In which he plainly imitates the words of Priam,
οὔτι μοι αἰτίη ἐσσὶ, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν,
οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν[924].
Now, even with reference to the acquittal of Helen, the cases are quite dissimilar. What Homer puts into the mouth of Priam, Virgil stamps with the authority of a deity: what Priam says of the Homeric Helen, who had been carried off by Paris, and whose general character was very far from depraved, the Venus of Virgil says of a hardened traitress as well as adulteress. Again, what Priam says relative to himself, ‘I do not blame thee,’ seems in the Æneid to resemble the unlimited enunciation of an abstract proposition. But, above all, let us notice how lamentably Virgil has mauled the sentiment by introducing Paris into the passage, of whose moral guilt, if there be such a thing as moral guilt upon earth, there could be no doubt, and whom Homer, with true poetic justice, has taken care to punish by making him the object of the general reprobation and hatred of his countrymen[925]. In acquitting such an offender, and throwing the charge of his crimes upon the Immortals, by the mouth, too, of one belonging to their number, Virgil has given into the worst form of fatalism, that namely which annihilates all moral sanctions and ideas as applicable to human conduct.
And this he has done with no plea whatever which might have been drawn, valeat quantum, from the exigencies of his poem. Paris was not before the eye of Æneas: Venus was not dissuading her son from taking vengeance upon Paris; he is forced into our sight; the allusion is as irrelevant with reference to the purpose of the passage, as it is blameworthy in an ethical point of view; and in all probability the mention of him is introduced for no other reason than that it supplied Virgil with a hemistich to fill up a gap in an extremely fine passage, and to secure its prosodial equilibrium, to which the balance of moral sanctions is sacrificed without remorse.
As it is with the management of his gods, so with his conception of human nature; Virgil seems to have lost the sight of its higher prerogatives, and especially of the great and noble truth, that it is susceptible of divine influences without the loss of its free agency. The poems of Homer, notwithstanding their copious theurgy, are throughout eminently and entirely human. Their human agency is adorned and elevated (as well as unhappily lowered and darkened), it is even modified and controlled, but never inwardly mutilated, curtailed or superseded, by the interference of the Immortals. But, in regard to his relations with the deities, Æneas is a mere puppet; and the gallant spirit of Turnus on his last battlefield is, as it were, put down within him by main force from heaven.
Æneas and Dido in the Shades.
Thus for example, Virgil is not ashamed to introduce to us Æneas in the shades below apologizing to Dido for his black desertion of her by saying, ‘he could not help it, the gods compelled him; and really he never thought she would take it so much to heart.’
Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi;