Piniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;
Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mento
Præcipitant senis, et glacie riget horrida barba.
His pine-bearing head, girt with clouds, is beaten by wind and rain. So far so good. But while such is the temperature of the air at the summit, it grows colder, not warmer, as we descend: for snow covers his shoulders. This is the second image. Next, we mount again to his mouth, which discharges rivers over his chin: and not even here have we done with incongruity, for his beard, although thus watered from above, is rough and stiff with ice. Now such a confusion, as is here exhibited, of images which nature always exhibits in a fixed and very imposing order, is, we may be assured, no mere casual error, but indicates a rooted indifference about matters which the poets of nature study, not only with accuracy, but with an accuracy which is the fruit of their reverence and love.
The Dolopes of Homer are a part of the Myrmidons, for they are the subjects of Phœnix[939], and Phœnix commands the fifth division of the Myrmidons: they are named by Virgil as a separate race[940]. The Rhadamanthus of Homer appears to have been conceived by the Poet as a mild and benevolent character, for he is placed in the Plains of the Blest, while Minos administers severer justice in the under-world. But the Rhadamanthus of Virgil is the judge of the infernal regions, and is the image of rigour; while his Minos[941] has the very mild and also secondary function of dealing, in the vestibule of the Shades, with the cases of such persons as had been unjustly condemned on earth[942]. Again, where Homer uses exaggeration to enhance effect, Virgil carries it far into caricature. In the Iliad, Diomed[943] heaves a stone, of a weight that ‘two men such as are nowadays (οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι) could scarcely lift.’ He allows for a short interval since the Trojan war, and says that two ordinary men of his day could scarcely lift what warriors of extraordinary strength, by an extraordinary effort, then raised and hurled. In another place, Ajax flings a stone, such as even a man in the fullest vigour could now scarcely hold[944]. Again, Hector discharges against the Greek rampart one which two strong men could hardly raise with a lever; but then he is specially aided by Jupiter[945]. Now in the Fifth Æneid, Æneas gives to Mnestheus, as a prize, a breastplate which he himself had won, the spoil of Demoleos. This Demoleos[946] was no hero, for he is never named by Homer; again, the Demoleos of Virgil wore the breastplate when he chased the Trojans flying in all directions (‘palantes,’ Æn. v. 265), so that it must have been light to him: there was no time at all for human degeneracy, since they are still his contemporaries that are on the stage; and yet such was the weight of this breastplate, that two men together could scarcely carry it on their shoulders.
‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebant
Multiplicem, connixi humeris[947].’
Let it not be thought that the varied examples, which have here been quoted, are either irrelevant or without serious significance. There cannot, surely, be a more decided error than to treat accuracy in matters of this kind as a matter of sheer indifference. It is not only inseparable from the function of the primitive Poet as the historian of his subject, but it appertains also to the perfection of his poetic nature, that he should have a nice sense of proportion even in figurative language. I have dwelt, however, upon minor points, not for their own sake, but because the manner in which Virgil handles them appears to throw no unimportant light upon the frame and temper of his work at large, and of the later as compared with the earliest poetry.
Contrast of principal aims.
In diction, Virgil is ornate and Homer simple; in metre, Virgil is uniform and sustained, Homer free and varied; in the faculty of invention, for which the historical office of early poetry still leaves ample room, Homer is inexhaustible, while, from the needless accumulation of imitations in every sort and size, Virgil gives ground to suspect that he was poor, at least by comparison. The first thought of Homer was his subject, and the second his nation; the first thought of Virgil was his Emperor and the court around the throne, the second the elaboration of his verse. Characters, feelings, facts, were used by Virgil for producing on the mind the effect of scenic representation; the end of Homer, on the contrary, was to give adequate vent, in and through these things poetically conceived and handled, to his own yearnings, and to the sympathies of his hearers[948]. The intercommunion of spirit between the poet and those to whom he sang, was not in him a sordid quest of popularity; it was only an expression of the truth that he founded both his composition and his hopes upon the basis of a great effort to be the organ of the general heart of mankind. All this we may discern in his notices, informal as they are, of the profession of the minstrel: