Qua Saturae iacet atra palus, gelidusque per imas
Quaerit iter vallis atque in mare conditur Ufens[513].
This union of patriotic sentiment with the love of Nature and with the romantic associations of the past, Virgil has in common with the most distinctively national of the poets of the present [pg 333]century, from whom in the other characteristics of his art and genius he is widely removed.
The national sentiment to which Virgil and the other contemporary poets give expression is thus seen to be the sentiment of the Italian race[514]. For two centuries the principal members of that race had looked to Rome as their chief glory, rather than as their old rival and antagonist. The thought of Rome as their head had become to the other Italian tribes their basis of union with one another and the main ground of their self-esteem in relation to other nations. To that self-esteem and sense of superiority Virgil was fully alive. He is not altogether free from the narrowness of national prejudice. He has not the largeness of soul which enables Homer, while never losing his sense of the superiority of the Greeks over the Trojans, yet to awaken feelings of admiration and of generous pity for Hector and Sarpedon, for Priam and Andromache. Yet if Virgil has not this largeness of soul he has the tenderness of human compassion:—
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt[515].
He might have maintained a stronger sympathy for his hero, and have gratified a sentiment still fresh in the minds of his countrymen, by attributing to Dido the shameless licence as well as the dangerous fascination of Cleopatra; or he might have painted the Carthaginians in traditional colours of cruelty and treachery, in which Roman writers represented the most formidable among the enemies of Rome. But Virgil’s artistic sense or his humaner feeling saved him from this ungenerous [pg 334]gratification of national prejudice. Yet while more just or tolerant than other Roman writers to the Carthaginians, and especially to the memory of their greatest man, he indicates something like antipathy to the Greeks. The triumph of Rome over her Greek enemies is made prominent in the announcement of her future glories:—
Veniet lustris labentibus aetas,
Cum domus Assaraci Phthiam clarasque Mycenas
Servitio premet ac victis dominabitur Argis[516];
and again:—