Turnus will always find more favour in the eyes of modern readers than his rival. Our English sympathies do not run at all with the foreign adventurer who comes between him and his promised bride, and who claims both the lady and the kingdom by virtue of a convenient oracle. Mr Gladstone’s may perhaps be only an ingenious fancy, that Turnus was really the favourite with the poet himself; that although he made Æneas victorious, as was required, in order to carry out the complimentary reference of the Roman origin to Troy, still the young chief of native Italian blood, maintaining a gallant struggle for his rights against gods and men, and only conquered at the last by supernatural force and fraud, was purposely held out to popular admiration. But we must, at least, feel sympathy with him as utterly over-weighted in the final struggle by the superior strength and immortal arms of his adversary, and the flapping of the Fury’s awful wings.
To trace the influence of the Æneid upon modern poetry would require a separate treatise. Spenser is full of Virgil. Tasso’s great poem is in many passages the Æneid made Christian, with its heroes transplanted from the days of Troy to those of the Crusades. Dante borrows less from him, though with an intenser reverence he takes him for his “master” and his guide. In his mind, indeed, Virgil seems to have held a place midway, as it were, between the Pagan and the Christian life. If Beatrice represents, as has been said, the heavenly “Wisdom,” Virgil is, in his allegory, the human intellect at its best and purest, which comes as near heaven as unassisted humanity may; for he is the guide who only quits the Christian poet when he is close to the gates of Paradise.
The “Sortes Virgilianæ” were long in use, often as a fashionable pastime, sometimes in graver earnest: the inquirer opened the volume at random, and took for the answer of fate the first few lines which caught his eye. In the times of the later Roman emperors, they ranked among the most popular, and perhaps the least objectionable, of the many superstitious practices which were then so prevalent. The Emperor Severus was said to have been encouraged in his boyhood by the very words which had such an effect on Octavia—“Thou shalt be our Marcellus!” And when subsequently he showed a taste rather for elegant accomplishments than for military renown, again the “Sortes,” consulted for him by his father, gave the well-known lines already quoted,[44] in which the glory of the Roman is pronounced to be that of the conqueror, not of the student or the artist. The superstition held its ground, through the middle ages, down to times very near our own. The story rests upon no mean authority, that Charles I. once tried the oracle with a startling result. He was in the Bodleian Library while the Court lay in Oxford, and was there shown a splendid edition of Virgil. Lord Falkland suggested to him sportively that he should try the “Sortes.” The lines upon which the king opened are said to have been these, as they stand in Mr Conington’s version:—
“Scourged by a savage enemy,
An exile from his son’s embrace,
So let him sue for aid, and see
His people slain before his face:
Or when to humbling peace at length
He stoops, be his or life or land,
But let him fall in manhood’s strength,
And welter tombless on the sand.”
It was a gloomy oracle; and Falkland, anxious to remove the impression, tried his own fortune. He lighted on Evander’s lament over his son Pallas:—
“I knew the young blood’s maddening play,
The charm of battle’s first essay;
O valour blighted in the flower!
O first mad drops of war’s full shower!”
A few months afterwards Falkland fell at the battle of Newbury, barely thirty-four years old.
There has always been a mystical school of classical interpretation, who see in the Æneid, as in the Iliad and Odyssey, a tissue of allegory from first to last. Not content with identifying the Trojan chief with Augustus, they found a double meaning in every character and every legend in the poem. Bishop Warburton, in his well-known ‘Divine Legation,’ expended a great amount of learning and research to prove that in the Descent to the Shades in the sixth book we have a sketch, scarcely veiled, of the great Eleusinian mysteries. Others saw in Dido the love-passion and the fate of Cleopatra, Antony in Turnus, the flight of Marius to the marshes in the person of Sinon, the miserable end of Pompey in Priam—
“The head shorn off, the trunk without a name.”
It is impossible to enjoy either Homer or Virgil, if their text is to be “improved” at every step after this sort. Augustus and Octavia looked to the poet for a tale of the olden time, and he told it well. No doubt he threw in graceful compliments to Rome and its ruler; but to have to guess at some hidden meaning all along would have been far too severe a tax on the imperial audience, and would certainly not heighten the enjoyment of modern readers.