and character. In the first place It should be remarked that the action is chosen not only as suited to embody the idea of Rome, but as having a peculiar nobleness and dignity of its own. It brings before us the spectacle of the destruction of the city of greatest name in poetry or legend, of the foundation of the imperial city of the western seas, in which Rome had encountered her most powerful antagonist in her long struggle for supremacy, and that of the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome itself. The scenes through which the action is carried are familiar, yet full of great memories and associations—Troy and its neighbourhood, the seas and islands of Greece, the coasts of Epirus, familiar to all travellers between Italy and the East, Sicily, the site of Carthage, Campania, Latium, the Tiber, and all the country within sight of Rome. The personages of the action are prominent in poetry and legend, or by their ethnical names stir the sentiment of national enthusiasm—Aeneas and Anchises, Dido, Acestes, Evander, Turnus. The spheres of activity in which they are engaged are war and sea adventure. The passion of love is a powerful addition to the older sources of interest. The Aeneid revives, by a conventional compromise between the present and the remote past, some image of the old romance of Greece; it creates the romance of “that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.” It might be said of the manner of life represented in the Aeneid, that it is no more true to any actual condition of human society than that represented in the Eclogues. But may not the same be said of all idealizing restoration of a remote past in an age of advanced civilization? The life represented in the Oedipus Tyrannus or in King Lear is not the life of the Periclean nor of the Elizabethan age, nor is it conceivable as the real life of a prehistoric age. The truth of such a representation is to be judged, not by its relation to any actual state of things ever realized in the world, but by its relation to an ideal of the imagination—the ideal conception of how man, endowed with the gifts and graces of a civilized time, but yet not without the buoyancy of a more primitive age, might play his part under circumstances which would afford scope for the passions and activities of a vigorous personality, and for the refined emotions and subtle reflection of an era of high intellectual and moral cultivation. The verdict of most readers of the Aeneid will be that Virgil does not satisfy this condition as it is satisfied by Sophocles and Shakespeare. Yet there is a courtesy, dignity and consideration for the feelings of others in the manners of his chief personages, such as might be exhibited by the noblest in an age of chivalry and in an age of culture. The charm of primitive simplicity is present in some passages of the Aeneid, the spell of luxurious pomp in others. The delight of voyaging past beautiful islands is enhanced by the suggestion of the adventurous spirit which sent the first explorers abroad. Where Virgil is least real, and most purely imitative, is in the battle-scenes of the later books. They afford scope, however, to his patriotic desire to do justice to the martial energy of the Italian races; and some of them have a peculiar beauty from the pathos with which the deaths of some of the heroes are described.
But the adverse criticisms of the Aeneid are chiefly based on Virgil’s supposed failure in the crucial test of the creation of character. And his chief failure is pronounced to be the “pious Aeneas.” Is Aeneas a worthy and interesting hero of a great poem of action? Not, certainly, according to the ideals realized in Achilles and Odysseus, nor according to the modern ideal of heroism. Virgil wishes to hold up in Aeneas an ideal of pious obedience and persistent purpose—a religious ideal belonging to the ages of faith combined with the humane and self-sacrificing qualities belonging to an era of moral enlightenment. His own sympathy is with his religious ideal rather than with that of chivalrous romance. Yet that there was in his own imagination a chord responsive to the chivalrous emotion of a later time is seen in the love and pathos which he has thrown into his delineations of Pallas, Lausus and Camilla. But he felt that the deepest need of his time was not military glory, but peace, reconciliation, the restoration of law, order and piety.
In Dido Roman poetry has added to the great gallery of men and women, created by the imaginative art of different times and peoples, the ideal of a true queen and a true woman. On the episode of which she is the heroine the most passionate human interest is concentrated. It has been objected that Virgil does not really sympathize with his own creation, that he gives his approval to the cold desertion of her by Aeneas. But if he does not condemn his hero, he sees in the desertion and death of Dido a great tragic issue in which a noble and generous nature is sacrificed to the larger purpose of the gods. But that Virgil really sympathized with the creation of his imagination appears, not only in the sympathy which she still inspires, but in the part which he assigns to her in that shadowy realm—
“Conjunx ubi pristinus illi
Respondet curis, aequatque Sychaeus amorem.”
Even those who have been insensible to the representative and to the human interest of the Aeneid have generally recognized the artistic excellence of the poem. This is conspicuous both in the conception of the action and the arrangement of its successive stages and in the workmanship of details. Each of the first eight books has a large and distinct sphere of interest, and they each contribute to the impression of the work as a whole. In the first book we have the storm, the prophecy of Jove and the building of Carthage; in the second the destruction of Troy; in the third the voyage among the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean; in the fourth the tragedy of Dido; in the fifth the rest in the Sicilian bay, at the foot of Mount Eryx; in the sixth the revelation of the spiritual world of Virgil’s imagination, and of the souls of those who built up the greatness of Rome in their pre-existent state; in the seventh the arrival of the Trojans at the mouth of the Tiber and the gathering of the Italian clans; in the eighth the first sight of the hills of Rome, and the prophetic representation of the great crises in Roman history, leading up to the greatest of them all, the crowning victory of Actium. Among these books we may infer that Virgil assigned the palm to the second, the fourth and the sixth, as he selected them to read to Augustus and the imperial family. The interest is generally thought to flag in the last four books; nor is it possible to feel that culminating sympathy with the final combat between Turnus and Aeneas that we feel with the combat between Hector and Achilles. Yet a personal interest is awakened in the adventures and fate of Pallas, Lausus and Camilla. Virgil may himself have become weary of the succession of battle-scenes—“eadem horrida bella”—which the requirements of epic poetry called upon him to portray. There is not only a less varied interest, there is greater inequality of workmanship in the later books, owing to the fact that they had not received their author’s final revisal. Yet in them there are many lines and passages of great power, pathos and beauty. Virgil brought the two great instruments of varied and continuous harmony and of a rich, chastened and noble style to the highest perfection of which the Latin tongue was capable. The rhythm and style of the Aeneid is more unequal than the rhythm and style of the Georgics, but is a larger and more varied instrument. The note of his supremacy among all the poetic artists of his country is that subtle fusion of the music and the meaning of language which touches the deepest and most secret springs of emotion. He touches especially the emotions of reverence and of yearning for a higher spiritual life, and the sense of nobleness in human affairs, in great institutions, and great natures; the sense of the sanctity of human affections, of the imaginative spell exercised by the past, of the mystery of the unseen world. This is the secret of the power which his words have had over some of the deepest and greatest natures in all ages. (W.Y.S.; T.R.G.)
Bibliography
Appendix Vergiliana.—Under this collective name there are current several poems of some little length and some groups of shorter pieces, all attributed to Virgil in antiquity. Virgil wrote a Culex, but not the Culex now extant, though it passed for his half a century after his death. The Aetna, the Ciris and the Copa are clearly not Virgil’s. The Moretum is said to have been translated by him from a Greek poem by his teacher Parthenius; it is an exquisite piece of work, familiar perhaps to English readers in Cowper’s translation. The case of the Catalepton (κατὰ λεπτὸν) is peculiar. Two of these little poems (Ite hinc indnes and Villula quae Sironis) are generally accepted as Virgil’s; opinion varies as to the rest, with very little to go upon, but generally rejecting them. The whole are printed in the larger editions of Virgil. For English readers the most obvious edition is that of Robinson Ellis (1907), who has also edited the Aetna separately.
Manuscripts.—Gellius (Noctes Atticae, ix. 14, 7) tells us of people who had inspected idiographum librum Vergilii, but this has of course in all probability long since perished. There are, however, seven very ancient MSS. of Virgil. (1) The Mediceus at Florence, with a note purporting to be by a man, who was consul in 494, to say he had read it. (2) The Palatinus Vaticanus of the 4th or 5th century. (3) The Vaticanus of the same period. (4) The “Schedae Vaticanae.” (5) The “Schedae Berolinenses,” perhaps of the 4th century. (6) The “Schedae Sangallenses.” (7) The “Schedae rescriptae Veronenses”—the last three of insignificant extent. For a full account of the MSS., see Henry, Aeneidea, i., and Ribbeck, Prolegomena ad Verg.
Ancient Commentators.—Commentaries on Virgil began to be written at a very early date. Suetonius, V. Verg. 44, mentions an Aeneidomastix of Carvilius Pictor and other works on Virgil’s “thefts” and “faults,” besides eight “volumina” of Q. Octavius Avitus, setting out in parallel passages the “likenesses” (ὁμοιότητες was the name of the work) between Virgil and more ancient authors. M. Valerius Probus (latter part of 1st century A.D.) wrote a commentary, but it is doubtful for how much of what passes under his name he is responsible, if for any of it. At the end of the 4th century come the commentaries of Tiberius Claudius Donatus and of Servius, the former writing as a teacher of rhetoric, the latter of style and grammar. The work of Servius was afterwards expanded by another scholar, whose additions greatly added to its worth, as they are drawn from older commentators and give us very valuable information on the old Roman religion and constitution, Greek and Latin legends, old Latin and linguistic usages. In this enlarged form the commentary of Servius and the Saturnalia of Macrobius (also of the end of the 4th century) are both of great interest to the student of Virgil. There are, further, sets of Scholia in MSS. at Verona and Bern, which draw their material from ancient
