It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action, that he was most esteemed in former times. [pg 61]The Aeneid may not have been regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such expressions as ‘ludere quae vellem,’ ‘carmina qui lusi pastorum,’ ‘in tenui labor[90],’ etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of the glory of Augustus—
Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora[91]—
coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he has been exposed in the present century.
The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the Iliad:—
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii:
Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade[92].
The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth [pg 62]book of the Odes of Horace. The continuance of this influence is unmistakeable in Ovid, and there are also many traces of Virgilian expression in the prose style of Livy[93]. The author of the dialogue ‘De Oratoribus’ testifies to the favour which the poet enjoyed, even before the publication of his epic, both with the Emperor and with the whole people, who ‘on hearing some of his verses recited in the theatre rose in a body and greeted him, as he happened to be present at the spectacle, with the same marks of respect which they showed to the Emperor himself[94].’ He would thus appear, even in his lifetime, to have thoroughly ‘touched the national fibre[95],’ and to have gained that place in the admiration of his countrymen which he never afterwards lost. By the poets who came after him his memory was cherished with the veneration men feel for a great master, united to the affection which they feel for a departed friend. Lucan indeed rather enters into rivalry with him than follows in his footsteps; nor can there be any surer way of learning to appreciate the peculiar greatness of Virgil’s manner than by reading passages of the Aeneid alongside of passages of the Pharsalia. The new poets under the Flavian dynasty, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius, though they failed to apprehend the secret of its success, made the Aeneid their model, in the arrangement of their materials, in their diction, and in the structure of their verse. Statius, in bidding farewell to his Thebaid, uses these words of acknowledgement:—
Vive, precor, nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,
Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora[96];