2. Ardentes pugnas, burning battles, sounds well enough to a modern ear, but I much doubt, if it would have passed in the times of Virgil. At least, I recollect no such expression in all his works; ardens being constantly joined to a word, denoting a substance of apparent light, heat, or flame, to which the allusion is easy, as ardentes gladios, ardentes oculos, campos armis sublimibus ardentes, and, by an easy metaphor, ardentes hostes, but no where, that I can find, to so abstract a notion, as that of fight. It seems to be to avoid this difficulty, that some have chosen to read ardentis, in the genitive, which yet Servius rejects as of no authority.
3. But the most glaring note of illegitimacy is in the line,
Tithoni primâ quot abest ab origine Caesar.
It has puzzled all the commentators from old Servius down to the learned Mr. Martyn, to give any tolerable account of the poet’s choice of Tithonus, from whom to derive the ancestry of Augustus, rather than Anchises, or Assaracus, who were not only more famous, but in the direct line. The pretences of any or all of them are too frivolous to make it necessary to spend a thought about them. The instance stands single in antiquity: much less is there any thing like it to be found in the Augustan poets.
II. But the phraseology of these lines is the least of my objection. Were it ever so accurate, there is besides, on the first view, a manifest absurdity in the subject-matter of them. For would any writer, of but common skill in the art of composition, close a long and elaborate allegory, the principal grace of which consists in its very mystery, with a cold, and formal explanation of it? Or would he pay so poor a compliment to his patron, as to suppose his sagacity wanted the assistance of this additional triplet to lead him into the true meaning? Nothing can be more abhorrent from the usual address and artifice of Virgil’s manner. Or,
III. Were the subject-matter itself passable, yet, how, in defiance of all the laws of disposition, came it to be forced in here? Let the reader turn to the passage, and he will soon perceive, that this could never be the place for it. The allegory being concluded, the poet returns to his subject, which is proposed in the six following lines:
Intereà Dryadum sylvas, saltusque sequamur
Intactos, tua, Maecenas, haud mollia jussa;
Te sine nil altum mens inchoat: en age segnes
Rumpe moras; vocat ingenti clamore Cithaeron,
Taygetique canes, domitrixque Epidaurus equorum,
Et vox assensu nemorum ingeminata remugit.
Would now any one expect, that the poet, after having conducted the reader, thus respectfully, to the very threshold of his subject, should immediately run away again to the point, from which he had set out, and this on so needless an errand, as the letting him into the secret of his allegory?
But this inserted triplet agrees as ill with what follows, as with what precedes it. For how abrupt is the transition, and unlike the delicate connexion, so studiously contrived by the Augustan poets, from
Tithoni primâ quot abest ab origine Caesar.