The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 35

so also a little farther on she has to warn him again (50 foll.) at the entrance to the cave:

"cessas in vota precesque, Tros" ait "Aenea, cessas?"

It may be fancy in me to see even in his prayer which follows a leaning to think of Troy and his past troubles (56 foll.). But I cannot but believe that in this book he is meant to take a last farewell of all who have shared his past fortunes, have helped him or injured him; he meets Palinurus, Dido, Tydeus, Deiphobus, and the rest, and while meditating over these he has once more to be hurried by his guide (538):

sed comes admonuit breviterque adfata Sibylla est: nox ruit, Aenea, nos flendo ducimus horas.

When Anchises appears the whole tone changes, and his famous words seem to me to show conclusively that hesitation and want of fixed, undeviating purpose had been so far his son's chief failing (806):

et dubitamus adhuc virtutem extendere factis, aut metus Ausonia prohibet consistere terra?

The father's vision and prophecy are of the _future_ and the great deeds of men to come, and henceforward Aeneas makes no allusion to the past and the figures that peopled it, abandons talk and lamentations, "virtutem extendit factis." At the outset of Book vii. we feel the s.h.i.+p moving at once; three lines suffice for the fresh start; Circe is pa.s.sed unheeded. "Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo," says the poet in line 43; "maius opus moveo;" for the real subject of the poem is at last reached, and a heroic character by heroic deeds is to lay the foundation of the eternal dominion of Rome.

A very few words shall suffice about the Aeneas of the later books. Let us freely allow that he is not strongly characterised; that for us moderns the interest centres rather in Turnus, who is heroic as an individual, but not as a pioneer of civilisation divinely led; that there is no real heroine, for feminine pa.s.sion would be here out of place and un-Roman, and the courts.h.i.+p of Lavinia is undertaken, so to speak, for political reasons. The role of Aeneas, as the agent of Jupiter in conquest and civilisation, would appeal to a Roman rather than to a modern, and it was reserved for the modern critic to complain of a lack of individual interest in him. So, too, it is in Jewish history; we feel with Esau more than with Jacob, and with David more than with Moses, who is none the less the grandest typical Israelite in the Old Testament. And, indeed, Virgil's theme here is less the development of a character or the portraiture of a hero than the idealisation of the people of the Italy which he loved so well, who needed only a divinely guided leader and civiliser to enter upon the glorious career that was in store for them.

I cannot escape the belief, as I read again through these books, that Virgil did intend to depict in Aeneas his ideal of that Roman character to which the leading writers of his day ascribed the greatness of their race. His _pietas_ is now confirmed and enlarged, it has become a sense of duty to the will of the G.o.ds as well as to his father, his son, and his people, and this sense of duty never leaves him, either in his general course of action or in the detail of sacrifice and propitiation.

His courage and steadfastness never fail him; he looks ever forward, confident in divine protection; the s.h.i.+eld he carries is adorned--a wonderful stroke of poetic genius--with scenes of the future, and not of the past (viii. 729 foll.):

talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum.

He is never in these books to be found wanting in swiftness and vigilance; when he cheers his comrades it is no longer in a half-hearted way, but as at the beginning of the eleventh book, with the utmost vigour and confidence, "Arma parate, animis et spe praesumite bellum"

(xi. 18).

His _humanitas_ again is here more obvious than in his earlier career, and it is plainly meant to be contrasted with the heroic savagery of Mezentius and Turnus. So keenly did the poet feel this development in his hero's character, that in his descriptions of the death of Lausus and the burial of Pallas--n.o.ble and beautiful youths whom he loved in imagination as he loved in reality all young things--his tenderness is so touching that even now we can hardly read them without tears. And not only is the hero heroic and humane, but he is a just man and keeps faith; when, in the twelfth book, the Rutulians break the treaty, and his own men have joined in the unjust combat (xii. 311):

at pius Aeneas dextram tendebat inermem nudato capite atque suos clamore vocabat: "quo ruitis? quove ista repens discordia surgit?

o cohibete iras; ictum iam foedus et omnes compositae leges: mihi ius concurrere soli."

He claims for himself alone, under the guiding hand of providence, the right to deal with Turnus, the enemy of humanity and righteousness. And we may note that when it came to that last struggle, though conquering by divine aid, he was ready to spare the life of the conquered till he saw the spoils of the young Pallas upon him.

The character of Aeneas, then, though not painted in such strong light as we moderns might expect or desire, is _intentionally_ developed into a heroic type in the course of the story--a type which every Roman would recognise as his own natural ideal. And this growth is the direct result of religious influence. It is partly the result of the hero's own natural _pietas_, innate within him from the first, as it was in the breast of every n.o.ble Roman; partly the result of a gradually enlarged recognition of the will of G.o.d, and partly of the strengthening and almost sacramental process of the journey to Hades, of the revelation there made of the mysteries of life and death, and of the great future which Jupiter and the Fates have reserved for the Roman people. In these three influences Virgil has summed up all the best religious factors of his day: the instinct of the Roman for religious observance, with all its natural effect on conduct; the elevating Stoic doctrine which brought man into immediate relation with the universal; and, lastly, the tendency to mysticism, Orphic or Pythagorean, which tells of a yearning in the soul of man to hope for a life beyond this, and to make of this life a meet preparation for that other.

Only one word more. We can hardly doubt the truth of the story that the poet died earnestly entreating that this greatest work of his life should perish with him, and this may aptly remind us that though I have been treating the Aeneid as a poem of religion and morals, yet, after all, Virgil was a poet rather than a preacher, and thought of his Aeneid, not as a sermon, but as a work of art. Had he thought of it as a sermon he could hardly have wished to deprive the Roman world of it. The true poet is never a preacher except in so far as he is a poet. If the Greeks thought of their poets as teachers, says the late Prof. Jebb, "this was simply a recognition of poetry as the highest influence, intellectual and spiritual, that they knew." "It was not merely a recreation of their leisure, but a power pervading and moulding their whole existence." Surely this is also true of Virgil, and of the best at least of his Roman readers. No one can read the sixth Aeneid, the greatest effort of his genius, without feeling that poetry was all in all to him; that learning, legend, philosophy, religion, whatever in the whole range of human thought and fancy entered his mind, emerged from it as poetry and poetry only.[899]

NOTES TO LECTURE XVIII

[869] Sellar, _Virgil_, p. 371.

[870] Sainte-Beuve, _etude sur Virgile_, p. 68.

[871] Horace, _Epode_ 16, where, however, he is not quite so much in earnest as in _Odes_ iii. 6. Sall.u.s.t, prefaces to Jugurtha and Catiline: these do not ring quite true.

[872] _Georg._ iv. 511 foll.

[873] _Georg._ iii. 440 foll. The famous lines (498 foll.) about the horse smitten with pestilence will occur to every one.

[874] _Aen._ vi. 309.

[875] _Op. cit._ p. 231. He cites _Georg._ i. 107 and 187 foll.

[876] Sellar, _Virgil_, p. 232.

[877] _Georg._ iv. 221 foll.

[878] _Georg._ ii. 493.

[879] Prof. Hardie recently asked me an explanation of the double altar that we meet with more than once in Virgil in connection with funeral rites: _e.g._, _Ecl._ 5. 66; _Aen._ iii. 305; v. 77 foll. Servius tries to explain this, but clearly did not understand it. Of course I could offer no satisfactory solution. Yet we are both certain that there is a satisfactory one if we could only get at it.

[880] Much has been written about the part of the Fates in the _Aeneid_ and their relation to Jupiter. See Heinze, _Vergils epische Technik_, p. 286 foll.; Glover, _Studies in Virgil_, 202 and 277 foll. I may be allowed to refer also to my _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 342 foll.

[881] _Aen._ i. 257 foll., vi. 756 foll., viii. 615 foll.

[882] _Suggestions preliminary to a Study of the Aeneid_, p. 36.

[883] It is not likely to strike us unless we read the whole _Aeneid_ through, without distracting our minds with other reading, and this few of us do. I did it some ten years ago; before that the development of character had not dawned on me fully. I later on found it shortly but clearly set forth in Heinze's _Vergils epische Technik_, p. 266 foll.; and this caused me to read the poem through once more, with the result that I became confirmed in my view, and read a paper on the subject to the Oxford Philological Society, which I have in part embodied in this lecture.

[884] This is dwelt on in _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 124 foll.

[885] _De Republica_, vi. 15.

[886] It may be as well to note here that the actual representation of G.o.d in the _Aeneid_ is its weakest point. It was an epic poem, and could not dispense with the Homeric machinery: hence Jupiter is practically the representative of the Stoic all-pervading deity, with the Fates behind him. But it is not unlikely that Virgil may thus have actually helped to make the way clear for a n.o.bler monotheistic idea by damaging Jupiter in the course of this treatment; see _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 341 foll.

[887] On the Homeric Aeneas there are some good remarks in Boissier's _Nouvelles Promenades archaeologiques_ (_Horace et Virgile_), p. 130 foll. Of all the Homeric heroes he seems to come nearest, though but slightly sketched, to the Roman ideal of heroism.

[888] Heinze, _Vergils epische Technik_, p. 17.

[889] I should be disposed to consider this pa.s.sage as decisive of the point, but that it immediately follows upon the doubtful lines 567-588, in which Aeneas is tempted in his mad fury to slay Helen; and if those lines are not Virgil's, we have not sufficient explanation of the rebuke which Venus here administers to her son. On the other hand, if they were really Virgil's, and omitted (as Servius declares) by the original editors Tucca and Varius, we should have a convincing proof that the poet meant his hero, in these terrible scenes, to come so short of the true Roman heroic type as to be capable of slaying a woman in cold blood, and while a suppliant at an altar of the G.o.ds.

Into this much-disputed question I must not go farther, except to note that while Heinze is absolutely confident that Virgil never wrote these lines, the editor of the new Oxford text of Virgil is equally certain that he did. My opinion is of no value on such a point; but I am disposed to agree with Mr. Hirtzel that "versus valde Vergilianos, ab optimis codicibus omissos, iniuria obleverunt Tucca et Varius." They are certainly in keeping with the picture of Aeneas' _impotentia_ which is generally suggested in Book ii. If it should be argued that this _impotentia_, _i.e._ want of self-control, is only put into the mouth of Aeneas in order to heighten the effect of his stirring narrative, it will be well to remember the remonstrances of Venus, which make such a hypothesis impossible.

[890] _Op. cit._ p. 231.

[891] _Vergils epische Technik_, p. 113 foll.

[892] The original story was, that unable to escape from an enforced marriage with Iarbas, she killed herself to mark her unflinching faithfulness to her first husband Sicharbas. Servius quotes Varro as stating that it was not Dido, but Anna who committed suicide for love of Aeneas (on _Aen._ iv. 682); and as Varro died before the Aeneid was begun, this may be taken as proving that Virgil's version of the love-story was not his own invention. But it is quite possible that Servius here only means that Varro's version differed in this point from that which the poet soon afterwards adopted; it may be that the story in the poem is thus practically his own.

[893] _Op. cit._ p. 116.

[894] _Ancient Lives of Vergil_, Clarendon Press, 1879.

[895] The critics have, I think, been weaker in dealing with the fifth book than with any of the others. Prof.

Tyrrell is too violent in his contempt for it to admit of quotation here. Heinze has some good and acute remarks on Virgil's motive in placing the book where it is, but seems to me to miss the real importance of it (_op. cit._ 140 foll.). Even Boissier, whose delightful account of the scenery of Eryx should be read by every one who would appreciate this book (_op. cit._ p. 232), goes so far as to say that it is the one book with which we feel we might easily dispense so far as the story is concerned.

[896] _Roman Festivals_, p. 307.

[897] _Op. cit._ p. 270.

[898] _Commentary on Dante's Divina Commedia_, pp. 615 foll. I am indebted for this reference to Stewart's _Myths of Plato_, p. 367.