The tragic splendour of Dido’s death is enhanced by her proud sense of a high destiny fulfilled and of queenly rule exercised over a great people—
Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum Fortuna, peregi:
Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.
Urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi[599].
Thus although the necessities of his position and his own ‘inscitia reipublicae’ prevented Virgil, in his representation, from appealing to the generous political emotions of a free people, he was able not only to gratify the pride of empire felt by his countrymen, but to sustain among them the sense of imaginative reverence with which the sovereignty of the State over its individual members deserves to be regarded.
But there is another class of political facts which interest the mind as much as those which arise out of the play of conflicting forces within a free commonwealth,—viz. the relations of independent powers with one another. And of this class of facts both Homer and Virgil make use in their representations. In [pg 380]Homer we see the spectacle, never realised in actual Grecian history at least till the days of Alexander, of the many independent Greek powers united under one leader in a common enterprise, and of the various powers of the western shores of Asia combined in defence of their leading State. The antagonism between the Greeks and Trojans is, in point of general conception, more like the hostile inter-relations of nations in modern times, than like the wars of city against city, with which the pages of later Greek history are filled[600]. The union of the Italian tribes and cities under the command of Turnus, and that of Trojans, Arcadians, and Etrurians—all foreigners recently settled in Italy—under Aeneas, may be compared to the union of independent Greek powers under Agamemnon, and that of ‘the allies summoned from afar,’ who, while following their own princes, yet submitted to the command of Hector. Yet in Virgil’s conception of the great powers of the world, and even of cities most remote from one another, as having an intimate knowledge of each other’s fortunes,—in the idea of what in modern times would be called a ‘foreign policy’ and ‘the balance of power,’ which dictates the mission of Turnus to Diomede, and the appeal of Aeneas to the Etrurians to take part with him in averting the establishment by the Rutulians of a sovereignty over the whole of Italy,—we meet with a condition of international relations and policy, which, if based on the experience of any period of ancient history, might have been suggested by the memory of the time when Hannibal’s great scheme of combining the fresh vigour of the western barbarians, the smouldering elements of resistance in Italy, and the military power and prestige of the old monarchies of Macedonia and Syria, was defeated not more by the irresolution and disunion among those powers, than by the traditional policy through which Rome had made her dependent allies feel that her interest [pg 381]was identified with their own. But this aspect of the world, though an anachronism from the point of view either of the time when the poem was written, or of that in which the events represented are supposed to happen, enhances the dignity of the action, by exhibiting the enterprise of Aeneas as a spectacle attracting the attention and involving the destinies of the great nations of the world.
The state of material civilisation exhibited in the Aeneid must be regarded also as a poetical compromise between the simplicity and rude vigour of primitive civilisation and the splendour and refinement of the age in which the poem was written. Thus Acestes, the friendly king and Sicilian host of Aeneas, welcomes him on his return from Carthage in the rough dress of some primitive hunter—
Horridus in iaculis et pelle Libystidis ursae[601].
Evander receives him beneath his humble roof,
stratisque locavit