though he can express a Roman contempt for death,—
Est hic, est animus lucis contemptor[624],
and can sympathise with the energetic daring of his Italian heroes and heroine,—Turnus, Lausus, Pallas[625], and Camilla,—yet shares the sentiment with which his hero looks forward to peace as the crown of his labours, and regards the wars which he was compelled to wage as a hated task imposed on him by the Fates—
Nos alias hinc ad lacrimas, eadem horrida bella,
Fata vocant[626].
Yet even in the incidents of his battle-pieces Virgil does not follow Homer slavishly. The warlike action of the poem is not [pg 390]a mere succession of single combats, or a confused mêlée of battle, surging ‘this way and that,’ between the rampart that guards the ships and the walls of the city. It is said that the greatest soldier of modern times, in the enforced leisure of his last years, condescended to express a criticism, not indeed a favourable one, on Virgil’s skill as a tactician; and it is an element of novelty in the representation of the Aeneid that it suggests at least some image of the combined operations of modern warfare. But it is in the play which Virgil gives to the other human emotions of his personages, tempering and counteracting the blind rage of battle, that the poet of a more advanced era most conspicuously appears. The ancient world at its best, whether we judge of it from the representations of its poets, or the recorded acts of its greatest men and most powerful and enlightened States, did not rise to that height of chivalrous generosity which scorns to take an enemy at a disadvantage, or to wipe away the memory of defeat or disaster by a cruel revenge. Achilles in his treatment of Hector, Caesar in his treatment of Vercingetorix, the Spartans in dealing with Plataeae, the Syracusans with the remnant of the defeated Athenians, the Athenians themselves with the helpless defenders of Melos, the Romans with the Samnites who spared their lives at the Caudine Forks,—all alike fall below the standard of nobleness which men of temper inferior to that of the great men and nations of antiquity often reached in mediaeval times. Those who appear to come nearest this standard in ancient times,—who could at least honour courage in an enemy or refuse to press too heavily upon him in his defeat,—are the Carthaginian Hannibal and his not unworthy conqueror. Virgil cannot be said, in this respect, to rise altogether superior to the spirit of the old Greek and Roman world. In the Aeneid it is thought no shame, but rather a glory, for soldiers to slay defenceless or wounded men in battle or in the dim confusion of a night foray. Yet the sentiments of his warriors engaged in battle are more tempered with humanity than those of the heroes of the Iliad. There is no word of throwing the bodies [pg 391]of the slain to dogs and vultures. There is no such deadly struggle over the bodies of Lausus or Pallas as over that of Patroclus. Turnus and Aeneas alike act on the principle expressed in the request of the dying champion of Italy,—
Ulterius ne tende odiis[627].
Not only is the warlike passion less cruel in the Aeneid, but the feeling of the sanctity which invests the dead is stronger. The only passage in the Aeneid which might have exposed Virgil to the reproach of Lucretius, as forgetting in the supposed interests of religion the certain claims of humanity, is that in which Aeneas, following the example of Achilles, sets aside the captive youths for immolation to the Manes of Pallas.
But the chief source of interest in the Virgilian battle-pieces is the pathetic sympathy awakened for the untimely death of some of the nobler personages of the story. The tender compassion called forth by the blight which fell in his own time upon the earliest of the ‘breves et infaustos populi Romani amores[628],’ and reappeared again in the deaths of Drusus and Germanicus—that compassion which dictates the words
si qua fata aspera rumpas