What degrees of conscientious workmanship went into these results, we are just now learning. Carcopino,[2] who, with a copy of Vergil in hand, has carefully surveyed the Latin coast from the Tiber mouth, past the site of Lavinium down to Ardea, is convinced that the poet traced every manoeuvre and every sally on the actual ground which he chose for his theatre of action in the last six books. It still seems possible to recognize the deep valley of the ambuscade and the plain where Camilla deployed her cavalry. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that for the sake of a heroic-age setting Vergil studied the remains and records of most ancient Rome. There were still in existence in various Latin towns sixth-century temples laden with antique arms and armor deposited as votive offerings, terracotta statues of gods and heroes, and even documents stored for safe-keeping. In the expansion of Rome over the Campus Martius unmarked tombs with their antique furniture were often disclosed. It is apparent from his works that Vergil examined such material, just as he delved into Varro's antiquities and Cato's "origins" for ancient lore. His remarks on Praeneste and Antemnae, his knowledge of ancient coin symbols, of the early rites of the Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work. It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast hoard of material. There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic. Wherever the work had received the final touch, the composition shows a flawless unity.
[Footnote 2: Carcopino, Virgile et les origines d'Ostie.]
The poet's response to personal experience reveals itself nowhere more than in the political aspect of the Aeneid a fact that is the more remarkable because Vergil lived so long in Epicurean circles where an interest in politics was studiously suppressed.
What makes the poem the first of national epics is, however, not a devotion to Rome's historical claims to primacy in Italy. The narrow imperialism of the urban aristocracy finds no support in him. Not the city of Rome but Italy is the patria of the Aeneid, and Italy as a civilizing and peace-bringing force, not as the exploiting conqueror. Here we recognize a spirit akin to Julius Caesar. Vergil's hero Aeneas, is not a Latin but a Trojan. That fact is, of course, due to the exigencies of tradition, but that Aeneas receives his aid from the Greek Evander and from the numerous Etruscan cities north of the Tiber while most of the Latins join Turnus, the enemy, cannot be attributed to tradition. In fact, Livy, who gives the more usual Roman version, says nothing of the Greeks, but joins Latinus and the Latian aborigines to Aeneas while he musters the Etruscans under the Rutulian, Turnus. The explanation for Vergil's striking departure from the usual patriotic version of the legend is rather involved and need not be examined here. But we may at any rate remark his wish to recognize the many races that had been amalgamated by the state, to refuse his approval of a narrow urban patriotism, and to give his assent to a view of Rome's place and mission upon which Julius Caesar had always acted in extending citizenship to peoples of all races, in scattering Roman colonies throughout the empire, and in setting the provinces on the road to a full participation in imperial privileges and duties. With such a policy Vergil, schooled at Cremona, Milan, and Naples, could hardly fail to sympathize.
It has been inferred from the position of authority which Aeneas assumes that Vergil favored a strong monarchial form of government and intended Aeneas to be, as it were, a prototype of Augustus. The inference is doubtless over-hasty. Vergil had a lively historical sense and in his hero seems only to have attempted a picture of a primitive king of the heroic age. Indeed Aeneas is perhaps more of an autocrat than are the Homeric kings, but that is because the Trojans are pictured as a migrating group, torn root and branch from their land and government, and following a semi-divine leader whose directions they have deliberately chosen to obey. In his references to Roman history, in the pageant of heroes of the sixth book, as well as in the historical scenes of the shield, no monarchial tendencies appear. Brutus the tyrannicide, Pompey and Cato, the irreconcilable foes of Caesar, Vergil's youthful hero, receive their meed of praise in the Aeneid, though there were many who held it treason in that day to mention rebels with respect.
It is indeed a very striking fact that Vergil, who was the first of Roman writers to attribute divine honors to the youthful Octavian, refrains entirely from doing so in the Aeneid at a time when the rest of Rome hesitated at no form of laudation. Julius Caesar is still recognized as more than human,
vocabitur hic quoque votis,
but Augustus is not. The contrast is significant. The language of the very young man at Naples had, of course, been colored by Oriental forms of expression that were in part unconsciously imbibed from the conversations of the Garden. These were phrases too which Julius Caesar in the last two years of his life encouraged; for he had learned from Alexander's experience that the shortest cut through constitutional obstructions to supreme power lay by way of the doctrine of divine royalty. In fact, the Senate was forced to recognize the doctrine before Caesar's death, and after his death consistently voted public sacrifices at his grave. Vergil was, therefore, following a high authority in the case of Caesar, and was drawing the logical inference in the case of Octavian when he wrote the first Eclogue and the prooemium of the Georgics. This makes it all the more remarkable that while his admiration for Augustus increased with the years, he ceased to give any countenance to the growing cult of "emperor worship." That the restraint was not simply in obedience to a governmental policy seems clear, for Horace, who in his youthful work had shown his distrust of the government, had now learned to make very liberal use of celestial appellatives.
Augustus, then, is not in any way identified with the semi-divine Aeneas. Vergil does not even place him at a post of special honor on the mount of revelations, but rather in the midst of a long line of remarkable principes. With dignity and sanity he lays the stress upon the great events of the Republic and upon its heroes. We may, therefore, justly conclude that when he wrote the epic he advocated a constitution of the type proposed by Cicero, in which the princeps should be a true leader in the state but in a constitutional republic.
It is the great past, illustrated by the pageant of heroes and the prophetic pictures of Aeneas's shield, that kindles the poet's imagination. His sympathies are generous enough to include every race within the empire and every leader who had shared in Rome's making, from the divine founder, Romulus, and the tyrannicide, Brutus, to the republican martyrs, Cato and Pompey, as well as the restorers of peace, Caesar and Augustus. He has no false patriotism that blinds him to Rome's shortcomings. He frankly admits with regret her failures in arts and sciences with a modesty that permits of no reference to his own saving work. What Rome has done and can do supremely well he also knows: she can rule with justice, banish violence with law, and displace war by peace. After the years of civil wars which he had lived through in agony of spirit, it is not strange that such a mission seemed to him supreme. And that is why the last words of Anchises to Aeneas are: