New relative position of Trojans and Greeks.
But from the period when the Æneid appeared, or at least so soon as it became the normal poem of the Roman literature, a new cause was in operation which, without mitigating in any degree the previous depraving agencies, introduced a new set of them, and began to disturb the positions of the two grand sets of characters, Greek and Trojan, relatively to one another.
Virgil had sought to give to the Cæsars the advantage of a hold upon royal antiquity by fabulous descent. He had before him the choice between Greece and Troy, which alike and alone enjoyed a world-wide honour. He could not hesitate which to select. The Greek histories were too near and too well known. Besides, the Greek dynasties generally had dwindled before they disappeared. The splendour of the Pelopids in particular had been quenched in calamity and crime, and no other of the Homeric lines had attained to greatness in political influence or historic fame. But the family of Priam had fallen gloriously in fighting for hearth and altar: it had disappeared from history in its full renown, ‘Magna mei sub terras ibat imago.’ Virgil chose too the house which was most ancient, and which traced link by link, as that of Agamemnon did not, a known and a named lineage up to Jupiter.
From this cause, both in the Æneid itself and afterwards, the Trojan characters were set upon stilts, and the Greeks were left to take their chance. Besides the loss of equilibrium, and the allowed predominance of coarser elements, which we have to lament in the Greek handling of them, we now see them pass, with the Romans, even into insignificance. The Diomed of Arpi is a person wholly unmarked; and he, like all the rest of his countrymen, is treated by Virgil simply as an instrument for obtaining enhanced effect, in the interest that he endeavours to concentrate on his Trojan characters; whereas the key to all Homer’s dispositions in the Iliad is to be found in the recollection, that he dealt with everything Trojan in the manner which was recommended and required by his Greek nationality. From this time forward, we find the palm both of valour and of wisdom clean carried over from the Greek to the Trojan side: the heroes of Homer remain, like unhewn boulders on the plain, crude, gross, and reciprocally almost indistinguishable masses of cunning or ferocity.
Virgil gave the tone in this respect, not only to the literature of ancient Rome, but to that of Christian Italy. For this reason, we may presume, among others, Orlando, the prime hero of the Italian romance, is, as I have before observed, modelled upon Hector. He is in many respects a very grand conception. Pulci, in describing his death, rises even to the sublime when he says there is
‘Un Dio, ed una Fede, ed uno Orlando.’
Which we may render in prose ‘One God, one way to God, one true type of manhood.’ Still it is remarkable that in Bojardo, as well as in Ariosto, the purer traces of the Homeric arrangement thus far at least remain, that Orlando, although he is the type of the Christian chivalry, yet, as he resembles Hector in piety and virtue, so likewise retains his likeness in this respect, that he is not the most formidable or valiant warrior of the poems. In Ariosto particularly, he is made inferior to Mandricardo, to Rodomonte, and most of all, but this for personal and prudential reasons, to Ruggiero. These three perhaps may be considered as being respectively the Ajax, the Diomed, and the Achilles of the Orlando Furioso.
And now the fancy for derivation from a Trojan stock, of which Virgil had set the fashion, was fully developed. Ariosto, at great length and in the most formal manner, establishes this lineage for his patrons, the family of Este. Others followed him. The humour passed even beyond the limits of Italy, into these then remote isles. A Trojan origin was ascribed to the English nation, and the authority of Homer, as to characters and history, was openly renounced by Dryden.
‘My faithful scene from true records shall tell
How Trojan valour did the Greek excel: