Of Brauron in the rocks, the Key shalt bear.
Of Artemis. There shalt thou live and die,
And there have burial.“[[33]]
[33]. From Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Iphigenia in Tauris (George Allen & Co. Ltd.).
Virgil: Dido
Nineteen years before the birth of Christ the great Roman poet Virgil died, leaving amongst his papers an epic poem which had been the work of many years. Both in life and art this poet of the Augustan Age had a very high ideal; and because he was conscious of defects in his work: because his last illness came before he was able to put the finishing touches upon it, he begged that it should be burned. But the emperor Augustus interposed. Some parts of the poem were already known and loved in the circle of Virgil’s friends, of whom the emperor was one. They knew its fine theme—the founding of the Roman State by its legendary ancestor Æneas; and having already some foretaste of its beauty and charm and strong patriotic appeal, it seemed that the destruction of the poem would mean an immense and irreparable loss. So the Emperor decided that it should be preserved, and directed Virgil’s executors to edit it.
The poem is of course the Æneid, and Dido is its heroine. Like the Greek epics, it is an authentic voice of the ancient world; but of an Age, a Race and a Civilization vastly different from theirs. It is quite frankly fashioned in the Homeric form, and its hero is one of the Trojan chiefs who fled overseas to Italy, to re-establish his race there at the command of the gods. It actually brings Æneas at one point of his wanderings within three months’ time of an incident in the Odyssey: it shows us Andromache still mourning for Hector, and the gods still at enmity over the old feud between Greek and Trojan. But all these links with the earlier epics, and many others, subtler or more obvious, are merely formal. In spirit there is as wide a severance as we know to exist in actual time. The Æneid, with its humane, philosophic and cultured poet, belongs to a state of society many hundreds of years later than the Iliad and Odyssey. And although it is a mistake to regard the earlier poems as really ‘primitive,’ they represent an age which, because it was relatively simpler and less self-conscious, seems youthful and buoyant by comparison.
The outward similarity and the fundamental contrast between Homer and Virgil make a fascinating subject on which to linger; and one aspect at least we must just glance at, because of its bearing on Dido’s story. It is that added element of purpose in the Æneid which perhaps includes in itself or is the ultimate cause of all the other points of difference from the Greek poems. The Æneid was conceived with a deep and serious aim, and composed with infinite care. It did not originate, as perhaps the Iliad and Odyssey may have done, in the almost spontaneous lays of wandering minstrels, for the delight and honour of princely hosts. It was designed from the first to represent the divine birth of the Latin race, the gradual uprising of the Roman state, its long struggle with barbarism and its mission to civilize the Western world—all as the ordinance of the supreme deity.
From the very beginning of the poem its purpose is clear upon the face of it; and one of the most important results is the creation of a new type of hero. Æneas is not an ardent young soldier like Achilles, nor an acute and hardy sailor like Odysseus, with their zest and naïveté. He is a much more complex character, with a deeper estimate of life and some civic virtues which had not been evolved when the earlier heroes were created. He is a pioneer and adventurer who loves above all things home and a settled order; an invader who does not enjoy warfare in the least; a prince who rules by gentleness; a tender son and husband and father who is capable of the deepest cruelty to the woman who loves him; a man sadly conscious of human weakness, but conscious too of the divine within himself and of the high destiny to which he is called.