Virgil

by W. Lucas Collins

Æneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council. His goddess-mother Venus pleads with her father Jupiter to have pity on her offspring. And Jupiter—very open to influence of this kind now, as in Homer’s story—reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate. Æneas shall reach Latium safely, and reign there three years. His son Iulus—or Ascanius, as he is otherwise called—shall succeed him, and transfer the seat of power from Lavinium to his own new-founded city, Alba Longa. Three hundred years his race shall rule there, till in due course the twin-brothers Romulus and Remus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome. To the glories of this new capital the Father of the gods will assign neither limit nor end. The wrongs of Troy shall be redressed. The sons of the East, in their new home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.

“So stands my will. There comes a day,
While Rome’s great ages hold their way,
When old Assaracus’s sons
Shall quit them on the Myrmidons,
O’er Phthia and Mycenæ reign,
And humble Argos to their chain.
From Troy’s fair stock shall Cæsar rise,
The limits of whose victories
Are ocean, of his fame the skies;
Great Julius, proud that style to bear,
In name and blood Iulus’ heir.”

Thus, before he has concluded the first book of his great poem, the poet has taken us into his counsels as to the purport of the song. It is not a mere epic romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic deeds and exciting adventures; it is, like some of our modern novels, a romance with a purpose; and the purpose is the claiming for the great house of Julius the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of the glories of that house in the person of Augustus. And as the Iliad of Homer, beyond the mere vocation of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike audience by the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also—the glorification of the Greek nation—so the Roman poet may be said to have written a counter-Iliad, to extol the later fortunes of the royal house of Troy in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them, of Iulus. For any historic foundation of such a genealogy we may look in vain. King Brute stands upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of Troy as the founder of the Julian house and of Rome. But, for the present, we must be content to assume his existence, and to follow the course of the narrative as the poet wills. The claim of Trojan descent is not an invention of Virgil’s, though he may have been the first to work it out so much in detail. It was a claim in which his countrymen always delighted, and there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also, Virgil seems to have at heart. He does not care so much, after all, for the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of Rome. The empire of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough, and more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the “Pollio.” To the soul of the Roman poet—unlike his master Homer in this—war, and more especially civil war, is absolutely hateful. He can describe it, when needed for his purpose, and describe it well; but it is as the scourge of nations, or at best the terrible remedy for greater evils;—not, as the Greek poet calls it, “the strife which is the joy of men.”

Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she may, the counsels of Jupiter. She puts into the heart of the Queen of Carthage, on whose shores Æneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of pity and compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also, to comfort her son Æneas in his trouble. Attended by his faithful friend Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader, the strange coast on which he finds himself—

“When in the bosom of the wood
Before him, lo, his mother stood,
In mien and gear a Spartan maid,
Or like Harpalycè arrayed,
Who tires fleet coursers in the chase,
And heads the swiftest streams of Thrace.
Slung from her shoulders hangs a bow;
Loose to the wind her tresses flow;
Bare was her knee; her mantle’s fold
The gathering of a knot controlled.
And ‘Saw ye, youths,’ she asks them, ‘say,
One of my sisters here astray;
A silver quiver at her side,
And for a scarf a lynx’s hide;
Or pressing on the wild boar’s track
With upraised dart and voiceful pack?’”

There is in this description a happy reminiscence of an earlier legend. In such guise—not with any of the meretricious attractions assigned to the goddess of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain nymph—had she won her mortal lover, the Trojan shepherd Anchises, from whom this her dear son was born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she had enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of the child’s birth, nor to boast of the favour shown him by a goddess, but to bring the boy up in the forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood-nymph. Anchises, in his pride, had neglected or forgotten her warning, and was punished by premature weakness and a helpless old age.

Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus replies to her son’s questions as to the inhabitants of the land. They are a colony from Tyre; their queen, Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false brother Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichæus, had possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she has escaped with her husband’s wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa. Æneas tells her in return his own sad story, and is comforted by the assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are safe—all but one unhappy vessel and her crew. Then, as she turns to leave him, the disguised divinity becomes apparent.

“Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed;
Her falling robe her footsteps swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept.”

Æneas and his companion mount the crest of the hill, whence they look down upon the half-finished walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that most essential structure in a city of any pretension, an amphitheatre for public spectacles, and building a magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist of invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,—like Ulysses in the court of Phæacia—the strangers enter the brazen gates of the temple. All is magnificent and wonderful. But, marvel of marvels! both walls and doors are sculptured with a history which Æneas knows only too well. Even here is recorded, on this distant and unknown shore, the story of stories—the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the Trojan chief peruses the several groups, and identifies the various incidents. Here the Greeks fly to their ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans: there, again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in slaughter before him. The death of young Troilus, hurled from his chariot, is there; and, to match the picture, Hector dragged at Achilles’s chariot-wheels round the city walls. Memnon the Ethiopian and the amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst the foremost combatants, Æneas can recognise himself.

While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates are reading this sculptured history, the queen herself approaches. And while they admire her majesty and grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the missing comrades of Æneas make their appearance before her as suppliants. They tell the story of their shipwreck on the coast: and they think Æneas is lost, as he had thought they were. Then the mist in which Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves, and the two parties recognise and welcome each other. Dido, like all the world, has heard of the name of Æneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy. She can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience: