Iam canit effectos extremus vinitor antes[355].
Another set of associations, interwoven with the rich and firm texture of the poem, are those derived from earlier science and poetry. Of the resources of learned allusion Lucretius makes a singularly sparing use. The localising epithets and mythological names in which Virgil’s poem abounds possessed no attraction for his austerer genius, nourished by the severe models of an older time, and rejecting the ornaments and distractions from the main interest familiar to Alexandrine literature. Virgil had already shown in the Eclogues this tendency to overlay his native thought with the spoils of Greek learning. Such phrases as ‘Strymoniae grues,’ ‘Pelusiacae lentis,’ ‘Amyclaeum canem,’ ‘Idumaeas palmas,’—the refe[pg 236]rences to the ‘harvests of Mysia and Gargarus,’ to the ‘vines of Ismarus,’ ‘Cytorus, waving with boxwood,’ etc. etc., must have been charged, for Virgil’s contemporaries, in a way which they cannot be for a modern reader, with the memories of foreign travel or of residence in remote provinces, or with the interest attaching to lands recently made known. To us their chief interest is that by their strangeness they enhance the effect with which the more familiar names of Italian places are used. Thus the contrasted pictures of the illimitable pastures of Libya and of the wintry wastes of Scythia enable us to realise more exquisitely the charm of that fresh[356] Italian pastoral scene immediately preceding, the description of which combines the tender feeling of the Eclogues with the deeper realism of the Georgics. Thus too the great episode on the beauty and riches of Italy (ii. 136–176) is introduced in immediate contrast to the account of the prodigal luxuriance of Nature in the forests and jungles of the East. But even to a modern reader such expressions as these—
Vos silvae amnesque Lycaei—
vocat alta voce Cithaeron—
O, ubi campi
Spercheusque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta, etc.,
seem to bear with them faint echoes from a far-off time, of some ideal life of poetry and adventure in the free range and ‘otia dia’ of pastoral scenes,—of some more intimate union of the human soul with the soul of mountains and woodland than is granted to the common generations of men. On Virgil himself, to whom the whole of Greek poetry and legend was an open page, the spell which they exercised was of the same kind as that exercised by the magic of classical allusion on the poets and painters of the Renaissance.
The contrast between Lucretius and Virgil, as regards their relation to the ancient mythology, has already appeared in the examination of the Invocations to their respective poems. This [pg 237]contrast is still more brought out by the large use which Virgil makes of mythological allusions in the body of his poem, as compared with the rare, and generally polemical, references to the subject in Lucretius. Virgil recalls the tales and poetical representations of mythology sometimes by some suggestive epithet, or other qualifying expression, as in speaking of ‘poppies steeped in the sleep of Lethe,’ ‘Halcyons dear to Thetis,’ ‘the Cyllenian star,’ ‘the slow-rolling wains of the Eleusinian mother,’ and the like. More frequently however he does this by direct mention of some of the more familiar, and occasionally of some of the more recondite, tales which had supplied materials to earlier poets and painters. Thus, in connexion with the topic of lucky and unlucky days, he hints at the tale of the war of the Giants with the Olympian gods, at that of Scylla and Nisus in connexion with the signs of the weather, at that of the Centaurs and Lapithae—the ‘brawl fought to the death over the wine cup’—in the account of the vine, at that of the daughter of Inachus tormented in her wanderings by the vengeance of Juno in connexion with the plague of flies with which cattle were afflicted, etc. etc. Less familiar stories, of picturesque adventure or of a kind of weird mystery, are revived in the passages—
Talis et ipse iubam cervice effudit equina