Æneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes "majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the Æneid reflects the terror of that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally on the temper of the West. Orontes—to borrow Juvenal's phrase—was already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality, the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.
It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness. It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods" were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world.
A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.
"Dî tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
Præmia digna ferant!"
The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of Æneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine order. Man was greater than his fate:—
"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,
Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."
There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which Æneas addresses himself to his final combat:—
"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis."
But the "dîs aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid. We close it as we close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of Æneas, but his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of Æneas becomes Rome.