Gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident[503].
In this way Virgil softens and humanises the idea of the Imperial State, representing her as not only the conqueror but the civiliser of the ancient world, and the transmitter of that civilisation to the world of the future. And while he invests the thought of ancient and powerful sovereignty with imaginative associations, and describes acts of heroism with the glow of martial enthusiasm, yet the crowning glory which he ascribes to the Romans is the piety inherited from their Trojan ancestors. The final appeasement of the rancour of Juno is secured by the declaration of Jupiter—
Hinc genus Ausonio mixtum quod sanguine surget,
Supra homines, supra ire deos pietate videbis,
Nec gens ulla tuos aeque celebrabit honores[504].
The national idea of Rome was associated also with the thought of the divine origin, the great antiquity, the unbroken tradition, and the eternal duration of the State. Universal [pg 329]empire, uninterrupted continuity of existence, were the claims of the ancient Imperial as of the modern Ecclesiastical Rome. And this idea, by the strong hold which it had on the minds first of the Romans themselves and afterwards of other nations, went far to realise itself. The confidence of the Romans in themselves was intimately connected with their belief in their origin. Ennius had impressed on their minds the belief in the miraculous birth of their founder and in his miraculous elevation after death, and in the protection afforded by the ‘augustum augurium’ by which the building of their city had been consecrated. Among no people did ancient customs and ceremonies, of which in many cases the origin was altogether forgotten, survive with such vitality. In no other people did the memory of their past history, whether of triumph or disaster, exercise so potent an influence on the present time. In no Republic have the pride of birth and the reverence felt to ancestors been so powerful and prevailing sentiments: no State has ever been more loyal to the memory of the men who at successive crises in its history had served it or saved it from its enemies: and no great secular power ever felt so strong an assurance of an unbroken ascendency in the future, and of the dependence of the fate of the world on that ascendency.
The Aeneid appealed to all these sentiments even with more power than the epic of the Republic and than the various national histories in which Roman literature was peculiarly rich. Virgil, while still leaving to his countrymen the pride of their descent from Mars, made them feel the charm of their relation to a more gracious divinity, and even the hereditary claim which they had to regard themselves as special objects of care to the Supreme Ruler of Heaven[505]. The association of their destiny with the fortunes of Aeneas enabled them to look back to a remoter and more famous epoch of antiquity than the legends of their origin which had satisfied the fancy of the older Romans. Various passages in the poem enable Virgil to invest impressive ceremonies, existing in his own time, with the asso[pg 330]ciations of an immemorial past. The three great prophetic passages in the first, sixth, and eighth books enable him to revive, as Ennius had done, the thought of the great men and families of Rome, and of the great events both of earlier and more recent history. The march of Roman conquest during one hundred and fifty momentous years enabled the younger poet to evoke greater, though in some respects less happy, memories than those evoked by his predecessor. And the security of the Empire established in his day justified him in looking forward to the future with even a more assured confidence, though perhaps in a less sanguine spirit.
The national sentiment manifesting itself in the pride of empire and deeply rooted in the past, was combined with strong local attachments and the attribution of a kind of sanctity to the great natural features of the land or to spots associated with historic memories which had impressed themselves on the hearts of successive generations. Virgil was, as we saw in examining the Georgics, peculiarly susceptible of such impressions. There is no passage in any ancient writer which makes us feel so vividly the ‘religio loci’ which has for more than two thousand years invested the very site of Rome as that in the eighth book of the Aeneid, in which Evander conducts Aeneas over the ground destined to be occupied by the temples and dwellings of Rome. The feeling which the sight of the Capitoline hill and of the Tarpeian rock calls forth is one rather of religious awe than of any more familiar sentiment. The feeling, on the other hand, with which the Tiber is introduced—
Caeruleus Thybris, caelo gratissimus amnis—
is one rather of proud affection than of religious veneration. The aspect of the great city itself awed the imagination rather than called forth the affections of her citizens. But these affections were given to the rivers and streams, the lakes, and mountain-homes of Italy. Patriotism in the Augustan Age was as much an Italian as a Roman sentiment. The military greatness of Rome was even more identified with the discipline and cou[pg 331]rage of the Marsian and Apulian[506] soldier than with that of the Latin race[507]. Her moral greatness is more often identified by the poets with the virtues of the old Sabellian stock than with those of the ‘populus Romanus Quiritium.’ While the Georgics celebrate the peaceful glory and beauty of Italy, the Aeneid evokes the memory of its old warlike renown—