Plate LX. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF ZEUS
They are often engaged in praising Gallus or Varus or Pollio, the young poet’s patrons. It was the success of the Bucolics which led Mæcenas to choose Vergil for carrying out an important literary project. A poet was required to sing the praises of country life in such a manner as to encourage the movement “back to the land,” which Augustus was trying to foster. In his Georgics Vergil frankly admits that he is fulfilling the “hard commands” of Mæcenas. The Georgics are a treatise on husbandry, but here again it is not first-hand work. We are informed that Vergil’s poetry had regained him his paternal farm at Mantua. But the Georgics were not written on the farm. They were diligently composed in a library at Naples. They arose from the study of Aratus and Hesiod, not from memory of Italian life, and even in those gorgeous passages where Vergil is praising a country life, it is not of the Italian farm that he is thinking but of literary hills and dells in Greece. I think it is clear that the poet took little pleasure in his task. He very gladly digresses from the description of soils and mattocks to tell us a charming piece of Greek mythology or to introduce a literary reference. Octavian had been a “powerful god” already in the Eclogues before he became Augustus. Now the only question is which of the stars shall receive him after death. “Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more than a fair share of heaven.” Vergil pauses to depict the triumph of Augustus—Nile flowing with blood, Asia tamed, the Niphates driven back, the Parthian conquered. No literary catchword was ever more absurd than the phrase “rustic of genius” applied to Vergil. As soon as he had the means, he gladly turned his back upon his ancestral farm to become a student and a courtier. Nevertheless Mæcenas was magnificently served. Vergil had already forged a weapon of matchless music and eloquence in his surging hexameters, and he used it to depict the honest joys of rustic toil, the laborious tranquillity of the farm, the beauty and interest of nature. He was instantly recognised by Augustus as the destined laureate of the new Rome.
Plate LXI. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF BACCHUS, INTERIOR
The Æneid was solemnly devoted to the altar of Rome and Augustus. Homer was the Greek model here, as Theocritus had been for the Bucolics and Hesiod for the Georgics. The origin of Rome was to be linked on to the Trojan story as had already been done by the inventive Greeks. Æneas had fled from Troy to Italy, and had left his son Julus (the eponymous hero of the Julian house) to found an heroic kingdom in Italy long before the genuine Roman heroes. Thus the humble native story of Romulus was superseded. Piety was to be the great virtue honoured by this poem, for piety towards the memory of Julius Cæsar was the principal title upon which Augustus rested his claim to honour. There were other analogies, perhaps. Dido most probably suggested Cleopatra to the Roman reader. But it is to the praise of Rome, to the glorification of that sense of filial duty which the Romans called “piety” that the great epic is mainly devoted. Here again, though the eloquence is so splendid and the versification so majestic, the Æneid like its predecessors is a work of the study quite clearly written to order. The plot is carelessly constructed. Æneas himself, with all his piety, never for a moment lives. The religious motives which led to his desertion of Dido barely satisfy us. Æneas makes the speeches, and the gods continually intervene when danger threatens him. Our sympathies are generally with the enemy, with Turnus or Camilla. Æneas is as chilly and statuesque as Augustus himself.
It is in the famous Sixth Book, which tells of the descent to Hades, that the praise of Rome is most elegant and most explicit. Here we are shown the heroes of Roman history side by side with the heroes of the Greeks, and here the young Marcellus, lately dead, is introduced in those immortal and touching lines which caused Octavia his mother to swoon when the poet recited them. Here too the poet pronounces in very significant language the Roman idea of the destiny of his race.
excudent alii spirantia mollius æra,
credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uoltus,
orabunt causas melius, cælique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hæ tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.
“Others shall mould, I doubt not, the breathing bronze more delicately and draw the living features out of marble, others shall plead causes more eloquently, map out the wanderings of the sky with the rod, and tell the risings of the stars. Thou, Roman, forget not to govern the nations under thy sway. These shall be thy arts: to impose the rule of peace, to spare the subject, and defeat the proud.” In these lines we hear the proud Philistinism of an imperial people. This is the genuine Roman (dare I add “British”?) attitude towards the arts and sciences. They are for others to provide, for Greeks and Egyptians. Even oratory, the highest achievement of the Roman genius in literature, is thus scornfully thrown to the foreigner. The Romans knew that they could buy or seize better statues than they could carve: their task was to conquer and govern—not an ignoble art.
The Æneid is explicitly a national laureate poem. The poet seeks to enshrine all Roman life in his pages, to epitomise Roman history and to introduce allusions to characteristic pieces of myth and ritual. He inserts whole lines of Ennius or Lucretius when they please him. They are superseded and replaced. Just like Dryden, he feels that he is the heir of the ages. The extraordinary popularity which Vergil attained even in his own lifetime grew in the course of a few centuries almost into a cult. His tomb became an object of pilgrimage; in early Christian times he became a prophet and in the Middle Ages a wizard. The gentleness and purity of his personal life played their part in the creation of this strange Vergilian legend.