It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the pious Æneas”—the man who respects the old-time faith, and preserves the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service.
So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, and then desert her—not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman Catholics do today.
The “Æneid” is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we might some day be lured into similar respect for the established religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: “Dum pius Æneas,” meaning: “While the pious Æneas”—. We boys knew we were being propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to express our feelings. “The dumb pious Æneas” became our formula. “What’s your next hour?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious Æneas!”
We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight—a religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a “cestus,” which we did not recognize as plain “brass knucks.” And woe to the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen Dido—“furens quid femina possit”—happened to be caught reading the story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed suicide because of a faithless lover!
Does anyone question that the “Æneid” is propaganda? If so, I mention that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “Æneid” we find this pious emperor described in the following fashion:
This, this is he—long promised, oft foretold—
Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,
God-born himself, in Latium shall restore
And rule the land that Saturn ruled before.
That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown in art circles today.
“I have here,” says Mrs. Ogi, “a letter from a Professor who has been reading this manuscript. He protests, ‘not in a professorial fashion’—”
“Naturally not,” says Ogi.
“That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who has given the greater part of his life to studying them. ‘To say that Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than there was electric machinery.’”