VIRGIL

BY THE REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

AUTHOR OF
‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.




WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXX

CONTENTS.

ADVERTISEMENT.

This volume of the Series was to have been undertaken by the late Mr Conington. None can be more sensible than the present writer of the loss which all readers have sustained in the substitution rendered necessary by his lamented death.

The Editor begs to acknowledge the courteous permission of Mr Conington’s representatives and publishers to make full extracts from his admirable version of the Æneid. {1}

INTRODUCTION.

Virgil has always been, for one reason or other, the most popular of all the old classical writers. His poems were a favourite study with his own countrymen, even in his own generation; within fifty years of his death they were admitted to the very questionable honour, which they have retained ever since, of serving as a text-book for schoolboys. The little Romans studied their Æneid, from their master’s dictation, as regularly, and probably with quite as much appreciation of its beauties, as the fourth form of an English public school, and wrote “declamations” of some kind upon its heroes. In the middle ages, when Greek literature had become almost a deserted field, and Homer in the original was a sealed book even to those who considered themselves and were considered scholars, Virgil was still the favourite with young and old. The monks in their chronicles, philosophers in their secular studies, enlivened their pages with quotations from the one author with whom no man of letters would venture to confess himself wholly unacquainted. The {2} works of Virgil had passed through above forty editions in Europe before the first printed edition of Homer appeared from the Florence press in 1448. He has been translated, imitated, and parodied in all the chief European languages. The fate of Dido, of Pallas, and of Euryalus, has drawn tears from successive generations of which the poet never dreamed.

In the middle ages his fame underwent a singular transformation. From the magic power of song the transition seems incongruous to the coarser material agency of the wizard. But so it was; Virgilius the poet became, in mediæval legends, Virgilius the magician. One of his Eclogues (the Eighth), in which are introduced the magical charms by which it is sought to reclaim a wandering lover, is supposed to have given the first impulse to this superstitious belief. All kinds of marvels were attributed to his agency. It was said that he built at Rome, for the Emperor Augustus, a wondrous tower, in which were set up emblematic figures of all the subject nations which acknowledged the imperial rule, each with a bell in its hand, which rang out whenever war or revolt broke out in that particular province, so that Rome knew at once in what direction to march her legions. In the same building—so the legend ran—he contrived a magic mirror, in which the enemies of the Empire could be seen when they appeared in arms; and another—surely the most terrible agency that was ever imagined in the way of domestic police—in which the guilt of any Roman citizen could be at once seen and detected. A fount of perpetual fire, and salt-springs of medicinal {3} virtue, were said to have been the gifts of the great enchanter to the Roman populace. At Naples the marvels which were attributed to his agency were scarcely less; and even now there is scarcely any useful or ornamental public work of early date, in the neighbourhood of that city, which is not in some way connected by vulgar tradition with the name of Virgil. The wondrous powers thus ascribed to him were, according to some legends, conferred upon him by Chiron the learned centaur—by whom the great Achilles, and the poet’s own hero, Æneas, were said to have been educated; by others, with that blending of pagan belief with Christian which is so commonly found in mediæval writers, they were referred to direct communication with the Evil One. [1]

French scholars have always had the highest appreciation of the Augustan poet, and his popularity {4} in England is to this day as great as ever. Even a practical House of Commons, not always very patient of argument, and notoriously impatient of some prosaic speakers, will listen to a quotation from Virgil—especially when pointed against a political opponent. Those to whom his rolling measure is familiar still quote him and cheer him so enthusiastically, that others listen with more or less appreciation. To the many who have almost forgotten what they once knew of him, his lines awake reminiscences of their youth—which are always pleasant: while even those to whom he is a sound and nothing more, listen as with a kind of sacred awe. The debates of our reformed Parliament will certainly be duller, if ever Virgil comes to be proscribed as an unknown tongue.

English translators of Virgil have abounded. But the earliest and by no means the least able of those who presented the Roman poet to our northern islanders in their own vernacular was a Scotsman, Bishop Gawain Douglas of Dunkeld, that clerkly son of old Archibald “Bell-the-Cat” whom Scott names in his ‘Marmion.’ Few modern readers of Virgil are likely to be proficients in the ancient northern dialect which the bishop used; but those who can appreciate him maintain that there is considerable vigour as well as faithfulness in his version. Thomas Phaer, a Welsh physician, was the next who made the attempt, in the long verses known as Alexandrine, in 1558. A few years later came forth what might fairly be called the comic English version, though undertaken in the most serious earnest by the {5} translator. This was Richard Stanyhurst, an Irishman, a graduate of Oxford and student of Lincoln’s Inn. He seems to have been the original prophet of that “pestilent heresy,” as Lord Derby calls it, the making of English hexameters; for that was the metre which he chose, and he congratulates himself in his preface upon “having no English writer before him in this kind of poetry.” Without going so far as to endorse Lord Derby’s severe judgment, it may be confessed that Stanyhurst did his best to justify it. His translation, which he ushered into public with the most profound self-satisfaction, is quite curious enough to account for its reprint by the “Edinburgh Printing Society” in 1836. One of the points upon which he prides himself is the suiting the sound to the sense, which Virgil himself has done happily enough in some rare passages. So when he has to translate the line,

he does it as follows:—

When he has to express the Cyclops forging the thunderbolts, it is

and very much more of the same kind.

The Earl of Surrey and James Harrington tried their hand at detached portions, and although the quaint conceits which were admired in their day have little charm for the modern reader, there is not want {6} ing, especially in the former, a spirit and vigour in which, some of those who came before and after them lamentably failed. The translations by Vicars and Ogilby, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have little claim to be remembered except as the first presentations of the whole Æneid in an English poetical dress. In dull mediocrity they are about equal.

In 1697, Dryden, at the age of sixty-six, finished and published his translation; written, as he pathetically says, “in his declining years, struggling with want, and oppressed with sickness;” yet, whatever be its shortcomings, a confessedly great work, and showing few traces of these unfavourable circumstances. His great renown, and the unquestionable vigour and ability of the versification, insured its popularity at once; and it was considered, by the critics of his own and some succeeding generations, as pre-eminently the English Virgil. Dr Johnson said of it that “it satisfied his friends and silenced his enemies.” It may still be read with pleasure, but it has grave faults. Independently of its general looseness and diffuseness, in many passages amounting to the vaguest paraphrase, there are too many instances in which, not content with making his author say a good many things which he never did say, he palpably misinterprets him. There are many passages of much vigour and beauty; but even of these it has been said, and not unfairly, by a later translator, Dr Trapp, that “where you most admire Dryden, you see the least of Virgil.” Dryden had the advantage of consulting in manuscript a translation by the Earl of Lauderdale {7} (afterwards published), which has considerable merit, and to which in his preface he confesses obligations “not inconsiderable.” They were, in fact, so considerable as this, that besides other hints in the matter of words and phrases, he borrowed nearly four hundred lines in different places, with scarcely an attempt at change.

Dryden was followed by various other translators more or less successful. Pitt and Symmons, the latter especially, might have earned a greater reputation had they preceded instead of followed the great poet whose laurels they plainly challenged by adopting his metre. But the recent admirable translation of the Æneid into the metre of Scott by Mr Conington will undoubtedly take its place henceforward as by far the most poetical, as it is also the most faithful and scholarly, rendering of the original. {8}

THE POET.

Publius Virgilius Maro —such was his full name, though we have abbreviated the sounding Roman appellatives into the curt English form of “Virgil”—lived in the age when the great Roman Empire was culminating to its fall, but as yet showed little symptom of decay. The emperor under whom he was born was that Octavianus Cæsar, nephew of the great Julius, whose title of “Augustus” gave a name to his own times which has since passed into a common term for the golden age of literature in every nation. In the Augustan age of Rome rose and flourished, in rapid succession, a large proportion of those great writers to whose works we have given the name of classics. This brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes—to the increase of cultivation and refinement, to the leisure and quiet which followed after long years of war and civil commotion; but in part also it was owing to the character of the Roman emperor himself. Both Augustus and his intimate {9} friend and counsellor Mæcenas were the professed patrons of letters and of the fine arts. Mæcenas was of the highest patrician blood of Rome. He claimed descent from the old Etruscan kings or Lucumos—those ancient territorial chiefs who ruled Italy while Rome was yet in her infancy, such as Lars Porsena of Clusium. Clever and accomplished, an able statesman in spite of all his indolence, Mæcenas had immense influence with Augustus. At his splendid palace on the Esquiline Hill—the Holland House of the day—met all the brilliant society of Rome, and his name very soon became a synonym for a liberal patron of art and literature. To be eminent in any branch of these accomplishments was to insure the notice of the minister; and to be a protégé of his was an introduction at once, under the happiest auspices, to the emperor himself. Such good fortune occurred to Virgil early in his life.

He was born in the little village of Andes (probably the modern Pietola), near Mantua, and received a liberal education, as is sufficiently evident from the many allusions in his poems. When grown to manhood, he seems to have lived for some years with his father upon his modest family estate. He suffered, like very many of his countrymen—his friend and fellow-poet Horace among the number—from the results of the great civil wars which so long desolated Italy, and which ended in the fall of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The district near Mantua was assigned and parcelled out among the legionaries who had fought for Antony and young {10} Octavianus against Pompey. Cremona had espoused the cause of the latter, and Mantua, as Virgil himself tells us, suffered for the sins of its neighbour. His little estate was confiscated, amongst others, to reward the veterans who had claims on the gratitude of Octavianus. But through the intercession of some powerful friend who had influence with the young emperor—probably Asinius Pollio, hereafter mentioned, who was prefect of the province—they were soon restored to him. This obligation Virgil never forgot; and amongst the many of all ranks who poured their flattery into the ears of Augustus (as Octavianus must be henceforth called), perhaps that of the young Mantuan poet, though bestowed with something of a poet’s exaggeration, was amongst the most sincere. The first of his Pastorals was written to express his gratitude for the indulgence which had been granted him. If the Cæsar of the day was susceptible of flattery, at least he liked it good of its kind. “Stroke him awkwardly,” said Horace, “and he winces like a restive horse.” But the verse of the Mantuan poet had the ring of poetry as well as compliment.

These Pastorals (to be more particularly noticed hereafter) were his earliest work, composed, probably, between his twenty-seventh and thirty-fourth year, while he was still living a country life on his newly-recovered farm. They seem to have attracted the favourable attention of Mæcenas; and soon, among the brilliant crowd of courtiers, statesmen, artists, poets, and historians who thronged the audience-chamber of the popular minister, might be seen the {11} tall, slouching, somewhat plebeian figure of the young country poet. [2] He soon became a familiar guest there; but although Augustus himself, half in jest, was said to have spoken of his minister’s literary dinners as a “table of parasites,” it is certain Virgil never deserved the character. This intimacy with Mæcenas must have led to frequent and prolonged visits to Rome; but his chief residence, after he left his Mantuan estate, seems to have been at Naples. It was at the suggestion of this patron that he set about the composition of his poem upon Roman agriculture and stock-breeding—the four books of Georgics. His greatest and best-known work—the Æneid—was begun in obedience to a hint thrown out by a still higher authority, though he seems to have long had the subject in his thoughts, and probably had begun to put it into shape. Augustus had condescended to ask the poet to undertake some grander theme than an imaginary pastoral life or the management of the country farm. The result was the Æneid, modelled upon the two great poems of Homer—in fact, a Roman Iliad and Odyssey combined in one. It was never completely finished, for Virgil, whose health was at no time robust, died before he had put in the finishing touches which his fastidious taste required. It is even said that in his last illness he would have burnt the copy, if his friends would have allowed the sacrifice. It is hardly {12} probable, as a German scholar has ingeniously suggested, that it was because the cruelties of Augustus’s later years made him repent of having immortalised a tyrant. He died in his fifty-first year, at Brundusium, where he had landed in the suite of the emperor, whom he had met during a visit to Athens, and who brought him back with him to Italy. He was buried, as was the custom of the Romans, by the side of the public road leading out of Naples to Puteoli; and the tomb still shown to travellers, near Posilippo, as the last resting-place of the poet, may at least mark the real site. He died a comparatively rich man, possessed of a town-house at Rome, near the palace of Mæcenas, with a good library. Living, as he did, in the highest society of the capital, where he was very popular, he never forgot his old friends; and it is pleasant to read that he sent money to his aged parents regularly every year. So highly was he esteemed by his own cotemporaries, that on one occasion when he visited the theatre, the whole audience is said to have risen in a body and saluted him with the same honours which were paid to Augustus. He preserved to the last his simple manners and somewhat rustic appearance; and it is believed that his character, amongst all the prevalent vices of Rome, remained free from reproach—saving only that with which he was taunted by the libertines of the capital, the reproach of personal purity. It is as much to his honour that Caligula should have ordered all his busts to be banished from the public libraries, as that St Augustin should have quoted him alone of heathen authors, in his celebrated ‘Confessions. {13} ’

THE PASTORALS.

The earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called “Bucolics”— i. e. , Songs of the Herdsmen—and sometimes “Eclogues,” as being “selections” from a larger number of similar compositions which the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in fact, how {14} ever familiar to us in the language of ancient and modern poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the satyrs and fauns and dryad-nymphs with whom a fanciful mythology had peopled the same region, and who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral poets in the company of their human dramatis personæ . The Arcadia of history was a rich and fertile district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as one of our own midland counties. Like them, if it had any reputation at all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation for dulness. It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of the qualities of the animal seem to have been shared by the natives themselves. “A slip of Arcadia” passed into a proverbial nickname for a boy who was the despair of his schoolmaster. The Arcadia of the poets and romance-writers, from classical times down to our own Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr Conington says, “the poets’ golden land, in which imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life of the present.” This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the early days of authorship down to a very recent date. Thyrsis and Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetical existence of something like fifteen hundred years, and talk very much the same language in the Pastorals of Pope that they did in the Greek Idylls. It is curious, also, that when society itself has been most artificial, this affectation of pastoral simplicity seems to have been most in vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who lavished their applause and rewards upon Virgil when {15} he read to them these lays of an imaginary shepherd-life; how Galatæa was won by a present of a pair of wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Melibœus thankfully went to supper with his friend Tityrus on roasted chestnuts and goat-milk cheese. Society in England had never less of the reality of pastoral simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady chose to be painted with a lamb or a crook—when the “bucolic cant,” as Warton contemptuously terms it, was the fashionable folly of the day. So when aristocratic life in France had reached a phase of corruption which was only to be purged by a revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette, with her ladies and gentlemen in waiting, were going about the farm at Trianon with crooks in their hands, playing at shepherds and shepherdesses, on the brink of that terrible volcano.

Of the ten Eclogues, the majority take the form of pastoral dialogue. Frequently it is a singing-match between two rival shepherds—not always conducted in the most amicable fashion, or with the most scrupulous delicacy in the matter of repartee, the poetical “Arcadian” being in this point a pretty faithful copy from nature. Most of the names, as well as of the subjects and imagery, are taken, as has been said, from the Greek Idylls of Theocritus. So closely has Virgil copied his model that he even transplants the natural scenery of Sicily, employed by Theocritus, to his pastoral dreamland, which otherwise would seem to be localised on the banks of the Mincio, in the neighbourhood of his native Mantua. This gives him an {16} opportunity of touching upon subjects of the day, and introducing, in the name and guise of shepherds, himself and his friends. Sometimes we can see through the disguise by the help of contemporary Roman history; more often, probably, the clue is lost to us through our very imperfect modern knowledge. We know pretty well that Tityrus,—who in the First Eclogue expresses his gratitude to the “godlike youth” who has preserved his little farm from the ruthless hands of the soldier colonists, while his poor neighbour Melibœus has lost his all,—can be no other than the poet himself, who thus compliments his powerful protector. So, too, in a later Eclogue, when the slave Mœris meets his neighbour Lycidas on the road, and tells him how his master has been dispossessed of his farm by the military colonists, and has narrowly escaped with his life, we may safely trust the traditional explanation, that in the master Menalcas we have Virgil again, troubled a second time by these intruders, and compelled to renew his application to his great friend at Rome. The traditional story was, that the poet was obliged to take refuge from the violence of the soldiers in the shop of a charcoal-burner, who let him out at a back-door, and eventually had to throw himself into the river Mincio to escape their pursuit. Lycidas, in the Pastoral, is surprised to hear of his neighbour’s new trouble.

Honest Lycidas expresses his horror at the narrow escape of the neighbourhood from such a catastrophe. What should they all have done for a poet, if they had lost Menalcas? who could compose such songs—and who could sing them? And he breaks out himself into fragmentary reminiscences which he has picked up by ear from his friend. Then Mœris too—who, being a poet’s farm-servant, has caught a little of the inspiration—repeats a few lines of his master’s. “As you hope for any blessings,” says Lycidas, “let me hear the rest of it.”

Mœris can remember a scrap or two of his master’s verses. There was one in particular, which Lycidas had heard him singing one moonlight night, and would much like to hear again;—“I can remember the tune myself,” he says, “but I have forgotten the words.” Mœris will try. The compliment to Augustus with which the strain begins sufficiently marks the real poet who here figures as Menalcas.

But Mœris cannot remember much more. They must both wait, he says, until his master comes home again. So the pair walk on together towards Rome, cheating the long journey with singing as they go; and thus closes this pretty pastoral dialogue, the graceful ease of which, with its subdued comedy, it would be impossible for any translator to render adequately.

Another of these Eclogues relates the capture of Silenus, one of the old rural deities of very jovial reputation, by two young shepherds, while he lay sleeping off the effect of yesterday’s debauch. He is com {19} monly represented—and he was rather a favourite subject with ancient artists—as a corpulent bald-headed old man, riding upon an ass, in a state of evident inebriety, carrying a capacious leather wine-bottle, and led and followed by a company of Nymphs and Bacchanals. He had the reputation, like the sea-god Proteus, of knowing the mysteries of nature and the secrets of the future; and there was a current story, upon which this Pastoral is founded, of his having been caught while asleep, like him, by some shepherds in Phrygia, and carried to King Midas, to whom, as the price of his release, he answered all questions in natural philosophy and ancient history—just as Proteus unfolded to Menelaus, under similar compulsion, the secret of his future fate.

The Pastoral into which Virgil introduces this story is addressed to his friend Varus—a man evidently of high rank—and seems meant as an apology for not complying with his request to write a poem on his exploits.

Then he goes on to tell his story:—

Silenus’s strain is a poetical lecture on natural philosophy. He is as didactic in his waking soberness as some of his disciples are in their cups. He describes how the world sprang from the four original elements, and narrates the old fables of the cosmogonists—the Deluge of Deucalion, the new race of men who sprang from the stones which he and Pyrrha cast behind them, the golden reign of Saturn, the theft of fire by Prometheus, and a long series of other legends, with which he charms his listeners until the falling shadows warn them to count their flocks, and the evening-star comes out, as the poet phrases it, “over the unwilling heights of Olympus”—loath yet to lose the fascinating strain.

Besides this Pastoral addressed to Varus, there are {21} three inscribed to other friends: one to Cornelius Gallus, and two to Caius Asinius Pollio, who was among the most eminent men of his day alike as a statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, and at that time held the high office of consul at Rome. He had been the friend of the great Julius, as he was afterwards of his nephew Octavianus (Augustus), and was probably the person who preserved or restored to the poet his country estate. The fourth in order of these poems, commonly known as the “Pollio,” is the most celebrated of the whole series, and has given rise to a great amount of speculation. Its exact date is known from the record of Pollio’s consulship—40 before the Christian era. Its subject is the expected birth of a Child, in whom the golden age of innocence and happiness should be restored, and who was to be the moral regenerator of the world. The date of the poem itself, approaching so closely the great Birth at Bethlehem—the reference to the prophecy of the Cumæan Sibyl, long supposed to be a voice from heathendom predictive of the Jewish Messiah—and the remarkable coincidence of the metaphorical terms employed by the poet with the prophetical language of the Old Testament, have led many to the pious belief that the Roman poet did but put into shape those vague expectations of a Great Deliverer which were current in his day, and which were to have a higher fulfilment than he knew. The “Pollio” may be familiar to many English readers who are unacquainted with the original through Pope’s fine imitation of it in his poem of “The Messiah,” first published anonymously in the {22} ‘Spectator.’ [6] But as the Latin Eclogue itself is short, it may be well to attempt a translation of it here, before remarking further upon its meaning.

It would be out of place here to discuss the various conjectures of the learned as to who the Child was, to whose birth the poet thus looks forward. Whether it was a son of the Consul Pollio himself, who died in his infancy; or the expected offspring of Augustus’s marriage with Scribonia, which was, after all, a daughter—Julia—whose profligate life and unhappy death were a sad contradiction of Virgil’s anticipations; or a child of Octavia, sister of Augustus;—which of these it was, or whether it was any one of them, neither ancient nor modern commentators have been able to decide. “It is not certain,” says Mr. Conington, “that the child ever was born; it is certain that, if born, he did not become the regenerator of his time.” It is possible, too, that the whole form of the poem may be strictly imaginary—that the child had been born already, long ago, and that it was no other than Octavianus Cæsar—and that Virgil does but use here the licence of poetry to express his hopes of a golden age that might follow the peace of Brundusium. And as to how far this very remarkable poem may or may not be regarded as one of what Archbishop Trench has called “the unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” would be to open a field of inquiry of the {25} highest interest indeed, but far too wide for these pages. Yet it cannot be entirely passed over.

The Sibylline oracles, to which Virgil alludes in his opening lines, whatever their original form, were so garbled and interpolated, both in Christian and pre-Christian times, that it is impossible now to know what they did or did not contain. But they were recognised, in the early Church—by the Emperor Constantine, who is said to have attributed his own conversion in great part to their study, and by St. Augustine, amongst others—as containing distinct prophecies of the Messiah. The recognition of the Roman Sibyl or Sibyls as bearing their testimony to the truth of Christianity is still familiar to us in the ancient hymn, “Dies Iræ,”—so often translated—

and in an old Latin mystery-play of the eleventh century, when the witnesses are summoned to give evidence as to the Nativity, there appear among them, in company with the Hebrew prophets, Virgil and the Sibyl, who both join in a general “ Benedicamus Domino ” at the end. St. Augustine quotes twenty-seven Latin verses (which, however, seem very fragmentary and unconnected) as actual utterances of the Sibyl of Erythræ, which contain prophecies, more or less clear, of the great Advent. The original, he says, was in Greek, and the initial letters of each verse formed a sentence, “Jesus Christ the Son of God the Saviour.” [7] Whatever truth there may be in any {26} special predictions of this nature as existing in the heathen world, it is at least certain that there prevailed very largely, about the date of the Christian era, a vague expectation of some personal advent which should in some way regenerate society.

The new “cycle of centuries,” which the poet supposes to begin with the birth of the Child, refers to the doctrine held by Plato and his disciples (possibly of Etruscan origin) of an “Annus Magnus,” or Great Year. It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long intervals, in which the history of the world repeated itself. [8] A curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his life of Sulla.

Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of the genius and character of Virgil’s pastoral poetry. {27} It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said to have now become obsolete. English poets were at one time strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton, Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,—the last perhaps the most successful,—were all more or less imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity again. {28}

THE GEORGICS.

The Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod—“Works and Days”—which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world, with its five ages of the human race—the gold, the silver, the brazen, “the age of heroes,” and the present—which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced.

From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem {29} “On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really composed with a view to their practical instruction.

He addresses his poem to his noble patron Mæcenas. And amongst the long list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.

The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over—advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,—squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,—he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The {31} Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet, would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to Cæsar as the hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English ear:—

The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the vineyard, but especially of the latter. The apple, the pear, the olive, all receive due notice from the poet; but upon the culture of the vine he dwells with a hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air than those which he gives out upon other branches of cultivation. The soil, the site, the best kinds to choose, the different modes of propagation, are all discussed with considerable minuteness. It would seem that in those earlier times, as now, the vintage had a more poetical aspect than even the harvest-field. The beauty of the crop, the merriment of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it has gone through the usual process of conversion, gave, as is still the case in all wine-producing countries, a holiday character to the whole course of cultivation. All other important crops contribute in some way to supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly its enjoyments. And when, at the beginning of the book, the poet invokes the god of wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however temperate his own habits might be, he had not {33} adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for “the dark red wine:” they might have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:—

But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second book:—

The Third Georgic treats of the herd and the stud. The poet’s knowledge on these points must be strongly suspected of being but second-hand—rather the result of having studied some of the Roman “Books of the Farm,” than the experience of a practical stock-breeder. Such a work was Varro’s ‘On Rural Affairs,’ which Virgil evidently followed as an authority. From that source he drew, amongst other precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays down in this formula:—

Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our modern judges of stock. But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with an eye to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow of the present day would not be considered by us a handsome animal. Besides, the object of the Roman breeder was to obtain animals which would be “strong to labour,”—good beasts under the yoke; not such as would lay on the greatest weight of flesh at the least {36} possible cost, for the purposes of the butcher. His points of a good horse are entirely different, and approach more nearly our own ideal—“Fine in the head, short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in the chest.” Bay and dapple-grey he chooses for colour; white and chestnut he considers the worst. He had not reached the more catholic philosophy of the modern horse-dealer, that “no good horse was ever yet of a bad colour.”

The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows the poet to indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of pastoral life under the hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or shepherd drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying with him all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a campaign; and again of his winter life in some vague northern region which he calls by the general name of Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of wine, as the southern poet compassionately phrases it) some kind of beer or cider. But the most remarkable of these passages is that which closes the book, and describes the ravages of some terrible pestilence which, beginning with the flocks and herds, extended at last to the wild beasts and to the birds, and even to the fish. There is no historical account of such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that Virgil used his licence as a poet to embellish with imaginary details some ordinary epidemic, in order to present to his readers a companion picture to that of the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by his favourite model Lucretius. {37}

There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also—and with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a poet—minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a {38} fact in natural history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old preliminary caution—“First catch your bee:” but an experienced bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful. [10]

The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon bee-keeping.

The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,—of his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a nobler kind—“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer expresses it. [11] He compares its details, in more than one passage, with those {39} of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.

is his instruction to his pupils—“From Jove all things begin.” His motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days adopted—“Ora et labora”—“Pray and work.” It has been commonly said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English poet’s words,

But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and beauties, as the “skirts” of a divine glory. In all his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics.

It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of Mæcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their {40} farms. Whether it had that result may well be doubted: the discharged soldier, however heartily he might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as his instructor. The practical influence of these treatises in any way is equally doubtful. “It would be absurd to suppose,” says Dean Merivale, “that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time, and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyment.” [12] {41}

THE ÆNEID.

CHAPTER I.

THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.

The Æneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of Troy. The fascination of that remarkable cycle of legend had not weakened after the lapse of ten centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment, but he goes to him for his subject. He even makes his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to the Iliad—at least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject of this latter poem is the wanderings and final establishment in his native country of the Greek hero Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the story of the escape of a Trojan hero from the ruin of his city, and the perils by land and sea which he encountered, until his final settlement in the distant west, in the land which the gods had promised him. Æneas, like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes and sufferings; and like him, though he has the justice and the deliberate counsels of heaven all on his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permitted {42} to vex and thwart him for many long years. This Æneas—reputed son of the goddess Venus by a mortal husband, Anchises—had played no unimportant part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been told that King Priam had no less than fifty sons, it might have been said that he stood very near the throne. For he was the representative of the younger branch of the house of Dardanus—the family of Assaracus—as Priam was of the elder branch, that of Ilus. [13] A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round him in the Iliad. He is there addressed as “counsellor of the Trojans;” they honoured him, we are told, “equally with the godlike Hector;” and Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has rejected the house of Priam, but that “Æneas, and his sons, and his sons’ sons” should hereafter reign over the Trojans.” [14] Some Homeric critics have even fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer’s poem, a jealousy between Æneas and the sons of Priam. But this surely arises from reading Homer by the light of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of events, when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam’s kingdom, the prince of the house of Assaracus should rebuild the Trojan fortunes on the far-off shores of Italy. {43}

Like Homer, Virgil dashes at once into the heart of his story. This is how he introduces his hero:—

He tells us nothing, however, for the present, of the escape from Troy and the embarkation of the fugitives, or of the guiding oracles in obedience to which they had sailed forth in quest of this new home. He only shows us Æneas on the sea, having just set sail from Sicily, where the angry Queen of Heaven catches sight of him. Juno, we must remember—Virgil, apparently, has no idea that any one could need reminding of it—Juno has never forgotten or forgiven that scene upon Mount Ida, where the Trojan Paris preferred the fascinations—or the bribes—of Venus to her own stately charms. She had persuaded her royal consort, the king of gods and men, to consent to the downfall of the accursed race; and she persecutes this unhappy remnant, now on its voyage, with unrelenting hate. Even the poet, who makes use of her persecution as one of the mainsprings of his story, professes his astonishment at its bitterness,—

She had another reason, too, for her present jealous feelings. The city of Carthage, where she was especially honoured, she had hoped to make the mistress of the world. And now—so the inexorable Fates have woven it in their web—this new brood from Troy are to destroy it in the years to come. Rome, and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey to his readers, is to have this universal empire.

But they have not reached Latium yet, these hateful Trojans. They never shall. The Queen of Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds, where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of Æolia, controlling his boisterous subjects:—

At Juno’s request Æolus lets loose his prisoners. Out rush the winds in mad delight.

The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are cast on the rocks; one goes down with all its crew before their leader’s eyes. But Neptune, the sea-god, comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as Juno is hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King of the Winds in his dominions—he knows by whose instance he has dared this outrage. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern authority:—

So the tempest is stilled, and Æneas, with seven ships, the survivors of his fleet of twenty, runs into a land-locked harbour on the coast of Carthage. The crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn, while Æneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and kills deer to mend their meal. Wine they have good {46} store of—the parting gift from King Acestes, late their host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to the fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in words of good cheer:—

Æneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council. His goddess-mother Venus pleads with her father Jupiter to have pity on her offspring. And Jupiter—very open to influence of this kind now, as in Homer’s story—reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate. Æneas shall reach Latium safely, and reign there three years. His son Iulus—or Ascanius, as he is otherwise called—shall succeed him, and transfer the seat of power from Lavinium to his own new-founded city, Alba Longa. Three hundred years his race shall rule there, till in due course the twin-brothers Romulus and Remus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome. To the glories of this new capital the Father of the gods will assign neither limit nor end. The wrongs of Troy shall be redressed. The sons of the East, in their new home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.

Thus, before he has concluded the first book of his great poem, the poet has taken us into his counsels as to the purport of the song. It is not a mere epic romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic deeds and exciting adventures; it is, like some of our modern novels, a romance with a purpose; and the purpose is the claiming for the great house of Julius the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of the glories of that house in the person of Augustus. And as the Iliad of Homer, beyond the mere vocation of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike audience by the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also—the glorification of the Greek nation—so the Roman poet may be said to have written a counter-Iliad, to extol the later fortunes of the royal house of Troy in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them, of Iulus. For any historic foundation of such a genealogy we may look in vain. King Brute stands upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of Troy as the founder of the Julian house and of Rome. But, for the present, we must be content to assume his existence, and to follow the course of the narrative as the poet wills. The claim of Trojan descent is not an invention of Virgil’s, though he {48} may have been the first to work it out so much in detail. It was a claim in which his countrymen always delighted, and there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also, Virgil seems to have at heart. He does not care so much, after all, for the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of Rome. The empire of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough, and more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the “Pollio.” To the soul of the Roman poet—unlike his master Homer in this—war, and more especially civil war, is absolutely hateful. He can describe it, when needed for his purpose, and describe it well; but it is as the scourge of nations, or at best the terrible remedy for greater evils;—not, as the Greek poet calls it, “the strife which is the joy of men.”

Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she may, the counsels of Jupiter. She puts into the heart of the Queen of Carthage, on whose shores Æneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of pity and compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also, to comfort her son Æneas in his trouble. Attended by his faithful friend Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader, the strange coast on which he finds himself—

There is in this description a happy reminiscence of an earlier legend. In such guise—not with any of the meretricious attractions assigned to the goddess of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain nymph—had she won her mortal lover, the Trojan shepherd Anchises, from whom this her dear son was born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she had enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of the child’s birth, nor to boast of the favour shown him by a goddess, but to bring the boy up in the forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood-nymph. Anchises, in his pride, had neglected or forgotten her warning, and was punished by premature weakness and a helpless old age.

Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus replies to her son’s questions as to the inhabitants of the land. They are a colony from Tyre; their queen, Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false brother Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichæus, had possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she has escaped with her husband’s wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa. Æneas tells {50} her in return his own sad story, and is comforted by the assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are safe—all but one unhappy vessel and her crew. Then, as she turns to leave him, the disguised divinity becomes apparent.

Æneas and his companion mount the crest of the hill, whence they look down upon the half-finished walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that most essential structure in a city of any pretension, an amphitheatre for public spectacles, and building a magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist of invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,—like Ulysses in the court of Phæacia—the strangers enter the brazen gates of the temple. All is magnificent and wonderful. But, marvel of marvels! both walls and doors are sculptured with a history which Æneas knows only too well. Even here is recorded, on this distant and unknown shore, the story of stories—the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the Trojan chief peruses the several groups, and identifies the various incidents. Here the Greeks fly to their ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans: there, again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in slaughter before him. The death of young Troilus, hurled from his chariot, is there; and, to match the picture, Hector dragged at Achilles’s chariot-wheels round {51} the city walls. Memnon the Ethiopian and the amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst the foremost combatants, Æneas can recognise himself.

While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates are reading this sculptured history, the queen herself approaches. And while they admire her majesty and grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the missing comrades of Æneas make their appearance before her as suppliants. They tell the story of their shipwreck on the coast: and they think Æneas is lost, as he had thought they were. Then the mist in which Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves, and the two parties recognise and welcome each other. Dido, like all the world, has heard of the name of Æneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy. She can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience:

The sentiment has been adopted by modern writers in all languages. “She had suffered persecution and learnt mercy,” says Sterne in a like case: and even in Sterne’s mouth, the sentiment is natural and true.

The strangers are hospitably welcomed, and offered every facility for refitting their fleet, and preparing for the continuance of their voyage. Æneas sends down to his ships for presents worthy of so kind a hostess: and, with a father’s pride, he sends also for his young son to introduce him to the queen. The evening is devoted to feasting and revelry. The royal bard—that indispensable figure in all courts, Trojan or Tyrian or Greek—sings to the assembled guests. It is to be remarked that his lay is not, as we might expect, of {52} heroes and their deeds: it is the song of Silenus, in the Pastorals, over again—the favourite subject of the poet, the wonders of nature and creation.

All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who, at his false mother’s bidding, has assumed the shape of Æneas’s young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus’s machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the passion which is to be her ruin. Æneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on Othello’s:—

Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story—his escape and his seven years’ wanderings. And Æneas begins; and, with an exact imitation of Homer’s management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal night of Troy. {53}

CHAPTER II.

ÆNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.

It has been said that this poem is a kind of supplement to the Iliad. Æneas tells us what was not there told by Homer, but what is presupposed in his Odyssey,—the later history of the siege and capture of Troy. He relates at length the stratagem of the Wooden Horse, by which the Greeks at last outwitted their enemies. The fleet, which had seemed to sail for home, had withdrawn, and lay concealed in the harbour of Tenedos. The wooden fabric—dedicated to Minerva, as the tale went—was left standing outside the city. It was suggested to bring it within the walls, when the priest Laocoon rushed to prevent it—suspecting some such stratagem as in truth had been contrived. He even hurled his spear against its side, and might have thus made a beginning of its destruction, when behold, a prisoner was brought in. It was the treacherous Sinon; a Greek who had undertaken to play the dangerous part of a double spy. The tale he told his captors was this: that he, though a Greek, was a fugitive from Greek vengeance—especially from the {54} hated Ulysses. He had been fixed upon as a victim to propitiate the offended gods; for there had come an oracle from Apollo, that as the blood of a virgin had to be shed to propitiate the gales on the expedition to Troy, so blood—that of a Greek—must purchase their return. Ulysses had contrived that Sinon should be the victim, and it was to escape this doom that he had thus fled.

The Trojans were moved to pity—they spared the traitor’s life; only, in return, King Priam adjured him to tell them the true intent of the Horse. Sinon declared that the Greeks had meant to set it up themselves, an offering to Minerva, within the Trojan citadel when they should have captured it; it behoved the Trojans now to seize it and drag it within the walls: for, if this were done, then—so ran the oracles—Asia should avenge itself upon Europe, and the Greeks in their turn should be besieged in their homes. [17]

The traitor’s tale was all too easily believed. There came, too, a fearful omen, which hurried the Trojans to adopt this false counsel. The priest Laocoon, who had dared to strike the wooden monster, was seized, while offering sacrifice to Neptune, with his two sons, by two huge sea-serpents (so old is the belief, false or true, in these apocryphal monsters), which came sailing in to the beach from the direction of Tenedos. In the description which the poet gives of their move {55} ments at sea, we seem to be reading a versified extract from the log of some modern sea-captain:—

The two unhappy youths are first caught and strangled—then the father. The legend is well known to others besides students of the Æneid, from the marble group of the Laocoon; which, however, does not tell the story in the same way, or in so probable a shape, as the poet does, since it represents the reptiles as embracing all three victims at once in their folds. Then, with glad shouts and songs of youths and maidens, the huge monster was dragged over a breach made purposely in the walls of Troy. Yet not without a voice of warning, disregarded, from Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, who had the gift of prophecy, and whose fate it was, like so many prophets in their own families, to prophesy in vain—nor without difficulties which might in themselves have well been considered presages of evil:—

Inside, the fabric is full of armed Greeks. How many there were in number has been disputed—though possibly, in a legend of this kind, the question of more or fewer is scarcely relevant. It is a question, however, which derives some interest from the fact that it was one of the difficulties which exercised the mind of the first Napoleon during his exile. Studying the siege of Troy as if it were a mere prosaic operation in modern warfare, he was struck by the improbability of the whole stratagem. How “even a single company of the Guard” could be hid in such a machine, and dragged from some distance inside the city walls, the French Emperor was unable to conceive, and regarded the story as an infringement of even a poet’s licence. Napoleon was not much of a Latin scholar, and, so far as the main point of his criticism went, had depended too implicitly upon French translators. Segrais, discussing the question in a note, thought there might be perhaps some two or three hundred. Indeed most of our English translators have gone out of their way to exaggerate the number. But Virgil himself, as has been pertinently remarked by Dr Henry, only makes nine men actually come out of the horse, all of whom he mentions by name. The poet certainly does not say in so many words that these were all, but he, at least, is not answerable for a larger number. Among the nine are the young Neoptolemus, surnamed Pyrrhus—“Red-haired,”—son of the dead Achilles, and now his successor in the recognised championship of the force; Sthenelus, the friend and comrade of Diomed (for whose absence it seems hard {57} to account); Machaon, the hero-physician, whom one hardly expects to find selected for such a desperate service; Epeus, the contriver of the machine; and Ulysses, without whose aid and presence no such stratagem would seem complete.

At dead of night the traitor Sinon looked out to sea, and saw a light in the offing. It was the fire-signal from Agamemnon’s vessel; the Greek fleet had come back under cover of the darkness from its lurking-place at Tenedos. Then he silently undid the fastenings of the horse, and the Greek adventurers, as has been said, emerged from their wooden prison.

In the visions of the night Æneas saw the ghastly spectre of the dead Hector stand before him,—

Virgil seems to have followed the more horrible tradition, which appears also in some of the Greek dramatists, that Achilles fastened Hector to his chariot while still alive.

The shade of the dead hero had come to warn {58} Æneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Æneas, as the hope of his race, the prince of the house of Priam formally intrusts the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of Vesta, to be carried into the new land which he shall colonise. It is a formal transfer of the kingdom and the priesthood to the younger branch—the line of Assaracus.

Æneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within the city. Already the storming-party had attacked and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,—to whom Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first point which Menelaus made for. Æneas himself is summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point the Latin “ Fuimus ”—“We have been—and are not,” for this is understood. [19] “ Fuimus Troes ”—Mr Conington’s translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:—

It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the word “Vixi”—“I have lived”—in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the {59} turn of the expression is due to that euphemism, which refrained from using any words of direct ill omen.

“The father of the gods,” says Panthus, “has transferred all our glory to Argos.” There was a story (alluded to in one of the lost tragedies of Sophocles, of which we have but a fragment) that on the night of the capture of Troy the tutelary deities departed in a body, taking their images with them. It is a singular parallel to the well-known tradition, that before the fall of Jerusalem supernatural voices were heard in the night exclaiming, “Let us depart hence!” The Romans had a regular formula for the evocation of the gods from an enemy’s city, and inviting them, with promises of all due honours and sacrifices, to transfer their seat to Rome; and to attack any city without these solemn preliminaries was held to bring a curse on the besiegers. [20]

Æneas is anxious to assure his fair listener that, in spite of Hector’s adjuration to fly, he did all that man might do in defence of his king and his countrymen. He had rallied a band of brave men, and for a while made head against the enemy. They were favoured by the mistake made by a party of Greeks, who took them for friends in the darkness, and whom they cut to pieces, and having arrayed themselves in their armour, dealt destruction in the enemy’s very ranks. But all resistance was in vain. The appearance of Neoptolemus—Pyrrhus—the “Red-haired”—and the comparison of the young warrior in his strength and beauty to {60} the serpent who comes forth after casting its winter slough, is fine in the original, and finely translated:—

And the fate of the unhappy Priam is an equally beautiful picture, of a different tone:—

Hecuba, who with her women is clinging to the altar, rebukes her husband for this mad attempt to match his feeble strength against the enemy. Still, when Pyrrhus rushes into the hall in pursuit of one of Priam’s sons, Polites, and slays him full in the father’s sight, the old man hurls a javelin at the Greek chief, with a taunting curse upon his cruelty. But it is

And the ruthless son of Achilles drags the old king to the altar, and slays him there.

One more episode of that terrible night Æneas relates to his hostess:—

But his goddess-mother, Venus, stays his hand, and bids him think rather of saving his wife, and aged father, and infant son. Virgil gives us no hint of the other story of Helen’s discovery by her angry husband Menelaus, who was lifting his sword to kill the adulteress, when his arm fell powerless before the fascination of her beauty.

Obedient to the goddess, says Æneas, he went to seek his father Anchises, that he might carry him with him in his flight. But the old man refused to move. He would die, he said, in Troy. Life might be dear to the young; but for himself, even the tender mercies of the enemy would give him all he seeks, though they leave his corpse unburied,—

The desperate entreaties of his son were all in vain, until there came an omen from heaven. While Æneas was threatening—since the old man would not be saved—to rush himself again into the fight and meet a warrior’s death, his wife Creusa placed their young son Iulus in his arms. Lo! on the child’s head there played a lambent light of flame. The mother and Æneas would have sought to extinguish it, but Anchises recognised in it a sign from heaven. Virgil reads us no special interpretation, but surely he meant his Roman readers to understand that the seal of sovereignty was thus early set upon the founder of the great house of Julius. Thunder on the left hand—always the best of auguries—and a meteor flashing across the sky and pointing out their path to the fugitives, confirm the omen.

So the old man was lifted on his son’s shoulders, Iulus walking by his side, and Creusa following at some distance. They were to meet outside the city, at the temple of Ceres. Anchises bore in his hands the little images of the household gods (like Laban’s teraphim) and the sacred fire; for Æneas himself, redhanded from the battle, might not touch them. But soon the steps of their enemies were heard in pursuit; and Æneas, making his way with his precious burden through by paths to the place of rendezvous, reached it only to find that though many other fugitives, men, women, and children, had assembled there, the unhappy Creusa had not followed him. Cursing men and gods alike in his agony, he retraced his steps towards Troy, and even penetrated unharmed into the {63} wreck of Priam’s palace, crying aloud his wife’s name. Suddenly her shade appeared to him, and bade him not continue so vain a search, or grieve for a loss which was but the fulfilment of the counsels of heaven. She is content to know the future glories which are in store for her husband, and thankful that her own fate has been death (we are left to suppose, at the hands of the Greeks) rather than captivity and slavery. Æneas listened, and at once, obedient to the recognised voice of the gods, whether for good or evil, as is his character throughout, yielded to his fate, and hid himself with his little band of fugitives in the forests of Mount Ida. There they had spent the winter months in building themselves a little fleet of galleys out of the abundant pine-wood; and with the early summer launched upon the seas, wholly in ignorance of their destination, but awaiting confidently the guidance of heaven towards their promised resting-place. {64}

CHAPTER III.

ÆNEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.

So , with his father and his infant son, and carrying with him the national gods and sacred fire of Troy, Æneas and the remnant of the Trojans had set forth upon their voyage for the unknown shores of Hesperia—the “Land of the West.” Their first resting-place was on the friendly coast of Thrace, where Æneas laid the foundations of a city which was to bear his name. A strange adventure befell him there. While he was pulling some cornel-twigs which grew out of a mound, he found, to his horror, that the ends dropped blood. A third time, after prayer to avert the omen, he plucked a sapling, when a hollow voice from below warned him to desist from such cruelty. It is the grave of the unhappy Polydorus, a young son of Priam, whom his father, when Troy became hard pressed, had sent away with some of his treasures to the safe keeping of the king of Thrace, who for the sake of these treasures had basely murdered him. The cornel-wood spears with which he had been transfixed had taken root, and the blood had flowed {65} from his body. [21] They did but wait to pay due honours to the shade of Polydorus, and then hastened from the accursed coast. Landing next on the sacred isle of Delos, they consulted the oracle there as to their future home. Apollo was as enigmatical as his wont—he bade them “seek out their ancient mother.” They understood this to be spoken of the ancient cradle of their race; Anchises thought the phrase pointed to Crete, the birthplace of their ancestral hero Teucrus, and where stood the ancient Mount Ida, from which the mountain in the Troad derived its name. And Idomeneus, the king of Crete, who had joined the war against Troy, had been driven from his kingdom, and left a vacant throne. [22] To Crete they sailed, and there began to build a city, to be called Pergamia, after the citadel of Troy. But a year of deadly pestilence fell on man and beast; and in a dream Æneas saw the angry gods of Troy standing by him “in the full moonlight that streamed through the windows,” and warning him that the promised land, the ancient home of their race, is not in Crete, but Hesperia—the “Land of the West”—whence came their forefather Dardanus. Then Anchises too re {66} membered that such had been the frequent warning of Cassandra—the prophetess to whom none would listen. They re-embarked accordingly. After a storm of three days and three nights, when no pilot could keep the course, they were cast upon the islands of the Harpies [23] —the monster sisters, half women and half birds, foul and loathsome, who are hateful to gods and men. With them they had to do battle for the meal which they had spread; and one of those hags, in her wrath, prophesied that before they reached their promised Hesperia they should be forced “to eat their tables.”

The description of the ensuing voyage, in Mr Conington’s tasteful translation, reads like a passage from the ‘Lord of the Isles,’ yet presents a fair equivalent, especially in the last fine touch, to the Latin original:—

They landed on the coast of Leucadia, at Actium—the scene, be it remembered, of Augustus’s great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the Trojan chief takes care to say, he refreshed his weary crew with rest, and celebrated national games. Nay, he hung up there, fugitive as he was, a trophy of defiance—a shield which he had taken from a Greek hero, and inscribed upon it, “The spoil of Æneas from the conquering Argives.” So speaks the poet; his Roman audience would recognise the Actian games, celebrated there every fifth year by order of Augustus in honour of his great victory; and Æneas’s trophy is not so out of place as it might seem.

At Buthrotus, in Epirus, the wanderers had met with old friends. Andromache is settled there, now the wife of Helenus, who, by a strange vicissitude, has become the successor of Neoptolemus in his Greek province. There is little of what we call sentiment in these “heroic” times, especially as concerns “woman and her master.” It grates upon the feelings of the reader who has in mind the pathetic scene between Hector and his wife in the Iliad of Homer, to be told here by the poet—told, too, as an ordinary incident, as in fact it was—that Andromache had become the property of the conqueror Neoptolemus, and that he, {68} bent upon a marriage with Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, had handed over his Trojan wife—“Hector’s Andromache,” as she still pathetically calls herself—to her fellow-captive Helenus, Hector’s brother. She tells her own sad story, not without some sense of its wretchedness—

And she envies the fate of Polyxena, her sister-in-law, slain on the tomb of Achilles. Still, she has accepted her lot—the lot of so many women in her day. And Helenus, her present lord, is (if that be any consolation) a sort of king; for Orestes has killed Neoptolemus, and Helenus has in some way succeeded him, and built a new “Pergamus” in Greece. So that here, too, the poet would tell us, Troy has conquered her conquerors—a son of Priam reigns in the territory of Achilles. But the impression made upon an English mind as to Andromache’s fate is, after all, that of degradation, and we gladly turn from the page which relates it.

Helenus, like his sister Cassandra, has the gift of prophecy; he had been the great authority on all such matters to his countrymen during the siege. He now read the omens for Æneas, at his request; all were favourable. The wanderers should reach the promised Hesperia; but that western land was further off than they thought, and their voyage would prove long and weary. When they reached it, they should find under {69} a holm-oak a white sow with a litter of thirty young ones: there the new town was to be built—the “Alba Longa” which has already been forenamed in Jupiter’s promise to Venus. Helenus dismissed them with good wishes and ample presents; Andromache making special gifts to the boy Ascanius, whose age and features remind the mother of her own lost Astyanax. Æneas’s words of farewell are these:—

They set sail from this friendly shore, and on the following day caught their first sight of the shores of Italy. But though they landed and offered sacrifice to Juno, as Helenus had bid them do, they knew that this was not the spot on which they were to settle, and soon put to sea again. They passed the bay of Tarentum, escaping the dangers of Charybdis, and landed under Ætna, on the shore where dwell the Cyclops—the one-eyed race of giants, who, according to one legend, labour in their underground forges for Vulcan, the divine smith. Here the poet introduces us to a direct reminiscence of the wanderings of Ulysses. He adopts the whole of Homer’s story—the visit of the Greek chief and his comrades to the cave of the giant Polyphemus, his {70} cannibal meal, and the vengeance which Ulysses took upon him by burning out his eye. [24] Æneas relates how he met there with one of Ulysses’ crew, who by some mischance had been left behind, and who had hid himself three months (so close is the date of the two voyages) from the clutches of Polyphemus and his fellow-Cyclops. They took the wretched fugitive on board, and put to sea again just in time to escape the blind monster, who waded into the sea after them at the sound of the oars. They skirted the coast of Sicily, and at Drepanum the chief had buried his father Anchises. It was on casting off from Sicily that he had been driven by the storm on this unknown coast of Libya, on the spot soon to be famous enough as the site of Carthage.

CHAPTER IV.

DIDO.

The Carthaginian queen has been an eager listener to Æneas’s story. She is love-stricken—suddenly, and irremediably. The poet has thought it necessary to explain the fact by the introduction of the god of love himself, whom, in the shape of the young Ascanius, she has been nursing on her bosom. The passion itself is looked upon by the poet—and as we must suppose by his audience—as such a palpable weakness, that even in a woman (and it is to women almost exclusively, in ancient classical fiction, that these sudden affections are attributed) it was thought necessary to account for it by the intervention of some more than human influence. Either human nature has developed, or our modern poets understand its workings better. Shakespeare makes the angry Brabantio accuse the Moor of having stolen his daughter’s love

but Othello himself has a far simpler and more natural explanation of the matter {72} —

So it has been with Dido. But she is terribly ashamed of her own feelings. She finds relief in disclosing them to a very natural confidant—her sister Anna. She confesses her weakness, but avows at the same time a determination not to yield to it. The stranger has interested her deeply, after a fashion which has not touched her since the death of her husband Sichæus.

But her sister—suiting her counsels, as all confidants are apt to do, to the secret wishes rather than to the professions of Dido—encourages the passion. Perpetual widowhood has a romantic sound, but is not, in Anna’s opinion, a desirable estate. Besides, in this newly-planted colony, surrounded as they are by fierce African tribes, an alliance with these Trojan strangers will be a tower of strength. The stout arm of such a husband as Æneas is much needed by a widowed queen. His visit—so Anna thinks—is nothing less than providential—

By all means let them detain their illustrious visitor with them as long as possible—his ships require re {73} fitting and his crews refreshment—and the result will not be doubtful.

The advice suits with the queen’s new mood too well to be rejected. Together the sisters offer pious sacrifices to the gods—to Juno especially, as the goddess of marriage—to give their sanction to the hoped-for alliance. The restless feelings of the enamoured woman are described in one of the finest and most admired passages of the poem:—

The powers of Olympus here come again upon the scene. Juno sees, not without a secret satisfaction, the prospect of an entanglement between Æneas and Dido, which may detain these hated Trojans in Africa, and so prevent their settlement and dominion in Italy. So Carthage, and not the Rome of the future, may yet be the mistress of the world. She addresses herself at once to the goddess of love—not without a sneer at the success of her snares in poor Dido’s case; a sorry triumph it is indeed—two divinities pitted against a weak woman! But come—suppose in this matter they agree to act in concert; let there be a union between the two nations, and let Carthage be the seat of their joint power; its citizens shall pay equal honours to the queen of heaven and the queen of love. Venus understands perfectly well that Juno’s motive is at any cost to prevent the foundation of Rome; but, having a clearer vision (we must presume) than her great rival of the probable results, she agrees to the terms. There is to be a hunting-party on the morrow, {75} and Juno will take care that opportunity shall be given for the furtherance of Dido’s passion. The royal hunt is again a striking picture, almost mediæval in its rich colouring:—

A rejected suitor of the Carthaginian queen,—Iarbas, king of Gætulia,—hears the news amongst the rest. He is a reputed son of Jupiter; and now, furious at seeing this wanderer from Troy—“this second Paris,” as he calls him—preferred to himself, he appeals for vengeance to his Olympian parent. The appeal is heard, and Mercury is despatched to remind Æneas of his high destinies, which he is forgetting in this dalliance at Carthage. If he has lost all ambition for himself, let him at least remember the rights of his son Ascanius, which he is thus sacrificing to the indulgence of his own wayward passions. The immortal messenger finds the Trojan chief busied in planning the extension of the walls and streets of the new city which he has already adopted as his home. He delivers his message briefly and emphatically, and vanishes. Thus recalled to a full sense of his false position, Æneas is at first horror-struck and confounded. How to disobey the direct commands of Heaven, and run counter to the oracles of fate; how, on the other hand, to break his faith with Dido, and ungratefully betray the too confiding love of his hostess and benefactress; how even to venture to hint to her a word of parting, and how to escape the probable vengeance of the Carthaginian people;—all these considerations crowd into his mind, and perplex him terribly. On the main point, however, his resolution is soon taken. He will obey the mandate of the gods, at any cost. He summons the most trusted of his comrades, and bids them make secret preparations to set sail once more in quest of their home in Italy. He promises himself that he will {78} either find or make some opportunity of breaking the news of his departure to Dido.

This is the turning-point of the poem; and here it is that the interest to a modern reader, so far as the mere plot of the story is concerned, is sadly marred by the way in which the hero thus cuts himself off from all our sympathies. His most ingenious apologists—and he has found many—appeal to us in vain. Upon the audience or the readers of his own time, no doubt, the effect might have been different. To the critics of Augustus’s court, love—or what they understood by it—was a mere weakness in the hero. The call which Heaven had conveyed to him was to found the great empire of the future; and because he obeys the call at the expense of his tenderest feelings, the poet gives him always his distinctive epithet—the “pious” Æneas. The word “pious,” it must be remembered, implies in the Latin the recognition of all duties to one’s country and one’s parents, as well as to the gods. And in all these senses Æneas would deserve it. But to an English mind, the “piety” which pleads the will of Heaven as an excuse for treachery to a woman, only adds a deeper hue of infamy to the transaction. It

But our story must not wait for us to discuss too curiously the morals of the hero. Æneas has thought to make his preparations without the knowledge of the queen—while she

But, as the poet goes on to say, “Who can cheat the eyes of love?” Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly with his “baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Æneid—“The Passion of Dido,” as it has been called—is of a very high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and curses against her false lover, now she condescends to pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief’s defence, such as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium. His father Anchises is warning him continually in the visions of the night not to linger here: and now the messenger of the gods in person has come to chide this fond delay.

The grand storm of wrath in which the injured queen bursts upon him in reply has severely taxed the powers of all Virgil’s English translators. They seem to have felt themselves no more of a match for “the fury of a woman scorned” than Æneas was. Certainly they all fail, more or less, to give the fire and bitterness of the original. The heroics of Dryden suit it better, perhaps, than any other measure:—

But in this passage, if nowhere else, a French translator has surpassed all his English rivals. Possibly the fervid passion of the scene, worked up as it {81} is almost to exaggeration, is more akin to the genius of the French language. [27] {82}

We cannot, however, do better than return to Mr Conington’s version for the sequel:—

The Trojans prepare to depart; but the enamoured queen makes one more despairing effort to detain her faithless guest. She sends her sister to ask at least for some short space of delay—until she shall have schooled herself to bear his loss. Æneas is obdurate in his “piety.” Then her last resolve is taken. She cheats her sister into the belief that she has found some spells potent enough to restrain the truant lover. Part of the charm is that his armour, and all that had belonged to him while in her company, must be consumed by fire. So a lofty pile is built in the palace-court; but it is to be the funeral pile of Dido. As she looks forth from the turret of her palace at daybreak, she sees the ships of Æneas already far in the offing; for, warned again by Mercury that there will be risk of his departure being prevented by force if he delays, he has already set sail under cover of the night. For a moment the queen thinks of ordering her seamen to give chase; but it is a mere passing phase of her despair. She contents herself with imprecating an eternal enmity between his race and hers—fulfilled, as {83} the poet means us to bear in mind, in the long and bloody wars between Rome and Carthage.

With a master’s hand the poet enhances the glories of his country by this prophetic introduction of the terrible Hannibal. The peaceful empire of Cæsar, before whom East and West bow, is thrown into the broadest light by reference to those early days when Rome lay almost at the mercy of her implacable enemy.

So she mounts the funeral pile, and stabs herself with the Trojan’s sword, her sister Anna coming upon the scene only in time to receive the parting breath. {85}

CHAPTER V.

THE FUNERAL GAMES.

Far off at sea, Æneas and his crew see the flames go up from Dido’s palace.

Not yet is their course clear for Italy. A storm comes on, and they make for refuge towards the friendly coast of Sicily, and run their vessels into a sheltered bay under Mount Eryx. Their return is gladly welcomed by their late host, Acestes, who receives the wanderers, as before, with princely hospitality, still mindful of his own Trojan blood. It chances that the morrow is the anniversary of the burial of Anchises; and Æneas, summoning an open-air council of his crews, announces to them his intention of commemorating his father by a solemn public {86} sacrifice. It is a day which—wherever his lot may be hereafter cast—he will ever keep holy; and not without some providential guidance, as he deems, has this opportunity been afforded him, by his being driven back to Sicily, of celebrating it on friendly soil under the auspices of his kinsman. There shall be nine days of sacrifice and prayer; then shall follow funeral games, with prizes at his own cost.

The sacrificial oxen are duly slain, and the libations poured at the tomb of Anchises; the bowls of new milk, of wine, and of blood, and the fresh spring flowers, which were reckoned acceptable offerings to the dead. Then Æneas lifts his voice in prayer to the shade of the hero, and a startling omen follows the invocation. A serpent, dappled with green and gold, glides out of the tomb, tastes of the offerings, and disappears again. Æneas sees in the creature the tutelary genius of the spot, or, it may be, the special attendant of his father’s shade. In either case, he accepts its appearance as a good omen, and joyfully redoubles his devotions.

In the funeral games which follow, the Roman poet no doubt had two models in his mind. He was ambitious to reproduce, or perhaps to rival, in Roman, song, for an audience of his countrymen, the grand description which his great master Homer had given of the games which Achilles celebrates in honour of the dead Patroclus. He wished also, there can be little doubt, to pay a poet’s best compliment to his imperial patron, and to weave into his song, with such licence of embellishment as is allowed to all poets, a record of those {87} funeral games which Augustus had instituted in remembrance of his uncle, the great Dictator Julius. But Virgil is here very far from being a mere copyist from Homer. In lieu of the chariot-race, the great feature in the games of the Iliad, he has given us a galley-race, the incidents of which are quite as exciting, and to our modern comprehensions more thoroughly intelligible.

The day fixed for the great spectacle has arrived, and the Sicilians from far and near flock to it, some to take part in the games, and all to see. First of the various contests comes the galley-race, for which four of the fastest vessels in the fleet have entered—the Shark, the Centaur, the Chimæra, and the Scylla; each displaying, no doubt, as its figure-head, a representation of the monster whose name it bore. Their captains were men well known. Humouring a genealogical fancy of his Roman countrymen for tracing their descent to some one of the old Trojan colonists,—much after the fashion of English houses who try to find an ancestor on the Roll of Battle Abbey,—the poet tells us that three at least out of the four gave their names in due time to patrician houses in Rome. Mnestheus, who commands the Shark, left his name (certainly with considerable modification) to the gens or clan of Memmius. The captain of the Centaur, Sergestus, is in like manner the reputed ancestor of the Sergian clan, as Cloanthus, who sails the Scylla, is of the Cluentian. Only Gyas, the captain of the Chimæra, a bulky craft, “as big as a town,” has no such genealogical honours assigned him. {88}

The course lies out in the bay, and the competing vessels are to round a rock, covered at high tides, on which an oak has been set up, leaves and all, to serve as a mark for the steersmen. They take up their positions by lot, and await the signal, to be given by sound of trumpet. The picture of the start would suit, with wonderfully little alteration, the description of a modern University boat-race:—

[Our modern oarsmen would certainly be wiser in this, that they would reserve their own breath (of which they would find considerable need towards the end of the race), and leave the whole of the shouting to be done by enthusiastic spectators.]

So goes the race, until the galleys near the rock which they have to round. Gyas sees that his steersman, from over caution, is giving it too wide a berth, and that there is danger of the Scylla, more venturous, cutting in between. He shouts an order to keep closer in; but the old seaman is somewhat obstinate, and it is very soon too late. Cloanthus has seen his advantage, shot round the rock at very close quarters, and now leaves Gyas in the Chimæra behind. Burning with fury, Gyas turns on his steersman, and pitches him into the sea. Happily he can swim, and the rock is close at hand; he climbs upon it, and sits there dripping, to the considerable amusement of the spectators, who, like all lookers-on, seem unmercifully alive to the ludicrous element in any disaster.

Deprived of her helmsman, the huge Chimæra loses her course for a moment, and the two galleys in the rear are quick to take advantage of it. The Shark and Centaur are now rounding the rock almost side by side. But Sergestus, in his eagerness not to lose an inch of advantage, emulates the manœuvre of the Scylla too closely, and takes the Centaur too near. Her broadside of oars touch some of the jutting crags, the oars are broken, and the boat’s head takes the rock, and hangs there hard and fast. All efforts of the {90} crew to get her off are unavailing. Mnestheus makes the dangerous turn safely on the outside of his rival, and his men, encouraged by success, redouble their efforts. The Chimæra has no good steersman to replace old Menœtes, who is still drying himself on the rock, and she is easily passed on the return course homewards. The struggle becomes now one of intense interest between Mnestheus and Cloanthus, who is still leading in the Scylla.

The Shark has a stern chase, but the Scylla rows heavily, as we have been told, though she has the best crew, and the distance lessens at every stroke. Had the course been longer, the Shark would have made at least a dead heat of it. But as it is, amidst a storm of shouts, the Scylla wins. The turning-point of victory is one which does not approve itself to modern readers. The sea-deities interfere. Standing high upon his quarter-deck, Cloanthus lifts his prayer to the powers of ocean, not to permit his prize to be snatched from him at the last. He vows an offering of a milk-white bull and libations of red wine if they will help him at his need.

Possibly, after all, the poet only means us to understand that this was Mnestheus’s explanation of his defeat—that the luck was against him. [29]

Cloanthus is crowned with bays as the victor of the day, and receives as his prize an embroidered robe of rare device—one of those miracles of divers colours of needlework in which the classical age seems to have as far excelled us as the mediæval ladies certainly did. Each crew receives three oxen and a supply of wine, while a talent of silver is divided amongst the men of the victorious Scylla. Mnestheus, as second in the race, wins a shirt of mail whose scales are of gold, which two of his attendants bear off with difficulty. The third of the captains has a pair of brazen caldrons and chased silver bowls. But while the awards are being distributed, the crippled Centaur has got off the rock, and is brought into harbour; and a Cretan slave-woman, with her twin children, is allotted, by the liberality of Æneas, as a consolation to her captain. {92}

From the shore of the bay the company now move off to a natural amphitheatre close at hand, where the rest of the games are to be exhibited. Æneas takes his place high in the midst on an extemporised throne. For the foot-race, which comes first on the list, a crowd of competitors enter, both of native Sicilians and of their Trojan guests. Among the Sicilians are Salius and Patron, of Greek families settled in the island, and Helymus and Panopes, friends and companions of Acestes. The favourites among the Trojans are Diores, one of the many sons of Priam, and Nisus and Euryalus, noted for their romantic friendship, of which we shall hear more hereafter. The prizes in this contest are a war-horse with full trappings for the first, an Amazonian quiver for the second, and a helmet—the spoil of some conquered Greek on the plain of Troy—for the third. Nisus goes off with a strong lead, and has the race easily in hand. Next him, but at a long interval, comes Salius, Euryalus lying third, Helymus and Diores, close together, fourth and fifth. But when within a short distance of the goal, Nisus slips up in the blood and filth which has been left uncleared at the spot where the oxen have been sacrificed, and falls heavily to the ground. Knowing himself to be out of the race, he determines that his dear Euryalus shall win. So, by a piece of most unjustifiable jockeyship, which ought to have led to his being warned off from all such contests for ever after, he rises up at the moment that Salius is passing, and brings him down upon him. Euryalus has thus an easy victory, Helymus and Diores coming in second {93} and third. Very naturally, there is much dispute about the award. Salius complains loudly of unfair play; but young Euryalus is handsome and popular, and Diores backs his claim energetically; for it is very evident that if Salius is adjudged the first prize, Euryalus the second, and Helymus the third, then he—Diores—will be nowhere. So the result is accepted by the judges as it stands. But Æneas quiets the reasonable objections of Salius by the present of a lion’s hide with gilded claws. Then Nisus makes appeal for compensation, pointing out to the laughing spectators the blood and dirt which are the very disagreeable evidences of his mishap, and protesting, with a consummate impudence which suits with the popular humour, that the whole thing was an accident, and that he, as the winner that would have been, is the real object of commiseration. If a fall deserves a prize, who has so good a claim as the man who fell first? Again the generosity of Æneas answers the appeal, and Nisus is presented with a shield of the finest workmanship, another Greek trophy. Successful knavery, if the knave be somewhat of a humourist withal, always wins a sort of sympathy from the public—in the Augustan epic as well as in modern comedy.

The prizes of the foot-race having been thus decided, the lists are cleared for the boxing-match. The boxing-match of the classical ancients was very different indeed from a modern set-to. The combatants certainly wore gloves; but these were meant to add weight and force to the blow, not to deaden it. The stoutest {94} champion of the modern prize-ring might shrink from encountering an antagonist whose fists were bound round with strips of hardened ox-hide. But such was the “cæstus” which was worn by the pugilists of this heroic age. The prizes are displayed by Æneas; for the conqueror, a bull with gilded horns; a helmet and falchion for the loser. Up rises the Trojan Dares, whose strength and skill are well known. The only man whom he acknowledged as his superior in the ring was one whom we might have least expected—Paris, who certainly bears no such reputation in Homer. At the great games held in honour of the dead Hector, of which we have the very briefest note in the Iliad, Dares had defeated the huge champion Butes, sprung from a race of athletes, and so mangled him that he died on the spot. No wonder that when he now steps forth, and goes through some preparatory sparring with the air, no one is found bold enough to put on the gloves with him. So, after a glance of triumph round the admiring circle, he advances to where the bull stands in front of Æneas, lays his hand upon its horns, and claims it as his rightful property in default of an antagonist.

King Acestes is concerned for the honour of Sicily. There is lying beside him on the grass a grey-haired chief named Entellus, sometime a pupil in this art of the great hero Eryx, who gave his name to the mountain which overhangs the place of assembly. Will he sit tamely by, Acestes asks, and see this Trojan boaster carry off the prize and the glory unchallenged? Entellus listens to his friend, and feels the old fire stir {95} within him. He would willingly enter the ring once more for the honour of his native island,—

He rises from his seat, however, and throws down in the arena, by way of challenge, a pair of ancient gloves of a most murderous pattern. Seven folds of tough bull-hide have knobs of lead and iron sewn inside them. They are the gloves in which the hero Eryx fought his fatal battle with Hercules, whom he had rashly challenged, and they still bear the blood-stains of Eryx’s previous victories. Dares, stout champion as he is, starts back in dismay when he sees them, and Æneas himself takes them up and handles them with wonder. Entellus, however, will not insist on using these; and two pair of less formidable manufacture and of equal weight are produced, with which the two heroes engage. Virgil’s description of this ancient prize-fight is highly spirited. It may remind some readers, who are old enough to remember such things, of the bulletins of similar encounters between a “light-weight” and a “heavy-weight,” furnished in past days by sporting writers to our own newspapers—with the happy omission of the slang of the ring:—

Acestes rushes in, like an attentive second, to raise his friend; and Entellus, roused to fury by his fall, renews the fight savagely: {97} —

The unhappy Dares is borne off by his friends in miserable plight,—with half his teeth knocked out, blood streaming from his face, and hardly able to stand. All the savage has been roused in Entellus’s nature by the fight. He is not half satisfied that his victim has escaped him. He would gladly have sacrificed him to the memory of his great master Eryx,—here, on the spot where that hero fought his own last fight. He lays his hand upon the bull, the prize of battle, and addresses Æneas and the spectators. Dryden’s version of this passage, though it contains as much of Dryden as of Virgil, has justly been praised as very noble:—

Mr Conington has well remarked that here we have, no doubt, “the veteran combatant’s feelings as conceived by the veteran poet.” He wrote the lines in his sixty-second year, and they harmonise pathetically with the words in his dedication: “What I now offer to your lordship is the wretched remainder of a sickly age.” We are not obliged to take this self-depreciation too literally: whatever may be the shortcomings of Dryden’s translation, the hand of the old poet had no more lost its vigour than that of Entellus.

The archers are next to try their skill. In this contest Acestes himself takes part. The other competitors are Mnestheus, whose crew were just now second in the race; Eurytion, a brother of Pandarus, the great archer of the Iliad, whose treacherous arrow, launched against Menelaus during the truce, had wellnigh turned the fate of Troy; and Hippocoon, of whom we know nothing more. He draws the first lot, and his arrow strikes the mast on which the mark, a live dove, is perched. Mnestheus shoots next, and cuts the cord which fetters her; and as she flies away a shaft from Eurytion’s bow follows and kills her. There is nothing left for Acestes to do, but to shoot an arrow high in the air to show the strength of his hand and his bow. To the astonishment of the gazers, the arrow takes fire, and, leaving a trail of light on its path like a shooting-star, vanishes in the sky. It is an omen, as Æneas declares; it must be that the gods, in spite of facts, will him to be the real victor. So the prize—an embossed bowl, a present from the father of Hecuba to Anchises—is awarded to the {99} Sicilian prince, even Eurytion, the actual winner, acquiescing heartily in the arrangement. Yet the omen, as the poet tells us, really boded disaster; though whether to Sicily or to the Trojans, or how it was afterwards fulfilled, he does not stop to explain. Commentators have, as a matter of duty, done so for him; but it is hardly worth while to vex ourselves with their conjectures on a point on which Æneas himself was mistaken.

The games are over—at least, so far as the public programme seems to have gone. But Æneas has a surprise in store for his hosts. He whispers privately to the governor or tutor of his son Iulus, while he requests the company once more to clear the amphitheatre. Soon there sweeps into the ring the young chivalry of Troy—a goodly company of mounted youths, all of noble blood, who are to play out their play before their assembled seniors.

Such was the Ludus Trojæ—“The Game of Troy”—introduced, according to the poet, by Iulus in after-days into his new-built town of Alba, and borrowed from Alba by the Romans. Whatever its origin may have been, it was revived at Rome by Augustus, in his zeal for restorations of all kinds, as “an ancient and honourable institution.” Princes of the imperial house—young Marcellus, and Tiberius the future emperor—rode, like Iulus, in the show; the emperor himself took a warm interest in it; and the eagerness of the young patricians to distinguish themselves in the various manœuvres before his eyes and those of their friends led to serious accidents. To one young horseman who was crippled by his fall Augustus gave a golden torque, and granted to him and his family permission to bear the name of “Torquatus”—renowned in the early annals of Rome. But other accidents happened, and led to such loud complaints that the sport was discontinued.

But while the eyes of Trojans and Sicilians are engaged with this spectacle, a terrible proceeding has taken place down on the shore. The ships, as usual, are drawn up there hard and fast upon the sand. The Trojan matrons are gathered near them, making moan for the good Anchises—for the games are a {102} spectacle for men. They are looking wistfully, too, across the sea, thinking how far they have sailed already, and how far they may yet have to sail. The watchful hate of Juno sees her opportunity. She despatches Iris down to them in the shape of one of their number—Beroe. She harangues them eloquently. How long will they be content to live this wandering life, in search of a distant home—which possibly has no existence but in deceitful prophecies?

The disguised Iris seizes a brand and rushes towards the ships. While the rest hesitate, one of their number detects the star-like eyes and celestial gait. It is not old Beroe—nay, she, to the witness’s own knowledge, lies at this very moment sick in bed. It is no less than a visitor from heaven. They hesitate no longer: they snatch the embers from the altars, and in a moment the deed is done, and the galleys are in flames. The news is brought to Æneas just as the gay parade of youths is ending; and Ascanius gallops at once down to the shore, dashes his helmet on the ground that all may know him, and implores the furious women to stay their hands. Do they fancy they are burning the war-ships of the Greeks? His voice recalls them to themselves, and in guilty fear and shame they fly to hide themselves among the rocks and woods. Æneas rends his clothes, and appeals to Jupiter. The ruler of the sky hears, and sends down a thunder-shower which drenches everything on sea and shore, so that all but four galleys escape with little damage.

But Æneas is troubled at heart. May not this mad {103} instinct of the women be right, after all? Were it not better to rest here in Sicily, than wander on again over the weary ocean in quest of this Western Land? He takes counsel with the Nestor of the fleet—the aged Nautes—to whom the goddess of wisdom has given an understanding spirit beyond his fellows. The old seaman’s motto is one of the poet’s noblest utterances [30] —

He bids his chief take counsel, too, with Acestes. In the visions of the night the shade of his father Anchises once more appears to him, and gives the same advice as Nautes. It is settled that the women and the old men, and all that are weary and faint-hearted, shall be left behind in Sicily, while the picked band of good men and true sail on with their leader into the west; thus their reduced number of ships will yet suffice them. [31] The damaged galleys are hastily repaired, and the foundations of a new town are marked out for the Trojan settlers: it is to be called Acesta, in honour of {104} their kind host. The parting of the wanderers from their friends is a fine passage, finely rendered:—

CHAPTER VI.

THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.

The Sea-god, at Venus’s intercession for her son, sends Æneas and his crews calm seas and prosperous gales. One victim only the Fates demand; Palinurus, the pilot of Æneas’s ship, gives way to sleep during the quiet watches of the night, slips overboard, and is lost. The poet has clothed the whole story in a transparent mythological allegory, and which must have been intended to be transparent. Sleep is personified; Palinurus resists his first temptations; but the god waves over his eyes a bough steeped in dews of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and the unhappy steersman can hold out no longer. The accident happens near the shore of the twin Sirens, of whose seductions Homer has told us in the wanderings of Ulysses:—

Æneas discovers his loss by the unsteady course of {106} the galley, and takes the helm himself, until he brings the little fleet safe into the harbour of Cumæ. The crews disembark, with the joy which these seamen of old always felt when they touched land again, and proceed at once to search for water, cut wood, and light fires:—

Here Æneas consults the mysterious Sibyl, whose oracular verses are referred to in Virgil’s Pastoral already noticed. She figures under various names in classical story—that which she bears here is Deiphobè. Her dwelling is in a cave in the rock behind the temple, with which it communicates by a hundred doors. Within sits the prophetess on a tripod, where she receives the inspiration of the god. When the oracle is pronounced, the doors all fly open, and the sound comes forth. But there is one way in which she is wont to give her answers, against which Helenus has already warned her present visitors. She has a habit of jotting down her responses in verse upon the leaves of trees—each verse apparently on a separate leaf—and then piling them one upon another {107} in her cave. When the doors fly open, the gust of wind whirls the leaves here and there in all directions; and the ambiguities which are proper to all oracles are considerably increased in the process of rearranging the several leaves into anything like coherent order—the Sibyl herself disdaining all further interference. So that many of her clients go away without having received any intelligible answer at all, and from that time forth “hate the very name of the Sibyl.” A modern writer, [32] whose poetical taste has made him one of the most interesting critics of Virgil, has thought that the confusion of the prophetic leaves was meant to symbolise the idea that the will of the gods was made known to mortals only in disjointed utterances, and under no regular law of order. Æneas, therefore, in his appeal to the prophetess, begs her specially to give her answer by word of mouth.

Deiphobè proceeds to the seat of augury, and goes through the terrible struggle which, according to all legends, invariably accompanied this form of prophecy. Even when she comes in view of the awful doors, the influence begins:—

The paroxysms increase after she has entered the cave, and is in the agonies of inspiration:—

At last all the hundred doors fly open at once, and the voice of destiny comes forth. The wanderers shall reach Latium safely, but they shall wish they had never reached it.

Æneas hears,—undismayed. He is a true hero so far, that he is always equal to his fate. One request he makes of the Sibyl,—that he may visit the shades below, the entrance to which is said to lie here, within the prophetess’s domain, and there see again the face of {109} his father. Deiphobè consents, but not without the solemn warning, often quoted to point a far higher moral than the heathen poet was likely to have conceived—so often, that the Latin words themselves are probably familiar even to those who profess but little Latin scholarship:—-

Their terseness and pathos are not easy to reproduce in any other language, but Mr Conington has done it as well, perhaps, as it could be done:—

Few are they of mortal birth who, by the special grace of the gods, have achieved that desperate venture with success. Still, if Æneas is determined to attempt it, she will teach him the secret of the passage. Deep in the shades of the neighbouring forest there grows a tree which bears a golden bough, which he must find and carry with him into the regions of the dead; it is the gift which Proserpine, who reigns there, claims from all who enter her court.

Accompanied by his faithful Achates, Æneas enters {110} the woods in quest of the golden bough. The search seems in vain, until two white doves, the birds of his goddess-mother Venus, make their appearance, and, leading the way by short successive flights, draw the seekers on to the wondrous tree, on which they at last alight. The hero makes prize of the golden branch, with which he returns to the Sibyl. Under her directions he offers the due sacrifices to the infernal powers—four black bulls, a barren heifer, and a black ewe-lamb—and then, still under the leading of the prophetess, with drawn sword in his hand, he enters the mouth of Hades.

Then they come in sight of the rivers of Hell—Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx. The relative physical geography is somewhat confused by the poet, but it is the Styx on which the Ferryman of the Shades, the surly Charon,—

plies his office of transporting the dead, performing the duties which Homer assigns to Mercury. But it is not all who even in death are allowed to pass the gloomy river. Only those who have received all due rites of burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at once; those unhappy ones who from any cause lie unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the Sibyl explains to Æneas, when he marks with surprise {112} how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his own companions who had perished in the storm off the coast of Carthage. Among them, too, he sees the figure of his late pilot Palinurus, who tells him the story of his unhappy fate; how, after all, he was not drowned, but, clinging to the piece of rudder which had broken away with him, had drifted three days and nights upon the waves, and had at last swam ashore on the fated coast of Italy. There the cruel natives had attacked and killed him, as he struggled up the cliffs; and now his corpse lies tossed to and fro amid the breakers in the harbour of Velia. He prays of his leader either to sail back there and to

or, by his influence with these Powers below, to get the law of exclusion relaxed in his favour. This last request the Sibyl rebukes at once, as utterly inorthodox and heretical; but comforts him at the same time with the assurance that the barbarous natives shall be plagued by heaven for their abominable deed, nor shall they find deliverance until they solemnly propitiate his shade by the erection of a mound and the establishment of funeral honours, and call the spot by the name of Palinurus—which name, the Sibyl declares, shall endure there for ever. The oracular voice in this case was not deceitful: the place, or supposed place, is still called “Punta di Palinuro.” Virgi {113} l’s imperial audience might know it well, for Augustus was very nearly himself becoming a sacrifice on that very spot to the manes of the ancient pilot, many of his ships having been cast away on that very headland.

Charon is by no means gracious to the intruders. At first he warns them off. He has no pleasant recollections of former visitors from upper air, who, without the proper qualification of being previously dead and duly burnt or buried, had made their way against all rule into this abode of shadows. Hercules had come there, and carried off their watchful guardian Cerberus: Theseus and his friend Pirithous had even tried to do the same by Proserpine.

The Sibyl bids Charon have no fears of this kind now—Cerberus and Proserpine are safe from all designs on the part of her companion. This is Æneas of Troy, known for his “piety” as widely as for his deeds of arms. He does but seek an interview with his sire Anchises. But, if Charon be deaf to all such argu {114} ments,—she shows the golden bough. The passport is irresistible. Sullenly, and without a word of reply, the dark boatman brings his craft to shore, and bids the freight of ghosts clear the decks and make room for his living passengers. The boat groans, its seams open and let in the water, as the substantial flesh and blood steps on board. [33] So, in the Iliad of Homer, {115} the mortal horses and earthly chariot of Diomed groan and strain under their immortal burden, when Minerva takes her seat beside the champion.

Cerberus, in spite of Hercules, is at home again, and on the watch. His three heads and snake-wreathed neck are lifted in fury at the sight of strangers, and his bark rings through the shades. But the Sibyl has brought with her a medicated cake, which she throws down to him; he eats, and falls at once into a heavy sleep.

Then, led by the Sibyl, the Trojan chief passes through the various regions of the world below. First they hear the cries of those infants who but just knew life in the world above, and then were snatched away from its enjoyment. [34] Next them come those who have been condemned to death by an unjust judgment, and for whom Minos here sits as judge of appeals. In the next region are those unhappy ones {116} —

Suicide was no crime in the early pagan creed; but Virgil has to a certain degree adopted the Platonic notion, that to take away one’s own life was to desert the post of duty. It is remarkable how thoroughly he adopts Homer’s view of the incomparable superiority of the life of the upper world to the best possible estate in the land of shadows. We have here again the sad lament of Achilles in the Iliad—that the life of a slave on earth was more to be desired than the colourless existence of the heroes in Elysium.

Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach the “Mourning Fields,” in which the poet places all the victims of love. If there was any doubt as to his view of the passion—that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be reprobated or pitied according to circumstances—it would be set at rest by the characters of those victims with whom he peoples this unlovely region. Grouped together with such devoted wives as Evadne, who, when her husband fell in the Trojan war, slew herself for grief upon his funeral pile, and Laodamia, whose only crime was that by her too urgent prayers she won back her dead Protesilaus to her embrace for a few {117} fleeting moments, and died of joy in his arms, [35] we find the treacherous Eriphyle, who, for the bribe of a golden necklace, persuaded her husband Amphiarus to go to his predestined death in the same war, and even such disgraces to their sex as were Phædra and Pasiphae. In these Mourning Fields Æneas meets one whom he would, it may be conceived, have very gladly avoided. Half veiled in mist, seen dimly like the moon through a cloud, Dido stands before him there: and thus, for the first time, he is made certain of her death. Æneas is ready with regrets, and even tears.

At last, without a word, she turns from her false lover, and seeks in the dim groves the society of her dead husband Sichæus. {118}

The Sibyl leads her companion on to the Field of the Heroes. There he sees the mighty men of old: the chiefs who fought against Thebes in the great siege which preceded that of Troy—Tydeus, and Adrastus, and Parthenopæus. There, too, are the shades of his own companions in arms, who fell in defence of their city. Among these last is one who has another tale to tell of the abominable Helen. It is Deiphobus, one of the many sons of Priam, to whom Helen had been given after the death of Paris. Æneas is shocked to see the unsubstantial shape of the prince bearing the marks of barbarous mutilation; his hands lopped, his face gashed, and his ears and nostrils cut off. (For, even in this shadowy existence, the ghosts all bear the marks of violent death—Dido’s self-inflicted wound being specially mentioned.) Æneas asks the history of this terrible disfigurement, and Deiphobus tells it at some length: how the double traitoress, who was then his wife, had led Menelaus and his companion, the accursed Ulysses, to the chamber where he lay sunk in sleep on the disastrous night of the city’s capture, and how they two had thus mangled his body.

But the Sibyl warns her companion, who stands absorbed in grief at his comrade’s fate, that the permitted hours of their visit are fast passing away. She guides him on to where the path they are treading divides, leading in one direction to the Elysian Fields, in the other to Tartarus,—for the district which they have explored already is represented as of an entirely neutral character. On the left, Æneas sees {119} rise before him the broad bastions of Tartarus, round which flows the fiery stream of Phlegethon:—

Æneas asks of his companion the meaning of these fearful sounds. They are the outcries of the wicked in torment. They may not be seen by human eyes; but Deiphobè herself has been shown all the horrible secrets of their prison-house by Hecate, when intrusted by that goddess with the charge of the entrance to the Shades. She tells Æneas how Rhadamanthus sits in judgment there, and forces the wicked to confess their deeds. Crimes successfully concealed on earth are there made manifest; then the culprit is handed over to the Furies for punishment. Such punishments are various as the crimes; strange and horrible in the cases of extraordinary offenders,—especially against the majesty of the gods. In the lowest gulf of all,—

lie the twin giants, sons of Aloeus, who sought to storm heaven, and hurl Jupiter from his throne. There, too, is chained Salmoneus, who, counterfeiting the thunder and lightning of the Olympian ruler, was struck down by the force which he profanely imitated. Tityos, son of Earth, who dared to offer violence to the goddess Latona, lies there also, suffering the punishment assigned by the Greek mythologists to Prometheus:—

Virgil is here more literally orthodox, and less philosophical in his creed, than his master Lucretius. For he, too, knew the story of Tityos, but saw in it only an allegory; “every man is a Tityos,” says the elder poet, “whose heart is torn and racked perpetually by his own evil lusts and passions.” Other and various torments has the Sibyl seen; for the selfish and covetous, for the adulterer, for the betrayer of trust, and the spoiler of the orphan; the feast ever spread {121} before the hungry eyes and ever vanishing; the rock overhanging the head of the guilty, ever ready to fall; the stone that has to be rolled with vast labour up the hill, only to roll back again for ever; and, most remarkable of all punishments, the doom of the restless adventurer Theseus for his attempt on Proserpine—to sit for ever in perpetual inactivity. And amidst them all rings out the warning voice of Phlegyas (condemned for having set fire to the temple of Apollo) from his place of torment:—

Here again we have, it may be, a protest against the teaching of Lucretius: a distinct rejection, on Virgil’s part, of the materialistic doctrine which would deny a divine Providence and human responsibility.

The whole conception of Virgil’s hell is grand and terrific. Highly material and sensational, it is hardly more so than mediæval divines and artists have represented; and indeed it is more than probable that, consciously or unconsciously, they often adopted pagan notions on the subject. In its moral teaching, whether the poet intended his descriptions to be taken in their literal sense or interpreted in the way of parable, his creed has at least the essential elements of truth.

But now the visitors turn their steps towards the Elysian fields, and after duly hanging up the golden bough at the gate for Proserpine’s acceptance, they enter those abodes of the blest: {122} —

There are assembled the illustrious dead—warriors who have died for their country; priests of unstained life; bards who have never perverted their powers; all who have been benefactors of mankind,—

Shadows as they are, all the items of their happiness are material. The games of the palæstra, the song of the bard, the care of ghostly horses and ghostly chariots, form the interests of this world of spirits;—the interests of earth, without earth’s substantial realities. The poet found his imagination fail him, as it fails us all, when he tries to paint the details of an incorporeal existence.

Among these happy spirits the hero finds his father Anchises. He recognises and addresses him. Anchises had expected the visit, and receives him with such tears of joy as spirits may shed. But when Æneas strives to embrace him, the conditions of this spiritual world forbid it:—

The occupation of Anchises in these regions is much more philosophical than that which is assigned to the other shades. He is contemplating the unborn rulers of the Rome that is to be; the spirits, as yet incorporeal, which are soon to receive a new body, and so go forth into upper air. Deep in a forest lies the river Lethe, and a countless multitude of forms are seen thronging its banks, to drink of the water of forgetfulness. Oblivious of all their past lives, they will thus take their place once more, in changed bodies, among the inhabitants of earth. The poet’s adaptation of the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration is none of the clearest; but he signifies that, after the lapse of a thousand years in a kind of Purgatory below, these spirits are again summoned to play their part, in new bodies, upon earth. Anchises can read their destinies; and he points out to his son the shadowy forms, like the kings in ‘Macbeth,’ that are to be the kings and consuls of the great Roman, nation. First, those who shall reign in Alba—Silvius, that shall be born to Æneas in his new home, Capys, and Numitor; young Romulus, son of the war-god (he wears already the two-crested helmet in right of his birth), who shall transplant the sceptre to the seven-hilled city, and the kings that shall succeed him there. He shows him, too, those who shall make the future great names of the Republic—Brutus, the Decii, Camillus, Fabius, and the Scipios. But the centre of the picture is reserved for one great house: {124} —

The future glories of Rome are described in a grand and well-known passage, to the majestic rhythm of which no English translator seems able to do full justice. The poet contrasts the warlike genius of his countrymen with the softer accomplishments of their rivals:—

One personal sketch the poet’s art had reserved to the last. Anchises points out to his visitor the shade that is to be the great Marcus Marcellus, five times consul—the “Sword of Rome,” as Fabius was said to be its Shield, in the long wars with Carthage, and the conqueror of Syracuse. By his side moves the figure of an armed youth, tall and beautiful, but whose face is sad, and his eyes fixed on the ground. The company of shadows crowd round him, murmuring their admiration. Who is it? Æneas asks. It is the young Marcellus of the Empire, the hope and promise of Rome—the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus, and destined, as many thought, to be his successor. Unwillingly Anchises replies to his son’s question:—

He had died not long before, in his twentieth year, intensely lamented both by his family and the people.

The recital of the passage by the poet before his imperial audience had a more striking effect than even he himself could have expected. Octavia swooned away, and had to be removed by her attendants,—sending, however, magnificent presents afterwards to the poet for his eulogy on her dead son. [37] {127}

The biographers add, that Augustus commanded Virgil to read no further on that day, and that the poet replied he had already ended the subject. He has not much more to say in this Sixth Book. Anchises gives his son some prophetic intimations as to his future fortunes in Italy, and then escorts his visitors to the gates of Sleep.

The lines have been taken to mean that this visit to the shades was, after all, but a dream. {128}

CHAPTER VII.

THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM.

It has been said that this poem combines in some degree the characters both of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. Up to this point we have had the wanderings and adventures of the Trojan hero: he has been the Ulysses of his own tale. Henceforth we have a tale of the camp and the battle-field, of siege and defence, and personal combat; and we are reminded, in almost every passage, of the stirring scenes of the Iliad.

Æneas, on his ascent into upper air, rejoins his crew, and the fleet, setting sail from Cumæ, enters the noble harbour of Caieta. Not that the place had any such name as yet; but there the hero buries his old nurse, and gives her name to the spot. Once more embarking, they pass the promontory of Circe, and hear, as they sail by, the roars and yells of the unhappy prisoners, changed by the spells of the sorceress into the shape of brutes, whom she holds in bondage there. They listen and shudder, and bless the favouring gale which bears them away from such perilous neighbourhood. Then, with the morrow’s dawn, the fleet enters the {129} mouth of the Tiber. The picture of the galleys going up the stream is very beautiful:—

War is now the subject, and Homer is the model. Yet the Roman poet never shows his individual genius more strongly than in his treatment of the external scenery amidst which his action lies. He is still the worshipper of Nature, even while he sets himself to sing of battles, as he was in his Pastorals and Georgics. Homer tells us of the rivers of the Troad, Simois and Scamander—but it is only as they affect Hector or Achilles; his heart is all the while with the combat {130} ants, not with the flowing river. Not so Virgil: with him we feel the cool breeze, we see the glancing shadow of the trees upon the river, we hear the flutter of the startled birds, and the long plash of the oars in the water: we sail with Æneas on a party of pleasure, rather than a voyage of conquest.

Latium is reached at last. They moor their galleys under the trees which fringe the river-banks, and land to make their morning meal. It is but a scant one. Such wild fruits as they can collect are laid upon the wheaten cakes which they have brought with them, and when the fruit is finished they attack the cakes themselves. “Lo!” exclaims Iulus—“we are eating our tables!” Joyfully Æneas recognises, in the boy’s involuntary interpretation, the fulfilment of the curse of the Harpies, [38] and of certain strange words of his father Anchises, that when they were reduced to “eat their tables,” then they had found their destined home, and might begin to build their city. This, then, is their promised rest. He pours libations and offers prayers to the gods of the land, and peals of thunder from a cloudless sky seem to announce that the invocation is accepted.

As soon as the moon rises, scouts are sent out to explore the country. The king of the land is old Latinus, whose palace is near at hand. He has one only daughter, Lavinia, for whose hand all the neighbouring princes have long been suitors. Turnus of Ardea, the gallant chief of the Rutuli, tallest and handsomest of all the rivals, has the goodwill of the {131} queen-mother; the maiden’s own choice in such a matter being the last consideration which would enter into the thought of a Roman poet. When the Trojan chief has thus informed himself in some measure as to the localities, he sends a formal embassy to King Latinus’s court, carrying presents in token of goodwill. Meanwhile he busies himself in hurriedly marking out the boundaries of his new town, and fencing it round with an earthen rampart and a palisade.

The strangers are ushered into the presence of Latinus, where he sits in his ancestral palace, surrounded by the cedar statues of the demi-gods and heroes of his line.

He knows at once who his visitors are. Strange portents had long disturbed his court, and had warned him that his daughter must wed with no prince of Latian race: that a foreign host and a stranger bridegroom will come to claim her, and that the kings who shall spring from this union will spread the Latian name from sea to sea. He inquires the strangers’ errand courteously, and the Trojan Ilioneus, as spokesman of the embassy, thus makes reply:—

The king muses thoughtfully for a while: but he recognises the fulfilment of the auguries. Let Æneas come—he is welcome. If this be the bridegroom sent by heaven, he shall be more welcome still. He sends back the ambassadors in right royal fashion, all mounted on choice horses from his own stud, and with a chariot of honour to convey their chief to an interview.

Juno’s relentless hatred is stirred once more. Will neither fire nor sword kill, nor water drown, these accursed Trojans? Shall she, the Queen of Heaven, be baffled by a mortal like Æneas? If it be written in the fates that he is to wed Lavinia, her marriage-dower shall be paid in Trojan and Latian blood. Venus shall find that she, like Hecuba, has borne a firebrand—that Æneas, like Paris, shall light a flame that shall consume his nation. If the powers of heaven will not take her part, she will seek aid from {134} hell. She summons the Fury Alecto from the shades below, and bids her sow strife between the people of Latinus and their foreign visitors.

The Fury, rejoicing in her errand, seeks the chamber of Latinus’s queen, and darts into her breast one of the living serpents that serve her for coils of hair. Straightway the queen is seized with madness, and, after vainly trying to rouse her husband to oppose this foreign marriage, she rushes like a Bacchanal through the neighbouring villages, and calls upon the mothers of Latium to avenge her wrongs and rescue her daughter.

Next the Fury instils the same venom into the heart of Turnus, where he lies in his town of Ardea. He has been the champion of Latium against their enemies the Tuscans, and this is their gratitude—to give his promised bride to another! The young chief leaps from his couch, calls madly for his arms, and orders an instant march upon Latinus’s capital. He will expel these intruders at once, and demand the princess from her father by force of arms.

Meanwhile—still at the instigation of Alecto—the seeds of quarrel have been sown between the men of Latium and their Trojan guests. There is a tame deer which has been nursed in the house of Tyrrheus, the ranger of the royal forest,—a pet and favourite with all the country-folk.

In evil hour Ascanius, riding out with a hunting-party, gets his hounds upon the scent, and shoots the poor animal as it floats quietly down the river in the noon-day heat. It has just strength to carry the Trojan arrow in its body to its mistress’s door, and die moaning at her feet. [39] Tyrrheus and his household are mad with rage, and rouse the whole country-side against this wanton outrage, as they hold it, on the part of the strangers. The shepherd’s horn sounds out its summons to the whole neighbourhood; and the angry rustics, when they hear the story, seize axes, staves, and such rude weapons as come first to hand, and attack the young prince and his hunting-party. The Trojans come out from their intrenchment to rescue their friends, and the fray now becomes a regular battle, no longer fought with stakes and hunting implements, but with sword and spear. Blood is soon shed; the rustic weapons are no match for the Trojan steel; and young Almo, the ranger’s son, is carried home dead, amongst others. Almost a sadder loss is {136} that of the good old yeoman Galæsus, who yokes a hundred ploughs, and whose character gives him even more influence than his wealth. He is slain as he stands between the combatants, vainly pleading for peace.

The bodies are carried through the city streets, as in a modern revolution, by way of demonstration. There they make their dumb appeal to the passions of the people—

and the appeal is answered by a universal cry for “War! {137} ”

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES.

Turnus arrives amongst them from Ardea at this critical moment, and shouts fiercely for instant battle. In vain does King Latinus quote the oracle, and refuse to fight against the destinies. He will be no party to a bloody and useless war. But the impetuosity of an angry populace is too strong for him. Powerless to stem the popular current, he nevertheless delivers his own soul, and abdicates his sovereignty. The guilt of the blood that shall be shed must rest on those who stir the war. He warns Turnus that he may yet live to rue the part he has taken, when too late: for himself, death will soon put an end to all troubles.

By an old tradition,—handed on, as the poet will have it, from these old days of Latium to the Rome of Augustus,—the powers of War were held to be confined within the gates of Janus, the porter of the Immortals, only to be let loose by solemn act of state authority.

Since Latinus will not do his office, Juno in person—so the poet has it—descends from heaven, smites upon the barred portals, and “lets slip the dogs of war.”

The whole remaining portion of this seventh book is in Virgil’s most spirited style. And it is here that the harp of our northern minstrel answers best to Mr Conington’s touch. The gathering of the clans—for it is nothing else—the rapid sketches of the chiefs as they pass in succession with their array of followers—the details of costume—the legendary tale which the poet has to tell of more than one of them as he passes them in review—even the devices borne on the shields,—are all features in which Scott delighted as thoroughly as Virgil, and which his well-known rhythm suits better than any other which a translator could choose. Some few portions of this stirring warlike diorama must content the readers of these pages. The first who passes is the terrible chief of Agylla, who fears neither god nor man, and whose notorious cruelties have so exasperated his own people against him that he is now a refugee in the court of Turnus: {140} —

In the description of the next leader we have some notice of early heraldry:—

Coras and Catillus, twin-brothers from the old town of Tibur; Cæculus, from the neighbouring Præneste—reputed son of Vulcan, because said to have been found as an infant lying amidst the forge embers—whose following take the field with slings and javelins, each man with his left foot bare to give him firmer stepping-hold; Clausus the Sabine, from whom sprang the great house of the Claudii—some of whom assuredly were listening to the poet’s recitation; Halæsus, of the seed of Agamemnon, sworn foe to all who bear the hated name of Trojan; and a host of chiefs of lesser name and inferior powers, join the march. Messapus, the “horse-tamer,” brings with him a powerful band of retainers from many a city, who chant the deeds of their leaders as they go—

Nearly last of the warlike array, who all acknowledge him as their leader, comes the prince of the Rutuli, Æneas’s rival and enemy:—

He brings with him the largest host of all—a cloud of {143} well-armed footmen of various tribes, whose shields seem to cover the plain.

This pretty picture of Camilla, the Volscian huntress (whom Dryden very ungallantly terms a “virago”), vowed from her childhood to Diana—the prototype of Tasso’s Clorinda, but far more attractive—closes at once the warlike pageant and the book:—

The story of Camilla’s infancy, which is given us subsequently, is quite in accordance with this description. Her father, driven from his territory, like Mezentius, by an angry people, had carried his infant daughter with him in his flight. Hard pressed by his pursuers, he came to the banks of a river. To swim across the stream, though swollen by winter torrents, were easy for himself: but how to carry his child? “With brief prayer and vow to the huntress Diana, he tied her to a spear, and threw her across. The child alighted safely on the other side, and the father followed. Fed on mares’ milk, and exercised from infancy in the use of the bow, Camilla had grown up in the forest, vowed to maidenhood and to Diana. {145}

CHAPTER IX.

ÆNEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER.

The turn of events gives the Trojan chief much natural disquiet. All Latium is in arms against his little force of adventurers. He lies down within his lines to a disturbed and anxious rest, where he has a remarkable vision. A figure rises, wrapped in a grey mantle, with his brows crowned with reed. It is “Father Tiber,” the tutelary genius of the Rome that shall be. He bids his visitor be of good cheer: his coming has been long looked for. He renews, for his encouragement, the old oracle of Anchises:—

He will find allies, too, within reach. A colony from Arcadia have migrated to Italy under their king Evander, and have founded in the neighbouring mountains {146} a city called Pallanteum. He will reach the place by sailing up the stream, and from them, ever at feud with their Latian neighbours, he will get the aid he requires.

Æneas wakes from sleep, arms the crews of two of his galleys, and begins his voyage up the course of the friendly Tiber, who purposely calms his waves and moderates his current. The sow with her thirty young is soon found, and duly sacrificed, as the river-genius has warned him, to propitiate the wrath of Juno. Evander, with his son Pallas and all his people, is keeping high festival to Hercules, when the masts of the Trojan galleys are suddenly seen among the trees as they turn a bend of the river. The strangers are hailed by Pallas; and Æneas, bearing in his hand the olive-bough of a suppliant, is led by the young chief before his father. In a well-studied speech he claims kindred with the Arcadian hero, albeit a Trojan and Greek might at first sight seem natural enemies. Dardanus of Troy traced his descent from Atlas—Evander’s genealogy goes back to the same great ancestor. Their mutual enmity with the Latians should be also a bond of union: and lo! Æneas has shown his goodwill and confidence in thus placing himself fearlessly in Evander’s power. Evander is the Nestor of the Æneid;—somewhat given to long stories and reminiscences of his own youth. He had known his present visitor’s father well, in the years gone by, when the Trojan court had visited the country of Priam’s sister Hesionè. {147}

He tells his visitor also, at very considerable length, the story of Hercules slaying the monster Cacus, son of Vulcan, half man and half beast, whose breath was as flames of fire, and whose diet was human flesh—the prototype of the giants of later fiction. He points out also to his guest the local features of the country—for they are standing on the site which is to be Rome, and Pallanteum is to become the Palatine mount of future history. Whatever of mythical legend the poet mixed up in his topography, he knew the interest with which his patrician audience—for antiquarianism was almost as fashionable in the court of the Cæsars as it is now—would listen while, by the mouth of Evander, he dwelt on the old historic localities of the imperial city: the Carmental gate, named after the nymph who was Evander’s mother; the grove where Romulus in after-days made his first “Asylum” for the motley band whom he gathered round him; the {148} Tarpeian rock; the hill on which was to stand the Capitol; the Janiculum, with its Saturnian walls, the key of Rome’s defences. “Now”—says the poet, speaking in his own person of the glories of the great city in his own day,—

A league is made between the Trojans and their new friends. King Evander confesses that his own power is small, but Æneas has arrived at a fortunate conjuncture. The Etruscans of Agylla, who have just expelled their tyrant Mezentius for his cruelties, have determined to pursue him to the death. But they have been warned by their soothsayer to choose a foreign leader; and here they are at the gates of Pallanteum, come to beseech Evander to head their expedition. He is himself too old—his son Pallas too inexperienced; he at once presents to them Æneas as a heaven-sent leader. The omens are all favourable, and both troops and commander are well pleased. Æneas selects the best of his crew, whom Evander furnishes with war-horses; the rest he sends back in the galleys to bear the tidings of his own movements {149} to his son Iulus, and to charge him and the Trojans to keep close within their rampart, in case of attack during his absence. Taking command of his Etruscan allies, and followed by four hundred Arcadian horse under the young Pallas, whom his father gladly sends, as the youths of noble houses were sent in the days of knighthood, to learn the art of war under so great a captain, Æneas sets out on his march for Turnus’s capital. The old king does not part from his son without sad misgivings; he has trusted Æneas with more than his life.

Venus has not been neglectful of her son. She has persuaded Vulcan to forge for him weapons and armour of such sort as only the immortal smith can make. The fire-god can never resist her blandishments; and he goes down to the forge where the Cyclops are ever at work, in the caverns beneath the Lipari Islands, off the coast of Sicily. There is much business in hand there already. Some of the one-eyed workmen are forging bolts for Jupiter, composed of four elements,—

Some are finishing a war-chariot for Mars; others are shaping an ægis for Minerva—a shield of dragon’s scales and rings of gold. But their master bids them {150} put all these tasks aside; War, and Wisdom, and even Government itself, must be content to come to a standstill, until the behests of Beauty have been obeyed.

The idea of the Shield of Æneas, which Venus comes and lays before him while he sleeps, is of course borrowed directly from Homer’s Shield of Achilles. But the working out of it is quite original. Vulcan’s subject, in this case, is not, as in the Shield of the Iliad, an epitome of human life, but a prophetic history of Rome. The whole passage in which it is elaborately described is of remarkable beauty even to our modern taste, and upon a Roman’s ear and imagination must have had a wonderful effect. The story is told in eight (or perhaps nine) compartments, filled with the leading events in the great city’s existence. The two first contain the birth of Romulus, and the union of the Romans with the Sabines, which began with the seizure of the Sabine women:—

The doom of Mettius the Alban, and the keeping of the Tiber bridge by Horatius against Lars Porsena, occupy the two next compartments. Next comes the defence of the Capitol against the Gauls by Manlius:—

In the succeeding compartments are wrought the procession of the Salii with the sacred shields, and the regions of the world below, where Catiline lies in torment, while Cato has his portion with the just. And within the whole, round the umbo or boss of the shield, there runs a sea of molten gold in which sport silver dolphins, framing the centre design—the glories of Augustus:—

There the gods of Rome—conspicuous amongst whom is the archer Apollo, the tutelary deity of the house of Cæsar—put to flight the dog-headed Anubis, and the other monstrous gods of Egypt. There, too, is blazoned the “triple triumph” of Augustus, graced by a long procession of captives of all tribes, from Scythia to the Euphrates.

CHAPTER X.

TURNUS ATTACKS THE TROJAN ENCAMPMENT.

Æneas had been right in his forebodings of danger. Turnus has heard of the chief’s absence, and takes advantage of it to lead his force at once against the new-built fortification in which the rest of the Trojans lie. His first attempt is to burn their galleys, where they lie drawn ashore on the river-bank, close to their lines. But the ships are built of the sacred pines of Ida, the special favourites of the great goddess Cybele; and she has endued them, by favour of Jupiter, with the power of transformation into sea-nymphs when their work is done. No sooner do the torches of the enemy touch them than they slide off into the water, and in their new shape float out to sea. Even this portent does not scare the leader of the Rutuli. “Lo!” he cries—“Heaven takes from our enemies even their hopes of flight!” He does but draw his leaguer all the closer round the Trojan lines. Throughout the night the watch-fires blaze at close intervals, and captains of the guard, each with a hundred men, are set at their several posts to prevent the escape of the prey {154} before the general attack which is ordered for the morning.

But the Rutulian chieftains grow weary of a monotonous duty. They have store of wine in their camp, and they bring it out to cheer their night-watch. The sounds of noisy revelry soon rise from every station, until, as the revellers are gradually overpowered by sleep, all is lulled into unusual silence.

Two Trojan sentinels have watched anxiously every sound and movement in the enemy’s lines. They are Nisus and his young friend Euryalus,—late among the competitors in the foot-race—inseparable in peace or war. Nisus sees, as he thinks, an opportunity for stealing through the Rutulian guards, and bearing news to Æneas at Pallanteum of the peril in which his son and his companions lie. He is a keen sportsman, and knows the forest by-paths well. He confides his design to Euryalus, but has no notion of taking the youth with him to share the danger. He, on the other hand, insists upon accompanying his friend. The consent of Iulus and his elder counsellors is readily obtained. Let them but bring back Æneas to the rescue, and no rewards and honours shall be too great for the pair. Turnus’s horse and armour, Latinus’s royal demesne, captives of price, shall be the guerdon of Nisus: for Euryalus,—the prince will adopt him henceforth as his personal esquire and companion in arms. One only request the youth has to make. He has an aged mother in the camp—the only one of the elder matrons who refused to be left in safety with Acestes in Sicily, and whom no dangers {155} could separate from her son. Will the prince promise her solace and protection, should harm befall Euryalus on the way? The answer of Iulus is given in tears; he has no mother left, and the mother of Euryalus shall be to him as his own. He girds the youth with the sword from his own side, and the friends set out upon their perilous errand, escorted to the gates by the Trojan captains with prayers and blessings.

The enterprise might have succeeded, had not the two friends been tempted, by the helpless state in which they found the Rutulian camp, to slaughter their sleeping enemies as they passed. Rhamnes and Remus—names to be borne hereafter by more historic actors in the history of Rome—with a crowd of victims of lesser note, fall by the swords of Nisus and his companion. Euryalus even stops, with a young man’s vanity, to put on the glittering belt which he has stripped from one of his victims, and the helmet of the sleeping Messapus. Thus precious time is lost, and the moonlight streams upon them as they clear the Rutulian lines, and take the path, which Nisus knows, for Pallanteum.

A detachment of the enemy’s cavalry is on the march to join Turnus. The glimmer of the moonlight on Euryalus’s helmet—his new prize—betrays the friends as they try to steal by, and they are challenged at once by Volscens, the commander. They fly to the neighbouring wood; but the horsemen surround it, and though Nisus escapes them, it is only to find that his friend has fallen into their hands. He rushes back, and in the wild hope of {156} effecting a rescue, hides himself in the thicket, whence he launches two spears with fatal effect upon the party who are dragging along their prisoner. Enraged at the sudden attack, and seeing no enemy in the darkness, Volscens lays hold upon Euryalus, and vows revenge. Nisus rushes from his cover, and implores them to turn their swords on him, and to spare a youth whose only crime has been his friendship.

With the first dawn Turnus leads his forces to the attack—the heads of Nisus and Euryalus borne in front upon the points of spears, so savage is the Rutu {157} lian at the slaughter made by them amongst his sleeping comrades. The mother of Euryalus has heard the news, and sees the ghastly trophies from the ramparts, Iulus performs his promise, and the frantic woman is, under his personal directions, tenderly removed. He himself becomes the hero of the day. The archer’s craft, his love of which had led to the feud with the Latins, is turned to good service in the defence of the camp. Numanus, a brother-in-law of Turnus, is loudly taunting the Trojans in front of their lines:—

Iulus, after brief prayer to Jupiter, sends an arrow through the boaster’s temples. But Apollo, taking the shape of the boy’s guardian, Butes, warns him to be content with this first triumph: such weapons, says he of the silver bow, with that jealousy of mortals common to all pagan divinities, are not for boys.

Attack and defence are maintained vigorously on either side. Turnus is everywhere, dealing death where he comes. Mezentius, the infidel, tries to fire the palisade: Messapus, “the horse-tamer,” calls for ladders to scale it. A detachment of Volscians form a “tortoise,” by linking their shields like a penthouse over their heads, and under this cover try to plant their ladders; but the Trojans hoist a huge rock aloft, and dash it down with murderous effect upon {159} the roof of shields, crushing the bearers underneath. A tall wooden flanking-tower is set on fire by Turnus, and falls over, with its defenders, among the enemy. Two only survive the fall, one of whom—a slave-born warrior, who bears a blank shield—flings himself into the Rutulian ranks, and dies there fighting against overwhelming numbers. The other, Lycus, a swift and active runner, reaches the rampart of the intrenchment, and nearly succeeds in climbing over amongst his friends, when Turnus grasps him and bears him off, in spite of the missiles showered down by his sympathising comrades.

Pandarus and Bitias, two brothers of gigantic stature, have charge of one of the gateways of the intrenched camp. They throw the double gates wide open, and take their stand, one on either side, within. Fast as the more venturous spirits among the enemy rush through, they are either felled by the giant warders, or, if they escape these first, are slain inside by the other Trojans, who even carry the battle outside the gates. Word comes to Turnus of the increasing boldness of the enemy. He rushes to the rescue, slays right and left, and brings Bitias to the ground by hurling at him a huge falarica —a spear used in the great catapults which formed the artillery of those days. His brother Pandarus by main strength closes the great gates, shutting out some of his unfortunate friends as well as his enemies, and shutting in, to the dismay of the Trojans, their terrible enemy. When he sees Turnus, however, he rushes upon him to avenge his brother’s death; but the Rutulian cleaves him with his keen {160} falchion down to the chin. Then he turns on the dismayed defenders, and smites them right and left. Had he but bethought himself then to open the gates once more, and let his comrades in, so cowed were the Trojans at the moment that their defeat was certain. But all his heart is set on slaughter, and the Trojans, rallied by Mnestheus (the hero of the galley-race), soon find out that he is alone. Nevertheless he fights his way gallantly towards the river.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DEATH OF PALLAS.

The scene changes to Olympus, where Jupiter holds a council of the gods. He is as much troubled as in the Iliad with the dissensions in his own court, and holds the balance with difficulty between his queen and his daughter, each unscrupulous in their partisanship. Venus complains to him bitterly of the peril in which her son Æneas stands, by reason of Juno’s machinations. That goddess replies, with considerable show of reason, that Æneas has brought his troubles upon himself; that Latinus and Turnus and Lavinia were all going on peacefully before he came; and that—if the whole history of the Trojans must needs be discussed again—Venus herself, by her instrument Helen, was the mother of all the mischief. The king of the gods somewhat loses patience, and swears by the great river of Styx, with the awful nod which shakes Olympus, that Trojan and Rutulian shall even fight it out, and the Fates shall decide the question. So he dissolves the Olympian convocation.

The fight at the Trojan encampment is renewed in {162} the morning as fiercely as ever. But succours are on their way. The ships of the Etruscan leader Tarchon—the name which future kings of Rome were to bear with little alteration—have been sailing all night down the Tyrrhenian Sea, under their new-found chief Æneas. His galley leads the van; and with him in the stern—for he takes the helm himself—sits young Pallas, hearing him tell of the great deeds of old. The poet gives us something like a muster-roll of the Etruscan chiefs and their followings; more interesting perhaps to the ear of a Roman, who would catch up here and there some historical allusion to a place or family with which he claimed some connection, than to the modern reader, who can have no such sympathies. He gives us, too, the figure-heads from which the ships of the most noted captains took their names: the Tiger—a favourite, it would seem, to our English nautical taste even down to the present day—the Centaur, the Apollo, the Triton, the Mincius—the last-named from the river that flowed by Virgil’s own town of Mantua,—

Æneas has a strange rencontre in his night-voyage. Suddenly there rises round his galley a circle of water-nymphs—they are his own vessels, thus transformed, and their errand is to warn him of the danger in which {163} Iulus and his people lie. The sight which meets his eyes as he enters the Tiber at daybreak confirms their tidings: he sees the camp surrounded by enemies. Standing high upon his deck, he raises aloft the wondrous shield. The Trojans recognise in the signal the arrival of the help they so sorely need, and welcome it with prolonged shouts. Then their enemies note it also,—and the fight grows fiercer still. Tarchon—who seems to act as captain of the fleet under Æneas as admiral—looks out a good place to beach the galleys, bids the men give way with a will, and runs them well up, the forepart high and dry—all, except the gallant captain himself, whose vessel breaks her back and goes to pieces.

Turnus has left the command of the storming-party to his lieutenants, and gone down himself with a picked force to oppose Æneas’s landing. The Arcadian contingent, unused to fighting on foot and half in the water, get into confusion, and turn. Young Pallas gallantly rallies them, for the honour of his countrymen. He himself wins his spurs, in this his first field, by deeds which would become Æneas himself. One brief episode in his exploits is pathetic enough. There are fighting on the Rutulian side the twin-brothers Thymber and Larides:—

Young Lausus, the son of the tyrant Mezentius, is leading his men against Pallas, when a greater soldier interposes between the two young heroes. Turnus comes, and Pallas meets him eagerly—yet not without full consciousness of the inequality of the combat. He hurls his spear, so strongly and truly that it penetrates through Turnus’s shield, and slightly grazes his body. Then Turnus launches his weapon in return, and it goes right through the metal plates and tough ox-hide of the shield, and through the corselet of Pallas, deep into his breast, and the young prince falls to the ground writhing in his dying agony. Turnus stands astride of the corpse, and shouts triumphantly to the discomfited Arcadians. Yet there is something generous, according to the fierce code of the times, in his treatment of his dead enemy; he neither strips the armour, nor makes any attempt to prevent the Arcadians from carrying off the body. He bids them bear it home to King Evander for burial; only with a warning as to what fate awaits the allies of the foreigner:—

One trophy he takes from the person of the dead prince—a belt richly embroidered in gold with the tale of the daughters of Danaus. He girds it on over his armour, unconscious of the influence it will have upon his own fate. {165}

Æneas, in a different quarter of the field, hears of the death of his young esquire, and furiously hews his way towards Turnus. All who cross his path, veteran chiefs and young aspirants to glory, alike go down before him, and no appeal for mercy checks his hand. Eight prisoners he takes alive; but only with the intent to slay them as victims at the funeral pile of Pallas. But the rival champions do not meet as yet. Juno, fearing the issue of an encounter with Æneas in his present mood, cheats the eyes of Turnus with a phantom in his enemy’s shape. When Turnus meets it in the fight, the shape turns and flies towards the ships, pursued by him with bitter taunts on Trojan cowardice. One galley has her gangway down, and the false Æneas takes refuge on board. Turnus follows; when the moorings are loosed by an invisible hand, the galley floats down stream, and the Rutulian, raving and half determined to end his disgrace by suicide when he finds out how he has been cheated, is swept along the coast to his own town of Ardea.

Mezentius takes his place, and seconded by his son Lausus, spreads slaughter amongst the Trojan ranks. But a spear cast by the strong hand of Æneas lodges in the groin of the father, and the son gallantly rushes forward to cover his retreat. Æneas warns the youth to stand back—some thought, it may be, of Pallas makes him unwilling to take the younger life; but Lausus dares his fate, and the Trojan falchion, driven home through his light shield and broidered vest—

reaches the young chief’s heart. Æneas can be generous too. He will not strip the body; nay, he chides the cowardice of Lausus’s comrades, who hesitate to lift the dying youth, and himself raises him carefully from the ground, and gives him what comfort may be gathered from the fact that he has met his death “at Æneas’s hand.”

Mezentius hears of the death of his son as he lies by the river-bank bathing his wound. “With a cry of agony the father bewails his own crimes, which had thus brought death upon his innocent son. Crippled as he is, he calls for his good horse Rhæbus, who has ever hitherto borne him home victor from the battle. To-day they two will carry home the head of Æneas, or fall together. He charges desperately upon the Trojan, who is right glad to meet him. Thrice he wheels his horse round his wary enemy, hurling javelin after javelin, which the Vulcanian shield receives on its broad circumference, and retains until it looks, in the poet’s language, like a grove of steel. At last Æneas launches a spear which strikes Mezentius’s horse full in the forehead, and poor Rhæbus rears, and rolling over in his dying agonies, pins his master to the ground. Æneas rushes in upon the fallen champion, who, disdaining to ask quarter, bares his throat to the sword, and dies as fearlessly as he has lived. {167}

CHAPTER XII.

THE DEATH OF CAMILLA.

Æneas’s first care, after raising a trophy crowned with the arms of the slain Mezentius, is to send home to Evander the body of his son. A picked detachment escort it to Laurentum with all honour, wrapped in robes of gold—embroidered robes, wrought by the hands of the unfortunate Dido. The youth’s charger, Æthon, is led behind the bier, and his lance and helm are also borne in the procession; a custom which we have borrowed from the Romans, and retain to this day in our military funerals. Æthon weeps copious tears for his dead master; an incident not so entirely due to a poet’s imagination as it may seem, since the historian Suetonius tells us that some favourite horses of Julius Cæsar showed the same tokens of grief, and refused their food, just before his death. Another feature in the obsequies of Pallas is happily obsolete; the prisoners whom Æneas had taken alive with this express object follow behind the corpse, to be sacrificed at the funeral pile. There was nothing horrible to the polished courtiers of Augustus in such a thought. Even {168} in that age of refinement and civilisation, the emperor himself, after the defeat of Antony’s party at Perusia, was said to have slaughtered three hundred prisoners in honour of the great Julius, to whom altars were raised as a demi-god. True, the story was probably an invention of political opponents; but the mere fact that such a story could be invented and believed, marks strongly the cruel temper of the age. The old king receives back, in bitter grief, all that remains to him of the gallant son whom he had so lately sent forth to his first fatal field: and he charges Æneas, by the mouth of the envoys, to avenge him on his son’s murderer—for this he only waits to close his own eyes.

A truce of twelve days is agreed upon between the armies for the burial of their dead. The Latins have meanwhile sent an embassy to ask aid from Diomed, the hero of the Trojan war, who has come home and settled in Italy. He is paying the penalty of having wounded Venus in the battle before Troy, and is not allowed to reach his native Argolis. He warns the ambassadors that it is not good to war against the race from which Æneas comes—he, for his part, will have no more of it. At this crisis the Latins hold a council of war. Their king advises a compromise with the enemy—a grant of land on which to settle, or a new equipped fleet to carry the fortunes of Troy yet further on. Then there rises in the council one Drances, a better orator than warrior, who boldly proposes to give the princess Lavinia to the bridegroom whom the gods have sent. Or, let Turnus meet Æneas in single {169} combat—why are the rest to suffer for his pride? Is all Latium to be steeped in blood that Turnus may have a princess to wife? Turnus is not slow to reply. He will go forth to meet the Trojan willingly—will Drances follow him?

Even while they thus debate, Æneas has left his intrenchments by the Tiber, and is marching on the city. The queen with her daughter and the terrified women betake themselves to the temples, while Turnus sets himself to marshal his allies for the defence. While some are left to guard the walls, the whole force of cavalry ride out to meet the enemy. His best lieutenant for this service is the huntress Camilla. She leads her light Volscian horse, supported by Messapus with his heavier Latins, to meet the cavalry of Æneas, while Turnus with his squadron lays an ambuscade for him in a wooded valley. Camilla, with her fair staff of followers, Tulla and Tarpeia—names of ominous sound to Roman ears—deals slaughter in the enemy’s ranks in no feminine fashion.

But, fierce Amazon as she is, she is tempted by a woman’s love of ornament. There is a Trojan, one Chlorus, priest as well as man-at-arms, conspicuous for the brilliant accoutrements of his charger and himself. His horse is covered with chain-armour clasped with gold; and purple and saffron, and gold embroidery—the full splendours of Asiatic costume which he affects—mark him out as a tempting prey. It might have {170} been, the poet suggests, a desire to deck some of her national temples with such distinguished spoils,—or it might have been, he admits, only a woman’s fancy to wear them herself,—but she singles him out and chases him over the field, regardless of her own safety. Arruns the Tuscan has long sought his opportunity, and his spear reaches Camilla as she gallops in headlong pursuit of her gay enemy.

So dies Camilla; and the Volscian horse are so disheartened by her loss that they turn and fly to the city, so closely pursued by the Trojans that the gates have to be hastily closed, shutting out in many cases friends as well as foes. Turnus leaves the cover of the wood to attack Æneas, but night falls on the plain before their forces meet. {171}

CHAPTER XIII.

THE LAST COMBAT.

The spirit of the Latins is wellnigh broken—they feel that their cause is a failing one. And Turnus sees angry eyes bent upon him, as the cause of this ill-fated war. He will take all hazards, then, upon himself: there shall be no more blood shed of Latin or Rutulian—unless it be his own. He declares his intention to Latinus—he will meet Æneas in single combat. The old king is reluctant to allow it: Queen Amata, with tears and prayers, begs him to forego his resolution. Lavinia herself—such is the entire reticence of the maiden nature in epic story—speaks no word throughout the whole. But, as modern critics have long discovered, there is no question but that she has a sentiment for Turnus. She hardly could have a thought of Æneas, whom she had never seen. When she hears her mother’s appeal to the Rutulian prince, she does almost more than speak—she blushes, through her tears.

These last four lines, in Mr Conington’s version, read like a bit of Waller or Lovelace—and yet they are a fairly close translation of the original.

The challenge is sent to Æneas, and by him joyfully accepted. There shall be solemn truce between Trojan and Rutulian, while the rival champions do battle for the princess and the kingdom. Turnus, too, has one weapon of Vulcan’s forging—his father’s sword. But now, in his haste for the combat, he snatches up and girds on a blade of less divine temper. The lists are set between the two lines, and the oaths duly sworn. Æneas calls the gods to witness, that if the victory falls to Turnus, the Trojans on their part shall retire at once to Evander’s colony, and make war no more on Latium. Or even if he himself be the conqueror, he will not treat the Latins as a conquered race:—

But at once, before the rivals meet, by the instigation of Juno the truce is broken on the part of the Rutulians. They have a strong fear that their own champion, young and gallant as he is, is no equal {173} match in arms for the great Æneas: he is but moving to his death. So speaks the seer Tolumnius, and points to an omen on the river-bank: an eagle swooping down upon a flock of swans, and bearing one off in his talons, but put to flight when they turn in a body and pursue him. Æneas is the bird of prey—they are the unwarlike swans; let them but turn on him, and he too will fly. The seer is not content with the mere exposition of auguries; at once he hurls his own javelin into the Trojan ranks, and brings down his man. The fight speedily becomes general. Æneas, unarmed and bareheaded, rushes between the ranks, and is wounded by an arrow while he calls loudly on his own men to keep the truce. None knew, or cared to know, from whose hand the arrow came: for no man, says the poet, was ever heard to boast of such a coward’s shot.

Then, while Æneas is led to the camp, faint and bleeding, by his son lulus and his faithful Achates,—while the aged leech, Iapis, vainly tries all his skill upon the wound—for the barb will not quit the flesh,—Turnus spreads slaughter among the Trojan ranks. But only for a while. Venus drops a healing balsam into the water with which her son’s wound is being bathed; at once the arrow-head drops out, and the hero stands up sound and whole. Again he dons the Vulcanian armour, and re-enters the battle. The Rutulians give way before him, but he scorns to smite the fugitives, and seeks out only Turnus. And Turnus, pale and unnerved—for the presage of his fate lies heavy upon his soul—has no longer any mind to {174} meet him. It is very strange, to our modern notions of heroism, to see this infirmity of resolution in a tried soldier and captain like Turnus. But the heroes of these elder days lose heart at once when they feel their star is no longer in the ascendant. Turnus, like Hector in the Iliad, shrinks from the fate which he foresees.

Turnus has a sister, Juturna, a river-nymph and demi-goddess, a favourite of Juno, who has warned her if possible to save her brother. She now takes the place of his charioteer, and, while she drives rapidly over the field, takes care to keep him far from Æneas, who is calling loudly on him to halt and keep his compact of personal duel. At last the Trojan leader, baffled in this object, throws all his forces suddenly on the town, which lies almost at his mercy, stripped of its defenders, and bids his captains bring torches and scaling-ladders. A horseman, sorely wounded in the face, brings word of this new danger to Turnus as he is wheeling madly over the battle-field, and implores him to come to the rescue. He looks round towards the walls, and sees the flames already mounting. Then he rallies once more the old courage which had so strangely failed him. He sees his fate as clearly as before, but he will meet it. He knows his sister now, too late, in his charioteer; but he will fly no longer—“Is death such great wretchedness, after all?” He leaps from his chariot, as he knows, to meet it, lifts his hand, and shouts to his Rutulians to stay their hands, and the ranks of both armies divide before him as he makes towards {175} the part of the wall where Æneas is leading the attack.

Trojans, Latins, and Rutulians look on in awe and admiration as the two chiefs advance to try this last ordeal of battle. Each hurl their spears—without effect; then Turnus draws his sword, and they fight on hand to hand—

But the faithless sword which Turnus had so carelessly girded on instead of his father’s good weapon, though it has done him fair service on the crowd of meaner enemies, breaks in his grasp when he essays it on the {176} armour of Æneas, and thus helpless, he takes to flight, Æneas hotly pursuing.

A dark-plumaged bird is seen to hover round the devoted head of the Rutulian chief, half blinding him with its flapping wings. It is a Fury whom the king of the gods has sent in that shape to harass him. At length, in his flight, he finds a huge stone, which not twelve men of “to-day’s degenerate sons” could lift.

The Rutulian prince confesses his defeat, and asks his life, in no craven spirit, for the sake of his aged father—bidding Æneas think of old Anchises. The conqueror half relents, when his eyes fall upon something which makes that appeal worse than useless.

So closes the Æneid. Does any reader complain that the poet has not carried the story further? With the death of Turnus the catastrophe is complete. The princess of Latium is the prize of the victor; and the loves of Æneas and Lavinia are certainly not of that romantic character that we need care to follow them. The Trojans are settled in Italy—two races under one name. For so has Jupiter promised, as some indulgence to the feelings of his queen, that the old Latin name shall at least not be merged in the detested name of Trojan, and on such terms has the goddess reluctantly acquiesced in the settlement of the wanderers on Italian ground. Latins, not Trojans, are to rule {179} the world. Thus has the poet combined the indigenous glories of his country with the grand descent of its rulers from the old mythical heroes of Troy.

Yet there is a singular vein of melancholy to be traced in the words of Æneas, when he parts with his son before he goes to his last victory. They are perhaps the noblest words which the poet has put into his mouth, and they have something of the sadness which more or less affects all true nobility:—

The old tradition—well known, no doubt, to Virgil’s audience and first readers—was that the son, not the father, lived to enjoy the sovereignty of Latium. The hero of many vicissitudes was not held to have settled down into the peaceful rest which he looks forward to, throughout the poet’s story, as the end of all his campaigns and wanderings. The Rutulians, so said the legends, would not yet bow to the foreign usurper; and Æneas fought his last battle with them on the banks of the river Numicius, and then, like so many of the favourite heroes of a people—disappeared; either carried, living or dead, by some divine agency, to heaven, or caught away in the arms of the river-god. {180}

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

The Æneid has two drawbacks to its popularity as an epic poem amongst modern readers. One defect is common to all classical fiction—that there is no love-romance, properly so called, on the part either of the hero or of any other male character in the poem. Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil or Homer. We find in their verse none of those finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance, that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy, as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely of much older birth, has given now for centuries to poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. Poets had to sing as they could without it in Virgil’s days. Augustus and Octavia, as they listened to the courtly raconteur , would have opened their eyes wide with astonishment if he had sung to them of the devotion of Lancelot, as surely as they would have laughed at the purity of Galahad. They understood what love was, in their fashion; many ladies of the {181} court sympathised with Dido, no doubt. They understood well enough “the fury of a woman scorned.” They had seen a whole love-poem in real life, with the appropriate tragical dénouement , in Antony and Cleopatra. That was their notion of the grand passion. Probably the more shrewd among them looked upon Antony as a fool to prefer “love” to empire, and applauded Æneas’s “piety” in obeying the oracles of the gods, when they pointed to a new wife whose dowry was a kingdom. There was quite love enough in the action of the poem to suit their tastes, and at anything better or purer they would have only shrugged their fair patrician shoulders.

But there is a more serious defect in the interest of the Æneid, when presented to English readers. It is, that Æneas is no hero. All the defences and apologies which have been made for him are perfectly just, and perfectly unnecessary. He was a hero quite good enough for the court of Augustus, and so far quite suitable for Virgil’s purpose. Le Bossu was perfectly right when he contended that a hero, to be an object of legitimate interest, need not be a pattern of moral virtues. He might have gone further, and said that such paragons, who are plainly superior to the ordinary weaknesses of human nature, generally make very dull heroes indeed. Undoubtedly Æneas is a dutiful son, a respectable father, and, it may even be admitted, in spite of the unfortunate way in which he lost his wife, an exemplary husband. He spread his palms out to heaven in the most orthodox fashion on all occasions, and listened obediently to the message which the gods {182} were always sending him, to set up his home in Latium at all costs. All these estimable qualities are enough to furnish forth a dozen heroes. He is also ready to fight on all proper occasions; and as to the charge that he is equally ready to weep upon all occasions, which has been brought against him by one set of critics, and excused by others, both might have spared their pens; for it is a weakness which may be charged with equal truth upon most of the heroes, not only of classical fiction, but of classical history. It is not only that the chiefs of the Iliad weep without fearing any imputation against their manliness, but if we are to trust the unsensational chronicles of Cæsar, the whole rank and file of his army, even the veterans of the tenth legion—the “fighting division”—when first they heard that they were to be led against the tall and truculent-looking Germans, “could not restrain their tears,” and set to work to make their wills forthwith. The thing is unaccountable, except from some strange difference of temperament; for who can imagine a company of our veriest raw ploughboy recruits so behaving themselves? They might shake in their very shoes; they might even very probably run away: but crying and howling is not our way of expressing emotion, after childhood is past. But we are accustomed to read of such exhibitions of feeling in the natives of warmer climates, as, for instance, in the characters of Scripture; and an occasional burst of tears on Æneas’s part would not have unheroed him in our estimation one whit. It is his desertion of Dido which makes an irredeemable poltroon of him in {183} all honest English eyes. A woman and a queen receives the shipwrecked wanderer with a more than Oriental hospitality; loves him, “not wisely but too well”—and he deserts her. And then Mercury is made to remark, as a reason for Æneas getting away as quickly as possible, that “varium et mutabile semper fœmina !”—that the poor lady’s mood was changeable, forsooth! The desertion is in obedience to the will of the gods, no doubt. That explanation satisfied the critics of Augustus’s day, and he was to them, as Virgil calls him, the “pious” Æneas. To the modern reader, such an authorisation only makes the treachery more disgusting. The morality of English romance, ancient or modern, is by no means immaculate. Tristram and Iseult, still more Lancelot and Guinevere, are of very frail clay. The Sir Galahads ride alone; then, now, and always, in fiction as in fact. But a hero who could be false to a woman, and who was to find in that falsehood the turning-point to fame and success,—he might befit the loose tale with which the rybauder raised a laugh round the camp-fire, but he was the subject of no lay to which noble knight or dame would listen. The passion might be only pars amours , but it must be loyal. To keep such faith, once pledged, the hero might break all other laws, divine or human; but keep it he must. “ Loyaulté passe tout, et faulsseté honnet tout. ” The principle is by no means the highest, but it is incomparably higher than Virgil’s. And this makes Lancelot, in spite of his great crime, a hero in one sense, even to the purest mind, while the calculating piety of Æneas is revolting. {184}

The apologetic criticisms of some translators, who have felt themselves bound not only to give a faithful version of their author, but to defend his conception of a hero, are highly entertaining. Dryden, who was said by one of his malicious critics to have written “for the court ladies,” admits candidly that he knows they “will make a numerous party against him,” and that he “cannot much blame them, for, to say the truth, it is an ill precedent for their gallants to follow;” winding up with a satirical suggestion that they would do well at least “to learn experience at her cost.” But in spite of this special pleading, even Dryden cannot conceal from himself that his hero makes but a very poor figure in this part of the story; nor can he resist the humorous remark that he was more afraid of Dido, after all, than of Jupiter. “For you may observe,” says he, “that as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delayed it until the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly, that if he weighed not anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in the morning.” Delille says that Æneas “triumphed over his passions in order to obey the will of heaven;” and forgets to add, that the triumph would have been more complete and more creditable if it had been achieved somewhat earlier in the story. He notices the unfortunate fate of poor Creusa,—left to follow as she might, and never missed till the more fortunate survivors met at the rendezvous,—only to say how necessary it was for the purposes of the story to dispose of her somehow, if there was a new wife awaiting Æneas in Italy; and how the account (his own ac {185} count) of his affectionate search for her (with the usual tears) must have recommended him to Dido, and excused that poor lady for falling in love with him instantly! Rousseau has more truth in his epigram,—what could Dido expect better from a man who left his lawful wife to be burnt in Troy, and vowed he never missed her? Segrais, very like a Frenchman of the days of Louis XIV., thinks all would have been right if Æneas had but thrown a little more sentiment into the parting, and had bestowed upon Dido a few of those tears which were so ready upon less pathetic occasions. [42] As to the scene in the Shades, where the {186} false lover begins at last to make his tardy excuses and apologies, the French critic fairly throws up his brief for the defence, and contents himself with the suggestion that this was one of those passages in the poem with which Virgil himself was dissatisfied, and which he must certainly have intended to correct. But Æneas has, in fact, little personal character of any kind. He is only what Keble calls him, “a shadow with a mighty name;” and that writer even goes so far as to suggest, that in the curse imprecated upon him by Dido, and her treatment of him in the Shades, we may see an intimation that the poet intended the abasement of his hero. [43]

Turnus will always find more favour in the eyes of modern readers than his rival. Our English sympathies do not run at all with the foreign adventurer who comes between him and his promised bride, and who claims both the lady and the kingdom by virtue of a convenient oracle. Mr Gladstone’s may perhaps be only an ingenious fancy, that Turnus was really the favourite with the poet himself; that although he made Æneas victorious, as was required, in order to carry out the complimentary reference of the Roman origin to Troy, still the young chief of native Italian blood, maintaining a gallant struggle for his rights against gods and men, and only conquered at the last by supernatural force and fraud, was purposely held out to popular admiration. But we must, at least, feel sympathy with him as utterly over-weighted in the final struggle by the superior strength and immortal {187} arms of his adversary, and the flapping of the Fury’s awful wings.

To trace the influence of the Æneid upon modern poetry would require a separate treatise. Spenser is full of Virgil. Tasso’s great poem is in many passages the Æneid made Christian, with its heroes transplanted from the days of Troy to those of the Crusades. Dante borrows less from him, though with an intenser reverence he takes him for his “master” and his guide. In his mind, indeed, Virgil seems to have held a place midway, as it were, between the Pagan and the Christian life. If Beatrice represents, as has been said, the heavenly “Wisdom,” Virgil is, in his allegory, the human intellect at its best and purest, which comes as near heaven as unassisted humanity may; for he is the guide who only quits the Christian poet when he is close to the gates of Paradise.

The “Sortes Virgilianæ” were long in use, often as a fashionable pastime, sometimes in graver earnest: the inquirer opened the volume at random, and took for the answer of fate the first few lines which caught his eye. In the times of the later Roman emperors, they ranked among the most popular, and perhaps the least objectionable, of the many superstitious practices which were then so prevalent. The Emperor Severus was said to have been encouraged in his boyhood by the very words which had such an effect on Octavia—“Thou shalt be our Marcellus!” And when subsequently he showed a taste rather for elegant accomplishments than for military renown, again the “Sortes,” consulted for him by his {188} father, gave the well-known lines already quoted, [44] in which the glory of the Roman is pronounced to be that of the conqueror, not of the student or the artist. The superstition held its ground, through the middle ages, down to times very near our own. The story rests upon no mean authority, that Charles I. once tried the oracle with a startling result. He was in the Bodleian Library while the Court lay in Oxford, and was there shown a splendid edition of Virgil. Lord Falkland suggested to him sportively that he should try the “Sortes.” The lines upon which the king opened are said to have been these, as they stand in Mr Conington’s version:—

It was a gloomy oracle; and Falkland, anxious to remove the impression, tried his own fortune. He lighted on Evander’s lament over his son Pallas:—

A few months afterwards Falkland fell at the battle of Newbury, barely thirty-four years old. {189}

There has always been a mystical school of classical interpretation, who see in the Æneid, as in the Iliad and Odyssey, a tissue of allegory from first to last. Not content with identifying the Trojan chief with Augustus, they found a double meaning in every character and every legend in the poem. Bishop Warburton, in his well-known ‘Divine Legation,’ expended a great amount of learning and research to prove that in the Descent to the Shades in the sixth book we have a sketch, scarcely veiled, of the great Eleusinian mysteries. Others saw in Dido the love-passion and the fate of Cleopatra, Antony in Turnus, the flight of Marius to the marshes in the person of Sinon, the miserable end of Pompey in Priam—

It is impossible to enjoy either Homer or Virgil, if their text is to be “improved” at every step after this sort. Augustus and Octavia looked to the poet for a tale of the olden time, and he told it well. No doubt he threw in graceful compliments to Rome and its ruler; but to have to guess at some hidden meaning all along would have been far too severe a tax on the imperial audience, and would certainly not heighten the enjoyment of modern readers.

One would be glad to know what was the view that was really taken by that profligate court on the one hand, and by the poet himself on the other, of the theological machinery of the poem; those powerful and passionate Genii who pull the wires of the human puppets to gratify their own preferences and hatreds, {190} and are themselves the slaves of an awful Fate which overrides them all. Wherever Justice had fled from the earth, as the legend ran, in those pagan days, she had not found refuge in heaven. The human virtues which Virgil gives his heroes were no copies of anything celestial. Such lessons as the “gods” taught were chiefly perfidy and revenge. For men of intellect and of a pure life—and such is credibly said to have been Virgil’s—the only salvation lay in utter unbelief of such a creed; or, at most, a stoical submission to that Unknown Fate which ruled all things human and divine. But even when the forms and creeds of religion had become a mockery, the rule of right, however warped, was recognised—in fiction, if not in fact: and Virgil, though for some reason he declined to paint the true hero at full length, has enabled us to pick out his component parts from his sketches of a dozen characters.

END OF VIRGIL.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

               Tros.
                 |
    +————————————+———————————+
 Ilus.                   Assaracus.
   |                         |
Laomedon.                  Capys.
   |                         |
 Priam.                   Anchises.
                             |
                           Æneas.