The speech of Aeneas (198–207) again reminds us of the ultimate object of all the vicissitudes and dangers which he encounters:—
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum
Tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas
Ostendunt[478].
Immediately afterwards we come upon one of the three great passages of the poem in which the action is prophetically advanced into the Augustan Age. These three passages (i. 223–296, vi. 756–860, viii. 626–731), like the greater episodes of the Georgics, draw attention directly to what is the most vital and most permanent source of interest in the Aeneid. They serve, along with the opening lines of the poem, better than any other passages to bring out the relation both of dependence on the Homeric epic and of contrast with it which characterise the Virgilian epic.
The passage before us, the interview between Jupiter and [pg 317]Venus, owes its original suggestion to the scene in the first book of the Iliad in which Thetis intercedes with Zeus, to avenge the wrong done to her son. The object of this intercession is a purely personal one; the result of it is the whole series of events which culminates in the death of Hector. The object which Venus claims of Jupiter is the fulfilment of his promise that a people should arise from the blood of Teucer—
Qui mare, qui terras omni dicione tenerent[479];
the result of her prayer is that Jupiter reveals to her not only the immediate future of Aeneas and the founding of Lavinium and of Alba, but the birth of Romulus, the building of Rome, the ultimate triumph of the house of Assaracus over Pthia, Mycenae, and Argos, the peaceful reign on earth and the final acceptance into heaven of the greatest among the descendants of Aeneas, who is there called, not by his later title of Augustus, but by the earlier name which he inherited from his adoptive father—
Iulius a magno demissum nomen Iulo[480].
In this passage we note (1) Virgil’s relation to the earlier poem of Naevius, who had sketched the outline of the scene which is here filled up; and also the reproduction of the diction of Ennius in the passage—