It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action, that he was most esteemed in former times. 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‘To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,’ ‘who sang the idle songs of shepherds,’ ‘my task is on a lowly theme.’,’ etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of the glory of Augustus—

coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he has been exposed in the present century.

The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the Iliad:—

The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth book of the Odes of Horace. The continuance of this influence is unmistakeable in Ovid, and there are also many traces of Virgilian expression in the prose style of LivyCf. Wölflin in the Philologus, xxvi, quoted by Comparetti.. The author of the dialogue ‘De Oratoribus’ testifies to the favour which the poet enjoyed, even before the publication of his epic, both with the Emperor and with the whole people, who ‘on hearing some of his verses recited in the theatre rose in a body and greeted him, as he happened to be present at the spectacle, with the same marks of respect which they showed to the Emperor himselfTac. De Oratoribus, ch. xiii..’ He would thus appear, even in his lifetime, to have thoroughly ‘touched the national fibre‘Si Virgile faisait aux Romains cette illusion d’avoir égalé ou surpassé Homère, c’est qu’il avait touché fortement la fibre Romaine.’ Sainte-Beuve.,’ and to have gained that place in the admiration of his countrymen which he never afterwards lost. By the poets who came after him his memory was cherished with the veneration men feel for a great master, united to the affection which they feel for a departed friend. Lucan indeed rather enters into rivalry with him than follows in his footsteps; nor can there be any surer way of learning to appreciate the peculiar greatness of Virgil’s manner than by reading passages of the Aeneid alongside of passages of the Pharsalia. The new poets under the Flavian dynasty, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius, though they failed to apprehend the secret of its success, made the Aeneid their model, in the arrangement of their materials, in their diction, and in the structure of their verse. Statius, in bidding farewell to his Thebaid, uses these words of acknowledgement:—

and Silius, having occasion to mention Mantua, celebrates it as—

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

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 Tacitus says ‘should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a happy memory of himselfTac. Ann. iv. 38.,’ 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 mindi. 24. 11..’ 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.

Though some of the causes which tended to lower the estimation in which Virgil was held were only temporary in their operation, yet it can hardly be doubted that his claim to pre-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.

What charm Virgil had for his countrymen as the reviver of the early poetry of Greece and as the first creator of the early romance of Italy, what permanent value he has as one of the great interpreters of the secret of Nature and of the meaning of human life, will appear in the course of the detailed examination of his various poems. But there are some considerations, from an historical point of view, which may be stated provisionally as grounds for assigning to him the place of most importance in Latin literature. He is, more than any other Latin writer, a representative writer,—representative both of the general national idea and of the sentiment and culture of his own age. One clear note of this representative character is that he absorbs and supersedes so much of what went before him, and that he anticipates and also supersedes much that came after him. The interest which Rome and Italy have for all times, the interest which the Augustan Age has as the epoch of the maturest civilisation of ancient times and as a great turning-point in the history of mankind, will secure the attention of the world to an author who sets before it, in forms of pure art and with elaborate workmanship, the idealised spectacle of the marvellous career of Rome, and best enables it to feel the charm of natural beauty and ancient memories associated 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.

(1.) The Aeneid brings home to us, in a way in which no other work of Latin literature can do, all those elements in the idea of the destiny, the genius, and character of Rome which most powerfully move the imagination, while it enables us for a time to forget those elements of hardness, unscrupulous injustice, and oppressive domination on which the historian is forced to dwell, and which alienate the sympathies as much as her nobler aspect compels the admiration of mankind. The grandeur and dignity of the Imperial State appear softened and mellowed by Virgil’s marvellous art and humane feeling. ‘The Aeneid,’ says Hallam, ‘reflects the glory of Rome as from a mirrorIntroduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v..’ ‘It remains,’ says Mr. Merivale, ‘the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events and incidentsRoman Empire, chap. xli..’ ‘Virgile,’ writes M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘a été le poëte du CapitoleÉtude sur Virgile..’ ‘Dans ce poëme,’ writes M. de Coulanges of the Aeneid, ‘ils (les Romains) se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs croyances, leur EmpireLa Cité antique..’ M. Patin again describes the same poem as ‘expression de Rome, de Rome entière, de la Rome de tous les temps, de celle des Empereurs, des Consuls, des RoisÉtudes sur la Poésie latine..’ He might have added that it had anticipated the idea of the Rome of the Popes, in some at least of its aspects. The type of character which Virgil has conceived in Aeneas is more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual Consuls and Imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of 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.

(2.) The spell which Rome exercises over the imagination is quite distinct from the charm which the thought of Italy has for the hearts of men. The love of Italy was a sentiment as deeply rooted in Virgil’s nature as his pride in Rome. This sentiment pervades all his works and inspires some of his noblest poetry. In his pastoral poems, under all the borrowed imagery of the Greek idyl, it reveals itself in his sensibility to the beauty of the Italian climate (‘caeli indulgentia’), to the charm of the various seasons, to the distinctive graces of the plants and wild flowers native to the soil, and in the expression of the deep attachment with which the peasant-proprietor clung to his little plot of ground as the sphere alike of his cares and of his happiness. In the Aeneid this patriotic feeling shows itself, as a similar feeling shows itself in the poetry of Scott, in the enthusiasm with which the martial memories of famous towns and tribes are recalled in association with the picturesque features of the land. But by no work of art, ancient or modern, is the complete impression, moral and physical, of the old Italian land and people,—

produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry‘Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini Quirites atavique Romani,’ etc. Columella. as well as in her warlike energy; that he should 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 pleasureCf. Lucretius, iii. 105–106: Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum Cum redeunt felusque ferunt variosque lepores. to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek. Some sympathy with the ‘Itala virtus’—the courage and discipline of the Marsian and other Sabellian races—Ennius had already expressed in his national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close of one of his noblest passages,—

(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age, were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems, better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration. The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new organisation to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy, Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively recent period, continued to be the master-force in European politics,—apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free national life on a large scale,—finds its earliest expression. And the loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil’s time faith in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the necessary bond of civil order and union.

(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane and sympathetic emotions, expressed 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.

This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in reconciling these various factors of belief. The ‘Fates,’ which are the medium through which man’s happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings. But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems, in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin, in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political sentiment, ‘il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce 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‘Virgile fut en effet une des âmes les plus chrétiennes du Paganisme. Quoique attaché de tout son cœur à l’ancienne religion, il a semblé quelquefois pressentir la nouvelle, et un Chrétien pieux pourrait croire qu’il ne lui manqua pour l’embrasser que de la connaître.’ Gaston Boissier..

(5.) Though other periods of ancient history, and notably the fifth century B.C. in Greece, were richer in genius and enjoyed a happier and nobler life than the Augustan Age, yet this latter age, as the latest of the great literary epochs of antiquity, inherited the science, wisdom, power, and beauty stored up in all the art and writings of the past. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of culture, and Virgil was pre-eminently the most cultivated man belonging to the age. In early youth he had learned from Greek masters all they could teach him in poetry and rhetoric, in science and philosophy; and through all his life he combined the productive labours of an artist with the patient diligence of a student. He was familiar with the successive schools of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod down to the epic and didactic poets of Alexandria. He was acquainted with all the physical sciences known in his time, especially, it is said, with astronomy and medicine. His earlier writings show the influence of the philosophical system of Epicurus, while his later convictions are more in agreement with the Platonic philosophy. The oratory of the later books of the Aeneid breathes the spirit of Stoicism. We are told that he proposed to devote the years that might remain to him after the completion of the Aeneid to the further study of philosophy, perhaps with the view of writing a great poem, which might rival and answer Lucretius. The extant fragments of Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Attius, and Lucilius, and of later and obscurer writers such as Hostius and Varro Atacinus, show 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.

(6.) Virgil’s pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil, alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance with which a long continuous poem, epic 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.

In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters, having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious littérateurs of the Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought and feeling. The representation 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:—

The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.

Whether the gifts of intellect and feeling by which Virgil represented his country and his age entitle him to a place among the greatest poets of the world, will be answered variously according to the degree in which men recognise in him the presence of that diviner faculty of imagination which no analysis can explain. If we look to him for the original force of creative imagination which we find in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles on the one hand, and in the greatest poets of modern times on the other, we shall fail to establish his equality with them. But as there have been various types of philosophical intellect in the world, so there have been various types of imaginative power. And among these types we may distinguish those characteristic of the Hellenic, the Germanic, and the Italian races. The genius of the ancient Latin race is further removed from that of the modern Germanic race, than either is from the genius of ancient Greece. The peculiar richness of our own poetic literature arises from its combining some of the great characteristics of each type. While Scott and Byron, for instance, are among the greatest representatives of the purely modern imagination, the works of Pope and Gray are essentially of the Latin type; and those of Dryden, Milton, and Spenser blend Roman strength or the culture of Latin ideas with English boldness and modern exuberance of fancy: while, again, Shelley, Keats, and all the greatest among our living poets have received a powerful impulse from Greek art and Greek ideas. It must be admitted by students of Latin literature that the intellectual movement and sensibility of the present time has a closer affinity with the ancient Greek than with the ancient Latin culture. Students of Homer and Aeschylus, as well as those who have once felt the spell of

of Wordsworth’s contemplative elevation and the impassioned ideality of Shelley, find, in turning to Virgil, that their range of feeling and of contemplation has become narrower. They no longer enjoy the same illimitable prospect, they no longer breathe the same keen air, which buoyed them up on the higher altitudes of poetry. Greek and modern works of imagination manifest a profounder feeling, a more varied contemplation of the mystery of life, than is compatible with the more realistic tendencies of Latin poetry. And though the representation of the outward world in Virgil is, in its serene beauty, suggestive of a secret unceasing life which appeals to the human spirit in its more tranquil moods, yet it does not move the mind to that profounder sense of an affinity between the soul of man and the soul of Nature which the great modern poets awaken. The charm and power of Latin poetry consists, for the most part, 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.

Virgil too possessed this gift of vividly realising the objects 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 HoraceIt is in the poems connected with this theme that Horace writes most from the heart; yet even where he writes chiefly from the head he imparts the same vital realism to the results of his reflection.; what Cynthia in life and death was to Propertius; what the remembrance of past joy in the midst of sorrow was to Ovid; that the thought of Rome and the memories associated with it, the charm of the land and air of Italy, the strength and sanctity of human affection, the mystery of the unseen world, were to Virgil. The necessities of his art require him to introduce into his poem materials which touch his own nature less deeply, and which come to him through the reflex action of literary association; and these, though he always treats them gracefully, he does not invest with the same sense of reality. But when his imagination is moved by the thought of Rome, of Italy, of a remote antiquity, of human affection, of the unseen world, then his art becomes truly and vividly creative. The depth of feeling with which these things affect him reveals itself in the blended majesty and sweetness, the tenderness and pathos of his tones, occasionally in some more solemn cadence and a kind of mystic yearning.

If a return to the high admiration once felt for Virgil involved any detraction from the high admiration with which the great poets of Greece and of the modern world are regarded, anything like his claims to his old rank would generally be set aside. If for no other reason, yet because they have more in common with the general ideas and movement of the modern world, these last-named poets have a stronger hold on students of literature in the present day. But, happily, the ‘sacrum litterarum studium’—to use a phrase of Macrobius—the religion of the world of letters, is not a jealous or intolerant faith. The object of that religion is to keep alive the sentiment of reverence for every kind of excellence which has appeared in the literature of the world. That Virgil was once the object of the greatest reverence is a reason for not lightly putting his claims aside now. In our study of the great writers of old, it is well to realise the true lesson taught in the sad beauty of the lines,—

The course of time brings with it losses as well as gains in sensibility. Though the thoughts of the Latin poet may not help us to understand the spirit of our own era, they are a bond of union with the genius and culture of Europe in other times. If poetry ever exercises a healing and reconciling influence on life, the deep and tranquil charm of Virgil may prove some antidote to the excitement, the restlessness, the unsettlement of opinion in the present day. And as it is by the young especially that the imaginative art of Virgil, in comparison with the imaginative art of other great poets, is most questioned, they may be reminded that the words of such a writer are best understood after long study and experience of life have enabled us to feel ‘their sad earnestness and vivid exactnessGrammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman..’ The wise and generous counsel of Burke should induce some diffidence in their own judgment on the part of those to whom the power and charm of this poet have been slow in revealing themselves.

‘Different from them are all the great critics. They have taught us one essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge as well as perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere applied it or something like it in his own profession. It is this, that if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed onAppeal from the New to the Old Whigs..’

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 IllustribusQuoted by Reifferscheid in his Suetonii Reliquiae.,’ 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 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.

The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be knownGossrau, in his edition of the Aeneid (1876), argues and quotes authorities in favour of retaining the older form Virgilius.. Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature into the unfamiliar Vergil. He was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festivalCf. Pliny, Ep. iii. 7. Martial, xii. 67:— Octobres Maro consecravit Idus. . The year of his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious contemporaries.

This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil’s childhood and early youth were passed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world. The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no 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:—

His birth-place was in the ‘pagus,’ or ‘township,’ of Andes in the neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a ‘vicus,’ and there it is said to be distant from Mantua ‘xxx milia passuum.’ The word pagus, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be used as equivalent to vicus, but as a ‘country-district,’ which might include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the characteristic features of Virgil’s early home. The immediate neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the first Eclogue,

or

can apply.

The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil’s early years appear to have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics. From the fact that the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side nearest Cremona. The use of the word ‘depellere’ (Ecl. i. 21) might perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation of ‘driving our weaned lambs’ forbids our attaching much force to this problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10:—

There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for introducing the hills gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond ‘the picturesque hill and castle of Vallegio,’ about fifteen miles higher up the river than Mantua. Eustace, in his Classical Tour, finds many of the features introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds, like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as

The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an independent value as affording insight into social life and character, irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and intermingles with the even course of Virgil’s poetic career. And this may have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic faculty, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the 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‘Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat, sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.’ Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle: ‘Il lui était utile même d’avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.’, was not unfavourable to the concentration of his whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the 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.

He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion, and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The ‘monstrari digito praetereuntium’ was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that gratification which Horace derived from it.

Both his parents lived till after the loss of his farm, when the poet was in his twenty-ninth year. Two brothers died before him, one while still a boy, the other after reaching manhood. To his half-brother Valerius Proculus he left one half of his estate. Augustus, Maecenas, and his two friends Varius and Tucca also received legacies. He was never married, nor is there any record in connexion with him of any of those temporary liaisons which the other poets of the Augustan Age formed and celebrated in their verse. Some modern critics arguing from a single expression in the Life by Donatus, and giving to a tradition connected with the subject of the second Eclogue a meaning which, even if the tradition was trustworthy, need not apply to it, have written of Virgil as if throughout his 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 inventedCp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem of Catullus., and the attractions which they have for the baser nature of men in all times, sufficiently explain both the original existence and the later revival of these imputations. We are called upon not merely to disregard them as unproved, or irrelevant to our estimate of the poet’s art, but to reject them as incompatible with the singular purity and transparent sincerity of nature revealed in all the maturer works of his geniusThe German historians of Roman literature are more just in their judgment of Virgil’s character than of his genius. Thus W. S. Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous remark—‘Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an Vergil unbegreiflich war.’.

The cordial and discriminating language both of the Satires and the Odes of Horace confirms the impression of delicacy and simplicity of character suggested by the general tone of Virgil’s writings. The appreciation of Horace for Virgil reminds us of the touching tribute which the great comic poet of Athens pays to her greatest tragic poet, where he speaks of him as showing the same disposition among the Shades as he had shown in the world above—

and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellow-dramatist to our own great poet, in the words ‘my gentle Shakespeare.’ 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.

His works do not present any single distinct impression of the poet himself, in his own character and convictions, separable from his artistic representation. Yet from the study of these works we are able to form a general conception of the disposition, affections, and moral sympathies which distinguish him from the other great writers of his country. We might perhaps without undue fancifulness express the dominant ethical or social characteristic—the ideal virtue or grace—of some of the great Roman writers by some word peculiarly expressive of Roman character or culture, and of frequent use in these writers themselves. Thus, in regard to Cicero, the man of quick susceptibility to praise and blame, to sympathy and coldness, who, except where his personal or political antagonism was roused, had the liveliest sense of the claims of kind offices and kind feeling which men have on one another, the word humanitas seems to sum up those qualities of heart and intellect which, in spite of the transparent weaknesses of his character, gained for him so much affection, and which, through the sympathy they enabled him to feel and arouse in others, were the secret of his unparalleled success as an advocate. To Lucretius we might apply the word sanctitas, in the sense in which he applies the word sanctus to the old philosophers, as expressive of that glow of reverential emotion which animates him in his search after truth and in his contemplation of Nature. His own words ‘lepor’ and ‘lepidus’ express the graceful vivacity, artistic and social rather than ethical, which we associate with the thought of Catullus. The quality, mainly intellectual and social, but still not devoid of ethical content, of which Horace is the most perfect type, is ‘urbanitas.’ The full meaning of the great Roman word ‘gravitas’—the vital force of ethical feeling as well as the strength of character connoted by it, and by its sister-qualities ‘dignity and authority’—is only completely realised in the pages of Tacitus. And so it is only in Virgil, and especially in that poem in which he deals with types of human character and motives originating in human affection, that we understand all the feelings of love to family and country, and of fidelity to the dead, and that sense of dependence on a higher Power, sanctioning and sanctifying these feelings and the duties demanded by them, which the Romans comprehended in their use of the word ‘pietas.’

With this recognition of man’s dependence on a wise and beneficent Power above him, is perhaps connected another moral characteristic strongly indicated in many passages of the Aeneid, and mentioned among the personal attributes of Virgil in some of the editions of Donatus’s Life, though it does not appear in that accepted by the latest critics as resting on the best MS. authorityCf. Reifferscheid, p. 67.. This quality is the stoical power of endurance which he attributes to his hero, but which in him is combined with nothing either of the austerity or pedantry of Stoicism. The passage in the biography, which, if an interpolation in the original Life, is one that is at least ‘well invented,’ is to the following effect:—‘He was in the habit of saying that there was no virtue of more use to a man than patience, and that there was no fortune so harsh, that a brave man cannot triumph over it by wisely enduring it.’ Mr. Wickham, in his edition of Horace, refers to this passage as illustrating the maxims of consolation addressed by Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius. Many lines in the Aeneid, such as the

indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace-loving disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute endurance.

The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of independence and self-assertion that his character was deficient. It is to the excess of his feeling of deference to power, and not to any insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally—as in the Invocation to the Georgics—transcending the limits of truth and sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously contributed little to human happiness. But the nobleness of Virgil’s nature is not the nobleness of those qualities which make men great in resistance to wrong, but the nobleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.

By no poet in any time has he been surpassed in devotion to his art. Into this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling, all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a generous appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his habits of composition confirm the impression of his assiduous industry. In writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest compass. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the phrase ‘parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino’—‘that he produced verses by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.’ The Aeneid was first arranged and written out in prose: when the structure of the story was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it, as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the true ἀοιδός, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious artist. It is recorded on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he read his own poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm (‘suavitate tum lenociniis miris’), that verses which would have sounded commonplace when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when ‘chanted to their own musicCompare the lines of Coleridge on hearing ‘The Prelude’ read aloud by Wordsworth:— ‘An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted.’ ’ by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given of the effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This large, musical, and impassioned utterance—the ‘os magna sonaturum’—is a sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a rhythmical expression for his thought.

It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that Virgil established and for a long time retained his ascendency as one of the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully re-established, the examination of his various works will show that it was not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but to all time and to every people.

The name by which the earliest of Virgil’s recognised works is known tells us nothing of the subject of which it treats. The word ‘Eclogae’ simply means selections. As applied to the poems of Virgil, it designates a collection of short unconnected poems. The other name by which these poems were known in antiquity, ‘bucolica,’ indicates the form of Greek art in which they were cast and the pastoral nature of their subjects. Neither word is used by Virgil himself; but the expressions by which he characterises his art, such as ‘Sicelides Musae,’ ‘versus Syracosius,’ ‘Musa agrestis’ and ‘silvestris,’ show that he writes in a pastoral strain, and that he considered the pastoral poetry of Greece as his model. He invokes not only the ‘Sicilian Muses,’ but the ‘fountain of Arethusa.’ He speaks too of Pan, and Arcadia, and the ‘Song of Maenalus.’ His shepherd-poets are described as ‘Arcadians.’ The poets whom he introduces as his prototypes are the ‘sage of Ascra,’ and the mythical Linus, Orpheus, and Amphion. He alludes also to Theocritus under the name of the ‘Syracusan shepherd.’ The names of the shepherds who are introduced as contending in song or uttering their feelings in monologue—Corydon, Thyrsis, Menalcas, Meliboeus, Tityrus, etc.—are Greek, and for the most part taken from the pastoral idyls of Theocritus. There is also frequent mention of the shepherd’s pipe, and of the musical accompaniment to which some of the songs chanted by the shepherds are set.

The general character of the poems is further indicated by the frequent use of the word ‘ludere,’ a word applied by 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:—

This reference shows further that the poem which stands first in order was placed there when the edition of the Eclogues was given to the world. But other references (at v. 86–87 and vi. 12) seem to imply that the separate poems were known either by distinct titles, such as Varus, the title of the sixth, or from their opening lines, as the ‘Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexim,’ and the ‘Cuium pecus? an Meliboei?’ It has been also suggested, from lines quoted in the ninth, which profess to be the opening lines of other pastoral poems, that the ten finally collected together were actual ‘selections’ from a larger number, commenced if not completed (‘necdum perfecta canebat’) by Virgil. But these passages seem more like the lines attributed to the contending poets in the third and seventh Eclogues, i.e. short unconnected specimens of pastoral song.

Nearly all the poems afford indications of the time of their composition and of the order in which they followed one another; and that order is different from the order in which they now appear. It is said, on the authority of Asconius, that three years, from 42 B.C. to 39 B.C., were given to the composition of the Eclogues. But an allusion in the tenth (line 47) to the expedition of Agrippa across the Alps in the early part of 37 B.C. proves that a later date must be assigned to that poem. The probable explanation is that Virgil had intended to end the series with the eighth, which celebrated the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini in 39 B.C.,—

but that his friendship for Gallus induced him to add the tenth, 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 fifthThe lines of Propertius— Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus, might suggest the inference that the seventh was composed at the time when Virgil was residing in the neighbourhood of Tarentum. But, at the time when Propertius wrote, Virgil was engaged in the composition of the Aeneid, not of the Eclogues. The present ‘canis’ seems rather to mean that Virgil, while engaged with his Aeneid, was still conning over his old Eclogues. Yet he must have strayed ‘subter pineta Galaesi’ some time before the composition of the last Georgic. It has been remarked by Mr. Munro that the ‘memini’ in the line Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis looks like the memory of a somewhat distant past. Could the villa of Siron have been in the neighbourhood of Tarentum? (a question originally suggested by Mr. Munro); may it have passed by gift or inheritance into the possession of Virgil, and was he in later life in the habit of going to it from time to time? or was the distance too great from Mantua for him to have transferred his family thither?, were in all probability written by the poet in his native district, the sixth, ninth, and perhaps the seventh, at the villa which had formerly belonged to Siron (‘villula quae Sironis eras’), the rest at Rome. The principle on which the poems are arranged seems to be that of alternating dialogue with monologue. The eighth, though not in dialogue, yet resembles the latter part of the fifth, in presenting two continuous songs, chanted by different shepherds. The poem first in order may have occupied its place from its greater interest in connexion with the poet’s fortunes, or from the honour which it assigns to Octavianus, whose pre-eminence over the other competitors for supreme power had sufficiently declared itself before the first collected edition of the poems was published.

In the earliest poems of the series the art of Virgil, like the lyrical art of Horace in his earlier Odes, is more imitative and conventional than in those written later. He seems satisfied with reproducing the form, rhythm, and diction of Theocritus, and mingling some vague expression of personal or national feeling with the sentiment of the Greek idyl. That the fifth was written after the second and third appears from the lines v. 86–87, in which Menalcas, under which name Virgil introduces himself in the Eclogues, presents his pipe to Mopsus:—

From these lines also it may be inferred as probable that the second poem, ‘Formosum pastor Corydon,’ was written before the third, ‘Dic mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus? an Meliboei?’

A tradition, quoted by Servius and referred to (though inaccurately) by Martialviii. 56. 12., attributes the composition of the second Eclogue to the admiration excited in Virgil by the beauty of a young slave, Alexander, who was presented to him by Pollio and carefully educated by him. A similar story is told of his having received from Maecenas another slave, named Cebes, who also obtained from him a liberal education and acquired some distinction as a poet. It is not improbable that Virgil may have been warmly attached to these youths, and that there was nothing blameable in his attachment. Even Cicero, a man as far removed as possible from any sentimental weakness, writes to Atticus of the death of a favourite slave, a young Greek, and evidently, from the position he filled in Cicero’s household, a boy of liberal accomplishments, in these words: ‘And, I assure you, I am a good deal distressed. For my reader, Sositheus, a charming boy, is just dead; and it has affected me more than I should have thought the death of a slave ought to affect oneEp. ad Att. i. 12..’ It remains true however that in one or two of those Eclogues in which he most closely imitates Theocritus, Virgil uses the language of serious sentiment, and once of bantering raillery, in a way which justly offends modern feeling. And this is all that can be said against him.

There are more imitations of the Greek in this and in the next poem than in any of the other EcloguesDr. Kennedy refers to no less than seventeen parallel passages from Theocritus, many of them being almost literal translations from the Greek poet.. The scenery of the piece, in so far as it is at all definite, combines the mountains and the sea-landscape of Sicily with Italian woods and vineyards. Corydon seems to combine the features of an Italian vinedresser with the conventional character of a Sicilian shepherd. The line

applies rather to an Italian scene than to the pastoral district of Sicily; and this reference to ploughing seems inconsistent with the description of the fierce midsummer heat, and with the introduction of the ‘fessi messores’ in the opening lines of the poem. These inconsistencies show how little thought Virgil had for the objective consistency of his representation. The poem however, in many places, gives powerful expression to the feelings of a despairing lover. There are here, as in the Gallus, besides that vein of feeling which the Latin poet shares with Theocritus, some traces of that ‘wayward modern mood’ of longing to escape from the world and to return to some vague ideal of Nature, and to sacrifice all the gains of civilisation in exchange for the homeliest dwelling shared with the object of affection:—

and again,

The third Eclogue, which is in dialogue, and reproduces two features of the Greek idyl, the natural banter of the shepherds and the more artificial contest in song, is still more imitative and composite in character. It shows several close imitations, especially of the fourth, fifth, and eighth Idyls of TheocritusDr. Kennedy refers to twenty-seven parallels from Theocritus.. In this poem only Virgil, whose muse even in the Eclogues is almost always serious or plaintive, endeavours to reproduce the playfulness and vivacity of his original. Both in the bantering dialogue and in the more formal contest of the shepherds, the subjects introduced are for the most part of a conventional pastoral character, but with these topics are combined occasional references to the tastes and circumstances of the poet himself. Thus in lines 40–42,

allusion is made to the astronomical studies of which Virgil made fuller use in the Georgics. In the line

and again,

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,

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 composedFrom the similarity between the lines in Hor. Sat. i. 1. 114, Ut cum carceribus missos, and those at the end of Georg. i. 512, Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae, it has been argued that Georgic i, at all events, must have appeared before the first Book of the Satires. Ribbeck supposes that the lines of the Georgics may have been seen or heard by Horace before the appearance of the poem, and imitated by him. But is it likely that Horace would have appropriated an image from an unpublished poem? Is it not as probable that Virgil was the imitator here, as in other passages where he uses the language of contemporaries, e.g. of Varius, Ecl. viii. 88?. 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 applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as CiceroCompare the contrast drawn by him between Ennius and the contemporary ‘Cantores Euphorionis,’ Tusc. Disp. iii. 19. for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of the ‘Roman gravitasCf. also W. F. Teuffel’s History of Roman Literature, chap. i. note 1..’ 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:—

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

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.

There was only one form of literary art known to the Greeks or Romans of the Augustan Age which was at all suitable for the treatment on a large scale of such a subject as that which now filled the mind of Virgil. Next after the epic poem of heroic action, the didactic epos was regarded at Rome as the most serious and elaborate form of poetic art. It was more suited than any other form to the Roman mind. It is the only form in which the genius of Rome has produced master-pieces superior not only to anything of the kind produced by Greece but to all similar attempts in modern times. As Roman invention, stimulated by the practical sense of utility, by the passion for vast and massive undertakings, and by the strong perception of order and unity of design, devised a new kind of architecture for the ordinary wants of life, so in accordance with the national bent to reduce all things to rule, to impose the will of a master on obedient subjects, to use the constructive and artistic faculties for some practical end, if it did not create, it gave ampler compass, more solid and massive workmanship, and the associations of great ideas to that form of poetic art which had been the most meagre and unsubstantial of all those invented by the genius of Greece.

Moreover, a new form, or rather a form of more ample capacity, was required to embody the new poetical feelings and experience which now moved the Roman and Italian mind. If less interest was felt at Rome in following the course of individual destiny, the interest felt in contemplating the outward aspect and secret movement of Nature was now stronger than it had been in the great ages of Greek literature. Though the vivid enjoyment of the outward world had unconsciously shaped the tales of the early Greek mythology, and though this enjoyment had entered directly, as a subordinate element, into the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry of Greece, and, more prominently, into the later poetry of Alexandria, and although the phenomena and laws of Nature had aroused the speculative curiosity of the early Greek philosophers, no poet before Lucretius had treated of Nature, in the immensity of her range, in the primal elements and living forces of her constitution, and, at the same time, in her manifold aspects of beneficence and beauty, and of destructive energy, as the subject of a great poem. The forms adopted by the great masters of Greek poetry,—the epic, lyric, and dramatic writers,—whose essential business it was to represent the actions and passions of men, were inapplicable to the treatment of this new subject of man’s environment. Lucretius accordingly had to take the outline of his form from the early physiological writers, whom the Greeks scarcely ranked among their poets at all, and who, though animated by the speculative passion to penetrate to the secret of Nature, were not specially interested in her aspects of beauty or power, or in her relation to the life of man. If he cannot claim the title of an inventor in art, yet by adding volume and majesty to the rudimentary type of these early writers, he gave to the ancient world the unique specimen of a great philosophical poem.

So too Virgil, penetrated with the feeling of Nature in her relation to human wants and enjoyment, and desirous to give an adequate expression to this feeling, could derive no guidance from the nobler genius of Greece. To find a suitable vehicle, he had to turn to the earliest and latest periods of her literature. The didactic, as distinct from the philosophic or contemplative poem, was the invention of a time prior to the existence of 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 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.

In that poem Virgil combines something of the spirit of the older or primitive type of didactic poetry with the systematic treatment of their subject employed by the Alexandrine Metaphrastae. He retains the old form of a personal address, not only in the dedication of the poem to Maecenas, but in the manner in which he inculcates his precepts on the husbandman, or indicates what he himself would do in particular circumstancesE.g. Ausim vel tenui vitem committere sulco; and again, Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem, etc. . Yet he bears more resemblance to the poets of Alexandria in his systematic treatment and arrangement of his materials. He aims, like them, at communicating a large body of unfamiliar knowledge, as well as conveying practical precepts founded on experience. By combining these two aims, but much more by making the aims of conveying precept and instruction altogether subsidiary to that of moving the imagination and the affections, Virgil, if he has not created a new type of didactic poetry, has at least produced almost the only specimen of it which the world cares to read. He is apparently conscious of the difficulty of imparting to a poem of this type a continuous poetical charm; as Lucretius, with more reason, is conscious of the difficulty of securing a sustained poetical interest for his argumentative processes and his investigations into the first principles of things. Virgil’s difficulty is to maintain his subject on the level of poetical feeling, while at the same time adhering to the necessities of practical instruction. And this difficulty attaches to every kind of didactic poetry. He had to associate with a poetic charm, not only the fair results of the husbandman’s labour, the ‘heavy harvests and the Massic juice of the vine,’ but the processes and mechanical appliances through which these fair results were obtained. Although his idea of his art did not demand an exhaustive treatment of all the operations of rural industry, such as was demanded of the prose writers on the subject, yet it did demand that, in making his selection, he should regard the importance of each topic in connexion with the work of the farm as well as its adaptation to poetic treatment. It cannot be denied that this necessary infusion of prosaic matter deprives even the most perfect specimen of didactic poetry of that purity of imaginative interest which pervades the masterpieces of epic, lyrical, and dramatic genius: but it is, on the other hand, a great triumph of art to have redeemed so much as Virgil has done from the homely realities of life into the more sacred ground of poetry, and that without sacrifice either of the truth of fact or of the dignity and sobriety of expression.

If the idea of the poem and of the national interests associated with it arose in Virgil’s mind during his life in Rome, it was in his retirement in Campania that he prepared himself for and executed his task. Like the Aeneid it was a work of slow growth, the result of careful study and meditation. Besides the great change of the concluding episode, there are some slight indications that the poem was retouched in later editions; and perhaps a very few lines added to the original work may have been either left finally unadjusted to their proper place, or may have been transposed in the copying of the manuscriptBoth the nexus of the sense and the rhythm condemn the latitude of transposition which Ribbeck allows himself. Perhaps the only alteration which is absolutely demanded is at iv. 203–205. The lines there, as they stand, clearly interrupt the sense, and are more in place either after 196 or after 218. The strong line, Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis, is a fitting conclusion for the fine paragraph beginning Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse, etc. Either of these places seems more suitable for the lines than that after 183. It is possible that the conjecture which Ribbeck adopts from Wagner, ‘absoluto iam opere in marginem illos versus a poeta coniectos esse,’ may give the true explanation of the misplacement of the lines, though this does not seem to apply to any other passage in the poem. Such bold changes as those introduced by Ribbeck at ii. 35–46, and again at iii. 120–122, are not required by the sense, and are condemned by rhythmical considerations. The line 119, Exquirunt calidumque animis et cursibus acrem, is weak for the concluding line of the paragraph, which ends much more naturally with that transposed from 122 to 99, Neptunique ipsa deducat origine gentem, as it is Virgil’s way to introduce his mythological illustrations after his real observations are finished. The paragraph of four lines, Quare agite o proprios ... Taburnum, stands bald and bare in the position Ribbeck assigns it, between 108 and 109. The minor changes for the most part disturb old associations and throw no new light on the poet’s thought.. Although regard for his art was a more prominent consideration in the mind of Virgil than of Lucretius, yet he did not, any more than his predecessor, wish to 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—

were gifts which could not come from any study of books. The poetry of manhood is, more often perhaps than we know, the conscious reproduction of the unconscious impressions of early years, received in a susceptible and retentive mind. Virgil, in common with all great poets, retained through life the ‘child’s heart within the man’s.’ Through this geniality of nature he was able—

to glorify trite and familiar things by the light reflected from the healthy memories and the idealising fancies of boyhood and early youth.

But while his feeling is all his own,—the happy survival probably of the childhood and youth passed in his home in the district of Andes,—he largely avails himself of the observation, the thought, and the language of earlier writers, both Greek and Roman. His poem is eminently a work of learning as well as of native feeling. He combines in its varied and firm texture the homely wisdom embodied in the precepts and proverbs of Italian peasants (‘veterum praecepta’),—the quaint and oracular dicta of Hesiod,—the scientific knowledge and mythological lore of Alexandrine writers,—the philosophic and imaginative conceptions of Lucretius,—with the knowledge of natural history contained in the treatises of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and the systematic practical directions of the old prose writers on rural economy, such as the Carthaginian MagoCf. Col. iii. 15: ‘Ut Mago prodit, quem secutus Vergilius tutari semina et muniri sic praecepit,’ etc., whose work had been translated into Latin,—Democritus and Xenophon among Greek prose writers,—Cato, the two Sasernae, Licinius Stolo, Tremellius, and Varro among Latin authors. The purely practical precepts of the Georgics were apparently selected and condensed from these writersCf. Col. iv. 9: ‘Nam illam veterem opinionem non esse ferro tangendos anniculos malleolos quod aciem reformidant, quod frustra Vergilius et Saserna, Stolonesque, et Catones timuerunt,’ etc. Also ix. 14: ‘Ceterum hoc eodem tempore progenerari posse apes iuvenco perempto Democritus et Mago nec minus Vergilius prodiderunt.’ As a trace of Virgil’s imitation of Varro, compare the passage where, after speaking of the injury done by goats to the vine, Varro says, ‘Sic factum ut Libero Patri repertori vitis hirci immolarentur,’ with Georgic ii. 380, ‘Non aliam ob culpam,’ etc.. But no literary inspiration or ideas were likely to have come from any of these last-named authors, unless the Invocation in the first Book may have been suggested by the example of Varro, who begins his treatise with an invocation to the XII Di consentes. The proverbial sayings or rustic songs embodying the traditional peasant lore, such as the ‘Quid vesper serus vehit?’ and the ‘hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra, Camille, metes‘From dust in winter, from mud in spring time, you will reap great crops, Camillus.’,’ which add an antique and homely charm to the poem, may have become known to Virgil from the book of the Sasernae, who are quoted by Varro as authorities for many of the old charms used by the primitive husbandmen, such as ‘Terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto,’ which is to be repeated ‘ter novies.’ Servius notes that the words ‘sulco attritus splendescere vomer’ recall an old saying of Cato, ‘Vir bonus est, mi fili, colendi peritus, cuius ferramenta splendent‘He, my son, is a worthy man, and a good farmer, whose implements shine brightly.’.’ The notices of ceremonial observances, such as the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of things that might lawfully be done on holy daysi. 269., were probably derived from the pontifical books and the sacred books of the other priestly colleges, of which Virgil made large use also in the Aeneid. In all the writers on practical farming, from Cato to Varro, he found that strong appreciation of the supreme worth of rural industry and that strong interest in its processes and results which justified him in identifying his subject with the thought of the national life.

Among the sources of literary inspiration from which Virgil drew in the Georgics, the oldest, and not the least abundant, was the ‘Works and Days’ of Hesiod. Yet a comparison of the two poems shows immediately that the Georgics do not, either in form or substance, stand in that close relation to their prototype, in which the Eclogues on the one hand, and the Aeneid on the other, stand to the idyls of Theocritus and to the epic poems of Homer. The immediate influence of Hesiod is most apparent in the first Book of the Georgics, in which the subject is treated in connexion with theological ideas; while in the second Book and in the later Books, in which the philosophical conception of Nature, though in subordination to the conception of a supreme Spiritual power, becomes more prominent, the spirit of Hesiod gives place to the spirit of Lucretius. There is, however, a real affinity between the primitive piety of the old Boeotian bard and the attitude in which Virgil contemplated the world, though the faith of Virgil has become more rational under the speculative teaching and enquiry which had taken the place of earlier modes of thought among the Greeks. Virgil is ever seeking to produce a poetical reconcilement between primitive tradition and more enlightened views both of moral and physical truth. Thus he introduces the old fable of the creation of the present race of men in immediate juxtaposition with the assertion of the ‘laws and eternal conditions imposed by Nature on certain places.’ He accepts the belief in a Golden Age and in the blight which fell on the world under the dispensation of Jove; but he regards this blight as sent, not in anger, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. He describes the natural progress of the various arts of life under this stimulus, but still leaves room for divine intervention in the more important discoveries:—

Again, the teleological view of Nature, which appears in the Georgics in antagonism to the teaching of Lucretius, in such passages as i. 231—

and i. 351—

is in the spirit of Hesiod, though in advance of his conception of Zeus, who appears in him not as a beneficent Providence, but rather as a jealous task-master. So too the constant inculcation of prayer and ceremonial observances—

the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.

But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint naïveté characteristic of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as ‘quo sidere terram Vertere,’—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being regulated not by the Roman CalendarThe great confusion into which it had fallen before its reformation by Julius Caesar may have made this return to the primitive ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ familiar to Virgil’s youth., with its prosaic divisions of the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the constellations,—the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in the line

the use of such quaint expressions as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’—seem all intended to remind the reader that the subject is one ‘antiquae laudis et artis,’—the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,—that too in which man’s dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above Nature is most vividly realisedThe same suggestion of the ancient and unchanging nature of this art is vividly conveyed in the Chorus of the Antigone:— Θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν Γᾶν ἄφθιτον ἀκαμἀταν ἀποτρύεται, ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος, ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων. . This infusion into the practical realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder and ‘freshness of the early world’ Virgil derives from the relation which he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.

Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil’s debt to Hesiod is greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as ‘Strymoniae grues,’ by reference to the products of distant lands—

by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for the natural products which were supposed to be their gifts. But to several special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233—

is copied from Eratosthenes. The account of the signs of the weather, from i. 355 to 465, is taken from the Διοσημεῖα of Aratus, a work so popular at Rome, that it was not only imitated and almost incorporated in his poem by Virgil, but had been translated by Cicero in his youth, and was subsequently translated by Germanicus. Again, the description at iii. 425, of the dangerous serpent that haunts the Calabrian pastures, is closely imitated from the extant Θηριακά of Nicander; nor can we doubt that there were in the fourth Book imitations of the lost Μελισσουργικά of the same author, who probably anticipated Virgil in the use which he made of Aristotle’s observations on the habits of bees.

A comparison of the passages in the Georgics with those of which they are imitations produces the impression not only of Virgil’s immense superiority as a poet over the Alexandrine Metaphrastae, but of the immense superiority of the Latin hexameter, as an organ for expressing the beauty and power of Nature, over the exotic jargon and unmusical jingle which those writers compounded out of their epic studies and their scientific nomenclature. To take one or two instances of Virgil’s imitations from these writers:—in the passage Georg. i. 233–246, Virgil reproduces very closely scientific statements of Eratosthenes and Aratus. But of the five lines which follow—

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 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. MunroIntroduction to Notes, ii. p. 315., 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 worthyCompare the contemptuous expressions used by Cicero, Tusc. Disp. ii. 3, of those who had written on the Epicurean philosophy in Latin. It seems strange, if he had any hand in editing his poems, that he makes no exception there in favour of Lucretius. 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,—

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

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.

For the technical execution of his poem Virgil could gain little help from his Greek models. The mass of materials which he had to reduce to order was much larger and more miscellaneous than the special topics selected for their art by the Alexandrians. The subject treated in the Georgics would have afforded scope for several poems treated on the principle on which Aratus and Nicander treated their subjects; and not only was the mass of materials larger and more varied, but the whole purpose of the Georgics was more complex. Virgil’s artistic aim was not only to combine into one work the topics which he treats successively in the four books of the Georgics, but to interweave with them the poetry of personal and national feeling, of speculative ideas, of ethical and religious teaching, of science, of the living world of Nature. In Lucretius, on the other hand, he found an example of the systematic treatment of a vaster range of topics,—a range so vast, indeed, that the principal topics of Virgil’s art enter as subsidiary elements into one part of his representation. Lucretius too had shown how to combine with the systematic exposition of his abstract theme a strong personal interest and a strong ethical purpose. He had shown how, out of the treatment of this abstract theme, opportunities naturally arose for uttering the poetry and pathos of human life, and for delineating in all its beauty and majesty the outward face and revealing the inner secret of Nature. He thus supplied the general plan which Virgil might follow, with modifications suited to his narrower range of subject and his more purely didactic office. We see how Virgil adopts this 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.

The first parallel to be noticed, in the comparison between the two poems, is in the personal address. Maecenas stands in the same relation to the Georgics as Memmius does to the ‘De Rerum Natura.’ But as Memmius in the body of the poem is often merged in the ideal philosophical student, so Virgil, after the lines of compliment at the opening of his various books, for the most part directs his instructions to some imaginary husbandman. In the tones in which Memmius and Maecenas are respectively addressed there may be an equal sincerity of feeling. But a difference in the relation in which the poets stand to those whom they address makes itself felt in the contrast between such lines as these,

and

In the one case we recognise the man, born into the equal relations of an aristocratic Republic, who knows of no social superior in the world, and is attracted to him whom he honours by his dedication solely by the charm of friendship. In the other case, though the affection may not be less sincere, there is the unmistakeable note of deference to a social superior.

The difference between the position which the two poets 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—

In every book of the poem his praises are repeated in language of enthusiastic devotion. In the poem of Virgil the living Caesar occupies the place of a tutelary deity—

He is ranked above all living men, and above the great men of the past by whom Rome had been saved from her enemies: he is addressed as the immediate object of care to the native gods of Italy, and as destined after death to rank among the ruling powers of Heaven. Something is said in his honour in every book of the poem. The lines near the end,

seem intended to leave the thought of his actual greatness as the abiding impression on the mind of the reader; as the concluding lines of the Invocation seem intended to make his presence felt as that of its inspiring deity. While we cannot doubt that the admiration expressed by Lucretius is the sincere and generous tribute of genius acknowledging a great debt and unconsciously exaggerating the nobleness of its benefactor, it is impossible to determine how far Virgil’s language is the expression of sincere conviction, and how far it is dictated by the necessities of his position.

But it is in their invocations of a Superior Power to aid them in their task that we recognise the strongest contrast between the philosophic poet, who, while denying all supernatural agency, is yet carried away by his imagination to attribute consciousness, will, and passion to the great creative Power of Nature,—the source of all life, joy, beauty, and art,—and the ‘pius vates,’ influenced by the religious sense of man’s dependence on a Spiritual Power, deeply feeling the poetical charm of the old mythology, and striving to effect some reconcilement between the fading traditions of Polytheism and the more philosophical conceptions prevalent in his time. Lucretius for the moment adopts the symbolism of ancient mythology, and probably the actual figures of pictorial art (which elsewhere he speaks of as a great source of human delusion), to impart visible presence, colour, and passion to his thought; but he leaves no doubt on the reader’s mind that his representation is merely symbolical. Virgil, on the other hand, appears in the opening lines of the Georgics to attribute a distinct personality to the beings of that composite Polytheism which had gradually grown up out of the union of Greek art and Roman religion, but which it is difficult to comprehend as having any real hold over the minds of men who had received any tincture of Greek philosophy. In the divine office which he assigns to Caesar he adopts the latest addition to this eclectic Pantheon; and this new divinity he introduces in the midst of the old gods, just as he fancifully introduces Gallus in the Eclogues amid the choir of Apollo and the Muses.

But in the Eclogues there is no feeling of doubt in our minds that the representation is purely fanciful. The strain in the Georgics is altogether too serious; the juxtaposition of Caesar with the gods of Olympus and the protecting deities of the husbandman is too carefully meditated to admit of our supposing the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to ‘adsuesce vocari’ to be intended to be taken as a mere play of fancy. We cannot 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?

To answer these questions we must endeavour to realise the very composite character which the Pagan religion, the accumulation of many beliefs from the earliest and rudest fancies of primitive times to the studied representations of Greek art and the later symbolical explanations of philosophical schools, presented to men living in the Augustan Age. In this Invocation and in the body of the poem we can trace three or four distinct veins of belief, existing together, without producing any sense of inconsistency, and combining into a certain unity for the purpose of artistic representation.

Religion in the Augustan Age presented a different aspect to the dwellers in the town and in the country; to the refined classes whose tastes were formed by Greek art and poetry, and to men of the old school,—senators like Cotta or antiquarians like Varro,—who sought to conform to the ancient Roman traditions; to students of philosophy, who either, like the Epicureans, denied all Divine agency, or like the Stoics, resolved the many divinities of the popular belief into one Divine agency under many forms. The peculiarity of Virgil’s mind is that his belief, at least as expressed in his poetry, was a kind of syncretism composed out of all these modes of thought and belief. Like Horace and Tibullus, he sympathises in imagination with that rustic piety which expressed the natural thankfulness of the human heart for protection afforded to the flocks and the fruits of the field, by festivals and ceremonial observances like the Palilia and Ambarvalia, by sacrifice of a 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,—

and again in Tibullus,

of a happy and generally of a genial and festive character, and not altogether devoid of such elements of simple piety as find expression in the

of Horace. Poetical sympathy with the beliefs and picturesque ceremonies of the peasants among whom they lived enhanced the real enjoyment derived from their country life by men of refined feeling like Horace and Tibullus. But Virgil’s feeling in regard to the religious trust and observances of the country people appears to be stronger than mere poetical sympathy. He sees in them a class of men more immediately dependent than others on the protection of some unseen Power, and thus forced, as it were, into more immediate relation with that Power. The modes in which they endeavoured to gain the favour of that Power or to express their thankfulness for its protection were probably among the influences which had moulded his own early belief and character in his Mantuan farm. In the prayer

as in the later exclamation,

he is identifying himself in imagination with a living mode of popular belief, and one to which he may have been attracted by his early associations as well as by poetical sympathy.

But the Invocation recognises the creations of Greek art along with the ruder and simpler objects of Italian worship. The ‘Fauni Dryadesque puellae’ assume to Virgil’s fancy the forms of Greek art and poetry. The legend of Neptune producing the horse by the stroke of his trident suggests the attributes of Ποσειδῶν ἵππιος, not of the Italian Neptunus. It is not the Roman Minerva, but ἁ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθάνα, who is associated in poetry and legend with the olive,—

He calls upon Pan to leave his native groves and the woodland pastures of Lycaeus, just as Horace describes him as passing nimbly from his Arcadian haunt to the Sabine Lucretilis. These gods, nymphs, and satyrs of an alien belief were now to Romans as to Greeks the recognised materials which art and song had to shape into new forms. In the vigorous prime of Greek poetry, so late even as the age of Sophocles and Herodotus, there was a real belief in the personal existence and active agency of these supernatural beings. This real belief first gave birth to, and was afterwards merged in, the representations of art. Art, which owed its birth to religious sentiment, superseded it. But after a time and under new conditions the strong admiration for the beauty or significance of the objects represented in art produces a strong wish to revive the belief in their reality; and in minds peculiarly susceptible of such influences the wish tends to fulfil itself.

Probably Virgil himself would not have cared to probe too deeply the state of half-belief in which his heart and mind realised the bright existence and kindly influence of beings consecrated to him by the most cherished associations of living art and the poetry of the past. Even Lucretius, while sternly rejecting all belief in their existence as absolutely incompatible with truth, feels from time to time attracted by their poetical charm. Horace, we can see, from the absence of anything in his Satires, or Epistles, implying a real belief in the gods of mythology, keeps his literary belief apart from his true convictions. 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.

But there was another mode of Greek influence acting on the educated minds of Rome, stronger than that of the ancient mythology. That influence was the religious speculations of the various philosophical schoolsCompare the first book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.. There was, on the one hand, the Epicurean acceptance of an infinite number of gods dwelling in the ‘Intermundia,’ enjoying a state of supreme calm, apart from all concern with this world or the labours and pursuits of men. They might be objects of pure contemplation, and pious reverence to the human spirit; but they were capable neither of being propitiated nor made angry by anything that men could do. The Stoic doctrine, on the other hand, recognised the incessant agency and forethought of a Supreme Spiritual Power over human life. It accepted the stories and beings of the traditional religion, but explained them away. The various deities worshipped by the people are the various manifestations and functions of this one Supreme Spiritual Power, whether called by the name of Zeus, or by the abstract name of Providence (πρόνοια). This is the Power addressed in the famous hymn of Cleanthes, and that appealed to in the familiar τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν of Aratus. It is part of Virgil’s eclecticism to combine the science of Epicurus with the theology of the more spiritual schools. The Supreme Spiritual Power in the Georgics is generally spoken of under the title of ‘Pater.’ It is noticeable that the word Iuppiter is used either with a purely physical signification, as in

or as in the phrases ‘sub Iove,’ ‘ante Iovem,’ in reference to the stories of the ancient mythology. Even in this Invocation, 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 CeresServius has the following note on the passage:—‘Stoici dicunt non esse nisi unum deum, et unam eandemque (esse) potestatem, quae pro ratione officiorum nostrorum variis nominibus appellatur. Unde eundem Solem, eundem Liberum, eundem Apollinem vocant. Item Lunam, eandem Dianam, eandem Cererem, eandem Iunonem, eandem Proserpinam dicunt; secundum quos, pro Sole et Luna, Liberum et Cererem invocavit.’. The rhythm of the lines 5–7 can leave no doubt whatever as to this identification, notwithstanding the appeal to Varro’s example, who distinguishes the various deities whom he invokes. It is characteristic of Virgil’s art to introduce such a variation in any passage which he imitates, and also to suggest a thought which he does not distinctly develope. In the lines 95–96,

he reproduces a thought which Callimachus had expressed in his hymn to ArtemisQuoted by M. Benoist.—

The ‘flava Ceres’ of Virgil’s description seems to call up before our mind a picture of the harvest-moon looking down on the corn-fields of the prosperous husbandman.

The national religion of Rome was something distinct both from the rustic Paganism of Italy, and from that aesthetic amalgamation of Greek and Roman beliefs and that semi-philosophical rationalism which art and literature made familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age. The great symbol of that national religion was the Temple of Jove on the Capitol

Cf. ‘Incolumi Iove et urbe Roma.’ Hor. iii. 5. 12. Cf. also iii. 3. 42; iii. 30. 8.

Cf. also ‘Sedem Iovis Optimi Maximi auspicato a maioribus pignus imperii conditam,’ etc. Tac. Hist. iii. 72; and ‘Sed nihil aeque quam incendium Capitolii, ut finem imperio adesse crederent, impulerat,’ iv. 54.

The Capitol is the symbol of the eternal duration of the Empire to Virgil also:—

The motives and purpose influencing Virgil to undertake the composition of the Aeneid are to be sought partly in his own literary position, partly in the state of public feeling at the time when he commenced his task, and partly in the direction given to his genius by the personal influence of Augustus. As the author of the Georgics he had established his position as the foremost poetic artist of his time. He had achieved a great success in a great and serious undertaking. He had entered into competition with Greek poets of acknowledged reputation, and had surpassed them in their own province. He had accomplished all that could be accomplished by him as the poet of the peaceful charm of country life. But while in his two earlier works he limits himself to that field assigned to him by Horace,—that over which the ‘gaudentes rure Camenae’ presided,—the stirring of a larger ambition is observable in both poems:—

and again:—

He had yet to find a fuller expression for his sympathy with his age, which had deepened with the deepening significance of the 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.

The completion of the Georgics and the first conception of the Aeneid coincided in point of time with the event which not only established a sense of security in the room of the long strain of alarm and anxiety and a sense of national unity in the room of internecine strife in the Roman world, but which, to those looking back upon it after nineteen centuries, appears to be one of the most critical turning-points in all history. The enthusiasm of the moment found expression by the voice of Horace:—

But Virgil represents more truly the deeper tendencies of his 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.

In both the Eclogues and Georgics it was seen that Virgil allows his genius to be in some measure directed by others in the choice of his subjects, while he follows his own judgment in his mode of treating them. In the earlier poems he acknowledges the direction given to him both by Varus and by Pollio,—

while at the same time he excuses himself from directly celebrating their actions. In the Georgics he describes his task as being commanded by Maecenas—‘tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa.’ The desire of Augustus, whether openly expressed or not, to commemorate his success and to add lustre to his rule by associating them with the noblest art of his age, must have acted with more imperious urgency on the will of Virgil than the wishes of any of his earlier patrons. His patriotic and personal feeling to the saviour of the State and his own benefactor must have made the task imposed on him a service of love as well as of obligation. But in undertaking this task he desired to make it subservient to the purpose of producing a work which should emulate the greatest poetical works of the Greeks, and which should, at the same time, be a true symbol of Rome at the zenith of her fortunes.

Virgil had now found in his own age a motive for the composition of that epic poem which it had been his boyish ambition to attempt,—

He could appeal as Ennius, or even as Homer had done, to hearers animated by the same feeling which moved himself. The two great conditions of a work of art which should gain the ear of the world immediately, and which should interest it permanently, were prepared for him in the enthusiasm of the moment, and in the enduring interest attaching to the career of Rome. His highly-trained faculty, already proved and exercised in other works, was a guarantee for the artistic execution of any design which he should undertake. But two questions remained for him to solve,—what form should his epic poem assume? should he follow absolutely the precedent of Homer, or of Ennius, or endeavour to surpass the contemporary panegyrists like Varius by a direct celebration of the events of his age? And if he adopted the Homeric type, what subject should he adopt so as to impart the interest of personal fortunes and human character to a poem the inspiring motive of which was the national idea?

The problem which Virgil set before himself was really one altogether new in literature. The Alexandrian Age had endeavoured to revive an interest in the heroic adventure of early or mythical times. It had recognised the principle that this distant background was essential to a poem of heroic action, and that events of contemporary or recent history were not capable of epic treatment. But it had not discerned the necessary supplement to that principle, that if such a poem, on a large scale, is to gain a permanent place in literature, it must bear some immediate relation to the age in which it is written, and be associated with some ethical and religious truths or some political cause of vital importance to the world. The epic poet 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.

Both Ennius and Naevius had set the example of connecting a continuous narrative of the events of their own time with the mythical glories and the traditional history of Rome. And the Introduction to the third Georgic indicates that some idea of this kind at one time hovered before the imagination of Virgil. But while moved by the same patriotic impulses as these older poets, Virgil must have felt as strongly as Horace did that they were examples to be avoided in the choice of form and mode of treatment. He and Horace acknowledged the Greeks alone as their masters in art. He aspires not only to surpass Ennius and Naevius in the office they fulfilled, but to enter into rivalry with Homer,—to perform for the Romans of the Augustan Age a work analogous to that which Homer performed for the Greeks of his age. To do this, it was necessary to select some single heroic action from the cycle of mythical events, and to connect that with the whole story of Rome and Italy and with the events of the Augustan Age. The action had in some way to illustrate or symbolise the thoughts, memories, and hopes with which public feeling was identified at the time when the poem was written. Thus the original motive of the Virgilian epic was essentially different from that of the Homeric poems. The Iliad and the Odyssey have their origin in the pure epic impulse. The germ of the poems is the story; their purpose is to satisfy the curiosity felt in human action and character. The ‘wrath of Achilles,’ the ‘return of Odysseus,’ are, as they profess to be, the primary sources of interest in the poems 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‘So vast a toil it was to build up the Roman people.’’ with which the exordium closes. The choice and conduct of the action were the mechanical difficulties to be overcome by the poet, not the inspiring motives of his genius. This is the main cause of the comparative tameness of the Aeneid in point of human interest. Actors and action did not spring out of the spontaneous movement of the imagination, but were chosen by a refined calculation to fulfil the end which Virgil had in view. What Aeneas and his followers want in personal interest, is supposed to accrue to them as instruments in the hands of destiny. A new type of epic poetry is thus realised. The Iliad and the Odyssey are essentially poems of personal, the Aeneid is the epic of national fortunes.

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, 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 Troy is announced by the mouth of Poseidon in the twentieth Book of the Iliad (307–308):—

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,—

and the Ἰλίου πέρσις of Stesichorus is quoted as the authority for the representationSchwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 298.. The motive actuating Stesichorus was 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 NaeviusThe account here given of the development of the legend is taken from Schwegler, Römische Geschichte..

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 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 PyrrhusThe growth of this legend is discussed with learning and ability by Professor Nettleship in his ‘Vergil,’ pp. 46–61..

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. 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 spontaneous 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 tributeSuetonius says of the Emperor Claudius, ‘Iliensibus, quasi Romanae gentis auctoribus, tributa in perpetuum remisit, recitata vetere epistula Graeca Senatus populique Romani Seleuco regi amicitiam et societatem ita demum pollicentis, si consanguineos suos Ilienses ab omni onere immunes praestitisset.’ For these and other official recognitions of the connexion between Rome and Ilium, see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 305 et seq.. T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the AeneadaeMommsen (book iii. ch. 14) quotes these two lines from an Epigram composed in the name of Flamininus:— Αἰνεἀδας Τίτος ὕμμιν ὐπέρτατον ὤπασε δῶρον Ἑλλήνων τεύξας παισὶν ἐλευθερίαν. . In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans:—

Composite character of the Aeneid illustrated by an examination of the poem.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that the legend of Aeneas was better suited than any other which he could have selected for the two objects which Virgil had before his mind in the composition of the Aeneid; first, that of writing a poem representative and commemorative of Rome and of his own epoch, in the spirit in which some of the great architectural works of the Empire, such as the Column of Trajan, the Arches of Titus and of Constantine, were erected; and, secondly, that of writing an imitative epic of action, manners, and character which should afford to his countrymen an interest analogous to that which the Greeks derived from the Homeric poems. The knowledge necessary to enable him to fulfil the first purpose was contained in such works as the ceremonial books of the various Priestly Colleges, the ‘Origines’ of Cato, the antiquarian treatise of Varro, and perhaps the ‘Annales’ and ‘FastiCf. Hor. Od. iii. 17. 2–4:— Quando et priores hinc Lamias ferunt Denominatos, et nepotum Per memores genus omne fastos, etc. ’ which preserved the record of national and family traditions. In giving life to these dry materials his mind was animated by 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:—

As poetic sources of inspiration for this part of his task Virgil had the national epic poems of Naevius and Ennius; and of both of these he made use: of the first, in his account of the storm which drives Aeneas to Carthage and of his entertainment there by the Carthaginian Queen; of the second, by his use of many half-lines and expressions which give an antique and stately character to the description of incidents or the expression of sentiment. For Virgil’s other purpose, his chief materials were derived from his intimate familiarity with the two great Homeric poems: but he availed himself also of incidents contained in the Homeric Hymns, in the Cyclic poems, in the Greek Tragedies, as for instance the lost Laocoon of Sophocles, and in the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius. His own experience of life, and still more the insight which his own nature afforded him into various moods of passion, affection, and chivalrous emotion, enabled him to impart novelty and individuality to the materials which he derived from these foreign and ancient sources.

A minute examination of the various books of the poem would bring out clearly that these two objects, that of raising a monument to the glory of Rome and of Augustus, and that of writing an imitative epic reproducing some image of the manners and life of the heroic age, were present to the mind of Virgil through his whole undertaking. It will be sufficient in order to show this two-fold purpose to look at the first book, and at some of the more prominent incidents in the later books.

The Aeneid, like the Annals of Ennius, is a poem inspired by national sentiment, and expressive of the idea of Rome. But the ‘Res Romana Audire est operae pretium procedere recte Qui rem Romanam Latiumque augescere vultis. ,’ 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:—

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 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 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 businessCf. At Tiberius, nihil intermissa rerum cura, negotia pro solatiis accipiens. Tac. Ann. iv. 13., 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 peaceiii. 132–7:— Ergo avidus muros optatae molior urbis Pergameamque voco, et laetam cognomine gentem Hortor amare focos, arcemque attollere tectis,— *   *   *   *   * Iura domosque dabam. , might be regarded as a kind of foreshadowing of those which were afterwards played by Augustus on the real stage of human 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 spectarentur‘The funeral was most remarkable for the display of ancestral images, as the founder of the Julian house, Aeneas and all the Alban kings, and Romulus founder of the city, and after them the Sabine lords, Attus Clausus, and the other images of the Claudii, in a long line passed before the eyes of the spectators.’ Ann. iv. 9..’ 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 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—

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—

The national, religious, and political ideas which form the central interest of the poem have been considered in the previous chapter. We have seen how Virgil was moved by an impulse similar to that which acted on Ennius in a ruder age, and in what way he strove to express the meaning which the idea of Rome has for all times, and to find an adequate symbol of the dominant sentiment of his own time. It remains to consider how far the poem sustains by its command over our sympathies the interest thus established in its favour; and to ascertain what value the Aeneid, as a poem of action, unfolding a spectacle of human life, manners, character, and passion, possessed for the Romans and still possesses for ourselves.

The action of the poem, apart from its bearing on the destinies of the world, has a grandeur and dignity of its own. It is enacted on a great theatre, developes itself by incidents giving free play to the highest modes of human energy and passion, and through the agency of personages already renowned in legend and poetry. In that mythical age which the poet recalls to life no spectacle could be imagined more deserving to fix the attention of the world than the fall of Troy, the building of Carthage, and the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome. Whatever else may be said of the personages of the story, they are conceived of as playing no common part in human affairs. In following their fortunes we breathe the air of that high poetic region which forms the undetermined border-land between mythology and history. We look back on the ruined state of the greatest city of legendary times, and we 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 actors moreover who play their part in these critical events are not ‘common or mean.’ The crisis is conceived of as one so momentous, from the issues involved in it, as to call forth the passions and the energies of the old Olympian Powers. But even the human personages of the story appear with a prestige of glory and sanctity, and yet are sufficiently unfamiliar to excite new expectations. Aeneas, as the son of a mightier goddessIl. xx. 105., is distinguished in the Iliad by the honours of a higher lineage than Achilles. He is brave in war, the comrade of Hector, a hero deemed worthy to encounter Achilles himself as well as Diomede in battle. He is especially dear to the gods, and is marked out by prophecy as destined to bear, and transmit to his descendants, the rule over the remnant of the Trojans. To Anchises attaches the sanctity of one enjoying a closer communion with the immortals, of one at once 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.

It may therefore be said that in the choice of the time and the scenes in which his action is laid, in the character of the action itself, and in the eminence of the personages taking part in it, Virgil fulfils all the conditions of his art which reflexion on the models of the past and on the circumstances in life most capable of interesting the imagination could teach him. The care with which he prepared himself for his task is as remarkable as the judgment with which he conceived its main conditions. The conduct of his story shows the most intimate familiarity with the incidents and adventures contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Cyclic poems and the dramas founded on them, in the Homeric hymns and the Alexandrine epic. It shows how Virgil so combines and varies the details thus suggested, as to recall many features of the Homeric age, and at the same time to produce the impression of something new in literary art. The revived image of that age must have affected the contemporaries of the poet in a manner different from its effect on us. To us both the Iliad and the Aeneid are ancient and unfamiliar: the one comes before us as an original picture of manners, the other as a copy taken in a long subsequent age. But to a Roman of the time of Augustus the life of the Homeric age must have appeared almost as remote as it does to us. The direct imitations of Homer in the Aeneid might produce on his mind the same mixed impression of 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.

But the Aeneid not only revives the romance of the Greek heroic age: it creates the romance of ‘that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.’ It bestows the colour and warmth of human life on dim traditions, on vague names, on the memories of early warfare clinging to ancient towns, and on the origins of immemorial customs and ceremonies. The task of giving poetic life to the dry prose of Cato, to the dust of antiquarian learning, and to the rigid formalism of the old Roman ceremonial must have taxed the poet’s powers more than that of reawakening the interest in the old Homeric life. Virgil accomplishes this result through his power of living at the same time in the past and in the present; of feeling powerfully the associations of a remote antiquity, and the immediate action of all that was most impressive to thought and imagination in the age in which he lived.

The earlier works of Virgil had proved his strength in descriptive and didactic poetry, and in the expression of personal feeling, of national sentiment, and of ethical contemplation; 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 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.

Virgil cannot be said to have failed either in the conception of his subject, in the collection and preparation of his materials, or in the art and faculty demanded for impressive narrative. Yet all feel that the Aeneid is much inferior to the Homeric poems in natural human interest, as it is much inferior in reflective interest to the greatest extant dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poem, as a whole, produces the impression rather of careful construction than of organic growth. The reflexion employed on it is rather that of a critic applying artistic principles to impart unity to many heterogeneous materials, than that of an imaginative thinker, seeing his story unfold itself before him in the light of some great intuition into the secret meanings of life.

His inferiority to Homer in the power of making his story at once vividly real and nobly ideal arises partly from an inferiority in his own temper, and partly from the inferior adaptability of the life of his own age to imaginative treatment. There is no trace in Virgil of that keen enjoyment of personal adventure and bodily activity which is present in every page of the Homeric poems. Virgil’s materials are gathered from study and reflexion, not from strong and many-sided contact with life. Though he writes of ‘arma virumque’ with a Roman sense of the duty of disregarding danger and death, he has none of the ‘delight of battle’ which animates the Iliad and the poetical and prose romances of Scott. Neither does he make us feel that elevation of spirit in the presence of the danger of the sea, which the author of the Odyssey among ancient, and Byron among modern poets, communicate to their readers.

But the vast difference in manners, feelings, and modes of thought, between an early and a late age—between the spring and the autumn of ancient civilisation—presented still more insuperable obstacles to Virgil in his attempt to accomplish the work of Homer. In the first period imagination is the 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, of the gathering of clouds, of the constellations, of the stillness of night, of the habits of wild animals, of the more violent forces of the elements, of the omens which suddenly appear to men engaged in battle or assembled in council in the open air and awaiting a sign for their guidance.

An image of this Homeric life Virgil has to reproduce from the midst of a state of society utterly unlike it. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of order and material civilisation, in which great results were produced, not by individual force, but by masses and combinations of men directed by political sagacity and secret council; in which the life of the richer class was passed in great cities and luxurious villas; in which the comforts of life were abundantly supplied through the organisation of commerce and the ministrations of a multitude of slavesFor an instance of the number of slaves in a single household in the reign of Nero compare the speech of C. Cassius in Tac. Ann. xiv. 43: ‘Quem numerus servorum tuebitur, cum Pedanium Secundum quadringenti non protexerint?’ The simplicity of the old Roman life which Virgil idealises in the Georgics, as compared with the luxurious indulgence of the later Republic and the Empire, was in a great measure due to the comparative rarity of slavery in the earlier ages of Roman history.; in which the outward world was enjoyed as a beautiful spectacle rather than as a field of active exertion and personal adventure; in which the belief in the supernatural was fixed in imposing outward symbols, but was no longer a fresh source of wonder and expectation; an age too, in which the natural emotions of the heart and imagination were becoming deadened by satiety and the ‘strenua inertia’ of luxurious living.

The art of Virgil is thus powerless to produce a true image of the life and manners of the Homeric age. Yet he does surround the actors in his story with an environment of religious belief and observances, of political and social life, of material civilisation, of martial movement and sea-adventure, formed partly out of his poetical and antiquarian studies, partly out of the familiar spectacle of his own age, partly out of his personal sympathies and convictions. And this representation, though 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 romanceCf. ‘Virgil’s Aeneis war der früheste Versuch in dieser künstlichen oder phantastischen Fassung des Epos, das erste romantische Heldengedicht, und machte den Uebergang zu den gleich zwitterhaften Epen der modernen Zeit.’ Bernhardy, Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur.. The work in English poetry which comes most near to the Aeneid in the union of modern ethical and political feeling with the spectacle of the martial life and the ideas of the supernatural belonging to a much earlier time, is ‘The Faery QueenIt is probably too early to institute a comparison between the epic of Virgil and any recent work of imagination, but not too early to indicate adherence to those critics who find a parallel not in art and genius only, but in the simplicity and sincerity of nature revealed in their works, between the author of the Aeneid and the author of the ‘Idylls of the King.’:’ though the allegorical meaning of that poem is as different as possible from the solid basis of fact—the marvellous career of Rome—on which the Aeneid is founded. Virgil produces much more than Spenser the illusion of a kind of life not absolutely withdrawn from mundane experience. The scenes through which he guides the personages of his story are the familiar places of central Italy, of Sicily, of the Greek islands, of the shores of Africa. These personages are engaged in important transactions, such as make up the actual history of early nations,—wars, alliances, intermarriages, and the like. Even the supernatural element in the poem produces the illusion, if not of conformity with the belief of men in the age in which the poem was written, yet of conformity with that stage in the whole growth and decomposition of ancient beliefs which, through the works of art and poetry, has made the deepest impression on the world. Thus if Virgil’s representation of scenes, persons, incidents, modes of life, supernatural belief, etc. wants both the freshness and naïveté of Homer and the ideality and exuberance of fancy characteristic of 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.

In addition to his great knowledge of antiquity and his gift of living in the creations of earlier art and poetry, Virgil possessed in his own imaginative constitution elements of power which enabled him to give solidity and beauty to the world of his invention. Among these elements of power his feeling of religious awe, his sense of majesty investing the forms of government, his veneration for antiquity, his susceptibility to the associations attaching to particular places, are conspicuous. His sympathy with the primary human affections suggests to him the details of many pathetic situations. He has a Roman admiration for courage, endurance, and magnanimous bearing. His refined perceptions, perfected by a life of studious culture and by familiarity with the social life of men inheriting the traditions of a great governing class, enable him to make the various actors on his stage play their parts with grace and dignity.

By some of these sources of imaginative power Ennius also was moved in the composition of his epic. In that which is Virgil’s strength, sympathy with the primary human affections, it would have been impossible for any poet who came after them to have surpassed Homer, Sophocles, or Lucretius. But in Homer this sympathy is combined with a sterner, in Sophocles with a severer mood. In Lucretius the feeling is identified with the general melancholy of his thought. The feeling of humanity in Virgil is as original and pervading as the feeling with which Nature affects him. From all these elements of inspiration, his imagination is able to body forth the world of his creation in the remote border-land of history and mythology, and to impart to it not only solidity and self-consistency, but also grandeur of outline and beauty of detail.

While the various religious elements in Virgil’s nature find ample scope in the representation of the Aeneid, his apathy in regard to active political life is seen in the tameness of his reproduction of that aspect of human affairs. In the Homeric βουλή and ἀγορά we recognise not only the germs of the future political development of the Greeks, but the germs out of which all free political life unfolds itself. To the form of government exhibited in the Aeneid, the words which Tacitus uses of a mixed constitution might be more justly applied,—‘it is one more easily praised than realised, or if ever it is realised, it is incapable of permanenceAnn. iv. 33..’ And even if the Virgilian idea could be realised in some happy moment of human affairs, it does not contain within itself the capacity of any further development. The difficulties of the problem of government are solved in Virgil by the picture which he draws of passive and loyal submission on the part of nobles and people to a wise, beneficent, and disinterested ruler and legislatorIt is true, as Gibbon remarks in his Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, that the expression ‘dare iura’ is only once applied to Aeneas—but it is the regular expression used of a ruler of a settled community, as for instance of Dido. It is applied at the end of the Georgics to Augustus, ‘per populos dat iura.’. The idea of the ruler in the Aeneid is the same as that of the ‘Father.’ It is under such a rule, exercised from Rome as its centre, that the unchanging future of the world is anticipated—

The case of Mezentius does indeed show that Virgil recognised the ultimate right of rebellion when the paternal king passed into the tyrannical oppressor; but such an instance affords no scope for representing the manifestation of political passions and virtues. The free play of conflicting forces in a community has no attraction for Virgil’s imagination. He suggests no thought either of the popular liberty realised in the best days of the Roman commonwealth, or of the sagacity and steadfast traditions of the Roman Senate. The only trace of discussion and opposition appears in the debate within the court of Latinus. 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.

But besides the ideals of popular freedom and senatorian dignity which were realised in the Republic, the Roman mind was impressed by another political ideal, the ‘Majesty of the State.’ The one political force that remained unchanged, amid the various changes of the Roman constitution from the time of the kings to the time of the emperors, was the power of the executive. And this power depended not on material force, but on the sentiment with which the magistrate was regarded as the embodiment for the time being of that attribute in the State which commanded the reverence of the people. The greatest political offence which a Roman could commit under the Republic was a violation of the ‘majesty of the Commonwealth;’ under the Empire ‘of the majesty of the Emperor.’ The sentiment out of which this idea arose was felt by Virgil in all its strength. Thus although the actual government of Latinus is exhibited as a model neither of wisdom nor of strength, it is invested with all the outward semblance of powerful and ancient sovereignty—

The spectacle of the fall of Troy acquires new grandeur from the representation of Troy, not, as it appears in Homer, as a city with many allies, but as the centre of a wide and long-established empire—

The tragic splendour of Dido’s death is enhanced by her proud sense of a high destiny fulfilled and of queenly rule exercised over a great people—

Thus although the necessities of his position and his own ‘inscitia reipublicae’ prevented Virgil, in his representation, from appealing to the generous political emotions of a free people, he was able not only to gratify the pride of empire felt by his countrymen, but to sustain among them the sense of imaginative reverence with which the sovereignty of the State over its individual members deserves to be regarded.

But there is another class of political facts which interest the mind as much as those which arise out of the play of conflicting forces within a free commonwealth,—viz. the relations of independent powers with one another. And of this class of facts both Homer and Virgil make use in their representations. In Homer we see the spectacle, never realised in actual Grecian history at least till the days of Alexander, of the many independent Greek powers united under one leader in a common enterprise, and of the various powers of the western shores of Asia combined in defence of their leading State. The antagonism between the Greeks and Trojans is, in point of general conception, more like the hostile inter-relations of nations in modern times, than like the wars of city against city, with which the pages of later Greek history are filledThe Peloponnesian war, which united the Dorian and oligarchical States of Greece under the lead of Sparta against Athens and her allies, admits, as is indicated by Thucydides in his Introduction, of the best parallel to the Trojan war, as represented by Homer.. The union of the Italian tribes and cities under the command of Turnus, and that of Trojans, Arcadians, and Etrurians—all foreigners recently settled in Italy—under Aeneas, may be compared to the union of independent Greek powers under Agamemnon, and that of ‘the allies summoned from afar,’ who, while following their own princes, yet submitted to the command of Hector. Yet in Virgil’s conception of the great powers of the world, and even of cities most remote from one another, as having an intimate knowledge of each other’s fortunes,—in the idea of what in modern times would be called a ‘foreign policy’ and ‘the balance of power,’ which dictates the mission of Turnus to Diomede, and the appeal of Aeneas to the Etrurians to take part with him in averting the establishment by the Rutulians of a sovereignty over the whole of Italy,—we meet with a condition of international relations and policy, which, if based on the experience of any period of ancient history, might have been suggested by the memory of the time when Hannibal’s great scheme of combining the fresh vigour of the western barbarians, the smouldering elements of resistance in Italy, and the military power and prestige of the old monarchies of Macedonia and Syria, was defeated not more by the irresolution and disunion among those powers, than by the traditional policy through which Rome had made her dependent allies feel that her interest 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.

The state of material civilisation exhibited in the Aeneid must be regarded also as a poetical compromise between the simplicity and rude vigour of primitive civilisation and the splendour and refinement of the age in which the poem was written. Thus Acestes, the friendly king and Sicilian host of Aeneas, welcomes him on his return from Carthage in the rough dress of some primitive hunter—

Evander receives him beneath his humble roof,

The Arcadian prince is roused in the morning by the song of birds under the eaves, and proceeds to visit his guest accompanied by two watchdogs which lay before his door. On the other hand the description, in the account of the building of Carthage, of the foundation of the great theatre—

the picture of the great Temple of Juno—

of the rich frescoes and bas-reliefs adorning it—

That the passion of Dido is powerfully conceived and delineated, that it satisfies modern feeling more legitimately than the representation of the unhallowed impulses of Phaedra, or of the cruel and treacherous rancour of Medea, will scarcely be questioned. Yet perhaps it is doing no injustice to the genius of Virgil to say that his power in dealing with human life consists generally in conceiving some state of feeling, some pathetic or passionate situation, rather than in the creation and sustained development of living characters. How the great impersonations of poetry and prose fiction, which are more real to our imaginations than the personages of history or those whom we know in life, come into being, is a question which probably their authors themselves could not answer. Though reflexion on human nature and deliberate intention to exemplify some law of life may precede the creative act which gives them being, and though continued reflexion may be needed to sustain 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—

but his sympathetic insight into this passion—an insight already shown in the Eclogues—stimulates the forces of his imagination to a nobler as well as a more vital creation than in any other of his impersonations. Dido ranks for all times as one of the great heroines of poetry. So long as she appears on the scene the interest in the exhibition of her nature overpowers all other interests. But this is not the case with Virgil’s other personages. We are more interested in what they say and in what happens to them than in what they are. In other words, it is by his oratorical and descriptive, rather than by his dramatic faculty, that he secures the attention of his readers. As oratory was one of the most important powers in ancient life, so it became a prominent element in ancient epic and dramatic poetry,—in Homer, Ennius, and Virgil, as well as in Sophocles, Euripides, and the Roman tragedians. The oratory of the Aeneid shows nothing of the speculative power—of the application of great ideas to life—which gives the profoundest value not only to many speeches in Sophocles, but also to some of those in the Iliad, and notably to such as proceed from the mouth of Odysseus. It cannot equal the vivid naturalness of the speeches of Nestor, nor the impassioned grandeur of those of Achilles. Neither is it characterised by the subtle psychological analysis which is the most interesting quality in the rhetoric of Euripides. On the other hand, it is not disfigured 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.

The descriptive faculty of Virgil is quite unlike that of Homer, but yet it has great excellences of its own. In the Iliad and Odyssey man appears ‘vigorous and elastic such as poetry saw him first, such as poetry would ever see himLandor’s Pentameron.;’ and the outward world is described in the clear forms and the animated movement which impress themselves immediately on the sense and mind of men thus happily organised. Virgil too presents to us the varied spectacle of human life and of the outward world under many impressive aspects. But these aspects of things do not affect the mind with the immediate impulse which the natural man receives from them, and of which he retains the vivid picture in his mind. As in his pastoral poems and in the Georgics Virgil seems to abstract from the general aspect of things the characteristic sentiment which Nature inspires in particular places and at particular times, and to see the scene which he describes under the influence of that sentiment, so in the Aeneid various human ‘situations’ are conceived under the influence of some sense of awe or wonder, of beauty or pathos, of local or antique association; and the whole description is so presented as to bring this central interest into prominent relief. The thought of the whole situation, not the sequence of events in time or causal connexion, is what determines the grouping and subordination of details.

Thus in the description of the storm in Book i., the dominant feeling by the light of which the circumstances are to be realised is that of sudden and overwhelming power in the elements and of man’s impotence to contend against them. In the description of the harbour in which the ships of Aeneas find refuge we feel the sense of calm and peace after storm and danger. In the interview between Venus and her son the impression left on the mind is that of a mysterious supernatural grace enhancing the charm of human beauty, such as is produced by the pictorial representations of religious art. We seem to look on the rising towers and dwellings of Carthage with that joyful sense of wonder and novelty with which the thought of the beginning of great enterprises, or of the discovery of unknown lands, and the first view of ancient and famous cities, such as Rome or Venice, appeal to the imagination. In the second Book the effect of the whole representation is enhanced by the sentiment of awe and mystery with which night, and darkness, and the intermittent flashes of light which break the darkness, impress the mind. Thus as a prelude to the terrible and tragical scenes afterwards represented, the apparition of Hector comes before Aeneas in the deepest stillness of the night—