The magnificent temples of deities blending the attributes of native Italian gods with those of the gods of Olympus seemed to preside over the tumult and active business of the Forum; and the majesty of the Capitoline Jove was still recognised as the manifestation of the stability and power of the State. But the Roman imagination was at the same time beginning to be impressed by a new symbol of Divine agency, which was felt in all national concerns. The ideal majesty of Jove was merging, as an object of veneration, in the actual majesty of Caesar, regarded as the vicegerent of the Supreme Power. All these phases of religious belief, Greek and Italian, old and new, some appealing to the popular, some to the educated mind, meet in the poetry of the Augustan Age, and nowhere in more close conjunction than in this Invocation. They appear in still [pg 227]stranger connexion with the later results of science and philosophic thought. It is impossible to find any principle of reconcilement in accordance with which their proper place in the reasonable intelligence of the age may be assigned to each. They came together in Virgil as a composite result of the union of his literary and philosophic tastes with his religious feeling and national sympathies. So far as we can attach any truth of meaning to this Invocation, we must look upon it as a symbolical expression of Divine agency and superintendence in all the various fields of natural production.
Virgil is much more sparing than Lucretius in the proems to his other books. In the second book there is a brief invocation to Liber, who is introduced, with rich pictorial colouring, as the special god of the vintage; and at lines 39–46 there is an appeal to Maecenas, which disclaims, perhaps not without some reference to the contrary practice of Lucretius, all intention to detain his hearer ‘through digressions from the main theme and long preambles.’ In the fourth there is again a brief appeal to Maecenas, a statement of the subject, an admission of its homely character,—‘In tenui labor,’—an expression of the hope that, even out of these materials, great glory may ensue if Apollo hears the poet’s prayer and no unpropitious powers impede the course of his song. The introduction to the third book is more extended, and more interesting from the light which it throws on the motives which determined Virgil to the choice of the subject of his epic poem. Here, too, as in the first and second books, there is an appeal to the tutelary deities of the herds and flocks, the Italian Pales, and the ‘Pastor ab Amphryso,’—the Apollo νόμιος of Greek legend and rural worship. The associations of Greek poetry are also evoked in the reference to the woods and streams of Lycaeus, to the lowing herds of Cithaeron, to the dogs that range over Taygetus, and to the famous horses of the Argive plain. The choice of the subject is justified by the contrast suggested between its novelty—‘silvas saltusque sequamur Intactos’—and the hackneyed poems founded on mythological subjects which his immediate predecessors in [pg 228]poetry had written in imitation of their Alexandrine prototypes. But he indicates here, with a new application of the words of Ennius, the aspiration to compose a great national epic in celebration of the exploits of Caesar:—
temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora[344].
Under the allegory of the games which he proposed to celebrate, and the marble temple which he proposed to raise on the banks of the Mincio, he associates the thought of his early home with his ambition to rival the great works of Greek genius (for this seems to be the meaning of the lines
Cuncta mihi, Alpheum linquens lucosque Molorchi,
Cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia cestu)[345],—
and to spread the fame of Caesar through distant ages. This invocation must have been written later than the crowning victory of Actium, but before the plan of the Aeneid had definitely assumed shape in the poet’s mind. From the allegorical representations of the designs in gold, ivory, and marble for the ornaments of the temple, and still more clearly from the direct statement
Mox tamen ardentis accingar dicere pugnas
Caesaris[346],