Virgil

Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story—his escape and his seven years’ wanderings. And Æneas 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.

ÆNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.

It has been said that this poem is a kind of supplement to the Iliad. Æneas 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 The fleet, which had seemed to sail for home, had withdrawn, and lay concealed in the harbour of Tenedos.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 hated Ulysses. He had been fixed upon as a victim 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 Priam 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.[17]

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 movements at sea, we seem to be reading a versified extract from the log of some modern sea-captain:—

The two unhappy youths are first caught and strangled—then the father. The legend is well known to others besides students of the Æneid, 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 families, to prophesy in vain—nor without difficulties which might in themselves have well been considered presages of evil:—

Inside, the fabric is full of armed Greeks. How many there were in number has been disputed—though 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 Diomed (for whose absence it seems hard 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 fire-signal 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 the Greek adventurers, as has been said, emerged from their wooden prison.

In the visions of the night Æneas saw the ghastly spectre of the dead Hector stand before him,—

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 Æneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Æneas, 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.

Æneas 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. Æneas 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.[19] “Fuimus Troes”—Mr Conington’s translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:—

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 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!” The 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.[20]

Æneas 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 the serpent who comes forth after casting its winter slough, is fine in the original, and finely translated:—

And the fate of the unhappy Priam is an equally beautiful picture, of a different tone:—

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

And the ruthless son of Achilles drags the old king to the altar, and slays him there.

One more episode of that terrible night Æneas relates to his hostess:—

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 Æneas, 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 might 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,—

The desperate entreaties of his son were all in vain, until there came an omen from heaven. While Æneas 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 Æneas 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 hand—always 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 Æneas himself, redhanded from the battle, might not touch them. But soon the steps of their enemies were heard in pursuit; and Æneas, 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 men and gods alike in his agony, he retraced his steps towards Troy, and even penetrated unharmed into the 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. Æneas 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 III.

ÆNEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.

So, with his father and his infant son, and carrying with him the national gods and sacred fire of Troy, Æneas 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 resting-place was on the friendly coast of Thrace, where Æneas laid the foundations of a city which was to bear his name. A strange adventure befell him there. While 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 from his body.[21] 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.[22] 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 Æneas 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 remembered that such had been the frequent warning of 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[23]—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:—

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 Æneas 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 Æneas’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 he, 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—

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 Neoptolemus, 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 Æneas, 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 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. Æneas’s words of farewell are these:—

They set sail from this friendly shore, and on the 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, escaping the dangers of Charybdis, and landed under Ætna, 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 Polyphemus, his cannibal meal, and the vengeance which Ulysses took upon him by burning out his eye.[24] Æneas 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.

CHAPTER IV.

DIDO.

but Othello himself has a far simpler and more natural explanation of the matter—

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 Sichæus.

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 Æneas is much needed by a widowed queen. His visit—so Anna thinks—is nothing less than providential—

By all means let them detain their illustrious visitor with them as long as possible—his ships require refitting 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:—

The powers of Olympus here come again upon the scene. Juno sees, not without a secret satisfaction, the prospect of an entanglement between Æneas 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! 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, 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 mediæval in its rich colouring:—

A rejected suitor of the Carthaginian queen,—Iarbas, king of Gætulia,—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 Æneas 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, Æneas 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, however, his resolution is soon taken. He will obey the mandate of the gods, at any cost. He 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 either find or make some opportunity 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 apologists—and 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” Æneas. 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 Æneas 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

But our story must not wait for us to discuss too curiously the morals of the hero. Æneas has thought to make his preparations without the knowledge of the queen—while she

But, as the poet goes on to say, “Who can cheat the eyes of love?” Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly with his “baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Æneid—“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 Æneas 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:—

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 is almost to exaggeration, is more akin to the genius of the French language.[27]

We cannot, however, do better than return to Mr Conington’s version for the sequel:—