When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion,—degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition,—it was evidence of Virgil’s grip on humanity that the poet of poets became the wizard of wizards. Even under the Antonines, the Sors Vergiliana (Virgilian prophecy) was practised. The Æneid was opened at random, and the first verse that struck the eye was considered a prophecy of good or bad portent. “The mediæval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the Roman, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the perfect in style, with whom no other writer could be compared; the Philosopher, who grasped the ideas of all things; the Wise One, whose comprehension seemed to other mortals unlimited. His writings became the Bible of a race. The mysteries of Roman priestcraft, the processes of divination, the science of the stars, were all found in his works.”
True indeed are the words of Professor MacMechan: “Beginning the Æneid is like setting out upon a broad and beaten highway along which countless feet have passed in the course of nineteen centuries. It is a spiritual highway, winding through every age and every clime;” and these of Professor Woodberry: “The Æneid shows that characteristic of greatness in literature which lies in its being a watershed of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that clothes it with the past of imagination, character and event, and forward to Christian times in all that clothes it with emotion, sentiment, and finality to the heart.”
As we approach modern literature, the great Italian Dante consciously takes Virgil as his “master and author.” “O glory and light of other poets! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love, that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author.” On English literature the influence of the Æneid has been so potent that our space will hardly suffice to convey the barest hint of its direct and indirect lines. Celtic story developed from it a voyage of Brutus who founds a new Troy, or London. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century sets forth this tale in his history. It was believed down to the seventeenth century and is reported by Milton. Elizabethan literature has frequent references to it. Chaucer in his House of Fame outlines the Æneid, emphasizing the Dido episode, which interested also Nash, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Spenser teems with allusions and indeed translations, so—
“Anchyses sonne, begott of Venus fayre,”
Said he, “out of the flames for safegard fled
And with a remnant did to sea repayre;
Where he, through fatall errour, long was led
Full many yeares, and weetlesse wandered
From shore to shore emongst the Lybick sandes
Ere rest he fownd.”