We have not got much further in explaining Shakespeare’s allusion than when Warburton made the Warburtonian emendation of Sichaeus for Æneas. Shakespeare had probably quite forgotten Virgil’s
Illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat:
... atque inimica refugit
In nemus umbriferum.
(Æ. vi. 469.)
Perhaps he remembered only that Æneas, ancestor and representative of the Romans, between his two authorised marriages with ladies of the “superior” races, intercalated the love-adventure, which alone seized the popular imagination and which of all the deities Venus alone approved, with ran African queen.
[213] No word of this in Plutarch.
[214] Wrong; even if on numismatic evidence her features be considered to fall short of and deviate from the Greek ideal. Professor Ferrero describes her face as “bouffie.”
[215] The sense is: “Her beauty was not so surpassing as to be beyond comparison with other women’s,” etc. Compare the Greek: “καὶ γὰρ ἦν, ὡς λέγουσιν, αὐτὸ μὲν καθ’ αὑτὸ, τὸ κάλλος αὐτῆς οὐ πάνυ δυσπαράβλητον, οὐδ’ οἶον ἐκπλῆξαι τοῦς ἰδόντας.”
[216] Plutarch in the corresponding passage merely says that she was “apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus commonly drawen in picture.”