Note VI.
A new Marcellus shall arise in thee.—P. 423.
In Virgil thus:
Tu Marcellus eris.
How unpoetically and badly had this been translated, Thou shalt Marcellus be! Yet some of my friends were of opinion, that I mistook the sense of Virgil in my translation. The French interpreter observes nothing on this place, but that it appears by it, the mourning of Octavia was yet fresh for the loss of her son Marcellus, whom she had by her first husband, and who died in the year ab urbe conditâ, 731; and collects from thence, that Virgil, reading this Æneïd before her in the same year, had just finished it; that, from this time to that of the poet's death, was little more than four years; so that, supposing him to have written the whole Æneïs in eleven years, the first six books must have taken up seven of those years; on which account, the six last must of necessity be less correct.
Now, for the false judgment of my friends, there is but this little to be said for them; the words of Virgil, in the verse preceding, are these,
----Siquâ fata aspera rumpas—
as if the poet had meant, "if you break through your hard destiny, so as to be born, you shall be called Marcellus:" but this cannot be the sense; for, though Marcellus was born, yet he broke not through those hard decrees, which doomed him to so immature a death. Much less can Virgil mean, "you shall be the same Marcellus by the transmigration of his soul:" for, according to the system of our author, a thousand years must be first elapsed, before the soul can return into a human body: but the first Marcellus was slain in the second Punic war; and how many hundred years were yet wanting to the accomplishing his penance, may with ease be gathered, by computing the time betwixt Scipio and Augustus. By which it is plain, that Virgil cannot mean the same Marcellus; but one of his descendants, whom I call a new Marcellus, who so much resembled his ancestor, perhaps in his features and his person, but certainly in his military virtues, that Virgil cries out, quantum instar in ipso est! which I have translated,
How like the former, and almost the same!