Concilium horrendum[613]—
is conceived with a kind of grim power, showing that the imagination of Virgil does not merely reproduce, but endows with a new life the figures which he borrows most closely from his original. But the life-like realism, the combined humour and terror of Homer’s representation, are altogether absent from the Aeneid. These marvellous creations appear natural in the Odyssey, and in keeping with the imaginative impulses and the adventurous spirit of the ages of maritime discovery: but they stand in no real relation to the feelings and beliefs with which men encountered the occasional dangers and the frequent discomforts of the Adriatic or the Aegean in the Augustan Age.
In his conception of these real dangers of the sea, which have to be met in the most advanced as well as the most primitive times, Virgil’s inferiority to Homer, both in general effect and in lifelike detail, is very marked. The wonderful [pg 386]realism of the sea adventures in the fifth Book of the Odyssey produces on the mind the impression that the poet is recalling either a peril that he himself had encountered, or one that he had heard vividly related by some one who had thus escaped ‘from the issue of death:’ and that there was in the poet too the genuine delight in danger, the spirit
‘That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine,’
which has been attributed to the companions of his hero’s wanderings.
Odysseus, like Aeneas, feels his limbs and heart give way before the sudden outburst of the storm; but, though swept from the raft and overwhelmed for a time under the waves, he never loses his presence of mind or his courage—
ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὣς σχεδίης ἐπελήθετο τειρόμενός περ,
ἀλλὰ μεθορμηθεὶς ἐνὶ κύμασιν ἐλλάβετ’ αὐτῆς,
ἐν μέσσῃ δὲ καθῖζε τέλος θανάτου ἀλεείνων[614].