Trans pontum fugat et terris inmittit apricis[678].
The point of comparison in this simile is not merely the obvious [pg 417]one of the number of leaves falling or birds flying across the sea in autumn, but rather the inner likeness between the passive helplessness with which the leaves have yielded to the chill touch of the year, and that with which the shades—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα—have yielded to the chill touch of death. Nor perhaps is it pressing the language of Virgil too far to suppose that in the words ‘terris inmittit apricis’ he means to leave on the mind a feeling of some happier possibilities in death than the certainty of ‘cold obstruction.’ One of the most characteristically Virgilian similes—that at vi. 453—
qualem primo qui surgere mense
Aut videt, aut vidisse putat per nubila Lunam—
is almost a translation of the lines of Apollonius (iv. 1447)—
τὼς ἰδέειν, ὥς τίς τε νέῳ ἐνὶ ἤματι μήνην
ἢ ἴδεν, ἢ ἐδόκησεν ἐπαχλύουσαν ἰδέσθαι[679],—
but the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower world. Other images are suggested by the poet’s delicate sense of grace in flower or plant, combined with his tender compassion for the beauty of youth perishing prematurely. Such are those which enable us more vividly to realise the pathos of the death of Euryalus and of the burial of Pallas. Yet though these images are characteristically Virgilian, they also bear unmistakeable traces of imitation. The lines—
Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo