristic of the hero—‘insignem pietate virum.’ His piety appears in the faith which he has in his mission, and in the trust which he has in divine guidance. Prayer is his first resource in all emergencies; sacrifice and thanksgiving are the accompaniments of all his escapes from danger and difficulty. This characteristic deprives the representation of Aeneas of the interest springing from energetic resource or spontaneous feeling. But as much as the character loses in human interest, it gains in the impression produced [pg 343]of a fitting instrument to carry out the purpose of a Power working secretly for a distant end.

The effect of the same idea is apparent in the way in which the action is furthered by special revelations, visions, prophecies, omens, and the like. These intimations of the future are, for the most part, altogether of an unpoetical and unimaginative character. The omens by which the Fates make their will known, such as the omen of the cakes and of the white sow with her litter, are, like those that occur so often in the pages of Livy, of an essentially prosaic type: not like those in Homer, striking sights or sounds acting on the imagination with the force of divine warning. Occasionally Virgil’s own invention, or perhaps the guidance of some Greek predecessor, suggests signs of a less trivial significance—such as that of the meteor or line of light marking out the way from the burning city to Mount Ida—

Illam, summa super labentem culmina tecti,

Cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva,

Signantemque vias542;

but for the most part the formal, superstitious, prosaic element in the Roman religion—the same element which made their generals before some decisive battle allow themselves to draw their auguries from the mode in which chickens ate their food,—is present in the religious guidance of the action. The Roman belief in the supernatural was arrested and stunted at a primitive stage of religious development. So far from elevating the thought and enlarging the imagination, that belief tended to repress all speculation, lofty contemplation, and poetry. Even Virgil’s idealising art fails to conceal the triviality of the media through which the invisible Power made its will and purpose manifest.

The mythological machinery of the poem also, although borrowed from the repertory of Homer, yet moves in obedience to this silent, impersonal, uncapricious Power. Juno endea[pg 344]vours to strive against it, till forced to confess her impotence. Venus by her intrigues serves to further its purposes. Yet both these Olympian divinities are but puppets ‘in some unknown Power’s employ,’ which makes for its own end alike through their furtherance and antagonism. The gods who take part in the action are of Greek invention, but the Power which even they are obliged to obey, if not Roman in original conception, is yet essentially Roman in significance.

This thought of an unseen Power, working by means of omens and miracles on the mind of the hero of the poem, with the distant aim of establishing universal empire in the hands of a people, obedient to divine will and observant of all religious ceremonies, may be said to be the theological or speculative idea of the poem. It is the doctrine of predestination in its hardest form. It is a thought much inferior both in intellectual subtlety and in ethical value to that of the Fate of Greek tragedy in conflict with human will. Yet there is a kind of material force and greatness in Virgil’s conception, and a consistency not with ideal truth but with visible facts. The ideal truth of Sophocles—the idea of final purification and reconcilement of a noble human nature with the divine nature—is not manifest in the world: it is only in harmony with the best hopes and aspirations of men. Virgil’s idea was the shadow of the great fact apparent in his age,—the vast, inevitable, omnipotent, unsympathetic power of the Roman empire.

But there is another personal and humane religious element, not so prominent and not so influential on the action, but pervading the poem like an atmosphere, purifying it, and making it luminous with the light of a higher region. This is the element of religious faith or hope, personal to Virgil and yet catholic in its significance, and in harmony with the convictions of religious men of all times. The rigid, formal, and narrow conceptions of the Roman religion came into collision both with the belief in gods of like passions with men, revealed in the art and poetry of the Greeks, and with the development [pg 345]of ethical feeling and especially of the sentiment of humanity fostered by Greek philosophy. Virgil’s temperament, patriotic, imaginative, and humane, was in accord with all these modes of religious conception. If national destiny and some portions of the destiny of individuals are shaped by an inflexible power—

Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando543,—

yet the personal agency of Beings, in immediate relation with man, who are not only ‘mindful of the righteous and unrighteous544,’ but who also ‘pios respectant,’ is devoutly acknowledged—

Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid

Usquam iustitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,

Praemia digna ferant545.

Their relation to man is expressed by the same word, pietas, which expresses man’s relation to them—

Iuppiter omnipotens, si nondum exosus ad unum

Troianos, si quid pietas antiqua labores

Respicit humanos546.

They are, like the gods of Tacitus, avengers of wrong as well as rewarders of righteousness: but their avenging wrath against the strong springs from their mercy to the weak—

Di, si qua est caelo pietas, quae talia curet,

Persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant

Debita, qui nati coram me cernere letum

Fecisti et patrios foedasti funere voltus547.

This close personal relation between men and an invisible [pg 346]Being or Beings, like to man in feelings and moral attributes, but infinitely greater in power and knowledge, exists in the Aeneid side by side with the doctrine of the omnipotence of Fate, crushing, if necessary, human wishes and human happiness under its iron determinations. But in the final award of happiness or misery after death, revealed in the sixth book, the agency of Fate gives place to that of a moral dispensation awarding to men their portions according to their actions. The way in which Virgil indicates his belief in the spiritual life after death is analogous to, as well as suggested by, the myths in the Gorgias and in the tenth book of the Republic of Plato. While there is a certain vagueness and uncertainty in his view of the condition in which the souls of ordinary men pass the thousand years of purification before drinking of the waters of Lethe and entering again on a mortal life, the class of sinners to whom eternal punishment is awarded, and that of holy men who dwell for ever in Elysium, are indicated with great definiteness and beauty. In the first class are those whom the old Roman world regarded as impious or unnatural,—those who have violated the primal sanctities of life, who have dealt treacherously with a client or the master of their household, who have risen in rebellion against their country, who have sacrificed their human affections and their duty as citizens to their greed of grain—

Hic, quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat,

Pulsatusve parens et fraus innexa clienti;

Aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis,

Nec partem posuere suis, quae maxima turba est;

Quique ob adulterium caesi, quique arma secuti

Impia, nec veriti dominorum fallere dextras,

Inclusi poenam expectant....

*   *   *   *   *

Vendidit hic auro patriam, dominumque potentem

Imposuit: fixit leges pretio atque refixit:

Hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos:

Ausi omnes immane nefas ausoque potiti548.

[pg 347]

In the other class are those who have died in battle for their native land, who have lived pure and holy lives as priests or poets, who have served mankind by great discoveries, or have left memorials of themselves in good deeds done to their fellow-men—

Hic manus, ob patriam pugnando volnera passi,

Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,

Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,

Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,

Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo549.

and the play of human passions and impulses: and in this it is in accordance both with the actual history of Rome, and with the record of it contained in literature.

the mighty life which was to be; the last great epic is weighty with the accumulated experience of all that had been. The stream of epic poetry shows no longer the jubilant force and purity of waters—‘exercita cursu flumina’—which rise in the high mountain-land separating barbarism from civilisation; it moves more slowly and less clearly through more level and cultivated districts; its volume is swollen and its weight increased by tributaries which have never known the ‘bright speed

believing that Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote. Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the restoration of security and abundance to the land:—

[pg 185]

III.

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

The chief modes of rural industry treated in the various books are those which flourished in Italy,—the tillage of the land for various crops, the cultivation of the vine and the olive, the breeding and rearing of cattle, sheep, and horses, and the tending of bees. It is noticed by Servius that the agricultural precepts of the poem apply only to Italy and not to other lands: ‘Sane agriculturae huius praecepta non ad omnes pertinent terras, sed ad solum situm Italiae.’ The frequent references to the products of other lands serve to suggest by contrast the superiority of Italy in those which are the special subject of the poem and which are most essential to human well-being. Cato also is represented by Cicero282 as resting the charm of a country life in the contemplation of the same operations of Nature as those indicated in the opening lines of the Georgics:—

Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram

Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites

Conveniat283,—

[pg 186]

The number of Roman writers who treated in prose of this subject, both before and after Virgil, testifies further to the strong national interest attaching to it. Among these writers, Varro, the immediate predecessor of Virgil, associates the subject directly with the pride which the Romans felt in their country. He introduces the speakers in his Dialogue as holding their conversation in the Temple of Tellus, and examining a map or painting of Italy on the wall. One of the speakers addresses the others in these words, ‘You who have travelled over many lands, have you ever seen any more richly cultivated than Italy? I, indeed, have never seen any so richly cultivated.’ He especially characterises the excellence of its corn-crops, its vines, olives, and fruit-trees: ‘What spelt shall I compare to the Campanian? what wheat to the Apulian? what wine to the Falernian? what oil to that of Venafrum? is not Italy planted with trees, so that the whole of it seems an orchard284?’ Other authors, Virgil himself among them285, and Columella in the Introduction to his treatise286, testify to the pride which the Italians took in their breed of horses and herds of cattle. And though the Italian bees and their product were not so famous in poetry as the bees of Hymettus and ‘the honey of Hybla,’ yet Horace speaks of the country near Tarentum as one ‘where the honey yields not to the honey of Hymettus;’ and in another Ode, in which he contrasts his own moderate estate with the resources of richer men, he mentions Calabrian honey along with the wine of Formiae and the fleeces of Gallic pastures among the chief sources of wealth:—

Quanquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes

Nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora

Languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis

Crescunt vellera pascuis287.

[pg 187]

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

The subject was moreover intimately associated with the national history. Several of the early legends, such as those of Cincinnatus, and, in more historical times, of Atilius Regulus and Curius Dentatus, attest the prominence which agriculture enjoyed among the pursuits of the foremost men in the Republic. The surnames of many noble families, patrician and plebeian, such as the Lentuli, Stolones, Bubulci, Pisones, Dolabellae, and the name of the great Fabian Gens, are connected etymologically with agricultural occupations, products, or implements, and afford evidence of a time when the men who filled the great offices of the State lived on their own lands288, and were known for the success with which they improved their farms. The passion to possess and subdue the land was, in the early history of the Republic, the main motive power both of the political and military history of Rome. Even down to the establishment of the Empire there was no question which more divided the two great parties in the State than that of the Agrarian laws. And though, after the conquest of Italy, Roman wars were fought for dominion rather than for new territory, yet the hope of owning land, if not on Italian yet on some foreign soil, which he should hold by his sword as well as cultivate by his plough, supported the Roman [pg 188]soldier, even under the Empire, through the long years of his service. The Roman ‘colonies,’ the origin of so many famous European cities, were settlements of ‘Coloni’ or cultivators of the soil.

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

Non hic te carmine ficto

Atque per ambages et longa exorsa tenebo.

[pg 189]

and

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,

Omnia iam volgata289.

But it is not the judgement of the poet, but the despotic will of the Emperor, that is responsible for this imperfection. The fourth Book originally ended with an episode which afforded scope for the expression of personal feeling, for awakening an interest in that land which was now of vast importance to the State, and which affected the imagination of cultivated Romans as it does that of cultivated men in modern times290, and for illustrating the national greatness and the recent history of Rome. In the first edition the mention of Egypt at line 287 had led Virgil to celebrate the administration of that province under his early friend Cornelius Gallus. When Gallus fell into disgrace and was forced to commit suicide in 26 B.C., Virgil was required to re-edit the poem with a new concluding episode291. The subject treated in the earlier edition of the poem would have enabled Virgil to give renewed expression to his admiration and affection for the Gallus of the Eclogues, to tell the tale of the downfall of Cleopatra, and to magnify the greatness of Rome in the conquest and government of her provinces. The episode as it now stands is a finished piece of metrical execution; it illustrates the attraction which the Greek mythological stories had for educated Romans; it is expressed in those tones of tender pathos of which Virgil was a master; but it is at the same time a standing proof of the malign [pg 190]influence which the Imperial despotism already exercised on the spontaneous inspiration of genius, as well as on all sincere expression of feeling.

of Augustus as at once a great earthly conqueror and a being of divine descent and possessed of more than mortal attributes: the especial object of care to the supreme God of Heaven; to Apollo, whom, since the victory of Actium, he claimed as his tutelary divinity; to the Earth-goddess, the giver of fruitfulness and prosperity; to Mars, the second divine ancestor of the Roman race, in whose honour the famous temple, of which the ruins are yet visible, had been raised after the battle of Philippi. The statue is of Greek workmanship; the Greek divinities are presented in the forms familiar to Greek art; but the idea is purely Roman, and born of the immediate circumstances of the age.

follow in imagination ‘the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,’ meets us also in the lines,

as Varius was accepted as the poet of epic, Pollio of tragic poetry:—

pressed by the word ‘humanitas,’ continued to prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word pietas, as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our ‘piety’ and of our ‘pity.’ The Power above man is regarded by him not as an unreal phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.

colossal master-work of Livy;’ and that was the product of the later and least brilliant period of this epoch.

plan, modified to suit his own ideas, in the personal dedication; in the Invocation and short introduction to his various books; in his manner of arranging, connecting, and illustrating the successive stages of his exposition; and, lastly, in the use which he makes of episodes, chiefly at the end of various books, with the view of enabling his readers to feel the intimate connexion of his subject with the most valued interests of life,—with religion and morality, with family affection, with peace, prosperity, and national greatness.

qu’aimerait l’avenir.’ If it was as a great national poet, the rival of Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus, that he exercised the most powerful spell over his contemporaries, it was rather as the ‘pius vates,’ the prophetic teacher, that, in spite of themselves, he gained ascendency over the cultivated minds of the early Latin and the mediaeval Churches

taneous invention, he possessed a remarkable power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the invention of a new world of wonder and adventure,—a work most difficult of accomplishment in a late stage of human development,—the most attractive aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving, under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial passions of an earlier and ruder age.

That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer: ‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s [pg 208]mouth320 the sentiment that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the didactic directions of the Georgics were given.

pride which he feels in every detail of his subject, from the great human interests with which these details are associated in his mind. What these human interests are is brought out prominently in the episodes of the poem, which still remain to be considered.

Tacitus says ‘should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a happy memory of himself

great ideas and interests with which the poem deals. But the three most important passages, those of most original invention and profound feeling, viz. those at Book I. 466 to the end of the Book, Book II. 136 to 177, and also from line 458 to the end, serve like those great cardinal passages in the Aeneid, in which the action is projected from a remote legendary past into the actual present, to bring into light the true central interest of the poem,—the bearing of the whole subject on the greatness and well-being of the Italian race.

in the Age of Augustus. And the sincere and appreciative interest which they took in one another was not only a source of great happiness in their lives, but was able to fulfil the function of an enlightened and generous criticism. Poets were in the habit of reading their works to their friends before submitting them to the public. It is characteristic of the modesty of Virgil and of his unceasing aim at perfection that he was in the habit of reading to his friends chiefly those passages in his works of which he was himself distrustful. The fastidious taste of Horace sometimes rebelled against the importunity of those who desired to hear him read his own compositions. Yet the well-known

knowledge the sources of which are difficult to discover

of cultivated nature,’ or fresh and picturesque with the charm of meadow, river-bank, or woodland pasture.

lightened by personal experience. The eminent men with whom he was brought into contact, Octavianus, Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, are not individualised; though the different feelings of reverential or loyal respect, of colder deference, or admiring enthusiasm, which they severally excited in him, can be clearly distinguished. In the undesigned revelation of himself, which every author makes in his writings, there are few indications of the religious and moral feeling and of the national sentiment which are among the principal elements in Virgil’s maturer poems: but we find abundantly the evidence of a mind open to all tender and refined influences, free from every taint of envy or malice, serious and pensive, and finding its chief happiness in making the charm, which fascinated him in books, in Nature, and in life, heard in the deep and rich music of the language, of which he first drew out the full capabilities:—

illustrative images in Lucretius. Virgil too is much inferior to the older poet, and much less original, in the general reflections on life which he occasionally introduces,—such as that at iii. 66,—

the ordinary processes of Nature with an ideal charm,—could not help assuming a somewhat similar mould to that which had been originally cast for the philosophic thought and realistic observation of the older poet.

lines—Namque canebat uti—are imitated from the song of Orpheus in the first book of the Argonautics

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

Spenser, it is yet a solid creation of the classical mind, exercised for the first time on a great scale in bodying forth an imaginary foretime, peopling it with the personages of earlier art or of the poet’s fancy, and filling up the outlines of tradition with the sentiment, the interests, and the ideas of the age in which the poem was written.

III.

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

The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families, or men intimately associated [pg 22]with them; and they wrote to please themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.

Among the names of the patrons of literature that of Maecenas has become proverbial, but perhaps even more important than his patronage was that exercised by the Emperor himself. Not only was he a man of great natural gifts, but he had received a most elaborate education. He was a powerful and accomplished orator, and a practised writer40. As was not unusual with men who had received a thorough rhetorical training, he attempted the composition of a tragedy, and had the sense to treat his failure with good-natured humour41. He made other attempts in verse, and composed several works in prose, chiefly turning on the history of his own times. He showed in his composition an especial regard for purity and correctness of style. Suetonius tells us that he allowed no composition to be written on himself ‘except in a serious spirit and by the best writers.’ Horace testifies to this fastidiousness in the line,—

Cui male si palpere, recalcitret undique tutus42.

[pg 23]

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

Dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae43.

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

The relation between Maecenas and the members of his literary circle was one of more intimacy and unreserve. This circle included among its members Virgil and Varius, Horace and Propertius. The great works with which the name of Maecenas is inseparably associated,—the Georgics of Virgil, the first three books of the Odes of Horace, and the first book of his Epistles,—entitle him to be honoured as among the most enlightened and fortunate of all the patrons of literature. Virgil addresses him in language not only of loyal admiration, but of acknowledgment for the encouragement and guidance which he owed to him: and that such an influence may have been really exercised by the inferior over the superior mind is shown [pg 24]by the testimony given by Goethe of the stimulus which his genius derived from the encouragement of the Duke of Weimar44. Horace writes of Maecenas in the language not only of admiration and gratitude, but of warm and disinterested affection; and the favour shown to Propertius, a poet of a very opposite type, shows that his appreciation of genius was not limited by a narrow partisanship. His character seems to have left very different impressions on the minds of his contemporaries, according as they knew him intimately or merely from the outside. It is a proof of his capacity and his loyalty45 that he was the one man thoroughly trusted by Augustus in all affairs of state, as Agrippa was in war: and that his qualities of heart were no less admirable appears not only from the poetical eulogies in the Georgics, the Elegies of Propertius, and the Odes of Horace, but also from the more natural tribute to his worth as a man and his sincerity as a friend contained in Horace’s Satires and Epistles. On the world outside his own immediate circle he produced the impression of an effeminate devotion to pleasure. His love of pleasure and his shrinking from death seem to be confirmed by the testimony of Horace:—

Cur me querelis, etc.

The sketch of him by Velleius Paterculus presents the view of his character suggested by the contrast between his ability as a statesman and the apparent indolence of his private life: ‘A man, who, while in all critical emergencies displaying sleepless vigilance, foresight, and capacity for action, yet, during intervals of relaxation, was in his indolent self-indulgence almost more effeminate than a woman46.’ It is remarkable that Tacitus ascribes a similar character to the man in whom, after the death of [pg 25]Maecenas, Augustus most confided—Sallustius Crispus47. Perhaps the position of Maecenas, as the trusted confidant of a jealous and imperious master, required him to begin his career by playing a part which afterwards became habitual to him. Among the traits of his character indicated by Horace are knowledge of men, reticence, and indifference to the outward distinctions of birth and rank. Whatever ambition he had was to exercise real power as the minister of Augustus, not to enjoy official titles. He certainly used his position to direct the genius both of Virgil and Horace to public objects. There is no reason to doubt the fact noticed in the Life of Virgil, that he influenced him in the choice of the subject of the Georgics with the view to revive the chief among the ancient arts, ‘by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had grown great.’ But it was with Horace that he shared all his public interests and private feelings, and it is not a very hazardous conjecture to presume that many of the Odes and familiar writings of the latter poet reflect the tastes and sentiments of Maecenas, perhaps give back the very style and manner of his conversation. The alternation observable in the Odes of Horace between an apparent devotion to the lighter themes of lyrical poetry and the serious interest in great affairs, the irony disclaiming all lofty and austere pretension, the Epicurean taste for simplicity combined with the Epicurean love of pleasure, the indifference to outward state, and the urbanity and knowledge of the world, more conspicuous in Horace than in any other ancient poet, are suggestive of habitual contact with the worldly wisdom, the real power disguised under an appearance of carelessness, the refined enjoyment of life, the genial social nature, which were not only a great power in the State, a great charm in the life of a by-gone age, but have [pg 26]through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and beneficent influence on human culture.

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

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

No direct literary influence was exercised by Agrippa, who is described by the elder Pliny as ‘A man, whose manners more [pg 27]nearly approached rustic plainness than refinement of taste;’ but his military and naval successes, and still more the great works of utility and beauty erected under his superintendence, contributed to the same end as the poetry of Virgil and Horace, that of perpetuating the spell of the name of Caesar upon the imagination of the world.

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

Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas

Quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus48;

and it is to Gallus that he assigns the pre-eminence in his own especial province of poetry,—as he represents the shepherd-poet Linus presenting him with the reeds which the Muses had of old given to ‘the sage of Ascra49.’

The Odes of Horace, addressed to men of high official station and ancient family, such as Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Aelius Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, still further illustrate the close connexion between the great world and the world of letters. His later Epistles, many of which are addressed to young men of rank devoting themselves to literary studies and pursuits, attest the continuance of the same tendency as time went on. And in the following generation Ovid and [pg 28]his contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas50. The chief cause of this close bond of union between social rank and literary genius was the fact that the men who in a former age would, from their birth and education, have had a great political career before them, were now debarred from the highest sphere of active life; while they were not yet, what they became under the systematic corruption of the later Caesars, too enervated and demoralised to continue susceptible of the nobler kinds of intellectual pleasure.

Probably in no other aristocratic or courtly society has there been so large a number of men possessing the ability and knowledge, the accomplishments and leisure, required for the appreciative enjoyment of a literature based on so fine and elaborate a culture. There are some circumstances which made the patronage of the earlier half of the Augustan Age more favourable to letters than that of other periods in which the same influence has been exercised. The chief literary patrons then were men who had played a prominent part in a revolutionary era,—men indeed of ancient birth or hereditary distinction, yet owing their pre-eminence to their talent, energy, and aptitude for the time, and thus open to new influences, and free from the prejudices of an old-established nobility. They had the culture and careful education of an aristocratic class, combined with the liberal tendencies of revolutionary leaders. The distance which in the preceding age would have kept apart men born into a high social and political position from men of genius of humble origin was easily passed in a time immediately succeeding that in which the great C. Julius had practically proclaimed the doctrine of ‘an open career to every [pg 29]kind of merit.’ Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially marked:—

Cum referre negas quali sit quisque parente

Natus, dum ingenuus51.

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

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

This relation of men of letters to the leaders of society under the Empire could not but exercise a strong influence both for good and evil on the literature of the age. Such a society,—able, versed in affairs, accomplished, fond of pleasure,—whatever [pg 30]else it may be, is sure to be characterised by good sense, a strong feeling of order and dignity, an acute perception of propriety in conduct and manners, an urbanity of tone restraining all arrogant self-assertion and violent animosity of feeling. Such a society is the determined enemy of all pedantry, eccentricity, and exaggeration, of all austerity or indecorum, of one-sided enthusiasm or devotion to a single idea. The ‘aurea mediocritas’ in feeling, conduct, thought, and enjoyment is the ideal which it sets before itself. Horace, except in his highest and most thoughtful moods, is the true representative of such a society; but its indirect influence may be noted also in the moderation, the invariable propriety and dignity, both of thought and language in Virgil, and in the tones of refinement with which Propertius and Ovid record the experience and preach the philosophy of pleasure. Yet literature probably lost as much from the limitation of sympathy imposed upon it as it gained from this acquired dignity and urbanity of tone. The Roman poets of this era, even while expressing national sentiments and ideas, were not like Homer, Pindar, or Sophocles, who, while putting a sufficiently high value on distinctions of birth and fortune, and on the personal qualities accompanying these distinctions, are yet, in a sense in which the poets of the Augustan Age are not, the poets of a whole people. Horace introduces that series of his Odes which most breathes a national spirit by disclaiming all sympathy with the ‘profanum vulgus.’ He looks upon it as one of the privileges of genius, ‘to scorn an ill-natured public.’ He did not wish his Satires to be thumbed by the multitude or by men of the class of Hermogenes Tigellius. He cared only for the appreciation of men belonging to the class in which all culture and regard for the traditions of Rome were now centred. The urban populace, as represented in literature, appears only as a rabble,—and this is still more the case in the days of Juvenal,—which had to be kept in order, fed, amused, and tended, like some dangerous wild beast. The middle class, absorbed in money-making and commercial adventure, supplies to Horace [pg 31]the representatives of the misers and parvenus whom he painted in his Satires for the amusement of his aristocratic readers. The tone of Virgil is equally anti-popular. The view of society which he delights to present is that of a paternal ruler giving laws to his people and caring for their welfare. His repugnance to the influence of the ‘popularis aura’ on government is indicated in such passages as the famous simile near the beginning of the Aeneid,

Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est

Seditio, saevitque animis immobile vulgus52,

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

iactantior Ancus

Nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris53.

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

the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety editions of his works are said to have been published before the year 1500

born in the consulship of Pollio of whom this marvellous career is predicted? (2) is it at all probable that Virgil, directly or indirectly, had any knowledge of the Messianic prophecies or ideas?

I.

The Aeneid, like the Annals of Ennius, is a poem inspired by national sentiment, and expressive of the idea of Rome. But the ‘Res Romana493,’ the growth of which Ennius witnessed and celebrated, had become greatly extended and had assumed a new form since the epic of the Republic was written. Yet the sentiment of national glory was essentially the same in the age of the elder Scipio and in the age of Augustus, though in the first it may be described as still militant, in the second as triumphant. In each time the Romans had a firm conviction of their superiority over all other nations, and a firm trust in the great destiny which had attended them since their origin, and still, as they believed, awaited them in the future. The ground on which their national self-esteem rested was their capacity for conquest and government; the result of that capacity was only fully visible after the empire over the world was established.

The pride of empire is thus the most prominent mode in which the national sentiment asserts itself in the poetry of the Augustan Age. In that series of Odes in which the art of Horace becomes the organ of the new government this sentiment finds expression by the mouth of the old enemy of the Roman race, the goddess Juno:—

[pg 326]

Horrenda late nomen in ultimas

Extendat oras, qua medius liquor

Secernit Europen ab Afro,

Qua tumidus rigat arva Nilus.

 *   *   *   *

Quicunque mundi terminus obstitit,

Hunc tanget armis, visere gestiens

Qua parte debacchentur ignes,

Qua nebulae pluviique rores494.

And while it animates even the effeminate tones of the elegiac poets to a more manly sound, this pride of empire is the dominant mode of patriotic enthusiasm in the Aeneid. Thus, in the very beginning of the poem, Virgil describes the people destined to spring from the remnant of the Trojans as

populum late regem belloque superbum.

To them Jupiter himself promises empire without limit either in time or place:—

His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono,

Imperium sine fine dedi495.

In the same passage he sums up their greatness in the arts of war and peace in the line

Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam496.

The earliest oracle given to Aeneas in the course of his wanderings contains the promise of universal dominion:—

[pg 327]

Hic domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris,

Et nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis497.

The sacred images of the gods who are partners of his enterprise make a similar announcement to him:—

Nos tumidum sub te permensi classibus aequor,

Idem venturos tollemus in astra nepotes,

Imperiumque urbi dabimus498.

In the fourth book Jupiter, who appears rather as contemplating the future course of affairs than as actively influencing it, speaks of Aeneas in these words:—

Sed fore, qui gravidam imperiis belloque frementem

Italiam regeret, genus alto a sanguine Troiae

Proderet, ac totum sub leges mitteret orbem499.

In the famous passage in the sixth book the mission of Rome is summed up, in contrast to the artistic glories of Greece, in the lines—

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento

(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque inponere morem,

Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos500.

The oracle of Faunus thus announces to Latinus the great future which awaited the race destined to arise from the union of the Trojans and Italians:—

Externi venient generi, qui sanguine nostrum

Nomen in astra ferant, quorumque ab stirpe nepotes

Omnia sub pedibus, qua Sol utrumque recurrens

Aspicit Oceanum, vertique regique videbunt501.

[pg 328]

In the ninth book Virgil for once breaks through the impersonal reserve of the epic singer to claim for Nisus and Euryalus an eternity of fame,—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum

Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit502.

In several of these passages it is not merely the pride of conquest and dominion which is expressed, but the higher and humaner belief that the ultimate mission of Rome is to give law and peace to the world. Thus the initiation of Iulus into war is accompanied by the declaration put into the mouth of Apollo—

iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident503.

In this way Virgil softens and humanises the idea of the Imperial State, representing her as not only the conqueror but the civiliser of the ancient world, and the transmitter of that civilisation to the world of the future. And while he invests the thought of ancient and powerful sovereignty with imaginative associations, and describes acts of heroism with the glow of martial enthusiasm, yet the crowning glory which he ascribes to the Romans is the piety inherited from their Trojan ancestors. The final appeasement of the rancour of Juno is secured by the declaration of Jupiter—

Hinc genus Ausonio mixtum quod sanguine surget,

Supra homines, supra ire deos pietate videbis,

Nec gens ulla tuos aeque celebrabit honores504.

The national idea of Rome was associated also with the thought of the divine origin, the great antiquity, the unbroken tradition, and the eternal duration of the State. Universal [pg 329]empire, uninterrupted continuity of existence, were the claims of the ancient Imperial as of the modern Ecclesiastical Rome. And this idea, by the strong hold which it had on the minds first of the Romans themselves and afterwards of other nations, went far to realise itself. The confidence of the Romans in themselves was intimately connected with their belief in their origin. Ennius had impressed on their minds the belief in the miraculous birth of their founder and in his miraculous elevation after death, and in the protection afforded by the ‘augustum augurium’ by which the building of their city had been consecrated. Among no people did ancient customs and ceremonies, of which in many cases the origin was altogether forgotten, survive with such vitality. In no other people did the memory of their past history, whether of triumph or disaster, exercise so potent an influence on the present time. In no Republic have the pride of birth and the reverence felt to ancestors been so powerful and prevailing sentiments: no State has ever been more loyal to the memory of the men who at successive crises in its history had served it or saved it from its enemies: and no great secular power ever felt so strong an assurance of an unbroken ascendency in the future, and of the dependence of the fate of the world on that ascendency.

The Aeneid appealed to all these sentiments even with more power than the epic of the Republic and than the various national histories in which Roman literature was peculiarly rich. Virgil, while still leaving to his countrymen the pride of their descent from Mars, made them feel the charm of their relation to a more gracious divinity, and even the hereditary claim which they had to regard themselves as special objects of care to the Supreme Ruler of Heaven505. The association of their destiny with the fortunes of Aeneas enabled them to look back to a remoter and more famous epoch of antiquity than the legends of their origin which had satisfied the fancy of the older Romans. Various passages in the poem enable Virgil to invest impressive ceremonies, existing in his own time, with the asso[pg 330]ciations of an immemorial past. The three great prophetic passages in the first, sixth, and eighth books enable him to revive, as Ennius had done, the thought of the great men and families of Rome, and of the great events both of earlier and more recent history. The march of Roman conquest during one hundred and fifty momentous years enabled the younger poet to evoke greater, though in some respects less happy, memories than those evoked by his predecessor. And the security of the Empire established in his day justified him in looking forward to the future with even a more assured confidence, though perhaps in a less sanguine spirit.

The national sentiment manifesting itself in the pride of empire and deeply rooted in the past, was combined with strong local attachments and the attribution of a kind of sanctity to the great natural features of the land or to spots associated with historic memories which had impressed themselves on the hearts of successive generations. Virgil was, as we saw in examining the Georgics, peculiarly susceptible of such impressions. There is no passage in any ancient writer which makes us feel so vividly the ‘religio loci’ which has for more than two thousand years invested the very site of Rome as that in the eighth book of the Aeneid, in which Evander conducts Aeneas over the ground destined to be occupied by the temples and dwellings of Rome. The feeling which the sight of the Capitoline hill and of the Tarpeian rock calls forth is one rather of religious awe than of any more familiar sentiment. The feeling, on the other hand, with which the Tiber is introduced—

Caeruleus Thybris, caelo gratissimus amnis—

is one rather of proud affection than of religious veneration. The aspect of the great city itself awed the imagination rather than called forth the affections of her citizens. But these affections were given to the rivers and streams, the lakes, and mountain-homes of Italy. Patriotism in the Augustan Age was as much an Italian as a Roman sentiment. The military greatness of Rome was even more identified with the discipline and cou[pg 331]rage of the Marsian and Apulian506 soldier than with that of the Latin race507. Her moral greatness is more often identified by the poets with the virtues of the old Sabellian stock than with those of the ‘populus Romanus Quiritium.’ While the Georgics celebrate the peaceful glory and beauty of Italy, the Aeneid evokes the memory of its old warlike renown—

quibus Itala iam tum

Floruerit terra alma viris, quibus arserit armis508.

The first omen509 which meets the Trojans on approaching Italy marks it out as a land ‘mighty in arms’ as well as ‘in the richness of its soil.’ The speech of Remulus in the ninth book identifies the ancient rural life of Italy with the hardihood and warlike aptitude of the people, as the Georgics identify it with their virtue and happiness:—

Durum ab stirpe genus natos ad flumina primum

Deferimus saevoque gelu duramus et undis;

Venatu invigilant pueri, silvasque fatigant;

Flectere ludus equos et spicula tendere cornu.

At patiens operum parvoque adsueta iuventus

Aut rastris terram domat, aut quatit oppida bello.

Omne aevum ferro teritur, versaque iuvencum

Terga fatigamus hasta; nec tarda senectus

Debilitat vires animi mutatque vigorem:

Canitiem galea premimus, semperque recentis

Comportare iuvat praedas et vivere rapto510.

[pg 332]

In the account of the gathering of the Italian clans in the seventh book, and of the Etruscans and the Northern races in the tenth, the warlike sentiment of the land is appealed to in association with the names of ancient towns, mountain districts, lakes, and rivers:—

Quique altum Praeneste viri, quique arva Gabinae

Iunonis gelidumque Anienem et roscida rivis

Hernica saxa colunt, quos dives Anagnia pascit,

Quos, Amasene pater511;

and again:—

Qui Tetricae horrentis rupes montemque Severum

Casperiamque colunt Forulosque et flumen Himellae;

Qui Tiberim Fabarimque bibunt, quos frigida misit

Nursia, et Hortinae classes populique Latini;

Quosque secans infaustum interluit Allia nomen512;

and also:—

Qui saltus, Tiberine, tuos, sacrumque Numici

Litus arant, Rutulosque exercent vomere collis,

Circaeumque iugum, quis Iuppiter Anxurus arvis

Praesidet et viridi gaudens Feronia luco;

Qua Saturae iacet atra palus, gelidusque per imas

Quaerit iter vallis atque in mare conditur Ufens513.

This union of patriotic sentiment with the love of Nature and with the romantic associations of the past, Virgil has in common with the most distinctively national of the poets of the present [pg 333]century, from whom in the other characteristics of his art and genius he is widely removed.

The national sentiment to which Virgil and the other contemporary poets give expression is thus seen to be the sentiment of the Italian race514. For two centuries the principal members of that race had looked to Rome as their chief glory, rather than as their old rival and antagonist. The thought of Rome as their head had become to the other Italian tribes their basis of union with one another and the main ground of their self-esteem in relation to other nations. To that self-esteem and sense of superiority Virgil was fully alive. He is not altogether free from the narrowness of national prejudice. He has not the largeness of soul which enables Homer, while never losing his sense of the superiority of the Greeks over the Trojans, yet to awaken feelings of admiration and of generous pity for Hector and Sarpedon, for Priam and Andromache. Yet if Virgil has not this largeness of soul he has the tenderness of human compassion:—

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt515.

He might have maintained a stronger sympathy for his hero, and have gratified a sentiment still fresh in the minds of his countrymen, by attributing to Dido the shameless licence as well as the dangerous fascination of Cleopatra; or he might have painted the Carthaginians in traditional colours of cruelty and treachery, in which Roman writers represented the most formidable among the enemies of Rome. But Virgil’s artistic sense or his humaner feeling saved him from this ungenerous [pg 334]gratification of national prejudice. Yet while more just or tolerant than other Roman writers to the Carthaginians, and especially to the memory of their greatest man, he indicates something like antipathy to the Greeks. The triumph of Rome over her Greek enemies is made prominent in the announcement of her future glories:—

Veniet lustris labentibus aetas,

Cum domus Assaraci Phthiam clarasque Mycenas

Servitio premet ac victis dominabitur Argis516;

and again:—

Eruet ille Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas,

Ipsumque Aeaciden, genus armipotentis Achilli517.

The bitterness of national animosity is especially apparent in his exhibition of the characters of Ulysses and Helen. The superiority of the Greeks in the arts and sciences is admitted not without some touch of scorn (‘credo equidem’) in contrast with the superiority of Rome in the imperial arts of conquering and governing nations. It may appear strange that the only race to which Virgil is unjust or ungenerous is the one to which he himself, in common with all educated Romans, was most deeply indebted. But it is to be remembered that there was a dramatic propriety in the expression of this hostility in the mouth of Aeneas and of Anchises. The championship of the cause of Troy demanded an attitude of antagonism to her destroyer. The Greek tragedians had themselves set the example of a degraded representation of two of the most admirable of Homer’s creations; and Virgil’s mode of conceiving and delineating character is much nearer to that of Euripides than to that of Homer. The original error of Helen and the craft in dealing with his enemies, which is one of many qualities in the versatile humanity of Odysseus, gave to these later artists [pg 335]the germ, in accordance with which the whole character was conceived. They did not adequately apprehend that the most interesting types of nobleness and beauty of character as imagined by the greatest artists are also the most complex, and the least capable of being squared with abstract conceptions of vices or virtues. The full truth of Homer’s delineations of character was apparently not recognised by the most cultivated of his Roman readers. It is enough for Virgil that Ulysses is ‘fandi fictor,’ as it is for Horace that Achilles is ‘iracundus, inexorabilis, acer:’ although the worldly wisdom of the last-named poet makes him comprehend better Homer’s ideal of intelligent than his ideal of emotional heroism:—

Rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,

Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixem518, etc.

Juvenal exhibits the virulence of national animosity towards the Greeks of his time, as well as a well-founded scorn of the moral baseness of character exhibited by many of them. The contempt of Tacitus is shown for their intellectual frivolity, combined with their assumption of intellectual superiority (‘qui sua tantum mirantur519’) based on the renown of their ancestors. The deference which Virgil and Horace might pay to the genius of early Greece was not due to the shadow of that genius as it existed in their own time. But the contemporary Greek littérateurs were not likely to resign their claim of precedence in favour of their new rivals. Neither Greek art520 nor Greek criticism seems ever to have made any cordial recognition of the literary genius of Italy. The light in which Virgil represents the Greek character may thus perhaps owe something to the wish to repay scorn with scorn.

prose composition. It seems to have arisen out of the impulse to convey instruction and advice on the management of life generally, and especially on the best means of securing a livelihood from the cultivation of the soil. The use of the language of poetry for a purpose essentially practical and prosaic was justified, in that primitive time, not only by the absence of any other organ of literary expression, but also by the fact that, in such a time, all literary effort was the result of animated feeling, and that the most common aspects of Nature, such as the changes of the seasons or of night and day, and what seem now the most familiar occupations of life, were apprehended by the lively mind of the Greek with a fresh sense of wonder, which use deadens in eras of more advanced civilisation. But while this sense of wonder imparts a poetical colouring to the language of early didactic poetry, and while sufficient harmony was secured for it by the training of the ear during centuries of epic song, the form and structure of this kind of art was, as compared with the other forms of Greek poetry, essentially rudimentary. The sole specimen which has reached our times appears in the form of a personal address, treating of a number of subjects not closely connected with one another, interspersed with various episodes, and producing the impression of a connected whole solely through the vivid personality of the writer. Didactic poetry was absolutely rejected in the maturity of Greek genius, after the rise of a prose literature had marked off clearly the separate provinces of prose and poetry, and after Greek taste had become more exacting in its demand of unity of impression and symmetry of form in every work of art. It was revived again in the Alexandrian epoch, when the creative impulse was lost, and life and its interests had become tamer, while at the same time knowledge had greatly increased, and a kind of literary dilettanteism was one of the chief elements in refined enjoyment. By the Alexandrine writers the irregular and desultory treatment of Hesiod was abandoned. The didactic poem was treated by them as one of the recognised branches of poetical art. It still retained the general character [pg 183]

with them; and they wrote to please themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.

beyond the mere expression of overstrained eulogy. In such expressions as

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

may feel the spell of outward pomp and magnificence and the attractions of pleasure; or he may be driven back on his own thought, and into communion with Nature, and to an ideal longing for simpler and purer conditions.

obtained distinction as the author of original elegics in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a poem of Euphorion of Chalcis

II.

The idea which Lucretius revealed to the world in fuller majesty and life than any previous poet or philosopher, was the idea of Nature, apprehended, not as an abstract conception, but as a power omnipresent, creative, and regulative throughout the great spheres of earth, sky, and sea, and the innumerable varieties of individual existence. The meaning conveyed by the Greek word φύσις, as employed by Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, etc., is powerless to move the imagination or enlarge the sense of beauty, when compared with the illimitable content of ‘Natura daedala rerum’ as conceived by the Latin poet. Nature is to him the one power absolutely supreme and independent in the Universe, [pg 205]too vast and too manifold to be subject to any will but her own,—

Libera continuo dominis privata superbis.

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

Quod superest arvi tamen id natura sua vi

Sentibus obducat, ni vis humana resistat

Vitai causa valido consueta bidenti

Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris.

Si non fecundas vertentes vomere glebas

Terraique solum subigentes cimus ad ortus,

Sponte sua nequeant liquidas existere in auras.

Et tamen interdum magno quaesita labore

Cum iam per terras frondent atque omnia florent,

Ant nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol

Aut subiti perimunt imbris gelidaeque pruinae,

Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant313.

[pg 206]

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

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

Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator

Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores314, etc.

The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser315, can now scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it316. The cause of this decay in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more rapid than the supply of new materials. ‘In the long warfare waged from infinite time’—

Ex infinito contractum tempore bellum—

[pg 207]

the destructive forces are gaining the superiority over the restorative forces of Nature; and this process is hastening on the advent of that ‘single day’ which will overwhelm in ruin the whole framework of earth, sea, and sky317.

What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do? Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the poem, which Virgil also remembered318, he did recognise the fact that human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to enrich and beautify the earth:—

Inde aliam atque aliam culturam dulcis agelli

Temptabant, fructusque feros mansuescere terram

Cernebant indulgendo blandeque colendo319.

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

That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer: ‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s [pg 208]mouth320 the sentiment that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the didactic directions of the Georgics were given.

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

Thy help is with the weed that creeps

Along the barest ground, etc.),

communicating to outward things the grace and tenderness [pg 209]of human sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.

But the Lucretian conception of Nature in its relation to human wants has been greatly modified by the religious tendency of Virgil’s thought, his respect for traditional opinion, his sense of man’s dependence on a higher Spiritual Power. Nature he regards as no more independent in her sphere than man is in his. The laws and conditions imposed on her have been appointed with reference to the relation in which she stands to man. Where these conditions are unfavourable, they have been appointed to quicken man’s faculties and force him into the ways of industry. Lucretius dwells on the fact that two-thirds of our globe are unsuited for human habitation, as disproving the opinion of a Divine creation of the world for the benefit of man321: Virgil dwells on the fact that two temperate regions have been assigned to weak mortals as a proof of Divine beneficence322. Virgil also accepts the idea that the earth once was more productive than it is323, but he accepts it in the spirit of Hesiod rather than of Lucretius. In the Golden Age, under Saturn, the earth bore all things spontaneously. It was Jove—or Providence—who imposed on man, and continues to impose on him, the necessity of labouring for his subsistence; and this he did, not, as Hesiod believed, in anger at the deceit of Prometheus, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. The poetical references to the Saturnian Age and the subsequent reign of Jove need not imply a literal belief in the fables of mythology, any more than the allusion at Georg. i. 62 to the fable of Pyrrha and Deucalion implies the literal acceptance of the explanation there given of the existence of the present race of men. But as that allusion seems meant to convey the belief in a Divine creative act, so the former allusion seems to convey a belief in a Divine moral dispensation. The idea of Providential guidance, of a Supreme Father, wielding the forces of Nature, shaping the destinies of man, acting for the most part by regular processes in order [pg 210]that man may learn to understand his ways324, but making his personal agency more manifest from time to time, as after the death of Caesar, by signs and wonders interrupting the order of Nature, supersedes or largely modifies the conception of natural law. The other powers of the Greek Olympus and of the Roman Pantheon are no longer, as the former are in the Iliad, at war with one another, but all work in harmony with the Supreme Will. Like the fables just referred to, the names of these deities seem to be introduced symbolically, to signify the different modes of activity of the one Supreme Spiritual Power, and the different forms under which he is to be reverenced.

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

sic omnia fatis

In peius ruere.

He too recognises the liability to failure and loss from causes over which man has no direct control,—the violence of storms, the inclemency of seasons, etc.,—as well as from others which he is able to provide against by constant vigilance. What resource has he against these untoward conditions? First he is bound to watch the signs of impending change which Providence has appointed, so as to leave as little as possible at the mercy of the elements. Next he has the resource of prayer, and the power of propitiating Heaven by customary rites and sacrifices, and by a life of piety and innocence. The ethical precepts of the poem, as is said by a distinguished French [pg 211]writer, may be summed up in the medieval maxim, ‘Laborare est orare325.’

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

Τῆς ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν,

so now they make the sweat of man’s brow the means through which the ‘divini gloria ruris’ can be realised. By the labour spent in drawing into actual existence the glory and beauty of the land man best fulfils his duty and secures his happiness. There is no truer source for him of material and moral good, of simple pleasures, of contemplative delight. Yet if we wish rightly to appreciate the purely didactic parts of the poem, it is impossible, as has been fully shown by Conington in his General Introduction to the Georgics, to overrate the stress which Virgil puts on the ceaseless industry, foresight, vigilance, and actual force326 which must be put forth by the husbandman, as the condition of success in the struggle in which he is [pg 212]engaged. The very style of the Georgics bears the impress of this predominant idea. It is this idea which seems to give Roman strength to the workmanship of the poem; as it is the sense of the rich and tender life of Nature which gives to it the softness of Italian sentiment, so marvellously blended with that Roman strength. The imperial tone of conquest and command and civilising influence makes itself heard in such lines as these:—

Exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis.

Tum denique dura

Exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentes.

In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur327.

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

[pg 213]

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

Seu pluris calor ille vias et caeca relaxat

Spiramenta, novas veniat qua sucus in herbas328, etc.,

i. 415–423,

Haud equidem credo, etc.,

iii. 242,

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, etc.,

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

Illic ut perhibent aut intempesta silet nox,

and iv. 219–227,

His quidam signis, etc.,

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

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri329,

and that he accepted certain results of science which impressed his imagination, without caring for their consistency with others which he equally accepts. There is a constant tendency in him to allow his belief in the miraculous to interfere with his belief in natural law; as for instance in the account he gives of the birth of bees (iv. 200), and again of their spontaneous generation from the blood of slain bullocks (iv. 285). He has not the firm faith in natural agency which Lucretius had. Phenomena are [pg 214]still regarded by him as isolated, not interdependent. The ordinary course of Nature he supposes to be interrupted by marvels and portents. The signs of coming things are represented, not as Lucretius would have represented them, as natural antecedents or concomitants of the things portended, but as arbitrary indications appointed for the guidance of man.

as we learn from Dionysius, in national hymns. It had been commemorated in a famous work of art, the bronze she-wolf still extant, at a time antecedent to the origin of Roman literature. It formed the chief subject of the first book of the Annals of Ennius, which, as dealing with the mythical portion of his theme, seems to have had more of an epic character than the later books. It was also a subject which by its relation to famous localities and memorials of the past,—such as the oldest city-wall, the Ruminal fig-tree, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the Palatine and Aventine hills,—and with the religious and social organisation of the State, admitted easily of being connected with the present time. It might have been so treated as to magnify the glory of the Emperor, who desired to be regarded as the second founder of the city, and is said to have debated whether he should not assume the title of Romulus, before deciding on taking that of Augustus. A poet of bolder and more original invention, and one more capable of sympathising with the purely martial characteristics of his hero, might have been attracted by this story of indigenous growth rather than by the exotic legend on which Virgil has bestowed such enduring life.

scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:—

Virgil is attested by the number of commentaries written on his works, the most famous of them being the still extant commentary of Servius, belonging to the latter part of the fourth century. The fortune of Virgil has in this respect been similar to that of his great countryman Dante. From the time of his death till the extinction of ancient classical culture, there was a regular succession of rhetoricians and grammarians who lectured and wrote treatises on his various poems. Among those who preceded Servius, the most famous names are those of Asconius Pedianus, Annaeus Cornutus, the friend of Persius, and Valerius Probus, in the first century A.D. These commentators supplied materials to Suetonius for the life on which that of Aelius Donatus, which is still extant, is founded. The frequent quotations from Virgil in the desultory criticism of Aulus Gellius and the systematic discussions in the Saturnalia of Macrobius attest the minute study of his poems in the interval between the second and the fifth centuries. Similar testimony to his continued influence is afforded by the early Christian writers, especially by Augustine. And though there may be traced in them a struggle between the pleasure which they derived from his poetry and the alienation of their sympathies owing to his paganism, yet it is probable that the favour shown to him and to Cicero during the first strong reaction from everything associated with the beauty of the older religion, was due as much to the pure and humane spirit of their teaching as to the fascination of their style: nor perhaps was this teaching inoperative in moulding the thought and giving form to the religious imagination of the Latin Church. The number and excellence of the MSS. of Virgil, the most famous of which date from the fourth and fifth centuries, confirm the impression of the continued favour which his works enjoyed before and subsequently to the overthrow of the Roman rule in the West. Wherever learning flourished during the darkest period of this later time, the poems of Virgil were held in special esteem. Thus we read in connexion with the literary studies of Bede: ‘Virgil cast over him the same spell [pg 65]

free agency of the divine and human actors playing their part in it.

applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as Cicero

more careful art of Virgil, and the fact that he attached more value to the perfection of his art than to the knowledge he imparts, give him that technical superiority over the older writer which, notwithstanding the tamer interest of his subject, and perhaps the tamer character of his own genius, has made the Georgics a poem much more familiar to the world than the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ Virgil, for one thing, enjoys greater freedom of omitting any set of topics,—any of those details on which Cato or Varro would have felt themselves bound to be specially explicit,—which would detract unduly from the beauty and general amenity of his exposition; or by a simple touch (such as the ‘Ne saturare fimo pingui,’ etc.) he can suggest the necessity of attending to such topics, while leaving their full realisation to the reader. He thus, by greater selection and elimination of his materials, avoids the monotony and the long prosaic interspaces between the grander bursts of poetry which his vast argument imposes on Lucretius. But, further, he avails himself of many more resources to give variety of interest and literary charm to the topics which he successively deals with. Each and all of these topics,—the processes of ploughing and sowing, the signs of the weather, the grafting of trees and the pruning of the vine, the qualities of horses and cattle, the tending of sheep and goats, the observation of the habits of bees,—bring him into immediate contact with the genial influences of the outward world. The vastness as well as the abstract character of his subject forces Lucretius to pass through many regions which seem equally removed from this genial presence and from all human associations. It is only the enthusiasm of discovery—the delight in purely intellectual processes—that bears him buoyantly through these dreary spaces; and it is only the knowledge that from time to time glimpses of illimitable power and wonder are opened up to him, and admiration for the energy and clear vision of his guide, that compel the flagging reader to accompany him. But Virgil leads his readers through scenes, tamer indeed and more familiar, yet always bright and smiling with some homely charm, or rich and glowing with the ‘pomp [pg 231]

mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which

‘Lament for Daphnis,’ with the strong Roman realism of the lines at the end of the first Georgic, in which the omens portending the death of Caesar are described. Nor can anything show more clearly the want of individuality with which Virgil uses the names of the Theocritean shepherds than the fact that while the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue represents the departed and deified soldier and statesman, the Daphnis of the ninth is a living husbandman whose fortunes were secured by the protecting star of Caesar,—

Nature, Virgil is still following in the tracks of Lucretius. Such expressions as

The affection and admiration of the greatest of his contemporaries, surviving in the tradition handed on to future times, testify to Virgil’s exemption from the personal frailties and asperities to which the impressible and mobile temperament of genius is peculiarly liable.

There was no individuality of character attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early imaginative invention associated with the dim tradition of his wanderings. The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,—some supplied by poetical invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, some suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome, some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character.

stranger connexion with the later results of science and philosophic thought. It is impossible to find any principle of reconcilement in accordance with which their proper place in the reasonable intelligence of the age may be assigned to each. They came together in Virgil as a composite result of the union of his literary and philosophic tastes with his religious feeling and national sympathies. So far as we can attach any truth of meaning to this Invocation, we must look upon it as a symbolical expression of Divine agency and superintendence in all the various fields of natural production.

were calculated strongly to affect any form of narrative poetry amongst the Romans, and also to take a rapid survey of the history of their narrative poetry from the beginning of their literature to the Augustan Age.

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

humanising studies. His profound melancholy is a mood natural to one who looks on the passing away of a great order of things, political, social, and religious, in the midst of scenes of turbulence and violence, and takes refuge from an alien world in the contemplation of another order of things, infinitely more majestic than either the old social state which was shaken and tottering to its fall, or the new which was yet ‘powerless to be born.’

which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other. Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and running streams among the valleys.’

vours to strive against it, till forced to confess her impotence. Venus by her intrigues serves to further its purposes. Yet both these Olympian divinities are but puppets ‘in some unknown Power’s employ,’ which makes for its own end alike through their furtherance and antagonism. The gods who take part in the action are of Greek invention, but the Power which even they are obliged to obey, if not Roman in original conception, is yet essentially Roman in significance.

founded on them; the representative character of the poems, like the representative character of Shakspeare’s historical dramas, is accidental and undesigned. The germ of the Aeneid, on the other hand, is to be sought in the national idea and sentiment, in the imperial position of Rome, in her marvellous destiny, and in its culmination in the Augustan Age. The actions and sufferings of the characters that play their part in the poem were to be only secondary objects of interest; the primary object was to be found in the race to whose future career these actions and sufferings were the appointed means. The real key-note to the poem is not the ‘Arma virumque’ with which it opens, but the ‘Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem

between hope and despair, the sense of personal unworthiness, the sweet memories, the heart-felt longings, the self-forgetful consideration and anxieties of an idealising affection. In such lines as these, expressing at once the sense of unworthiness and the rapid sinking of the heart from hope to despair—

Capitol in early times, the living Emperor under the Empire, were the visible representatives of this mysterious Power. But its influence was acknowledged throughout all Roman history in the importance attached to the great priestly offices, and especially to that of Pontifex Maximus, which became inseparably united to the office of Emperor; in the scrupulous regard paid to the auspices through which this Power was believed to communicate its will; in the ominous interpretation put on all appearances of departure from the ordinary course of Nature; and in the reference to the Sibylline books in all questions of difficulty. This impersonal Power is to the Romans both the object of awe and the source of their confidence. They seem never to distrust the steadfastness of its favour. They rather feel themselves its willing instruments, co-operating with it, blindly sometimes and sometimes remissly, and for every failure of intelligence or vigilance, punished by temporal calamities.

applied the word σοφοί to their poets, and which makes the great men of the second type not only powerful movers but also the wisest teachers of the world. The best poetry of the Augustan Age, if wanting in the highest mode of creative energy, is eminently free from the defects which sometimes result from the intenser form of imagination; it is in a remarkable degree pervaded and controlled by this sanity of genius. This excellence of the Augustan literature may be partly, as was said before, attributed to the familiar intercourse which men of letters enjoyed with men of action and large social influence; partly, and probably to a greater degree, to the cultivated and generous criticism which men of genius and fine accomplishment imparted to and received from one another.

Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and others to the poems of youth, of a light and playful character, and, for the most part, expressive of various moods of the passion of love. Thus at the end of the Georgics Virgil speaks of himself thus:—

the recently published Memoir of the daughter of his early friend and associate in poetry, perhaps the most direct: ‘I am much pleased to see (writes S. Coleridge) how highly Mr. Wordsworth speaks of Virgil’s style, and of his Bucolics which I have ever thought most graceful and tender. They are quite another thing from Theocritus, however they may be based on Theocritus

native sensibilities of the Romans. It is to commend to their love and admiration a purely Italian ideal that Virgil employs the resources of Greek learning, as well as all the strength and delicacy of his own genius.

it necessarily wants the vital freshness and vigour of Homer’s representation, has a peculiar dignity and charm of its own. It must be accepted as an artistic compromise, and not as the idealised picture of any life that has ever been realised in the world. It is one of the earliest and most interesting products of that kind of imagination which has in modern times created the literature of romance

English poet could gracefully maintain,—impresses us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from the Greek genius:—

other hand, help to remind us that the art and science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of intellectual culture.

[pg 365]

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute562. He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning; that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

Et vera incessu patuit dea.

*   *   *   *   *

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina563.

[pg 366]

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character. The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus564.

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto

Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda565.

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper566.

[pg 367]

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,

Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:

Nec te Troia capit567.

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate. Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy568. Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,

Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris

Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem

Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit569.

[pg 368]

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced570 in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

[pg 369]

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes571.

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri

Caelicolis et quanta solet572—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae

Numina magna deum573.

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each family into one community574, had been transmitted in popular beliefs and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, [pg 370]identified with the continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis

Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.

Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem

Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret575.

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the ‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,

Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri576.

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat577.

When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—

[pg 371]

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit578.

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’ for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs. It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,

Sanguinis et sacri pateras, animamque sepulchro

Condimus, et magna supremum voce ciemus579.

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!

Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris

Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum

Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,

[pg 372]

Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno580?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,

Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,

‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:

Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:

Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:

Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,

Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto581.’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence, Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona

Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,

Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat

Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem

Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras582.

Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus—

[pg 373]

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum583.

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the ‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, [pg 374]mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes584—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem585—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of a religious epic, that [pg 375]the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier586, following Macrobius, has pointed out the special propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of the ritual application of the words ‘porricio587’ and ‘porrigo’, and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs588,—‘Aenea, vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,

Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;

Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum

Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet589.

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum591,

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

was identified with their own. But this aspect of the world, though an anachronism from the point of view either of the time when the poem was written, or of that in which the events represented are supposed to happen, enhances the dignity of the action, by exhibiting the enterprise of Aeneas as a spectacle attracting the attention and involving the destinies of the great nations of the world.

whom he addresses some of his Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men, such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the older poets and with those of his own standing

city with many allies, but as the centre of a wide and long-established empire—

kind of merit.’ Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially marked:—

engaged. The very style of the Georgics bears the impress of this predominant idea. It is this idea which seems to give Roman strength to the workmanship of the poem; as it is the sense of the rich and tender life of Nature which gives to it the softness of Italian sentiment, so marvellously blended with that Roman strength. The imperial tone of conquest and command and civilising influence makes itself heard in such lines as these:—

ence than ever exists between the development of genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions, whose days from childhood to death were closely bound ‘each to each by natural piety,’ in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining type.

still regarded by him as isolated, not interdependent. The ordinary course of Nature he supposes to be interrupted by marvels and portents. The signs of coming things are represented, not as Lucretius would have represented them, as natural antecedents or concomitants of the things portended, but as arbitrary indications appointed for the guidance of man.

IV.

The great wealth and luxury of Rome, during the latter years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire, exercised also an influence on the life, the imagination, and the thoughts of the poets living in those times. Through commerce and conquest Rome had entered into the possession of the long accumulated wealth of the world, and, as generally happens in eras of advanced civilisation, the [pg 32]enjoyment of these was very unequally distributed. Nothing appears more remarkable in the social life of the latter days of the Republic than the great riches possessed and expended by a few individuals, such as Crassus, Hortensius, and the Luculli. One proof of the immense accumulation of money at that time is the large price which, as we learn from Cicero’s letters, was paid for the houses of the leading men among the nobility. The number of villas possessed by Cicero himself, the son of a provincial Eques, and debarred by stringent laws (though probably they were evaded) from turning his pre-eminence as an advocate to profit, and the sums spent by him in their adornment, suggest to us to what an extent the soil of Italy, the works of Greek art, and the natural and artificial products of the East, were at the disposal of the ruling aristocracy of Rome. Still more is this thought forced on us when we think of Proconsuls and Propraetors who came home glutted with the spoils of their provinces, which they squandered in the coarsest luxury. The change to the Empire, though it put a considerable check on this kind of plunder, did little to distribute wealth more generally, or to limit luxurious living. The appropriation during the Civil Wars of the sacred treasures long accumulated in the temples of the gods54, and the great stimulus given to commerce by the establishment of peace, added largely to the wealth available at Rome for purposes of munificence, of ostentation, or indulgence. But the largest share in the disposal of the wealth of the world had passed from the representatives of the old governing class to the ruling powers of the new Empire, and this change was decidedly for the public advantage. Augustus and his ministers possessed the old Greek virtue of μεγαλοπρέπεια, and understood that immense wealth could be better expended on great public objects than on beautifying their villas and fish-ponds, or giving a more dangerous variety to their entertainments. The policy of Augustus in restoring and building the temples of the gods had an artistic as well as a religious purpose. He wished [pg 33]to make his countrymen proud of the outward beauty of Rome, as Pericles had made the Athenians proud of the beauty of Athens.

The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the noble ruins of temples and theatres—the visible monuments preserved from that age—is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of his two great works nearly twenty years of ‘unhasting and unresting’ labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens and streams of Tibur or by the bright shores of Baiae55. To the liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and freedom from the ordinary cares of life56, which allowed them to give all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its most distinctive charm to their poetry—the beauty of Italian Nature. It is only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century. Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and more graceful words than these:—

[pg 34]

Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae

Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile

Fessis vomere tauris

Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.57

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

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes;

Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi

Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis

Taygeta, etc.58

of the Georgics.

The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of Nature, latent in particular places, the only period [pg 35]of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’

The ease of their circumstances and the fact that they owed this ease to others (‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’) have impressed themselves in other ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the enjoyment of Nature is a passive rather than an active enjoyment derived from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then, as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery59. Horace expresses a shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of delight in the Odyssey.

The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger sense of the [pg 36]purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the

Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce

Aequo animo60

of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life. Experience had satisfied him that the ‘slight repast, and sleep on the grass by a river’s side61,’ contributed more to his happiness in later life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The more active and energetic [pg 37]temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice of the topics treated in their poems.

think of Lucretius, perhaps not even of Cicero, reading Virgil’s Invocation, and especially the concluding lines of it, without a certain feeling of scorn. We cannot help asking how far could the pupil of Siron, the student of Epicurus and Lucretius, the enlightened associate of Maecenas, Augustus, Pollio, Horace, etc., attach any serious meaning to the words of this Invocation. How far was he simply complying with an established convention of literature? how far using these mythological representations as symbolism? how far was he identifying himself in imagination with the beliefs of his ideal husbandman?

shares with Lucretius the strong passion for poetry (‘dulces ante omnia Musae’), but neither he nor Horace, though each recognises the supreme claims of philosophy, shows the passion for enquiry which induced Lucretius

were determining the fate of the world. The Triumvirs, in assigning grants of land to their soldiers, had confiscated the territory of Cremona, which had shown sympathy with the Senatorian cause, and when this proved insufficient, an addition was made from the adjoining Mantuan territory, in which the farm of Virgil’s father was situated. The Commissioners appointed to distribute the land were Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, all friendly to Virgil, and by their advice he went to Rome, and obtained the restitution of his land by personal application to Octavianus. On his return to his native district he found that Varus had succeeded Pollio as Governor of the province. He appears to have been unfriendly to the Mantuans, and was either unable or unwilling to protect Virgil, who was forced at the imminent peril of his life to escape, by swimming the river, from the violence of the soldier who had entered on the possession of the land. Two of the Eclogues, the first and the ninth, are written in connexion with these events. Though he still adheres to an indirect and allusive treatment of his subject, these poems possess the interest of being based on real experience. They give expression to the sense of disorder, insecurity, and distress, which we learn from other sources accompanied these forced divisions and alienations of land. The first expresses also the gratitude of the poet to ‘the god-like youth’ to whom he owed the exceptional indulgence of being, though only for a short time, reinstated in the possession of his land. It is characteristic either of some weakness in Virgil’s nature, or of a great depression among the peaceful inhabitants of Italy, that he had no thought of resisting violence by violence, that he does not even express resentment against the intruder, but only a feeling of wonder that any man could be capable of such wickedness. To most readers the vehemence with which the author of the ‘Dirae,’ under similar circumstances, curses the land and its new owners, appears, if less sweet and musical, more natural than this mild submission to superior force expressed by Virgil. But in these personal experiences that strong sympathy with the national fortunes, [pg 116]

sense which he applied to the questions of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation. Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness, and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.

II.

The idea which Lucretius revealed to the world in fuller majesty and life than any previous poet or philosopher, was the idea of Nature, apprehended, not as an abstract conception, but as a power omnipresent, creative, and regulative throughout the great spheres of earth, sky, and sea, and the innumerable varieties of individual existence. The meaning conveyed by the Greek word φύσις, as employed by Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, etc., is powerless to move the imagination or enlarge the sense of beauty, when compared with the illimitable content of ‘Natura daedala rerum’ as conceived by the Latin poet. Nature is to him the one power absolutely supreme and independent in the Universe, [pg 205]too vast and too manifold to be subject to any will but her own,—

Libera continuo dominis privata superbis.

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

Quod superest arvi tamen id natura sua vi

Sentibus obducat, ni vis humana resistat

Vitai causa valido consueta bidenti

Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris.

Si non fecundas vertentes vomere glebas

Terraique solum subigentes cimus ad ortus,

Sponte sua nequeant liquidas existere in auras.

Et tamen interdum magno quaesita labore

Cum iam per terras frondent atque omnia florent,

Ant nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol

Aut subiti perimunt imbris gelidaeque pruinae,

Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant313.

[pg 206]

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

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

Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator

Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores314, etc.

The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser315, can now scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it316. The cause of this decay in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more rapid than the supply of new materials. ‘In the long warfare waged from infinite time’—

Ex infinito contractum tempore bellum—

[pg 207]

the destructive forces are gaining the superiority over the restorative forces of Nature; and this process is hastening on the advent of that ‘single day’ which will overwhelm in ruin the whole framework of earth, sea, and sky317.

What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do? Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the poem, which Virgil also remembered318, he did recognise the fact that human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to enrich and beautify the earth:—

Inde aliam atque aliam culturam dulcis agelli

Temptabant, fructusque feros mansuescere terram

Cernebant indulgendo blandeque colendo319.

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

That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer: ‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s [pg 208]mouth320 the sentiment that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the didactic directions of the Georgics were given.

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

Thy help is with the weed that creeps

Along the barest ground, etc.),

communicating to outward things the grace and tenderness [pg 209]of human sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.

But the Lucretian conception of Nature in its relation to human wants has been greatly modified by the religious tendency of Virgil’s thought, his respect for traditional opinion, his sense of man’s dependence on a higher Spiritual Power. Nature he regards as no more independent in her sphere than man is in his. The laws and conditions imposed on her have been appointed with reference to the relation in which she stands to man. Where these conditions are unfavourable, they have been appointed to quicken man’s faculties and force him into the ways of industry. Lucretius dwells on the fact that two-thirds of our globe are unsuited for human habitation, as disproving the opinion of a Divine creation of the world for the benefit of man321: Virgil dwells on the fact that two temperate regions have been assigned to weak mortals as a proof of Divine beneficence322. Virgil also accepts the idea that the earth once was more productive than it is323, but he accepts it in the spirit of Hesiod rather than of Lucretius. In the Golden Age, under Saturn, the earth bore all things spontaneously. It was Jove—or Providence—who imposed on man, and continues to impose on him, the necessity of labouring for his subsistence; and this he did, not, as Hesiod believed, in anger at the deceit of Prometheus, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. The poetical references to the Saturnian Age and the subsequent reign of Jove need not imply a literal belief in the fables of mythology, any more than the allusion at Georg. i. 62 to the fable of Pyrrha and Deucalion implies the literal acceptance of the explanation there given of the existence of the present race of men. But as that allusion seems meant to convey the belief in a Divine creative act, so the former allusion seems to convey a belief in a Divine moral dispensation. The idea of Providential guidance, of a Supreme Father, wielding the forces of Nature, shaping the destinies of man, acting for the most part by regular processes in order [pg 210]that man may learn to understand his ways324, but making his personal agency more manifest from time to time, as after the death of Caesar, by signs and wonders interrupting the order of Nature, supersedes or largely modifies the conception of natural law. The other powers of the Greek Olympus and of the Roman Pantheon are no longer, as the former are in the Iliad, at war with one another, but all work in harmony with the Supreme Will. Like the fables just referred to, the names of these deities seem to be introduced symbolically, to signify the different modes of activity of the one Supreme Spiritual Power, and the different forms under which he is to be reverenced.

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

sic omnia fatis

In peius ruere.

He too recognises the liability to failure and loss from causes over which man has no direct control,—the violence of storms, the inclemency of seasons, etc.,—as well as from others which he is able to provide against by constant vigilance. What resource has he against these untoward conditions? First he is bound to watch the signs of impending change which Providence has appointed, so as to leave as little as possible at the mercy of the elements. Next he has the resource of prayer, and the power of propitiating Heaven by customary rites and sacrifices, and by a life of piety and innocence. The ethical precepts of the poem, as is said by a distinguished French [pg 211]writer, may be summed up in the medieval maxim, ‘Laborare est orare325.’

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

Τῆς ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν,

so now they make the sweat of man’s brow the means through which the ‘divini gloria ruris’ can be realised. By the labour spent in drawing into actual existence the glory and beauty of the land man best fulfils his duty and secures his happiness. There is no truer source for him of material and moral good, of simple pleasures, of contemplative delight. Yet if we wish rightly to appreciate the purely didactic parts of the poem, it is impossible, as has been fully shown by Conington in his General Introduction to the Georgics, to overrate the stress which Virgil puts on the ceaseless industry, foresight, vigilance, and actual force326 which must be put forth by the husbandman, as the condition of success in the struggle in which he is [pg 212]engaged. The very style of the Georgics bears the impress of this predominant idea. It is this idea which seems to give Roman strength to the workmanship of the poem; as it is the sense of the rich and tender life of Nature which gives to it the softness of Italian sentiment, so marvellously blended with that Roman strength. The imperial tone of conquest and command and civilising influence makes itself heard in such lines as these:—

Exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis.

Tum denique dura

Exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentes.

In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur327.

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

[pg 213]

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

Seu pluris calor ille vias et caeca relaxat

Spiramenta, novas veniat qua sucus in herbas328, etc.,

i. 415–423,

Haud equidem credo, etc.,

iii. 242,

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, etc.,

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

Illic ut perhibent aut intempesta silet nox,

and iv. 219–227,

His quidam signis, etc.,

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

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri329,

and that he accepted certain results of science which impressed his imagination, without caring for their consistency with others which he equally accepts. There is a constant tendency in him to allow his belief in the miraculous to interfere with his belief in natural law; as for instance in the account he gives of the birth of bees (iv. 200), and again of their spontaneous generation from the blood of slain bullocks (iv. 285). He has not the firm faith in natural agency which Lucretius had. Phenomena are [pg 214]still regarded by him as isolated, not interdependent. The ordinary course of Nature he supposes to be interrupted by marvels and portents. The signs of coming things are represented, not as Lucretius would have represented them, as natural antecedents or concomitants of the things portended, but as arbitrary indications appointed for the guidance of man.

the modes in which his delight in nature manifests itself, the vein of romance which runs through his treatment of early times may perhaps be explained by some subtle intermixture of Celtic blood with the firmer temperament of the old Italian race. Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged.

II.

Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral.

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

[pg 153]

Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu

Nostra, neque erubuit silvas habitare Thalia237,

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

Nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poeta,

Et formosus ovis ad flumina pavit Adonis238.

In order to understand the pastoral poetry of Virgil, both in its relation to a Greek ideal and in its original truth of feeling, it is necessary to remember the chief characteristics of its prototype in the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Alexandria and in the early years of the reign of Hiero of Syracuse. The pastoral poetry of Sicily was the latest creation of Greek genius, born after the nobler phases of religious and political life, and the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry which arose out of them, had passed away. In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and vaguely longing to breathe a freer air239. But there was in ancient times a primitive and popular, as well as a late and artistic pastoral. Of the primitive pastoral, springing out of rustic gatherings and festivals, or from lonely communion with Nature,

[pg 154]

Per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia240,

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

οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης

τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠίθεός τε,

παρθένος ἠίθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλουν241—

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

This primitive pastoral poetry may have been spread over all Greece and the islands of the Aegean, from the earliest settlements of the Hellenic race, or of that older branch of the family to which the name Pelasgic has been vaguely given, [pg 155]and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and the woods, and to have trained it to assume some form of art, was Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

Some of the primitive modes of feeling which gave birth to the earliest pastoral song still survive, though in altered form, in this later Sicilian poetry. The song of the βουκόλοι, or herdsmen, like the song of the masked worshippers of Bacchus (τραγῳδία), may be traced to that stage in the development of the higher races in which Nature was the chief object of worship and religious sympathy. Under the symbols of Linus, Daphnis, or Adonis, the country people of early times lamented the decay of the fresh beauty of spring, under the burning midsummer heat242. This primitive germ of serious feeling has perpetuated itself in that melancholy mood which runs through the pastoral poetry of all countries. From that tendency of the Greek imagination to give a human meaning to all that interested it, this dirge over the fading beauty of the early year soon assumed the form of a lament over the death of a young shepherd-poet, dear to gods and men, to the flocks, herds, and wild animals, to the rocks and mountains, among which he had lived. In the Daphnis of Theocritus, the human passion of love produces that blighting influence on the life of the shepherd which in the original myth was produced by the fierce heat of summer on the tender life of the year. A still later development of the myth appears in the lament over the extinction of youthful genius by early death. It is not in any poem of Theocritus, but in the ‘Lament of Bion,’—the work of a later writer, apparently an Italian-Greek,—

[pg 156]

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι

Αὐσονικᾶς ὀδύνας μέλπω μέλος243,—

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

Another traditional theme of ‘pastoral melancholy,’ of which Theocritus makes use, is the unrequited love of the Cyclops for Galatea. This too had its origin in the personification of natural objects244. But, unlike the song of Daphnis, the myth of which it was the expression was purely local, and confined to the shores of Sicily. It also illustrates the tendency of all pastoral song to find its chief human motive in the passion of love. While the original motive of the primitive lament for Daphnis or Linus was the unconscious sympathy of the human heart with Nature, the most prominent motive of artistic pastoral or idyllic poetry, from the ‘Song of Songs’ to the ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ and ‘The Long Vacation Pastoral’ of these later times, has been the passion of the human heart for the human object of its affection, blending with either an unconscious absorption in outward scenes or a refined contemplation of them245.

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

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit246.

[pg 157]

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

Such were the first rude utterances of the deeper as well as the gayer emotions of men, living in the happy security of the country districts or the ‘otia dia’ of the mountains in Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Southern Italy, which the art of Theocritus and his successors cast into artistic forms and measures suited to the taste of educated readers. How far, in the manner in which he accomplished this, Theocritus had been anticipated by ‘the grave muse of Stesichorus,’ and whether this wild product of the mountains was of a native Siculian or an Hellenic stock, it is not possible to determine. A citizen of Syracuse, in the palmy days of Hiero, before there was any dream of Roman conquest; deeply susceptible of the beauty of his native island, but, like a Greek, seeing this beauty in relation to human associations; familiar with the songs and old traditions of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life in friendly association with his literary compeers, such as the Alexandrine Aratus247 and Nicias, the physician and poet248,—he [pg 158]sought to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-shore with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and grotesque superstitions of actual herdsmen should be found in union with the refinement, the mythological lore, the keen sense of the beauty, not unmixed with the melancholy, of life, characteristic of a circle of poets and scholars enjoying their youth in untroubled and uneventful times. All his materials, old and new, assumed the shape of pictures from human life in combination with the representations of the sounds, sights, and living movement of Nature. The essential characteristic both of his pastoral Idyls and of those drawn from city-life, such as the second, fourteenth, and fifteenth, is what has been well called the ‘disinterested objectivity249’ of Greek art: and this is the chief note of their difference from Virgil’s pastorals. Even where, as in the seventh, the poet introduces himself on the scene, he appears as one, and not the most important, of the personages on it. He does not draw attention to his own feelings or fortunes, only to his playful converse and rivalry in song with the young shepherd-poet Lycidas, ‘with the bright laughing eye and the smile ever playing on his lip250.’

It may be urged against these Idyls that, as compared with the best modern Idyls, in prose or verse, they are, for the most part, wanting in incident or adventure; and this charge is equally applicable to Virgil’s pastorals. But there is always dramatic vivacity and consistency in the personages of Theocritus, and this cannot equally be said of those introduced into the Eclogues. It might be urged also against the representations of Theocritus, and still more against those of Virgil, that the ‘vestigia ruris’ have been too carefully obliterated. Yet, though not drawn immediately from life, this picture of Sicilian shepherds and peasants, possessed with the vivid belief in Pan and the Nymphs, singing the old dirge of the herdsman Daphnis [pg 159]among the mountain pastures, or the love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields251, challenging each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless tending their flocks rather as a picturesque pastime than as a toilsome occupation, and living a life of free social enjoyment in the open air, was a genuine ideal of the Greek imagination, not perhaps, too far removed from the actual reality.

Before the time of Virgil there had been no attempt to introduce this form of art into Italy. Though the germ of a rude rustic poetry existed in the ‘Fescennine verses,’ no connexion can be traced between them and the highly artificial pastoral of the Augustan Age. The Eclogues of Virgil are in form and even in substance a closer reproduction of a Greek original than any other branch of Latin literature, with the exception of the comedy of Terence. The ‘Lament of Daphnis,’ the song of unrequited love, the bantering dialogues of the shepherds and their more formal contests in song, reappear in Latin tones and with some new associations of individual and national life, but in such a manner as to recall the memory of the Sicilian idyl rather than to suggest a new experience from life. And yet Virgil is not satisfied, like the authors of Latin comedy, with presenting to the imagination types of Greek life, Greek sentiment and manners, and Greek scenes. He desires not only to reproduce in new words and music the charm which had fascinated him in Theocritus, but to blend the actual feeling and experience of an Italian living in the Augustan Age with this ideal restored from a by-gone time. The result is something composite, neither purely Greek nor purely Italian; not altogether of the present time nor yet of a mythical foretime; but a blending of various elements of poetic association and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of classical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress [pg 160]along with the fantastic shapes of mythological invention. The scenes and personages of the Eclogues are thus one stage further removed from actuality than those of the Greek pastoral. They do not reproduce, as Keats has done, the Greek ideal of rural life, and they do not create a purely Italian ideal. There was, indeed, latent in the Italian imagination an ideal of a homely rustic life, finding its happiness in the annual round of labour and in the blessing of a virtuous home, and that ideal Virgil loved to draw with ‘magic hand;’ but that was altogether unlike the ideal of the Greek imagination. The life of industry and happiness which Virgil glorifies in the Georgics,—that of the ‘primitive, stout-hearted, and thrifty husbandmen’ of Horace,—whose pride was in their ‘glad harvests,’ their ‘trim fields,’ their ‘vineyards,’ and in the use which they derived from their flocks, herds, and beehives, had nothing in common with that of the ‘well-trimmed sunburnt shepherds’ whom Greek fancy first created, and whom Keats has made live for us again, enjoying the fulness of actual existence in union with the dreams of an ‘Elysian idleness252.’ Least of all could the pastoral life of Arcadia or Sicily have been like the habitual ways of men in the rich plains of Mantua. The district of Italy most like the scenes of the Greek idyl was Calabria, where, among the desolate forest-glades, the herds and flocks of some rich senator or eques were now tended by barbarous slaves, with whose daily existence the ideal glories of pastoral song were not likely to intermingle.

II.

Had Virgil’s sole object been to write a national epic which should satisfy popular sentiment, we can imagine several reasons why the tale of Romulus should have been chosen as its subject in preference to that of Aeneas. Though the traditional account of the founder of the city owes some of its features to Greek invention, yet it has a much more naïve and indigenous character than that of the Trojan settlement in Latium. It was more firmly rooted in the popular mind. It was still celebrated, [pg 301]as we learn from Dionysius, in national hymns. It had been commemorated in a famous work of art, the bronze she-wolf still extant, at a time antecedent to the origin of Roman literature. It formed the chief subject of the first book of the Annals of Ennius, which, as dealing with the mythical portion of his theme, seems to have had more of an epic character than the later books. It was also a subject which by its relation to famous localities and memorials of the past,—such as the oldest city-wall, the Ruminal fig-tree, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the Palatine and Aventine hills,—and with the religious and social organisation of the State, admitted easily of being connected with the present time. It might have been so treated as to magnify the glory of the Emperor, who desired to be regarded as the second founder of the city, and is said to have debated whether he should not assume the title of Romulus, before deciding on taking that of Augustus. A poet of bolder and more original invention, and one more capable of sympathising with the purely martial characteristics of his hero, might have been attracted by this story of indigenous growth rather than by the exotic legend on which Virgil has bestowed such enduring life.

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

The Greek germ out of which the legend arose, and the acceptance of this explanation of their origin by the Romans from the beginning of their literary history, are clearly ascertained. But there is great uncertainty as to the connecting link between these two stages in the development of the legend. The continuance of the line of Aeneas after the destruction of [pg 302]Troy is announced by the mouth of Poseidon in the twentieth Book of the Iliad (307–308):—

Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει

καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται455.

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

Αἰνήας σὺν τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀπαίρων εἰς τὴν Ἑσπερίαν456,—

and the Ἰλίου πέρσις of Stesichorus is quoted as the authority for the representation457. The motive actuating Stesichorus was [pg 303]probably the desire to connect the newly-discovered localities in Italy and Sicily with the cycle of Homeric narrative. But Stesichorus apparently knew nothing of a Trojan settlement in Latium; Siris in Oenotria seems to have been fixed on by him as the place of refuge for the Palladium and the Penates of Troy. It was after the destruction of Siris that the fancy of the Greeks fixed on Lavinium, where there was a worship similar to that established at Siris, as the ultimate resting-place of Aeneas. The first definite statement connecting Rome with Troy was made by Cephalon of Gergis in the Troad (about 350 B.C.), who ascribed the foundation of the city to Romus a son of Aeneas. In the course of the next half century this appears to have become the prevailing belief among the Greeks, whose attention was now attracted by the growing ascendency of Rome in Italy. About the beginning of the third century Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, is said to have shaped the legend into the form adopted by Naevius458.

It is obvious that there is a great gap in our knowledge of the stages in the development of the legend between Stesichorus, a poet of the sixth century, and Cephalon, an historian of the fourth. And the question suggests itself whether, in the interval between them, the Romans themselves had accepted any similar explanation of their origin. The early connexion between Rome and Cumae renders it not impossible that the Romans had formed some idea of their Trojan descent, before the wars of Pyrrhus brought them into more intimate connexion with the Greeks. It was by the Greek colonists of Cumae that the Isles of the Sirens, the Kingdom of the Laestrygones, and the abode of Circe were localised near Sorrento, the ancient town of Formiae, and the promontory of Circeii. It seems probable that to them also may be ascribed the mythical connexion established between the promontories of Caieta, Misenum, and Palinurum, in their own immediate neighbourhood, with the names of the household or followers of Aeneas. The [pg 304]mythical traditions which assign a Greek origin to various important Latin towns, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Praeneste, and to the earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill, probably owe their invention to the same source. Alba Longa, as the chief city of the old Latin confederacy, must have been an object of greater interest to the Cumaeans than Tibur or Tusculum, and if we could be sure of the existence of the belief in the Trojan settlement in Latium before the destruction of Alba, we might infer with probability the great antiquity of the legend which ascribed the foundation of that town to the son of Aeneas. This belief might easily have passed to Rome; and Cephalon may have received it, in a somewhat distorted form, from native sources. But it is impossible to take any step in these conjectures without feeling the extreme uncertainty of our ground. We really know nothing of the acceptance of this account of their origin by the Romans before the time of the First Punic War; it is not easily reconcileable with the indigenous belief which certainly struck much deeper roots in the national history: the story as told by Cephalon appears to exclude the connexion between Rome and Alba as an intermediate link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus459.

But besides the foreign and prosaic origin of the story, there is great vagueness and indistinctness in the incidents and personages connected with it. Homer indeed has supplied a definite, though not a marked, outline to the character of Aeneas; and Stesichorus, in shaping the family group of Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius flying from Troy with their household-gods, may have suggested to Virgil the leading characteristic of his hero. But these were nearly all the elements in the legend derived from primitive poetical sources. [pg 305]There was no individuality of character attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early imaginative invention associated with the dim tradition of his wanderings. The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,—some supplied by poetical invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, some suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome, some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character.

But, on other grounds, the judgment of Virgil may be justified in the choice of this legend, vague, composite, and unpoetical as it was, as most adapted to his own genius and to the purpose of his epic poem. It was the only subject, of national significance, connected with the Homeric cycle of events. Not only the epic and dramatic poets of Greece, but the Roman tragic poets had recognised the heroic legends of Greece as the legitimate material for those forms of poetry which aimed at representing human action and character with seriousness and dignity. The personages and events connected with the Trojan War had especially been made familiar to the Romans by the works of their early dramatic poets. The Romans themselves had no mythical back-ground, rich in poetic associations, to their own history. It was impossible for a poet of a literary age to create this back-ground. But it was possible for him to give substance and reality to the shadowy connexion, existing in legend and in the works of older national writers, between the beginnings of Roman history and this distant region of poetry and romance. Virgil’s imagination, as was seen in the examination of the Georgics, was peculiarly susceptible of the impressions produced by a remote antiquity and by old poetic associations. If he was deficient in spon[pg 306]taneous invention, he possessed a remarkable power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the invention of a new world of wonder and adventure,—a work most difficult of accomplishment in a late stage of human development,—the most attractive aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving, under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial passions of an earlier and ruder age.

Although there is no evidence that the connexion of Rome with Troy had sunk deeply into the popular mind before the time of Virgil, yet it had been recognised in official acts of the State for more than two centuries. So early as the First Punic War the Acarnanians had applied to the Romans for assistance against the Aetolians, on the ground that their ancestors alone among the Greeks had taken no part in the Trojan War. The Senate had offered alliance and friendship to King Seleucus on condition of his exempting the people of Ilium, as kinsmen of the Romans, from tribute460. T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the Aeneadae461. In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans:—

[pg 307]

Amnem Troiugena Cannam Romane fuge462.

So early as the time of Timaeus, i.e. before the First Punic War, the connexion of Aeneas with the worship of the Penates at Lavinium had been recognised. His own worship also established itself in the religion of the State by his identification with Jupiter Indiges, who seems to have had a temple on the banks of the river Numicius. Many families among the Roman aristocracy, as for instance the Cluentii, Sergii, Memmii463, claimed to be descended from the followers of Aeneas. From the time of Naevius this account of the origin of the Romans had been the accepted belief in all Latin literature. Ennius begins his annals from the date

Quum veter occubuit Priamus sub Marte Pelasgo464.

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

Ab Iove principium generis, Iove Dardana pubes

Gaudet avo; rex ipse Iovis de gente suprema

Troius Aeneas, etc465.

[pg 308]

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

Ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum,

and again (Georg. i. 28),

cingens materna tempora myrto466.

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

Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,

Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris,

Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo467.

While the vagueness of the tradition and the absence of definite incident and individual character associated with it were conditions unfavourable to novelty and vividness of representation, yet they allowed to Virgil great latitude in carrying out his purpose of giving body and substance to all that unknown and shadowy past, which survived only in names, customs, and cere[pg 309]monies. He was not limited to any particular district or period. His plan enabled him to embrace in the compass of his epic the dim traditions connected with the ‘origins’ of the famous towns and tribes of Central Italy and of several of the great Roman families; it enabled him to imagine the primitive state of places which had a world-wide celebrity in his own time; to invoke, as an element of poetic interest, the veneration paid to the ancient rites of religion; and to cast an idealising light on events, personages, families, or customs familiar to his own age, by associating them with the sentiment of an immemorial past. One great excellence of the Aeneid, as a representative poem, is the large prospect of Roman and Italian life which it opens up before us. The vague outlines of the story which he followed enabled Virgil to enlarge his conception with an ampler content of local and national material, than if he had been called upon to recast a more definite and more vital tradition. The want of individuality in the personages of his story justified him in exhibiting their character in accordance with his own ideal; in conceiving of Aeneas as the type of antique piety combined with modern humanity, and of Turnus as the type of the haughty and martial spirit, animating the old Italian race.

Even the composite character of the legend and the heterogeneous elements out of which it was composed, if unfavourable to unity of impression and simplicity of execution, conduced to the poet’s purpose of concentrating in one representation, of a Roman vastness of compass, whatever might enhance and illustrate the greatness of Rome and of its ruler. The Rome of the Augustan Age no longer exhibited the political and religious unity of an old Italian republic; it was expanding its limits so as to embrace in a much wider unity the various nations that had played their part in the past history of the world. As the glory and wealth of Asia, Greece, Carthage, etc. had all gone to swell the glory and wealth of Rome, so all the traditions, historic memories, and literary art of the past were to be made tributary to her national representative poem. The first great epic poem of the ancient world is buoyant with the promise of [pg 310]the mighty life which was to be; the last great epic is weighty with the accumulated experience of all that had been. The stream of epic poetry shows no longer the jubilant force and purity of waters—‘exercita cursu flumina’—which rise in the high mountain-land separating barbarism from civilisation; it moves more slowly and less clearly through more level and cultivated districts; its volume is swollen and its weight increased by tributaries which have never known the ‘bright speed468’ of its nobler sources.

two years later, either before the poems were finally collected for publication, or in preparing a new edition of them. They were written at various places and at various stages of the poet’s fortunes. They appear to have obtained great success when first published, and some of them were recited with applause upon the stage. The earliest in point of time were the second and third, and these, along with the fifth, may be ascribed to the year 42 B.C. The seventh, which has no allusion to contemporary events and is a mere imitative reproduction of the Greek idyl, may also belong to this earlier period, although some editors rank it as one of the latest. The first, which is founded on the loss of the poet’s farm, belongs to the next year, and the ninth and sixth probably may be assigned to the same year, or to the early part of the following year. The date of the fourth is fixed by the Consulship of Pollio to the year 40 B.C.; that of the eighth to the year 39 B.C. by the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini. The opening words of the tenth show that it was the last of the series; and the reference to the expedition of Agrippa implies that it could not have been written earlier than the end of 38 B.C. or the beginning of 37 B.C. The first, second, third, and fifth

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

too vast and too manifold to be subject to any will but her own,—

of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’

to make his countrymen proud of the outward beauty of Rome, as Pericles had made the Athenians proud of the beauty of Athens.

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

[pg 1]

THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE

of the Odyssey and that of the Aeneid. The one poem is pervaded by the eager curiosity of the youthful prime of the world, attracting the most daring and energetic spirits to the discovery and peopling of new lands; the other by that more languid curiosity, awakened by the associations of the past,—by the longing for some change to break the routine of a too easy life,—and by the refined enjoyment of beauty, urging men to encounter some danger and more discomfort for the sake of visiting scenes famous in history, rich in natural charms, or in works of art, the inheritance from more creative times.

Virgil shows a great susceptibility to the beauty and power of Nature. But Nature presents different aspects and awakens a different class of feelings in these poems. In the Eclogues he shows a great openness and receptivity of mind, through which all the softer and more delicate influences of the outward world enter into and become part of his being. The ‘molle atque facetum’ of Horace denotes the yielding susceptibility

or monotonous in the style of the Georgics, nothing trivial or mean; while always rich and pregnant with suggestion, it is never overstrained or overloaded; while always elevated to the pitch of poetry, it never seems to soar too far above the familiar aspects of the world. Nothing shows the perfect sanity of Virgil’s genius more clearly than his entire exemption from the besetting sin of our own didactic poetasters of last century—a sin from which even Wordsworth himself is not altogether free—that of calling common things by pompous names, and of dignifying trifles by applying heroic phrases to them. If he seems sometimes to deviate from this habitual temperance of manner in the account of his bee communities, he does so purposely, to convey through this gentle vein of irony something of that pensive meditativeness of spirit which is produced in him by reflection on the transitory passions, joys, and vicissitudes of our mortal life.

of the brighter side of Roman imperialism, as Tiberius (till his final retirement from Rome),—in his strength of body and mind, his military and administrative capacity, his unrelieved application to business

mark the first beginnings of the two Imperial cities which in historical times disputed the empire of the world. The poem evokes the associations, ancient and recent, attaching to the various scenes through which the action passes,—Troy, Carthage, Sicily, the shores of Latium, the Tiber, and the hills on which Rome was built. The vagueness of the time in which the action is laid enables the poet to connect together, in a most critical position of human affairs, the fortunes of the chief powers of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The spheres of man’s activity in which the action moves—war and sea-adventure in search of undiscovered lands—give the fullest scope to energetic representation. In his conception of the voyage of Aeneas and of a great war determining the issue of his enterprise, Virgil followed the greatest epic examples, and found a subject to which he could impart the interest of adventurous incident and heroic achievement. In his conception of the part played in the action by the passion of love, he introduced a more familiar and modern phase of life which the examples of the Greek tragedians and of the Alexandrine epic had proved to be capable of idealising treatment.

the spectacle of Rome, and the thought of her wide empire, her genius, character, and history; by the visible survivals of ancient ceremonies and memorials of the past; by the sight of the great natural features of the land, of old Italian towns of historic renown, or, where they had disappeared, of the localities still marked by their name:—

II.

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

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus

Sceptra potitus115—

is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer. If any one ever succeeded in securing that which [pg 69]Tacitus says ‘should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a happy memory of himself116,’ that may be truly said of Virgil. Though his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that ‘he gave a new direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a critical period of the world’s history what the future would love.’

It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he made to Varius, before leaving Italy, ‘that if anything happened to him he should destroy the Aeneid.’ A letter written to Augustus is quoted by Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work of such vast compass ‘almost from a perversion of mind117.’ No poet could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical self-disparagement of Horace.

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

Yet the words in the letter to Augustus,—‘that I fancy myself to have been almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a work’—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art, [pg 71]which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other. Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and running streams among the valleys.’

As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek epics is the probable explanation of Virgil’s own dissatisfaction with the Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures, was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil, at the approach of death, wished ‘to destroy what in those solemn moments he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false reputation118.’ In the latter he says, ‘The [pg 72]whole of the Aeneid, from the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea.’ ‘Virgil is one of the remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling. His was lyric poetry.’ ‘It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the very work which was but a failure119.’

Although the service rendered to the study of antiquity by the historical insight of Niebuhr is probably as great as that rendered by the genius of any scholar of this century, yet the opinions expressed by him on literature are often more arbitrary than authoritative. Still this verdict on the merits of the Aeneid was in accordance with the most advanced criticism of the time when it was written, both in Germany and England. The writer by whom the critical taste of England was most stimulated and enlarged about the same time was Coleridge; and in his ‘Table Talk’ such disparaging dicta as this occur more than once: ‘If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ The whole tone of the criticism which arose out of the admiration of German thought and poetry was thoroughly opposed to the spirit in which Latin literature had been admired. Mr. Carlyle also expressed in one of his earliest works—the Life of Schiller—an estimate of the value of Virgil, which was not uncommon among younger scholars at the Universities some thirty years ago. ‘Virgil and Horace,’ he writes, ‘he (Schiller) learned to construe accurately, but is said to have taken no deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and meek beauty of the first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of the last, the matchless elegance of both would of course escape his inexperienced perception; while the matter of their writings must have appeared frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible.’ Even the warmest admirers of Virgil about that time, such as Keble, are content to claim for him high excellence as the poet of outward nature. The late Professor Conington, while showing the finest appreciation of ‘the marvellous grace and delicacy, the evidences of a culture most elaborate and most refined,’ in the poet to the [pg 73]interpretation of whose works he devoted the best years of a scholar’s life, has questioned ‘the appropriateness of the special praise given to Virgil’s agricultural poetry, and conceded though with more hesitation to his pastoral compositions.’ He speaks also of it as an admitted fact that ‘in undertaking the Aeneid at the command of a superior, Virgil was venturing beyond the province of his genius.’ And he describes this disparaging estimate as the opinion ‘which is now generally entertained on Virgil’s claims as an epic poet120.’ Mr. Keightley is also quoted by him as speaking of Virgil as ‘perhaps the least original poet of antiquity121.’ It is certainly not in the spirit of an ardent admirer that the author of Virgil’s life in the ‘Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology’ approaches the criticism of his poetry. But it is by German critics and scholars that Virgil’s claim to a high rank among the poets of the world is at the present day most seriously impugned. Thus to take two or three conspicuous instances of their disparaging criticism: Mommsen in his History of Rome122 speaks contemptuously of the ‘successes of the Aeneid, the Henriade, and the Messiad;’ Bernhardy in his Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur (1871) brings together a formidable list of German critics and commentators unfavourable to the merits of the Aeneid, in which the illustrious name of Hegel appears; Gossrau in his edition of the Aeneid quotes from Richter (as a specimen of the unfavourable opinions pronounced by many critics) the expression of a wish that, with the exception of the descriptions and episodes, the rest of the poem had been burned123; and W. S. Teuffel, among other criticisms which ‘damn with faint praise,’ has the following: ‘Aber er ist zu weich und zu wenig genial als dass er auf dem seiner Natur zusagendsten Gebiete hätte beharren und darauf Ruhm ernten können.’

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

Again, the greater nearness of the Augustan Age, not in time only but in spirit and manners, to our own age, which in the last century told in Virgil’s favour in the comparison with Homer, tells the other way now. The critics of last century were interested in other ages, in so far as they appeared to be like their own. The rude vigour and stirring incident of the Homeric Age or the Middle Ages had no attraction for men living under the régime of Louis XIV. and XV. or of Queen Anne and the first Georges. What an illustrious living Frenchman says of the great representative of French ideas in the last century might be said generally of its criticism. ‘Voltaire,’ says M. Renan, ‘understood neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle Ages124.’ And yet he was prepared to pronounce his judgment on them by the light of that admirable common [pg 75]sense which he applied to the questions of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation. Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness, and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.

Other causes connected with a great expansion of human interests acting on the imagination, and with the revolt against the prevailing poetical style, which arose about the beginning of the present century, have tended to lower the authority of writers who formed the standard of taste to previous ages. The desire of the new era was to escape from the exhausted atmosphere of literary tradition, and to return again to the simplicity of Nature and human feeling. The genius of [pg 76]Roman literature is more in harmony with eras of established order, of adherence to custom, of distinct but limited insight into the outward world and into human life, than to eras of expansive energy, of speculative change, of vague striving to attain some new ideal of duty or happiness. The genius of Greece exercised a powerful influence on several of the great English and German poets who lived in the new era. But neither Goethe nor Schiller, Byron nor Scott, Shelley nor Keats were at all indebted, in thought, sentiment, or expression, to the poets of the Augustan Age. Among the great poets of this new era the only one known to have greatly admired Virgil, and who in his poems founded on classical subjects was influenced by him, is the one who most decidedly proclaimed his revolt against the artificial diction and representation of the school of classical imitators,—the poet Wordsworth.

The very perfection of Virgil’s art, combined with the calmness and moderation of his spirit, was out of harmony with the genius of such a time. He seemed to have nothing new to teach the eager generation which regarded the world and speculated on its own destiny with feelings altogether unlike to those of the generations that went before it. The truth of his sentiment, its adaptation to the spiritual movement of his own age, in which it gained ascendency like a new revelation, had caused it to pass into the modes of thought and feeling habitual to the world. This too may be said of the ethical feeling and common sense of Cicero’s philosophical treatises. Moral speculation has been so long and so deeply permeated by the thought expressed in these treatises that it now appears trite and common-place. So too the moderation and unfailing propriety of Virgil’s language had no attraction of freshness or novelty to stimulate the imagination. The direct force of language in Homer or Lucretius never can become trite or common-place. It affects the mind now as powerfully and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to [pg 77]force the reader’s admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested, it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect. As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital force which it originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language. The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word ‘meditari,’ applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation—‘iustissima tellus.’ These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.

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

name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world.

ciated with Italy; and who has interpreted, as no one else has done, the meaning and tendency of his age, and of the change which was then preparing for the human spirit and for the nations of the future.

of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines

in no ordinary degree by that love of fame and distinction which very powerfully influenced the greatest Roman conquerors and statesmen, orators and poets. The disdain of such distinctions and the dislike of public spectacles are mentioned, in contrast to the tastes of his predecessor, among the causes of the unpopularity of Tiberius. The enumeration in the Ancyraean inscription of the honours and titles bestowed on him, recorded with ‘imperial brevity’ and dictated by a proud self-esteem, attests the strength of this ruling passion in the latter years of the life of Augustus. The direct pressure which he brought to bear on the most eminent poets of the time to celebrate his wars is sufficiently indicated in many passages in the Odes and familiar writings of Horace. Belonging by descent to the comparatively obscure families of the Octavii and Atii, Augustus attached peculiar importance to the glories of the Julian line, which he inherited through his great-uncle and adoptive father. Even Julius Caesar, notwithstanding his Epicurean disregard of the religious ideas of his age, had encouraged the belief in his divine descent, as marking him out for the special favours of fortune. There was moreover in Augustus, in contradistinction to Julius Caesar, a strong vein of religious or superstitious sentiment. His personal courage has been questioned, probably with injustice, but he appears to have been in a marked degree liable to supernatural terrors

of a personal address, which accident may have first suggested to Hesiod, and which either his example or their own taste had imposed on the early philosophic poets. The Alexandrine type of poem differed from that of Hesiod by professing to convey systematic instruction on some definite branch of knowledge, instead of offering practical directions on the best method of carrying on some occupation, combined with a medley of precepts, moral, religious, and ceremonial. The change may be compared to that which the Roman satire underwent, from the inartistic medley of Ennius and Lucilius to the systematic treatment of some special subject in the satire of Persius and Juvenal. The primary aim of such writers as Aratus and Nicander was not to communicate ideas capable of affecting the imagination, but to satisfy intellectual curiosity by communicating interesting information. So soon as this information ceased to be interesting, the value of their work was gone. Thus although accident has handed down several specimens of the Alexandrine type of didactic poetry, their chief literary use is to enable us, by contrast, better to appreciate the genius which, by interfusing with the materials used by them other elements deeply affecting the heart, the imagination, and the moral sympathies, has given the world, instead of the temporary gift of a little useful information, the κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί which it possesses in the Georgics.

Po; the starwort, out of which wreaths are made to adorn the altars of the gods, is gathered by shepherds by the winding banks of the Mella (a river in Northern Italy mentioned also by Catullus); the meadow-land which unfortunate Mantua lost is adduced as a type of the best kind of pasture, and the land in the neighbourhood of Capua and the region skirting Mount Vesuvius as that most suitable for corn-crops. We read also of the rose-beds of Paestum,—of the olives clothing the sides of the Samnian Taburnus,—of the woodland pastures of Sila,—of those by the banks of the Silarus, on Alburnus green with ilexes, and by the dry torrent-bed of the Tanager,—and of the yellow cornfields through which the dark Galaesus flows. The Aeneid affords further testimony of the interest which Virgil awakens in the region which forms the distant environment of Rome. But the sentiment of the Georgics is a sentiment of peace inspired by the land, quite different from that inspired by the Imperial City, and from the memories of war and conquest with which the neighbourhood of Rome is associated. And though the aspect which Nature generally presents in the poem is that of her nobler mood, yet that air of indolent repose which characterises her presence in the Eclogues is not altogether absent from the severer poem. The sense of rest after toil—‘molles sub arbore somni,’—the quiet contemplation of wide and peaceful landscapes,—‘latis otia fundis,’—relieve the strain of strenuous labour which is enforced as the indispensable condition of realising the glory of the land.

works the secret of his power and charm, so it is desirable, before entering on a separate study of the various books which constitute the literature of any age, to take a general survey of the most important conditions affecting the lives, thoughts, and art of all who lived and wrote in that age. In the Augustan Age these conditions may be classified under four heads: (1) the political circumstances of the Empire and the state of moral and religious feeling resulting from them; (2) the social relation of men of letters to men eminent in the State; (3) the wealth, luxury, and outward splendour which met the eye and gratified the senses, in the great city itself, and in the villas scattered over the shores and inland scenes of central Italy; (4) the intellectual culture inherited from the preceding age and modified by the tastes and conditions of the new generation. These will be reviewed as conditions acting on the imagination, and forming the intellectual atmosphere in the midst of which the productions of poetical genius expanded into various shapes and dimensions of beauty and stateliness.

ciations of an immemorial past. The three great prophetic passages in the first, sixth, and eighth books enable him to revive, as Ennius had done, the thought of the great men and families of Rome, and of the great events both of earlier and more recent history. The march of Roman conquest during one hundred and fifty momentous years enabled the younger poet to evoke greater, though in some respects less happy, memories than those evoked by his predecessor. And the security of the Empire established in his day justified him in looking forward to the future with even a more assured confidence, though perhaps in a less sanguine spirit.

them in a consistent course, yet no mere analytic insight into the springs of action can explain the process by which a great artist works. The beings of his imagination seem to acquire an existence independent of the experience and of the deliberate intentions of their author, and to inform this experience and mould these intentions as much as they are informed and moulded by them. Virgil’s imagination in the creation of Dido seems to be possessed in this way. She grows more and more real as her passion deepens. Virgil’s intention in this representation may have been to show the tragic infatuation of a woman’s love—

I.

The appearance of the Eclogues marked Virgil out among his contemporaries as the poet of Nature and rural life. That province was assigned to him, as epic poetry was to Varius and tragedy to Pollio. It is to the Eclogues only that the lines in which Horace characterises his art can with propriety be applied. These lines were written before the appearance of the Georgics, and probably before any considerable part of the poem had been composed272. The epithets which admirably characterise the receptive attitude of Virgil’s mind in the composition of his pastoral poems are quite inapplicable to the solid and severe workmanship and the earnest feeling of his didactic poem. The Eclogues are the poems of youth, and of a youth passed in study and in contact with Nature rather than with the serious interests of life. Though Virgil indicates in them the ambition which was moving him to vaster undertakings, yet he shows at the same time his consciousness of the comparative triviality of his art. The class of poem to which the word ludere is [pg 175]applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as Cicero273 for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of the ‘Roman gravitas274.’ The genuine Roman spirit demanded of its highest literature, as of its native architecture, that it should either have some direct practical use, or contribute in some way to enhance the sense of national greatness.

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

Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.

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

Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae,

Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo275.

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

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

Urbem quam dicunt Romam Meliboee putavi

Stultus ego huic nostrae similem276.

But before undertaking the task of writing the Georgics he had become an honoured member of the circle of Maecenas, the intimate friend of Varius and of Horace (who himself owed his introduction to that circle to the kindly offices of the two older poets) and of others distinguished in literature and public affairs. He had lived for a time near the centre of the world’s movement, in close relations to the minds by which that movement was directed. As the most genuine of his Eclogues had been inspired by his personal share in the calamities of his country, it was natural that he should, now when his own fortunes were restored through the favour of those at the head of affairs, feel a stronger and more disinterested sympathy with the public condition, at a crisis to which no one capable of understanding its gravity could feel indifferent. It was natural that his new relations and the impulse of the new ideas which came to him through them should move him to undertake some work of art more suited to his maturer faculty, his graver temperament, and the firmer fibre of his genius. Nor is there any difficulty in [pg 177]believing that Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote. Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the restoration of security and abundance to the land:—

Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,

Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas277,

and in the same Ode:—

Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,

Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores278.

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

Tua, Caesar, aetas

Fruges et agris rettulit uberes279.

All Virgil’s early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify himself with this object and with the interests and [pg 178]happiness of such representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who [pg 179]aspired to fulfil the office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the poet’s own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns it280.

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

Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.,

and iv. 125–146,

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis, etc.,

[pg 180]

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

vividly interesting and permanently instructive historical work which the world possesses. But even had the genius of Rome been capable of producing a Thucydides, the circumstances of the time would have reduced him to silence. Tacitus regards the establishment of the Empire as equally fatal to the genius of the historian, as it was to the genius of the orator:—‘Postquam bellatum apud Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa ingenia cessere. Simul veritas pluribus modis infracta, primum inscitia rei publicae ut alienae, mox libidine assentandi

in life, had provoked a moral and religious reaction. The idea of a return to a simpler and better life, and of a revived faith in the gods and in the forms and ceremonies of religion, existed at least as an aspiration, if it did not bear much fruit in action. This ideal aspiration finds its expression not only in the two great poems of Virgil, whose whole nature was in thorough harmony with it, who may be regarded almost as the prophet of a new and purer religion, but in many of the Odes of the sceptical disciple of Aristippus. It was part of the policy of Augustus, whether from sincere conviction or as an instrument of social and political regeneration, to revive religion and morality. Among the great acts of his reign commemorated by himself he especially mentions the building and restoration of the temples

Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus

which interested him; and his singularly receptive nature enabled him to feel a much larger number of interests than the other poets of his country. What his speculative system was to Lucretius in its power of concentrating on itself all his capacity of feeling; what ‘Lesbia’ and ‘Sirmio’ and the few objects associated with the happiness and pain of his life were to Catullus; what the valley in the Sabine hills was to Horace

the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of things that might lawfully be done on holy days

II.

Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral.

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

[pg 153]

Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu

Nostra, neque erubuit silvas habitare Thalia237,

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

Nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poeta,

Et formosus ovis ad flumina pavit Adonis238.

In order to understand the pastoral poetry of Virgil, both in its relation to a Greek ideal and in its original truth of feeling, it is necessary to remember the chief characteristics of its prototype in the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Alexandria and in the early years of the reign of Hiero of Syracuse. The pastoral poetry of Sicily was the latest creation of Greek genius, born after the nobler phases of religious and political life, and the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry which arose out of them, had passed away. In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and vaguely longing to breathe a freer air239. But there was in ancient times a primitive and popular, as well as a late and artistic pastoral. Of the primitive pastoral, springing out of rustic gatherings and festivals, or from lonely communion with Nature,

[pg 154]

Per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia240,

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

οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης

τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠίθεός τε,

παρθένος ἠίθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλουν241—

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

This primitive pastoral poetry may have been spread over all Greece and the islands of the Aegean, from the earliest settlements of the Hellenic race, or of that older branch of the family to which the name Pelasgic has been vaguely given, [pg 155]and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and the woods, and to have trained it to assume some form of art, was Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

Some of the primitive modes of feeling which gave birth to the earliest pastoral song still survive, though in altered form, in this later Sicilian poetry. The song of the βουκόλοι, or herdsmen, like the song of the masked worshippers of Bacchus (τραγῳδία), may be traced to that stage in the development of the higher races in which Nature was the chief object of worship and religious sympathy. Under the symbols of Linus, Daphnis, or Adonis, the country people of early times lamented the decay of the fresh beauty of spring, under the burning midsummer heat242. This primitive germ of serious feeling has perpetuated itself in that melancholy mood which runs through the pastoral poetry of all countries. From that tendency of the Greek imagination to give a human meaning to all that interested it, this dirge over the fading beauty of the early year soon assumed the form of a lament over the death of a young shepherd-poet, dear to gods and men, to the flocks, herds, and wild animals, to the rocks and mountains, among which he had lived. In the Daphnis of Theocritus, the human passion of love produces that blighting influence on the life of the shepherd which in the original myth was produced by the fierce heat of summer on the tender life of the year. A still later development of the myth appears in the lament over the extinction of youthful genius by early death. It is not in any poem of Theocritus, but in the ‘Lament of Bion,’—the work of a later writer, apparently an Italian-Greek,—

[pg 156]

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι

Αὐσονικᾶς ὀδύνας μέλπω μέλος243,—

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

Another traditional theme of ‘pastoral melancholy,’ of which Theocritus makes use, is the unrequited love of the Cyclops for Galatea. This too had its origin in the personification of natural objects244. But, unlike the song of Daphnis, the myth of which it was the expression was purely local, and confined to the shores of Sicily. It also illustrates the tendency of all pastoral song to find its chief human motive in the passion of love. While the original motive of the primitive lament for Daphnis or Linus was the unconscious sympathy of the human heart with Nature, the most prominent motive of artistic pastoral or idyllic poetry, from the ‘Song of Songs’ to the ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ and ‘The Long Vacation Pastoral’ of these later times, has been the passion of the human heart for the human object of its affection, blending with either an unconscious absorption in outward scenes or a refined contemplation of them245.

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

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit246.

[pg 157]

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

Such were the first rude utterances of the deeper as well as the gayer emotions of men, living in the happy security of the country districts or the ‘otia dia’ of the mountains in Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Southern Italy, which the art of Theocritus and his successors cast into artistic forms and measures suited to the taste of educated readers. How far, in the manner in which he accomplished this, Theocritus had been anticipated by ‘the grave muse of Stesichorus,’ and whether this wild product of the mountains was of a native Siculian or an Hellenic stock, it is not possible to determine. A citizen of Syracuse, in the palmy days of Hiero, before there was any dream of Roman conquest; deeply susceptible of the beauty of his native island, but, like a Greek, seeing this beauty in relation to human associations; familiar with the songs and old traditions of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life in friendly association with his literary compeers, such as the Alexandrine Aratus247 and Nicias, the physician and poet248,—he [pg 158]sought to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-shore with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and grotesque superstitions of actual herdsmen should be found in union with the refinement, the mythological lore, the keen sense of the beauty, not unmixed with the melancholy, of life, characteristic of a circle of poets and scholars enjoying their youth in untroubled and uneventful times. All his materials, old and new, assumed the shape of pictures from human life in combination with the representations of the sounds, sights, and living movement of Nature. The essential characteristic both of his pastoral Idyls and of those drawn from city-life, such as the second, fourteenth, and fifteenth, is what has been well called the ‘disinterested objectivity249’ of Greek art: and this is the chief note of their difference from Virgil’s pastorals. Even where, as in the seventh, the poet introduces himself on the scene, he appears as one, and not the most important, of the personages on it. He does not draw attention to his own feelings or fortunes, only to his playful converse and rivalry in song with the young shepherd-poet Lycidas, ‘with the bright laughing eye and the smile ever playing on his lip250.’

It may be urged against these Idyls that, as compared with the best modern Idyls, in prose or verse, they are, for the most part, wanting in incident or adventure; and this charge is equally applicable to Virgil’s pastorals. But there is always dramatic vivacity and consistency in the personages of Theocritus, and this cannot equally be said of those introduced into the Eclogues. It might be urged also against the representations of Theocritus, and still more against those of Virgil, that the ‘vestigia ruris’ have been too carefully obliterated. Yet, though not drawn immediately from life, this picture of Sicilian shepherds and peasants, possessed with the vivid belief in Pan and the Nymphs, singing the old dirge of the herdsman Daphnis [pg 159]among the mountain pastures, or the love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields251, challenging each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless tending their flocks rather as a picturesque pastime than as a toilsome occupation, and living a life of free social enjoyment in the open air, was a genuine ideal of the Greek imagination, not perhaps, too far removed from the actual reality.

Before the time of Virgil there had been no attempt to introduce this form of art into Italy. Though the germ of a rude rustic poetry existed in the ‘Fescennine verses,’ no connexion can be traced between them and the highly artificial pastoral of the Augustan Age. The Eclogues of Virgil are in form and even in substance a closer reproduction of a Greek original than any other branch of Latin literature, with the exception of the comedy of Terence. The ‘Lament of Daphnis,’ the song of unrequited love, the bantering dialogues of the shepherds and their more formal contests in song, reappear in Latin tones and with some new associations of individual and national life, but in such a manner as to recall the memory of the Sicilian idyl rather than to suggest a new experience from life. And yet Virgil is not satisfied, like the authors of Latin comedy, with presenting to the imagination types of Greek life, Greek sentiment and manners, and Greek scenes. He desires not only to reproduce in new words and music the charm which had fascinated him in Theocritus, but to blend the actual feeling and experience of an Italian living in the Augustan Age with this ideal restored from a by-gone time. The result is something composite, neither purely Greek nor purely Italian; not altogether of the present time nor yet of a mythical foretime; but a blending of various elements of poetic association and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of classical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress [pg 160]along with the fantastic shapes of mythological invention. The scenes and personages of the Eclogues are thus one stage further removed from actuality than those of the Greek pastoral. They do not reproduce, as Keats has done, the Greek ideal of rural life, and they do not create a purely Italian ideal. There was, indeed, latent in the Italian imagination an ideal of a homely rustic life, finding its happiness in the annual round of labour and in the blessing of a virtuous home, and that ideal Virgil loved to draw with ‘magic hand;’ but that was altogether unlike the ideal of the Greek imagination. The life of industry and happiness which Virgil glorifies in the Georgics,—that of the ‘primitive, stout-hearted, and thrifty husbandmen’ of Horace,—whose pride was in their ‘glad harvests,’ their ‘trim fields,’ their ‘vineyards,’ and in the use which they derived from their flocks, herds, and beehives, had nothing in common with that of the ‘well-trimmed sunburnt shepherds’ whom Greek fancy first created, and whom Keats has made live for us again, enjoying the fulness of actual existence in union with the dreams of an ‘Elysian idleness252.’ Least of all could the pastoral life of Arcadia or Sicily have been like the habitual ways of men in the rich plains of Mantua. The district of Italy most like the scenes of the Greek idyl was Calabria, where, among the desolate forest-glades, the herds and flocks of some rich senator or eques were now tended by barbarous slaves, with whose daily existence the ideal glories of pastoral song were not likely to intermingle.

inspiration of the poem. The glory of Italy is declared to be the motive for the revival of this ancient theme—

the object of which seems to be to assign function and personality to the gods of Olympus and of Italy, the influence of the Stoic theology was recognised in ancient times in the identification of the sun and moon—‘clarissima mundi lumina’—with Liber and Ceres

happiness of such representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who [pg 179]

Virgil’s style appears as great in its power of reaching the secrets of the human spirit, as in the Georgics it proved itself to be in eliciting the deeper meaning of Nature. He combines nearly all the characteristic excellences of the great Latin writers. His language appears indeed inferior not only to that of Lucretius and Catullus but even to that of Ennius in reproducing the first vivid impressions of things upon the mind. The phrases of Virgil are generally coloured with the associations and steeped in the feeling of older thoughts and memories. Yet if he seems inferior in direct force of presentation, he unites the two most marked and generally dissociated characteristics of the masters of Latin style,—the exuberance and vivacity of those writers in whom impulse and imagination are strong, such as Cicero, Livy, and Lucretius,—the terseness and compactness of expression, arising either from intensity of perception or reflective condensation, of which the shorter poems of Catullus, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the writings of Sallust, and the memorial inscriptions of the time of the Republic and of the Empire afford striking examples. Virgil’s condensation of expression often resembles that of Tacitus, and seems to arise from the same cause, the restraint imposed by reflexion on the exuberance of a poetical imagination. By its combination of opposite excellences the style of the Aeneid is at once an admirable vehicle of continuous or compressed narrative, of large or concentrated description, of fluent and impassioned, or composed and impressive oratory. It possesses also the power, which distinguishes the older Latin writers, of stamping some grave or magnanimous lesson in imperishable characters on the mind—

III.

The imperial and the religious ideas of Rome, as embodied in the Aeneid, find their fullest realisation in the position assigned to Augustus. The pride of empire, the loyalty to the State, the religious trust, which in the age of Ennius attached themselves to the ‘Respublica Romana,’ found, in the age of Virgil, a new centre of attraction in the person of the Emperor. A poem, which should express the dominant idea and sentiment of that age, could not fail to bring into prominence the change through which the government not of Rome only but of the whole civilised world was then passing. The relations of the great poets of the time to the men at the head of affairs made them the fittest exponents of this new tendency. They used their art with the view of giving to public sentiment a permanent direction in favour of the new order of things. The political object of glorifying the personal rule of Augustus and [pg 348]of surrounding it with the halo of a divine sanction associated itself with the artistic, the patriotic, and the religious objects of Virgil. And although the excess of eulogy and some modes of its manifestation offend the modern, as they would have offended a more ancient sentiment of personal dignity, there is no reason to question the disinterested sincerity of Virgil’s panegyric. The permanence of the change introduced by Augustus attests the fact that his policy not only kindled the enthusiasm of the moment, but met the most deeply-felt needs of the world. And though his personal qualities and the great things accomplished by him do not touch the imagination or awaken the sentiment of admiration in modern times, like those of his immediate predecessor in power, yet he was pre-eminently the man suited to his age, as an age of restoration and re-organisation, and he was pre-eminently a Roman of the Romans. The great C. Julius, in his genius and qualities, ‘towers’ not only above his own nation but, ‘like Hannibal, above all nations.’ The perfect success of Augustus was due to the fact not only that he was the man wanted by his epoch, but that he was the complete embodiment of the great practical talents and character of Rome. He not only monopolised in his own person all the chief functions, but in his administration he displayed all the best and most varied capacities of the Roman magistracy. In his government and in his legislation he exercised the influence formerly exercised by Censor and Chief of the Senate, by Consul and Proconsul, by Praetor and Aedile. To the aptitudes for these various duties he added those that fitted him at least to fill the place of ‘Imperator’ at the head of the Roman armies, and to give new importance and efficacy to the office of Pontifex Maximus. He possessed also in a remarkable degree the personal qualities of industry, vigilance, practical sagacity, authority, dignity, and urbanity, which are of most importance in the government of men. If his character falls below both the ancient and the modern ideal of heroism, it is thoroughly conformable to a Roman ideal of practical power and usefulness. He is the representative man [pg 349]of the brighter side of Roman imperialism, as Tiberius (till his final retirement from Rome),—in his strength of body and mind, his military and administrative capacity, his unrelieved application to business550, his unsympathetic impartiality, his suspicious and ruthless policy in suppressing opposition, his callous indifference to suffering,—is of its more sombre side. It is a great enhancement of the representative character of Virgil’s national epic, that it is associated with the name and acts of one who was not only the founder, but was the most typical embodiment of the Roman empire.

Although the choice of the subject of the Aeneid was determined, in a great measure, by its adaptability to the personal and political object of Virgil, no attempt is made to exhibit either the character or the actions of Aeneas as symbolical of those of Augustus. Still less are we to look for any modern parallels to the other personages of the poem, such as Turnus or Dido, Latinus or Lavinia, Drances or Achates. Yet the position assigned to Aeneas, as a fatherly ruler over his people, their chief in battle, their law-giver in peace, and their high-priest in all spiritual relations, may have been intended as a kind of symbol of the new monarchy. The Roman imagination acknowledged two ideals of a ruler of men,—the ideal of a Romulus and that of a Numa. In Aeneas both are combined with the characteristics of a new ideal which rather anticipated a future, than reproduced any older type of character. Augustus too might be regarded as at once the Romulus and the Numa of the new empire; and thus the parts played by Aeneas, as chief in battle and legislator in peace551, might be regarded as a kind of foreshadowing of those which were afterwards played by Augustus on the real stage of human [pg 350]affairs. But it would be no compliment either to the intellectual power of Augustus or to the discernment of Virgil, to suppose that the personal attributes of Aeneas were intended to have any resemblance to the strong and self-reliant character of the Emperor. The relation to Aeneas adds to the personal glory of Augustus by the ancestral distinction thus conferred upon him,—a distinction at all times highly prized among the Romans, and especially prized by the Caesars as helping to reconcile a proud aristocracy to their ascendency. In the immediate successors of Augustus, the obscurity of the Octavii and Atii was forgotten in the combined lustre of the Julian and Claudian families. And on one of those occasions, in which the sentiment of family pride was most powerfully appealed to,—the funeral of Drusus, son of Tiberius,—we read in Tacitus—‘funus imaginum pompa maxime inlustre fuit, cum origo Iuliae gentis Aeneas omnesque Albanorum reges, et conditor urbis Romulus, post Sabina nobilitas, Attus Clausus, ceteraeque Claudiorum effigies, longo ordine spectarentur552.’ In thus throwing the halo both of a remote antiquity and of a divine ancestry around Augustus, Virgil helped to recommend his rule to the sentiment of his countrymen.

In seeking to enhance the greatness of a living ruler by associating him with the actions of a remote legendary ancestor, the panegyric of Virgil does not transcend the limits which Pindar allows himself in evoking the mythical glories of the past in honour of his patrons. But Virgil seeks to establish a closer connexion between the past and the present, than that established by Pindar. The connexion between the living man, who wins a victory in the games, and his heroic ancestor, is adduced as a proof of the inheritance by the descendant of the personal qualities which first gave distinction to his race. But the connexion between Aeneas and Augustus [pg 351]is the connexion between means and end. The actions of Aeneas are not held up as a mere example which his descendant might emulate: they are the first links in the long chain of events which reached from the siege of Troy to the victory of Actium and the establishment of the empire. The distant vision of the glory awaiting the greatest of his descendants is, more than any immediate or personal end, the motive which animates both the divine and human actors in the enterprise. It is after a vivid picture of the martial and peaceful glories of the Augustan reign that the stirring appeal is made—

Et dubitamus adhuc virtutem extendere factis,

Aut metus Ausonia prohibet consistere terra553?

The means through which the vision of this distant future is revealed, are the voice of Jove himself in unfolding the volume of the fates to Venus, that of the beatified shade of Anchises in exhibiting the spectacle of his unborn descendants to Aeneas, and the art of Vulcan in framing the ‘fabric of the shield surpassing all description.’

The glory attributed to Augustus in the shield of Aeneas is that of a great warrior and conqueror, the champion, not, like C. Julius, of the popular against the aristocratic party in the State, of the Provinces against the Senate, but of the nation against its old enemies, the monarchies of the East. He appears as celebrating a mighty triumph, and dedicating three hundred temples to the gods of Italy in thankful acknowledgment of his victory. The glory announced in the prophecy of Jupiter is that of the establishment by Augustus of an Empire of Peace, as the completion of his warlike triumph—

Aspera tum positis mitescent saecula bellis:

Cana Fides et Vesta, Remo cum fratre Quirinus

Iura dabunt554.

[pg 352]

And in the revelation of Anchises, Augustus is spoken of as—

Augustus Caesar, Divi genus: aurea condet

Saecula qui rursus Latio, regnata per arva

Saturno quondam555.

He is there proclaimed to be greater in the extent of his conquests and civilising labours than Hercules and Bacchus. And, though less prominently than in the Invocation to the Georgics, divine honours and the function of answering prayer are promised to him by the mouth of Jupiter—

Hunc tu olim caelo, spoliis Orientis onustum,

Accipies secura: vocabitur hic quoque votis556.

The personal figure of the Emperor is thus encompassed with the halo of military glory, of beneficent action on the world, of a divine sanction, and of an ultimate heritage of divine honours.

The Aeneid considered as a representative work of genius is thus seen to be the expression or embodiment of an idea of powerful meaning for the age in which the poem was written, for the centuries immediately succeeding that age, and, through the action of historical associations, for all times. As the great poem of Dante gained both immediate and permanent attention by the human interest which it imparted to the spiritual idea on which mediaeval Europe based its life; as the inspiration of Milton’s great Epic was drawn from his passionate sympathy with the intensest form of religious and political life in his age; so the quality of Virgil’s genius which secured for him the most immediate and the most lasting consideration was his sympathetic comprehension of the imperial idea of Rome in its secular, religious, and personal significance. This idea he has ennobled with the associations of a divine origin and of a divine sanction; of a remote antiquity and an unbroken con[pg 353]tinuity of great deeds and great men; of the pomp and pride of war, and of the majesty of government: and he has softened and humanised the impression thus produced by the thought of peace, law, and order given to the world. In his stately diction we are reminded only of the power, glory, majesty, and civilising influence with which the idea of Rome is encompassed. There is nothing to obtrude the thought of the spirit, in which life, freedom, and individuality were crushed out of the world. And this idea, of which Virgil’s poem is the glorified representation, was one actually realised, one which influenced the lives of generations of men, and which was an important element in moulding the whole subsequent history of the world. Yet the idea is one more adapted to be the inspiring influence of a great historical work, like the national history of Livy, or ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ than of a great poem, which must satisfy the human and moral sympathies of men as well as their sense of power. Material greatness and civilisation, and the qualities of mind and character through which these effects are produced, exercise a great spell over the imagination and the masculine sympathies of the world. But the highest art does more than this—it enlarges man’s sense of a spiritual life, it purifies his notions of happiness, it deepens his conviction of a righteous government of the world. Through the imagination it speaks to the soul. The idea of imperial Rome is rather that of the enemy than of the promoter of the spiritual life or of individual happiness: it impresses on the mind the thought of a vast and orderly, but not of a moral and humane government. The idea of the Roman Republic, as it shines through the rude fragments of the Annals of Ennius in such utterances as these—

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque557,—

is suggestive of a nobler energy of character, of more abundant public and private virtue, than the idea pervading and animating [pg 354]the polished verse of the Aeneid. The thought of the Rome of Ennius is associated in our minds with the free political life of the Forum and the Campus Martius, and with the grave deliberations of the Senate, as well as with the exercise of military force and administrative sovereignty. The idea of Italy pervading the Georgics has everything to attract and nothing to repel our sympathies: and thus notwithstanding the inferior opportunities for awakening human interest which necessarily attach to a didactic when compared with an epic poem, the charm exercised by that poem is more unmixed and unchanging than that of the poem which evokes the proud memories of the Capitol. In the Aeneid, Virgil is really the panegyrist of despotism under the delusive disguise of paternal government. In so far as there is any conflict between right and wrong in the Aeneid, the wrong appears to be the ‘victrix causa’ ‘which pleases the gods.’ The religious idea of the Fates is invested with none of the ethical mystery with which the analogous idea in Greek poetry is invested. They act in a hard, plain, arbitrary way, irrespective of right and wrong, regardless of personal happiness or suffering. The actors in the poem who move our sympathies are those who perish in blind resistance to, or blind compliance with, their decrees—Dido, Pallas, Turnus, and Lausus. The opposition between natural human feeling and the ‘divom inclementia’ is reverently accepted and acquiesced in by Virgil in the person of his hero.

The conclusion at which we arrive as to the value of the Aeneid as an epic poem representative of the Roman Empire, is that Virgil has given a true, adequate, and noble expression to an idea which actually has exercised a greater spell over the imagination and a greater influence over the daily lives of men, than any other which owed its origin to their secular interests: but that this idea, regarded from its political, religious, and personal side, is one which does not touch the heart, or enlighten the conscience: and this is an important drawback to the claim which the Aeneid may have to the highest rank as a work of art.

stateliness and dignity and is weighty with the burden of the whole world’s history, the Greek is fluent and buoyant with the spirit and life of the ‘novitas florida mundi.’ The greatness of Aeneas is a kind of ‘imputed’ greatness; he is important to the world as bearing the weight of the glory and destiny of the future Romans—

more energetic delineation of character. And in the representation of this struggle it is quite true, as has been well shown by Mr. Nettleship, that Virgil’s own sympathies go with the ‘victrix causa’ which ‘pleased the gods,’ not with the ‘victa’ which pleases our modern sensibilities. He professes not to question but

period was more distinguished by original force of mind, the latter half by more complete and perfect culture. The age of Cicero was one of great energy in the chief provinces of human activity—in war and politics, in oratory, poetry, and philosophy. There is no intellectual quality so characteristic of his own oratory, of the poetry of Lucretius, of the military and political genius of Julius Caesar, as the ‘vivida vis,’—the energy, at once rapid and enduring in its action, as of a great elemental force. Among their contemporaries, though there was no man of high political capacity, yet there was a many-sided intellectual activity manifesting itself in the forum and senate-house, in social intercourse and correspondence, and in varied literary and philosophical discourse. As a result of this novel activity of mind, the Latin language developed then for the first time all its resources as a powerful organ of literature, inferior indeed to the language of Greece in the days of its purity, but much superior as the instrument of poetry and oratory, history and philosophy, to that language in its decay

among the mountain pastures, or the love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields

favoured and afflicted above others, and elevated, like Oedipus, out of weakness and suffering here, into honour and influence beyond the grave. Iulus receives a reflected glory from the transcendent greatness of the Julian house. Dido or Elissa was a name famous in Phoenician legend, and associated with the ancient renown of Tyre. Evander is illustrious from his Arcadian origin, from his relation to Hercules, from the fame of his mother as one of the Italian Camenae. Even the mere ethnical names of Latinus and Turnus receive individuality by being introduced in the line of old Italian dynasties, and in direct connexion with Faunus, Picus, and other beings of the native mythology.

by the forensic special pleading and word-fencing which is an occasional flaw in the dramatic art of Sophocles, and a pervading mannerism in that of the younger poet. The impression of grave political deliberation is left on the mind by some of the fragments of Ennius more effectually than by anything uttered in the councils of gods or men in the Aeneid. But it is in the greatest of modern epics that the full force of intellect and feeling animating grave councils of state is most grandly idealised. The speeches in Virgil, though they want the intellectual power and the majestic largeness of utterance of those in Milton, are, like his, stately and dignified in expression; they are disfigured by no rhetorical artifice of fine-spun argument or exaggerated emphasis; they are rapid with the vehemence of scorn and indignation, fervid with martial pride and enthusiasm, or, occasionally, weighty with the power of controlled emotion. They have the ring of Roman oratory, as it is heard in the animated declamation of Livy, and sometimes seem to anticipate the reserved force and ‘imperial brevity’ of Tacitus. They give a true voice to ‘the high, magnanimous Roman mood,’ and to the fervour of spirit with which that mood was associated. And this effect is sometimes increased by the use which the polished poet of the Augustan Age makes of the grave, ardent, but unformed utterances—‘rudes et inconditae voces’—of the epic and tragic poets of the Republic.

mythical traditions which assign a Greek origin to various important Latin towns, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Praeneste, and to the earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill, probably owe their invention to the same source. Alba Longa, as the chief city of the old Latin confederacy, must have been an object of greater interest to the Cumaeans than Tibur or Tusculum, and if we could be sure of the existence of the belief in the Trojan settlement in Latium before the destruction of Alba, we might infer with probability the great antiquity of the legend which ascribed the foundation of that town to the son of Aeneas. This belief might easily have passed to Rome; and Cephalon may have received it, in a somewhat distorted form, from native sources. But it is impossible to take any step in these conjectures without feeling the extreme uncertainty of our ground. We really know nothing of the acceptance of this account of their origin by the Romans before the time of the First Punic War; it is not easily reconcileable with the indigenous belief which certainly struck much deeper roots in the national history: the story as told by Cephalon appears to exclude the connexion between Rome and Alba as an intermediate link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus

gifts, social and intellectual, of Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works. But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of the Latin civilisation

[pg 365]

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural ‘machinery,’ consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil’s epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute562. He seems to feel that they are above man’s questioning; that it is for him ‘parere quietum;’ and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing—

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

Et vera incessu patuit dea.

*   *   *   *   *

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina563.

[pg 366]

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the βοῶπις of Cicero’s Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The ‘mother of the Aeneadae’ combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character. The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast attributes which the Romans reverenced under the title of ‘Iuppiter Stator,’—

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus564.

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the earth-shaking might with which he passed from the heights of Samothrace to Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves towards the ships of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect made familiar in the plastic art of a later time—

alto

Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda565.

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates—

Actius, haec cernens, arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper566.

[pg 367]

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle—

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,

Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella

Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident:

Nec te Troia capit567.

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate. Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy568. Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,

Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris

Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem

Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit569.

[pg 368]

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced570 in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the ranks of the gods.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—

[pg 369]

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis

Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso

Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes571.

Another passage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself to her son in her divine proportions—

confessa deam, qualisque videri

Caelicolis et quanta solet572—

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,—

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae

Numina magna deum573.

But there are traces in the Aeneid of another religious belief and practice more primitive and more widely spread than the worship of the Olympian gods, or of the impersonal abstractions of Italian theology. The religious fancies which originally united each city, each tribe, and each family into one community574, had been transmitted in popular beliefs and in ceremonial observances from a time long antecedent to the establishment of the Olympian dynasty of gods. This brighter creation of the imagination did not banish the secret awe inspired by the older spiritual conceptions. Invisible Powers were supposed to haunt certain places, to protect each city with their unseen presence or under some visible symbol, and to make their abode at each family hearth, uniting all the kindred of the house in a common worship.

These survivals of primitive thought appear in many striking passages in the Aeneid. The idea of a secret indwelling Power, [pg 370]identified with the continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis

Dira loci; iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.

Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Iovem, cum saepe nigrantem

Aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret575.

This belief imparts dignity to what from a merely human point of view seems grotesque rather than sublime, the reception by the Trojans of the ‘fatalis machina feta armis’ within their walls. The fatal error is committed under the conviction that the protection enjoyed under the old Palladium would be renewed under this new symbol. The construction of the unwieldy mass is attributed to Calchas, acting from the motive expressed in the lines—

Ne recipi portis aut duci in moenia possit,

Neu populum antiqua sub religione tueri576.

This same belief of the dependence of cities on their indwelling deities pervades the whole description of the destruction of Troy. Thus the despair produced by the first discovery of the presence of the enemy within the town obtains utterance in the words—

Excessere omnis adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat577.

When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—

[pg 371]

Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem

Ipse trahit578.

A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’ for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.

But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs. It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—

Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,

Sanguinis et sacri pateras, animamque sepulchro

Condimus, et magna supremum voce ciemus579.

The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of Aeneas to his ancient comrade—

O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!

Quae tantae tenuere morae? quibus Hector ab oris

Expectate venis? ut te post multa tuorum

Funera, post varios hominumque urbisque labores,

[pg 372]

Defessi aspicimus: quae caussa indigna serenos

Foedavit voltus, aut cur haec volnera cerno580?

And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in the world below, in the lines which follow—

Ille nihil, nec me quaerentem vana moratur,

Sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens,

‘Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his,’ ait, ‘eripe flammis:

Hostis habet muros: ruit alto a culmine Troia:

Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia Penates:

Hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere,

Magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto581.’

Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence, Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband—

Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona

Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam,

Libabat cineri Andromache manisque vocabat

Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem

Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras582.

Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus—

[pg 373]

Praeterea fuit in tectis de marmore templum

Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat,

Velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum583.

The long account of the ‘Games’ in Book V., which, from a Roman point of view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the Manes of Anchises.

The whole of the Sixth Book—the master-piece of Virgil’s creative invention—is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato among the four great religious teachers,—the ‘pii vates’ who, in transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity.

The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of distinction between the ‘Inferno’ of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less austere majesty than those expressed in the Choëphoroe. The whole humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil’s representation with the primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, [pg 374]mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the ‘potiora studia’ on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which

falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes584—

we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is unfolded before Aeneas,—that, too, like the vision of Er the son of Armenius, is but a μῦθος,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of moral belief which inspires Virgil’s shadowy representation, in his recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts—

coniunx ubi pristinus illi

Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem585—

the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and follows the light of his own intuition.

Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of a religious epic, that [pg 375]the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier586, following Macrobius, has pointed out the special propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of such epithets as ‘eximios’ applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of the ritual application of the words ‘porricio587’ and ‘porrigo’, and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs588,—‘Aenea, vigila,’—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred symbols of Mars. Other passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of veiling the head in worship and sacrifice—

Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes,

Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves,

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu;

Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum

Hostilis facies occurrat et omina turbet589.

There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the peculiar ceremonial of Rome,—as in the prayer offered to the god of Soracte—

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new

Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum591,

but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.

Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,

Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo

[pg 376]

Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem

Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna590.

—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being regulated not by the Roman Calendar

identified with the continued existence and fortunes of cities, imparts sublimity to that passage in Book VIII. in which the Roman feeling of the sanctity of the Capitol obtains its grandest expression—

native sources. The thought of Lucretius acted upon the mind of Virgil through the force both of sympathy and antagonism, as a strong original nature acts upon one which is at once receptive of influence and possessed of firm convictions of its own. The national sentiment of Ennius and the censorious spirit of Lucilius reappeared in new forms in the Augustan poetry; while the more humane and social feelings, and the enjoyment of beauty in Nature and art, fostered by Greek studies, as well as the taste for less elevated pleasures, stimulated by the life of a luxurious capital, are elements which the poetry of the early Empire has in common with that of the last years of the Republic.

loving disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute endurance.

[pg 185]

III.

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

The chief modes of rural industry treated in the various books are those which flourished in Italy,—the tillage of the land for various crops, the cultivation of the vine and the olive, the breeding and rearing of cattle, sheep, and horses, and the tending of bees. It is noticed by Servius that the agricultural precepts of the poem apply only to Italy and not to other lands: ‘Sane agriculturae huius praecepta non ad omnes pertinent terras, sed ad solum situm Italiae.’ The frequent references to the products of other lands serve to suggest by contrast the superiority of Italy in those which are the special subject of the poem and which are most essential to human well-being. Cato also is represented by Cicero282 as resting the charm of a country life in the contemplation of the same operations of Nature as those indicated in the opening lines of the Georgics:—

Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram

Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites

Conveniat283,—

[pg 186]

The number of Roman writers who treated in prose of this subject, both before and after Virgil, testifies further to the strong national interest attaching to it. Among these writers, Varro, the immediate predecessor of Virgil, associates the subject directly with the pride which the Romans felt in their country. He introduces the speakers in his Dialogue as holding their conversation in the Temple of Tellus, and examining a map or painting of Italy on the wall. One of the speakers addresses the others in these words, ‘You who have travelled over many lands, have you ever seen any more richly cultivated than Italy? I, indeed, have never seen any so richly cultivated.’ He especially characterises the excellence of its corn-crops, its vines, olives, and fruit-trees: ‘What spelt shall I compare to the Campanian? what wheat to the Apulian? what wine to the Falernian? what oil to that of Venafrum? is not Italy planted with trees, so that the whole of it seems an orchard284?’ Other authors, Virgil himself among them285, and Columella in the Introduction to his treatise286, testify to the pride which the Italians took in their breed of horses and herds of cattle. And though the Italian bees and their product were not so famous in poetry as the bees of Hymettus and ‘the honey of Hybla,’ yet Horace speaks of the country near Tarentum as one ‘where the honey yields not to the honey of Hymettus;’ and in another Ode, in which he contrasts his own moderate estate with the resources of richer men, he mentions Calabrian honey along with the wine of Formiae and the fleeces of Gallic pastures among the chief sources of wealth:—

Quanquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes

Nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora

Languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis

Crescunt vellera pascuis287.

[pg 187]

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

The subject was moreover intimately associated with the national history. Several of the early legends, such as those of Cincinnatus, and, in more historical times, of Atilius Regulus and Curius Dentatus, attest the prominence which agriculture enjoyed among the pursuits of the foremost men in the Republic. The surnames of many noble families, patrician and plebeian, such as the Lentuli, Stolones, Bubulci, Pisones, Dolabellae, and the name of the great Fabian Gens, are connected etymologically with agricultural occupations, products, or implements, and afford evidence of a time when the men who filled the great offices of the State lived on their own lands288, and were known for the success with which they improved their farms. The passion to possess and subdue the land was, in the early history of the Republic, the main motive power both of the political and military history of Rome. Even down to the establishment of the Empire there was no question which more divided the two great parties in the State than that of the Agrarian laws. And though, after the conquest of Italy, Roman wars were fought for dominion rather than for new territory, yet the hope of owning land, if not on Italian yet on some foreign soil, which he should hold by his sword as well as cultivate by his plough, supported the Roman [pg 188]soldier, even under the Empire, through the long years of his service. The Roman ‘colonies,’ the origin of so many famous European cities, were settlements of ‘Coloni’ or cultivators of the soil.

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

Non hic te carmine ficto

Atque per ambages et longa exorsa tenebo.

[pg 189]

and

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,

Omnia iam volgata289.

But it is not the judgement of the poet, but the despotic will of the Emperor, that is responsible for this imperfection. The fourth Book originally ended with an episode which afforded scope for the expression of personal feeling, for awakening an interest in that land which was now of vast importance to the State, and which affected the imagination of cultivated Romans as it does that of cultivated men in modern times290, and for illustrating the national greatness and the recent history of Rome. In the first edition the mention of Egypt at line 287 had led Virgil to celebrate the administration of that province under his early friend Cornelius Gallus. When Gallus fell into disgrace and was forced to commit suicide in 26 B.C., Virgil was required to re-edit the poem with a new concluding episode291. The subject treated in the earlier edition of the poem would have enabled Virgil to give renewed expression to his admiration and affection for the Gallus of the Eclogues, to tell the tale of the downfall of Cleopatra, and to magnify the greatness of Rome in the conquest and government of her provinces. The episode as it now stands is a finished piece of metrical execution; it illustrates the attraction which the Greek mythological stories had for educated Romans; it is expressed in those tones of tender pathos of which Virgil was a master; but it is at the same time a standing proof of the malign [pg 190]influence which the Imperial despotism already exercised on the spontaneous inspiration of genius, as well as on all sincere expression of feeling.

II.

Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral.

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

[pg 153]

Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu

Nostra, neque erubuit silvas habitare Thalia237,

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

Nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poeta,

Et formosus ovis ad flumina pavit Adonis238.

In order to understand the pastoral poetry of Virgil, both in its relation to a Greek ideal and in its original truth of feeling, it is necessary to remember the chief characteristics of its prototype in the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Alexandria and in the early years of the reign of Hiero of Syracuse. The pastoral poetry of Sicily was the latest creation of Greek genius, born after the nobler phases of religious and political life, and the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry which arose out of them, had passed away. In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and vaguely longing to breathe a freer air239. But there was in ancient times a primitive and popular, as well as a late and artistic pastoral. Of the primitive pastoral, springing out of rustic gatherings and festivals, or from lonely communion with Nature,

[pg 154]

Per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia240,

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

οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης

τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠίθεός τε,

παρθένος ἠίθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλουν241—

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

This primitive pastoral poetry may have been spread over all Greece and the islands of the Aegean, from the earliest settlements of the Hellenic race, or of that older branch of the family to which the name Pelasgic has been vaguely given, [pg 155]and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and the woods, and to have trained it to assume some form of art, was Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

Some of the primitive modes of feeling which gave birth to the earliest pastoral song still survive, though in altered form, in this later Sicilian poetry. The song of the βουκόλοι, or herdsmen, like the song of the masked worshippers of Bacchus (τραγῳδία), may be traced to that stage in the development of the higher races in which Nature was the chief object of worship and religious sympathy. Under the symbols of Linus, Daphnis, or Adonis, the country people of early times lamented the decay of the fresh beauty of spring, under the burning midsummer heat242. This primitive germ of serious feeling has perpetuated itself in that melancholy mood which runs through the pastoral poetry of all countries. From that tendency of the Greek imagination to give a human meaning to all that interested it, this dirge over the fading beauty of the early year soon assumed the form of a lament over the death of a young shepherd-poet, dear to gods and men, to the flocks, herds, and wild animals, to the rocks and mountains, among which he had lived. In the Daphnis of Theocritus, the human passion of love produces that blighting influence on the life of the shepherd which in the original myth was produced by the fierce heat of summer on the tender life of the year. A still later development of the myth appears in the lament over the extinction of youthful genius by early death. It is not in any poem of Theocritus, but in the ‘Lament of Bion,’—the work of a later writer, apparently an Italian-Greek,—

[pg 156]

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι

Αὐσονικᾶς ὀδύνας μέλπω μέλος243,—

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

Another traditional theme of ‘pastoral melancholy,’ of which Theocritus makes use, is the unrequited love of the Cyclops for Galatea. This too had its origin in the personification of natural objects244. But, unlike the song of Daphnis, the myth of which it was the expression was purely local, and confined to the shores of Sicily. It also illustrates the tendency of all pastoral song to find its chief human motive in the passion of love. While the original motive of the primitive lament for Daphnis or Linus was the unconscious sympathy of the human heart with Nature, the most prominent motive of artistic pastoral or idyllic poetry, from the ‘Song of Songs’ to the ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ and ‘The Long Vacation Pastoral’ of these later times, has been the passion of the human heart for the human object of its affection, blending with either an unconscious absorption in outward scenes or a refined contemplation of them245.

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

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit246.

[pg 157]

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

Such were the first rude utterances of the deeper as well as the gayer emotions of men, living in the happy security of the country districts or the ‘otia dia’ of the mountains in Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Southern Italy, which the art of Theocritus and his successors cast into artistic forms and measures suited to the taste of educated readers. How far, in the manner in which he accomplished this, Theocritus had been anticipated by ‘the grave muse of Stesichorus,’ and whether this wild product of the mountains was of a native Siculian or an Hellenic stock, it is not possible to determine. A citizen of Syracuse, in the palmy days of Hiero, before there was any dream of Roman conquest; deeply susceptible of the beauty of his native island, but, like a Greek, seeing this beauty in relation to human associations; familiar with the songs and old traditions of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life in friendly association with his literary compeers, such as the Alexandrine Aratus247 and Nicias, the physician and poet248,—he [pg 158]sought to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-shore with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and grotesque superstitions of actual herdsmen should be found in union with the refinement, the mythological lore, the keen sense of the beauty, not unmixed with the melancholy, of life, characteristic of a circle of poets and scholars enjoying their youth in untroubled and uneventful times. All his materials, old and new, assumed the shape of pictures from human life in combination with the representations of the sounds, sights, and living movement of Nature. The essential characteristic both of his pastoral Idyls and of those drawn from city-life, such as the second, fourteenth, and fifteenth, is what has been well called the ‘disinterested objectivity249’ of Greek art: and this is the chief note of their difference from Virgil’s pastorals. Even where, as in the seventh, the poet introduces himself on the scene, he appears as one, and not the most important, of the personages on it. He does not draw attention to his own feelings or fortunes, only to his playful converse and rivalry in song with the young shepherd-poet Lycidas, ‘with the bright laughing eye and the smile ever playing on his lip250.’

It may be urged against these Idyls that, as compared with the best modern Idyls, in prose or verse, they are, for the most part, wanting in incident or adventure; and this charge is equally applicable to Virgil’s pastorals. But there is always dramatic vivacity and consistency in the personages of Theocritus, and this cannot equally be said of those introduced into the Eclogues. It might be urged also against the representations of Theocritus, and still more against those of Virgil, that the ‘vestigia ruris’ have been too carefully obliterated. Yet, though not drawn immediately from life, this picture of Sicilian shepherds and peasants, possessed with the vivid belief in Pan and the Nymphs, singing the old dirge of the herdsman Daphnis [pg 159]among the mountain pastures, or the love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields251, challenging each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless tending their flocks rather as a picturesque pastime than as a toilsome occupation, and living a life of free social enjoyment in the open air, was a genuine ideal of the Greek imagination, not perhaps, too far removed from the actual reality.

Before the time of Virgil there had been no attempt to introduce this form of art into Italy. Though the germ of a rude rustic poetry existed in the ‘Fescennine verses,’ no connexion can be traced between them and the highly artificial pastoral of the Augustan Age. The Eclogues of Virgil are in form and even in substance a closer reproduction of a Greek original than any other branch of Latin literature, with the exception of the comedy of Terence. The ‘Lament of Daphnis,’ the song of unrequited love, the bantering dialogues of the shepherds and their more formal contests in song, reappear in Latin tones and with some new associations of individual and national life, but in such a manner as to recall the memory of the Sicilian idyl rather than to suggest a new experience from life. And yet Virgil is not satisfied, like the authors of Latin comedy, with presenting to the imagination types of Greek life, Greek sentiment and manners, and Greek scenes. He desires not only to reproduce in new words and music the charm which had fascinated him in Theocritus, but to blend the actual feeling and experience of an Italian living in the Augustan Age with this ideal restored from a by-gone time. The result is something composite, neither purely Greek nor purely Italian; not altogether of the present time nor yet of a mythical foretime; but a blending of various elements of poetic association and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of classical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress [pg 160]along with the fantastic shapes of mythological invention. The scenes and personages of the Eclogues are thus one stage further removed from actuality than those of the Greek pastoral. They do not reproduce, as Keats has done, the Greek ideal of rural life, and they do not create a purely Italian ideal. There was, indeed, latent in the Italian imagination an ideal of a homely rustic life, finding its happiness in the annual round of labour and in the blessing of a virtuous home, and that ideal Virgil loved to draw with ‘magic hand;’ but that was altogether unlike the ideal of the Greek imagination. The life of industry and happiness which Virgil glorifies in the Georgics,—that of the ‘primitive, stout-hearted, and thrifty husbandmen’ of Horace,—whose pride was in their ‘glad harvests,’ their ‘trim fields,’ their ‘vineyards,’ and in the use which they derived from their flocks, herds, and beehives, had nothing in common with that of the ‘well-trimmed sunburnt shepherds’ whom Greek fancy first created, and whom Keats has made live for us again, enjoying the fulness of actual existence in union with the dreams of an ‘Elysian idleness252.’ Least of all could the pastoral life of Arcadia or Sicily have been like the habitual ways of men in the rich plains of Mantua. The district of Italy most like the scenes of the Greek idyl was Calabria, where, among the desolate forest-glades, the herds and flocks of some rich senator or eques were now tended by barbarous slaves, with whose daily existence the ideal glories of pastoral song were not likely to intermingle.

whole life he yielded to a laxity of morals from which perhaps some of his eminent contemporaries were not free, but which was condemned by the manlier instincts of Romans, as of all modern nations. The expression of Donatus is probably a mere survival of the calumnies against which Asconius vindicated Virgil’s character. The statement of the same biographer, that on account of his purity of speech and life he was known in Naples by the name ‘Parthenias,’ is at least as trustworthy evidence as that on which the imputations on his character have been revived. The levity and mendacity with which such calumnies were invented

tions. In the case of Virgil, it is not possible, at all events for a modern reader, distinctly to separate them. The power of the old mythology over the fancy and the weakness of scientific thought in ancient times to overthrow that power is nowhere more visible than in his poetry.

the representatives of the misers and parvenus whom he painted in his Satires for the amusement of his aristocratic readers. The tone of Virgil is equally anti-popular. The view of society which he delights to present is that of a paternal ruler giving laws to his people and caring for their welfare. His repugnance to the influence of the ‘popularis aura’ on government is indicated in such passages as the famous simile near the beginning of the Aeneid,

of a cultivated age can maintain his place as a great artist only by being something more than an artist. He must feel more strongly than others, and give expression to the deepest tendencies of his own time. His subject must be charged with the force of the present, and not be mere material for the exercise of his imitative faculty. Virgil might, merely as an artist, have easily surpassed the Jason of Varro, or the Thebaid of Statius; but no technical skill in form, diction, and rhythm could have given to his treatment of such subjects the immediate attraction or the enduring spell which belongs to the Aeneid.

But the antagonism between Drances and Turnus is one of personal rivalry, not of political difference; and the only limit to the sovereignty of Latinus lies in his own weakness of will and in the opposition of his household.

which henceforward animates his poetry, originates. Virgil may thus in a sense be numbered among the poets who ‘are cradled into poetry by wrong.’

they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure. They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of ‘epyllia’ or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,—the childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.

pleasures in which his contemporaries indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the poets and artists of a southern land is powerfully attracted. The abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the fact recorded of him that he ‘took very little food and wine,’ must have quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished. Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit, or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and greater power in delineating varied types of character: but in combination with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of Virgil would have been lost.

actual successes of his reign, to further his policy of national regeneration, and to make men feel the security of a divinely-appointed government, along with the pride of belonging to a powerful imperial State.

novelty and familiarity which is produced on a modern reader by the reproduction and recasting of the doctrines, incidents, and language of the Bible in the two epic poems of Milton. The fascination of this world of supernatural agency and personal adventure, brought home to him for the first time in the most elevated tones of his own language, may have charmed the Roman reader in the same way as the revival of mediaeval romance in the literary languages of modern Europe charmed the readers of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. And if such were the first impressions produced by the poem, a closer examination of it must have shown that the imagination of Virgil had out of ancient materials built up something new in the world. If his representation of the heroic age wants the vivid truth and naïveté of Homer’s representation, yet it is impressive with the dignity of antique associations, and rich with the colouring of his own human sensibilities.

52.

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286.

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