Propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus errat
Mincius, et tenera praetexit arundine ripas.
Next, this temple was to be dedicated, as a monument of the victor’s piety, as well as glory, to some propitious, tutelary deity, under whose auspices the great adventure had been atchieved. The dedication is then made to the poet’s divinity, Augustus:
In medio mihi Caesar erit, templumque tenebit.
Templum tenebit. The expression is emphatical; as intimating to us, and prefiguring the secret purpose of the Aeneïs, which was, in the person of Aeneas, to shadow forth and consecrate the character of Augustus. His divinity was to fill and occupy that great work. And the ample circuit of the epic plan was projected only, as a more awful enclosure of that august presence, which was to inhabit and solemnize the vast round of this poetic building.
And now the wonderful address of the poet’s artifice appears. The mad servility of his country had deified the emperor in good earnest; and his brother poets made no scruple to worship in his temples, and to come before him with handfuls of real incense, smoking from the altars. But the sobriety of Virgil’s adoration was of another cast. He seizes this circumstance only to embody a poetical fiction; which, on the supposition of an actual deification, hath all the force of compliment, which the fact implies, and yet, as presented through the chast veil of allegory, eludes the offence, which the naked recital must needs have given to sober and reasonable men. Had the emperor’s popular divinity been flatly acknowledged, and adored, the praise, even under Virgil’s management, had been insufferable for its extravagance; and, without some support for his poetical numen to rest upon, the figure had been more forced and strained, than the rules of just writing allow. As it is, the historical truth of his apotheosis authorizes and supports the fiction, and the fiction, in its turn, serves to refine and palliate the history.
The Aeneïs being, by the poet’s improvement of this circumstance, thus naturally predicted under the image of a temple, we may expect to find a close and studied analogy betwixt them. The great, component parts of the one will, no doubt, be made, very faithfully, to represent and adumbrate those of the other. This hath been executed with great art and diligence.
1. The temple, we observed, was erected on the banks of a river. This site was not only proper, for the reason already mentioned, but also, for the further convenience of instituting public games, the ordinary attendants of the consecration of temples. These were generally, as in the case of the Olympic and others, celebrated on the banks of rivers.
Illi victor ego, et Tyrio conspectus in ostro,
Centum quadrijugos agitabo ad flumina currus.
Cuncta mihi, Alpheum linquens lucosque Molorchi,
Cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia caestu.
To see the propriety of the figure in this place, the reader needs only be reminded of the book of games in the Aeneïd, which was purposely introduced in honour of the Emperor, and not, as is commonly thought, for a mere trial of skill between the poet and his master. The emperor was passionately fond of these sports, and was even the author, or restorer, of one of them. It is not to be doubted, that he alludes also to the quinquennial games, actually celebrated, in honour of his temples, through many parts of the empire. And this the poet undertakes in the civil office of VICTOR.
2. What follows is in the religious office of Priest. For it is to be noted, that, in assuming this double character, which the decorum of the solemnities, here recounted, prescribed, the poet has an eye to the political design of the Aeneïs, which was to do honour to Caesar, in either capacity of a civil and religious personage; both being essential to the idea of the PERFECT LEGISLATOR, whose office and character (as an eminent critic hath lately shewn us[36]) it was his purpose, in this immortal work, to adorn and recommend. The account of his sacerdotal functions is delivered in these words: