The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 22

But Virgil represents more truly the deeper tendencies of his age than the poet who has most faithfully painted its social aspects. He looks beyond the temporary triumph and sense of relief, and sees in the victory of Actium the culminating point of all the past history of Rome and the starting point of a greater future. There had been no time since the final defeat of Hannibal so calculated to re-awaken the sense of national life, of the mission to subdue and govern the world a.s.signed to Rome, and of the divine guardians.h.i.+p of which she was the object. As the joy of a great success had found a representative voice in Ennius in the age when the State, relieved from all overwhelming danger, started on its career of foreign conquest, so it found as deep and true a voice in Virgil at the time when the relief, if not from as imminent a danger, yet certainly from a much longer strain of anxiety, left Rome free to consolidate her many conquests into a vast and orderly Empire.

In both the Eclogues and Georgics it was seen that Virgil allows his genius to be in some measure directed by others in the choice of his subjects, while he follows his own judgment in his mode of treating them.

In the earlier poems he acknowledges the direction given to him both by Varus and by Pollio,-

Non iniussa cano- Accipe iussis Carmina coepta tuis,-

while at the same time he excuses himself from directly celebrating their actions. In the Georgics he describes his task as being commanded by Maecenas-'tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa.' The desire of Augustus, whether openly expressed or not, to commemorate his success and to add l.u.s.tre to his rule by a.s.sociating them with the n.o.blest art of his age, must have acted with more imperious urgency on the will of Virgil than the wishes of any of his earlier patrons. His patriotic and personal feeling to the saviour of the State and his own benefactor must have made the task imposed on him a service of love as well as of obligation. But in undertaking this task he desired to make it subservient to the purpose of producing a work which should emulate the greatest poetical works of the Greeks, and which should, at the same time, be a true symbol of Rome at the zenith of her fortunes.

Virgil had now found in his own age a motive for the composition of that epic poem which it had been his boyish ambition to attempt,-

c.u.m canerem reges et proelia.

He could appeal as Ennius, or even as Homer had done, to hearers animated by the same feeling which moved himself. The two great conditions of a work of art which should gain the ear of the world immediately, and which should interest it permanently, were prepared for him in the enthusiasm of the moment, and in the enduring interest attaching to the career of Rome.

His highly-trained faculty, already proved and exercised in other works, was a guarantee for the artistic execution of any design which he should undertake. But two questions remained for him to solve,-what form should his epic poem a.s.sume? should he follow absolutely the precedent of Homer, or of Ennius, or endeavour to surpa.s.s the contemporary panegyrists like Varius by a direct celebration of the events of his age? And if he adopted the Homeric type, what subject should he adopt so as to impart the interest of personal fortunes and human character to a poem the inspiring motive of which was the national idea?

The problem which Virgil set before himself was really one altogether new in literature. The Alexandrian Age had endeavoured to revive an interest in the heroic adventure of early or mythical times. It had recognised the principle that this distant background was essential to a poem of heroic action, and that events of contemporary or recent history were not capable of epic treatment. But it had not discerned the necessary supplement to that principle, that if such a poem, on a large scale, is to gain a permanent place in literature, it must bear some immediate relation to the age in which it is written, and be a.s.sociated with some ethical and religious truths or some political cause of vital importance to the world.

The epic poet of a cultivated age can maintain his place as a great artist only by being something more than an artist. He must feel more strongly than others, and give expression to the deepest tendencies of his own time. His subject must be charged with the force of the present, and not be mere material for the exercise of his imitative faculty. Virgil might, merely as an artist, have easily surpa.s.sed the Jason of Varro, or the Thebaid of Statius; but no technical skill in form, diction, and rhythm could have given to his treatment of such subjects the immediate attraction or the enduring spell which belongs to the Aeneid.

Both Ennius and Naevius had set the example of connecting a continuous narrative of the events of their own time with the mythical glories and the traditional history of Rome. And the Introduction to the third Georgic indicates that some idea of this kind at one time hovered before the imagination of Virgil. But while moved by the same patriotic impulses as these older poets, Virgil must have felt as strongly as Horace did that they were examples to be avoided in the choice of form and mode of treatment. He and Horace acknowledged the Greeks alone as their masters in art. He aspires not only to surpa.s.s Ennius and Naevius in the office they fulfilled, but to enter into rivalry with Homer,-to perform for the Romans of the Augustan Age a work a.n.a.logous to that which Homer performed for the Greeks of his age. To do this, it was necessary to select some single heroic action from the cycle of mythical events, and to connect that with the whole story of Rome and Italy and with the events of the Augustan Age.

The action had in some way to ill.u.s.trate or symbolise the thoughts, memories, and hopes with which public feeling was identified at the time when the poem was written. Thus the original motive of the Virgilian epic was essentially different from that of the Homeric poems. The Iliad and the Odyssey have their origin in the pure epic impulse. The germ of the poems is the story; their purpose is to satisfy the curiosity felt in human action and character. The 'wrath of Achilles,' the 'return of Odysseus,' are, as they profess to be, the primary sources of interest in the poems founded on them; the representative character of the poems, like the representative character of Shakspeare's historical dramas, is accidental and undesigned. The germ of the Aeneid, on the other hand, is to be sought in the national idea and sentiment, in the imperial position of Rome, in her marvellous destiny, and in its culmination in the Augustan Age. The actions and sufferings of the characters that play their part in the poem were to be only secondary objects of interest; the primary object was to be found in the race to whose future career these actions and sufferings were the appointed means. The real key-note to the poem is not the 'Arma virumque' with which it opens, but the 'Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem(454)' with which the exordium closes. The choice and conduct of the action were the mechanical difficulties to be overcome by the poet, not the inspiring motives of his genius. This is the main cause of the comparative tameness of the Aeneid in point of human interest. Actors and action did not spring out of the spontaneous movement of the imagination, but were chosen by a refined calculation to fulfil the end which Virgil had in view. What Aeneas and his followers want in personal interest, is supposed to accrue to them as instruments in the hands of destiny. A new type of epic poetry is thus realised. The Iliad and the Odyssey are essentially poems of personal, the Aeneid is the epic of national fortunes.

II.

Had Virgil's sole object been to write a national epic which should satisfy popular sentiment, we can imagine several reasons why the tale of Romulus should have been chosen as its subject in preference to that of Aeneas. Though the traditional account of the founder of the city owes some of its features to Greek invention, yet it has a much more _nave_ and indigenous character than that of the Trojan settlement in Latium. It was more firmly rooted in the popular mind. It was still celebrated, as we learn from Dionysius, in national hymns. It had been commemorated in a famous work of art, the bronze she-wolf still extant, at a time antecedent to the origin of Roman literature. It formed the chief subject of the first book of the Annals of Ennius, which, as dealing with the mythical portion of his theme, seems to have had more of an epic character than the later books. It was also a subject which by its relation to famous localities and memorials of the past,-such as the oldest city-wall, the Ruminal fig-tree, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the Palatine and Aventine hills,-and with the religious and social organisation of the State, admitted easily of being connected with the present time. It might have been so treated as to magnify the glory of the Emperor, who desired to be regarded as the second founder of the city, and is said to have debated whether he should not a.s.sume the t.i.tle of Romulus, before deciding on taking that of Augustus. A poet of bolder and more original invention, and one more capable of sympathising with the purely martial characteristics of his hero, might have been attracted by this story of indigenous growth rather than by the exotic legend on which Virgil has bestowed such enduring life.

That legend seems, at first sight, to fail in the elements both of national and human interest. It was mainly of Greek invention. It seems to have been received by the Romans at a later stage in their development than that in which religious or legendary beliefs strike deep root in the popular imagination. It existed in vague and indistinct shape, and was a.s.sociated with no marked individuality of personages or incidents. It was of composite growth, made up of many incongruous elements, the product rather of antiquarian learning and reflexion than of creative imagination.

The Greek germ out of which the legend arose, and the acceptance of this explanation of their origin by the Romans from the beginning of their literary history, are clearly ascertained. But there is great uncertainty as to the connecting link between these two stages in the development of the legend. The continuance of the line of Aeneas after the destruction of Troy is announced by the mouth of Poseidon in the twentieth Book of the Iliad (307308):-

??? d? d? ???e?a? ?? ???ess?? ????e?

?a? pa?d?? pa?de?, t?? ?e? et?p?s?e ?????ta?(455).

If an historical character may be a.s.signed to any pa.s.sages in the Iliad, it may be presumed that the author of these verses knew of a line of princes ruling over some remnant of the Trojans, and claiming Aeneas as their ancestor. But these verses do not imply any removal to a distant settlement. The Cyclic poet, Arctinus, next spoke of Aeneas as retiring to Mount Ida and founding a city there. The earliest traditions accordingly point to the Troad as the scene of the rule of his descendants: other traditions however, which must have been known to Virgil, brought him to Thrace, to various places on the Aegean, and to Buthrotum in Epirus. The origin of these traditions is believed to be the connexion of Aeneas with the wors.h.i.+p of Aphrodite, which was widely spread over the Mediterranean, probably as a survival of early Phoenician settlements. This connexion in wors.h.i.+p is supposed to have arisen from a confusion between the Trojan hero and the t.i.tle ???ea?, denoting one of the attributes of the G.o.ddess.

But the writer who first gave the idea of a Trojan settlement in Italy is said to have been Stesichorus, the lyrical poet of Himera in Sicily, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. One of the representations in the Ilian table in the Capitoline Museum exhibits the figures of Aeneas, of his son Ascanius, of the trumpeter Misenus, and of Anchises carrying the sacred images, just as they are on the point of embarking on board their s.h.i.+p. The following inscription is written under these figures,-

????a? s?? t??? ?d???? ?pa???? e?? t?? ?spe??a?(456),-

and the ????? p??s?? of Stesichorus is quoted as the authority for the representation(457). The motive actuating Stesichorus was probably the desire to connect the newly-discovered localities in Italy and Sicily with the cycle of Homeric narrative. But Stesichorus apparently knew nothing of a Trojan settlement in Latium; Siris in Oenotria seems to have been fixed on by him as the place of refuge for the Palladium and the Penates of Troy. It was after the destruction of Siris that the fancy of the Greeks fixed on Lavinium, where there was a wors.h.i.+p similar to that established at Siris, as the ultimate resting-place of Aeneas. The first definite statement connecting Rome with Troy was made by Cephalon of Gergis in the Troad (about 350 B.C.), who ascribed the foundation of the city to Romus a son of Aeneas. In the course of the next half century this appears to have become the prevailing belief among the Greeks, whose attention was now attracted by the growing ascendency of Rome in Italy. About the beginning of the third century Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, is said to have shaped the legend into the form adopted by Naevius(458).

It is obvious that there is a great gap in our knowledge of the stages in the development of the legend between Stesichorus, a poet of the sixth century, and Cephalon, an historian of the fourth. And the question suggests itself whether, in the interval between them, the Romans themselves had accepted any similar explanation of their origin. The early connexion between Rome and c.u.mae renders it not impossible that the Romans had formed some idea of their Trojan descent, before the wars of Pyrrhus brought them into more intimate connexion with the Greeks. It was by the Greek colonists of c.u.mae that the Isles of the Sirens, the Kingdom of the Laestrygones, and the abode of Circe were localised near Sorrento, the ancient town of Formiae, and the promontory of Circeii. It seems probable that to them also may be ascribed the mythical connexion established between the promontories of Caieta, Misenum, and Palinurum, in their own immediate neighbourhood, with the names of the household or followers of Aeneas. The mythical traditions which a.s.sign a Greek origin to various important Latin towns, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Praeneste, and to the earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill, probably owe their invention to the same source. Alba Longa, as the chief city of the old Latin confederacy, must have been an object of greater interest to the c.u.maeans than Tibur or Tusculum, and if we could be sure of the existence of the belief in the Trojan settlement in Latium before the destruction of Alba, we might infer with probability the great antiquity of the legend which ascribed the foundation of that town to the son of Aeneas. This belief might easily have pa.s.sed to Rome; and Cephalon may have received it, in a somewhat distorted form, from native sources. But it is impossible to take any step in these conjectures without feeling the extreme uncertainty of our ground. We really know nothing of the acceptance of this account of their origin by the Romans before the time of the First Punic War; it is not easily reconcileable with the indigenous belief which certainly struck much deeper roots in the national history: the story as told by Cephalon appears to exclude the connexion between Rome and Alba as an intermediate link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus(459).

But besides the foreign and prosaic origin of the story, there is great vagueness and indistinctness in the incidents and personages connected with it. Homer indeed has supplied a definite, though not a marked, outline to the character of Aeneas; and Stesichorus, in shaping the family group of Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius flying from Troy with their household-G.o.ds, may have suggested to Virgil the leading characteristic of his hero. But these were nearly all the elements in the legend derived from primitive poetical sources. There was no individuality of character attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early imaginative invention a.s.sociated with the dim tradition of his wanderings.

The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,-some supplied by poetical invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, some suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome, some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character.

But, on other grounds, the judgment of Virgil may be justified in the choice of this legend, vague, composite, and unpoetical as it was, as most adapted to his own genius and to the purpose of his epic poem. It was the only subject, of national significance, connected with the Homeric cycle of events. Not only the epic and dramatic poets of Greece, but the Roman tragic poets had recognised the heroic legends of Greece as the legitimate material for those forms of poetry which aimed at representing human action and character with seriousness and dignity. The personages and events connected with the Trojan War had especially been made familiar to the Romans by the works of their early dramatic poets. The Romans themselves had no mythical back-ground, rich in poetic a.s.sociations, to their own history. It was impossible for a poet of a literary age to create this back-ground. But it was possible for him to give substance and reality to the shadowy connexion, existing in legend and in the works of older national writers, between the beginnings of Roman history and this distant region of poetry and romance. Virgil's imagination, as was seen in the examination of the Georgics, was peculiarly susceptible of the impressions produced by a remote antiquity and by old poetic a.s.sociations.

If he was deficient in spontaneous invention, he possessed a remarkable power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the invention of a new world of wonder and adventure,-a work most difficult of accomplishment in a late stage of human development,-the most attractive aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving, under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial pa.s.sions of an earlier and ruder age.

Although there is no evidence that the connexion of Rome with Troy had sunk deeply into the popular mind before the time of Virgil, yet it had been recognised in official acts of the State for more than two centuries.

So early as the First Punic War the Acarnanians had applied to the Romans for a.s.sistance against the Aetolians, on the ground that their ancestors alone among the Greeks had taken no part in the Trojan War. The Senate had offered alliance and friends.h.i.+p to King Seleucus on condition of his exempting the people of Ilium, as kinsmen of the Romans, from tribute(460). T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the Aeneadae(461). In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans:-

Amnem Troiugena Cannam Romane fuge(462).

So early as the time of Timaeus, i.e. before the First Punic War, the connexion of Aeneas with the wors.h.i.+p of the Penates at Lavinium had been recognised. His own wors.h.i.+p also established itself in the religion of the State by his identification with Jupiter Indiges, who seems to have had a temple on the banks of the river Numicius. Many families among the Roman aristocracy, as for instance the Cluentii, Sergii, Memmii(463), claimed to be descended from the followers of Aeneas. From the time of Naevius this account of the origin of the Romans had been the accepted belief in all Latin literature. Ennius begins his annals from the date

Quum veter occubuit Priamus sub Marte Pelasgo(464).

The poet Accius had written a tragedy called Aeneadae. The Roman annalists started with the tradition as an accepted fact. Thus Livy in reference to this belief uses the expression 'it is sufficiently established.' The great antiquarian Varro wrote a treatise on the Trojan origin of Roman families. Cicero in his Verrine orations (act. ii. 4. 33) speaks of the relations.h.i.+p of the people of Segesta in Sicily, which claimed to be a colony founded by Aeneas, with the Roman people. Even Lucretius, who stands apart from the general traditional beliefs of his countrymen, begins his poem with the words 'Aeneadum genetrix.' Virgil's poem appealed not to the popular taste, but to the national, religious, aristocratic, and literary sympathies of the cultivated cla.s.ses. The legend of Aeneas, if less ancient and less popular, a.s.signed a more august origin to the Roman race than the tale of the birth of Romulus:-

Ab Iove principium generis, Iove Dardana p.u.b.es Gaudet avo; rex ipse Iovis de gente suprema Troius Aeneas, etc(465).

These considerations may have recommended this subject to Virgil, as the most suitable symbol of the idea of Rome, from both a national and religious point of view. But the circ.u.mstance which must have absolutely determined his choice was the claim which the Julian gens made to be directly descended from Iulus, Aeneas, and the G.o.ddess Venus. This claim Virgil had already acknowledged in the line (Ecl. ix. 47),

Ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum,

and again (Georg. i. 28),

cingens materna tempora myrto(466).

Even Julius Caesar had shown the importance which he attached to it by taking the words 'Venus Victrix' for his watchword at the battle of Pharsalia. A greater tribute was paid to the qualities of Augustus, a more august consecration was conferred on his rule, by representing that rule as a prominent object in the counsels of Heaven a thousand years before its actual establishment, than could have been bestowed on him by the most detailed and ornate account of his actual successes. The personal, as distinct from the national motive of the poem, is revealed in the prophetic lines attributed to Jupiter,

Nascetur pulchra Troia.n.u.s origine Caesar, Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo(467).

While the vagueness of the tradition and the absence of definite incident and individual character a.s.sociated with it were conditions unfavourable to novelty and vividness of representation, yet they allowed to Virgil great lat.i.tude in carrying out his purpose of giving body and substance to all that unknown and shadowy past, which survived only in names, customs, and ceremonies. He was not limited to any particular district or period.

His plan enabled him to embrace in the compa.s.s of his epic the dim traditions connected with the 'origins' of the famous towns and tribes of Central Italy and of several of the great Roman families; it enabled him to imagine the primitive state of places which had a world-wide celebrity in his own time; to invoke, as an element of poetic interest, the veneration paid to the ancient rites of religion; and to cast an idealising light on events, personages, families, or customs familiar to his own age, by a.s.sociating them with the sentiment of an immemorial past.

One great excellence of the Aeneid, as a representative poem, is the large prospect of Roman and Italian life which it opens up before us. The vague outlines of the story which he followed enabled Virgil to enlarge his conception with an ampler content of local and national material, than if he had been called upon to recast a more definite and more vital tradition. The want of individuality in the personages of his story justified him in exhibiting their character in accordance with his own ideal; in conceiving of Aeneas as the type of antique piety combined with modern humanity, and of Turnus as the type of the haughty and martial spirit, animating the old Italian race.

Even the composite character of the legend and the heterogeneous elements out of which it was composed, if unfavourable to unity of impression and simplicity of execution, conduced to the poet's purpose of concentrating in one representation, of a Roman vastness of compa.s.s, whatever might enhance and ill.u.s.trate the greatness of Rome and of its ruler. The Rome of the Augustan Age no longer exhibited the political and religious unity of an old Italian republic; it was expanding its limits so as to embrace in a much wider unity the various nations that had played their part in the past history of the world. As the glory and wealth of Asia, Greece, Carthage, etc. had all gone to swell the glory and wealth of Rome, so all the traditions, historic memories, and literary art of the past were to be made tributary to her national representative poem. The first great epic poem of the ancient world is buoyant with the promise of the mighty life which was to be; the last great epic is weighty with the acc.u.mulated experience of all that had been. The stream of epic poetry shows no longer the jubilant force and purity of waters-'exercita cursu flumina'-which rise in the high mountain-land separating barbarism from civilisation; it moves more slowly and less clearly through more level and cultivated districts; its volume is swollen and its weight increased by tributaries which have never known the 'bright speed(468)' of its n.o.bler sources.

III.

_Composite character of the Aeneid ill.u.s.trated by an examination of the poem._

These considerations lead to the conclusion that the legend of Aeneas was better suited than any other which he could have selected for the two objects which Virgil had before his mind in the composition of the Aeneid; first, that of writing a poem representative and commemorative of Rome and of his own epoch, in the spirit in which some of the great architectural works of the Empire, such as the Column of Trajan, the Arches of t.i.tus and of Constantine, were erected; and, secondly, that of writing an imitative epic of action, manners, and character which should afford to his countrymen an interest a.n.a.logous to that which the Greeks derived from the Homeric poems. The knowledge necessary to enable him to fulfil the first purpose was contained in such works as the ceremonial books of the various Priestly Colleges, the 'Origines' of Cato, the antiquarian treatise of Varro, and perhaps the 'Annales' and 'Fasti(469)' which preserved the record of national and family traditions. In giving life to these dry materials his mind was animated by the spectacle of Rome, and the thought of her wide empire, her genius, character, and history; by the visible survivals of ancient ceremonies and memorials of the past; by the sight of the great natural features of the land, of old Italian towns of historic renown, or, where they had disappeared, of the localities still marked by their name:-

locus Ardea quondam Dictus avis; et nunc magnum tenet Ardea nomen(470).

As poetic sources of inspiration for this part of his task Virgil had the national epic poems of Naevius and Ennius; and of both of these he made use: of the first, in his account of the storm which drives Aeneas to Carthage and of his entertainment there by the Carthaginian Queen; of the second, by his use of many half-lines and expressions which give an antique and stately character to the description of incidents or the expression of sentiment. For Virgil's other purpose, his chief materials were derived from his intimate familiarity with the two great Homeric poems: but he availed himself also of incidents contained in the Homeric Hymns, in the Cyclic poems, in the Greek Tragedies, as for instance the lost Laoc.o.o.n of Sophocles, and in the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius.

His own experience of life, and still more the insight which his own nature afforded him into various moods of pa.s.sion, affection, and chivalrous emotion, enabled him to impart novelty and individuality to the materials which he derived from these foreign and ancient sources.

A minute examination of the various books of the poem would bring out clearly that these two objects, that of raising a monument to the glory of Rome and of Augustus, and that of writing an imitative epic reproducing some image of the manners and life of the heroic age, were present to the mind of Virgil through his whole undertaking. It will be sufficient in order to show this two-fold purpose to look at the first book, and at some of the more prominent incidents in the later books.