Here, as in the Georgics, Cato and Varro live in Virgil, but with far less of narrow literalness, with far more of rich enthusiasm. We can well believe that the Aeneid was a poem after Augustus's heart, that he welcomed with pride as well as gladness the instalments which, before its publication, he was permitted to see, [67] and encouraged by unreserved approbation so thorough an exponent of his cherished views. To him the Aeneid breathed the spirit of the old cult. Its very style, like that of Milton from the Bible, was borrowed in countless instances from the Sacred Manuals. When Aeneas offers to the gods four prime oxen (eximios tauros) the pious Roman recognised the words of the ritual. [68] When the nymph Cymodoce rouses Aeneas to be on his guard against danger with the words "Vigilas ne deum gens? Aenea, vigila!" [69] she recalls the imposing ceremony by which, immediately before a war was begun, the general struck with his lance the sacred shields, calling on the god "Mars, vigila!" These and a thousand other allusions caused many of the later commentators to regard Aeneas as an impersonation of the pontificate. This is an error analogous to, but worse than, that which makes him represent Augustus; he is a poetical creation, imperfect no doubt, but still not to be tied to any single definition.
Passing from the religious to the moral aspect of the Aeneid, we find a gentleness beaming through it, strangely contradicted by some of the bloody episodes, which out of deference to Homeric precedent Virgil interweaves. Such are the human sacrifices, the ferocious taunts at fallen enemies, and other instances of boasting or cruelty which will occur to every reader, greatly marring the artistic as well as the moral effect of the hero. Tame as he generally is, a resigned instrument in the divine hands, there are moments when Aeneas is truly attractive. As Conington says, his kindly interest in the young shown in Book V. is a beautiful trait that is all Virgil's own. His happy interview with Evander, where, throwing off the monarch, he chats like a Roman burgess in his country house; his pity for young Lausus whom he slays, and the mournful tribute of affection he pays to Pallas, are touching scenes, which without presenting Aeneas as a hero (which he never is), harmonise far better with the ideal Virgil meant to leave us. But after all said, that ideal is a poor one for purposes of poetry. Aeneas is uninteresting, and this is the great fault of the poem. Turnus enlists our sympathy far more, he is chivalrous and valiant; the wrong he suffers does not harden him, but he lacks strength of character. The only personage who is "proudly conceived" [70] is Mezentius, the despiser of the gods. The absence of restraint seems to have given the poet a more masculine touch; the address of the old king to his horse, his only friend, is full of pathos. Among female characters Camilla is perhaps original; she is graceful without being pleasing. Amata and Juturna belong to the class virago, a term applied to the latter by Virgil himself. [71] Lavinia is the modest maiden, a sketch, not a portrait. Dido is a character for all time, the chef d'oeuvre of the Aeneid. Among the stately ladies of the imperial house —a Livia, a Scribonia, an Octavia, perhaps a Julia—Virgil must have found the elements which he has fused with such mighty power, [72] the rich beauty, the fierce passion, the fixed resolve. Dido is his greatest effort: and yet she is not an individual living woman like Helen or Ophelia. Like Racine, Virgil has developed passions, not created persons. The divine gift of tender, almost Christian, feeling that is his, cannot see into those depths where the inner personality lies hidden. Among the traditional characters few call for remark. The gods maintain on the whole their Homeric attributes, only hardened by time and by a Roman moulding. Venus is, however, touched with magic skill; it may be questioned whether words ever carried such suggestions of surpassing beauty as those in which, twice in the poem, her mystic form [73] is veiled rather than pourtrayed. The characters of Ulysses and Helen bear the debased, unheroic stamp of the later Greek drama; the last spark of goodness has left them, and even his careful study of Homer, seems to have had no effect in opening the poet's eyes to the gross falsification. Where Virgil did not feel obliged to create, he was to the last degree conventional.
A most interesting feature in the Aeneid—and with it we conclude our sketch—is its incorporation of all that was best in preceding poetry. All Roman poets had imitated, but Virgil carried imitation to an extent hitherto unknown. Not only Greek but Latin writers are laid under contribution in every page. Some idea of his indebtedness to Homer may be formed from Conington's commentary. Sophocles and the other tragedians, Apollonius Rhodius and the Alexandrines are continually imitated, and almost always improved upon. And still more is this the case with his adaptations from Naevius, Ennius, Lucretius, Hostius, Furius, &c. whose works he had thoroughly mastered, and stored in his memory their most striking rhythms or expressions. [74] Massive lines from Ennius, which as a rule he has spared to touch, leaving them in all their rugged grandeur planted in the garden of his verse, to point back like giant trees to the time when that garden was a forest, bear witness at once to his reverence for the old bard and to his own wondrous art. It is not merely for literary effect that the old poets are transferred into his pages. A nobler motive swayed him. The Aeneid was meant to be, above all things, a National Poem, carrying on the lines of thought, the style of speech, which National Progress had chosen; it was not meant to eclipse so much us to do honour to the early literature. Thus those bards who like Naevius and Ennius had done good service to Rome by singing, however rudely, her history, find their Imagines ranged in the gallery of the Aeneid. There they meet with the flamens and pontiffs unknown and unnamed, who drew up the ritual formularies, with the antiquarians and pious scholars who had sought to find a meaning in the immemorial names, [75] whether of places or customs or persons; with the magistrates, moralists, and philosophers, who had striven to ennoble or enlighten Roman virtue; with the Greek singers and sages, for they too had helped to rear the towering fabric of Roman greatness. All these meet together in the Aeneid as if in solemn conclave, to review their joint work, to acknowledge its final completion, and predict its impending fall. This is beyond question the explanation of the wholesale appropriation of others' thought and language, which otherwise would be sheer plagiarism. With that tenacious sense of national continuity which had given the senate a policy for centuries, Virgil regards Roman literature as a gradually expanded whole; coming at the close of its first epoch, he sums up its results and enters into its labours. So far from hesitating whether to imitate, he rather hesitated whom not to include, if only by a single reference, in his mosaic of all that had entered into the history of Rome. His archaism is but another side of the same thing. Whether it takes the form of archaeological discussion, [76] of antiquarian allusion, [77] of a mode of narration which recalls the ancient source, [78] or of obsolete expressions, forms of inflection, or poetical ornament, [79] we feel that it is a sign of the poet's reverence for what was at once national and old. The structure of his verse, while full of music, often reminds us of the earlier writers. It certainly has more affinity with that of Lucretius than with that of Lucan. A learned Roman reading the Aeneid would feel his mind stirred by a thousand patriotic associations. The quaint old laws, the maxims and religious formulae he had learnt in childhood would mingle with the richest poetry of Greece and Rome in a stream flowing evenly, and as it would seem, from a single spring; and he who by his art had effected this wondrous union would seem to him the prophet as well as the poet of the era. That art, in spite of its occasional lapses, for we must not forget the work was unfinished, is the most perfect the world has yet seen. The poet's exquisite sense of beauty, the sonorous language he wielded, the noble rivalry of kindred spirits great enough to stimulate but not to daunt him, and the consciousness of living in a new time big with triumphs, as he fondly hoped, for the useful and the good, all united to make Virgil not only the fairest flower of Roman literature, but as the master of Dante, the beloved of all gentle hearts, and the most widely- read poet of any age, to render him an influential contributor to some of the deepest convictions of the modern world.
APPENDIX.
Note I.—Imitations of Virgil in Propertius, Ovid, and Manilius.
The prestige of Virgil made him a subject for imitation even during his lifetime. Just as Carlyle, Tennyson, and other vigorous writers soon create a school, so Virgil stamped the poetical dialect for centuries. But he offered two elements for imitation, the declamatory or rhetorical, which is most prominent in his speeches, and in the second and sixth books; and detached passages showing descriptive imagery, touches of pathos, similes, &c. These last might he imitated without at all unduly influencing the individuality of the imitator's style. In this way Ovid is a great imitator of Virgil; so to a less extent are Propertius, Manilius, and Lucan. Statius and Silius base their whole poetical art on him, and therefore particular instances of imitation throw no additional light on their style. We shall here notice a few of the points in which the Augustan poets copied him:—
(1) In Facts.—Beside the great number of early historical points on which he was followed implicitly, we find even his errors imitated, e.g. the confusion which perhaps in Virgil is only apparent between Pharsalia and Philippi, has, as Merivale remarks, been adopted by Propertius (iv. 10,40), Ovid (M. xv, 824), Manilius (i. 906), Lucan (vii. 854), and Juvenal (viii. 242); not so much from ignorance of the locality as out of deference to Virgilian precedent. The lines may be quoted—Virgil (G. i. 489), Ergo inter se paribus concurrere telis Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi; Propertius, Una Philippeo sanguine inusta nota; Ovid, Emathiaque iterum madefient caede Philippi; Manilius, Arma Philippeos implerunt sanguine campos. Vixque etiam sicca miles Romanus arena Ossa virum lacerosque prius superastitit artus; Lucan, Scelerique secundo Praestatis nondum siccos hoc sanguine campos; Juvenal, Thessaliae campis Octavius abstulit … famam…. This is analogous to the way in which the satirists use the names consecrated by Lucilius or Horace as types of a vice, and repeat the same symptoms ad nauseam, e.g. the miser who anoints his body with train oil, who locks up his leavings, who picks up a farthing from the road, &c. The veiled allusion to the poet Anser (Ecl. ix. 36) is perhaps recalled by Prop. iii. 32, 83, sqq. So the portents described by Virgil as following on the death of Caesar are told again by Manilius at the end of Bk. I. and referred to by Lucan (Phars. i.) and Ovid. Again, the confusion between Inarime and ein Arimois, into which Virgil falls, is borrowed by Lucan (Phars. v. 101).
(2) In Metre.—As regards metre, Ovid in the Metamorphoses is nearest to him, but differs in several points, He imitates him—(a) in not admitting words of four or more syllables, except very rarely, at the end of the line; (b) in rhythms like vulnificus sus (viii. 358), and the not unfrequent spondetazontes; (c) in keeping to the two caesuras as finally established by him, and avoiding beginnings like scilicet omnibus | est, &c. In all these points Manilius is a little less strict than Ovid, e.g. (i. 35) et veneranda, (iii. 130) sic breviantur, (ii. 716) altribuuntur. He also follows Virgil in alliteration, which Ovid does not. They differ from Virgil in—(a) a much more sparing employment of elision. The reason of this is that elision marks the period of living growth; as soon as the language had become crystallised, each letter had its fixed force, the caprices of common pronunciation no longer influencing it; and although no correct writer places the unelided m before a vowel, yet the great rarity of elision not only of m but of long and even short vowels (except que) shows that the main object was to avoid it, if possible. The great frequency of elision in Virgil must be regarded as an archaism. (b) In a much lesser variety of rhythm. This is, perhaps, rather an artistic defect, but it is designed. Manilius, however, has verses which Virgil avoids, e.g. Delcetique sacerdotes (i. 47), probably as a reminiscence of Lucretius.
Imitations in language are very frequent. Propertius gives ah pereat! qui (i. 17, 13), from the Copa. Again, Sit licet et saxo patientior illa Sicano (i. 16, 29), from the Cyclopia saxa of Aeneid, i. 201; cum tamen (i. 1, 8) with the indic. as twice in Virgil; Umbria me genuit (i. 23, 9), perhaps from the Mantua me genuit of Virgil's epitaph. These might easily be added to. Ovid in the Metamorphoses has a vast number of imitations of which we select the most striking; Plebs habitat diversa locis (i. 193); Navigat, hic summa, &c. (i. 296); cf. Naviget, haec summa est, in the 4th Aeneid; similisque roganti (iii. 240), amarunt me quoque Nymphae (iii. 454); Arma manusque meae, mea, nate, potentia, dixit (v. 365); Heu quantum haec Niobe Niobe distabat ab illa (vi. 273); leti discrimine parvo (vi. 426); per nostri foedera lecti, perque deos supplex oro superosque neosque, Per si quid merui de te bene (vii. 852); maiorque videri (ix. 269). These striking resemblances, which are selected from hundreds of others, show how carefully he had studied him. Of all other poets I have noticed but two or three imitations in him, e.g. multi illum pueri, multae cupiere puellae (iii. 383), from Catullus; et merito, quid enim…? (ix. 585) from Propertius (i. 17). Manilius also imitates Virgil's language, e.g. acuit mortalia corda (i. 79), Acherunta movere (i. 93), molli cervice reflexus (i. 334), and his sentiments in omnia conando docilis solertia vicit (i. 95), compared with labor omnia vicit improbus: invictamque sub Hectore Troiam (i. 766), with decumum quos distulit Hector in annum of the Aeneid; cf. also iv. 122, and litora litoribus regnis contraria regna (iv. 814); cf. also iv. 28, 37.
NOTE II.—On the shortening of final o in Latin poetry.