Eruet ille Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas,
Ipsumque Aeaciden, genus armipotentis Achilli[517].
The bitterness of national animosity is especially apparent in his exhibition of the characters of Ulysses and Helen. The superiority of the Greeks in the arts and sciences is admitted not without some touch of scorn (‘credo equidem’) in contrast with the superiority of Rome in the imperial arts of conquering and governing nations. It may appear strange that the only race to which Virgil is unjust or ungenerous is the one to which he himself, in common with all educated Romans, was most deeply indebted. But it is to be remembered that there was a dramatic propriety in the expression of this hostility in the mouth of Aeneas and of Anchises. The championship of the cause of Troy demanded an attitude of antagonism to her destroyer. The Greek tragedians had themselves set the example of a degraded representation of two of the most admirable of Homer’s creations; and Virgil’s mode of conceiving and delineating character is much nearer to that of Euripides than to that of Homer. The original error of Helen and the craft in dealing with his enemies, which is one of many qualities in the versatile humanity of Odysseus, gave to these later artists [pg 335]the germ, in accordance with which the whole character was conceived. They did not adequately apprehend that the most interesting types of nobleness and beauty of character as imagined by the greatest artists are also the most complex, and the least capable of being squared with abstract conceptions of vices or virtues. The full truth of Homer’s delineations of character was apparently not recognised by the most cultivated of his Roman readers. It is enough for Virgil that Ulysses is ‘fandi fictor,’ as it is for Horace that Achilles is ‘iracundus, inexorabilis, acer:’ although the worldly wisdom of the last-named poet makes him comprehend better Homer’s ideal of intelligent than his ideal of emotional heroism:—
Rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixem[518], etc.
Juvenal exhibits the virulence of national animosity towards the Greeks of his time, as well as a well-founded scorn of the moral baseness of character exhibited by many of them. The contempt of Tacitus is shown for their intellectual frivolity, combined with their assumption of intellectual superiority (‘qui sua tantum mirantur[519]’) based on the renown of their ancestors. The deference which Virgil and Horace might pay to the genius of early Greece was not due to the shadow of that genius as it existed in their own time. But the contemporary Greek littérateurs were not likely to resign their claim of precedence in favour of their new rivals. Neither Greek art[520] nor Greek criticism seems ever to have made any cordial recognition of the literary genius of Italy. The light in which Virgil represents the Greek character may thus perhaps owe something to the wish to repay scorn with scorn.
II.
The confidence which the Romans felt in the continued existence of their Empire and in their superiority over all other nations was closely connected with their religious feeling and belief[521]. Horace has expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and conciseness in the single line,
Dis te minorem quod geris imperas[522].