he reproduces a thought which Callimachus had expressed in his hymn to Artemis[337]—
Οὓς δὲ κεν εὐμειδής τε καὶ ἴλαος αὐγάσσηαι
κείνοις εὖ μὲν ἄρουρα φέρει στάχυν[338].
The ‘flava Ceres’ of Virgil’s description seems to call up before our mind a picture of the harvest-moon looking down on the corn-fields of the prosperous husbandman.
The national religion of Rome was something distinct both from the rustic Paganism of Italy, and from that aesthetic amalgamation of Greek and Roman beliefs and that semi-philosophical rationalism which art and literature made familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age. The great symbol of that national religion was the Temple of Jove on the Capitol[339].
That religion was based on the idea that the wide empire and eternal duration of Rome had been appointed by Divine decree. As distinguished from the national religion of Greece, which expressed itself in new and varied forms of art, Roman religion was one which adhered to ancient rites and expressed itself in the pomp of outward ceremonial and other impressive symbols. It acted on the imagination through the sense of vastness, pomp, stateliness, and solemnity; that of Greece through the sense of life, joy, beauty, and harmony animating its ceremonial and embodying itself in its symbols. The objects of Roman worship were almost innumerable. In addition to the greater divinities which it shared with the Greek worship, and besides the various native divinities common to it with the religion of other Italian races, Roman religion had erected temples to various abstract qualities, such as Peace, Faith, Concord, and the like. This tendency to multiply their deities, to deify mere abstractions, and to recognise a distinct deity as presiding over every common act and process of life, weakened or destroyed the sense of the personality of the gods, and thus indirectly promoted that advance to Monotheism which philosophy had made in a different direction. While the Greeks conceived of each local god or hero as a distinct person, endowed with his own human qualities and his own visible shape, and thus naturally adapted for the representations of dramatic poetry or plastic art, the Romans worshipped rather one Divine impersonal power with many attributes and functions. The need which the popular imagination feels of some personal embodiment of the idea of Godhead probably explains the readiness with which, in the dissolution of older faiths, the worship of the Emperor became the chief symbol of the national faith.
So far as the conceptions of the national religion of Rome, which have a powerful influence on the action of the Aeneid, enter into this Invocation, it is in the recognition of the divinity of Caesar. But here he is associated with the rural gods, who listen to the prayers of the husbandman, rather than, as elsewhere both in Horace and Virgil, with the majesty of the Roman State. The passage probably, as is suggested by Ribbeck, owes its origin to the decree of the Senate in 36 B.C.,—after the naval victory gained by Agrippa over Sextus Pompeius,—by which the worship of Caesar, ‘inter municipales deos,’ was established. There is probably no passage in Virgil, scarcely any in Latin poetry, which must strike the modern reader as so unreal as this, or so untrue to the actual convictions of educated men. There is none in which the language of adulation appears so palpably, or in which the love of mythological allusion, as one of the conventional ornaments of poetry, appears to exercise so unfortunate an influence on the truthful feeling of the poet. It seems strange that a man of the commanding understanding of Augustus should have derived any pleasure from the supposition that he might become the son-in-law of Tethys, from the statement that the glowing Scorpion was already beginning to make room for him in the sky, or from the appeal made to him to resist the ambition of supplanting Pluto as the future ruler of Tartarus. In contrast with this state of feeling we learn to respect the masculine sense and dignity with which Tiberius disclaims the attribution of divine honours: ‘I, Conscript Fathers, call you to witness and desire posterity to remember, that I am but a mortal, and am performing human duties, and consider it enough if I fill the foremost place[340].’ But though it is not possible that the lines from ‘Tuque adeo’ to ‘adsuesce vocari’ should ever appear natural to us, or that we should ever read them without some feeling that they are unworthy of the manliness of a great poet, we may yet recognise some symbolical meaning in them [pg 225]beyond the mere expression of overstrained eulogy. In such expressions as
Auctorem frugum tempestatumque potentem[341],
Virgil associates the idea of the power of Caesar with the main subject of his poem; and probably, as is pointed out by Ribbeck, he suggests the thought of the dependence of Rome and Italy for subsistence on the vigilance of their ruler[342]. In the mention of Tethys there is a reference to recent naval successes; and in the ‘tibi serviat ultima Thule’ there may be an allusion to the contemplated expedition to Britain, and certainly, as in so many other passages of the poetry of the age, there is a recognition of the wide empire of Rome. In the lines
Anne novum tardis, etc.,