Φύτευμ’ ἀχείρωτον αὐτόποιον
γλαυκᾶς παιδοτρόφου φύλλον ἐλαίας.
He calls upon Pan to leave his native groves and the woodland pastures of Lycaeus, just as Horace describes him as passing nimbly from his Arcadian haunt to the Sabine Lucretilis. These gods, nymphs, and satyrs of an alien belief were now to Romans as to Greeks the recognised materials which art and song had to shape into new forms. In the vigorous prime of Greek poetry, so late even as the age of Sophocles and Herodotus, there was a real belief in the personal existence and active agency of these supernatural beings. This real belief first gave birth to, and was afterwards merged in, the representations of art. Art, which owed its birth to religious sentiment, superseded it. But after a time and under new conditions the strong admiration for the beauty or significance of the objects represented in art produces a strong wish to revive the belief in their reality; and in minds peculiarly susceptible of such influences the wish tends to fulfil itself.
Probably Virgil himself would not have cared to probe too deeply the state of half-belief in which his heart and mind realised the bright existence and kindly influence of beings consecrated to him by the most cherished associations of living art and the poetry of the past. Even Lucretius, while sternly rejecting all belief in their existence as absolutely incompatible with truth, feels from time to time attracted by their poetical charm. Horace, we can see, from the absence of anything in his Satires, or Epistles, implying a real belief in the gods of mythology, keeps his literary belief apart from his true convic[pg 221]tions. In the case of Virgil, it is not possible, at all events for a modern reader, distinctly to separate them. The power of the old mythology over the fancy and the weakness of scientific thought in ancient times to overthrow that power is nowhere more visible than in his poetry.
But there was another mode of Greek influence acting on the educated minds of Rome, stronger than that of the ancient mythology. That influence was the religious speculations of the various philosophical schools[334]. There was, on the one hand, the Epicurean acceptance of an infinite number of gods dwelling in the ‘Intermundia,’ enjoying a state of supreme calm, apart from all concern with this world or the labours and pursuits of men. They might be objects of pure contemplation, and pious reverence to the human spirit; but they were capable neither of being propitiated nor made angry by anything that men could do. The Stoic doctrine, on the other hand, recognised the incessant agency and forethought of a Supreme Spiritual Power over human life. It accepted the stories and beings of the traditional religion, but explained them away. The various deities worshipped by the people are the various manifestations and functions of this one Supreme Spiritual Power, whether called by the name of Zeus, or by the abstract name of Providence (πρόνοια). This is the Power addressed in the famous hymn of Cleanthes, and that appealed to in the familiar τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν of Aratus. It is part of Virgil’s eclecticism to combine the science of Epicurus with the theology of the more spiritual schools. The Supreme Spiritual Power in the Georgics is generally spoken of under the title of ‘Pater.’ It is noticeable that the word Iuppiter is used either with a purely physical signification, as in
Iuppiter umidus austris—
Et iam maturis metuendus Iuppiter uvis—
or as in the phrases ‘sub Iove,’ ‘ante Iovem,’ in reference to the stories of the ancient mythology. Even in this Invocation, [pg 222]the object of which seems to be to assign function and personality to the gods of Olympus and of Italy, the influence of the Stoic theology was recognised in ancient times in the identification of the sun and moon—‘clarissima mundi lumina’—with Liber and Ceres[335]. The rhythm of the lines 5–7 can leave no doubt whatever as to this identification, notwithstanding the appeal to Varro’s example, who distinguishes the various deities whom he invokes. It is characteristic of Virgil’s art to introduce such a variation in any passage which he imitates, and also to suggest a thought which he does not distinctly develope. In the lines 95–96,
neque illum
Flava Ceres alto nequiquam spectat Olympo[336],