links and formulas, such as “principio,” “nunc age,” &c., but uses them more sparingly, so as to make the logical mechanism of the poem less rigid, while he still keeps up the liveliness of a personal address. All his topics admit of being vitalized by attributing to natural processes the vivacity of human relationships and sensibility, and by association with the joy which the ideal farmer. feels in the results of his energy'. Much of the argument of Lucretius, on the other hand, is as remote from the genial presence of nature as from human associations. Virgil makes a much larger use than Lucretius of ornament borrowed from older poetry, art, science and mythology. There is uniformity of chastened excellence in the diction and versification of the Georgics, contrasting with the imaginative force of isolated expressions and the majesty of isolated lines and passages in Lucretius. The “vivida vis” of imagination is more apparent in the older poet; the artistic perfection of Virgil is even more conspicuous in the Georgics than in the Eclogues or the Aeneid.
The principal episodes of the poem. In which the true dignity and human interest of the subject are brought out, occur in the first and second books. Other shorter episodes add variety to the different books. These episodes are 'not detached or isolated ornaments, but give a higher unity to the poem, and are the main ground of its permanent hold upon the world. There is indeed one marked exception to this rule. The long episode with which the whole poem ends—the tale of the shepherd Aristaeus, with which is connected the more poetical fable of Orpheus and Eurydice—has only the slightest connexion with the general ideas and sentiment of the poem. It is altogether at variance with the truthful realism and the Italian feeling which pervade it. But we are distinctly told that the original conclusion had contained the praises of Gallus, the friend of Virgil’s youth, who, about the time when Virgil was finishing the poem, had gained distinction in the war against Cleopatra, and had in consequence been made the first governor of the new province of Egypt. Such a conclusion might well have been in keeping with the main purpose of the poem.
After the fall of Gallus, owing to his ambitious failure in his Egyptian administration, and his death in 26 BC, the poet, according to the story, in obedience to the command of the emperor, substituted for this encomium the beautiful but irrelevant fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which he first displayed the narrative skill, the pathos and the magical power of making the mystery of the unseen world present to the imagination which characterize the Aeneid.
The cardinal episodes of the poem, as it now stands, are the passages in bk. i . from line 464 to the end, and in bk. ii. from 136 to 176 and from 475 to 542. The first, introduced in connexion with the signs of the weather, recounts the omens which accompanied the death of Julius Caesar, and shows how the misery of Italy and the neglected state of the fields are the punishment for the great sin of the previous generation. In the second of these passages the true keynote of the poem is struck in the invocation to Italy—
"Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
Magna virum.”
The thought of the beauties of the land, of the abundance and variety of its products, of its ancient cities and mighty works of man, its brave and hardy races, the great men who had fought for her in old times, and of him, the greatest among her sons, who was then defending Rome against her enemies in the farthest East, inspires the poet, and gives dignity to the trivial details of farm life. But a still higher and more catholic interest is given to the subject in the greatest of the episodes—the most perfect passage in all Latin poetry—that from line 458, “O fortunatos nimium,” to the end. The subject is there glorified by its connexion not only with the national well-being but with the highest life and purest happiness of man. The old delight in the labours of the field blends with the new delight in the beauty of nature, and is associated with that purity and happiness of family life which was an Italian ideal, and with the poetry of those religious beliefs and observances which imparted a sense of security, a constantly recurring charm, and a bond of social sympathy to the old rustic life.
The Georgics is not only the most perfect, but the most native of all the works of the ancient Italian genius. Even where he borrows from Greek originals, Virgil makes the Greek mind tributary to his national design. The Georgics, the poem of the land, is as essentially Italian as the Odyssey, the poem of the sea, is essentially Greek. Nature is presented to us as she is revealed in the soft luxuriance of Italian landscape, not in the clearly defined forms of Greek scenery. The poem shows the Italian susceptibility to the beauty of the outward world, the dignity and sobriety of the Italian imagination, the firm and enduring structure of all Roman workmanship, while it is essentially Italian in its religious and ethical feeling.
The work which yet remained for Virgil to accomplish was the addition of a great Roman epic to literature. This had been the earliest effort of the national imagination, when it first departed from the mere imitative reproduction of Greek originals. The work which had given the truest expression to the genius of Rome before the time of Virgil had been the Annales Aeneid.of Ennius. This had been supplemented by various historical poems but had never been superseded. It satisfied the national imagination as an expression of the national life in its vigorous prime, but it could not satisfy the newly developed sense of art; and the expansion of the national life since the days of Ennius, and the changed conditions into which it passed after the battle of Actium, demanded a newer and ampler expression. It had been Virgil’s earliest ambition to write an heroic poem on the traditions of Alba Longa; and he had been repeatedly urged by Augustus to celebrate his exploits. The problem before him was to compose a work of art on a large scale, which should represent a great action of the heroic age, and should at the same time embody the most vital ideas and sentiment of the hour—which in substance should glorify Rome and the present ruler of Rome, while in form it should follow closely the great models of epic poetry and reproduce all their sources of interest. It was his ambition to be the Homer, as he had been the Theocritus and Hesiod, of his country.
Various objects had thus to be combined in a work of art on the model of the Greek epic: the revival of interest in the heroic foretime; the satisfaction of national sentiment; the expression of the deeper currents of emotion of the age; the personal celebration of Augustus. A new type of epic poetry had to be created. It was desirable to select a single heroic action which should belong to the cycle of legendary events celebrated in the Homeric poems, and which could be associated with Rome. The only subject which in any way satisfied these conditions was that of the wanderings of Aeneas and of his final settlement in Latium. The story, though not of Roman origin but of a composite growth, had long been familiar to the Romans, and had been recognized by official acts of senate and people. The subject enabled Virgil to tell again of the fall of Troy, and to weave a tale of sea-adventure similar to that of the wanderings of Odysseus. It was also recommended by the claim which the Julii, a patrician family of Alban origin, made to descent from Iulus, the supposed son of Aeneas and founder of Alba Longa.
The Aeneid is thus at once the epic of the national life under its new conditions and an epic of human character. The true keynote of the poem is struck in the line with which the proem closes—
“Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.”
The idea which underlies the whole action of the poem is that of the great part played by Rome in the history of the world, that part being from of old determined by divine decree, and carried out through the virtue of her sons. The idea of universal empire is thus the dominant idea of the poem. With this idea that of the unbroken continuity of the national life is intimately associated. The reverence for old customs and for the traditions of the past was a large element in the national sentiment, and has a prominent place in the Aeneid. So too has the feeling of local attachment and of the power of local association over the imagination. The poem is also characteristically Roman in the religious belief and observances which it embodies. Behind all the conventional machinery of the old Olympic gods there is the Roman apprehension of a great inscrutable power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain observances, working out its own secret purposes through the agency of Roman arms and Roman counsels.
The poem is thus a religious as well as a national epic, and this explains the large part played in the development of the action by special revelation, omens, prophecies, ceremonial usages and prayer. But, while the predominant religious idea of the poem is that of a divine purpose carried out regardlessly of human feeling, in other parts of the poem, and especially in that passage of the sixth book in which Virgil tries to formulate his deepest convictions on individual destiny, the agency of fate seems to yield to that of a spiritual dispensation, awarding to men their portions according to their actions.
The idealization of Augustus is no expression of servile adulation. It is through the prominence assigned to him that the poem is truly representative of the critical epoch in human affairs at which it was written. The cardinal fact of that epoch was the substitution of personal rule for the rule of the old commonwealth over the Roman world. Virgil shows the imaginative significance of that fact by revealing the emperor as chosen from of old in the counsels of the supreme ruler of the world to fulfil the national destiny, as the descendant of gods and of heroes of old poetic renown; as one, moreover, who, in the actual work done by him, as victor in a great decisive battle between the forces of the Western and the Eastern world, as the organizer of empire and restorer of peace, order and religion, had rendered better service to mankind than any one of the heroes who in an older time had been raised for their great deeds to the company of the gods.
Virgil’s true and vet idealizing interpretation of the imperial idea of Rome is the basis of the greatness of the Aeneid as a representative poem. It is on this representative character and on the excellence of its artistic execution that the claim of the Aeneid to rank as one of the great poems of the world mainly rests. The inferiority of the poem to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a direct representation of human life is so unquestionable that we are in danger of underrating the real though secondary interest which the poem possesses as an imitative epic of human action, manners
