The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil

by W. Y. Sellar

(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age, were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems, better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration. The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new organisation [pg 82]to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy, Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively recent period, continued to be the master-force in European politics,—apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free national life on a large scale,—finds its earliest expression. And the loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil’s time faith in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the necessary bond of civil order and union.

(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane and sympathetic emotions, ex[pg 83]pressed by the word ‘humanitas,’ continued to prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word pietas, as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our ‘piety’ and of our ‘pity.’ The Power above man is regarded by him not as an unreal phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.

This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in reconciling these various factors of belief. The ‘Fates,’ which are the medium through which man’s happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings. But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems, in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin, in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political sentiment, ‘il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce [pg 84]qu’aimerait l’avenir.’ If it was as a great national poet, the rival of Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus, that he exercised the most powerful spell over his contemporaries, it was rather as the ‘pius vates,’ the prophetic teacher, that, in spite of themselves, he gained ascendency over the cultivated minds of the early Latin and the mediaeval Churches[134].

(5.) Though other periods of ancient history, and notably the fifth century B.C. in Greece, were richer in genius and enjoyed a happier and nobler life than the Augustan Age, yet this latter age, as the latest of the great literary epochs of antiquity, inherited the science, wisdom, power, and beauty stored up in all the art and writings of the past. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of culture, and Virgil was pre-eminently the most cultivated man belonging to the age. In early youth he had learned from Greek masters all they could teach him in poetry and rhetoric, in science and philosophy; and through all his life he combined the productive labours of an artist with the patient diligence of a student. He was familiar with the successive schools of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod down to the epic and didactic poets of Alexandria. He was acquainted with all the physical sciences known in his time, especially, it is said, with astronomy and medicine. His earlier writings show the influence of the philosophical system of Epicurus, while his later convictions are more in agreement with the Platonic philosophy. The oratory of the later books of the Aeneid breathes the spirit of Stoicism. We are told that he proposed to devote the years that might remain to him after the completion of the Aeneid to the further study of philosophy, perhaps with the view of writing a great poem, which might rival and answer Lucretius. The extant fragments of Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Attius, and Lucilius, and of later and obscurer writers such as Hostius and Varro Atacinus, show [pg 85]that he had read their works, and could skilfully adapt what he found in them to his own national epic. The Georgics, again, show a careful study and assimilation of the thought and language of Lucretius. And to the pursuits of a scholar he united the research of an antiquary. He collected from many sources the myths and traditions connected with the origin of ancient customs and ceremonies, or attaching to the towns and tribes of Italy, famous in early times. He was especially well versed in the ceremonial lore of the Priestly Colleges. Thus, in addition to his higher claims on the admiration of his countrymen, his poems were prized by them as a great repertory of their secular and sacred learning. Many fancies and dim traditions of a remote antiquity, many vestiges of customs and ceremonies which have disappeared from the world, many thoughts and expressions of men who have left scarcely any other memorial of themselves, still survive, because the mind of Virgil discerned some element of interest in them which fitted them to contribute to the representative character of the work to which his life was dedicated.

(6.) Virgil’s pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil, alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance with which a long continuous poem, epic [pg 86]or didactic, could as a whole gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive, meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil’s influence over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth, tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in vital force.

In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters, having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious littérateurs of the Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought and feeling. The repre[pg 87]sentation thus established gains ascendency over the future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius, and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are refreshed:—

Illa cadens raucum per levia murmur

Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva[135].

The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.