tot quondam populis regnisque superbum
Regnatorem Asiæ.
Each account is alike inaccurate: Priam had more than a city, but his dominions were confined to a mere nook of Asia Minor. And again, before quitting this part of the subject, let us observe how, in the case of Anchises, he departs from Homer, even where it would have served the purpose of his story to follow him closely. The Anchises of Homer is an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν; he does not appear at Troy among the δημογέροντες of the city, or of Priam’s court, which would have made him a secondary figure; he resides at Dardania as an independent sovereign, and it seems not unlikely that in lineal dignity, at least, he was even before Priam. But the Anchises of Virgil is resident in Troy[915]; and is therefore, of course, to be taken for a subject of Priam. Here the alteration very much lowers the rank of Æneas, and so far, therefore, of Augustus.
The effect of all this is, without any real gain either moral or poetical, entirely to bewilder the mind of the reader of the Æneid, in regard to a subject of real interest both historical and ethnological, with respect to which Homer has left on record a most careful and clear representation. It must indeed be admitted, that the intervening poets had set many examples of similar license; indeed they had made irregularity a rule; but they had no such powerful reasons as Virgil had for imitating, in some points at least, the precision of Homer, and besides, he has perhaps exceeded them all in the multitude and variety of his departures from it. On the other hand, some allowance, I admit, should be made for the less flexible character of the Latin tongue, which might have made the peculiar accuracy of Homer a real difficulty to Virgil.
I have thus minutely traced out this course of inconsistency and contradiction in particular instances, because they are highly illustrative of the character of Virgil’s work, if not of his mind. After the political and courtly idea of the poem, he seems to have abandoned all solicitude except for its form and sound, and to have been totally indifferent as to presenting any veracious, or if that word imply too much credulity, any self-consistent pattern, of manners, places, events, or characters.
Virgil must, materially at least, have saturated himself with the Iliad before he planned the Æneid, for his borrowing is alike incessant and diversified; and this it is which renders it so singular that he should at once have exposed himself to the double charge of servilely imitating and of gratuitously disfiguring his original.
If we look to the action of the Twelfth Book of the Æneid, it is all made up from Homer cut in pieces and recast. It begins with the idea of the single combat, borrowed from the Third and Seventh Iliads. Then come the pact and the breach of it by Juturna, under Juno’s influence, which are borrowed from the treachery of Pandarus, prompted by Minerva, under the same instigation. Next, the flight of Turnus before Æneas is borrowed from that of Hector before Achilles. After this, Turnus is disabled by a divine agency, like Patroclus before Hector; a downfall brought about in the one case, as in the other, without peril and without honour, so that here we have a copy even of one among the few points where the Iliad was little worthy to be imitated. Lastly, the thought of Pallas in the mind of Æneas (more highly wrought, however, and very effective), plays the part of the recollection of Patroclus[916] in the mind of Achilles.
Unfaithful imitations of detail.
Both here and elsewhere, the imitations in detail are too numerous to be noted. Some of them even descend to a character which, independently of their minuteness, approaches the ludicrous. The very dung, in which the Oilean Ajax loses his footing[917], in the Twenty-third Iliad, is reproduced in the Fifth Æneid, that Nisus may flounder in it. But even here we may note two characteristic differences. Homer trips up a personage, whom he has no particular occasion to set off favourably. Virgil chooses for the object of derision Nisus, on whom, in the beautiful episode which soon after follows, he is about to concentrate all the tenderest sympathies of his hearers. And again, Homer makes Ajax slip where, as he says, the oxen had just been slain over Patroclus: Virgil has no such probable cause to allege for the presence of the obnoxious material[918], but says cæsis forte juvencis. Now the Trojans had in fact left the tomb of Anchises, and had gone to a chosen spot to celebrate the foot-races[919]; so that even his gore and ordure are quite out of place.
So again, of all the formulæ in Homer, it is not very clear why Virgil should have chosen to recall the rather commonplace line