Exitium magnum atque Alpes inmittet apertas[476].
But to this motive are added other motives, both political and personal,—the memory of her former enmity to Troy arising out of her love to Argos, of the slight offered to her beauty by the judgment of Paris, and of the occasion given to her jealousy by the honour awarded to Ganymede:—
manet alta mente repostum
Iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
Et genus invisum et rapti Ganymedis honores[477].
These two sets of motives bring out distinctly the two-fold character of the action of the poem, its inner relation to the future fulfilment of the Roman destiny, its more immediate dependence on the past events forming the subject of the Homeric poems. The prominence in Virgil’s mind of the Roman over the Greek influences, in which his epic had its origin, is indicated by the position and weight of the line of cardinal significance—
Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem;
just as the dominant influence under which Lucretius wrote his poem is indicated by the position and weight of the line—
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
In entering on the detailed narrative, which forms the main body of the poem, Virgil at once attaches himself to Homer. The action, like the action of the Odyssey, is taken up at that stage immediately preceding the events of most critical interest, [pg 316]after which it advances steadily to the final catastrophe. The slower movement of the story in the years between the fall of Troy and the departure from Sicily is presupposed, and, like the adventures of Odysseus before his departure from the Isle of Calypso, the adventures of Aeneas are subsequently narrated by the principal actor in them. The storm which drives the Trojan fleet to the Carthaginian coast was an incident in the epic of Naevius; but the original suggestion and the actual description of it are due to the account of the storm raised by Poseidon in the fifth book of the Odyssey. Juno, in availing herself of the instrumentality of Aeolus, bribes him by a promise similar to that made to Sleep in the fourteenth book of the Iliad. The description of the harbour in which the Trojan ships find refuge is imitated from that of the harbour to which the Phaeacian ship brings Odysseus; and the success of Aeneas in the chase is suggested by two passages in the Odyssey, ix. 154 et seq. and x. 104 et seq.