Scuta virûm galeasque et fortia corpora volvit.
And why all this? Plainly, I apprehend, because, while Scamander was a word disqualified from entering into the Latin hexameter, Xanthus also was somewhat less convenient than Simois for the march of his resounding verse. Now this is a sample in small things of what Virgil has done in nearly all things, both small and great.
Νεκυΐα of Homer and Virgil.
There are instances in which Virgil is popularly thought to profit by the comparison with Homer, and where, notwithstanding, a full consideration may lead to a reversal of the sentence. The νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, for example, is thought inferior to that of the Sixth Æneid. To bring them fairly together, we should perhaps put out of view the philosophical and prophetical part of the latter[895]; but whether we do it or not is little material in the comparison. In either way, the Inferno of Virgil is, upon the whole, a stage procession of stately and gorgeous figures; but it has no consistent or veracious relation to any idea of the future or unseen state actually operative among mankind. Yet there existed such an idea, at least in the times of which Virgil was treating, if not at the period when he lived. It was surely a subject of the deepest interest, and of the most solemn pathos. What we are as men here depends very much on our conception of what we are hereafter to be. There is nothing more touching in all the history of the race of Adam, than its blind and painful feeling after a future still invisible. There is no witness to the comparative degradation of a race or age, so sure as its having ceased to yearn towards any thing beyond the grave. Homer has shown us in the Eleventh Odyssey[896], that, together with his keen sense of the present and visible, he felt the full force of this mysterious drawing towards the unseen. He is plainly as much in earnest here, as in any part of the poems. Virgil, on the other hand, succeeds in investing his hell with almost unequalled pomp, approximating at times to splendour. Homer attempts nothing of the kind; but he produces a perfect and profound impression of those regions, according to the idea in his own mind: they are shadowy, gloomy, cold, above all, and in one word, dismal. Virgil contrives to leave the reader convinced that he is a very great artist: Homer lets all such matters take care of themselves. But while Virgil creates no impression at all on the mind as to the World of Shades, no image of the timid, vague, and dim belief that was entertained respecting it, Homer has set it all before us with a truthfulness never equalled or approached. And yet Virgil abounds in details and measurements which Homer avoids. Tartarus is twice as deep as the distance from earth to sky[897], and the Hydra has fifty mouths. Yet the details of the one give no impression of reality, while the utter local vagueness and dreaminess of the other is far more definite in its effect, because it is made to minister to the appropriate ideas of sadness, sympathy, and awe. As to particular passages, the appearance of Dido is full of grandeur; but her silence, the basis of it, is borrowed from that of Ajax; while in the Odyssey the striding of Achilles in silence over the meadow of asphodel, when he swells with exultation upon hearing that his son excelled in council and in war, is perhaps one of the most sublime pieces of human representation, which Homer himself ever has produced.
Ethnological dislocations.
Let us now give an instance of Virgil’s utter indifference to historic truth and consistency. It is the more remarkable, because as he was pretending to derive the Julian family from the stock of Æneas, there would apparently have been some advantage in adhering strictly to the Homeric distinctions as to races on both sides in the Trojan war. But this appears to be entirely beneath his attention. For instance, he calls the Homeric Greeks Pelasgi[898]. It may be said he was guided by the Italian traditions, which connected the Greek and Pelasgian names as early colonists of that country. But first, some regard should be paid to Homer in matters which concern Troy; and it is rather violent to call the Greeks Pelasgi, when the only Pelasgi named in the war by the Poet are placed on the side of their enemies. Secondly, as it was his purpose throughout to depress the Greeks, why should he thus thrust them into view as one with an Italian race? Above all, why do this in a case, where Homer had himself supplied a link between Italy and Troy? Again, Virgil calls the Greek camp Dorica castra[899]. But the Dorians at the period of the Trojan war were utterly insignificant, and are never once named by Homer in connection with the contest. Again, Virgil calls Diomed, and the city of Arpi founded by him, Ætolian, and makes him complain that he was not allowed to go back to Calydon[900], simply because his father Tydeus, as a son of Œneus, had been of Ætolian extraction; though he commanded the Argives, and had nothing whatever to do with the Ætolians of Homer. Again, following a late and purposeless tradition, he calls Ulysses Æolides[901], though Homer has given the descent of Ulysses[902] without in any manner attaching it to the line of the Æolids, a collection of families whose descent, on account probably of their historical importance, he is more than ordinarily careful to mark.
With cases of simple inaccuracy, to which I do not seek to attach undue weight, we may connect the manner in which he confounds, on the other side, the distinctions of the Trojan races, so accurately marked by Homer. In the Twentieth Iliad, the genealogy of the reigning families of Troy and of Dardania is given with great precision. The distinction between Trojans and Dardanians is preserved through the Iliad, though the Trojan name is sometimes, but rarely, used to include the whole indigenous army, and sometimes it even signifies the entire force, including the allies, which opposed the Greek army. We might here, however, suppose that it would have been in the interest of Virgil’s aim to maintain, or even sharpen, the distinction between the Dardanian line, which was at most but indirectly worsted by the Greeks, and the line of Ilus, which fatally both sinned and suffered in the conflict of the Troica. But, on the contrary, he is still less discriminating in the use of names here, than he has been for the Greeks. The companions of Æneas are sometimes Teucri, Trojani, or Trojugenæ—sometimes Æneadæ, sometimes Dardanidæ. In the first of these names he entirely contravenes Homer, who produces a Teucer eminent among the Greeks, but nowhere connects the name with Troy, while Virgil makes a Cretan Teucer[903] the founder of the Trojan race. I grant that he here founds himself upon what may be called a separate tradition, though it is vague and slender, of a Teucrian race in Troas. In the two last appellations, without any authority, he wholly alters the effect of the Greek patronymic, and changes the mere family-name into a national appellation. Then again they appear as the Pergamea gens[904]. But Pergamus in Homer was simply the citadel of Troy, and is a correlative to πύργος[905]: the English might almost as well be called the people of the Tower. Not content yet, he will also have the Trojans to be Phryges:
Phrygibusque adsis pede, diva, secundo[906];
though in Homer the Phrygians are a people both ethnologically and politically separate[907] from the Trojan races. Again as to Æneas himself. He is called Rhæteius heros[908]; but if Virgil chose thus to designate his hero by reference to a single point of the Trojan territory, it should have been one with which he was locally connected, whereas the dominions of his family were not near the promontory or upon the coast, but among the hills at the other extreme of the country. Then again Æneas is Laomedontius heros[909]; but Laomedon was of the branch of Ilus, while Æneas belonged to that of Assaracus; and was moreover perjured, while the line of Assaracus was marked with no such taint. So we have again—
Dardanus, Iliacæ primus pater urbis et auctor[910];