ancient Classicsfor English Readers
EDITED BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
VIRGIL




A SERIES OF
ANCIENT CLASSICS
FOR
ENGLISH READERS.
EDITED BY:E-'V' W'     — TTC.AS COCT,-LI'S.
20 Vols. Small i2mo. Fine cloth. $x.oo each.
NOW COMPLETE, EMBRACING


1. HOMER'S ILIAD.
2. IIOMER'S ODYSSEY.
3. HERODOTUS.
4. C]ESAR.
5. VIRGIL.
6. IORACE.
7. AESCHYLUS.
S. XENOPHON.
9. CICERO.
10. SOPHOCLES.


11. PLINY.
12-. EURIPIDES.
13. JUVENAL.
14. ARISTOPHANES.
15. IIESIOD & THEOGNIS.
16. PLAUTUS & TERENCE.
17. TACITUS.
IS. LUCIAN.
19. PLATO.
20. GREEK ANTHOLOGY.


The aim of this delightful series of books is to explain, sufficiently for general readers, who these great writers were, and
what they wrote; to give, wherever possible, some connected
outline of the story which they tell, or the facts which they record, checked by the results of modern investigations; to present
some of their most striking passages in approved English translations, and to illustrate them generally from modern writers; to
serve, in short, as a popular retrospect of the chief literature of
Greece and Rome.
"Each successive issue only adds to our appreciation of the learning and
skill with which this admirable enterprise of bringing the best classics within
easy reach of English readers is conducted." —New York Independent.
" One of the most ingenious and successful literary enterprises of the day."
-Every Saturday.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Publishers,
715 and 717 Market St., Philadelphia.




V I R G I L
BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
4 TONIANA,' 'THR PUBLIC SCHOOLS,'* TC.


PHILAD ELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
I 8 78.




6
I,..




CONTENTS.
PAGu
INTRODUCTION,......*  *
THE POET,....   *....   8
THE PASTORALS,.....  18
THE GEORGICS,......28
THE E:NEID,CHAP. I. THE SIIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE, 41
It II. ENEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY,.53
t, III. )ENEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE,.  64
I  IV. DIDO,.......  71
i V. THE FUNERAL GAMES,....  85
tt VI. TIE SIBYL AND THE SHADES,... 105
it VII. THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM,.. 128,i VIII. THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TIIBES,. 137,i IX. ENEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITII EVANDER, 145,  X. TURNUS ATTACKS THE TROJAN ENCAMPMENT, 153
i XI. THE DEATH OF PALLAS,....161,i XII. THE DEATH OF CAMILLA,... 167
n XIII. THE LAST COMBAT,.....171
e XIV. CONCLUDING REMARKS... 180




a




INTRODUCTION.
VIRGIL has always been, for one reason or other, the
most popular of all the old classical writers. His poems
were a favourite study with his own countrymen, even
in his own generation; within fifty years of his death
they were admitted to the very questionable honour,
which they have retained ever since, of serving as a
text-book for schoolboys. The little Romans studied
their ~EEneid, from their master's dictation, as regularly,
and probably with quite as much appreciation of its/
beauties, as the fourth form of an English publiq
school, and wrote " declamations" of some kind upon
its heroes. In the middle ages, when Greek literature
had become almost a deserted field, and Homer in the
original was a sealed book even to those who considered themselves and were considered scholars, Virgil
was still the favourite with young and old. The
monks in their chronicles, philosophers in their secular studies, enlivened their pages with quotations from
the one author with whom no man of letters would
venture to confess himself wholly unacquainted. The
A. o. vol. v.                          A




IN TROD UCTION.


works of Virgil had passed through above forty editions in Europe before the first printed edition of
Homer appeared from the Florence press in 1448. He
has been translated, imitated, and parodied in all the
chief European languages.  The fate of Dido, of Pallas, and of Euryalus, has drawn tears from successive
generations of which the poet never dreamed.
In the middle ages his fame underwent a singular
transformation. From the magic power of song the
transition seems incongruous to the coarser material
agency of the wizard.  But so it was; Virgilius the
poet became, in mediaeval legends, Virgiliuls the magician.  One of his Eclogues (the Eighth), in which are
introduced the magical charms by which it is sought to
reclaim a wandering lover, is supposed to have given
the first impulse to this superstitious belief. All kin(is
of marvels were attributed to his agency.  It was said
that he built at Rome, for the Emperor Augustus, a
wondrous tower, in which were set up emblemlatic
figures of all the subject nations wllic acknowledged
the imperial rule, each with a bell in its (land, which
rang out whenever war or revolt broke out in tlat
particular province, so that Rome knew at once ill
what direction to march her legions.  In the same
building-so the legend ran-he contrived a magic
mirror, in which the enemies of the Empire could be
seen when they appeared in arms; and another-surely
the most terrible agency that was ever imagined in
the way of donestic police-in wlhich the guilt of any
Roman citizen could be at once seen and detected
A fount of perpetual fire, and salt-springs' of medicinal


*




IN TR OD U  C TIO.


3


virtue, were said to have been the gifts of the great
enchanter to the Roman populace.      At Naples the
marvels which were attributed to his agency were
scarcely less; and even now     there is scarcely any
useful or ornamental public work of early date, in the
neighbourhood of that city, which is not in some way
connected by vulgar tradition with the name of Virgil.
The wondrous powers thus ascribed to him were, according to sonic legends, conferred upon him by Chiron
the learned centaur-by whom the great Achilles, and
the poet's own hero, 2Aneas, were said to have been
educated; by others, with that blending of pagan belief with Christian which is so commonly found in
mediaeval writers, they were referred to direct communication with the Evil One.French scholars have always had the highest appreciation of the Augustan poet, and his popularity
* One story of this kind is perhaps curious enough for insertion. Virgil is said to have been startled one day by a voice
calling to him out of a small hole in a cave. It proceeded
from an Evil Spirit who had been conjured into that place of
confinement, and who undertook to show Virgil-certain books
of necromancy on condition of his release. The bargain was
made, and the condition fulfilled.  "He stood before Virgil
like a mighty man, whereof Virgil was afraid; and he marvelled greatly that so great a man might come out of so little a
hole. Then said Virgil, 'Should ye well pass througll the hole
that ye came out of?' And he said, 'Yes.'  ' I hold the
best pledge that I have that ye cannot do it.' The levill said,
'I consent thereto.' And then the devill wrang himself inio
the little hole again. Alnd when he was in, then Virgil closed
him there again, so that he had no power to come out again,
but there abideth still."-[' Of the Lyfe of Virgilius and hiE
deth, and the many nmarvayles that he dyd.']




4


INTRODUCTION.


in England is to this day as great as ever. (Even a
practical House of Commons, not always very patient
of argument, and notoriously impatient of some prosaic
speakers, will listen to a quotation from Virgil -
especially when pointed against a political opponent.;
Those to whom his rolling measure is familiar still
quote him and cheer him so enthusiastically, that
others listen with more or less appreciation. To the
many who have almost forgotten what they once knew
of him, his lines awake reminiscences of their youthwhich are always pleasant: while even those to whom
he is a sound and nothing more, listen as with a kind
of sacred awe. The debates of our reformed Parliament will certainly be duller, if ever Virgil comes to
be proscribed as an unknown tongue.
English translators of Virgil have abounded. But
the earliest and by no means the least able of those
who presented the Roman poet to our northern
islanders in their own vernacular was a Scotsman,
* Bishop Gawain Douglas of Dunkeld, that clerkly
son of old Archibald "Bell-the-Cat" whom    Scott
names in his 'Marmion.'    Few modern readers of
Virgil are likely to be proficients in the ancient
northern dialect which the bishop used; but those
who can appreciate him maintain that there is considerable vigour as well as faithfulness in his version.
Thomas Phaer, a Welsh physician, was the next
who made the attempt, in the long verses known as
Alexandrine, in 1558. A few years later came forth
what might fairly be called the comic English version,
though undertaken in the most serious earnest by the




IN TROD UCTION.


5


translator.  This was Richard Stanyhurst, an Irishman, a graduate of Oxford and student of Lincoln's
Inn. He seems to have been the original prophet of
that "pestilent heresy," as Lord Derby calls it, the
making of English hexameters; for that was the metre
which he chose, and he congratulates himself in his preface upon " having no English writer before him in this
kind of poetry." Without going so far as to endorse
Lord Derby's severe judgment, it may be confessed that
Stanyhurst did his best to justify it. His translation,
which he ushered into public with the most profound
self-satisfaction, is quite curious enough to account for
its reprint by the "Edinburgh Printing Society " in
1836. One of the points upon which he prides himself is the suiting the sound to the sense, which Virgil
himself has done happily enough in some rare passages. So when he has to translate the line,
"Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum"
he does it as follows -
"The townsmen roared, the trump tara-tantara rattled."
When he has to express the Cyclops forging the
thunderbolts, it is
"With peale meale ramping, with thick thwack sturdily
thund'ring;"
and very much more of the same kind.
The Earl of Surrey and James Harrington tried
their hand at detached portions, and although the
quaint conceits which were admired in their day have
little charm for the modern reader, there is not wantl




6


INTR O D UCTION.


ing, especially in the former, a spirit and vigour ill
which some of those who came before and after them
lamentably failed.  The translations by Vicars and
Ogilby, about the middle of the seventeenth century,
have little claim to be remembered except as the first
presentations of the whole AEneid in an English poetical
dress. In dull mediocrity they are about equal.
In 1697, Dryden, at the age of sixty-six, finished
and published his translation; written, as he pathetically says, "in his declining years, struggling with
want, and oppressed with sickness;" yet, whatever
be its shortcomings, a confessedly great work, and
showing few   traces of these unfavourable circumstances. His great renown, and the unquestionable
vigour and ability of the versification, insured its
popularity at once; and it was considered, by the
critics of his own and some succeeding generations,
as pre-eminently the English Virgil. Dr Johnson said
of it that "it satisfied his friends and silenced his
enemies."  It may still be read with pleasure, but it
has grave faults. Independently of its general looseness and diffuseness, in many passages amounting to
the vaguest paraphrase, there are too many instances
in which, not content with making his author say a
good many things which lie never did say, he palpably
misinterprets him. There are many passages of much
vigour and beauty; but even of these it has been said,
and not unfairly, by a later translator, Dr Trapp, that
"where you most admire Dryden, you see the least of
Virgil."  Dryden had the advantage of consulting in
manuscript a translation by the Earl of Lauderdale




INTRO )DUCTION.                  7
(afterwards published), which has considerable merit,
and to which in his preface lie confesses obligations
"not inconsiderable." They were, in fact, so considerable as this, that besides other hints in the matter of
words and phrases, he borrowed nearly four hundred
lines in different places, with scarcely an attempt at
change.
Dryden was followed by various other translators
more or less successful.  Pitt and Symmons, the latter
especially, might have earned a greater reputation had
they preceded instead of followed the great poet whose
laurels they plainly challenged by adopting his metre.
But the recent admirable translation of the Eneid into
the metre of Scott by Mr Conington will undoubtedly
take its place henceforward as by far tie most poetical,
as it is also the most faithful and scholarly, rendering
of the original




THE POET.


PUBLIUS VIRGILIUS MARO- such was his full name,
though we have abbreviated the sounding Roman
appellatives into the curt English form of "Virgil"lived in the age when the great Roman Empire was
culminating to its fall, but as yet showed little symptom of decay. The emperor under whom he was born
was that Octavianus Caesar, nephew of the great Julius,
whose title of "Augustus" gave a name to his own
times which has since passed into a common term for
the golden age of literature in every nation. In the
Augustan age of Rome rose and flourished, in rapid
succession, a large proportion of those great writers to
whose works we have given the name of classics. This
brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes-to the increase of cultivation and refine
ment, to the leisure and quiet which followed after
long years of war and civil commotion; but in part
also it was owing to the character of the Roman
emperor himself. Both Augustus and his intimate




THE POET.


9


friend and counsellor Maecenas were the professed
patrons of letters and of the fine arts. Maecenas was
of the highest patrician blood of Rome. He claimed
descent from the old Etruscan kings or Lucumosthose ancient territorial chiefs who ruled Italy while
Rome was yet in her infancy, such as Lars Porsena of
Clusium. Clever and accomplished, an able statesman
in spite of all his indolence, Maecenas had immense
influence with Augustus. At his splendid palace on
the Esquiline Hill-the Holland House of the daymet all the brilliant society of Rome, and his name
very soon became a synonym for a liberal patron of art
and literature. To be eminent in any branch of these
accomplishments was to insure the notice of the minister; and to be a protege of his was an introduction at
once, under the happiest auspices, to the emperor himself. Such good fortune occurred to Virgil early in
his life.
He was born in the little village of Andes (probably
the modern Pietola), near Mantua, and received a
liberal education, as is sufficiently evident from the
many allusions in his poems. When grown to manhood, he seems to have lived for some years with
his father upon his modest family estate.     He
suffered, like very many of his countrymen —his
friend and fellow-poet Horace among the numberfrom the results of the great civil wars which so long
desolated Italy, and which ended in the fall of the
Republic at the battle of Philippi. The district near
Mantua was assigned and parcelled out among the
legionaries who had fought for Altony and young




10


TIE POET.


Octavianus against Pompey. Cremona had espoused
the cause of the latter, and Mantua, as Virgil himself
tells us, suffered for the sins of its neighbour. His
little estate was confiscated, amongst others, to reward
the veterans who had claims on the gratitude of Octavianus.  But through the intercession of some powerful
friend who had influence with the young emperorprobably Asinius Pollio, hereafter mentioned, who was
prefect of the province-they were soon restored to
him.   This obligation Virgil never forgot; and
amongst the many of all ranks who poured their flattery into the ears of Augustus (as Octavianus must
be henceforth called), perhaps that of the young
Mantuan poet, though bestowed with something of
a poet's exa(ggeration, was amongst the most sincere.
The first of his Pastorals was written to express his
gratitude for the indulgence which had been granted
him. If the Caesar of the day was susceptible of
flattery, at least he liked it good of its kind.  " Stroke
him awkwardly," said Horace, " and he winces like a
restive horse."  But the verse of the Mantuan poet
had the ring of poetry as well as compliment.
These Pastorals (to be more particularly noticed
hereafter) were his earliest work, composed, probably,
between his twenty-seventh and thirty-fourth year,
while he was still living a country life on his newly
recovered farm.  They seem to have attracted the
favourable attention of Mecenas; and soon, among
the brilliant crowd of courtiers, statesmen, artists,
poets, and historians who thronged the audiencechamber of the popular minister, might be seen the




THE POET.


11


tall, slouching, somewhat plebeian figure of the young
country poet."   He soon became a familiar guest
there; but although Augustus himself, half in jest,
was said to have spoken of his minister's literary dinners as a " table of parasites," it is certain Virgil never
deserved the character.  This intimacy with Maecenas
must have led to frequent and prolonged visits to
Rome; but his chiel residence, after lie left his Mantuan estate, seems to lhave been at Naples.  It was at
the suggestion of this patron that he set about the
composition of his poem upon Roman agriculture and
stock-breeding-the four books of Georgics.     His
greatest and best-known work-the LEneid-was begun in obedience to a hint thrown out by a still
higher authority, though he seems to have long had the
subject in his thoughts, and probably had begun to
put it into shape.  Augustus had condescended to ask
the poet to undertake some grander theme than an imaginary pastoral life or the management of the country
farm. The result was the lEneid, modelled upon the
two great poems of Homer-in fact, a Roman Iliad and
Odyssey combined in one.    It was never completely
finished, for Virgil, whose health was at no time robust,
died before he had put in the finishing touches which
his fastidious taste required. It is even said that in
his last illness he would have burnt the copy, if his
friends would have allowed tle sacrifice. It is hardly
It has been thought that the friend of whom Horace speaks
(Sat. I. 3, 31), under whose somewhat slovenly dress and rustic
bearing lay hid so much talent and worth, may have been
Virgil.




12


THE POET.


probable, as a German scholar has ingeniously suggested, that it was because the cruelties of Augustus's later
years made him repent of having immortalised a tyrant.
He died in his fifty-first year, at Brundusium, where
he had landed in the suite of the emperor, whom he
had met during a visit to Athens, and who brought
him back with him to Italy. He was buried, as was
the custom of the Romans, by the side of the public
road leading out of Naples to Puteoli; and the tomb
still shown to travellers, near Posilippo, as the last
resting-place of the poet, may at least mark the real
site. He died a comparatively rich man, possessed of
a town-house at Rome, near the palace of MAecenas,
with a good library. Living, as he did, in the highest
society of the capital, where he was very popular, he
never forgot his old friends; and it is pleasant to read
that he sent money to his aged parents regularly every
year.  So highly was he esteemed by his own cotemporaries, that on one occasion when he visited the
theatre, the whole audience is said to have risen in a
body and saluted him with the same honours which
were paid to Augustus. He preserved to the last his
simple manners and somewhat rustic appearance; and
it is believed that his character, amongst all the pre
valent vices of Rome, remained free from reproachsaving only that with which he was taunted by the
libertines of the capital, the reproach of personal purity.
It is as much to his honour that Caligula should have
ordered all his busts to be banished from the public
libraries, as that St Angustin should have quoted him
alone of heathen authors, in his celebrated 'Confessions.'




THE PASTORALS.
THE earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been
said, were his Pastorals.  Of these we have ten
remaining, sometimes called "Bucolics '-. e., Songs
of the Herdsmen — and sometimes "Eclogues," as
being "selections" from a larger number of similar
compositions which the poet either never made public,
or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects
of these poems arc various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek
shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture
in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet
peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at
his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of
lis own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia.
That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all
day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either
in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies
on their lost loves, surely never existed in fact, how



14


THE PASTORA LS.


ever familiar to us in the language of ancient and
modern poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the
satyrs and fauns and dryad-nymphs with whom a
fanciful mythology had peopled the same region, and
who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral
poets in the company of their human dramatis personce. The Arcadia of history was a rich and fertile
district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as
one of our own midland counties.   Like them, if it
had any reputation at all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation for dulness.
It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of
the qualities of the animal seem to have been shared
by the natives themselves.   "A   slip of Arcadia"
passed into a proverbial nickname for a boy who was
the despair of his schoolmaster.  The Arcadia of tile
poets and romance-writers, from classical tilies down
to our own Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr
Conington says, "the poets' golden land, in which
imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life
of the present." This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the early days of authorship down
to a very recent date. Thyrsis and Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetic'al existence of something like fifteen hunllred years, and talk
very much the same language in the Pastorals of Pope
that they did in the Greek Idylls.  It is curious, also,
that when society itself has been most artificial, this affectation of pa.toral simplicity seemsto have been most in
vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who
lavished their applause and rewards upon Virgil when




THE PASTORA LS.


15


he read to them these lays of an imaginary shepherdlife; how Galata3a was won by a present of a pair of
wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Meliboeus
thankfully went to supper with his friend Tityrus on
roasted chestnuts and goat-milk cheese.  Society in
England had never less of the reality of pastoral simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady
chose to be painted with a lamb or a crook-when the
"bucolic cant," as Warton contemptuously terms it,
was the fashionable folly of the (lay.  So when aristocratic life in France had reached a phase of corruption which was only to be purged by a revolution,
Queen Marie Antoinette, with her ladies and gentle
nen in waitin(, were going about the farm at Trialnon
with crooks in their hands, playing at shepherds
and shepherdesses, on the brink    of that terrible
volcano.
Of tlhe ten Eclogues, the majority take the form of
pastoral dialogue. Frequently it is a. singing-nlatch
betweel two rival shepherds-lnot always conducted
in the most amicable fashion, or with the most scrupulous delicacy in the nlatter of repartee, the poetical
"Arcadian" being in this point a pretty faithful copy
from nature.  Most of the names, as well as of the
subjects and imagery, are taken, as has been said, from
the Greek Idylls of Theocritus.  So closely has Virgil
copied his model that lle.even transplants the natural
scenery of Sicily, employed by Theocritus, to his pastoral dreamland, which otherwise would seem to be
localised on the banks of the Mincio, in the neighbourhood of lis native Mantua. This gives him an




16


THE PASTORALS.


opportunity of touching upon subjects of the day, and
introducing, in the name and guise of shepherds, himself and his fiiends.  Sometimes we can see through
the disguise by the help of contemporary Roman history;
more often, probably, the clue is lost to us through our
very imperfect modern knowledge. We know pretty
well that Tityrus,-who in the First Eclogue expresses
his gratitude to the "godlike youth" who has preserved his little farm from the ruthless hands of the
soldier colonists, while his poor neighbour Melibceus
has lost his all,-can be no other than the poet himself, who thus compliments his powerful protector. So,
too, in a later Eclogue, when the slave Mceris meets
his neighbour Lycidas on the road, and tells him how
his master has been dispossessed of his farm by the
military colonists, and has narrowly escaped with his
life, we may safely- trust the traditional explanation,
that in the master Menalcas we have Virgil again,
troubled a second timle by these intruders, and compelled to renew his application to his great friend at
Rome. The traditional story was, that the poet was
obliged to take refuge from the violence of the soldiers in the shop of a charcoal-burner, who let hilm
out at a back-door, and eventually had to throw
himself into the river Mincio to escape their pursuit.
Lycidas, in the Pastoral, is surprised to hear of his
neighbour's new trouble.
LYc.-I surely heard, that all from where you hills
Begin to rise, and gently slope again
Down to the stream, where the old beech-trees
throw




THE PASTORALS.


17


Their ragged time-worn tops against the sky,*
Your poet-master had redeemed by song.
M(E.-You heard, no doubt-and so the story went;
But song, good Lycidas, avails as much,
When swords are drawn, as might the trembling
dove
When on Dodona swoops the eagle down.
Nay-had I not been warned of woes to comeWarned by a raven's croak on my left hand
From out the hollow oak-why then, my friend,
You had lost your Mceris and his master too."
Honest Lycidas expresses his horror at the narrow
escape of the neighbourhood from such a catastrophe.
What should they all have done for a poet, if they
had lost Menalcas? who could compose such songsand who could sing them? And he breaks out himself
ilto fragmentary reminiscences which he has picked
up by ear from his friend.  Then Moeris too-who,
being a poet's farm-servant, has caught a little of the
inspiration-repeats a few lines of his master's.  "As
you hope for any blessings," says Lycidas, "let me
hear the rest of it."
"So may your bees avoid the poisonous yewSo may your cows bring full-swoln udders homeIf canst remember aught, begin at once. I too,
I am a poet, by the Muses' grace: some songs
I have, mine own composing; and the swains
Call me their bard-but I were weak to heed them.
I cannot vie with masters of the art
* It is not difficult to believe that in the old time-worn
beeches overhanging the stream we have the actual landscape
of the poet's farm.. o vol.v.                              B




18              T'1E PASTORALS.
Like Varius or like Cinna; my poor Muse
Is but a goose among the tuneful swans."
Moeris can remember a scrap or two of his master's
verses.  There was one in particular, which Lycidas
had heard him singing one moonlight night, and would
much like to hear again;-" I cal renlember the tune
myself," he says, "but I have forgotten the words."
Moeris will try.  The compliment to Augustus with
which the strain begins sufficiently marks the real
poet who here figures as MIenalcas.
"Why, Daphnis, why dost watch the constellations
Of the old order, now the new is born?
Lo! a new star comes forth to glad the nations,
Star of the Caesars, filling full the corn." *
But Moeris cannot remember much more.    They must
both wait, he says, until his master comes home again.
So the pair walk on together towards Rome, cheating
the long journey with singing as they go; and thus
closes this pretty pastoral dialogue, the graceful ease
of which, with its subdued comedy, it would be impossible for any translator to render adequately.
Another of these Eclogues relates the capture of
Silenus, one of the old rural deities of very jovial reputation, by two young shepherds, while he lay sleeping off the effect of yesterday's debauch. He is com* Probably the comet which appeared after Julius Caesar's
death, and which the poet takes to announce a new era of
peace and happiness for Rome. The English reader may remember that a new star was said to have appeared at the accession of Charles II., from which equally happy auguries were
drawn-and were equally disappointed.




THE PASTORALS.


19


monly represented-and he was rather a favourite
subject with ancient artists-as a corpulent bald-headed
old mall, riding upon an ass, inl a state of evident inebriety, carrying a capacious leather wine-bottle, and
led and followed by a company of Nymphs and
Bacchanals.  lie had the reputation, like the sea-god
Proteus, of knowing the imysteries of nature and the
secrets of the future; and there was a current story,
upon which this Pastoral is founded, of his having
been caught while asleep, like him, by some shepherds in Phrygia, and carried to King Midas, to
whom, as the price of his release, he answered all questions in natural philosophy and ancient history-just
as Proteus unfolded to Menelaus, under similar compulsion, the secret of his future fate.
The Pastoral into which Virgil introduces this story
is addressed to his friend Varus-a man evidently of
high rank-and seems meant as an apology for not
complying with his request to write a poem on his
exploits.
"I thought to sing how heroes fought and bled,
But that Apollo pinclled my ear, and said' Shepherds, friend Tityrus, I would have you know,
Feed their sheep high, and keep their verses low.'"
Then he goes on to tell his story:"Two shepherd-youths, the story runs, one day
Came on the cave where old Silenus lay;
Filled to the skin, as was his wont to be,
With last night's wine, and sound asleep was he;
The garland from his head had fallen aside,
And his round bottle hanging near they spied.




-


20


THE PASTORALS.


Now was their time-both had been cheated long
By the sly god with promise of a song;
They tied him fast-fit bonds his garland madeAnd lo! a fair accomplice comes to aid:
Loveliest of Naiad-nymphs, and merriest too,
AEgle * did what they scarce had dared to do;
Just as the god unclosed his sleepy eyes,
She daubed his face with blood of mulberries.
He saw their joke, and laughed-' Now loose me, lad I
Enough-you've caught me-tying is too bad.
A song you want?-Here goes. For gEgle, mind,
I warrant me I'll pay her out in kind.
So he began. The listening Fauns drew near,
The beasts beat time, the stout oaks danced to hear.
So joys Parnassus when Apollo singsSo through the dancing hills the lyre of Orpheus rings."
Silenus's strain is a poetical lecture on natural philosophy. He is as didactic in his waking soberness as
some of his disciples are in their cups.  He describes
how the world sprang from the four original elements,
and narrates the old fables of the cosmogonists-the
Deluge of Deucalion, the new race of men who sprang
from the stones which he and Pyrrha cast behind
them, the golden reign of Saturn, the theft of fire by
Prometheus, and a long series of other legends, with
which he charms his listeners until the falling shadows
warn them to count their flocks, and the evening-stai
comes out, as the poet phrases it, " over the unwilling
heights of Olympus "-loath yet to lose the fascinating
strain.
Besides this Pastoral addressed to Varus, there are


* Angtic@, "Bright-eyes."




THE " POLLIO."


21


three inscribed to other friends: one to Cornelius
Gallus, and two to Caius Asinius Pollio, who was
among the most eminent men of his day alike as a
statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, and at that
time held the high office of consul at Rome. He had
been the friend of the great Julius, as he was afterwards of his nephew Octavianus (Augustus), and was
probably the person who preserved or restored to the
poet his country estate. The fourth in order of these
poems, commonly known as the " Pollio," is the most
celebrated of the whole series, and has given rise to a
great amount of speculation. Its exact date is known
from the record of Pollio's consulship-40 before the
Christian era. Its subject is the expected birth of a
Child, in whom the golden age of innocence and happiness should be restored, and who was to be the moral
regenerator of the world. The date of the poem itself,
approaching so closely the great Birth at Bethlehemthe reference to the prophecy of the Cunaean Sibyl,
long supposed to be a voice from heathendom predictive of the Jewish Messiah-and the remarkable
coincidence of the metaphorical terms employed by
the poet with the prophetical language of the Old
Testament, have led many to the pious belief that the
Roman poet did but put into shape those vague expectations of a Great Deliverer which were current in
his day, and which were to have a higher fulfilment
than he knew. The " Pollio " may be familiar to many
English readers who are unacquainted with the criginal
through Pope's fine imitation of it in his poem of
"The Messiah," first published anonymously in the




22              7'T1    PA. STORA LS.
' Spectator.' * But as the Latin Eclogue itself is short,
it may be well to attempt a translation of it here,
before remarking further upon its meaning.
"Muses of Sicily, lift me for once
To higher flight; our humble tamarisk groves
Delight not all; and though the fields and woods
Still bound nly song, give me the skill to make
Fit music for a Roman consul's ear.
"Comes the Last Age, of which the Sibyl sangA new-born cycle of the rolling years;
Justice returns to earth, the rule returns
Of good King Saturn;-lo! from the high heavens
Comes a new seed of men. Lucina chaste,
Speed the fair infant's birth, with whom shall end
Our age of iron, and the golden prime
Of earth return; thine own Apollo's reign
In him begins anew. This glorious age
Inaugurates, O Pollio, with thee;
Thy consulship shall date the happy months;
Under thine auspices the Child shall purge
Our guilt-stains out, and free the land from dread.
ITe with the gods and heroes like the gods
Shall hold familiar converse, and shall rul.,
With his great father's spirit the peaceful world.
For thee, 0 Child, the earth untilled slall pour
Her early gifts,-the winding ivy's wreath,
Smiling acanthus, and all flowers that blow.
She-goats undriven shall bring full udders home,
The herds no longer fear the lion's spring;
The ground beneath shall cradle thee in flowers,
The venonted snake shall die, the poisonous herb
Perish from out thy plath, and leave the almond there.
"But when with growing years the Child shall learn
The old heroic glories of his race,
No. 378.




THE " POLLIO."


23


And know what Honour means: then shall the plains
Glow with the yellow harvest silently,
The grape hang blushing from the tangled brier,
And the rough oak drip honey like a dew.
Yet shall some evil leaven of the old strain
Lurk still unpurged; still men shall tempt the deep
With restless oar, gird cities with new walls,
And cleave the soil with ploughshares; yet again
Another Argo bear her hero-crew,
Another Tiphys steer: still wars shall be,
A new Achilles for a second Troy.
" So, when the years shall seal thy manhood's strength,
The busy merchant shall forsake the seasBarter there shall not need; the soil shall bear
For all men's use all products of all climes.
The glebe shall need no harrow, nor the vine
The searching knife, the oxen bear no yoke;
The wool no longer shall be schooled to lie,
Dyed in false hues; but, colouring as he ee(ls,
The ram himself in the rich pasture-lands
Shall wear a fleece now purple and now gold,
And the lambs grow in scarlet. So the Fates
Who know not change have bid their spindles run,
And weave for this blest age the we) of doom.
"Come, claim thine honours, for the time draws nigh,
Babe of immortal race, the wondrous seed of Jove!
Lo, at thy coming how the starry spheres
Are moved to trembling, and the earth below,
And widespread seas, and the blue vault of heaven!
How all things joy to greet the rising Age!
If but my span of life be stretched to see
Tly birth, and blreath remain to sing thy praise,
Not Thracian Orpheus should o'ermatch my strain,
Nor Linus,-though each parent helped the son,
Phoebus Apollo and the Muse of Song:
Though in Arcadia Pan my rival stood,




THE PASTORALS.


His own Arcadia should pronounce for me.
How soon, fair infant, shall thy first smile greet
Thy happy mother, when the slow months crown
The heart-sick hopes that waited for thy birth?
Smile then, 0 Babe! so shall she smile on thee;
The child on whom no parent's smile hath beamed,
No god shall entertain, nor goddess love."
It would be out of place here to discuss the various
conjectures of the learned as to who the Child was, to
whose birth the poet thus looks forward.  Whether it
was a son of the Consul Pollio himself, who died in
his infancy; or the expected offspring of Augustus's
marriage with Scribonia, which was, after all, a daughter-Julia-whose profligate life and unhappy death
were a sad contradiction of Virgil's anticipations; or a
child of Octavia, sister of Augustus;-which of these
it was, or whether it was any one of them, neither
ancient nor modern commentators have been able to
decide. "It is not certain," says Mr Conington, " that
the child ever was born; it is certain that, if born, he
did not become the regenerator of his time."  It is
possible, too, that the whole form of the poem may
be strictly imaginary-that the cliild had been born
already, long ago, and that it was no other than
Octavianus CGesar-and that Virgil does but use here
the licence of poetry to express his hopes of a golden
age that might follow the peace of Brundusium. And
as to how far this very remarkable poem may or lay
not be regarded as one of wlat Archbishop Trench
has called "the unconscious prophecies of heathen.
dom," would be to open a field of inquiry of the




THE "POLLIO."


25


highest interest indeed, but far too wide for these
pages. Yet it cannot be entirely passed over.
The Sibylline oracles, to which Virgil alludes in his
opening lines, whatever their original form, were so
garbled and interpolated, both in Christian and preChristian times, that it is impossible now to know
what they did or did not contain.   But they were
recognised, in the early Church- by the Emperor
Constantine, who is said to have attributed his own
conversion in great part to their study, and by St
Augustine, amongst others-as containing distinct prophecies of the Messiah. The recognition of the Roman
Sibyl or Sibyls as bearing their testimony to the truth
of Christianity is still familiar to us in the ancient
hymn, " Dies Ir.e,"-so often translated"Teste David cum Sibylla;"
and 'in an old Latin mystery-play of the eleventh
century, when the witnesses are sulmmoned to give
evidence as to the Nativity, there appear among theil,
in company with the Hebrew prophets, Virgil and
the Sibyl, who both join il a general " Bcnedicalts
Domino" at the end.   St Augustine quotes twentyseven Latin verses (which, however, seenl very fiagnlentary anil uinconnected) as actual utterances of tlle
Sibyl of Erythrle, which contain propllecies, more or
less clear, of the great Advent. The original, le says,
was il Greek, and the initial letters of each verse
formed a sentence, " Jesus Christ the Son of God the
Saviour."*  Whatever truth there may be in any
* IHO'Tr XPEILTO0  OEOT TIO 2nTHP. He also quotes






26


THE PASTORALS.


special predictions of this nature as existing in the
heathen world, it is at least certain that there prevaile( very largely, about the date of the Christian era,
a vague expectation of some personal advent which
should in some way regenerate society.
The new "cycle of centuries," which the poet supposes to begin with the birth of the Child, refers to
the doctrine held by Plato and his disciples (possibly
of Etruscan origin) of an " Annus Magnus," or Great
Year.   It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long intervals, in which the history of
the world repeated itself." A curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his life of
Sulla.
"While the horizon was clear and cloudless, there was
heard suddenly the sound of a trumpet, shrill, prolonged,
and as it were wailing, so that all men -wre startled and
awed by its loudness. The Etruscan soothsayers declared
that it foreboded the coming of a new generatiol and the
revolution of the world. For that there were eight generations of man in all, diflering from each other in habits and
ways of life, and each had its allotted space of time, when
heaven brought round again the recurrence of the Great
Year, and that when tle end of one and the rise of another
was at hand, some wondrous sign appeared in earth or
heaven."-PLuTARCH. Sulla, c. 7.
Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of
the genius and character of Virgil's pastoral poetry.
other "Sibyllilne" verses from the Greek of Lactantius, referring to the crucifixion.-De Civ. Dei, xviii. 23.
* The duration is variously estimated-from 2489 to 18,000
years. See Coniigton's note.




T'HE PASTORALS.                27
It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said
to have now become obsolete. English poets were at
one time strongly imbued with it.  Spenser, Milton,
Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,-the last perhaps the Limit euccessful,-weore all n.)re or less
imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it
would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution
in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity
again.




26


THE PASTORALS.


special predictions of this nature as existing in the
heathen world, it is at least certain that there prevailed very largely, about thle date of the Christian era,
a vague expectation of solme personal advent which
should in some way regenerate society.
The new "cycle of centuries," which the poet supposes to begin with the birth of the Child, refers to
the doctrine held by Plato and his disciples (possibly
of Etruscan origin) of an " Annus Magnus," or Great
Year. It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long intervals, in which the history of
the world repeated itself.i  A curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his life of
Sulla.
"While the horizon was clear and cloudless, there was
heard suddenly the sound of a trumpet, shrill, prolonged,
and as it were wailing, so that all men w(,re startled and
awed by its loudness. The Etruscan soothsayers declared
that it foreboded the coming of a new generation and the
revolution of the world. For that there were eight generations of man in all, diflering from each other in habits and
ways of life, and each had its allotted space of time, when
heaven brought round again the recurrence of the Great
Year, and that when the end of one and the rise of another
was at hand, some wondrous sign appeared in earth or
heaven."-PLUTARCH. Sulla, c. 7.
Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of
the genius and character of Virgil's pastoral poetry.
other "Sibylline" verses from the Greek of Lactantius, referring to the crucifixion.-De Civ. Dei, xviii. 23.
* The duration is variously estimated-from 2489 to 18,000
years. See Conington's note.




TIlE PASTORALS.                27
It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said
to have now become obsolete. English poets were at
one time strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton,
Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,-the last perhaps the LTt euccessful,- wore a1 n.)re or less
imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it
would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution
in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity
again.




THE GEORGICS.
THE Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a
direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals.
The poem of Hesiod- " Works and    )ays"-which
has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early
history of the world, with its five ages of the human
race-the gold, the silver, the brazen, "the age of
heroes," and the present-which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from
the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even
worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the
Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in
their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky
(lays. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these
two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted
to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose
case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced.
From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem




TEE GEOROICS.


29


"On the Nature of Things," he drew quite as largely,
but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born
on the very day of Lucretius's death, and he had an
intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil's writings which
would seem to show that his greatest ambition would
have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets
of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of
country life.  And here and there, throughout these
books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity,
he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and
breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to
indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature's operations, which would have sorely puzzled a
Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could
suppose that the work was really composed with a
view to their practical instruction.
He addresses his poem to his noble patron Maecenas.
And amongst the long list of divine powers whom,
as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to
aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of
ornoe.
" Thou, Caesar, chief, where'er thy choice ordain,
To fix 'mid gods thy yet unchosen reignWilt thou o'er cities stretch thy guardian sway,
While earth and all her realms thy nod obey?
The world's vast orb shall own thy genial power,
Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower;
Before thy altar grateful nations bow,
And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow.
O'er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail,
Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail?




THE GEORGICS.


Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves,
While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves?
Wilt thou 'mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise,
And, a new star, illume thy native skies
Scorpius, e'en now, eacli shrinking claw confines,
And more than half his heaven to tlhee resigns.
Where'er thy reign (for not if hell invite
To wield the sceptre of eternal night,
Ne'er would such lust of dire lominion move
Thee, Caesar, to resign the realmn of Jove:
Though vaunting Greece extol th' Elysian plain,
Whence weeping Ceres wooes ler clild in vain)
Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide,
O'er the rude swain's uncertain path preside;
Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth)
And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth."
-SOTHEBY.
The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops.
The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough
deep, and to plough four times over-advice in the
principles of which modern farmers would cordially
agree. The poet also reconmends fallows at least every
other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years.  The Roman agriculturist had his pests of
the farm, and collplained of them as loudly as his
modern fellows.  The geese, and the cranes, and the
mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and
if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment,
the couch-grass,-squitcl, twitch, or quitcl, as it is
variously termed, which is said to spring up u nder the
national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the
Cape or in Australia,-he had indigenous weeds of his
own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The




THE GEORGICS.


31


Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden
instrument, which would break the heart alike of nan
and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the
poet, would shock one of our modern implementmanufacturers.  He gives a few hints as to lucky and
unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating
the weather from the various signs to be observed in
the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world;
and he closes this first division of his poem, as he
began it, with an apostrophe to Cuesar as the hope of
Rome and Italy.    It is one of the finest passages
in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well
as most..Dryden's version is spirited enough, and
though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English
ear:"Ye home-born deities, of mortal birth!
Thou, father Romulus, and mother Earth,
Goddess unmoved! whose guardian arms extend
O'er Tuscan Tiber's course, and Roman towers defend;
With youthful Caesar your joint powers engage,
Nor hinder him to save the sinking age.
O! let the blood already spilt atone
For the past crimes of curst Laomedon!
Heaven wants thee there; and long the gods, we know,
Have grudged thee, Caesar, to the world below;
Where fraud and rapine right and wrong confound;
Where impious arms from every part resound,
And monstrous crimes in every shape are crowned.
The peaceful peasant to the wars is prest
The fields lie fallow in inglorious rest:
The plain no pasture to the flock affords.
The crooked scythes are straightened into sworda:




32


THE GEORGICS.


And there Euphrates her soft offspring arms,
And here the Rhine rebellows with alarms;
The neighbouring cities range on several sides,
Perfidious Mars long-plighted leagues divides,
And o'er the wasted world in triumph rides.
So four fierce coursers, starting to the race,
Scour through the plain, and lengthen every pace:
Nor reins, nor curbs, nor threat'ning cries they fear,
But force along the trembling charioteer."
The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the
vineyard, but especially of the latter. The apple, the
pear, the olive, all receive due notice from the poet;
but upon the culture of the vine he dwells with a
hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air than those which he gives out upon other
branches of cultivation. The soil, the site, the best
kinds to choose, the different modes of propagation,
are all discussed with considerable minuteness.   It
would seem that in tlose earlier times, as now, the
vintage had a more poetical aspect than even the
harvest-field.  The beauty of tlle crop, the merriment
of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it
has gone through the usual process of conversion, gave,
as is still the case in all wine-producing countries,
a holiday character to the whole course of cultivation.
All other important crops contribute in some way to
supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly its enjoyments.  And when, at the
beginning of the book, the poet invokes the god of
wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough
heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however
temperato his own habits might be, he had not




THE GEORGICS.


33


adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the
ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a
taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always
a kindly word for "the dark red wine:" they might
have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It
is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:"Come, Father Bacchus, come! thy bounty fills
All things around; for thee the autumn hills,
Heavy with fruit, blush through their greenery;
In the full vats the vintage foams for thee:
Come, Father Bacchus, come! nor yet refuse
To doff thy buskins, and with noble juice
To stain thy limbs, and tread the grapes with me."
But although the poet makes the labours of the
gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song,
his most brilliant passages, and those best known and
remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he
breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural
details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the
most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second
book:" Colchian bulls with fiery nostrils never turned Italian field,
Seed of hydra's teeth ne'er sprang in bristling crop of spear
and shield;
But thy slopes with heavy corn-stalks and the Massic vine
are clad,
There the olive-groves are greenest, and the full-fed herds
are glad.
In thy plains is bred the war-horse, tossing high its crest
of pride;
Milk-white herds, 0 fair Clitumnus, bathe them in thy
sacred tideA. c. vol. v.                           0




--.Y-'T —.-` ---- — 7. -- - -—: --- —rr --- —II*._ _.


34               THE GEORGICS.
Mighty bulls to crown the altars, or to draw the conqueror's
car
Up the Sacred Way in triumph when he rideth from the war
Here the spring is longest, summer borrows months be
yond her own;
Twice the teeming flocks are fruitful, twice the laden orchards groan.
In thy plains no tigers wander, nor the lions nurse their
young;
Evil root of treacherous poison doth no wretched gatherer
wrong,
Never serpent rears its crest, or drags its monstrous coils
along.
Lo! where rise thy noble cities, giant works of men of old,
Towns on beetling crags piled heavenward by the hands of
builders boldAntique towers round whose foundations still the graild old
rivers glide,
And the double sea that girds thee like a fence on either side.
Such the land which sent to battle Marsian footmen stout
and good,
Sabine youth, and Volscian spearmen, and Liguria's hardy
brood;
Hence have sprung our Decii, Marii, mighty names which
all men bless,
Great Camillus, kinsmen Scipios, sternest men in battle's
press!
Hence hast thou too sprung, great Casar, whom the farthest East doth fear,
So that Mede nor swarthy Indian to our Roman lines come
near!\
Hail, thou fair and fruitful mother, land of ancient Saturn,
hail!
Rich in crops and rich in heroes! thus I dare to wake the
talo




THE GEORGICS.


35


Of thine ancient laud and honour, opening founts that
slumbered long,
Rolling through our Roman towns the echoes of old
Hesiod's song." *
The Third,osrgic treats of the herd and the stud.
The poet's knowledge on these points must he
strongly suspected of being but second-hand-rather
the result of having studied some of the Roman
" Books of the Farm," than the experience of a practical stock-breeder.  Such a work was Varro's 'On
Rural Affairs,' which Virgil evidently followed as an
authority. From that source he drew, amongst other
precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays
down in this formula:"An ugly head, a well-fleshed neck,
Deep dewlaps falling from the chin,
Long in the flank, broad in the foot,
Rough hairy ears, and horns bent in."
Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our
modern judges of stock. But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with an eye
to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow
of the present day would not be considered by us a
handsome animal. Besides, the object of the Roman
breeder was to obtain animals which would be " strong
to labour,"-good beasts under the yoke; not such as
would lay on the greatest weight of flesh at the least
* This fine passage-much of the beauty of which is necessarily
lost in this attempt at a translation-has been often imitated,
not least successfully by Thomson, in the eulogy upon his native
island with which he begins the fifth book of his poem on
"( Liberty."




-.-'`-IL- --- —--- --1~" ----~ —~~~1-~-II~ 1111


3G


THE GEORGICS.


possible cost, for the purposes of the butcher.  His
points of a good horse are entirely different, and
approach more nearly our own ideal —" Fine in the
head, short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in
the chest."   Bay and dapple-grey he chooses for
colour; white and chestnut he considers the worst.
Ile had not reached the more catholic philosophy of
the modern horse-dealer, that " no good horse was ever
yet of a bad colour."
The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows
the poet to indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of pastoral life under the
hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or shepherd
drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying
with him all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a
campaign; and again of his winter life in some vague
northern region which he calls by the general name of
Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of wine, as the southern poet compassionately
phrases it) some kind of beer or cider.  But the most
remarkable of these passages is that which closes the
book, and describes the ravages of some terrible
pestilence which, beginning with the flocks and herds,
extended at last to the wild beasts and to the birds,
and even to the fish. There is no historical account of
such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that
Virgil used his licence as a poet to embellish with
imaginary details some ordinary epidemic, in order to
present to his readers a companion picture to that of
the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by his favourite model Lucretius.




TIHE GEORGIC&.


37


There is no need to say very much about the
Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently
of more importance in the rural economy of the
Romans than they commonly are in ours.     Before
the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than
they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate
like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an
article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits
and natural history of the insect commonwealth to
which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so
little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to
have been no want of interest or research upon the
subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher
Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years
to this single branch of zoology.  Virgil certainly
would not help us much in a scientific point of view.
The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to
us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more
marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had
some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes
the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm,
a king, and imagines that they pick up their young
ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives alsoand with an air of as much practical reality as can be
expected from a poet-minute instructions for obtaining
a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer,
beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from
air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a




I-rrrr ~ _


38


THE GEORGICS.


fact in natural history, that bees will take up their
quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal.
The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that
falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times
has staggered some inexperienced commentators.  He
advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and
clip their wings.  Such a recipe certainly suggests at
first sight the old preliminary caution-" First catch
your bee:" but an experienced bee-keeper will find no
difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful.*
The fine episode with which this book concludes,
in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and
Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon
bee-keeping.
The Georgics have generally been considered as
the poet's most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,-of his
habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are
poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory
-was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests
war, and he' seeks to enthrone labour in.ts place. He
looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but
of a nobler kind-" a holy war of men against the
earth," as a French writer expresses it.t  He compares its details, in more than one passage, with those
* When we find, in a modern manual, even directions "How
to tame vicious bees," it is hard to say what a master of beecraft can not do. -See Mr Pettigrew's clever and amusing
'Handy Book.'
t Jules Legria




THE GEORGICS.


39


of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this,
the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against
the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.
"First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven "is his instruction to his pupils-" From Jove all things
begin."  His motto might have been that which the
Benedictines in their purer days adopted-" Ora et
labora " —" Pray and work."  It has been commonly
said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that
he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English
poet's words,
"Lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind."
But a study of his writings will go far to show that
such is not the case; that whatever the distinct
articles of his creed may llave been, he had a deep
individual sense of the personal existence of great
powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature
was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden
mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that
he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and
beauties, as the "skirts" of a divine glory. In all
his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more
plainly than in the Georgics.
It is said that this particular work was undertaken
by the desire of MAecenas, with the hope of turning the.
minds of the veteran soldiers,; to whom grants of land
had been made in return for their services, to a more
peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their




40     '        TIE GEOR(GIC3.
farms.  Whether it had that result may well be
doubted: the discharged soldier, however heartily he
might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as
his instructor. The practical influence of these treatises
in any way is equally doubtful. "It would be absurd
to suppose," says Dean Merivale, "that Virgil's verses
induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough,
or take from his bailiff the management of his own
estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some
of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time,
and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the
Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoy.
mont." *
* 'Fall of Rome,' iv. 576.




THE AE NE ID.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.
THE ZEneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of
Troy. The fascination of that remarkable cycle of
legend had not weakened after the lapse of ten
centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to
imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment,
but he goes to him for his subject. He even makes
his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to the Iliad-at
least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject
of this latter poem is the wanderings and final
establishment in his native country of the Greek hero
Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the story of
the escape of a Trojan hero 'from the ruin of his city,
and the perils by land and sea which he encountered,
until his final settlement in the distant west, in the
land which the gods had promised him.     XEneas,
like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes
and sufferings; and like him, though he has the
justice and the deliberate counsels of heaven all on
his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permitted




42


THE   EXVEID.


to vex and thwart him for many long years. This
lEneas-reputed son of the goddess Venus by a
mortal husband, Anchises-had played no unimportant part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been
told that King Priam had no less than fifty sons, it
might have been said that he stood very near the
throne. For he was the representative of the younger
branch of the house of Dardanus-the family of
Assaracus-as Priam was of the elder branch, that of
Ilus.* A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round
him in the Iliad.  He is there addressed as "counsellor of the Trojans;" they honoured him, we are
told, "equally with the godlike Hector;" and Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has
rejected the house of Priam, but that "A.neas, and
his sons, and his sons' sons" should hereafter reign.over
the Trojans." t  Some Homeric critics have even fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer's
poem, a jealousy between Alneas and the sons of Priam.
P,But this surely arises from reading Homer by the light
of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of events,
when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam's
kingdom, the prince of the house of Assaracus should
rebuild the Trojan fortunes on the far-off shores of Italy.
* The following pedigree is mythical-as pedigrees often are:
Tros.
Ilus.          Assaracus.
Laomedon.          Capys.
Priam.           Anchises.
liad, x. 306.




SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTIAGE. 43


Like Homer, Virgil dashes at once into the heart of
his story. This is how he introduces his hero:"Arms and the man I sing, who first,
By fate of Ilian realm amerced,
To fair Italia onward bore,
And landed on Lavinium's shore." *
He tells us nothing, however, for the present, of the
escape from Troy and the embarkation of the fugitives,
or of the guiding oracles in obedience to which they
had sailed forth in quest of this new home. He only
shows us s Aneas on the sea, having just set sail from
Sicily, where the angry Queen of Heaven catches
sight of him.    Juno, we must remember - Virgil,
apparently, has no idea that any one could need reminding of it-Juno has never forgotten or forgiven
that scene upon Mount Ida, where the Trojan Paris
preferred the fascinations-or the bribes-of Venus to
her own stately charms. She had persuaded her royal
consort, the king of gods and men, to consent to the
downfall of the accursed race; and she persecutes this
unhappy remnant, now on its voyage, with unrelenting hate.  Even the poet, who makes use of her persecution as one of the mainsprings of his story, professes his astonishment at its bitterness,Can such deep hate find place in breasts divine?" t
* The extracts are in all cases (where not otherwise marked)
from Mr Conington's translation, and are made with the permission of his representatives and publishers.
+ Milton has translated the line almost literally:"In heavenly spirits could such perversion dwell?"
-Par. Lost, vL




__~~~ _ _-_


44


THE    E INEI).


She had another reason, too, for her present jealous
feelings. The city of Carthage, where she was espe.
cially honoured, she had hoped to make the mistress
of the world. And now-so the inexorable Fates
have woven it in their web-this new brood from
Troy are to destroy it in the years to come. Rome,
and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey
to his readers, is to have this universal empire.
But they have not reached Latium yet, these
hateful Trojans. They never shall. The Queen of
Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds,
where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of
AEolia, controlling his boisterous subjects:" They with the rock's reverberant roar
Chafe blustering round their prison door:
He, throned on high, the sceptre sways,
Controls their moods, their wrath allays.
Break but that sceptre, sea and land
And heaven's ethereal deep
Before them they would whirl like sand,
And through the void air sweep."
At Juno's request 2Eolus lets loose his prisoners. Out
rush the winds in mad delight.
"All in a moment, sun and skies
Are blotted from the Trojans' eyes:
Black night is brooding o'er the deep,
Sharp thunder peals, live lightnings leap:
The stoutest warrior holds his breath,
And looks as on the face of death.
At once iEneas thrilled with dread;
Forth from his breast, with hands outspread,
These groaning words he drew:




SIIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE. 45
' happy thrice, and yet again,
Who died at Troy like valiant men,
E'en in their parents' view!
O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray,
Why passed I not the plain that day,
Yielding my life to you,
Where, stretched beneath a Phrygian sky,
Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon, lie:
Where Simois tumbles 'neath his wave
Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?'"
The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are
cast on the rocks; one goes down with all its crew
before their leader's eyes. But Neptune, the sea-god,
comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as Juno is
hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King
of the Winds in his dominions-he knows by whose
instance he has dared this outrage. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern authority:"Back to your master instant flee,
And tell him, not to him but me
The imperial trident of the sea
Fell by the lot's award;
His is that prison-house of stone,
A prison, Eurus, all your own;
There let him lord it to his mind,
The jailer-monarch of the wind,
But keep its portal barred."
So the tempest is stilled, and AEneas, with seven
ships, the survivors of his fleet of twenty, runs into a
land-locked harbour on the coast of Carthage. The
crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn,
while AEneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and
kills deer to mend their meal. Wine they have good




46


THE SHNEID.


store of-the parting gift from King Acestes, late their
host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to
the fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in
words of good cheer:" y'; that have seen grim Scylla rave,
And heard her monsters yell,You that nave looked upon the cave
Where savage Cyclops dwell,Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;
This suffering may yield us yet
A pleasant tale to tell."
JEneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council.
His goddess - mother Venus pleads with her fatht r
Jupiter to have pity on her offspring. And Jupitervery open to influence of this kind now, as in Homer's
story-reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate../Eneas shall reach Latium  safely, and reign there
tllree years.  His son Iulus-or Ascanius, as he is
otherwise called-shall succeed him, and transfer the
seat of power from Laviniuml to his own new-founded
city, Alba Longa.  Three hundred years his race shall
rule there, till in due course the twin-brothers lomiiulus and Remnus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and
the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome.
To the glories of this new capital the Father of the gods
will assign neither limit nor end. The wrongs of Troy
shall be redressed. The sons of the East, in their new
home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.
"So stands my will. There comes a day,
While Rome's great ages hold their way,
When old 'Assaracus's sons
Shall quit them oI, the Myrmidons,




SHIPWRECK ON TIE COAST OF CARTLIAGE.,t7
O'er Phthia and Mycense reign,
And humble Argos to their chain.
From Troy's fair stock shall Caesar rise,
The limits of whose victories
Are ocean, of his fame the skies;
Great Julius, proud that style to bear,
In name and blood Iulus' heir."
Thus, before he has concluded the first book of his
great poem, the poet has taken us into his counsels as
to the purport of the song. It is not a mere epic
romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic
deeds and exciting adventures; it is, like some of our
modern novels, a romance with a purpose; and the
purpose is the claiming for the great house of Julius
the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of
the glories of that house in the person of Augustus.
And as the Iliad of Homer, beyond the mere vocation
of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike audience by
the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also
-the glorification of the Greek nation-so the Roman
poet may be said to have written a counter-Iliad, to
extol the later fortunes of the royal house of Troy
in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them,
of Iulus.  For any historic foundation of such a
genealogy we may look in vain. King Brute stands
upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of
Troy as the founder of the Julian house and of Rome.
But, for the present, we must be content to assume
his existence, and to follow the course of 1 he
narrative as the poet wills.  The claim  of Trojan
descent is not an invention of Virgil's, though he




rlr
~ --- —:ll;;=;-;;a-; ---; --- --- ---__..


48


THE ENEI D.


may have been the first to work it out so much in
detail. It was a claim in which his countrymen
always delighted, and there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also, Virgil
seems to have at heart. He does not care so much,
after all, for the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of Rome.   The empire
of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough,
and more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the "Pollio." To the soul of
the Roman poet-unlike his master Homer in this-f
war, and more especially civil war, is absolutely hateful
He can describe it, when needed for his purpose, an
describe it well; but it is as the scourge of nations, or at
best the terrible remedy for greater evils;-not, as the
Greek poet calls it, " the strife which is the joy of men."
Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she
may, the counsels of Jupiter.   She puts into the
heart of the Queen of Cartllage,,on whose shores
~Eneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of
pity and compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also, to comfort lier son
/Eneas in his trouble.   Attended by his faithful
friend Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader,
the strange coast on which he finds himself"When in the bosom of the wood
Before him, lo, his mother stood,
In mien and gear a Spartan mtaid,
Or like Harpalycv arrayed,
Who tires fleet coursers in the chase,
And heads the swiftest streams of Thrac.




SHrPPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE. 49
Slung from her shoulders hangs a bow;
Loose to the wind her tresses flow;
Bare was her knee; her mantle's fold
The gathering of a knot controlled.
And 'Saw ye, youths,' she asks them, ' say,
One of my sisters here astray;
A silver quiver at her side,
And for a scarf a lynx's hide;
Or pressing on the wild boar's track
With upraised dart and voiceful pack?'"
There is in this description a happy reminiscence of
an earlier legend.  In such guise-not with any of
the meretricious attractions assigned to the goddess
of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain
nymph-had she won her mortal lover, the Trojan
shepherd Anchises, from whom this her dear son was
born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she
had enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of
the child's birth, nor to boast of the favour shown
him by a goddess, but to bring the boy up in the
forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood - nymi h.
Anchises, in his pride, had neglected or forgotten her
warning, and was punished by premature weakness
and a helpless old age.
Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus
replies to her son's questions as to the inhabitants of
the land. They are a colony from Tyre; their queen,
Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false brother
Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichbus,
had possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she
has escaped with her husband's wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa. ~Eneas tells. c. voL v.                            D




TIE.ENE D.


her in return his own sad story, and is comforted by
the assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are
safe-all but one unhappy vessel and her crew. Then,
as she turns to leave him, the disguised divinity becomes apparent.
"Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed;
Her falling robe her footsteps swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept."
AEneas and his companion mount the crest of the
hill, whence they look down upon the half-finished
walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that
most essential structure in a city of any pretension, an
amphitheatre for public spectacles, and building a
magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist of
invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,like Ulysses in the court of Phseacia-the strangers
enter the brazen gates of the temple. All is magnificent and wonderful.   But, marvel of narvelsl both
walls and doors are sculptured with a history which
ZEneas knows only too well. Even here is recorded,
on this distant and unknown shore, the story of stories
-the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the
Trojan chief peruses the several groups, and identifies
the various incidents. Here the Greeks fly to their
ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans: there,
again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in
slaughter before him. The death of young Troilus,
hurled from his chariot, is there; and, to match the picture. Hector dragged at Achilles's chariot-wheels round




SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE. 51


the city walls.  Memnon the Ethiopian and the amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst
the foremost combatants, ~Eneas can recognise himself.
While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates
are reading this sculptured history, the queen herself
approaches. And while they admire her majesty and
grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the
missing comrades of JEneas make their appearance before her as suppliants. They tell the story of their
shipwreck on the coast: and they think lEneas is lost,
as he had thought they were. Then the mist in which
Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves,
and the two parties recognise and welcome each other.
Iido, like all the world, has heard of the name of
JAneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy. She
can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience:
Myself not ignorant of woe,
Compassion I have learnt to show."
The sentiment has been adopted by modern writers
in all languages. " She had suffered persecution and
learnt mercy," says Sterne in a like case: and even in
Sterne's mouth, the sentiment is natural and true.
The strangers are hospitably welcomed, and offered
every facility for refitting their fleet, and preparing for
the continuance of their voyage. ~Eneas sends down
to his ships for presents worthy of so kind a hostess:
and, with a father's pride, he sends also for his young
son to introduce him to the queen. The evening is
devoted to feasting and revelry. The royal bardthat indispensable figure in all courts, Trojan or Tyrian
or Greek-sings to the assembled guests. It is to be
remarked that his lay is not, as we might expect, of




__


52


THE,ENE1D.


heroes and their deeds: it is the song of Silenus, in
the Pastorals, over again-the favourite subject of the
poet, the wonders of nature and creation.
"He sings the wanderings of the moon,
The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon;
Whence humankind and cattle came,
And whence the rain-spout and the flame,
Arcturus and the two bright bears,
And Hyads weeping showery tears;
Why winter suns so swiftly go,
And why-the winter nights move slow."
All the while, during the song and the banquet, the
queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her.
Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who,
at his false mother's bidding, has assumed the shape
of AEneas's young son.  The true Ascanius lies fast
bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus's machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and
the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom
the passion which is to be her ruin.  AEneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She
hangs upon his lips, like Desdemlona on Othello's:"Much of great Priam asks the dame,
Much of his greater son;
Now in what armour Memnon came,
Now how Achilles shone."
AT ve all, she begs of him to tell his own story-his
escape and his seven years' wanderings.  And ~Eneas
begins; and, with an exact imitation of Homer's
management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of.
Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal
night of Troy.




CHAPTER II.


ANEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.
IT has been said that this poem is a kind of supplement to the Iliad.  ZEneas tells us what was not there
told by Homer, but what is presupposed in his Odyssey,-the later history of the siege and capture of
Troy.  He relates at length the stratagem  of the
Wooden Horse, by which the Greeks at last outwitted
their enemies. The fleet, which had seemed to sail for
home, had withdrawn, and lay concealed in the harbour
of Tenedos. The wooden fabric-dedicated to Minerva,
as the tale went-was left standing outside the city.
It was suggested to bring it within the walls, when
the priest Laocoon rushed to prevent it-suspecting
some such stratagem as in truth had been contrived.
He even hurled his spear against its side, and might
have thus made a beginning of its destruction, when
behold, a prisoner was brought in. It was the treacherous Sinon; a Greek who had undertaken to play
the dangerous part of a double spy. The tale he told
his captors was this: that he, though a Greek, was a
fugitive from Greek vengeance-especially from the




54


THE EfNEID.


hated Ulysses. He had been fixed upon as a victir
to propitiate the offended gods; for there had come an
oracle from Apollo, that as the blood of a virgin had
to be shed to propitiate the gales on the expedition to
Troy, so blood-that of a Greek-must purchase their
return. Ulysses had contrived that Sinon should be
the victim, and it was to escape this doom that he
had thus fled.
The Trojans were moved to pity-they spared the
traitor's life; only, in return, King Priarn adjured him
to tell them  the true intent of the Horse.   Sinon
declared that the Greeks had meant to set it up
themselves, an offering to Minerva, within the Trojan
citadel when they should have captured it; it behoved the Trojans now to seize it and drag it within
the walls: for, if this were done, then-so ran the
oracles-Asia should avenge itself upon Europe, and
the Greeks in their turn should be besieged in their
homes.*
The traitor's tale was all too easily believed. There
came, too, a fearful omen, which hurried the Trojans
to adopt this false counsel. The priest Laocoon, who
had dared to strike the wooden monster, was seized,
while offering sacrifice to Neptune, with his two sons,
by two huge sea-serpents (so old is the belief, false or
true, in these apocryphal monsters), which came sailing in to the beach from the direction of Tenedos. In
the description which the poet gives of their move* Dante in his Inferno punishes Sinon with an eternal sweating-sickness: a singular penalty, which is shared only bv
Potiphar's wife.-Inf. xxx.




ENEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY. 55


ments at sea, we seem to be reading a versified extract
from the log of some modern sea-captain:"Amid the waves they rear their breasts,
And toss on high their sanguined crests;
The hind-part coils along the deep,
And undulates with sinuous sweep."
The two unhappy youths are first caught and strangled
-then the father. The legend is well known to others
besides students of the ZEneid, from the marble group of
the Laocoon; which, however, does not tell the story
in the same way, or in so probable a shape, as the poet
does, since it represents the reptiles as embracing all
three victims at once in their folds. Then, with glad
shouts and songs of youths and maidens, the huge
monster was dragged over a breach made purposely in
the walls of Troy. Yet not without a voice of warning, disregarded, from  Cassandra, daughter of King
Priam, who had the gift of prophecy, and whose fate
it was, like so many prophets in their own fanilies, to
prophesy in vain- nor without difficulties which might
in themselves have well been considered presages of
evil:
"Four times 'twas on the threshold stayed;
Four times the armour clashed and brayed;
Yet press we on, with passion blind,
All forethought blotted from our mind,
Till the dread monster we install
Within the temple's tower-built wall."
* Nay, the "crests" spoken of seem to have been (as reported of the modern sea-serpent) of actual hair; since Pindar,
as Conington has noted, calls them "manes."




66


THBE Z NEID.


Inside, the fabric is full of armed Greeks. How
many there were in number has been disputedthough possibly, in a legend of this kind, the question
of more or fewer is scarcely relevant. It is a question,
however, which derives some interest from the fact
that it was one of the difficulties which exercised the
mind of the first Napoleon during his exile. Studying
the siege of Troy as if it were a mere prosaic operation
in modern warfare, he was struck by the improbability
of the whole stratagem. How "even a single company of the Guard" could be hid in such a machine,
and dragged from some distance inside the city walls,
the French Emperor was unable to conceive, and regarded the story as an infringement of even a poet's
licence. Napoleon was not much of a Latin scholar,
and, so far as the main point of his criticism went, had
depended too implicitly upon French translators.
Segrais, discussing the question in a note, thought
there might be perhaps some two or three hundred.
Indeed most of our English translators have gone out
of their way to exaggerate the number. But Virgil
himself, as has been pertinently remarked by Dr
Henry, only makes nine men actually come out of the
horse, all of whom he mentions by name. The poet
certainly does not say in so many words that these
were all, but he, at least, is not answerable for a larger
number. Among the nine are the young Neoptolemus,
surnamed Pyrrhus-" Red-haired,"-son of the dead
Achilles, and now his successor in the recognised
championship of the force; Sthenelus, the friend and
comrade of Pionied (for whose absence it seems hard




JNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.          57
to account); Machaon, the hero-physician, whom one
hardly expects to find selected for such a desperate
service; Epeus, the contriver of the machine, and
Ulysses, without whose aid and presence no such stratagem would seem complete.
At dead of night the traitor Sinon looked out to
sea, and saw a light in the offing. It was the firesignal from Agamemnon's vessel; the Greek fleet had
come back under cover of the darkness from its lurking-place at Tenedos.  Then he silently undid the
fastenings of the horse, and tie Greek adventurers, as
has been said, emerged from their wooden prison.
In the visions of the night i/Eneas saw the ghastly
spectre of the dead Hector stand before him,"All torn by dragging at the car,
And black with gory dust of war.
Ah, what a sight was there to view!
How altered from the man we knew,
Our Hector, who from day's long toil
Comes radiant in Achilles' spoil,
Or with that red right hand, which casts
The fires of Troy on Grecian masts!
Blood-clotted hung his beard and hair,
And all those many wounds were there,
Which on his gracious person fell
Around the walls he loved so well."
Virgil seems to have followed the more horrible tradition, which appears also in some of the Greek dramatists, that Achilles fastened Hector to his chariot while
still alive.
The shade of the dead hero had come to warn




58


THE ENEID.


Eneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Eneas, as the hope of
his race, the prince of the house of Priam formally
intrusts the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of
Vesta, to be carried into the new land which he shall
colonise. It is a formal transfer of the kingdom and
the priesthood to the younger branch-the line of
Assaracus.
LEneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the
war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within
the city.  Already the storming-party had attacked
and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,-to whom
Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on
the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first
point which Menelaus made for.   Eneas himself is
summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the
rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a
pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point
the Latin " Fuimus, —"  We have been-and are not,"
for this is understood.'  "Fuimus Troes" -Mr Conington's translation gives the full sense, but at the
expense of its terseness:"We have been Trojans-Troy has beenShe sat, but sits no more, a queen."
It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the
word "Vixi " —"I have lived "-in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the
* The French word "feu," used of a person deceased, is pro
bably from this Latin use of "fui. "




.ENEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY. 59


turn of the expression is due to that euphemism which
refrained from using any words of direct ill omen.
"The father of the gods," says Panthus, " has transferred all our glory to Argos."  There was a story
(alluded to in one of the lost tragedies of Sophocles,
of which we have but a fragment) that on the night of
the capture of Troy the tutelary deities departed in a
body, taking their images with them. It is a singular
parallel to the well-known tradition, that before the
fall of Jerusalem supernatural voices were heard in the
night exclaiming, "Let us depart hence!"      Tlle
Romans had a regular formula for the evocation of the
gods from an enemy's city, and inviting them, with
promises of all due honours and sacrifices, to transfer
their seat to Rome; and to attack any city without
these solemn preliminaries was held to bring a curse
on the besiegers.*
Eneas is anxious to assure his fair listener that, in
spite of Hector's adjuration to fly, he did all that man
might do in defence of his king and his countrymen.
He had rallied a band of brave men, and for a while
made head against the enemy. They were favoured
by the mistake made by a party of Greeks, who took
them for friends in the darkness, and whom they cut
to pieces, and having arrayed themselves in their armour,
dealt destruction in the enemy's very ranks.  But all
resistance was in vain. The appearance of Neoptolemus-Pyrrhus —the "Red-haired "-and the comparison of the young warrior in his strength and beauty to
* For this reason, says Macrobius, the real name of Rome
and of its guardian deity was always kept a secret.




60


THE SN~EID.


the serpent who comes forth after casting its winter
slough, is fine in the original, and finely translated: —
"Full in the gate see Pyrrhus blaze,
A meteor, shooting steely rays:
So flames a serpent into light,
On poisonous herbage fed,
Which late in subterranean night
Through winter lay as dead:
Now from its ancient wounds undressed,
Invigorate and young,
Sunward it rears its glittering breast,
And darts its three-forked tongue."
And the fate of the unhappy Priam     is an equally
beautiful picture, of a different tone:"Perhaps you ask of Priam's fate:
He, when he sees his town o'erthrown,
Greeks bursting through his palace-gate,
And thronging chambers once his own,
His ancient armour, long laid by,
Around his palsied shoulders throws,
Girds with a useless sword his thigh,
And totters forth to meet his foes."
Hecuba, who with her women is clinging to the altar,
rebukes her husband for this mad attempt to match
his feeble strength against the enemy.   Still, when
Pyrrhus rushes into the hall in pursuit of one of
Priam's sons, Polites, and slays him full in the father's
sight, the old man hurls a javelin at the Greek chief,
with a taunting curse upon his cruelty. But it is
"A feeble dart, no blood that drew;
The ringing metal turned it back,
And left it clinging, weak and slack."




.ENEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.           6l
And the ruthless son of Achilles drags the old king
to the altar, and slays him there.
One more episode of that terrible night ~neas
relates to his hostess:
"I stood alone, when lo! I mark,
In Vesta's temple crouching dark,
The traitress Helen: the broad blaze
Gives me full light, as round I gaze.
She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate,
Made frantic by their city's fate,
Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,
The vengeance of her injured lord,She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend,
Sat cowering, by the altar screened.
My blood was fired: fierce passion woke
To quit Troy's fall by one sure stroke."
But his goddess-mother, Venus, stays his hand, and
bids him think rather of saving his wife, and aged
father, and infant son. Virgil gives us no hint of
the other story of Helen's discovery by her angry
husband Menelaus, who was lifting his sword to kill
the adulteress, when his arm fell powerless before the
fascination of her beauty.
Obedient to the goddess, says Eneaz, he went to
seek his father Anchises, that he might carry him
with him in his flight.  But the old man refused to
move.   He would die, he said, in Troy.  Life milght
be dear to the young; but for himself, even the tender
mercies of the enemy would give him all he seeks,
though they leave his corpse unburied,"He lacks not much that lacks a grave."




62'


THE ENNEID.


The desperate entreaties of his son were all in vain,
until there came an omen from heaven. While Eneas
was threatening —since the old man would not be
saved-to rush himself again into the fight and meet
a warrior's death, his wife Creusa placed their young
son Iulus in his arms. Lo! on the child's head there
played a lambent light of flame. The mother and
AEneas would have sought to extinguish it, but Anchises recognised in it a sign from heaven. Virgil
reads us no special interpretation, but surely he meant
his Roman readers to understand that the seal of
sovereignty was thus early set upon the founder of the
great house of Julius. Thunder on the left handalways the best of auguries-and a meteor flashing
across the sky and pointing out their path to the fugitives, confirm the omen.
So the old man was lifted on his son's shoulders,
Iulus walking by his side, and Creusa following at
some distance. They were to meet outside the city, at
the temple of Ceres. Anchises bore in his hands the
little images of the household gods (like Laban's teraphim) and the sacred fire; for.Eneas himself, redhanded from the battle, might not touch them.  But
soon the steps of their enemies were heard in pursuit;
and AEneas, making his way with his precious burden
through by-paths to the place of rendezvous, reached it
only to find that though many other fugitives, men,
women, and children, had assembled there, the unhappy Creusa had not followed him.   Cursing menl
and gods alike in his agony, he retraced his steps towards Troy, and even penetrated unharmed into the




ENEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.           63
wreck of Priam's palace, crying aloud his wife's name.
Suddenly her shade appeared to him, and bade him
not continue so vain a search, or grieve for a loss
which was but the fulfilment of the counsels of
heaven. She is content to know the future glories
which are in store for her husband, and thankful that
her own fate has been death (we are left to suppose,
at the hands of the Greeks) rather than captivity and
slavery. AEneas listened, and at once, obedient to the
recognised voice of the gods, whether for good or evil,
as is his character throughout, yielded to his fate, and
hid himself with his little band of fugitives in the
forests of Mount Ida. There they had spent the winter months in building themselves a little fleet of galleys out of the abundant pine-wood; and with the early
summer launched upon the seas, wholly in ignorance
of their destination, but awaiting confidently the guidance of heaven towards their promised resting-place.




CHAPTER IIL


AENEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.
So, with his father and his infant son, and carrying
with nim the national gods and sacred fire of Troy,
AEnes, and the remnant of the Trojans had set forth
upon their voyage for the unknown shores of Hesperia —the "Land of the West."  Their first restingplace was on the friendly coast of Thrace, where
AEneau laid the foundations of a city which was to
bear hts name. A strange adventure befell him there.
Whilo he was pulling some cornel-twigs which grew
out of a mound, he found, to his horror, that the ends
dropped blood.  A third time, after prayer to avert
the omen, he plucked a sapling, when a hollow voice
from below warned him to desist from such cruelty.
It is the grave of the unhappy Polydorus, a young
son of Priam, whom his father, when Troy became
hard pressed, had sent away with some of his treasures to the safe keeping of the king of Thrace, who
for the sake of these treasures had basely murdered
him. The cornel-wood spears with which he had been
transfixed had taken root, and the blood had flowed




ZENEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.            65
from his body.* They did but wait to pay due honours to the shade of Polydorus, and then hastened
from the accursed coast. Landing next on the sacred
isle of Delos, they consulted the oracle there as to
their future home. Apollo was as enigmatical as his
wont-he bade them "seek out their ancient mother."
They understood this to be spoken of the ancient
cradle of their race; Anchises thought the phrase
pointed to Crete, the birthplace of their ancestral hero
Teucrus, and where stood the ancient Mount Ida,
from which the mountain in the Troad derived its
name. And Idomeneus, the king of Crete, who had
joined the war against Troy, had been driven from his
kingdom, and left a vacant throne.+ To Crete they
sailed, and there began to build a city, to be called
Pergamia, after the citadel of Troy. But a year of
deadly pestilence fell on man and beast; and in a
dream AEneas saw the angry gods of Troy standing by
him " in the full,moonlight that streamed through the
windows," and warning him that the promised land,
the ancient home of their race, is not in Crete, but
Hesperia-the " Land of the West"-whence came
their forefather Dardanus.   Then Anchises too re* Horrible as the legend is, Spenser thought it worth adopting. The Red-Cross Knight, to make a garland for Fidessa,
tears branches from the tree that had once been Fradubio.'Faery Queen,' I. ii. 30.
+ The story of Idomeneus, according to the old annotators
upon Virgil, has a curious similarity to that of Jephthah. He
had vowed that if he escaped from a storm at sea, he would
offer in sacrifice the first thing that met him on landing. It
was his son. A plague followed, and his subjects expelled him.
A.. voL v.




66


THE ANEID.


membered that such had been the frequent warning ol.Cassandra-the prophetess to whom none would listen.
They re-embarked accordingly. After a storm of three
days and three nights, when no pilot could keep the
course, they were cast upon the islands of the Harpies *
-the monster sisters, half women and half birds, foul
and loathsome, who are hateful to gods and men.
With them they had to do battle for the meal which
they had spread; and one of those hags, in her wrath,
prophesied that before they reached their promised
Hesperia they should be forced " to eat their tables."
The description of the ensuing voyage, in Mr Conington's tasteful translation, reads like a passage from
the ' Lord of the Isles,' yet presents a fair equivalent,
especially in the last fine touch, to the Latin original:"The south wind freshens in the sail;
We hurry o'er the tide,
Where'er the helmsman and the gale
Conspire our course to guide;
Now rises o'er the foamy flood
Zacynthos, with its crown of wood,
* There is a fine description of these hags in Morris's ' Jason,'
where the voyagers
"Beheld the daughters of the Earth and Sea,
The dreadful Snatchers, who like women were
Down to the breast, with scanty close black hair
About their heads, and dim eyes ringed with red,
And bestial mouths set round with lips of lead.
But from their gnarled necks there 'gan to spring
Half hair, half feathers, and a sweeping wing
Grew out instead of arm on either side,
And thick plumes underneath the breast did hide
The place where joined the fearful natures twain.




.ENEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.           67
Dulichium, Samb, Neritos,
Whose rocky sides the waves emboss;
The crags of Ithaca we flee,
Laertes' rugged sovereignty;
Nor in our flight forget to curse
The land that was Ulysses' nurse."
They landed on the coast of Leucadia, at Actium-the
scene, be it remembered, of Augustus's great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the Trojan chief
takes care to say, he refreshed his weary crew with
rest, and celebrated national games. Nay, he hung
up there, fugitive as he was, a trophy of defiance-a
shield which he had taken from a Greek hero, and
inscribed upon it, "The spoil of lEneas from the conquering Argives." So speaks the poet; his Roman
audience would recognise the Actian games, celebrated
there every fifth year by order of Augustus in honour
of his great victory; and AEneas's trophy is not so out
of place as it might seem.
At Buthrotus, in Epirus, the wanderers had met
with old friends. Andromache is settled there, now
the wife of Helenus, who, by a strange vicissitude, has
become the successor of Neoptolemus in his Greek
province. There is little of what we call sentiment in
these "heroic " times, especially as concerns ' woman
and her master." It grates upon the feelings of the
reader who has in mind the pathetic scene between
Hector and his wife in the Iliad of Homer, to be told
here by the poet-told, too, as an ordinary incident,
as in fact it was-that Andromache had become the
property of the conqueror Neoptolemus, and that be,




68


THE  NE ID.


bent upon a marriage with Hermione, daughter of
Helen and Menelaus, had handed over his Trojan wife
— " Hector's Andromache," as she still pathetically
calls herself-to her fellow-captive Helenus, Hector's
brother. She tells her own sad story, not without
some sense of its wretchedness"Ay-I am living; living still
Through all extremity of ill."
And she envies the fate of Polyxena, her sister-in-law,
slain on the tomb of Achilles. Still, she has accepted
her lot-the lot of so many women in her day. And
Helenus, her present lord, is (if that be any consolation) a sort of king; for Orestes has killed Neoptoleinus, and Helenus has in some way succeeded him,
* and built a new  "Pergamus" in Greece. So that
here, too, the poet would tell us, Troy has conquered
her conquerors-a son of Priam reigns in the territory
of Achilles. But the impression made upon an English mind as to Andromache's fate is, after all, that of
degradation, and we gladly turn from the page which
relates it.
Helenus, like his sister Cassandra, has the gift of
prophecy; he had been the great authority on all such
matters to his countrymen during the siege. He now
read the omens for Eneas, at his request; all were
favourable. The wanderers should reach the promised
Hesperia; but that western land was further off than
they thought, and their voyage would prove long and
weary. When they reached it, they should find under




.ENEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.  69


a holm-oak a white sow with a litter of thirty young
ones: there the new town was to be built-the " Alba
Longa " which has already been forenamed in Jupiter's
promise to Venus. Helenus dismissed them with good
wishes and ample presents; Andromache making special gifts to the boy Ascanius, whose age and features
remind the mother of her own lost Astyanax.  Eneas'e
words of farewell are these:
"Live, and be blest! 'tis sweet to feel
Fate's book is closed and under seal.
For us, alas! that volume stern
Has many another page to turn.
Yours is a rest assured: no more
Of ocean wave to task the oar;
No far Ausonia to pursue,
Still flying, flying from the view."
They set sail from this friendly shore, and on tlhe following day caught their first sight of the shores of Italy.
But though they landed and offered sacrifice to Juno; as
Helenus had bid them do, they knew that this was not
the spot on which they were to settle, and soon put to
sea again. They passed the bay of Tarentum, emcaping
the dangers of Charybdis, and landed under Etna,
on the shore where dwell the Cyclops-the one-eyed
race of giants, who, according to one legend, labour in
their underground forges for Vulcan, the divine smith.
Here the poet introduces us to a direct reminiscence
of the wanderings of Ulysses.  He adopts the whole
of Homer's story-the visit of the Greek chief and his
comrades to the cave of the giant Polyphem'fl, his




70


TE UENEID.


cannibal meal, and the vengeance which Ulysses took
upon him  by burning out his eye.*  XEneas relates
how he met there with one of Ulysses' crew, who by
some mischance had been left behind, and who had
hid himself three months (so close is the date of the
two voyages) from the clutches of Polyphemus and his
fellow-Cyclops. They took the wretched fugitive on
board, and put to sea again just in time to escape the
blind monster, who waded into the sea after them at
the sound of the oars. They skirted the coast of
Sicily, and at Drepanum the chief had buried his
father Anchises.  It was on casting off from Sicily
that he had been driven by the storm on this unknown coast of Libya, on the spot soon to be famous
enough as the site of Carthage.
"So king /Eneas told his tale,
While all beside were stillRehearsed the fortunes of his sail,
And Fate's mysterious will:
Then to its close his legend brought,
And gladly took the rest he sought."
* Se Homer's Odyssey, p. 69.




CHAPTER IV.


DIDO.
THE Carthaginian queen has been an eager listener to
AEneas's story.  She is love-stricken-suddenly, and
irremediably. The poet has thought it necessary to
explain the fact by the introduction of the god of love
hilnself, whom, in the shape of the young Ascanius, she
has been nursing on her bosom. The passion itself is
looked upon by the poet-and as we must suppose by
his audience-as such a palpable weakness, that even in
a woman (and it is to women almost exclusively, in
ancient classical fiction, that these sudden affections
are attributed) it was tLought necessary to account for
it by the intervention of some more than human influence. Either human nature has developed, or our
modern poets understand its workings better.  Shakespeare makes the angry Brabantio accuse the Moor of
having stolen his daughter's love
"By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;"
but Othello himself-has a far simpler and more natural
explanation of the matter



72


THE ENEID.


"She loved me for the dangers I had passed;This only is the witchcraft I have used."
So it has been with Dido. But she is terribly ashamed
of her own feelings. She finds relief in disclosing
them  to a very natural confidant-her sister Anna.
She confesses her weakness, but avows at the same
time a determination not to yield to it. The stranger
has interested her deeply, after a fashion which has not
touched her since the death of her husband Sichaeus.
"Were not my purpose fixed as fate
With none in wedlock's band to mate,Were bed and bridal aught but pain,Perchance I had been weak again."
But her sister-suiting her counsels, as all confidants
are apt to do, to the secret wishes rather than to the
professions of Dido-encourages the passion.    Perpetual widowhood has a romantic sound, but is not, in
Anna's opinion, a desirable estate.  Besides, in this
newly-planted colony, surrounded as they are by fierce
African tribes, an alliance with these Trojan strangers
will be a tower of strength. The stout arm of such
a husband as Eneas is much needed by a widowed
queen.   His visit-so Anna thinks-is nothing less
than providential —
"'Twas Heaven and Juno's grace that bore,
I ween, these Trojans to our shore."
By all means let them detain their illustrious visitor
with them as long as possible-his ships require le



DIDO.


73


fitting and his crews refreshment-and the result will
not be doubtful.
The advice suits with the queen's new mood too
well to be rejected. Together the sisters offer pious
sacrifices to the gods-to Juno especially, as the
goddess of marriage-to give their sanction to the
hoped-for alliance.  The restless feelings of the enamoured woman are described in one of the finest and
most admired passages of the poem:"E'en as a deer whom from afar
A swain, in desultory war,
Where Cretan woods are thick,
Has pierced, as 'mid the trees she lies,
And, all unknowing of his prize,
Has left the dart to stick:
She wanders lawn and forest o'er,
While the fell shaft still drinks her gore.*
Now through the city of her pride
She walks, LEneas at her side,
Displays the stores of Sidon's trade,
And stately homes already made:
Begins, hut stops she knows not why,
And lets the imperfect utterance die.
Now, as the sunlight wears away,
She seeks the feast of yesterday,
Inquires once more of Troy's eclipse,
And hangs once more upon his lips;
Then, when the guests have gone their ways,
And the dim moon withdraws her rays,
* "To the which place a poor sequestered stag,
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Had come to languish."
— SHAKESPEARE, ' As you Like it,' ii. 1.




74


THE.NE ID.


And setting stars to slumber call,
Alone she mourns in that lone hall,
Clasps the dear couch where late he lay,
Beholds him, hears him far away;
Or keeps Ascanius on her knees,
And in the son the father sees,
Might she but steal one peaceful hour
From love's ungovernable power.
No more the growing towers arise,
No more in martial exercise
The youth engage, make strong the fort,
Or shape the basin to a port."
The powers of Olympus here come again upon the
scene. Juno sees, not without a secret satisfaction,
the prospect of an entanglement between LEneas and
Dido, which may detain these hated Trojans in Africa,
and so prevent their settlement and dominion in Italy.
So Carthage, and not the Rome of the future, may yet
be the mistress of the world.  She addresses herself at
once to the goddess of love-not without a sneer at
the success of her snares in poor Dido's case; a sorry
triumph it is indeed-two divinities pitted against a
weak woman I But come-suppose in this matter
they agree to act in concert; let there be a union between the two nations, and let Carthage be the seat
of their joint power; its citizens shall pay equal honours to the queen of heaven and the queen of love.
Venus understands perfectly well that Juno's motive
is at any cost to prevent the foundation of Rome; but,
having a clearer vision (we must presume) than her
great rival of the probable results, she agrees to the
terms. There is to be a hunting-party on the morrow,




DIDO.


75


and Juno will take care that opportunity shall be given
for the furtherance of Dido's passion. The royal hunt
is again a striking picture, almost mediaeval in its rich
colouring:"The morn meantime from ocean rose:
Forth from the gates with daybreak goes
The silvan regiment:
Thin nets are there, and spears of steel,
And there Massylian riders wheel,
And dogs of keenest scent.
Before the chamber of her state
Long time the Punic nobles wait
The appearing of the queen:
With gold and purple housings fit
Stands her proud steed, and champs the bit
His foaming jaws between.
At length with long attendant train
She comes: her scarf of Tyrian grain,*
With broidered border decked:
Of gold her quiver: knots of gold
Confine her hair: her vesture's fold
By golden clasp is checked.
The Trojans and Iulus gay
In glad procession take their way.
ZEneas, comeliest of the throng,
Joins their proud ranks, and steps along,
Aswwhen from Lycia's wintry airs
To Delos' isle Apollo fares;
The Agathyrsian, Dryop, Crete,
In dances round his altar meet:
He on the heights of Cynthus moves,
And binds his hair's loose flow
* This was the dye procured from the shell-fish called murexespecially costly, because each fish contained but a single drop
of the precious tincture.




76


THE ENEID.


With cincture of the leaf he loves.
Behind him sounds his bow;So firm JEneas' graceful tread,
So bright the glories round his head.
But young Ascanius on his steed
With boyish ardour glows,
And now in ecstacy of speed
He passes these, now those:
For him too peaceful and too tame
The pleasure of the hunted game:
He longs to see the foaming boar,
Or hear the tawny lion's roar.
Meantime, loud thunder-peals resound,
And hail and rain the sky confound:
And Tyrian chiefs and sons of Troy,
And Venus' care, the princely boy,
Seek each his shelter, winged with dread,
While torrents from the hills run red.
Driven haply to the same retreat,
The Dardan chief and Dido meet.
Then Earth, the venerable dame,
And Juno, give the sign:
Heaven lightens with attesting flame,
And bids its torches shine,
And from the summit of the peak
The nymphs shrill out the nuptial shriek.
That dlay she first began to die;
That day first taught her to defy
The public tongue, the public eye.
No secret love is Dido's aim:
She calls it marriage now; such name
She chooses to conceal her shame."




DID O.


77


A rejected suitor of the Carthaginian queen,-Iarbas, king of Gaetulia,-hears the news amongst the rest.
He is a reputed son of Jupiter; and now, furious at
seeing this wanderer from Troy-"this second Paris,"
as he calls him-preferred to himself, he appeals for
vengeance to his Olympian parent.   The appeal is
heard, and Mercury is despatched to remind IEneas of
his high destinies, which he is forgetting in this dalliance
at Carthage.  If he has lost all ambition for himself,
let him at least remember the rights of his son
Ascanius, which he is thus sacrificing to the indulgence
of his own wayward passions. The immortal messenger
finds the Trojan chief busied in planning the extension
of the walls and streets of the new city which he has
already adopted as his home. He delivers his message
briefly and emphatically, and vanishes. Thus recalled
to a full sense of his false position, ~Eneas is at first
horror-struck and confounded. How to disobey the
direct commands of Heaven, and run counter to the
oracles of fate; how, on the other hand, to break his
faith with Dido, and ungratefully betray the too confiding love of his hostess and benefactress; how even
to venture to hint to her a word of parting, and how to
escape the probable vengeance of the Carthaginian
people;-all these considerations crowd into his mind,
and perplex him terribly.  On the main point, nowever, his resolution is soon taken. He will obey the
mandate of the gods, at any cost. Ie summons the
most trusted of his comrades, and bids them make secret
preparations to set sail once more in quest of their
home in Italy.   He promises himself that he will




78


THE XEEID.


either find or make some oppportunity of breaking the
news of his departure to Dido.
This is the turning-point of the poem; and here it
is that the interest to a modern reader, so far as the
mere plot of the story is concerned, is sadly marred by
the way in which the hero thus cuts himself off from
all our sympathies. His most ingenious apologistsand he has found many-appeal to us in vain. Upon
the audience or the readers of his own time, no doubt,
the effect might have been different. To the critics
of Augustus's court, love-or what they understood by
it-was a mere weakness in the hero. The call which
Heaven had conveyed to him was to found the great
empire of the future; and because he obeys the call
at the expense of his tenderest feelings, the poet gives
him  always his distinctive epithet- the " pious"
AEneas. The word "pious," it must be remembered,
implies in the Latin the recognition of all duties to
one's country and one's parents, as well as to the gods.
And in all these senses 2Eneas would deserve it. But
to an English mind, the " piety " which pleads the will
of Heaven as an excuse for treachery to a woman, only
adds a deeper hue of infamy to the transaction. It
"Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse."
But our story must not wait for us to discuss too
curiously the morals of the hero. _Eneas has thought
to make his preparations without the knowledge of the
queen-while she
"Still dreams her happy dream, nor thinks
That ought can break those golden links."




DIDO.


79


But, as the poet goes on to say, " Who can cheat the
eyes of love?"  D)ido soon learns his change of purpose,
and taxes him openly with his baseness and ingratitude.
The whole of this fourth book oi the ilEneid- " The
Passion of Dido," as it has been called-is of a very
high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns
furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and
curses against her false lover, now she condescends to
pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief's defence, such
as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is
bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium.  His father
Anchises is warning him continually in the visions of
the night not to linger here: and now the messenger
of the gods in person has come to chide this fond
delay.
The grand storm of wrath in which the injured
queen bursts upon him in reply has severely taxed the
powers of all Virgil's English translators.  They seem
to have felt themselves no more of a match for "the
fury of a woman scorned" than,Eneas was. Certainly they all fail, more or less, to give the fire and
bitterness of the original.  The heroics of Dryden
suit it better, perhaps, than any other measure:"False as thou art, and more than false, forsworn!
Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born,
But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock,
And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck!
Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear?
Did he once look, or lend a listening ear,
Sigh when I sobbed, or shed one kindly tear?
All symptoms of'a base ungrateful mindSo foul, that, which is worse, 'tis hard to find.




80


THE JNEI D.


Of man's injustice why should I complain?
The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain
Triumphant treason, yet no thunder flies;
Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes:
Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies!
Justice is fled, and truth is now no more.
I saved the shipwrecked exile on my shore:
With needful food his hungry Trojans fed:
I took the traitor to my throne and bed:
Fool that I was!-'tis little to repeat
The rest-I stored and rigged his ruined fleet.
I rave, I rave! A god's command he pleads!
And makes heaven accessory to his deeds.
Now Lycian lots; and now the Delian god;
Now Hermes is employed from Jove's abode,
To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state
Of heavenly powers were touched with human fate!
But go: thy flight no longer I detainGo seek thy promised kingdom through the main!
Yet, if the heavens will hear my pious vow,
The faithless waves, not half so false as thou,
Or secret sands, shall sepulchres afford
To thy proud vessels and their perjured lord.
Then shalt thou call on injured Dido's name:
Dido shall come, in a black sulph'ry flame,
When death has once dissolved her mortal frame,
Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep;
Her angry ghost, arising from the deep,
Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep.
At least my shade thy punishment shall know;
And fame shall spread the pleasing news below."
But in this passage, if nowhere else, a French
translator has surpassed all his English rivals. Possibly the fervid passion of the scene, worked up as it




DIDO.


81


is almost to exaggeration, is more akin to the genius
of the French language.*
* Delille's fine translation of this passage is so little known
to English readers that it may well find room in a note:"Non-tu n'es point le fils de la mere d'Amour;
Au sang de Dardanus tu ne dois point le jour;
N'impute point aux dieux la naissance d'un traitreNon, du sang d'heros un monstre n'a pu naitre;
Non.-Le Caucase affreux, t'engendrant en fureur,
De ses plus durs rochers fit ton barbare cceur,
Et du tigre inhumain la compagne sauvage,
Cruel! avec son lait t'a fait sucer sa rage.
Car enfin qui m'arrete? Apres ses durs refus,
Apres tant de mepris, qu'attendrais-je de plus?
S'est-il laisse flechir a mes cris douloureux?
A-t-il au moins daign6 tourner vers moi les yeux?
Prosternee a ses pieds, plaintive, suppliante,
N'a-t-il pas d'un front caline ecoute son amante
Sans secours, sans asile, errant de mers en mers,
Par les flots en courroux jete dans nos deserts,
Je l'ai requ, l'ingrat! des fureurs de l'orage
J'ai sauve ses sujets, ses vaisseaux de naufrage,
Je lui donne mon coeur, mon empire, ma main:
O fureur, et voila que ce monstre inhumain
Ose imputer aux dieux son horrible parjure,
Me parle et d'Apollon, et d'oracle, et d'augure!
Pour presser son depart, l'ambassadeur des dieux
Est descendu vers lui de la voite des cieux:
Dignes soins, en effet, de ces maitres du monde!
En effet, sa grandeur trouble leur paix profonde!
-C'en est assez; va, pars; je ne te retiens pas;
Va chercher loin de moi je ne sais quels 6tats:
S'il est encore an dieu redoubtable aux ingrats,
J'espere que bient6t, pour prix d'un si grand crime,
Brise contre un ecueil, plonge dans un abime,
Tu palras mes malheurs, perfide I et de Didon
Ta voix, ta voix plaintive invoquera le mon."
A. C. vol. v.                                   P




82


THE AENEID.


We cannot, however, do better than return to iMr
Conington's version for the sequel:"Her speech half done, she breaks away,
And sickening shuns the light of day,
And tears her from his gaze;
While he, with thousand things to say,
Still falters and delays:
Her servants lift the sinking fair,
And to her marble chamber bear."
The Trojans prepare to depart; but the enamoured
queen makes one more despairing effort to detain her
faithless guest.  She sends her sister to ask at least
for some short space of delay-until she shall have
schooled herself to bear his loss. AEneas is obdurate
in his "piety."  Then her last resolve is taken.  She
cheats her sister into the belief that she has found
some spells potent enough to restrain the truant lover.
Part of the charm is that his armour, and all that
had belonged to him while in her company, must be
consumed by fire. So a lofty pile is built in the
palace-court; but it is to be the funeral pile of Dido.
As she looks forth from the turret of her palace at daybreak, she sees the ships of AEneas already far in the
offing; for, warned again by Mercury that there will
be risk of his departure being prevented by force if he
delays, he has already set sail under cover of the night.
For a moment the queen thinks of ordering her seamen
to give chase; but it is a mere pasging phase of her
despair.  She contents herself with imprecating an
eternal enmity between his race and hers-fulfilled, as




DIDO.


83


the poet means us to bear in mind, in the long and
bloody wars between Rome and Carthage.
"And, Tyrians, you through time to come
His seed with deathless hatred chase:
Be that your gift to Dido's tomb:
No love, no league 'twixt race and race.
Rise from my ashes, scourge of crime,
Born to pursue the Dardan horde
To-day, to-morrow, through all time,
Oft as our hands can wield the sword:
Fight shore with shore, fight sea with sea,
Fight all that are, or e'er shall be "
With a master's hand the poet enhances the glories
of his country by this prophetic introduction of the
terrible Hannibal.  The peaceful empire of Caesar,
befbre whom East and West bow, is thrown into the
broadest light by reference to those early days when
Rome lay almost at the mercy of her implacable enemy
"Then, maddening over crime, the queen
With bloodshot eyes, and sanguine streaks
Fresh painted on her quivering cheeks,
And wanning o'er with death foreseen,
Through inner portals wildly fares,
Scales the high pile with swift ascent,
Takes up the Dardan sword and bares —
Sad gift, for different uses meant.
She eyed the robes with wistful look,
And pausing, thought awhile and wept;
Then pressed her to the couch and spoke
Her lastgood-night or ere she slept.
'Sweet relics of a time of love,
When fate and heaven were kind,




84                TEE   ^NEID.
Receive my life-blood, and remove
These torments of the mind.
My life is lived, and I have played
The part that Fortune gave,
And now I pass, a queenly shade,
Majestic to the grave.
A glorious city I have built,
Have seen my walls ascend;
Chastised for blood of husband spilt,
A brother, yet no friend:
Blest lot! yet lacked one blessing more,
That Troy had never touched my shore!'"
So she mounts the funeral pile, and stabs herself
with the Trojan's sword, her sister Anna coming upon
the scene only in time to receive the parting breath.




CHAPTER V.


THE FUNERAL GAMES.
FAR off at sea, AEneas and his crew see the flames go
up from Dido's palace.
" What cause has lit so fierce a flame
They know not; but the pangs of shame
From great love wronged, and what despair
Will make a baffled woman dare,All this they know; and knowing tread
The paths of presage vague and dread."
Not yet is their course clear for Italy. A storm
comes on, and they make for refuge towards the
friendly coast of Sicily, and run their vessels into a
sheltered bay under Mount Eryx.     Their return is
gladly welcomed by their late host, Acestes, who
receives the wanderers, as before, with princely hospitality, still mindful of his own Trojan blood. It
chances that the morrow is the anniversary of the
burial of Anchises; and AEneas, summoning an openair council of his crews, announces to them his intention of commemorating his father by a solemn public




86


THE iENEID.


sacrifice. It is a day which-wherever his lot may
be hereafter cast-he will ever keep holy; and not
without some providential guidance, as he deems, has
this opportunity been afforded him, by his being
driven back to Sicily, of celebrating it on friendly
soil under the auspices of his kinsman. There shall
be nine days of sacrifice and prayer; then shall follow
funeral games, with prizes at his own cost.
The sacrificial oxen are duly slain, and the libations
poured at the tomb of Anchises; the bowls of new
milk, of wine, and of blood, and the fresh spring
flowers, which were reckoned acceptable offerings to
the dead. Then AEneas lifts his voice in prayer to
the shade of the hero, and a startling omen follows
the invocation. A serpent, dappled with green and
gold, glides out of the tomb, tastes of the offerings,
and disappears again..ZEneas sees in the creature the
tutelary genius of the spot, or, it may be, the special
attendant of his father's shade.  In either case, he
accepts its appearance as a good omen, and joyfully
redoubles his devotions.
In the funeral games which follow, the Roman poet
no doubt had two models in his mind. He was ambitious to reproduce, or perhaps to rival, in Roman song,
for an audience of his countrymen, the grand description which his great master Homer had given of the
games which Achilles celebrates in honour of the dead
Patroclus. He wished also, there can be little doubt,
to pay a poet's best compliment to his imperial patron,
and to weave into his song, with such licence of embellishment as is allowed to all poets, a record of thosc




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


87


funeral games which Augustus had instituted in remembrance of his uncle, the great Dictator Julius.
But Virgil is here very far from being a mere copyist
from Homer. Il lieu of the chariot-race, the great
feature in the games of the Iliad, he has given us a
galley-race, the incidents of which are quite as exciting, and to our modern comprehensions more thoroughly
intelligible.
The day fixed for the great spectacle has arrived,
and the Sicilians from far and near flock to it, some to
take part in the games, and all to see. First of the
various contests comes the galley-race, for which four
of the fastest vessels in the fleet have entered-the
Shark, the Centaur, the Chimpera, and the Scylla;
each displaying, no doubt, as its figure-head, a representation of the.monster whose name it bore. Their
captains were men well known. Humouring a genealogical fancy of his Roman countrymen for tracing
their descent to some one of the old Trojan colonists,
-much after the fashion of English houses who try
to find an ancestor on the Roll of Battle Abbey,-the
poet tells us that three at least out of the four gave
their names in due time to patrician houses in Rome.
Mnestheus, who commands the Shark, left his name
(certainly with considerable modification) to the gens
or clan of Memmius.   The captain of the Centaur,
Sergestus, is in like manner the reputed ancestor of
the Sergian clan, as Cloanthus, who sails the Scylla, is.
of the Cluentian.  Only Gyas, the captain of the
Chimera, a bulky craft, "as big as a town," has no
such genealogical honours assigned him




88


THE RNEID.


The course lies out in the bay, and the competing
vessels are to round a rock, covered at high tides, on
which an oak has been set up, leaves and all, to serve
as a mark for the steersmen.     They take up their
positions by lot, and await the signal, to be given
by sound of trumpet. The picture of the start would
suit, with wonderfully little alteration, the description
of a modern University boat-race:
" And now on rowing-bench they sit,
Bend to the oar their arms close knit,
And straining watch the sign to start,
While generous trembling fills each heart,
And thirst for victory.
Then, at the trumpet's piercing sound,
All from their stations onward bound:
Upsoars to heaven the oarsmen's shout,
The upturned billows froth and spout.
With plaudits loud and clamorous zeal
Echoes the woodland round;
The pent shores roll the thunder-peal,
The stricken hills resound."
[Our modern oarsmen would certainly be wiser in this,
that they would reserve their own breath (of which
they would find considerable need towards the end of
the race), and leave the whole of the shouting to be
done by enthusiastic spectators.]
" First (yas issues from the rout,
And holds the foremost place:
Cloanthus next; his oarsmen row
More featly, but his bark is slow,
And checks himn in the race.




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


89


Behind at equal distance strain
Centaur and Shark the lead to gain;
And now the Shark darts forth, and now
The Centaur has advanced her bow;
And now the twain move side by side,
Their long keels trailing through the tide."
8o goes the race, until the galleys near the rock which
they have to round. Gyas sees that his steersman,
from over caution, is giving it too wide a berth, and
that there is danger of the Scylla, more venturous,
cutting in between. He shouts an order to keep
closer in; but the old seaman is somewhat obstinate,
and it is very soon too late. Cloanthus has seen his
advantage, shot round the rock at very close quarters,
and now leaves Gyas in the Chimsera behind.  Burning with fury, Gyas turns on his steersman, and
pitches him into the sea. Happily he can swim, and
the rock is close at hand; he climbs upon it, and sits
there dripping, to the considerable amusement of the
spectators, who, like all lookers-on, seem unmercifully
alive to the ludicrous element in any disaster
Deprived of her helmsman, the huge Chimaera loses
her course for a moment, and the two galleys in the
rear are quick to take advantage of it. The Shark
and Centaur are now rounding the rock almost side by
side. But Sergestus, in his eagerness not to lose an
inch of advantage, emulates the manoeuvre of the Scylla
too closely, and takes the Centaur too near.  Her
broadside of oars touch some of the jutting crags, the
oars are broken, and the boat's head takes the rock,
and hangs there hard and fast. All efforts of the




90


THE JENEID.


crew to get her off are unavailing. Mnestheus makes
the dangerous turn safely on the outside of his rival,
and his men, encouraged by success, redouble their
efforts. The Chimaera has no good steersman to replace old Mencetes, who is still drying himself on the
rock, and she is easily passed on the return course
homewards. The struggle becomes now one of intense
interest between Mnestheus and Cloanthus, who is
still leading in the Scylla.
" The cheers redouble from the shore;
Heaven echoes with the wild uproar;
Those blush to lose a conquering game,
And fain would peril life for fame;
These bring success their zeal to fanThey can, because they think they can."
The Shark has a stern chase, but the Scylla rows
heavily, as we have been told, though she has the
best crew, and the distance lessens at every stroke.
Had the course been longer, the Shark would have
made at least a dead heat of it. But as it is, amidst a
storm of shouts, the Scylla wins.  The turning-point
of victory is one which does not approve itself to
modern readers.  The sea-deities interfere.  Standing
high upon his quarter-deck, Cloanthus lifts his prayer
to the powers of ocean, not to permit his prize to lbe
snatched from him at the last. He vows an offering
of a milk-white bull and libations of red wine if they
will help him at his need.


" He said; there heard him 'neath the sea
The Nereid train and Panope;




TIE FUNERAL GAMES.


91


And with his hand divinely strong,
Portunus * pushed the bark along."
Possibly, after all, the poet only means us to under.
stand that this was Mlnestheus's explanation of his
defeat-that the luck was against him.+
Cloanthus is crowned with bays as the victor of the
day, and receives as his prize an embroidered robe of
rare device-one of those miracles of divers colours of
needlework in which the classical age seems to have as
far excelled us as the mediaeval ladies certainly did.
Each crew receives three oxen and a supply of wine,
while a talent of silver is divided amongst the men of
the victorious Scylla.   Mnestheus, as second in the
race, wins a shirt of mail whose scales are of gold,
which two of his attendants bear off with difficulty.
The third of the captains has a pair of brazen caldrons
and chased silver bowls.    But while the awards are
being distributed, the crippled Centaur has got off
the rock, and is brought into harbour; and a Cretan
slave-woman, with her twin children, is allotted, by
the liberality of LEneas, as a consolation to her captain.
* One of the Roman sea-deities.
+ Such explanations of an unfavourable result are not entirely unknown in the annals of modern boat-races. Reasons
of a very apocryphal kind, if not so boldly mythological, have
been assigned by modern captains of crews for their having been
beaten. When an unsuccessful oarsman recounts his deeds to
a sympathetic audience, and "tells how fields were " not won,
he is apt to complain that, in some form or other, the rivergods were unjust. The state of the tide, or an intruding barge,
or an imprudent supper on the part of " No. 7," takes the place
of Panope and Portunus.




92


9THE.,NE1D.


From the shore of the bay the company now move
off to a natural amphitheatre close at hand, where the
rest of the games are to be exhibited. AEneas takes
his place high in the midst on an extemporised throne.
For the foot-race, which comes first on the list, a
crowd of competitors enter, both of native Sicilians and
of their Trojan guests. Among the Sicilians are Salius and Patron, of Greek families settled in the island,
and Helymus and Panopes, friends and companions of
Acestes. The favourites among the Trojans are Diores,
one of the many sons of Priam, and Nisus and Euryalus, noted for their romantic friendship, of which we
shall hear more hereafter. The prizes in this contest
are a war-horse with full trappings for the first, an
Amazonian quiver for the second, and a helmet-the
spoil of some conquered Greek on the plain of Troyfor the third. Nisus goes off with a strong lead, and
has the race easily in hand. Next him, but at a long
interval, comes Salius, Euryalus lying third, Helymus
and Diores, close together, fourth and fifth.  But
when within a short distance of the goal, Nisus slips
up in the blood and filth which has been left uncleared at the spot where the oxen have been sacrificed,
and falls heavily to the ground. Knowing himself
to be out of the race, he determines that his dear
Euryalus shall win. So, by a piece of most unjustifiable jockeyship, which ought to have led to his being
warned off from all such contests for ever after, he
rises up at the moment that Salius is passing, and
brings him down upon him. Euryalus has thus an
easy victory, Helymus and Diores coming in second




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


93


and third.  Very naturally, there is much dispute
about the award. Salius complains loudly of unfair
play; but young Euryalus is handsome and popular,
and Diores backs his claim energetically; for it is very
evident that if Salius is adjudged the first prize,
Euryalus the second, and Helymus the third, then he
-Diores-will be nowhere. So the result is accepted
by the judges as it stands.  But lEneas quiets the
reasonable objections of Salius by the present of a
lion's hide with gilded claws.  Then Nisus makes
appeal for compensation, pointing out to the laughing
spectators the blood and dirt which are the very
disagreeable evidences of his mishap, and protesting,
with a consummate impudence which suits with the
popular humour, that the whole thing was an accident,
and that he, as the winner that would have been, is
the real object of commiseration.  If a fall deserves a
prize, who has so good a claim as the man who fell
first?  Again the generosity of Eneas answers the
appeal, and Nisus is presented with a shield of the
finest workmanship, another Greek trophy.    Successful knavery, if the knave be somewhat of a
humourist withal, always wins a sort of sympathy
from the public-in the Augustan epic as well as in
modern comedy.
The prizes of the foot-race having been thus decided,
the lists are cleared for the boxing-match. The boxingmatch of the classical ancients was very different indeed from a modern set-to. The combatants certainly
wore gloves; but these were meant to add weight and
force to the blow, not to deaden it. The stoutest




94


THE ENEID.


champion of tne modern prize-ring might shrink from
encountering an antagonist whose fists were bound
round with strips of hardened ox-hide. But such was
the " caestus " which was worn by the pugilists of this
heroic age. The prizes are displayed by Eneas; for
the conqueror, a bull with gilded horns; a helmet and
falchion for the loser. Up rises the Trojan Dares,
whose strength and skill are well known. The only
man whom he acknowledged as his superior in the ring
was one whom we might have least expected-Paris,
who certainly bears no such reputation in Homer. At
the great games held in honour of the dead Hector, of
which we have the very briefest note in the Iliad,
Dares had defeated the huge champion Butes, sprung
from a race of athletes, and so mangled him that he
died on the spot. No wonder that when he now steps
forth, and goes through some preparatory sparring
with the air, no one is found bold enough to put on
the gloves with him.  So, after a glance of triumph
round the admiring circle, he advances to where the
bull stands in front of XEneas, lays his hand upon its
horns, and claims it as his rightful property in default
of an antagonist.
King Acestes is concerned for the honour of Sicily.
There is lying beside him on the grass a grey-haired
chief named Entellus, sometime a pupil in this art of
the great hero Eryx, who gave his name to the mountain which overhangs the place of assembly. Will he
sit tamely by, Acestes asks, and see this Trojan boaster
carry off the prize and the glory unchallenged? Entellus listens to his friend, and feels the old fire stir




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


within him. He would willingly enter the ring once
more for the honour of his native island,"But strength is slack in limbs grown old,
And aged blood runs dull and cold.
Had I the thing I once possessed,
Which makes yon braggart rear his crest,
Had I but youth, no need had been
Of gifts, to lure me to the green."
He rises from his seat, however, and throws down in
the arena, by way of challenge, a pair of ancient gloves
of a most murderous pattern. Seven folds of tough
bull-hide have knobs of lead and iron sewn inside
them. They are the gloves in which the hero Eryx
fought his fatal battle with Hercules, whom he had
rashly challenged, and they still bear the blood-stains
of Eryx's previous victories.  Dares, stout champion
as he is, starts back in dismay when he sees them, and
~Eneas himself takes them up and handles them with
wonder. Entellus, however, will not insist on using
these; and two pair of less formidable manufacture
and of equal weight are produced, with which the two
heroes engage. Virgil's description of this ancient
prize-fight is highly spirited.  It may remind some
readers, who are old enough to remember such things,
of the bulletins of similar encounters between a " lightweight " and a "heavy-weight," furnished in past days
by sporting writers to our own newspapers-with tho
happy omission of the slang of the ring:Raised on his toes each champion stands,
And fearless lifts in air his hands.




96


THE.ENEID.


Their heads thrown back avoid the stroke;
Their mighty arms the fight provoke.
That on elastic youth relies,
This on vast limbs and giant size;
But the huge knees with age are slack,
And fitful gasps the deep chest rack.
Full many a blow the heroes rain
Each on the other, still in vain:
Their hollow sides return the sound,
Their battered chests the shock rebound:
'Mid ears and temples come and go
The wandering gauntlets to and fro:
The jarred teeth chatter 'neath the blow.
Firm stands Entellus in his place,
A column rooted on its base;
His watchful eye and shrinking frame
Alone avoid the gauntlet's aim.
Like leaguer who invests a town,
Or sits before a hill-fort down,
The younger champion tasks his art
To find the bulwark's weakest part;
This way and that unwearied scans,
And vainly tries a thousand plans.
Entellus, rising to the blow,
Puts forth his hand: the wary foe
Midway in air the mischief spied,
And, deftly shifting, slipped aside.
Entellus' force on air is spent:
Heavily down with prone descent
He falls, as from its roots uprent
A pine falls hollow, on the side
Of Erymanth or lofty Ide.
Acestes rushes in, like an attentive second, to raise
his friend; and Entellus, roused to fury by his fall,
renews the fight savagely:



THE FUNERAL GAMES.


97


"Ablaze with fury he pursues
The Trojan o'er the green,
And now his right hand deals the bruise,
And now his left as keen.
No pause, no respite: fierce and fast
As hailstones rattle down the blast
On sloping roofs, with blow on blow,
He buffets Dares to and fro."
The unhappy Dares is borne off by his friends in
miserable plight,-with half his teeth knocked out,
blood streaming from his face, and hardly able to stand.
All the savage has been roused in Entellus's nature by
the fight. He is not half satisfied that his victim has
escaped him.  He would gladly have sacrificed him to
the memory of his great master Eryx,-here, on the
spot where that hero fought his own last fight. He
lays his hand upon the bull, the prize of battle, and
addresses AEneas and the spectators. Dryden's version
of this passage, though it contains as much of Dryden
as of Virgil, has justly been praised as very noble:"0 goddess-born, and ye Dardanian host,
Mark with attention, and forgive my boast;
Learn what I was by what remains, and know
From what impending fate you saved my foe!
Sternly he spoke, and then confronts the bull;
And on his ample forehead aiming full,
The deadly stroke descending pierced the skull.
Down drops the beast, nor needs a second wound,
But sprawls in pangs of death. and spurns the ground.
'Then thus, in Dares' stead, I offer this:
Eryx, accept a nobler sacrifice;
Take the last gift my withered arms can yieldThy gauntlets I resign, and here renounce the field.'"
A. c. vol. v.                           o




98


THE XENEID.


Mr Conington has well remarked that here we have,
no doubt, *- the veteran combatant's feelings as conceived by the veteran poet." He wrote the lines in
his sixty-second year, and they harmonise pathetically
with the words in his dedication: " What I now offer
to your lordship is the wretched remainder of a sickly
age."  We are not obliged to take this self-depreciation
too literally: whatever may be the shortcomings of
Dryden's translation, the hand of the old poet had no
more lost its vigour than that of Entellus.
The archers are next to try their skill.  In this
contest Acestes himself takes part.  The other competitors are Mlnestheus, whose crew were just now
second in the race; Eurytion, a brother of Pandarus,
the great archer of the Iliad, whose treacherous arrow,
launched against Menelaus during the truce, had wellnigh turned the fate of Troy; and Hippocoon, of
whom we know nothing more.      He draws the first
lot, and his arrow strikes the mast on which the mark,
a live dove, is perched.  Mnestheus shoots next, and
cuts the cord which fetters her; and as she flies away
a shaft from Eurytion's bow follows and kills her.
There is nothing left for Acestes to (do, but to shoot all
arrow high in the air to show the strength of his hand
and his bow. To the astonishment of the gazers, the
arrow takes fire, and, leaving a trail of light on its
path like a shooting-star, vanishes in the sky.  It is
an omen, as AKneas dereares; it must lIe that the gods,
in spite of facts, will him to be the real victor.  So
the prize —an embossed bowl, a present from     the
father of Hecuba to Anchises -is awarded to the




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


Sicilian prince, even Eurytion, the actual winner,
acquiescing heartily in the arrangement.  Yet the
omen, as the poet tells us, really boded disaster;
though whether to Sicily or to the Trojans, or how it
was afterwards fulfilled, he does not stop to explain.
Commentators have, as a matter of duty, done so for
him; but it is hardly worth while to vex ourselves
with their conjectures on a point on which   Eneas
himself was mistaken.
The games are over-at least, so far as the public
programme seems to have gone.    But ~Eneas las a
surprise in store for his hosts. He whispers privately
to the governor or tutor of his son lulus, while he
requests the company once more to clear the amphitheatre.  Soon there sweeps into the ring the young
chivalry of Troy-a goodly company of mounted
youths, all of noble blood, who are to play out their
play before their assembled seniors.
"They enter, glittering side by side,
And rein their steeds with youthful pride,
As 'neath their fathers' eyes they ride,
While all Trinacria's host and Troy's
With plaudits greet the princely boys.
Each has his hair by rule confined
With stripped-off leaves in garland twined:
Some ride with shapely bows equipped:
Two cornel spears they bear, steel-tipped:
And wreaths of twisted gold invest
The neck, and sparkle on the breast.
Three are the companies of horse,
And three the chiefs that scour the course:
Twelve gallant boys each chief obey,
And shine in tripartite array.




100


THE lNEID.


Young Priam first, Polites' heir,
Well pleased his grandsire's name to bear,
Leads his gay troop, himself decreed
To raise up an Italian seed:
He prances forth, all dazzling bright,
On Thracian steed with spots of white:
White on its fetlock's front is seen,
And white the space its brows between.
Then Atys, next in place, fron whom
The Atian family descend:
Young Atys, fresh with life's first bloom,
The boy Iulus' sweet boy-friend:
Iulus last, in form and face
Pre-eminent his peers above,
A courser rides of Tyrian race,
Memorial gift of Dido's love.
Sicilian steeds the rest bestride
From old Acestes' stalls supplied.
The Dardanids with mingling cheers
Relieve the young aspirants' fears,
And gaze delighted, as they trace
A parent's mien in each fair face.
"And now, when all from first to last
Beneath their kinsfolk's eyes had past,
Before the assembled crowd,
Epytides shrills forth fron far
His signal-shout, as if for war,
And cracks his whip aloud.
In equal parts the bands divide,
And gallop off on either side:
Then wheeling round in full career
Charge at a call with levelled spear
Again, again they come and go,
Through adverse spaces to and fro;
Circles in circles interlock,




THE FUNERAL GAMES.


101


And, sheathed in arms, the gazers mock
With mimicry of battle-shock.
And now they turn their backs in flight,
Now put their spears in rest,
And now in amity unite,
And ride the field abreast."
Such was the Ludus Trojwe-" The Game of Troy"
-introduced, according to the poet, by Iulus in afterdays into his new-built town of Alba, and borrowed
from Alba by the Romans. Whatever its origin may
have been, it was revived at Rome by Augustus, in
his zeal for restorations of all kinds, as "an ancient
and honourable institution." Princes of the imperial
house-young Marcellus, and Tiberius the future emperor-rode, like lulus, in the show; the emperor
himself took a warm interest in it; and the eagerness
of the young patricians to distinguish themselves in
the various manoeuvres before his eyes and those of
their friends led to serious accidents. To one young
horseman who was crippled by his fall Augustus gave
a golden torque, and granted to him and his family
permission to bear the name of "Torquatus"-renowned in the early annals of Rome. But other accidents happened, and led to such loud complaints that
the sport was discontinued.
But while the eyes of Trojans and Sicilians are
engaged with this spectacle, a terrible proceeding has
taken place down on the shore. The ships, as usual,
are drawn up there hard and fast upon the sand.
The Trojan matrons are gathered near them, making
moan for the good Anchises — for the games are a




102


THE,ENEID.


spectacle for men.  They are looking wistfully, too,
across the sea, thinking how far they have sailed
already, and how far they may yet have to sail. The
watchful hate of Juno sees her opportunity.    She
despatches Iris down to them in the shape of one
of their number-Beroe. She harangues them      eloquently.  How long will they be content to live this
wandering life, in search of a distant home-which
possibly has no existence but in deceitful prophecies?
The disguised Iris seizes a brand and rushes towards
the ships. While the rest hesitate, one of their number detects the star-like eyes and celestial gait.  It is
not old Beroe-nay, she, to the witness's own knowledge, lies at this very moment sick in bed. It is no
less than a visitor from heaven.  They hesitate no
longer: they snatch the embers from the altars, and
in a moment the deed is done, and the galleys are in
flames. The news is brought to ~Eneas just as the
gay parade of youths is ending; and Ascanius gallops
at once down to the shore, dashes his helmet on
the ground that all may know him, and implores the
furious women to stay their hands. Do they fancy
they are burning the war-ships of the Greeks?  His
voice recalls them to themselves, and in guilty fear
and shame they fly to hide themselves among the
rocks and woods.    ~Eneas rends his clothes, and
appeals to Jupiter.  The ruler of the sky hears, and
sends down a thun'der-shower which drenches everything on sea and shore, so that all but four galleys
escape with little damage.
But Eneas is troubled at heart.  May not this mad




TIE FUNERAL GAMES.


103


instinct of the women be right, after all?       Were
it not better to rest here in Sicily, than wander on
again over the weary ocean in quest of this Western
Land? He takes counsel with the Nestor of the fleet
-the aged Nautes-to whom the goddess of wisdom
has given an understanding spirit beyond his fellows.
The old seaman's motto is one of the poet's noblest
utterances -
" Whate'er betides, he only cures
The stroke of fortune who endures."
He bids his chief take counsel, too, with Acestes. In
the visions of the night the shade of his father Anchises
once more appears to him, and gives the same advice
as Nautes. It is settled that the women and the old
men, and all that are weary and faint-hearted, shall be
left behind in Sicily, while the picked band of good
men and true sail on with their leader into the west;
thus their reduced number of ships will yet suffice
them.t   The damaged galleys are hastily repaired, and
the foundations of a new town are marked out for the
Trojan settlers: it is to be called Acesta, in honour of
* " Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."
t Virgil himself lias no word of reproach for these weaker
spirits, who thus preferred the rest of Sicily to the far-off hopes
of Hesperia. But his impassioned pupil Dante is less merciful:
he classes them in his " Purgatory " with the murmuring Israel.
ites:" First they died, to whom the sea
Opened, or ever Jordan saw his heirs;
And they who with Eneas to the end
Endured not suffering, for their portion chose
Life without glory."
-Purg. xviii. (Cary.)




104              TTHE ANE1D.
their kind host. The parting of the wanderers from
their friends is a fine passage, finely rendered:"With kindliness of gentle speech
The good iEneas comforts each,
And to their kinsman prince commends
With tears his subjects and his friends.
Three calves to Eryx next he kills;
A lambkin's blood to Tempest spills,
And bids them loose from land:
With olive-leaves he binds his brow,
Then takes his station on the prow,
A charger in his hand,
Flings out the entrails on the brine,
And pours a sacred stream of wine.
Fair winds escort them o'er the deep:
With emulous stroke the waves they sweep."




CHAPTER VI.


THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.
THE Sea-god, at Venus's intercession for her son, sends
LEneas and his crews calm seas and prosperous gales.
One victim only the Fates demand; Palinurus, the
pilot of AEneas's ship, gives way to sleep during the
quiet watches of the night, slips overboard, and is
lost. The poet has clothed the whole story in a transparent mythological allegory, and which must have
been intended to be transparent.  Sleep is personified;
Palinurus resists his first temptations; but the god
waves over his eyes a bough steeped in dews of Lethe,
the river of forgetfulness, and the unhappy steersman
can hold out no longer. The accident happens near
the shore of the twin Sirens, of whose seductions
Homer has told us in the wanderings of Ulysses:"A perilous neighbourhood of yore
And white with mounded bones,
Where the hoarse sea with far-heard roar
Keeps washing o'er the stones."
AEneas discovers his loss by the unsteady course of




106


THE 'ENEID. '


the galley, and takes the helm himself, until he brings
the little fleet safe into the harbour of Cumie. The
crews disembark, with the joy which these seamen of
old always felt when they touched land again, and
proceed at once to search for water, cut wood, and
light fires:
"Sage Daedalus-so runs the taleFrom Minos bent to fly,
On feathery pinions dared to sail
Along the untravelled sky;
Flies northward through the polar heights,
Nor stays till he on Cumse lights.
First landed here, he consecrates
The wings whereon lie flew
To Phoebus' power, and dedicates
A fane of stately view."
Here Aneas consults the mysterious Sibyl, whose
oracular verses are referred to in Virgil's Pastoral
already noticed.  She figures under various names in
classical story-that which she bears here is Deipholb.
Her dwelling is in a cave in the rock behind tle
temple, with which it conlunaicates by a hundred
doors.  Within sits the propletess on a tripod, where
she receives the inspiration of the god. When the
oracle is pronounced, the doors all fly open, and tlhe
sound conies forth.  But there is one way in which
she is wont to give her answers, against which
Helenus has already warned her present visitors.  She
has a habit of jotting down her responses in verse
upon the leaves of tree —each verse apparently on a
separate leaf-and then piling them one upon another




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


107


in her cave. When the doors fly open, the gust of
wind whirls the leaves here and there in all directions;
and the ambiguities which are proper to all oracles are
considerably increased in the process of rearranging
the several leaves into anything like coherent orderthe Sibyl herself disdaining all further interference.
So that many of her clients go away without having
received any intelligible answer at all, and from that
time forth "hate the very name of the Sibyl."   A
modern writer, whose poetical taste has made him
one of the most interesting critics of Virgil, has
thought that the confusion of the prophetic leaves
was meant to symbolise the idea that the will of the
gods was made known to mortals only in disjointed
utterances, and under no regular law of order. uEneas,
therefore, in his appeal to the prophetess, begs her
specially to give her answer by word of mouth.
Deiphobe proceeds to the seat of augury, and goes
through the terrible struggle which, according to all
legends, invariably accompanied this form of prophecy.
Even when sle comes in view of the awful doors, the
influence begins:"Her visage pales its hue,
Her locks dishevelled fly,
Her breath comes thick, her wild heart glows;
Dilating as the madness grows,
Her form looks larger to the eye,
Unearthly peals her deep-toned cry,
As breathing nearer and more near
The God cones rushing on his seer."
* Keble.




110


THE NEIED.


the woods in quest of the golden bough. The search
seems in vain, until two white doves, the birds of his
goddess-mother Velus, make their appearance, and,
leading the way by short successive flights, draw the
seekers on to the wondrous tree, on which they at
last alight.  The hero makes prize of the golden
branch, with wlich lie returns to the Sibyl. Under
her directions lie offers the due sacrifices to the infernal powers-four black bulls, a barren heifer, and a
black ewe-lamb-and then, still under the leading of
the prophetess, with drawn sword in his hand, he
enters the mouth of Hades.
"Along the illimitable shade
Darkling and lone their way they made,
Through the vast kingdom of the dead,
An empty void, though tenanted.
So travellers in a forest move
With but the uncertain moon above,
Beneath her niggard light,
When Jupiter has hid fromn view
The heaven, and Nature's every hue
Is lost in blinding night.
"At Orcus' portals hold their lair
Wild Sorrow and avenging Care;
And pale Diseases cluster there,
And pleasureless Decay,
Foul Penury, and Fears that kill,
And Hunger, counsellor of ill,
A ghastly presence they:
Suffering and Death the threshold keep,
And with them Death's blood-brother Sleep:
Ill Joys with their seducing spells
And deadly War are at the door;




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


ill


The Furies couch in iron cells,
And Discord maddens and rebels;
Her snake-locks hiss, her wreaths drip gore.
"Full in the midst an aged elm
Broods darkly o'er the shadowy realm:
There dream-land phantoms rest the wing,
Men say, and 'neath its foliage cling.
And many monstrous shapes beside
Within the infernal gates abide;
There Centaurs, Scyllas, fish and maid,
There Briareus' hundred-handed shade,
Chimawra armed with flame,
Gorgons and Harpies make their den,
With the foul pest of Lerna's fen,
And Geryon's triple frame."
Then they come in sight of the rivers of Hell-Acheron, Cocytus, andl Styx.  The relative physical geography is somewhat confused by tle poet, but it is the
Styx on which the Ferryman of the Shades, the surly
Charon,"Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,
His eyeballs each a globe of fire,"plies his office of transporting the dead, performing the
duties which Homer assigns to Mercury. But it is not
all who even in death are allowed to pass the gloomy
river. Only those who have received all due rites of
burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at
once; those unhappy ones who from      any cause lie
unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on
the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the
Sibyl explains to AEneas, when he marks with surprise




112


THE,.NE1D.


how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side
praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman
drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to
the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his
own companions who had perished in the storm off
the coast of Carthage. Among them, too, he sees the
figure of his late pilot Palinurus, who tells him the
story of his unhappy fate; how, after all, he was not
drowned, but, clinging to the piece of rudder which
had broken away with him, had drifted three days
and nights upon the waves, and had at last swam
ashore on the fated coast of Italy.  There the cruel
natives had attacked and killed him, as he struggled
up the cliffs; and now his corpse lies tossed to and
fro amid the breakers in the harbour of Velia.  He
prays of his leader either to sail back there and to
"Give him a little earth for charity;"
or, by his influence with these Powers below, to get
the law of exclusion relaxed in his favour. This last
request the Sibyl rebukes at once, as utterly inorthodox
and heretical; but comforts him at the same time
with the assurance that the barbarous natives shall be
plagued by heaven for their abominable deed, nor
shall they find deliverance until they solemnly propitiate his shade by the erection of a mound and the
establishment of funeral honours, and call the spot by
the name of Palinurus-which name, the Sibyl declares,
shall endure there for ever. The oracular voice in
this case was not deceitful: the place, or supposed
place, is still called "Punta di Palinuro."  Virgil's




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES


113


imperial audience might know it well, for Augustus
was very nearly himself becoming a sacrifice on that
very spot to the manes of the ancient pilot, many of
his ships having been cast away on that very headland.
Charon is by no means gracious to the intruders
At first he warns them off. He has no pleasant
recollections of former visitors from upper air, who,
without the proper qualification of being previously
dead and duly burnt or buried, had made their way
against all rule into this abode of shadows. Hercules
had come there, and carried off their watchful guardian
Cerberus: Theseus and his friend Pirithous had even
tried to do the same by Proserpine.
"My laws forbid me to convey
Substantial forms of breathing clay.
'Twas no good hour that made me take
Alcides o'er the nether lake,
Nor found I more auspicious freight
In Theseus and his daring mate;
Yet all were Heaven's undoubted heirs,
And prowess more than man's was theirs.
That from our monarch's footstool dragged
The infernal watch-dog, bound and gagged;
These strove to force from Pluto's side
Our mistress, his imperial bride."
The Sibyl bids Charon have no fears of this kind nowCerberus and Proserpine are safe from all designs on
the part of her companion. This is iEneas of Troy,
known for his "piety" as widely as for his deeds of
arms.  He does but seek an interview with his sire
Anchises. But, if Charon be deaf to all such argua. c. vo  v.                            H




114


1fHE JENEID.


ments,-she shows the golden bough. The passport is
irresistible. Sullenly, and without a word of reply,
the dark boatman brings his craft to shore, and bids
the freight of ghosts clear the decks and make room
for his living passengers. The boat groans, its seams
open and let in the water, as the substantial flesh and
blood steps on board.*     So, in the Iliad of Homer,
The rickety state of Charon's boat was always a fertile
source of wit to the freethinkers among the classical satirists.
Lucian, in one of his very amusing dialogues, makes Charon
complain of his passengers bringing luggage with them: " My
boat is something rotten, look you, and lets in a good deal of
water at the seams; if you come on board with all that luggage
you may repent it-especially those of you who can't swim."(Dial. Mort., x.) So in another dialogue Menippus thinks it
hard to be asked to pay for his passage over, when " he helped
to bale the boat all the way." It may be observed that the
boat is said to be made of hide, stretched on a wooden frame,
like the " coracles" of the Britons, still in use on some of the
Welsh rivers. There may be some connection with an ancient
tradition which would identify the "white rock" of which
Homer speaks (Od., xxiv. 11) as marking the entrance to the
regions of the dead with the cliffs of our own island- " Albion."
A curious old legend of the coast of France gives some colour to
the interpretation. There was a tribe of fishermen who were
exempted from payment of tribute, on the ground that they
ferried over into Britain the souls of the departed. At nightfall, when they were asleep (so the legend ran), they would be
awakened by a loud knocking at their doors, and voices calling
them, and feel a strange compulsion to go down to the seashore. There they found boats, not their own, ready launched,
and to all appearance empty. When they stepped on board and
began to ply their oars they found the boats move as though
they were heavily laden, sinking within a finger's breadth of
the water's edge; but they saw no man. Within an hour, as




TIE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


the mortal horses and earthly chariot of Diomed groan
and strain under their immortal burden, when Minerva
talkes her seat beside the champion.
Cerberus, in spite of Hercules, is at home again,
and on the watch.      His three heads and snakewreathed neck are lifted in fury at the sight of
strangers, and his bark rings through the shades.
But the Sibyl has brought with her a medicated cake,
which she throws down to him; he eats, and falls at
once into a heavy sleep.
Then, led by the Sibyl, the Trojan chief passes
through the various regions of the world below.
First they hear the cries of those infants who but just
knew life in the world above, and then were snatched
away from its enjoyment.? Next them come those
who have been condemned to death by an unjust
judgment, and for whom Minos here sits as judge of
appeals. In the next region are those unhappy onesit seemed, they reached the opposite coast-a voyage which in
their own boats they hardly made in a whole day and night.
When they touched the shore of Britain still they saw no
shape, but they heard voices welcoming their ghostly passengers, and calling each of the dead by name and rank. Then
having got rid, as it seemed, of their invisible freight, they put
off again for home, feeling their boats so sensibly lightened
that hardly more than the keel touched the water.-See Gesner's
Notes on Claudian, iii. 123; Procopius, De Bell. Goth., iv. 20.
* We have here the foundation of the fanciful doctrine of a
Limbo Infantum, held by some doctors of the Romish Churcha kind of vestibule to the greater Purgatory, in which Mere
placed the souls of such children as died before they were old
enough to be admitted to the sacraments.




116


THE EN EID.


"Who all for loathing of the day
In madness threw their lives away:
How gladly now in upper air
Contempt and beggary would they bear,
And labour's sorest pain!
Fate bars the way: around their keep
The slow unlovely waters creep,
And bind with three-fold chain."
Suicide was no crime in the early pagan creed; but
Virgil has to a certain degree adopted the Platonic
notion, that to take away one's own life was to desert
the post of duty.  It is remarkable how thoroughly he
adopts Homer's view of the incomparable superiority
of the life of the upper world to the best possible
estate in the land of shadows.  We have here again the
sad lament of Achilles in the Iliad-that the life of a
slave on earth was more to be desired than the colourless existence of the heroes in Elysium.
Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach
the " Mourning Fields," in which the poet places all
the victims uf love. If there was any doubt as to his
view of the passion-that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be
reprobated or pitied according to circumstances-it
would be set at rest by the characters of those victims
with whom he peoples this unlovely region. Grouped
together with such devoted wives as Evadne, who,
when her husband fell in the Trojan war, slew herself
for grief upon his funeral pile, and Laodamia, whose
only crime was that by her too urgent prayers she won
back her dead Protesilaus to her embrace for a few




THE SIBYL AND TIE SHA DES.


117


fleeting moments, and died of joy in his arms,* we find
the treacherous Eriphyle, who, for the bribe of a golden
necklace, persuaded her husband Amphiarus to go to
his predestined death in the same war, and even such
disgraces to their sex as were Phaedra and Pasiphae.
In these Mourning Fields ~Eneas meets one whom
he would, it may be conceived, have very gladly
avoided. Half veiled in mist, seen dimly like the
moon through a cloud, Dido stands before him there:
and thus, for the first time, he is made certain or
her death. JAneas is ready with regrets, and even
tears.
"She on the ground averted kept
Hard eyes that neither smiled nor wept;
Nor bated more of her stern mood,
Than if a monument she stood."
At last, without a word, she turns from her false lover,
and seeks in the dim groves the society of her dead
husband Sichaeus.
* "Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes reappears;
Round the dear shade she would have clung-'tis vain,
The hours are past-too brief, had they been years;
And him no mortal effort can detain:
Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day,
He through the portal takes his silent way,
And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay.
"By no weak pity might the gods be moved;
She who thus perished, not without the crime
Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time,
Apart from happy ghosts that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."
-WORDSWORTH'S Laodaai=n




i18


THE NiVEID.


The Sibyl leads her companion on to the Field of
the Heroes. There he sees the mighty men of old:
the chiefs who fought against Thebes in the great siege
which preceded that of Troy-Tydeus, and Adrastus,
and Parthenopseus. There, too, are the shades of his
own companions in arms, who fell in defence of their
city. Among these last is one who has another tale
to tell of the abominable Helen. It is Deiphobus,
one of the many sons of Priam, to whom Helen had
been given after the death of Paris. AEneas is shocked
to see the unsubstantial shape of the prince bearing
the marks of barbarous mutilation; his hands lopped,
his face gashed, and his ears and nostrils cut off.
(For, even in this shadowy existence, the ghosts
all bear the marks of violent death - Dido's selfinflicted wound being specially mentioned.) XEneas
asks the history of this terrible disfigurement, and
Deiphobus tells it at some length: how the double
traitoress, who was then his wife, had led Menelaus
and his companion, the accursed Ulysses, to the chamber where he lay sunk in sleep on the disastrous night
of the city's capture, and how they two had thus
mangled his body.
But the Sibyl warns her companion, who stands
absorbed in grief at his comrade's fate, that the permitted hours of their visit are fast passing away. She
guides him on to where the path they are treading
divides, leading in one direction to the Elysian
Fields, in the other to Tartarus,-for the district which
they have explored already is represented as of an
entirely neutral character.  On the left, AEneas sees




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


119


rise before him the broad bastions of Tartarus, round
which flows the fiery stream of Phlegethon:"In front a portal stands displayed,
On adamantine columns stayed;
Nor mortal nor immortal foe
Those massy gates could overthrow.
An iron tower of equal might
In air uprises steep;
Tisiphonb, in red robes dight,
Sits on the threshold day and night,
With eyes that know not sleep.
Hark! from within there issue groans,
The cracking of the thong,
The clank of iron o'er the stones
Dragged heavily along."
Eneas asks of his companion the meaning of these
fearful sounds.  They are the outcries of the wicked
in torment.  They may not be seen by human eyes;
but Deiphobb herself has been shown all the horrible
secrets of their prison-house by Hecate, when intrusted
by that goddess with the charge of the entrance to the
Shades.  She tells AEneas how Rhadamanthus sits in
judgment there, and forces the wicked to confess their
deeds. Crimes successfully concealed on earth are
there made manifest; then the culprit is handed over
to the Furies for punishment. Such punishments are
various as the crimes; strange and horrible in the
cases of extraordinary offenders,-especially against the
majesty of the gods. In the lowest gulf of all,"Where Tartarus, with sheer descent,
Dips 'neath the ghost-world twice as deep




120


TIE.ENEID.


As towers above earth's continent
The height of heaven's Olympian steep,"lie the twin giants, sons of Aloeus, who sought to
storm heaven, and hurl Jupiter from his throne.
There, too, is chained Salmoneus, who, counterfeiting
the thunder and lightning of the Olympian ruler, was
struck down by the force which he profanely imitated.
Tityos, son of Earth, who dared to offer violence to
the goddess Latona, lies there also, suffering the punishment assigned by the Greek mythologists to Prometheus:"O'er acres nine from end to end
His vast unmeasured limbs extend;
A vulture on his liver preys:
The liver fails not, nor decays:
Still o'er that flesh which breeds new pangs,
With crooked beak the torturer hangs,
Explores its depth with bloody fangs,
And searches for her food;
Still haunts the cavern of his breast,
Nor lets the filaments have rest,
To endless pain renewed."
Virgil is here more literally orthodox, and less
philosophical in his creed, than his master Lucretius.
For he, too, knew the story of Tityos, but saw in it only
an allegory; "every man is a Tityos," says the elder
poet, " whose heart is torn and racked perpetually by
his own evil lusts and passions." Other and various
torments has the Sibyl seen; for the selfish and
covetous, for the adulterer, for the betrayer of trust,
and the spoiler of the orphan; the feast ever spread




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


121


before the hungry eyes and ever vanishing; the rock
overhanging the head of the guilty, ever ready to fall;
the stone that has to be rolled with vast labour up
the hill, only to roll back again for ever; and, most
remarkable of all punishments, the doom of the restless adventurer Theseus for his attempt on Proserpine
-to sit for ever in perpetual inactivity. And amidst
them all rings out the warning voice of Phlegyas (condemned for having set fire to the temple of Apollo)
from his place of torment:"Be warned-learn righteousness-and reverence heaven."
Here again we have, it may be, a protest against
the teaching of Lucretius: a distinct rejection, on
Virgil's part, of the materialistic doctrine which
would deny a divine Providence and human responsibility.
The whole conception of Virgil's hell is grand and
terrific. Highly material and sensational, it is hardly
more so than mediaeval divines and artists have represented; and indeed it is more than probable that,
consciously or unconscibusly, they often adopted
pagan notions on the subject. In its moral teaching,
whether the poet intended his descriptions to be taken
in their literal sense or interpreted in the way of
parable, his creed has at least the essential elements of
truth.
But now the visitors turn their steps towards the
Elysian fields, and after duly hanging up the golden
bough at the gate for Proserpine's acceptance, they
enter those abodes of the blest:



122


THE. NEID.


"Green spaces, folded in with trees,
A paradise of pleasaunces;
Around the champaign mantles bright
The fulness of purpureal light;
Another sun and stars they know,
That shine like ours, but shine below."
There are assembled the illustrious dead-warriors who
have died for their country; priests of unstained life;
bards who have never perverted their powers; all
who have been benefactors of mankind,"A goodly brotherhood, bedight
With coronals of virgin white."
Shadows as they are, all the items of their happiness
are material. The games of the palestra, the song of
the bard, the care of ghostly horses and ghostly
chariots, form the interests of this world of spirits;
-the interests of earth, without earth's substantial
realities. The poet found his imagination fail him, as
it fails us all, when he tries to paint the details of an
incorporeal existence.
Among these happy spirits the hero finds his father
Anchises.  He recognises and addresses him. Anchises had expected the visit, and receives him with such
tears of joy as spirits may shed.  But when   Eneas
strives to embrace him, the conditions of this spiritual
world forbid it:"Thrice strove the son his sire to clasp;
Thrice the vain phantom mocked his grasp:
No vision of the drowsy night,
No airy current, half so light."




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


123


The occupation of Anchises in these regions is much
more philosophical than that which is assigned to the
other shades. He is contemplating the unborn rulers
of the Rome that is to be; the spirits, as yet incorporeal, which are soon to receive a new body, and so
go forth into upper air. Deep in a forest lies the
river Lethe, and a countless multitude of forms are
seen thronging its banks, to drink of the water of forgetfulness. Oblivious of all their past lives, they will
thus take their place once more, in changed bodies,
among the inhabitants of earth. The poet's adaptation of the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration is
none of the clearest; but he signifies that, after the
lapse of a thousand years in a kind of Purgatory
below, these spirits are again summoned to play their
part, in new bodies, upon earth. Anchises can read
their destinies; and he points out to his son the
shadowy forms, like the kings in 'Macbeth,' that are
to be the kings and consuls of the great Roman
nation.  First, those who shall reign in Alba-Silvius, that shall be born to YEneas in his new home,
Capys, and Numitor; young Romulus, son of the
war-god (he wears already the two-crested helmet in
right of his birth), who shall transplant the sceptre to
the seven-hilled city, and the kings that shall succeed
him  there.  He shows him, too, those who shall
make the future great names of the Republic-Brutus,
the Decii, Camillus, Fabius, and the Scipios. But
the centre of the picture is reserved for one great
house:



124


THE 'ENEID.


Turn hither now your ranging eye:
Behold a glorious family,
Your sons and sons of Rome:
Lo! Caesar there and all his seed,
Iulus' progeny, decreed
To pass 'neath heaven's high dome.
This, this is he, so oft the theme
Of your prophetic fancy's dream,
Augustus Caesar, god by birth;
Restorer of the age of gold
In lands where Saturn ruled of old:
O'er Ind and Garamant extreme
Shall stretch his reign, that spans the earth.
Look to that land which lies afar
Beyond the path of sun or star,
Where Atlas on his shoulder rears
The burden of the incumbent spheres.
Egypt e'en now and Caspia hear
The muttered voice of many a seer,
And Nile's seven mouths, disturbed with fear,
Their coming conqueror know."
The future glories of Rome are described in a grand
and well known passage, ta the majestic rhythm    of
which no English translator seems able to do full
justice. The poet contrasts the warlike genius of his
countrymen with the softer accomplishments of their
rivals:
"Others with softer hand may mould the brass,
Or wake to warmer life the marble mass;
Plead at the bar with more prevailing force,
Or trace more justly heaven's revolving course:
Roman! be thine the sovereign arts of sway
To rule, and make the subject world obey;




THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.


125


Give peace its laws; respect the prostrate foe;
Abase the lofty, and exalt the low."
-SYMMONS.*
One personal sketch the poet's art had reserved to
the last. Anchises points out to his visitor the shade
that is to be the great Marcus Marcellus, five times
consul-the " Sword of Rome," as Fabius was said to
be its Shield, in the long wars with Carthage, and the
conqueror of Syracuse. By his side moves the figure
of an armed youth, tall and beautiful, but whose face
is sad, and his eyes fixed on the ground. The company of shadows crowd round him, murmuring their
admiration.   Who is it.? Aneas asks.        It is the
young MIarcellus of the Empire, the hope and promise
of Rome-the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus, and
destined, as many thought, to be his successor. Unwillingly Anchises replies to his son's question:"Alh son! compel me not to speak
The sorrows of our race!
That youth the Fates but just display
To earth, nor let him longer stay:
* But none of the recognised translations seem to come so
near the spirit of the original as Lord Macaulay's paraphrasefor of course it is only a paraphrase-in his lay of " The Prophecy of Capys: " —
"Leave to the sons of Carthage
The rudder and the oar;
Leave to the Greek his marble nymphs
And scrolls of wordy lore:
Thine, Roman, is the pilum;
Roman, the sword is thine;
The even trench, the bristling mound,
The legion's ordered line."




126


THIE     ArNEID.


With gifts like these for aye to hold,
Rome's heart had e'en been overbold.
Ah! what a groan from Mars's plain
Shall o'er the city sound!
How wilt thou gaze on that long train,
Old Tiber, rolling to the main
Beside his new-raised mound!
No youth of Ilium's seed inspires
With hope as fair his Latian sires:
Nor Rome shall dandle on her knee
A nursling so adored as he.
O piety! O ancient faith!
O hand untamed in battle scathe!
No foe had lived before his sword,
Stemmed he on foot the war's red tide
Or with relentless rowel gored
His foaming charger's side.
Dear child of pity! shouldst thou burst
The dungeon-bars of Fate accurst,
Our own Marcellus thou!
Briing lilies here, in handfuls bring:
Their lustrous blooms I fain would fling
Such honour to a grandson's shade
By grandsire hands may well be paid:
Yet O! it 'vails not now!"
He had died not long before, in his twentieth year,
intensely lamented both by his family and the people.
The recital of the passage by the poet before his
imperial audience had a more striking effect than even
he himself could have expected.    Octavia swooned
away, and had to be removed by her attendants,senting, however, magnificent presents afterwards to
the poet for his eulogy on her dead son.*
* Virgil is said to have received from her what would amount,




THE SIBYL AND. THE SHADES.


127


The biographers add, that Augustus commanded
Virgil to read no further on that day, and that the
poet replied he had already ended the subject. He has
not much more to say in this Sixth Book. Anchises
gives his son some prophetic intimations as to his
future fortunes in Italy, and then escorts his visitors
to the gates of Sleep.
"Sleep gives his name to portals twain:
One all of horn, they say,
Through which authentic spectres gain
Quick exit into day,
And one which bright with ivory gleams,
Whence Pluto sends delusive dreams.
Conversing still, the sire attends
The travellers on their road,
And through the ivory portal sends
From forth the unseen abode."
The lines have been taken to mean that this visit to
the shades was, after all, but a dream.
in our money, to above ~2000 —"a round sum," remarks
Dryden, with something like professional envy, "for twenty.
seven verses."




CHAPTER VII.


THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM.
IT has been said that this poem combines in some degree the characters both of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.
Up to this point we have had the wanderings and
adventures of the Trojan hero: he has been the
Ulysses of his own tale. Henceforth we have a tale
of the camp and the battle-field, of siege and defence,
and personal combat; and we are reminded, in almost
every passage, of the stirring scenes of the Iliad..Eneas, on his ascent into upper air, rejoins his crew,
and the fleet, setting sail from Cumse, enters the noble
harbour of Caieta. Not that the place had any such
name as yet; but there the hero buries his old nurse,
and gives her name to the spot. Once more embarking, they pass the promontory of Circe, and hear, as
they sail by, the roars and yells of the unhappy prisoners,
changed by the spells of the sorceress into the shape
of brutes, whom she holds in bondage there. They
listen and shudder, and bless the favouring gale which
hears them away from such perilous neighbourhood.
hlen, with the morrow's dawn, the fleet enters the




THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIU3M.


1 '9


mouth of the Tiber. The picture of the galleys going
up the stream is very beautiful:"The sea was reddening with the dawn:
The queen of morn on high
Was seen in rosy chariot drawn
Against a saffron sky,
When on the bosom of the deep
The Zephyrs dropped at once to sleep,
And, struck with calm, the tired oars strain
Against the smooth unmoving main.
Now from the deep JEneas sees
A mighty grove of glancing trees.
Embowered amid the silvan scene
Old Tiber winds his banks between,
And in the lap of ocean pours
His gulfy stream, his sandy stores.
Around, gay birds of diverse wing,
Accustomed there to fly or sing,
Were fluttering on from spray to spray
And soothing ether with their lay.
He bids his comrades turn aside
And landward set each vessel's head,
And enters in triumphant pride
The river's shadowy bed."
WVar is now the subject, and Homer is the model. Yet
the Roman poet never shows his individual genius
more strongly than in his treatment of the external
scenery amidst which his action lies. He is still the
worshipper of Nature, even while he sets himself to
sing of battles, as he was il his Pastorals and Georgics.
Homer tells us of the rivers of the Troad, Simois and
Scamander-but it is only as they affect Hector or
Achilles; his heart is all the while with the combatA c. vol. v.                             I




130


TH TiXE NEID.


ants, not with the flowing river. Not so Virgil: with
him  we feel the cool breeze, we see the glancing
shadow of the trees upon the river, we hear the
flatter of the startled birds, and the long plash of the
oars in the water: we sail with LEneas on a party of
pleasure, rather than a voyage of conquest.
Latium is reached at last. They moor their galleys
under the trees which fringe the river-banks, and
land to make their morning meal. It is but a scant
one. Such wild fruits as they can collect are laid
upon the wheaten cakes which they have brought
with them, and when the fruit is finished they attack
the cakes themselves.  "Lo!" exclaims lulus-" we
are eating our tables!"  Joyfully LElneas recognises,
in the boy's involuntary interpretation, the fulfilment
of the curse of the Harpies,* and of certain strange
words of his father Anchises, that when they were
reduced to "eat their tables," then they had found
their destined home, and might begin to build their
city. This, then, is their promised rest. He pours
libations and offers prayers to the gods of the land,
and peals of thunder from a cloudless sky seem to
announce that the invocation is accepted.
As soon as the moon rises, scouts are sent out to
explore the country.  The king of the land is old
Latinus, whose palace is near at hand. He has one
only daughter, Lavinia, for whose hand all -the neighbouring princes have long been suitors. Turnus of
Ardea, the gallant chief of the Rutuli, tallest and
handsomest of all the rivals, has the goodwill of the
* See p. 66.




THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM.


131


queen-mother; the maiden's own choice in such a
matter being the last consideration which would enter
into the thought of a Roman poet.  Wrhen the Trojan
chief has thus informed himself in some measure as
to the localities, he sends a formal embassy to King
Latinus's court, carrying presents in token of goodwill.
Meanwhile he busies himself in hurriedly marking out
the boundaries of his new town, and fencing it round
with an earthen rampart and a palisade.
The strangers are ushered into the presence of
Latinus, where he sits in his ancestral palace, surrounded by the cedar statues of the demi-gods and
heroes of his line.
"There too were spoils of bygone wars
Hung on the portals,-captive cars,
Strong city-gates with massive bars,
And battle-axes keen,
And plumy cones from helmets shorn,
And beaks from vanquished vessels torn,
And darts, and bucklers sheen."
He knows at once who his visitors are. Strange portents had long disturbed his court, and had warned
him that his daughter must wed with no prince of
Latian race: that a foreign host and a stranger bridegroom will come to claim her, and that the kings who
shall spring from this union will spread the Latian
name from sea to sea.   He inquires the strangers'
errand courteously, and the Trojan Ilioneus, as spokesman of the embassy, thus makes reply:"We come not to your friendly coast
By random gale o'er ocean tost,




THE IEiYEID.


Nor land nor star has made us stray
From our determined line of way:
Of steady purpose one and all
We flock beneath your city wall,
Driven from an empire, greater none
Within the circuit of the sun.
Jove is our sire: to Jove's high race
We, Dardans born, our lineage trace:
Jove's seed, the monarch we obey,
jEneas, sends us here to-day.
How fierce a storm from Argos sent
On Ida's plains its fury spent,
How Fate in dire collision hurled
The eastern and the western world,
E'en he has heard, whom earth's last verge
Just separates from the circling surge,
And he who, to his kind unknown,
Dwells midmost 'neath the torrid zone.
Swept by that deluge o'er the foam
For our lorn gods we ask a home:
A belt of sand is all we crave,
And man's free birthright, air and wave.
We shall not shame your Latin crown,
Nor light shall be your own renown,
Nor time obliterate the debt,
Nor Italy the hour regret
When Troy with outstretched arms she met
I swear it by Eneas' fate,
By that right hand which makes him great,
In peace and war approved alike
A friend to aid, a foe to strike,
Full oft have mighty nations-nay,
Disdain not that unsought we pray,
Nor deem that wreaths and lowly speech
The grandeur of our name impeachFull oft with zeal and earnest prayers
Have nations wooed us to be theirs;




THE TROJANS LAAVD IN LATIUM.


133


But Heaven's high fate, with stern comrmand,
Impelled us still to this your land.
Here Dardanus was born, and here
Apollo bids our race return:
To Tyrrhene Tiber points the seer
And pure Numicius' hallowed urn.
These presents too our hands convey,
Scant relics of a happier day,
From burning Ilium snatched away.
From this bright gold before the shrine
His sire Anchises poured the wine:
With these adornments Priar sate
'Mid gathering crowds in kingly state,
The sceptre and the diadem:
Troy's women wrought the vesture's hem."
The king muses thoughtfully for a while: but he
recognises the fulfilment of the auguries.  Let Eneas
come-he is welcome. If this be the bridegroom sent by
heaven, he shall be more welcome still. He sends back
the ambassadors in right royal fashion, all mounted on
choice horses from his own stud, and with a chariot of
honour to convey their chief to an interview.
Juno's relentless hatred is stirred once more. Will
neither fire nor sword kill, nor water drown, these
accursed Trojans? Shall she, the Queen of Heaven,
be baffled by a mortal like XEneas? If it be written
in the fates that he is to wed Lavinia, her marriagedower shall be paid in Trojan and Latian blood.
Venus shall find that she, like Hecuba, has borne a
firebrand-that JEneas, like Paris, shall light a flame
that shall consume his nation.   If the powers of
heaven will not take her part, she will seek aid from




134


THE E'NEID.


hell. She summons the Fury Alecto from the shades
below, and bids her sow strife between the people of
Latinus and their foreign visitors.
The Fury, rejoicing in her errand, seeks the chamber of Latinus's queen, and darts into her breast one of
the living serpents that serve her for coils of hair.
Straightway the queen is seized with madness, and,
after vainly trying to rouse her husband to oppose
this foreign marriage, she rushes like a Bacchanal
through the neighbouring villages, and calls upon the
mothers of Latium to avenge her wrongs and rescue
her daughter.
Next the Fury instils the same venom into the
heart of Turnus, where he lies in his town of Ardea.
He has been the champion of Latium against their
enemies the Tuscans, and this is their gratitude-to
give his promised bride to another! The young chief
leaps from his couch, calls madly for his arms, and
orders an instant march upon Latinus's capital. He
will expel these intruders at once, and demand the
princess from her father by force of arms.
Meanwhile-still at the instigation of Alecto-the
seeds of quarrel have been sown between the men of
Latium and their Trojan guests. There is a tame deer
which has been nursed in the house of Tyrrheus, the
ranger of the royal forest,-a pet and favourite with
all the country-folk.
"Fair Sylvia, daughter of the race,
Its horns with leaves would interlace,
Comb smooth its shaggy coat, and lave
Its body in the crystal wave.




THE TROJANS LAND IN LATIUM.


135


Tame and obedient, it would stray
Free through the woods a summer's day,
And home again at night repair,
E'en of itself, how late soe'er."
In evil hour Ascanius, riding out with a huntingparty, gets his hounds upon the scent, and shoots the
poor animal as it floats quietly down the river in the
noon-day heat.    It has just strength to carry the
Trojan arrow in its body to its mistress's door, and die
moaning at her feet.* Tyrrheus and his household
are mad with rage, and rouse the whole country-side
against this wanton outrage, as they hold it, on the
part of the strangers. The shepherd's horn sounds
out its summons to the whole neighbourhood; and
the angry rustics, when they hear the story, seize
axes, staves, and such rude weapons as come first to
hand, and attack the young prince and his huntingparty. Tile Trojans come out from their intrenchment
to rescue their friends, and the fray now becomes a
regular battle, no longer fought with stakes and hunting
implements, but with sword and spear. Blood is soon
shed; the rustic weapons are no match for the Trojan
steel; and young Allllo, the ranger's son, is carried
home dead, amongst others. Almost a sadder loss is
* Andrew Marvell most likely borrowed his thought from the
Roman poet in his graceful lines, "The Nymph's Complaint:" -
"The wanton troopers, riding by,
Have shot my fawn, andit will die.
Ungentle men I they cannot thrive
Who killed thee. Thou ne'er didst alive
Them any harm, alas! nor could
Thy death yet do them any good."




136               THE   X NEID.
that of the good old yeoman Galkesus, who yokes a
hundred ploughs, and whose character gives him even
more influence than his wealth. He is slain as he
stands between the combatants, vainly pleading for
peace.
The bodies are carried through the city streets, as
in a modern revolution, by way of demonstration.
There they make their dumb appeal to the passions of
the people"Young Almo in his comely grace,
And old Galaesus' mangled face "and the appeal is answered by a universal cry for
"War!"




CHAPTER VIIL


THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES
TURNUS arrives amongst them from Ardea at this critical
moment, and shouts fiercely for instant battle. In
vain does King Latinus quote the oracle, and refuse
to fight against the destinies. He will be no party to
a bloody and useless war. But the impetuosity of an
angry populace is too strong for him. Powerless to
stem the popular current, he nevertheless delivers his
own soul, and abdicates his sovereignty. The guilt of
the blood that shall be shed must rest on those who
stir the war. He warns Turnus that he may yet live
to rue the part he has taken, when too late: for limself, death will soon put an end to all troubles.
By an old tradition,-handed on, as the poet will
have it, from these old days of Latium to the Rome of
Augustus,-the powers of War were held to be confined within the gates of Janus, the porter of the Immortals, only to be let loose by solemn act of state
authority.
"Two gates there stand of War-'twas so
Our fathers named them long ago



138


THE JENXIFD.


The war-god's terrors round them spread
An atmosphere of sacred dread.
A hundred bolts the entrance guard,
And Janus there keeps watch and ward.
These, when his peers on war decide,
The consul, all in antique pride
Of Gabine cincture deftly tied
And purple-striped attire,
With grating noise himself unbars,
And calls aloud on Father Mars:
The warrior train takes up the cry,
And horns with brazen symphony
Their hoarse assent conspire."
Since Latinus will not do his office, Juno in person-.
so the poet has it-descends from heaven, smites upon
the barred portals, and "lets slip the dogs of war."
"Ausonia, all inert before,
Takes fire and blazes to the core:
And some on foot their march essay,
Some, mounted, storm along the way;
To arms! cry one and all:
With unctuous lard their shields they clean,
And make their javelins bright and sheen,
Their axes on the whetstone grind;
Look how that banner takes the wind!
Hark to yon trumpet's call!
Five mighty towns, with anvils set,
In emulous haste their weapons whet:
Crustunium, Tibur the renowned,
And strong Atina there are found,
And Ardea, and Antemnln  crowned
With turrets round her wall.
Steel caps they frame their brows to fit,
And osier twigs for bucklers knit:




THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES.


139


Or twist the hauberk's brazen mail
And mould them greaves of silver pale:
To these has passed the homage paid
Erewhile to ploughshare, scythe, and spade:
Each brings his father's battered blade,
And smelts in fire anew:
And now the clarions pierce the skies:
From rank to rank the watchword flies:
This tears his helmet from the wall,
That drags his war-horse from the stall,
Dons three-piled mail and ample shield,
And girds him for the embattled field
With falchion tried and true."
The whole remaining portion of this seventh book
is in Virgil's most spirited style. And it is here that
the harp of our northern minstrel answers best to Mr
Conington's touch. The gathering of the clans-for
it is nothing else-the rapid sketches of the chiefs as
they pass in succession with their array of followersthe details of costume-the legendary tale which the
poet has to tell of more than one of them as he passes
them in review-even the devices borne on the shields,
- -are all features in which Scott delighted as thoroughly as Virgil, and which his well-known rhythm suits
better than any other which a translator could
choose.  Some few    portions of this stirring warlike  diorama must content the readers of these
pages. The first who passes is the terrible chief of
Agylla, who fears neither god nor man, and whose
notorious cruelties have so exasperated his own people
against him that he is now a refugee in the court of
Turnus:



14C


~ THE  ENEID.


" Mezentius first from Tyrrhene coast,
Who mocks at heaven, arrays his host,
And braves the battle's storm;
His son, young Lausus, at his side,
Excelled by none in beauty's pride,
Save Turnus' conlely form:
Lausus, the tamer of the steed,
The conqueror of the silvan breed,
Leads from Agylla's towers in vain
A thousand youths, a valiant train:
Ah happy, had the son been blest
In hearkening to his sire's behest,
Or had the sire from whom he came
Had other nature, other name!"
In the description of the next leader we have some
notice of early heraldry:"Next drives along the grassy meads
His palm-crowned car and conquering steeds
Fair Aventinus, princely heir
Of Hercules the brave and fair,
And for his proud escutcheon takes
His father's Hydra and her snakes.
'Twas he that priestess Rhea bare,
A stealthy birth, to upper air,
'Mid shades of woody Aventine
Mingling her own with heavenly blood,
When triumph-flushed from Geryon slain
Alcides touched the Latian plain,
And bathed Iberia's distant kine
In Tuscan Tiber's flood.
Long pikes and poles his bands uprear,
The shapely blade, the Sabine spear.
Himself on foot, with lion's skin,




THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES. 141


Whose long white teeth with ghastly grin
Clasp like a helmet brow and chin,
Joins the proud chiefs in rude attire,
&nd flaunts the emblem of his sire."
Corae and Catillus, twin-brothers from the old town
of Tilar; Cseculus, from the neighbouring Praeneste
-reprued son of Vulcan, because said to have been
found us an infant lying amidst the forge emberswhose iollowing take the field with slings and javelins, each man with his left foot hare to give him
firmer stepping-hold; Clausus the Sabine, from whom
sprang the great house of the Claudii-some of whom
assuredly were listening to the poet's recitation;
Halwsus, of the seed of Agamemnon, sworn foe to
all who bear the hated name of Trojan; and a host
of chiefs of lesser name and inferior powers, join
the march.   Messapus, the "horse - tamer," brings
with him a powerful band of retainers from many
a city, who chant the deeds of their leaders as they
go"Like snow-white swans in liquid air,
When homeward from their food they fare,
And far and wide melodious notes
Come rippling from their slender throats,
While the broad stream and Asia's fen
Reverberate to the sound again.
Sure none had thought that countless crowd
A mail-clad company;
It rather seemed a dusky cloud
Of migrant fowl, that, hoarse and loud,
Press landward from the sea




142


THE AENEID.


" Came too from old Marruvia's realm,
An olive-garland round his helm,
Bold Unibro, priest at once and knight,
By king Archippus sent to fight:
Who baleful serpents knew to steep
By hand and voice in charmed sleep,
Soothed their fierce wrath with subtlest skill,
And from their bite drew off the ill.
But ah! his medicines could not heal
The death-wound dealt by Dardan steel:
His slumberous charms availed him nought,
Nor herbs on Marsian mountains sought,
And cropped with magic shears:
For thee Anguitia's woody cave,
For thee the glassy Fucine wave,
For thee the lake shed tears."
Nearly last of the warlike array, who all acknowledge
him as their leader, comes the prince of the Rutuli
AEneas's rival and enemy:"In foremost rank see Turnus move,
His conely head the rest above:
On his tall helm with triple cone
Chimsera in relief is shown;
The monster's gaping jaws expire
Hot volumes of AEtnean fire:
And still she flames and raves tile more
The deeper floats the field with gore.
With bristling hide and lifted horns,
Io, all gold, his shield adorns,
E'en as in life she stood;
There too is Argus, warder stern,
And Inachus from graven urn,
Her father, pours his flood."
He brings with him the largest host of all-a cloud of




THE MUSTER OF THE LATIN TRIBES.             143
well-armed footmen of various tribes, whose shields
seem to cover the plain.
This pretty picture of Canilla, the Volscian huntress (whom Dryden very ungallantly terms a " virago "),
vowed from her childhood to Diana-the prototv pe of
Tasso's Clorinda, but far more attractive-clo. ~s at
once the warlike pageant and the book:Last marches forth for Latium's sake
Camilla fair, the Volscian maid,
A troop of horsemen in her wake
In pomp of gleaming steel arrayed;
Stern warrior-queen! those tender hands
Ne'er plied Minerva's ministries:
A virgin in the fight she stands,
Or winged winds in speed outvies;
Nay, she could fly o'er fields of grain
Nor crush in flight the tapering wheat,
Or skiml the surface of the main
Nor let the billows touch her feet.
Where'er she moves, from house and land
The youths and ancient matrons throng,
And fixed in greedy wonder stand,
Beholding as she speeds along:
In kingly dye that scarf was dipped:
'Tis gold confines those tresses' flow:
Her pastoral wand with steel is tipped,
And Lycian are her shafts and bow." *
* No doubt the Camilla of the Roman poet is a reminiscence
of the Amazon Penthesilea in Homer, just as the fairy footstep,
that left no trace on sea or land, is borrowed from those wondrous mares of Ericthonius to whom HTomer assigns the same
performance. But the copy far surpasses the original in grace
and beauty. Our English poets have made free use of this fancy
of the footsteps of beauty: none more sweetly than Jonson




144


THE ASNE1D.


The story of Camilla's infancy, which is given us
subsequently, is quite in accordance with this description. Her father, driven from his territory, like
Mezentius, by an angry people, had carried his infant
daughter with him in his flight.   Hard pressed by his
pursuers, he came to the banks of a river.    To swim
across the stream, though swollen by winter torrents,
were easy for himself: but how to carry his child l
With brief prayer and vow to the huntress Diana, he
tied her to a spear, and threw her across. The child
alighted safely on the other side, and the father followed.    Fed on mares' milk, and exercised        from
infancy in the use of the bow, Camilla had grown
up in the forest, vowed to maidenhood and to Diana.
in his 'Sad Shepherd,' where AJglamour laments his lost
Earinb:"Here she was wont to go, and here, and hereJust where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow;
The world may find the spring by following her,
For other print her airy steps ne'er left.
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-bell from his stalk:
Blut like the south-west wind she shot along,
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."
- The ' Sad Shepherd,' Act I. sc. 1.




CHAPTER IX


XENEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER.
THB turn of events gives the Trojan chief much
natural disquiet. All Latium is in arms against his
little force of adventurers.  He lies down within his
lines to a disturbed and anxious rest, where he has a
remarkable vision. A figure rises, wrapped in a grey
mantle, with his brows crowned with reed.   It is
"Father Tiber," the tutelary genius of the Rome that
shall be. He bids'his visitor be of good cheer: his
coming has been long looked for. He renews, for his
encouragement, the old oracle of Anchises:On woody banks before your eye
A thirty-farrowed sow shall lie,
Her whole white length on earth stretched out,
Her young, as white, her teats about,
Sign that when thirty years come round
'White Alba' shall Ascanius found."
He will find allies, too, within reach. A colony from
Arcadia have migrated to Italy under their king Evander, and have founded in the neighbouring mountains
A. c. voL v.                           K




146


THE, E l D.


a city called Pallanteum. He will reach the place by
sailing up the stream, and from them, ever at feud
with their Latian neighbours, he will get the aid he
requires.
~Eneas wakes from sleep, arms the crews of two of
his galleys, and begins his voyage up the course of the
friendly Tiber, who purposely calms his waves and
moderates his current.  The sow with her thirty
young is soon found, and duly sacrificed, as the rivergenius has warned him, to propitiate the wrath of
Juno.   Evander, with his son Pallas and all his
people, is keeping high festival to Hercules, when the
masts of the Trojan galleys are suddenly seen among
the trees as they turn a bend of the river. The
strangers are hailed by Pallas; and ~Eneas, bearing in
his hand the olive-bough of a suppliant, is led by the
young chief before his father.  In a well- studied
speech he claims kindred with the Arcadian hero,
albeit a Trojan and Greek might at first sight seem
natural enemies. Dardanus of Troy traced his descent
from Atlas - Evander's genealogy goes back to the
same great ancestor. Their mutual enmity with the
Latians should be also a bond of union: and lo! AEneas
has shown his goodwill and confidence in thus placing
himself fearlessly in Evander's power.  Evander is
the Nestor of the Anleid;-somewhat given to long
stories and reminiscences of his own youth. He had
known his present visitor's father well, in the years
gone by, when the Trojan court had visited the.
country of Priam's sister Hesione.




AENEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER. 147


"A boy was I, a stripling lad,
My cheek with youth's first blossom clad;
I gazed at Priam and his train
Of Trojan lords, and gazed again:
But great Anchises, princely tall,
Was more than Priam, more than all.
With boyish zeal I schemed and planned
To greet the chief, and grasp his hand.
I ventured, and with eager zest
To Pheneus brought my honoured guest.
A Lycian quiver he bestowed
At parting, with its arrowy load,
A gold-wrought scarf, and bridle-reins
Of gold, which Pallas still retains."
He tells his visitor also, at very considerable length,
the story of Hercules slaying the monster Cacus, son
of Vulcan, half man and half beast, whose breath was as
flames of fire, and whose diet was human flesh-the
prototype of the giants of later fiction. le points out
also to his guest the local features of the country-for
they are standing on the site which is to be Rome,
and Pallanteum is to become the Palatine mount of
future history. Whatever of mythical legend the poet
mixed up in his topography, he knew the interest
with which his patrician audience-for antiquarianism
was almost as fashionable in the court of the Caesars
as it is now-would listen while, by the mouth of
Evander, he dwelt on the old historic localities of
the imperial city: the Carmental gate, named after the
nymph who was Evander's mother; the grove where
Romulus in after-days made his first "Asylum" for
the motley band whom he gathered round him; the




148


TRE EN EID.


Tarpeian rock; the hill on which was to stand the
Capitol; the Janiculum, with its Saturnian walls, the
key of Rome's defences.   "Now "-says the poet,
speaking in his own person of the glories of the great
city in his own day,"Now all is golden-then 'twas all
O'ergrown with trees and brushwood tall
E'en their rude hinds the spot revered:
Here in this grove, these wooded steeps,
Some god unknown his mansion keeps;
Arcadia's children deem
Their eyes have looked on Jove's own form,
When oft he summons cloud and storm,
And seen his wegis gleam."
A league is made between the Trojans and their new
friends. King Evander confesses that his own power
is small, but ZEneas has arrived at a fortunate conjuncture. The Etruscans of Agylla, who have just
expelled their tyrant Mezentius for his cruelties, have
determined to pursue him to the death.  But they
have been warned by their soothsayer to choose a
foreign leader; and here they are at the gates of
Pallanteum, come to beseech Evander to head their
expedition. He is himself too old-his son Pallas too
inexperienced; he at once presents to thenm Eneas as
a heaven-sent leader. The omens are all favourable,
and both troops and commander are well pleased.
AEneas selects the best of his crew, whom Evander
furnishes with war-horses; the rest he sends back in
the galleys to bear the tidings of his own movements




zENEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER. 149
to his son Iulus, and to charge him and the Trojans to
keep close within their rampart, in case of attack during
his absence. Taking command of his Etruscan allies,
and followed by four hundred Arcadian horse under
the young Pallas, whom his father gladly sends, as the
youths of noble houses were sent in the days of
knighthood, to learn the art of war under so great a
captain, ZEneas sets out on his march for Turnus's
capital.  The old king does not part from  his son
without sad misgivings; he has trusted AEneas with
more than his life.
Venus has not been neglectful of her son.   She
has persuaded Vulcan to forge for him weapons and
armour of such sort as only the immortal smith can
make. The fire-god can never resist her blandishments;
and he goes down to the forge where the Cyclops are
ever at work, in the caverns beneath the Lipari Islands, off the coast of Sicily. There is much business
in hand there already. Some of the one-eyed workmen are forging bolts for Jupiter, composed of four
elements,"Three rays they took of forky hail,
Of watery cloud three rays,
Three of the wingbd southern gale,
Three of the ruddy blaze." *
Some are finishing a war-chariot for Mars; others are
shaping an aegis for Minerva-a shield of dragon's
scales and rings of gold. But their master bids them
* The thunderbolt is usually represented on ancient coins
and medallions with twelve rays.




150


THE ENNEID.


put all these tasks aside; War, and Wisdom, and
even Government itself, must be content to come to
a standstill, until the behests of Beauty have been
obeyed.
The idea of the Shield of ~Eneas, which Venus
comes and lays before him while he sleeps, is of course
borrowed directly from Homer's Shield of Achilles.
But the working out of it is quite original. Vulcan's
subject, in this case, is not, as in the Shield of the
Iliad, an epitome of human life, but a prophetic history of Rome. The wlole passage in which it is elaborately described is of remarkable beauty even to our
modern taste, and upon a Roman's ear and imagination
must have had a wonderful effect. The story is told
in eight (or perhaps nine) compartments, filled with
the leading events in the great city's existence.  The
two first contain the birth of Romulus, and the union
of the Romans with the Sabines, which began with
the seizure of the Sabine women:
"There too the mother-wolf he made
In Mars's cave supinely laid:
Around her udders undismayed
The gamesome infants hung,
While she, her loose neck backward thrown,
Caressed them fondly, one by one,
And shaped them with her tongue.
Hard by, the towers of Rome he drew
And Sabine maids in public view
Snatched 'mid tile Circus games:
So 'twixt the fierce Romulean brood
And Tatius with his Cures rude
A sudden war upfiames.




.ENEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER. 161


And now the kings, their conflict o'er,
Stand up in arms Jove's shrine before,
From gollets pour the sacred wine,
And make their peace o'er bleeding swine."
The doom of Mettius the Alban, and the keeping of
the Tiber bridge by Horatius against Lars Porsena,
occupy the two nextcompartments.     Next comes
the defence of the Capitol against the Gauls by
Manlius:"A silver goose in gilded walls
With flapping wings announced the Gauls;
And through the wood the invaders crept,
And climbed the height while others slept.
Golden their hair on head and chin:
Gold collars deck their milk-white skin:
Short cloaks with colours checked
Shine on their backs: two spears each wields
Of Alpine make: and oblong shields
Their brawny limbs protect."
In the succeeding compartments are wrought the
procession of the Salii with the sacred shields, and the
regions of the world below, where Catiline lies in tormeint, while Cato has his portion with the just.  And
within the whole, round the umbo or boss of the
slield, there runs a sea of molten gold in which sport
silver dolphins, framing the centre design-the glories
of Augustus:"There in the midmost meet the sight
The embattled fleets, the Actian fight:
Leucate flames with warlike show,
And golden-red the billows glow.




162


THE 'ENEID.


Here Caesar, leading from their home
The fathers, people, gods of Rome,
Stands on the lofty stern:
The constellation of his sire
Beams o'er his head, and tongues of fire
About his temples burn,
With favouring Gods and winds to speed
Agrippa forms his line:
The golden beaks, war's proudest meed,
High on his forehead shine.
There, with barbaric troops increased,
Antonius, from the vanquished East,
And distant Red-sea side,
To battle drags the Bactrian bands
And Egypt; and behind him stands
(Foul shame!) the Egyptian bride."
There the gods of Rome-conspicuous amongst whom
is the archer Apollo, the tutelary deity of the house of
Caesar-put to flight the dog-headed Anubis, and the
other monstrous gods of Egypt. There, too, is blazoned the " triple triumph " of Augustus, graced by a
long procession of captives of all tribes, from Scythia
to the Euphrates.
"Such legends traced on Vulcan's shield
The wondering chief surveys:
On truth in symbol half revealed
HIe feeds his hungry gaze,
And high upon his shoulders rears
The fame and fates of unborn years."




CHAPTER X.


TURNUS ATTACKS THE TROJAN ENCAMPMENT.
AENEAS had been right in his forebodings of danger.
Turnus has heard of the chief's absence, and takes advantage of it to lead his force at once against the newbuilt fortification in which the rest of the Trojans
lie. His first attempt is to burn their galleys, where
they lie drawn ashore on the river-bank, close to their
lines. But the ships are built of the sacred pines of
Ida, the special favourites of the great goddess Cybele;
and she has endued them, by favour of Jupiter, with
the power of transformation into sea-nymphs when their
work is done. No sooner do the torches of the enemy
touch them than they slide off into the water, and in
their new shape float out to sea. Even this portent
does not scare the leader of the Rutuli.  "Lo!" he
cries-" Heaven takes from our enemies even their
hopes of flight!"  He does but draw his leaguer all
the closer round the Trojan lines. Throughout the night
the watch-fires blaze at close intervals, and captains
of the guard, each with a hundred men, are set at
their several posts to prevent the escape of the prey




154


THE ASNEID.


before the general attack which is ordered for the
morning.
But the Rutulian chieftains grow weary of a monotonous duty. They have store of wine in their camp,
and they bring it out to cheer their night-watch. The
sounds of noisy revelry soon rise from every station,
until, as the revellers are gradually overpowered by
sleep, all is lulled into unusual silence.
Two Trojan sentinels have watched anxiously every
sound and movement in the enemy's lines. They
are Nisus and his young friend Euryalus,-late among
the competitors in the foot-race-inseparable in peace
or war. Nisus sees, as he thinks, an opportunity for
stealing through the Rutulian guards, and bearing
news to AEneas at Pallanteum of the peril in which
his son and his companions lie. He is a keen sportsman, and knows the forest by-paths well. He confides his design to Euryalus, but has no notion of taking
the youth with him to share the danger. He, on the
other hand, insists upon accompanying his friend.
The consent of lulus and his elder counsellors is
readily obtained.  Let them but bring back _LEneas
to the rescue, and no rewardls and honours shall be
too great for the pair. Turnus's horse and armour,
Latinus's royal demesne, captives of price, shall be the
guerdon of Nisus: for Euryalus, -the prince will
adopt him henceforth as his personal esquire and companion in arms. One only request the youth has to
make.   He has an aged mother in the camp-the
only one of the elder matrons who refused to be left
in safety with Acestes in Sicily, and whom no dangers




TURNUS ATTACKS THE ENCAMPMENT. 155


could separate from her son. Will the prince promise
her solace and protection, should harm befall Euryalus
on the way? The answer of Iulus is given in tears;
he has no mother left, and the mother of Euryalus
shall be to him as his own. lie girds the youth with
the sword from his own side, and the friends set out
upon their perilous errand, escorted to the gates by
the Trojan captains with prayers and blessings.
The enterprise might have succeeded, had not the
two friends been tempted, by the helpless state in
which they found the Rutulian camp, to slaughter
their sleeping enemies as they passed. Rhamnes and
Remus-names to be borne hereafter by more historic
actors in tle history of Rome-with a crowd of victims of lesser note, fall by the swords of Nisus
and his companion.   Euryalus even stops, with a
young man's vanity, to put on the glittering belt
which he has stripped from one of his victims, and the
helmet of the sleeping Messapus. Thus precious time
is lost, and the moonlight streams upon them as they
clear the Rutulian lines, and take the path, which
Nisus knows, for Pallanteum.
A detachment of the enemy's cavalry is on the
march to join Turnus. The glimmer of the moonlight on Euryalus's helmet-his new prize-betrays
the friends as they try to steal by, and they are
challenged at once by Volscens, the commander.
They fly to the neighbouring wood; but the horsemen surround it, and though Nisus escapes thenr,
it is only to find that his friend has fallen into their
hands.  He rushes back, and in the wild hope of




1.56


THK ENEID.


affecting a rescue, hides himself in the thicket, whence
he launches two spears with fatal effect upon the party
who are dragging along their prisoner. Enraged at
the sudden attack, and seeing no enemy in the darkness, Volscens lays hold upon Euryalus, and vows
revenge. Nisus rushes from his cover, and implores
them to turn their swords on him, and to spare a
youth whose only crime has been his friendship.
"In vain he spoke: the sword, fierce driven,
That alabaster breast had riven.
Down falls Euryalus, and lies
In death's enthralling agonies:
Blood trickles o'er his limbs of snow;
His head sinks gradually low:
Thus, severed by the ruthless plough,
Dim fades a purple flower:
Their weary necks so poppies bow,
O'erladen by the shower.
But Nisus on the midmost flies,
With Volscens, Volscens in his eyes:
In clouds the warriors round hin rise,
Thick hailing blow on blow:
Yet on he bears, no stint, no stay;
Like thunderbolt his falchion's sway:
Till as for aid the Rutule shrieks
Plunged in his throat the weapon reeks
The dying hand has reft away
The lifeblood of its foe.
Then, pierced to death, asleep he fell
On the dead breast he loved so well."
With the first dawn Turnus leads his forces to the
attack-the heads of Nisus and Euryalus borne in
front upon the points of spears, so savage is the Rutu



TURNUS ATTACKS THE ENCAMPMENT.            157
lian at the slaughter made by them anlongst his sleep
ing comrades. The mother of Euryalus has heard the
news, and sees the ghastly trophies from the ramparts.
Iulus performs his promise, and the frantic woman is,
under his personal directions, tenderly removed. He
himself becomes the hero of the day. The archer's
craft, his love of which had led to the feud with the
Latins, is turned to good service in the defence of
the camp. Numanus, a brother-in-law of Turnus, is
loudly taunting the Trojans in front of their lines:"Twice captured Phrygians! to be pent
Once more in leaguered battlement,
And plant unblushingly between
Yourselves and death a stony screen!
Lo, these the men that draw their swords
To part our ladies from their lords!
What god, what madness brings you here
To taste of our Italian cheer?
No proud Atridaw leads our vans:
No false Ulysses talks and plans:
E'en from the birth a hardy brood,
We take our infants to the flood,
And fortify their tender mould
With icy wave and ruthless cold.
Early and late our sturdy boys
Seek through the woods a hunter's joys:
Their pastime is to tame the steed,
To bend the bow and launch the reed.
Our youth, to scanty fare inured,
Made strong by labour oft endured,
Subdue the soil with spade and rake,
Or city walls with battle shake.
Through life we grasp our trusty spear:
It strikes the foe, it goads the steer:




158


TIHE,ENEID.


Age cannot chill our valour: no,
The helnet sits on locks of snow;
And still we love to store our prey,
And eat the fruits our arms purvey.
You flaunt your robes in all men's eyes,
Your saffron and your purple dyes,
Recline on downy couch, or weave
The dreamy dance from morn to eve:
Sleeved tunics guard your tender skins,
And ribboned mitres prop your chins.
Phrygians!-nay rather Phrygian fair!
Hence, to your Dindymus repair!
Go where the flute's congenial throat
Shrieks through two doors its slender note,
Where pipe and cymbal call the crew;
These are the instruments for you:
Leave men, like us, in arms to deal,
Nor bruise your lily hands with steel."
Iulus, after brief prayer to Jupiter, sends an arrow
through the boaster's temples. But Apollo, taking the
shape of the boy's guardian, Butes, warns him to be
content with this first triumph: such weapons,- says
he of the silver bow, with that jealousy of mortals
common to all pagan divinities, are not for boys.
Attack and defence are maintained vigorously on
either side.  Turnus is everywhere, dealing death
where he comes. Mezentius, the infidel, tries to fire
the palisade: Messapus, "the horse-tamer," calls for
ladders to scale it.   A  detachment of Volscians
form a "tortoise," by linking their slieldls like a penthouse over their heads, and under this cover try to
plant their ladders; but the Trojans hoist a huge rock
aloft, and dash it down with murderous effect upon




TURNVUS A TTA CKS THE ENC.. MI'MENT.   15S
the roof of shields, crushing the bearers underneath;
A tall wooden flanking-tower is set on fire by Turnus,
and falls over, with its defenders, among the enemy.
Two only survive the fall, one of whom-a slave-born
warrior, who bears a blank shield-flings himself into
the Rutulian ranks, and dies there fighting against
overwhelming numbers.   The other, Lycus, a swift
and active runner, reaches the rampart of the intrenchment, and nearly succeeds in climbing over amongst
his friends, when Turnus grasps him and bears him
off, in spite of the missiles showered down by his
sympathising comrades.
Pandarus and Bitias, two brothers of gigantic stature,
have charge of one of the gateways of the intrenched
camp. They throw the double gates wide open, and
take their stand, one on either side, within.  Fast as
the more venturous spirits among the enemy rush
through, they are either felled by the giant warders, or,
if they escape these first, are slain inside by the other
Trojans, who even carry the battle outside the gates.
Word comes to Turnus of the increasing boldness of
the enemy. He rushes to the rescue, slays right and
left, and brings Bitias to the ground by hurling at him
a huge falarica-a spear used in the great catapults
which formed the artillery of those days. His brother
Pandarus by main strength closes.the great gates,
shutting out some of his unfortunate friends as well
as his enemies, and shutting in, to the dismay of the
Trojans, their terrible enemy. When he sees Turnus,
however, he rushes upon him to avenge his brother's
death; but the Rutulian cleaves him with his keen




160


THE ENEID.


falchion down to the chin. Then he turns on the
dismayed defenders, and smites them right and left.
Had he but bethought himself then to open the gates
once more, and let his comrades in, so cowed were the
Trojans at the moment that their defeat was certain.
But all his heart is set on slaughter, and the Trojans,
rallied by Mnestheus (the hero of the galley-race),
soon find out that he is alone. Nevertheless he fights
his way gallantly towards the river.
"The Trojans follow, shouting loud,
And closer still and closer crowd.
So when the gathering swains assail
A lion with their brazen hail,
He, glaring rage, begins to quail,
And sullenly departs:
For shame his back he will not turn,
Yet dares not, howsoe'er he yearn,
To charge their serried darts
So Turnus lingeringly retires,
And glows with ineffectual fires.
Twice on the foe e'en then he falls,
Twice routs and drives them round the walls:
But from the camp in swarms they pour,
Nor Juno dares to help him more.
At length, accoutred as he stood,
Headlong he plunged into the flood.
The yellow flood the charge received,
With buoyant tide his weight upheaved,
And cleansing off the encrusted gore,
Returned him to his friends once more."




CHAPTER XL


THE DEATH O PALLAS.
THE scene changes to Olympus, where Jupiter holds a
council of the gods. He is as much troubled as in the
Iliad with the dissensions in his own court, and holds
the balance with difficulty between his queen and his
daughter, each unscrupulous in their partisanship.
Venus complains to him bitterly of the peril in which
her son Aneas stands, by reason of Juno's machinations. That goddess replies, with considerable show ~
of reason, that AEneas has brought his troubles upon
himself; that Latinus and Turnus and Lavinia were
all going on peacefully before he came; and thatif the whole history of the Trojans must needs be
discussed again-Venus herself, by her instrument
Helen, was the mother of all the mischief. The king
of the gods somewhat loses patience, and swears by
the great river of Styx, with the awful nod which
shakes Olympus, that Trojan and Rutulian shall even
fight it out, and the Fates shall decide the question.
So he dissolves the Olympian convocation.
The fight at the Trojan encampment is renewed iih
A.. voL v.                         L




162


THE,ENEID.


the morning as fiercely as ever. But succours are on
their way. The ships of the Etruscan leader Tarchon
-the name which future kings of Rome were to
bear with little alteration-have been sailing all night
down the Tyrrhenian Sea, under their new-found chief
2Eneas. His galley leads the van; and with him in
the stern-for he takes the helm himself-sits young
Pallas, hearing him tell of the great deeds of old. The
poet gives us something like a muster - roll of the
Etruscan chiefs and their followings; more interesting
perhaps to the ear of a Roman, who would catch up here
and there some historical allusion to a place or family
with which he claimed some connection, than to the
modern reader, who can have no such sympathies. I He
gives us, too, the figure-heads from which the ships cf
the most noted captains took their names: the Tiger
-a favourite, it would seem, to our English nautical
taste even down to the present day-the Centaur, the
Apollo, the Triton, the Mincius-the last-named from
the river that flowed by Virgil's own town of Mantua,"Fair town! her sons of high degree,
Though not unmixed their blood;
Three races swell the mingled stream:
Four states from each derive their birth:
Herself among them sits supreme,
Her Tuscan blood her chiefest worth."
IEneas has a strange rencontre in his night-voyage.
Suddenly there rises round his galley a circle of waternymphs-they are his own vessels, thus transformed,
and their errand is to warn him of the danger in wiich




THE DEATH OF PALLAS.


163


Iulus and his people lie. The sight which meets his
eyes as he enters the Tiber at daybreak confirms their
tidings: he sees the camp surrounded by enemies.
Standing high upon his deck, he raises aloft the
wondrous shield.  The Trojans recognise in the signal
the arrival of the help they so sorely need, and welcome
it with prolonged shouts. Then their enemies note it
also, —and the fight grows fiercer still.  Tarchonwho seems to act as captain of the fleet under ~Eneas
as admiral-looks out a good place to beach the galleys,
bids the men give way with a will, and runs them
well up, the forepart high and dry-all, except the
gallant captain himself, whose vessel breaks her back
and goes to pieces.
Turnus has left the command of the storming-party
to his lieutenants, and gone down himself with a
picked force to oppose AEneas's landing. The Arcadian
contingent, unused to fighting on foot and half in the
water, get into confusion, and turn. Young Pallas
gallantly rallies them, for the honour of his countrymen.   He himself wins his spurs, in this his first field,
by deeds which would become LEneas himself.    One
brief episode in his exploits is pathetic enough.  There
are fighting on the Rutulian side the twin-brothers
Thymber and Larides:"So like, the sweet confusion e'en
Their parents' eyes betrayed;
But Pallas twin and twin between
Has cruel difference made;
For Thymber's head the steel has shorn;
Larides' severed hand forlorn
Feels blindly for its lord;




164


I'THE XVEID.


The quivering fingers, half alive,
Twitch with convulsive gripe, and strive
To close upon the sword."
Young Lausus, the son of the tyrant Mezentius, is
leading his men against Pallas, when a greater soldier
interposes between the two young heroes.   Turnus
comes, and Pallas meets him eagerly-yet not without full consciousness of the inequality of the combat.
He hurls his spear, so strongly and truly that it penetrates through Turnus's shield, and slightly grazes his
body. Then Turnus launches his weapon in return,
and it goes right through the metal plates and tough
ox-hide of the shield, and through the corselet of Pallas,
deep into his breast, and the young prince falls to the
ground writhing in his dying agony. Turnus stands
astride of the corpse, and shouts triumphantly to the
discomfited Arcadians. Yet there is something generous, according to the fierce code of the times, in his
treatment of his dead enemy; he neither strips the
armour, nor makes any attempt to prevent the Arcadians from carrying off the body. He bids them bear
it home to King Evander for burial; only with a warning as to what fate awaits the allies of the foreigner:"Who to LEneas plays the host,
Must square the glory with the cost."
One trophy he takes from the person of the dead
prince-a belt richly embroidered in gold with the
tale of the daughters of Danaus. He girds it on over
his armour, unconscious of the influence it will have
upon his own fate.




THE DEATH OF PALLAS.


165


Aneas, in a different quarter of the field, hears of
the death of his young esquire, and furiously hews his
way towards Turnas. All who cross his path, veteran
chiefs and young aspirants to glory, alike go down before him, and no appeal.for mercy checks his hand.
Eight prisoners he takes alive; but only with the
intent to slay them as victims at the funeral pile of
Pallas. But the rival champions do not meet as yet.
Juno, fearing the issue of an encounter with AEneas in
his present mood, cheats the eyes of Turnus with a
phantom in his enemy's shape. When Turnus meets
it in the fight, the shape turns and flies towards the
ships, pursued by him with bitter taunts on Trojan
cowardice.  One galley has her gangway down, and
the false zEneas takes refuge on board. Turnus follows;
when the moorings are loosed by an invisible hand,
the galley floats down stream, and the Rutulian, raving and half determined to end his disgrace by suicide
when he finds out how he has been cheated, is swept
along the coast to his own town of Ardea.
Mezentius takes his place, and seconded by his son
Lausus, spreads slaughter amongst the Trojan ranks.
But a spear cast by the strong hand of ~Eneas lodges
in the groin of the father, and the son gallantly rushes
forward to cover his retreat. )Eneas warns the youth
to stand back-some thought, it may be, of Pallas
makes him unwilling to take the younger life; but
Lausus dares his fate, and the Trojan falchion, driven
home through his light shield and broidered vest

" The vest his mother wove with gold "



166


THE.ENEID.


reaches the young chief's heart. AEneas can be generous too. He will not strip the body; nay, he chides
the cowardice of Lausus's comrades, who hesitate to
lift the dying youth, and himself raises him carefully
from the ground, and gives him what comfort may be
gathered from the fact that he has met his death "at
XAneas's hand."
Mezentius hears of the death of his son as he lies
by the river-bank bathing his wound. With a cry of
agony the father bewails his own crimes, which had
thus brought death upon his innocent son. Crippled
as he is, he calls for his good horse Rhaebus, who has
ever hitherto borne him home victor from the battle.
To-day they two will carry home the head of iEneas, or
fall together. Hle charges desperately upon the Trojan,
who is right glad to meet him. Thrice he wheels his
horse round his wary enemy, hurling javelin after
javelin, which the Vulcanian shield receives on its
broad circumference, and retains until it looks, in the
poet's language, like a grove of steel. At last jEneas
launches a spear which strikes Mezentius's horse full in
the forehead, and poor Rh-ebus rears, and rolling over
in his dying agonies, pins his master to the ground.
ZEneas rushes in upon the fallen champion, who, disdaining to ask quarter, bares his throat to the sword,
and dies as fearlessly as he has lived.




CHAPTER XII.


THE DEATH OF CAMILLA.
ANEAS'S first care, after raising a trophy crowned with
the arms of the slain Mezentius, is to send home to
Evander the body of his son. A picked detachment
escort it to Laurentum with all honour, wrapped in
robes of gold ---embroidered robes, wrought by the
hands of the unfortunate Dido. The youth's charger,
AEthon, is led behind the bier, and his lance and helm
are also borne in the procession; a custom which we
have borrowed from the Romans, and retain to this
day in our military funerals. ZEthon weeps copious
tears for his dead master; an incident not so entirely
due to a poet's imagination as it may seem, since the
historian Suetonius tells us that some favourite horses
of Julius Caesar showed the same tokens of grief, and
refused their food, just before his death.  Another
feature in the obsequies of Pallas is happily obsolete;
the prisoners whom uEneas had taken alive with this
express object follow behind the corpse, to be sacrificed
at the funeral pile. There was nothing horrible to the
polished courtiers of Augustus in such a thought. Even




168


THE l NE1D.


in that age of refinement and civilisation, the en-peror
himself, after the defeat of Antony's party at Perusia,
was said to have slaughtered three hundred prisoners
in honour of the great Julius, to whom altars were
raised as a demi-god. True, the story was probably
an invention of political opponents; but the mere fact
that such a story cculd be invented and believed,
marks strongly the cruel temper of the age. The old
king receives back, in bitter grief, all that remains to
him of the gallant son whom he had so lately sent
forth to his first fatal field: and he charges ~Eneas,
by the mouth of the envoys, to avenge him on his
son's murderer-for this he only waits to close his own
eyes.
A truce of twelve days is agreed upon between the
armies for the burial of their dead. The Latins have
meanwhile sent an embassy to ask aid from Diomed,
the hero of the Trojan war, who has come home and
settled in Italy. He is paying the penalty of having
wounded Venus in the battle before Troy, and is not
allowed to reach his native Argolis.  He warns the
ambassadors that it is not good to war against the race
from which   Eneas comes-he, for his part, will have
no more of it. At this crisis the Latins hold a council
of war. Their king advises a compromise with the
enemy-a grant of land on which to settle, or a new
equipped fleet to carry the fortunes of Troy yet further
on.   Then there rises in the council one Drances, a
better orator than warrior, who boldly proposes to
give the princess Lavinia to the bridegroom whom tie
gods have sent. Or, let Turnus meet ~Eneas in single




THE DEATH OF CAMILLA.


combat-why are the rest to suffer for his pride? Is
all Latium to be steeped in blood that Turnus may
have a princess to wife?  Turnus is not slow to reply.
He will go forth to meet the Trojan willingly-will
Drances follow him?
Even while they thus debate, lEneas has left his
intrenchments by the Tiber, and is marching on the
city. The queen with her daughter and the terrified
women betake themselves to the temples, while Turnus
sets himself to marshal his allies for the defence.
While some are left to guard the walls, the whole
force of cavalry ride out to meet the enemy. His best
lieutenant for this service is the huntress Camilla.
She leads her light Volscian horse, supported by Messapus with his heavier Latins, to meet the cavalry
of Eneas, while Turnus with his squadron lays an
ambuscade for him in a wooded valley.     Camilla,
with her fair staff of followers, Tulla and Tarpeianames of ominous sound to Roman ears-deals slaughter in the enemy's ranks in no feminine fashion.
"A Phrygian mother mourned her son
For every dart tmat new."
But, fierce Amazon as she is, she is tempted by a
woman's love of ornament. There is a Trojan, one
Chlorus, priest as well as man-at-arms, conspicuous for
the brilliant accoutrements of his charger and himself
His horse is covered with chain-armour clasped with
gold; and purple and saffron, and gold embroiderythe full splendours of Asiatic costume which he affects
-mark him out as a tempting prey. It might havu




170


THE IENEID.


been, the poet suggests, a desire to deck some of her
national temples with such distinguished spoils,-or
it might have been, he admits, only a woman's fancy
to wear them herself,-but she singles him out and
chases him over the field, regardless of her own safety.
Arruns the Tuscan has long sought his opportunity,
and his spear reaches Camilla as she gallops in headlong pursuit of her gay enemy.
"In vain she strives with dying hands
To wrench away the blade:
Fixed in her ribs the weapon stands,
Closed by the wound it made.
Bloodless and faint, she gasps for breath;
Her heavy eyes sink down in death;
Her cheek's bright colours fade."
So dies Camilla; and the Volscian horse are so dis
heartened by her loss that they turn and fly to the city,
so closely pursued by the Trojans that the gates have
to be hastily closed, shutting out in many cases
friends as well as foes.. Turnus leaves the cover of
the wood to attack    IlEeas, but night falls on the
plain before their forces meet.




CHAPTER XIIT


THE LAST COMBAT.
TimE spirit of the Latins is wellnigh broken-they
feel that their cause is a failing one. And Turnus sees
angry eyes bent upon him, as the cause of this ill-fated
war. He will take all hazards, then, upon himself:
there shall be no more blood shed of Latin or Rutulian
-unless it be his own. He declares his intention to
Latinus-he will meet ~Eneas in single combat. The
old king is reluctant to allow it: Queen Amata, with
tears and prayers, begs him to forego his resolution.
Lavinia herself-such is the entire reticence of the
maiden nature in epic story-speaks no word throughout the whole. But, as modern critics have long discovered, there is no question but that she has a sentiment for Turnus. She hardly could have a thought of
AEneas, whom she had never seen. When she hears
her mother's appeal to the Rutulian prince, she does
almost more than speak-she blushes, through her
tsars.
"Deep crimson glows the sudden flame,
And dyes her tingling cheek with shame.




172


THE EINEID.


So blushes ivory's Indian grain,
When sullied with vermilion stain:
So lilies set in roseate bed
Enkindle with contagious red."
These last four lines, in Mr Conington's version, read
like a bit of Waller or Lovelace-and yet they are a
fairly close translation of the original.
The challenge is sent to ~Eneas, and by him joyfully
accepted.  There shall be solemn truce between Trojan and Rutulian, while the rival champions do battle
for the princess and the kingdom. Turnus, too, has
one weapon of Vulcan's forging-his father's sword.
But now, in his haste for the combat, he snatches up
and girds on a blade of less divine temper. The lists
are set between the two lines, and the oaths duly
sworn.  XEneas calls the gods to witness, that if the
victory falls to Turnus, the Trojans on their part shall
retire at once to Evander's colony, and make war no
more on Latium. Or even if he himself be the conqueror, he will not treat the Latins as a conquered
race:"I will not force Italia's land
To Teucrian rule to bow;
I seek no sceptre for my hand,
No diadem for my brow:
Let race and race, unquelled and free,
Join hands in deathless amity."
But at once, before the rivals meet, by the instigation of Juno the truce is broken on the part of the
Rltulians.  They have a strong fear that their own
chalmpion, young and gallant as he is, is no equal




THE LAST COMBAT.


173


match in arms for the great AEneas: he is but moving
to his death. So speaks the seer Tolumnius, and points
to an omen on the river- bank: an eagle swooping
down upon a flock of swans, and bearing one off in his
talons, but put to flight when they turn in a body and
pursue him. IEneas is the bird of prey-they are the
unwarlike swans; let them but turn on him, and he
too will fly. The seer is not content with the mere
exposition of auguries; at once he hurls his own javelin into the Trojan ranks, and brings down his man.
The fight speedily becomes general. iEneas, unarmed
and bareheaded, rushes between the ranks, and is
wounded by an arrow while he calls loudly on his own
men to keep the truce. None knew, or cared to know,
from whose hand the arrow came: for no man, says
the poet, was ever heard to boast of such a coward's
shot.
Then, while iEneas is led to the camp, faint and
bleeding, by his son Iulus and his faithful Achates,while the aged leech, Iapis, vainly tries all his skill
upon the wound-for the barb will not quit the flesh,
-Turnus spreads slaughter among the Trojan ranks.
But only for a while. Venus drops a healing balsam
into the water with which her son's wound is being
bathed; at once the arrow-head drops out, and the
hero stands up sound and whole. Again he dons the
Vulcanian armour, and re-enters the battle.  The
Rutulians give way before him, but he scorns to smite
the fugitives, and seeks out only Turnus. And Turnus, pale and unnerved-for the presage of his fate
lies heavy upon his soul-has no longer any mind to




174


THE zENEID.


meet him. It is very strange, to our modern notions
of heroism, to see this infirmity of resolution in a tried
soldier and captain like Turnus. But the heroes of
these elder days lose heart at once when they feel
their star is no longer in the ascendant. Turnus, like
Hector in the Iliad, shrinks from the fate which he
foresees.
Turnus has a sister, Juturna, a river-nymph and
demi-goddess, a favourite of Juno, who has warned
her if possible to save her brother. She now takes
the place of his charioteer, and, while she drives
rapidly over the field, takes care to keep him far from
JAneas, who is calling loudly on him to halt and keep
his compact of personal duel.   At last the Trojan
leader, baffled in this object, throws all his forces
suddenly on the town, which lies almost at his mercy,
stripped of its defenders, and bids his captains bring
torches and scaling-ladders.   A  horseman, sorely
wounded in the face, brings word of this new danger
to Turnus as he is wheeling madly over the battlefield, and implores him to come to the rescue. He
looks round towards the walls, and sees the flames
already mounting. Then he rallies once more the old
courage which had so strangely failed him. He sees
his fate as clearly as before, but he will meet it. He
knows his sister now, too late, in his charioteer; but
he will fly no longer —" Is death such great wretchedness, after all?"  He leaps fiomn his chariot, as he
knows, to meet it, lifts his hand, and shouts to his
Rutulians to stay their hands, and the ranks of
both armies divide before him as he makes towards




THE LAST COMBAT.


175


the part of the wall where AEneas is leading the
attack.
"But great JEneas, when he hears
The challenge of his foe,
The leaguer of the town forbears,
Lets town and rampart go,
Steps high with exultation proud,
And thunders on his arms aloud;
Vast as majestic Athos, vast
As Eryx the divine,
Or he that roaring with the blast
Heaves his huge bulk in snow-drifts massed,
The father Apennine."
Trojans, Latins, and Rutulians look on in awe and
admiration as the two chiefs advance to try this last
ordeal of battle.  Each hurl their spears-without
effect; then Turnus draws his sword, and they fight
on hand to hand"Giving and taking wounds alike,
With furious impact home they strike
Shoulder and neck are bathed in gore:
The forest depths return the roar.
So, shield on shield, together dash
tEneas and his Daunian foe;
The echo of that deafening crash
Mounts heavenward from below."
But the faithless sword which Turnus had so carelessly
girded on instead of his father's good weapon, though
it has done him fair service on the crowd of meaner
enemies, breaks in his grasp when he essays it on the




176


THIE   NEID.


armour of Aneas, and thus helpless, he takes to flight,
AEneas hotly pursuing.
"Five times they circle round the place,
Five times the winding course retrace;
No trivial game is here: the strife
Is waged for Turnus own dear life."
A dark-plumaged bird is seen to hover round the
devoted head of the Rutulian chief, half blinding him
with its flapping wings. It is a Fury whom the king
of the gods has sent in that shape to harass him.
At length, in his flight, he finds a huge stone, which
not twelve men of "to-day's degenerate sons" could
lift.
" He caught it up, and at his foe
Discharged it, rising to the throw,
And straining as he runs.
But 'wildering fears his mind unman;
Running, he knew not that he ran,
Nor throwing that he threw;
Heavily move his sinking knees;
The streams of life wax dull and freeze:
The stone, as through the void it past,
Failed of the measure of its cast,
Nor held its purpose true.
E'en as in dreams, when on the eyes
The drowsy weight of slumber lies,
In vain to ply our limbs we think,
And in the helpless effort sink;
Tongue, sinews, all, their powers bely,
And voice and speech our call defy:
So, labour Turnus as he will,
The Fury mocks the endeavour stilL




THE LAST COMBAT.


177


Dim shapes before his senses reel:
On host and town he turns his sight:
He quails, he trembles at the steel,
Nor knows to fly, nor knows to fight:
Nor to his pleading eyes appear
The car, the sister charioteer.
The deadly dart iEneas shakes:
His aim with stern precision takes,
Then hurls with all his frame;
Less loud from battering-engine cast
Roars the fierce stone, less loud the blast
Follows the lightning's flame.
On rushes as with whirlwind wings
The spear that dire destruction brings,
Makes passage through the corselet's marge,
And enters the seven-plated targe
Where the last ring runs round.
The keen point pierces through the thigh,
Down on his bent knee heavily
Comes Turnus to the ground."
The iXltulian prince confesses his defeat, and asks
his life in no craven spirit, for the sake of his aged
father- -buaiing ~Eneas think of old Anchises.  The
conqueror half relents, when his eyes fall upon solething which makes that appeal worse than useless.
" Rolling his eyes, AEneas stood,
And checked his sword, athirst for blotd.
Now faltering more and more he felt
The human heart within him melt,
When round the shoulder wreathed in pride
The belt of Pallas he espied,
And sudden flashed upon his view
Those golden studs so well he knew,
A. o. vol. v.




178


THE AENEID.


Which Turnus in his hour of joy
Stripped from the newly-slaughtered boy,
And on his bosom bore, to show
The triumph of a satiate foe.
Soon as his eyes at one fell draught
Remembrance and revenge had quaffed,
Live fury kifndling every vein,
He cries with terrible disdain:
'What! in my friend's dear spoils arrayed
To me for mercy sue?
'Tis Pallas, Pallas guides the blade;
From your cursed blood his injured shade
Thus takes the atonement due.'
Thus as he spoke, his sword he drave
With fierce and fiery blow
Through the broad breast before him spread;
The stalwart limbs grow cold and dead;
One groan the indignant spirit gave,
Then sought the shades below."
So closes the AEneid. Does any reader complain
that the poet has not carried the story further? With
the death of Turnus the catastrophe is complete.  The
princess of Latium is the prize of the victor; and the
loves of AEneas and Lavinia are certainly not of that
romantic character that we need care to follow them.
The Trojans are settled in Italy-two races under one
name. For so has Jupiter promised, as some indulgence to the feelings of his queen, that the old Latin
name shall at least not be merged in the detested name
of Trojan, and on such terms has the goddess reluc.
tantly acquiesced in the settlement of the wanderers
on Italian ground. Latins, not Trojans, are to rule




THE LAST COMBAT.1


179


the world. Thus has the poet combined the indigenous glories of his country with the grand descent of
its rulers from the old mythical heroes of Troy.
Yet there is a singular vein of melancholy to be
traced in the words of Enneas, when he parts with his
son before he goes to his last victory. They are perhaps the noblest words which the poet has put into
his mouth, and they have something of the sadness
which more or less affects all true nobility:"In his mailed arms his child he pressed,
Kissed through his heln, and thus addressed:
'Learn of your father to be great,
Of others to be fortunate.'"
The old tradition-well known, no doubt, to Virgil's
audience and first readers-was that the son, not the
father, lived to enjoy the sovereignty of Latium. The
hero of many vicissitudes was not held to have
settled down into the peaceful rest which lie looks
forward to, throughout the poet's story, as the end of
all his campaigns and wanderings. The lutulians, so
said the legends, would not yet bow to the foreign
usurper; and AEneas fought his last battle with them
on the banks of the river Numicius, and then, like so
many of the favourite heroes of a people-disappeared;
4!her carried, living or dead, by some divine agency,
to heaven, or caught away in the arms of the rivergod.




CHAPTER XIV.


CONCLUDING REMARKS.
THE IEneid has two drawbacks to its popularity as
an epic poem amongst modern readers. One defect
is common to all classical fiction-that there is no
love-romance, properly so called, on the part either of
the hero or of any other male character in the poem.
Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil
or Homer.   We find in their verse none of those
finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance,
that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy,
as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most
perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has
been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely
of much older birth, has given now for centuries to
poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. Poets had to sing as they could without it in
Virgil's days. Augustus and Octavia, as they listened
to the courtly raconteur, would have opened their eyes
wide with astonishment if he had sung to them of the
devotion of Lancelot, as surely as they would have
laughed at the purity of Galahad. They understood
what love was, in their fashion; many ladies of the




CONCLUDING REMARKS.


181


court sympathised with Dido, no doubt. They understood well enough "the fury of a woman scorned."
They had seen a whole love-poem in real life, with
the appropriate tragical denouement, in Antony and
Cleopatra. That was their notion of the grand passion. Probably the more shrewd among them looked
upon Antony as a fool to prefer "love" to empire,
and applauded ~Eneas's "piety" in obeying the
oracles of the gods, when they pointed to a new wife
whose dowry was a kingdom.. There was quite love
enough in the action of the poem to suit their tastes,
and at anything better or purer they would have only
shrugged their fair patrician shoulders.
But there is a more serious defect in the interest of
the ~Eneid, when presented to English readers. It is,
that AEneas is no hero. All the defences and apologies which have been made for him are perfectly just,
and perfectly unnecessary. He was a hero quite good
enough for the court of Augustus, and so far quite
suitable for Virgil's purpose. Le Bossu was perfectly
right when he contended that a hero, to be an object
of legitimate interest, need not be a pattern of moral
virtues. He might have gone further, and said thai
such paragons, who are plainly superior to the ordinary
weaknesses of human nature, generally make very dull
heroes indeed. Undoubtedly /Eneas is a dutiful son,
a respectable father, and, it may even be admitted, in
spite of the unfortunate way in which he lost his wife,
an exemplary husband. He spread his palms out to
heaven in the most orthodox fashion on all occasions,
and listened obediently to the message which the gods




__v __


182


THE BENEID.


were always sending him, to set up his home in Latium
at all costs. All these estimable qualities are enough
to furnish forth a dozen heroes. He is also ready to
fight on all proper occasions; and as to the charge
that he is equally ready to weep upon all occasions,
which has been brought against him by one set of
critics, and excused by others, both might have spared
their pens; for it is a weakness which may be charged
with equal truth upon most of the heroes, not only of
classical fiction, but of classical history. It is not
only that the chiefs of the Iliad weep without fearing
any imputation against their manliness, but if we are
to trust the unsensational chronicles of Caesar, the
whole rank and file of his army, even the veterans of
the tenth legion-the " fighting division "-when first
they heard that they were to be led against the tall
and truculent-looking Germans, " could not restrain
their tears," and set to work to make their wills forthwith.  The thing is unaccountable, except from some
strange difference of temperament; for who can imagine a company of our veriest raw ploughboy recruits
so behaving themselves 1 They might shake in their
very shoes; they might even very probably run away:
but crying and howling is not our way of expressing
emotion, after childhood is past. But we are accustomed to read of such exhibitions of feeling in the
natives of wvarmer climates, as, for instance, in the
characters of Scripture; and an occasional burst of
tears on Eneas's part would not have unheroed him
in our estimation one whit.  It is his desertion of
Dido which makes an irredeemable poltroon of him in




CONCL UDING REMARKS.


183


all honest English eyes. A woman and a queen receives
the shipwrecked wanderer with a more than Oriental
hospitality; loves him, "not wisely but too well"and he deserts her. And then Mercury is made to
remark, as a reason for gAneas getting away as quickly
as possible, that "varium et mutabile semper feminal"
-that the poor lady's mood was changeable, forsooth!
The desertion is in obedience to the will of the gods,
nc doubt. That explanation satisfied the critics of
Augustus's day, and he was to them, as Virgil calls
him, the "pious" 'Eneas.    To the modern reader,
such an authorisation only makes the treachery more
disgusting. The morality of English romance, ancient
or modern, is by no means immaculate. Tristram and
Iseult, still more Lancelot and Guinevere, are of very
frail clay. The Sir Galahads ride alone; then, now,
and always, in fiction as in fact. But a hero who
could be false to a woman, and who was to find in
that falsehood the turning-point to fame and success,
-he might befit the loose tale with which the rybauder
raised a laugh round the camp-fire, but he was the
subject of no lay to which noble knight or dame would
listen. The passion might be only pars amours, but
it must be loyal. To keep such faith, once pledged,
the hero might break all other laws, divine or human;
but keep it he must.  " Lofaulte passe fout, et faulssete honnet tout."j  The principle is by no means the
highest,, but it is incomparably higher than Virgil's.
And this makes Lancelot, in spite of his great crime, a
hero in one sense, even to the purest mind, aihile the
calculating piety of i Enas is revolting.
O                       n.'''~  Y-~VI



c __


184


TlHrE BNEID.


The apologetic criticisms of some translators, whbe
have felt themselves bound not only to give a faithful
version of their author, but to defend his conception
of a hero, are highly entertaining. Dryden, who was
said by one of his malicious critics to have written
"for the court ladies," admits candidly that he knows
they "will make a numerous party against him," and
that he "cannot much blame them, for, to say the
truth, it is an ill precedent for their gallants to follow;"
winding up with a satirical suggestion that they would
do well at least "to learn experience at her cost."
But in spite of this special pleading, even Dryden
cannot conceal from himself that his hero makes but a
very poor figure in this part of the story; nor can he
resist the humorous remark that lie was more afraid of
Dido, after all, than of Jupiter.  "For you may observe," says he, "that as much intent as he was upon
his voyage, yet he still delayed it until the messenger
was obliged to tell him plainly, that if he weighed not
anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in
the morning."  Delille says that ]Eneas "triumphed
over his passions in order to obey the will of heaveni7
and forgets to add, that the triumph would have been
more complete and more creditable if it had been
achieved somewhat earlier in the story. He notices
the unfortunate fate of poor Creusa,-left to follow as
she might, and never missed till the more fortunate
survivors met at the rendezvous,-only to say how
necessary it was for the purposes of the story to dispose
of her somehow, if there was a new wife awaiting
nEncas in Italy; and how the account (his own ao




CONCLUDING REMARKS.


185


count) of his affectionate search for her (with the usual
tears) must have recommended him to Dido, and ex
cused that poor lady for falling in love with hir
instantly!   Rousseau has more truth in his epigram,
-what could Dido expect better from a man who left
his lawful wife to be burnt in Troy, and vowed he
never missed her?    Segrais, very like a Frenchman of
the days of Louis XIV., thinks all would have been
right if AEneas had but thrown a little more sentiment
into the parting, and had bestowed upon Dido a few
of those tears which were so ready upon less pathetic
occasions.* As to the scene in the Shades,, where the
* Dido has always been a favourite heroine with Frenchmen,
and has been worked up into three or four tragedies. One
writer, partly 'adopting M. Segrais's notion of how things
ought to have been-that is to say, how a Frenchman would
have behaved himself when such a parting was inevitable-has
made LEneas take at least a civil farewell of the injured queen:" Helas! si de mon sort j'avais ici mon choix,
Bornant a vous aimer le bonheur de ma vie,
Je tiendrais de vos mains un sceptre, une patrie:
Les dieux m'ont envie le seul de leurs bienfaits,
Qui pourait reparer tous les maux qu'ils m'ont faits."
And Dido, mollified by this declaration, far from cursing the
fugitive lover in her Last moments, assures him of her unchangeable affection, rather apologising for having so inconvenient]l
fallen in his way, and delayed him so improperly from Lavinia
and his kingdom:"Et toi, d'ont j'ai troublde la haute destin6e,
Toi, qui ne m'entends plus-adieux, mon cher En6e!
Ne crains point ma colere-elle expire avec moi,
Et mles derniers soupirs sont encore pour toi! " t
t Le Franc de Pompiguan, "Didon."




-- -- -3-iLi~ ----i-i --- —ri;=rT-7C- -In;-~I~-~1 


16'J


THE AENEID.


false lover begins at last to make his tardy excuses
and apologies, the French critic fairly throws up his
brief for the defence, and contents himself with the
suggestion that this was one of those passages in the
poem with which Virgil himself was dissatisfied, and
which he must certainly have intended to correct.
But ZEneas has, in fact, little personal character of any
kind. He is only what Keble calls him, "a shadow
with a mighty name; " and that writer even goes so
far as to suggest, that in the curse imprecated upon
him by Dido, and her treatment of him in the Shades,
we may see an intimation that the poet intended the
abasement of his hero.*
Turnus will always find more favour in the eyes of
modern readers than his rival.  Our English sympathies do not run at all with the foreign adventurer
who comes between him and his promised bride, and
who claims both the lady and the kingdom by virtue of
a convenient oracle. Mr Gladstone's may perhaps be
only an ingenious fancy, that Turnus was really the
favourite with the poet himself; that although he
made AEneas victorious, as was required, in order to
carry out the complimentary reference of the Roman
origin to Troy, still the young chief of native Italian
blood, maintaining a gallant struggle for his rights
against gods and men, and only conquered at the last
by supernatural force and fraud, was purposely held
out to popular admiration.  But we must, at least, feel
sympathy with him as utterly over-weighted in the
final struggle by the superior strength and immoi tal
* Prelect., ii. 724.




CONCVLUDlN G RE.MARKS.


187


arms of his adversary, and the flapping of the Fury's
awful wings
To trace the influence of the Eneid upon modern
poetry would require a separate treatise. Spenser is
full of Virgil. Tasso's great poem is in many passages
the ~Eneid made Christian, with its heroes transplanted from the days of Troy to those of the Crusades.
Dante borrows less from him, though with an intenser
reverence he takes him for his " master " and his guide.
In his mind, indeed, Virgil seems to have held a place
midway, as it were, between the Pagan and the Christian life. If Beatrice represents, as has been said, the
heavenly T"Wisdom," Virgil is, in his allegory, the
4uman intellect at its best and purest, which comes as
near heaven as unassisted humanity may; for he is
the guide who only quits the Christian poet when lie
is close to the gates of Paradise.
The "Sortes Virgilianax" were long in use, often
as a fashionable pastime, sometimes in graver earnest: the inquirer opened the volume at random,
and took for the answer of fate the first few lines
which caught his eye.   In the times of the later
Roman emperors, they ranked among the most popular, and perhaps the least objectionable, of the many
superstitious practices which were then so prevalent.
The Emperor Severus was said to have been encouraged in his boyhood by the very words which had
such an effect on Octavia-" Thou shalt be our Marcellus! "  And when subsequently lie slowed a taste
rather for elegant accomplishments than for military
renown, again the " Sortes." consulted for him by his




=======,,I --- —----— -~ —= —~-~ -—;~ --- —-~ —


188


THE.f NEID.


father, gave the well-known lines already quoted,* in
which the glory of the Roman is pronounced to be
that of the conqueror, not of the student or the artist.
The superstition held its ground, through the middle
ages, down to times very near our own. The story rests
upon no mean authority, that Charles I. once tried the
oracle with a startling result. He was in the Bodleian
Library while the Court lay in Oxford, and was tiere
shown a splendid edition of VirgiL  Lord Falkland
suggested to him sportively that he should try the
".Sortes." The lines upon which the king opened are
said to have been these, as they stand in Mr Conington's version:
"Scourged by a savage enemy,
An exile from his son's embrace,
So let him sue for aid, and see
His people slain before his face:
Or when to humbling peace at length
He stoops, be his or life or land,
But let him fall in manhood's strength,
And welter tombless on the sand."
It was a gloomy oracle; and Falkland, anxious to
remove the impression, tried his own fortune. He
lighted on Evander's lament over his son Pallas:"I knew the young blood'b udcdening play,
The charm of battle's first essay;
O valour blighted in the flower!
O first mad drops of war's full shower!"
A few months afterwards Falkland fell at the battle
of Newbury, barely thirty-four years old.
* P. 124.




CONCLUDING REMARKS.


189


There has always been a mystical school of classical
interpretation, who see in the AEneid, as in the Iliad
and Odyssey, a tissue of allegory from first to last. Not
content with identifying the Trojan chief with Augustus, they found a double meaning in every character
and every legend in the poem. Bishop Warburton,
in his well-known 'Divine Legation,' expended a
great amount of learning and research to prove that in
the Descent to the Shades in the sixth book we have
a sketch, scarcely veiled, of the great Eleusinian
mysteries. Others saw in Dido the love-passion and
the fate of Cleopatra, Antony in Turnus, the flight
of Marius to the marshes in the person of Sinon, the
miserable end of Pompey in Priam"The head shorn off, the trunk without a name."
It is impossible to enjoy either Homer or Virgil, if
their text is to be " improved" at every step after this
sort. Augustus and Octavia looked to the poet for a
tale of the olden time, and he told it well. No doubt
he threw in graceful compliments to Rome and its
ruler; but to have to guess at some hidden meaning
all along would have been far too severe a tax on the
imperial audience, and would certainly not heighten
the enjoyment of modern readers.
One would be glad to know what was the view that
was really taken by that profligate court on the one
hand, and by the poet himself on the other, of the
theological machinery of the poem; those powerful
and passionate Genii who pull the wires of the human
puppets to gratify their own preferences and hatreds,




- -; --------—: ---i. -- "r.~IY~- -


190


THIE    VENEID.


and are themselves the slaves of an awful Fate which
overrides them all.  Wherever Justice had fled from
the earth, as the legend ran, in those pagan days, she
had not found refuge in heaven.  The human virtues
which Virgil gives his heroes were no copies of anything celestial  Such lessons as the "gods" taught
were chiefly perfidy and revenge.  For men of intellect and of a pure life-and such is credibly said to
have been Virgil's-the only salvation lay in utter
unbelief of such a creed; or, at most, a stoical submission to that Unknown Fate which ruled all things
human and divine. But even when the forms and
creeds of religion had become a mockery, the rule of
right, however warped, was recognised-in fiction, if
not in fact: and Virgil, though for some reason he
declined to paint the true hero at full length, has
enabled us to pick out his component parts from his
sketches of a dozen characters.


END OF VIROIL,