The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil by W. Y. Sellar

Eclog. ix. 35.

‘Leporum

Disertus puer ac facetiarum.’ Catullus xii. 8.

The name of Trebatius also, though one associated with law rather than literature, may be added as a connecting link between the friends of Cicero and of Horace.

Munro’s Lucretius, Introduction to Notes, ii. page 305.

‘These writers your fine Hermogenes never reads, nor that ape, whose whole art is to repeat the songs of Calvus and Catullus.’ Hor. Sat. i. 10. 17–19.

Hor. Sat. ii. 1. 11.

Ann. i. 1; Hist. i. 1.

Cf. Juv. ii. 28: In tabulam Sullae si dicant discipuli tres.

Od. iii. 4. 28.

Cf. Eleg. i. 41–42:—

Non ego divitias patrum fructusque requiro

Quos tulit antiquo condita messis avo.

Cf. v. 1. 129–130:—

Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci

Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.

‘Imbellis et firmus parum.’ Ep. i. 16.

Eleg. i. 1; i. 10.

‘On the one side Augustus leading the Italians into battle with the Senate and people, the Penates and the great Gods—on the other Antonius with a barbaric and motley host, advancing in triumph from the peoples of the dawn and the shore of the Red Sea, bears with him Egypt, and the might of the East, and furthest Bactria, and following in his train,—sin accursed!—an Egyptian bride.’ Aen. viii. 678 et seq.

‘Be it thine, O Roman, to govern the nations with thy imperial rule.’

‘Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.’ Ennius.

In the Ancyraean inscription we find the following passage (Bergk’s reading): ‘Legibus novis latis multa revocavi exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostra civitate,’ etc.

Cf. Ancyraean inscription: ‘Templum Apollinis in Palatio cum porticibus, aedem Divi Iulii, Lupercal,’ etc. (where we notice the recognition of the divinity of Julius Caesar, along with the old Olympian and national gods, Apollo, Jupiter Tonans and Feretrius, Quirinus, the Lares and Penates, and with the deified abstractions Libertas and Juventas).

A similar influence is attributed by M. Sainte-Beuve to Louis XIV. After speaking of the freedom and licence of French literature under the patronage of Fouquet, he adds, ‘Le jeune roi vint, et il amena, il suscita avec lui sa jeune littérature; il mit le correctif à l’ancienne, et, sauf des infractions brillantes, il imprima à l’ensemble des productions de son temps un caractère de solidité, et finalement de moralité, qui est aussi celui qui règne dans ses propres écrits, et dans l’habitude de sa pensée.’

Aen. vi. 795.

Hor. Od. iv. 15. 9.

Aen. viii. 678 et seq.

Hor. Od. i. 2. 50.

Aen. i. 287; vi. 796; Hor. Od. iv. 15. 15.

Aen. i. 288.

Georg. ii. 170.

Aen. viii. 716.

Hor. Od. iv. 5. 20; Ep. ii. 1. 2.

‘Ad hoc templum divo Claudio constitutum quasi arx aeternae dominationis aspiciebatur.’ Tac. Ann. xiv. 31.

Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

Od. iii. 3. 9, etc.; Ep. ii. 1. 5.

Aen. vi. 801.

Od. iv. 5.

These comparisons may be more naturally referred to Roman ‘Euhemerism,’ than to the survival of the spirit of hero-worship, which, although still active in Greece, was a mode of feeling alien to the Roman imagination.

Cp. infra, chap. vi.

The belief in the divinity of the genius attending on each individual, and also the custom of raising altars to some abstract quality in an individual, such as the ‘Clemency of Caesar,’ help also to explain this supposed union of the god and man in the person of the Emperor. The language of Virgil in Eclogue IV. also throws light on the ideas possible as to the union of the divine with human nature.

This is indicated by the bare feet.

The substance of these remarks is taken from the late O. Jahn’s ‘Höfische Kunst und Poesie unter Augustus,’ published in his ‘Populäre Aufsätze.’ The account of the cameos is given solely on his authority. Several ideas on the whole subject of the deification of the Emperors are derived from the same source.

Sueton. De Vita Caesarum, ii. 90 et seq.

‘Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia ab aetate prima et cupide et laboriosissime exercuit.’ Sueton. ii. 84.

‘Augusto prompta ac profluens, quaeque deceret principem, eloquentia fuit.’ Tac. Ann. xiii. 3.

‘Aiacem tragoediam scripserat, eandemque, quod sibi displicuisset, deleverat. Postea L. Varius tragoediarum scriptor interrogabat eum, quid ageret Aiax suus. Et ille, “in spongium,” inquit, “incubuit.”’ Macrob. ii. 4. 2.

Sat. ii. 1. 20.

Ep. ii. 1. 248.

Essays Literary and Theological, by R. H. Hutton.

Cf. Propert. El. iv. 9. 34:—

Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides.

Do. ii. 1. 36:—

Et sumta et posita pace fidele caput.

Velleius ii. 88.

Tac. Ann. iii. 30: ‘Ille quamquam prompto ad capessendos honores aditu, Maecenatem aemulatus sine dignitate senatoria multos triumphalium consulariumque potentia anteiit, diversus a veterum instituto per cultum et munditias, copiaque et affluentia luxu propior: suberat tamen vigor animi ingentibus negotiis par, eo acrior quo somnum et inertiam magis ostentabat.’

‘Gallus for whom my love grows from hour to hour even as the green alder-tree shoots up in the early spring.’

Eclog. vi. 70, etc.

Sat. vii. 93, 94.

‘When you say it makes no matter what a man’s father was, provided he is of free-birth.’ Sat. i. 6. 7–8.

‘And as when often in a mighty multitude discord has arisen and the base rabble storms with passion.’

‘Ancus, unduly vain, even already delighting too much in the veering wind of the people’s favour.’

Cp. Merivale’s Roman Empire.

Vester, Camenae, vester in arduos

Tollor Sabinos; seu mihi frigidum

Praeneste, seu Tibur supinum,

Seu liquidae placuere Baiae. Od. iii. 4. 21–24.

Cf. the lines of Juvenal, vii. 66–68, in especial reference to Virgil:—

Magnae mentis opus nec de lodice paranda

Attonitae, currus et equos, faciesque Deorum

Aspicere, et qualis Rutulum confundat Erinnys, etc.

‘’Gainst flaming Sirius’ fury thou

Art proof, and grateful cool dost yield

To oxen wearied with the plough,

And flocks that range afield.’ Martin.

‘May my delight be in the fields and the flowing streams in the dales; unknown to fame may I love the rivers and the woods. O to be, where are the plains, and the Spercheos, and the heights, roamed over in their revels by Laconian maidens, the heights of Taygetus.’

Cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 470: ‘Mollesque sub arbore somni.’
Hor. Ep. i. 14. 35: ‘Prope rivum somnus in herba.’
Virg. Eclog. ii. 40: ‘Nec tuta mihi valle reperti.’
Hor. Ep. i. 11. 10: ‘Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem.’

‘It is great riches for a man to live sparingly with a contented mind.’

Ep. i. 14. 34–35.

Compare Munro’s Lucretius, p. 306 (third edition).

‘To be sleepless through the calm nights, searching by what words and verse I may succeed in holding a bright light before your mind, by which you may be able to see thoroughly things hidden from view.’

‘While I seem ever to be plying this task, to be searching into the nature of things, and revealing it, when discovered, in writings in my native speech.’

iii. 8.

Virg. Eclog. vi. 72; x. 50.

Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

‘All other themes which might have charmed the idle mind in song,’ etc.

Born at Alexandria, but afterwards settled at Rhodes. He ultimately returned to Alexandria.

‘Often did Macer, now advanced in years, read to me his poem on birds, and of the serpent whose sting is deadly, and of the herb that heals.’ Trist. iv. 10. 43–44.

Sueton. De Viris Illustribus.

‘Lead him home from the city, my strain, lead Daphnis home.’

Woermann, Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und Römer; Helbig, Campanische Wandmalerei.

Cf. ‘Senecae praedivitis hortos.’ Juv. ‘Pariterque hortis inhians, quos ille a Lucullo coeptos insigni magnificentia extollebat.’ Tac. Ann. xi. 1.

The substance of these remarks is derived from Helbig’s Campanische Wandmalerei.

Cf. Plautus, Pseudolus, i. 2. 14:—

Neque Alexandrina beluata conchuliata tapetia.

Scholium quoted by W. S. Teuffel in his account of L. Varius.

Tristia, iv. 10. 41, etc.

W. S. Teuffel.

Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius: ille meo quis?

Quis nisi Callimachus? Si plus adposcere visus,

Fit Mimnermus, et optivo cognomine crescit. Ep. ii. 2. 99.

Propertius may have been dead at the time when these lines were published; but we may remember that the famous lines on ‘Atticus’ did not see the light till after the death of Addison.

‘And the musical voice of Horace charmed my ears, while he makes his polished song resound on the Ausonian lyre.’

Od. iv. 3. 13. 16:—

‘At Rome, of all earth’s cities queen,

Men deign to rank me in the noble press

Of bards beloved of man: and now, I ween,

Doth envy’s rancorous tooth assail me less.’ Martin.

Ep. i. 19. 19–20.

‘O servile crew! how oft your antics mean

Have moved my laughter, oh, how oft my spleen.’ Martin.

Ep. ii. 1. 117.

‘’Tis writing, writing now is all the rage.’ Martin.

‘After the result of the campaign of Actium, when the interests of peace demanded that supreme power should be conferred on one man, those great geniuses disappeared. Truth too suffered in many ways, at first from ignorance of public life, as a matter with which men had no concern, and soon from the spirit of adulation.’ Hist. i. 1.

E. Quinet.

Traditum ab antiquis morem. Hor. Sat. i. 4. 117.

Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, etc. Hor. Od. iii. 4. 9.

‘Virgile depuis l’heure où il parut a été le poëte de la Latinité tout entière.’ Sainte-Beuve.

‘To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,’ ‘who sang the idle songs of shepherds,’ ‘my task is on a lowly theme.’

‘I must strive to find a way by which I may raise myself too above the ground, and speed to and fro triumphant through the mouths of men.’

‘Give place, all ye Roman writers, give place, ye Greeks: some work, I know not what, is coming to the birth, greater than the Iliad.’ Eleg. iii. 32, 64–65.

Cf. Wölflin in the Philologus, xxvi, quoted by Comparetti.

Tac. De Oratoribus, ch. xiii.

‘Si Virgile faisait aux Romains cette illusion d’avoir égalé ou surpassé Homère, c’est qu’il avait touché fortement la fibre Romaine.’ Sainte-Beuve.

‘Live then, I pray, yet rival not the divine Aeneid, but follow it from afar, and ever reverence its track.’ Thebaid xii. 816.

‘Mantua, home of the Muses, raised to the stars by Aonian song, and rival of the music of Smyrna.’ Silius, Punic. viii. 595.

E.g. iv. 14. 14; xii. 4. 1; xiv. 186; v. 10. 7; viii. 56, etc.

viii. 18. 5–9.

Ep. iii. 7.

E.g. i. 162; iii. 199; v. 45, 138, vi. 434, etc.; vii. 66, 226, 236, etc.

‘When the whole Horace had lost its natural colour, and the soot was sticking to the blackened Virgil.’ vii. 226.

Green’s History of the English People, p. 37.

Quoted by Comparetti; and also in Bähr’s Römische Literatur.

Works of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, by John Small, M.A., vol. i. p. cxlv.

Carlyle’s Translation of the Inferno.

Mr. Small, in his account of the writings of Bishop Gavin Douglas, says, ‘The works of Virgil passed through ninety editions before the year 1500.’

See Conington’s Introduction to the Aeneid.

Appendix to the Henriade.

Dict. Philos., art. Epopée.

Quoted by Comparetti.

Sainte-Beuve, ‘Causeries du Lundi.’

By Mr. Payne, in the Clarendon Press Series.

‘Who shall say what share the turning over and over in their mind, and masticating, so to speak, in early life as models of their Latin verse, such things as Virgil’s

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,

or Horace’s

Fortuna saevo laeta negotio,

has not had in forming the high spirit of the upper class in France and England, the two countries where Latin verse has most ruled the schools, and the two countries which most have had, or have, a high upper class and a high upper class spirit?’ High Schools and Universities in Germany, by M. Arnold.

‘Add too the companions of the Muses of Helicon, amongst whom Homer, the peerless, after holding the sceptre—.’

Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

i. 24. 11.

Vol. i. p. 197, Hare and Thirlwall’s translation.

Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii. p. 131 et seq. (London, 1855.)

Conington’s Virgil, Introduction to vol. ii.

Introduction to Eclogue v.

Book iii. chap. xiv.

He adds the comment, ‘Equidem dubito num legerit. Nam et philologos ita iudicare audivi de Virgilio ut non legisse eos appareret.’

Questions Contemporaines. L’Instruction Supérieure en France.

Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v.

Roman Empire, chap. xli.

Étude sur Virgile.

La Cité antique.

Études sur la Poésie latine.

‘A land of old renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil.’

‘Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini Quirites atavique Romani,’ etc. Columella.

Cf. Lucretius, iii. 105–106:

Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum

Cum redeunt felusque ferunt variosque lepores.

‘Hail mighty mother of harvests, Saturnian land, mighty mother of men.’

‘Virgile fut en effet une des âmes les plus chrétiennes du Paganisme. Quoique attaché de tout son cœur à l’ancienne religion, il a semblé quelquefois pressentir la nouvelle, et un Chrétien pieux pourrait croire qu’il ne lui manqua pour l’embrasser que de la connaître.’ Gaston Boissier.

‘As it falls it awakens a hoarse murmur among the smooth stones, and with its bubbling waters cools the parched fields.’

It is in the poems connected with this theme that Horace writes most from the heart; yet even where he writes chiefly from the head he imparts the same vital realism to the results of his reflection.

‘We are not the first to whom things of beauty appear beautiful,—we who are mortal men, and behold not the morrow.’

Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman.

Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

Quoted by Reifferscheid in his Suetonii Reliquiae.

For the name Catalepton cp. Professor Nettleship’s Vergil in Classical Writers, p. 23.

‘Sed tanta inchoata res est, ut paene vitio mentis tantum opus ingressus mihi videar, cum praesertim alia quoque studia ad id opus multoque potiora impertiar.’ Macrob. Sat. i. 24. 11. The ‘potiora studia’ seem clearly to mean the philosophical studies, to which his biographer says he meant to devote the remainder of his life after publishing the Aeneid.

‘A way remote from the world and the path of a life that passes by unnoticed.’

Cp. ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.’

Cf. Reifferscheid, Quaestiones Suetonianae, p. 400. Hagen, De Donatianae Vergilii vitae Codicibus, prefixed to his edition of the Scholia Bernensia. De vita et scriptis P. Vergili Maronis narratio, prefixed to Ribbeck’s text in the Teubner edition of Virgil.

Ribbeck, Prolegomena, cap. viii.

Gossrau, in his edition of the Aeneid (1876), argues and quotes authorities in favour of retaining the older form Virgilius.

Cf. Pliny, Ep. iii. 7. Martial, xii. 67:—

Octobres Maro consecravit Idus.

‘But no single day used then to give to their doom many thousands of men marshalled under their standards.’ Lucret. v. 999.

‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

‘From here, under some high rock, the song of the woodsman will rise into the air.’

‘I had indeed heard that from the spot where the hills begin to draw themselves away from the plain, sinking down with a gentle slope, as far as the river and the old beeches, with their now withered tops, your Menalcas had saved all his land by his songs.’

‘Yet we shall reach the town: or if we fear that night may first bring the rain—’

‘The herds will not lack their clear springs, nor their pasture.’

Cf. Eustace, vol. i. chap. v. Compare also the following characteristic passage quoted from Dickens by Mr. Hare in his Cities of Northern and Central Italy: ‘Was the way to Mantua as beautiful when Romeo was banished thither, I wonder? Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees? Those purple mountains lay on the horizon, then, for certain.’ Dickens certainly was not looking for Virgilian reminiscences in writing this description.

‘And thou, Benacus, uprising with waves and roar like that of the sea.’

‘And such a plain as ill-fated Mantua lost, a plain which fed its snow-white swans on its weedy river.’

Aeneid, x. 204.

‘Vergilius—nomen vix dubiae originis Gallicae. Cf. Vergiliae (stellae), Propert. i. 8. 10, Plin. fq. Οὐεργιλία (Oppid. Hispan.), Ptol. 2. 5. Radix vetust. Camb. guerg. (efficax) gl. Ox. extat etiam in vetusto nomine apud Caes.’ Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica, p. 11, edit. altera: Berol. 1871.

Cic. Epp. ad Att. vii. 7; ad Fam. xvi. 12.

Cic. Epp. ad Att. v. 2.

‘But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,

His cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,

Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride

Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills.’ Martin.

‘Meanwhile, cheering her long task with song, his wife runs over the web with her sounding shuttle.’

Ferunt infantem, cum sit editus, neque vagisse, et adeo miti vultu fuisse, ut haud dubiam spem prosperioris geniturae jam tunc indicaret.

Siquidem virga populea more regionis in puerperiis eodem statim loco depacta ita brevi evaluit tempore ut multo ante satas populos adaequasset, quae arbor Virgilii ex eo dicta atque etiam consecrata est summa gravidarum ac fetarum religione.

The resemblance of the name to the word virga is probably at the root of this story.

‘You will now be to him what Mantua and Cremona were before.’

‘Hence, away, empty phrases of the Rhetoricians, words swollen with water not from a Greek source, and you, ye Stilos, and Tarquiti, and Varros, tribe of grammarians oozing over with fat, away hence tinkling cymbal of our empty youth.... I shape my course to the blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siron, and will redeem my life from every care.’

‘For, I shall own the truth, ye were dear to me.’

‘But me a passionate delight hurries along over the lonely heights of Parnassus.’

‘When I would sing of kings and battles, Apollo pulled my ear and warned me.’

‘Cottage that belonged to Siron, and poor plot of ground, although deemed great riches by your former owner.’

Hor. Ep. ii. 1. 246.

‘Tenderness and grace have been granted to Virgil by the Muses who delight in the country.’

‘Maecenas goes to play at fives, Virgil and I to sleep, for that game does not agree with those suffering from dyspepsia and weak eyes.’

‘Yet there will remain some vestiges of the ancient sin, which will induce men to tempt the sea in ships.’

‘No more sincere souls has the earth ever borne, nor any to whom there is a more devoted friend than I.’

‘I then had my home in sweet Parthenope, happy in the pursuits of an inglorious idleness.’

‘You sing, beneath the pine-woods of the shaded Galaesus, Thyrsis and Daphnis on your well-worn reeds.’

Cf. supra, p. 69.

‘Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat, sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.’ Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle: ‘Il lui était utile même d’avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.’

Cp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem of Catullus.

The German historians of Roman literature are more just in their judgment of Virgil’s character than of his genius. Thus W. S. Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous remark—‘Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an Vergil unbegreiflich war.’

‘He was gentle here on earth, and is gentle there.’ Aristoph. Frogs, 82.

Cf. Reifferscheid, p. 67.

‘Whatsoever it shall be, every fortune must be mastered by bearing it.’
‘Learn, my son, from me to bear yourself like a man and to strive earnestly, from others learn to be fortunate.’

Compare the lines of Coleridge on hearing ‘The Prelude’ read aloud by Wordsworth:—

‘An Orphic song indeed,

A song divine of high and passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted.’

‘I, the idle singer of a pastoral song, who in the boldness of youth made thee, O Tityrus, beneath the shade of the spreading beech, my theme.’

The lines of Propertius—

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi

Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus,

might suggest the inference that the seventh was composed at the time when Virgil was residing in the neighbourhood of Tarentum. But, at the time when Propertius wrote, Virgil was engaged in the composition of the Aeneid, not of the Eclogues. The present ‘canis’ seems rather to mean that Virgil, while engaged with his Aeneid, was still conning over his old Eclogues. Yet he must have strayed ‘subter pineta Galaesi’ some time before the composition of the last Georgic. It has been remarked by Mr. Munro that the ‘memini’ in the line

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis

looks like the memory of a somewhat distant past. Could the villa of Siron have been in the neighbourhood of Tarentum? (a question originally suggested by Mr. Munro); may it have passed by gift or inheritance into the possession of Virgil, and was he in later life in the habit of going to it from time to time? or was the distance too great from Mantua for him to have transferred his family thither?

‘This taught me “the fair Alexis was loved by Corydon,” this too taught me “whose is the flock? is it the flock of Meliboeus?”’

viii. 56. 12.

Ep. ad Att. i. 12.

Dr. Kennedy refers to no less than seventeen parallel passages from Theocritus, many of them being almost literal translations from the Greek poet.

‘Look, the steers are drawing home the uplifted ploughs.’

‘O that it would but please you to dwell with me among the “homely slighted” fields and lowly cottages, and to shoot the deer.’

‘The Gods too were dwellers in the woods, and Dardanian Paris. Leave Pallas to abide in the towers which she has built; let our chief delight be in the woods.’

Dr. Kennedy refers to twenty-seven parallels from Theocritus.

‘Pollio loves my song, though it is but a shepherd’s song.’ ‘Pollio himself too is a poet.’

‘Who hates not Bavius may he be charmed with thy songs, O Maevius!’

‘Menalcas Vergilius hic intelligitur, qui obitum fratris sui Flacci deflet, vel, ut alii volunt, interfectionem Caesaris.’ Comment. in Verg. Serviani (H. A. Lion, 1826).

See Conington’s Introduction to this Eclogue.

‘No beast either tasted the river or touched a blade of grass.’

Compare M. Benoist’s note on the passage.

‘Proximis diebus equorum greges, quos in traiciendo Rubicone flumine consecrarat ac vagos et sine custode dimiserat, comperit pertinacissime pabulo abstinere ubertimque flere.’ Sueton. lib. i. c. 81.

‘As to Bacchus and to Ceres so to thee shall the husbandmen annually make their vows; thou too wilt call on them for their fulfilment.’

‘The star beneath which the harvest-fields should be glad in their corn-crops, and the grapes should gather a richer colour on the sunny hill-sides.’

‘Graft your pears, Daphnis: your fruits will be plucked by those who come after you.’

Kennedy.

‘Here the green Mincio fringes its bank with delicate reeds, and swarms of bees are buzzing from the sacred oak.’

‘This I remember, and that Thyrsis was beaten in the contest: from that time Corydon is all in all with us.’

Cf.

Ergo tua rura manebunt—

Ille meas errare boves—

Multa meis exiret victima saeptis.

Candidior postquam tondenti barba cadebat—

Fortunate senex.

See Kennedy’s note on the passage.

‘Though all your land is choked with barren stones or covered with marsh and sedge.’—P.

‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

M. Benoist.

‘Shall some unfeeling soldier become the master of these fields, so carefully tilled, some rude stranger own these harvest-fields? see to what misery fellow-countrymen have been brought by civil strife!’

‘Now in defeat and sadness, since all things are the sport of chance.’

‘Me too the shepherds call a bard, but I give no ear to them; for as yet my strain seems far inferior to that of Varius and of Cinna, and to be as the cackling of a goose among tuneful swans.’ Compare the lines which Theocritus applies to Lycidas:—

Καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν Μοισᾶν καπυρὸν στόμα, κἠμὲ λέγοντι

πάντες ἀοιδὸν ἄριστον· ἐγὼ δέ τις οὐ ταχυπειθής,

οὐ Δᾶν· οὐ γάρ πω κατ’ έμὸν νόον οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλόν

Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω, οὐδὲ Φιλητᾶν

ἀείδων, βάτραχος δὲ ποτ’ ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω.

Theoc. vii. 37–41.

‘Varus, thy name provided only Mantua be spared to us.’ ‘Daphnis, why gazest thou on the old familiar risings of the constellations?’

‘And now you see the whole level plain [sea?] is calm and still.’

i. 496.

Compare Gaston Boissier, La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins: ‘Il y a pourtant un côté par lequel la quatrième églogue peut être rattachée à l’histoire du Christianisme; elle nous révèle un certain état des âmes qui n’a pas été inutile à ses rapides progrès. C’était une opinion accréditée alors que le monde épuisé touchait à une grande crise et qu’une révolution se préparait qui lui rendrait la jeunesse.... Il regnait alors partout une sorte de fermentation, d’attente inquiète et d’espérance sans limite. “Toutes les créatures sonpirent,” dit Saint Paul, “et sont dans le travail de l’enfantement.” Le principal intérêt des vers de Virgile est de nous garder quelque souvenir de cette disposition des âmes.’

Any child born of this marriage in the year 40 B.C. must have owed its birth, not to Antony, but to Marcellus, the former husband of Octavia.

The application of the words ‘magnum Iovis incrementum’ by the author of the Ciris (398) to Castor and Pollux suggests a doubt as to Mr. Munro’s interpretation of the words, accepted by Dr. Kennedy; though at the same time there is nothing improbable in the supposition that Virgil gave a meaning to the words which was misunderstood by his imitator.

‘And will rule the world in peace with his father’s virtues.’

Fuit enim hic poeta, ut scrupulose et anxie, ita dissimulanter et clanculo doctus, ut multa transtulerit quae, unde translata sint, difficile sit cognitu. Sat. v. 18.

Quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset. Ib. 22.

De Graecorum penitissimis literis hanc historiam eruit Maro. Ib. 19.

‘Receive a song undertaken at your command.’

‘When the dew on the tender blade is most grateful to the flock.’

‘I shall hurl myself headlong into the waves from the high mountain’s crag.’

‘But I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin—

Saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala.

I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil.’ Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol. i. pp. 371, 372.

‘It was within our orchard I saw you, a child, with my mother gathering apples, and I was your guide: I had but then entered on my twelfth year. I could just reach from the ground the fragile branches: the moment I saw you how utterly lost I was, how borne astray by fatal passion.’

‘I loved you, maiden, when first you came with my mother wishing to gather hyacinths from the mountain, and I guided you on the way: and since I saw you, from that time, never after, not even yet, can I cease loving you; but you care not, no, by Zeus, not a whit.’

Compare 85–86 with Lucret. ii. 355, etc.:—

At mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans.

‘And would that I had been one of you, and had been either shepherd of your flock or the gatherer of the ripe grape.’

‘I am resolved rather to suffer among the woods, among the wild beasts’ dens, and to carve my loves on the tender bark of the trees.’

‘First my Muse deigned lightly to sing in the Sicilian strain, and blushed not to dwell among the woods.’

‘Nor need you be ashamed of your flock, O Godlike poet; even fair Adonis once fed his sheep by the river-banks.’

Compare the following passage from one of the prose idyls of G. Sand: ‘Depuis les bergers de Longus jusqu’à ceux de Trianon, la vie pastorale est un Éden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier. L’art, ce grand flatteur, ce chercheur complaisant de consolations pour les gens trop heureux, a traversé une suite ininterrompue de bergeries. Et sous ce titre, Histoire des bergeries, j’ai souvent désiré de faire un livre d’érudition et de critique où j’aurais passé en revue tous ces différents rêves champêtres dont les hautes classes se sont nourries avec passion.’ François le Champi.

‘Among the lonely haunts of the shepherds and the deep peace of Nature.’

‘One may not now hold converse with him from a tree or from a rock, like a maid and youth, as a maid and youth hold converse with one another.’

Compare the account of the origin of pastoral poetry in Müller’s Literature of the Greeks.

‘But I attune the plaintive Ausonian melody.’ Incertorum Idyll. 1. 100–101. (Ed. Ahrens.)

Compare Symonds’ Studies of Greek Poets, First Series, The Idyllists.

Wordsworth’s great pastoral ‘Michael’ is a marked exception to this general statement. So, too, love can hardly be called the most prominent motive in Tennyson’s ‘Dora.’

‘Poured forth its rustic banter in responsive strains.’

Idyl vii. 97, vi. 2.

Idyl xi. 2–6, xiii. 2.

Preface to Poems by M. Arnold, First Series.

vii. 19, 20:—

καί μ’ ἀτρέμας εἶπε σεσαρώς

ὄμματι μειδιόωντι, γέλως δέ οἱ εἴχετο χείλευς.

x. 41:—

θᾶσαι δὴ καὶ ταῦτα τὰ τῶ θείω Λιθυέρσα.

‘Next well-trimm’d

A crowd of shepherds, with as sunburnt looks

As may be read of in Arcadian books;

Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,

When the great deity, for earth too ripe,

Let his divinity o’erflowing die,

In music, through the vales of Thessaly.’

And again:—

‘He seem’d,

To common lookers on, like one who dream’d

Of idleness in groves Elysian.’

Keats, Endymion.

‘Often, I remember, when a boy I used to pass in song the long summer days till sunset.’

‘Then he tells in song how Gallus as he strayed by the streams of Permessus was led by one of the sisters to the Aonian mount.’

‘All those strains, which when attuned by Phoebus, Eurotas heard, enraptured, and bade his laurels learn by heart, he sings.’

Compare for this use of mollis in the sense of ‘impressible’ Cicero’s description of his brother Quintus (Ep. ad Att. i. 17): ‘Nam, quanta sit in Quinto fratre meo comitas, quanta iucunditas, quam mollis animus et ad accipiendam et ad deponendam iniuriam, nihil attinet me ad te, qui ea nosti, scribere.’

‘Fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus.’

‘There all alone he used to fling wildly to the mountains and the woods these unpremeditated words in unavailing longing.’

‘He, his snow-white side reposing on the tender hyacinth,—’

‘We leave the dear fields’—‘Therefore you will still keep your fields, large enough for your desires’—‘He allowed my herds to wander at their will, even as you see’—‘Ah! the hope of all my flock, which she had just borne, she left on the bare flint pavement’—‘Go on, my she-goats, once a happy flock, go on.’

This is the tone of the whole of the first Elegy of Tibullus, e.g.

Ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites

Rusticus et facili grandia poma manu.

Nec tamen interdum pudeat tenuisse bidentem, etc.

‘You are but a clown, Corydon, Alexis cares not for gifts.’

‘As if this could heal my madness.’

‘Ah! may the rough ice not cut thy tender feet.’

‘Shall I see you from afar hang from some bushy rock.’

‘Here green Mincio forms a fringe of soft reeds along his bank.’

‘I shall not yield in song either to Thracian Orpheus or to Linus, though he be aided by his mother, he by his father, Orpheus by Calliope, Linus by the fair Apollo. Even Pan, should he strive with me with all Arcadia as umpire, even Pan would say that he was vanquished, with Arcadia as umpire.’

‘On this side, with its old familiar murmur, the hedge, your neighbour’s boundary, on all the sweets of whose willow blossom the bees of Hybla have fed, will often gently woo you to sleep; on that from the foot of a high rock the song of the woodman will rise to the air; nor meanwhile will your darlings, the hoarse wood-pigeons, cease to coo, nor the turtle-dove to moan from the high elm-tree.’

Poems by Matthew Arnold. Memorial Verses:—

‘He found us when the age had bound

Our souls in its benumbing round,’ etc.

‘Such charm is in thy song for us, O Godlike poet, as is to weary men the charm of deep sleep on the grass, as, in summer heat, it is to quench one’s thirst in a sparkling brook of fresh water.’

‘What gifts shall I render to you, what gifts in recompense of such a strain: for neither the whisper of the coming south wind gives me such joy, nor the sound of shores beaten on by the wave, nor of rivers hurrying down through rocky glens.’

Coleridge’s Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 411.

Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 371.

From the similarity between the lines in Hor. Sat. i. 1. 114,

Ut cum carceribus missos,

and those at the end of Georg. i. 512,

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,

it has been argued that Georgic i, at all events, must have appeared before the first Book of the Satires. Ribbeck supposes that the lines of the Georgics may have been seen or heard by Horace before the appearance of the poem, and imitated by him. But is it likely that Horace would have appropriated an image from an unpublished poem? Is it not as probable that Virgil was the imitator here, as in other passages where he uses the language of contemporaries, e.g. of Varius, Ecl. viii. 88?

Compare the contrast drawn by him between Ennius and the contemporary ‘Cantores Euphorionis,’ Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

Cf. also W. F. Teuffel’s History of Roman Literature, chap. i. note 1.

‘You sing the lore of the old poet of Ascra, of the field on which the corn, the hill on which the grape grows.’ iii. 32. 77–78.

‘The city which is called Rome, O Meliboeus, I thought, in my folly, was like this city of ours.’

‘For safe the herds range field and fen,

Full-headed stand the shocks of grain.’

‘Now each man basking on his slopes

Weds to the widowed trees the vine.’

‘Thy era, Caesar, which doth bless

Our plains anew with fruitfulness.’ Martin.

Compare Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire, chap. xli. ‘The tradition that Maecenas himself suggested the composition of the Georgics may be accepted, not in the literal sense which has generally been attached to it, as a means of reviving the art of husbandry and the cultivation of the devastated soil of Italy; but rather to recommend the principles of the ancient Romans, their love of home, of labour, of piety, and order; to magnify their domestic happiness and greatness, to make men proud of their country on better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and the extent of its conquests. It would be absurd to suppose that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or to 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, amidst the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyments, of which, as we journey onward, we shall rejoice to catch at least occasional glimpses.’

E.g.

Ausim vel tenui vitem committere sulco;

and again,

Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem, etc.

De Senectute, xv. xvi.

‘What makes the cornfields glad, beneath what constellation, Maecenas, is right to turn up the soil, and wed the vine to the elms,’—

De Re Rustica, i. 2.

Georg. ii. 145, etc.; Aen. iii. 537.

‘Nec dubium quin, ut ait Varro, ceteras pecudes bos honore superare debeat, praesertim autem in Italia, quae ab hoc nuncupationem traxisse creditur, quod olim Graeci tauros Ἰταλοὺς vocabant.’

‘Although neither Calabrian bees produce honey for me, nor does my wine grow mellow in a Formian jar, nor fleeces grow rich in Gallic pastures.’ Compare too

Ego apis Matinae

More modoque, etc.

The importance of honey as a source of wealth is referred to by Mommsen in his History of Rome, book v. chap. xi. ‘A small bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-garden, not larger than an acre, in the neighbourhood of Falerii, honey to an average annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces (100l.).’

‘Illis enim temporibus proceres civitatis in agris morabantur.’ Columella.

‘I shall not here detain you with any tale of fancy, and winding digressions and long preambles.’

‘The other themes that might have charmed the vacant mind, are all hackneyed now.’

Cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 59–61: ‘M. Silano, L. Norbano consulibus Germanicus Aegyptum proficiscitur cognoscendae antiquitatis.’ The whole account of the tour of Germanicus illustrates the cultivated taste for foreign travel among the Romans of the later Republic, the Augustan Age, and early Empire, and also the mysterious interest which has attached to Egypt from the earliest times known to history.

This is distinctly stated by Servius in two places, his introductory comments on Eclogue x, and on Georgic iv, and seems sufficiently attested. Besides, the introduction into the Georgics of such an episode as the ‘Pastor Aristaeus’ requires some explanation.

Both the nexus of the sense and the rhythm condemn the latitude of transposition which Ribbeck allows himself. Perhaps the only alteration which is absolutely demanded is at iv. 203–205. The lines there, as they stand, clearly interrupt the sense, and are more in place either after 196 or after 218. The strong line,

Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis,

is a fitting conclusion for the fine paragraph beginning

Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse, etc.

Either of these places seems more suitable for the lines than that after 183. It is possible that the conjecture which Ribbeck adopts from Wagner, ‘absoluto iam opere in marginem illos versus a poeta coniectos esse,’ may give the true explanation of the misplacement of the lines, though this does not seem to apply to any other passage in the poem. Such bold changes as those introduced by Ribbeck at ii. 35–46, and again at iii. 120–122, are not required by the sense, and are condemned by rhythmical considerations. The line 119,

Exquirunt calidumque animis et cursibus acrem,

is weak for the concluding line of the paragraph, which ends much more naturally with that transposed from 122 to 99,

Neptunique ipsa deducat origine gentem,

as it is Virgil’s way to introduce his mythological illustrations after his real observations are finished. The paragraph of four lines, Quare agite o proprios ... Taburnum, stands bald and bare in the position Ribbeck assigns it, between 108 and 109. The minor changes for the most part disturb old associations and throw no new light on the poet’s thought.

‘While charmed with the love of it, we travel round each detail.’

‘To invest these poor interests with a new glory.’

Cf. Col. iii. 15: ‘Ut Mago prodit, quem secutus Vergilius tutari semina et muniri sic praecepit,’ etc.

Cf. Col. iv. 9: ‘Nam illam veterem opinionem non esse ferro tangendos anniculos malleolos quod aciem reformidant, quod frustra Vergilius et Saserna, Stolonesque, et Catones timuerunt,’ etc. Also ix. 14: ‘Ceterum hoc eodem tempore progenerari posse apes iuvenco perempto Democritus et Mago nec minus Vergilius prodiderunt.’ As a trace of Virgil’s imitation of Varro, compare the passage where, after speaking of the injury done by goats to the vine, Varro says, ‘Sic factum ut Libero Patri repertori vitis hirci immolarentur,’ with Georgic ii. 380, ‘Non aliam ob culpam,’ etc.

‘From dust in winter, from mud in spring time, you will reap great crops, Camillus.’

‘He, my son, is a worthy man, and a good farmer, whose implements shine brightly.’

i. 269.

‘Ceres first taught mortals to turn up the earth with iron.’

‘Pray, farmers, for wet summers and dry winters’—‘And may have called forth the rain by vows’—‘Especially worship the Gods, and offer the yearly sacrifices to mighty Ceres.’ Cf. Ἔργ. καὶ Ἡμ. 463:—

Εὔχεσθαι δὲ Διὶ χθονίῳ Δημήτερί θ’ ἁγνῇ.

The great confusion into which it had fallen before its reformation by Julius Caesar may have made this return to the primitive ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ familiar to Virgil’s youth.

‘When the white bird, abhorred by the long snakes, has come.’ Cf. Ἔργ. καὶ Ἡμ. 448:—

Φράζεσθαι δ’ εὖτ’ ἂν γεράνου φωνὴν ἐπακούσῃς.

The same suggestion of the ancient and unchanging nature of this art is vividly conveyed in the Chorus of the Antigone:—

Θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν Γᾶν

ἄφθιτον ἀκαμἀταν ἀποτρύεται,

ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος, ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων.

‘There, as they say, there is either the silence of midnight, and a thicker darkness beneath the canopy of night, or else the dawn returns to them from us and brings back the day; and when the morning sun breathes on us with the first breath of his panting steeds, there the glowing star of evening is lighting up her late fires.’

‘They are glad, now that the rains are over, to revisit their young brood and their dear nests.’

Introduction to Notes, ii. p. 315.

Compare the contemptuous expressions used by Cicero, Tusc. Disp. ii. 3, of those who had written on the Epicurean philosophy in Latin. It seems strange, if he had any hand in editing his poems, that he makes no exception there in favour of Lucretius.

Compare Munro’s notes passim, and specially the note on Lucret. iii. 449.

Compare Georg. iii. 291 with Lucret. i. 926.

Chap. iii. p. 109.

Merivale’s Roman Empire.

‘What remains of tilled land, even that Nature by its own force would overgrow with briars did not the force of man resist it, inured, for the sake of living, to ply, with pain and labour, the stout mattock, and to split up the new earth with the deep-sunk ploughs: did not we, by turning up the fruitful clods with the plough-share, and subduing the soil of the earth, call forth the seeds to the birth, they could not of their own impulse come forth into the clear air. And after all, sometimes the products of much toil, when they are already in blade and in beauty over the earth, either the Sun in heaven scorches with excessive heat, or sudden rains and chill frosts ruin them, and the blasts of the winds in wild hurricane make them their sport.’ Lucret. v. 206–217 (See Munro’s note on the passage). Cf. Georg. ii. 411; i. 198; i. 208; ii. 237; ii. 47; i. 197. Compare also Virgil’s use of subigere and vertere as applied to the soil.

‘And now the aged peasant, shaking his head, often sighs forth the complaint, that the labour of his hands has come to naught.’ Lucret. ii. 1164, etc.

v. 932. etc.

ii. 1160, etc.

ii. 1146; v. 95.

Compare Lucret. v. 1367–1369 with Georg. ii. 36. Compare also Virgil’s use of indulgere and indulgentia.

‘After that they essayed now one, now another, mode of tilling the dear plot of ground, and they saw that the earth made wild fruits into fruits of the garden, by a kindly and caressing culture.’

De Senectute, xv.

v. 204, etc.

Georg. i. 237–8.

Ib. 128.

Cf. Georg. i. 351–353:—

Atque haec ut certis possemus discere signis,

Aestusque pluviasque et agentis frigora ventos,

Ipse Pater statuit, quid menstrua Luna moneret.

‘Travailler et prier, voilà la conclusion des Georgiques.’ From an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes (vol. 104), called Un Poëte Théologien, by Gaston Boissier.

Compare, among many other similar instances, such expressions as these:—

Labor actus in orbem

Agricolis redit.

Omnia quae multo ante memor provisa repones.

Quae vigilanda viris.

Continuo in silvis magna vi flexa domatur, etc.

‘And is incessantly drilling the land, and exercising command over the fields’—‘Then at length exercise a stern command, and restrain the wild luxuriance of the branches’—‘They will, with no reluctant obedience, adopt any ways you bid them.’

‘Whether it is that the heat opens up various ways of access and relaxes the secret pores, where the sap may enter into the young plants.’

‘That he owed allegiance to no master.’

‘But your excellence and the hope of the delightful enjoyment of your friendship.’ ‘O my pride, O thou, to whom I justly ascribe the greatest share of my renown.’

‘While mighty Caesar is hurling the thunder-bolts of war by the deep Euphrates, and, a conqueror, issues his laws among willing subjects, and is already on the way which leads to Heaven.’

‘Gods or Goddesses whose task it is to watch over the fields.’

‘Blessed too was he who knew the Gods of the country.’

Compare the first book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.

Servius has the following note on the passage:—‘Stoici dicunt non esse nisi unum deum, et unam eandemque (esse) potestatem, quae pro ratione officiorum nostrorum variis nominibus appellatur. Unde eundem Solem, eundem Liberum, eundem Apollinem vocant. Item Lunam, eandem Dianam, eandem Cererem, eandem Iunonem, eandem Proserpinam dicunt; secundum quos, pro Sole et Luna, Liberum et Cererem invocavit.’

‘Nor is it without good result that golden-haired Ceres beholds him from Heaven on high.’

Quoted by M. Benoist.

‘But on whom she gazes with bright and favourable aspect, for them the field bears the ear of corn abundantly.’

Cf. ‘Incolumi Iove et urbe Roma.’ Hor. iii. 5. 12. Cf. also iii. 3. 42; iii. 30. 8.

Cf. also ‘Sedem Iovis Optimi Maximi auspicato a maioribus pignus imperii conditam,’ etc. Tac. Hist. iii. 72; and ‘Sed nihil aeque quam incendium Capitolii, ut finem imperio adesse crederent, impulerat,’ iv. 54.

The Capitol is the symbol of the eternal duration of the Empire to Virgil also:—

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum

Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.

Aen. ix. 448–9.

Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

‘Giver of fruits, and lord over the seasons.’

Cf. Tac. Ann. iii. 54. ‘At Hercule nemo refert quod Italia externae opis indiget, quod vita populi Romani per incerta maris et tempestatum cotidie volvitur.... Hanc, Patres Conscripti, curam sustinet princeps, haec omissa funditus rem publicam trahet.’

‘From this land thy white herds, Clitumnus, and the bull, most stately victim, after bathing often in thy sacred stream, have led the procession of the Roman triumphs to the temples of the Gods.’

‘I too must try to find some way by which I may rise aloft, and be borne triumphant through the mouths of men.’

‘I shall have all Greece to quit Alpheus and the groves of Molorchus, and to contend before me in the race and with the cestus of raw hide.’

‘Soon I shall gird myself up to celebrate the fiery battles of Caesar.’

‘And when the parched field is all hot and its blades of corn are withering, look! from the brow of its sloping channel he tempts forth the rushing stream: it as it falls awakens a hoarse murmur among the smooth stones, and with its bubbling waters cools the tilled land.’ i. 107–110.

‘Mark too, when in the woods, the walnut, in great numbers, clothes itself in blossom and weighs down the fragrant branches, if there is abundance of fruit, the corn crops will likewise be in abundance, and there will come a great threshing with a great heat.’ i. 187–190.

‘There is no other land of plain from which you will see more wains wending their way home with the lagging steers.’ ii. 205–206.

‘They let them feed in lonely pastures, and by the bank of brimming rivers, where moss abounds and the grass is greenest, and where caves give shelter, and the shadow of some rock is cast far in front.’ iii. 143–145.

a. ‘The young plant shoots up under the mighty shadow of its mother.’
b. ‘Rending them from the loving body of their mother.’
c. ‘Will cast off their woodland spirit.’
d. ‘And marvels at its strange leaves and fruits not its own.’
e. ‘Lest the plants through the sudden change should fail to recognise their mother.’
f. ‘And the plants will lift up their hearts.’
g. ‘By their strength they may become accustomed to mount aloft and despise the winds.’
h. ‘And while they are still in the first stage of growth or their leaves are new, you must spare their infancy.’
i. ‘Before that they shrink from the steel.’
k. ‘Especially while the leaf is still tender, and all unwitting of its trials.’

As an instance of the last, cf. iii. 316, 317:—

Atque ipsae memores redeunt in tecta, suosque

Ducunt.

‘These passions of their hearts and these desperate battles are all stilled to rest, by the check of a little handful of dust.’ Compare Horace’s line, Od. i. 28. 3:—

Pulveris exigui prope litus parva Matinum

Munera.

‘What joy to plant Ismarus with the vine, or to clothe the mighty sides of Taburnus with the olive.’

‘And now the last vintager sings with joy at completing all his rows.’

iii. 321–338.

‘So too looked even Saturn, when with nimble movement, at the approach of his wife, he let the mane toss on his neck, and, as he sped away, made high Pelion ring with his shrill neighing.’

‘So with the snowy gift of wool, if one may believe the tale, did Pan, the God of Arcadia, charm and beguile thee, O Luna, calling thee into the deep groves; nor didst thou scorn his call.’

‘These laws and everlasting covenants were at once established by Nature for particular places, from the time when Deucalion first cast stones into the empty world, whence men, a hard race, were born.’

‘The resources of art prove baneful: its masters retired baffled, Chiron, son of Philyra, and Melampus, son of Amythaon.’

‘The healing art muttered in speechless fear.’

‘Thrice let the auspicious victim pass around the young crops.’

‘And invoke thee, Bacchus, in their joyous chants, and in honour of thee hang soft faces waving in the wind from the high pine tree.’

‘Just as happens to the rower who scarcely keeps his boat against the stream, if he slackens his stroke, and has it swept headlong down the channel of the river.’

‘The best days of life are those which fly first from unhappy mortals: then disease steals on, and sad old age.’

‘When they behold the Sun, that we see the stars of night, and that they share alternately with us the divisions of the sky, and pass their nights parallel to our days.’

The passage in the Georgics may be compared with those passages which Mr. Munro quotes in his note to Lucret. i. 1.

W. Savage Landor.

‘And their brazen vessels constantly split asunder, and the rough icicle froze on their unkempt beards.’

‘When the snow lies deep, when the rivers force the masses of ice slowly down.’

‘Where dark Galaesus waters the yellowing cornfields.’

‘In his heart he enjoyed wealth equal to the wealth of kings; and as he returned late at night he loaded his board with a feast unbought.’

Cf. Ecl. viii. 6; Aen. i. 244.

Cf. supra, p. 239.

‘Those who ministered to them, came into close contact and bore the labour, which a feeling of honour compelled them to undergo, and the appealing voice of the weary sufferers, mingling with the voice of their complaining. It was in this way accordingly that the best men died.’

‘Neither the shade of the high groves, nor the soft meadows can rouse any feeling, nor the river which rolling over stones in a stream purer than amber hurries to the plain.’

‘Nor can the tender willows and the grass fresh with dew, and the rivers gliding level with their banks, delight her heart, and banish her sorrow.’

‘The ploughman goes sadly on his way, separating the sorrowing steer from his dead brother.’ The truth of this picture is confirmed by a modern writer, who, in her idyllic stories from the rural life of France, seems from time to time, better than any modern poet, to reproduce the Virgilian feeling of Nature. ‘Dans le haut du champ un vieillard, dont le dos large et la figure sévère rappelaient celui d’Holbein, mais dont les vêtements n’annonçaient pas la misère, poussait gravement son areau de forme antique, traîné par deux bœufs tranquilles, à la robe d’un jaune pâle, véritables patriarches de la prairie, hauts de taille, un peu maigres, les cornes longues et rabattues, de ces vieux travailleurs qu’une longue habitude a rendus frères, comme on les appelle dans nos campagnes, et qui, privés l’un de l’autre, se refusent au travail avec un nouveau compagnon et se laissent mourir de chagrin. Les gens qui ne connaissent pas la campagne taxent de fable l’amitié du bœuf pour son camarade d’attelage. Qu’ils viennent voir au fond de l’étable un pauvre animal maigre, exténué, battant de sa queue inquiète ses flancs décharnés, soufflant avec effroi et dédain sur la nourriture qu’on lui présente, les yeux toujours tournés vers la porte, en grattant du pied la place vide à ses côtés, flairant les jougs et les chaînes que son compagnon a portés, et l’appelant sans cesse avec de déplorables mugissements. Le bouvier dira: “C’est une paire de bœufs perdue: son frère est mort, et celui-là ne travaillera plus. II faudrait pouvoir l’engraisser pour l’abattre; mais il ne veut pas manger, et bientôt il sera mort de faim.”’ La Mare au Diable. G. Sand.

The famous picture in Lucret. ii. 355–366,

At mater viridis ... notumque requirit,

shows a similar observation of the strength of bovine affection.

‘What avail all their toil or their services to man? what that they have upturned the heavy earth with the plough-share? and yet they have received no harm from Massic vintages or luxurious banquets; their food is leaves and simple grass, their drink is the water of fresh springs, and rivers kept bright by their speed; and no care breaks their wholesome sleep.’

‘The guardian power of the groves, for whom three hundred snow-white steers browse in the rich thickets of Cea.’

‘On the one side Euphrates, on the other Germany sets war afoot: neighbouring cities, breaking their compacts, are in arms against each other; Mars, in unhallowed rage, is abroad over all the world; even as when the chariots have burst forth from the barriers, they bound into the course, and the charioteer, vainly pulling the reins, is borne along by his steeds, and the chariot no longer obeys his guidance.’

‘And the cattle spoke, horror unutterable’—‘And the images of ivory within the temples weep in sorrow, and the images of bronze sweat.’

‘A voice too was heard by many through the silent groves, speaking a mighty sound, and ghosts, wondrous pale, were seen in the dusk.’

‘And dogs of ill omen and dire birds gave signs’—‘and mountain-built cities echoed through the night with the howl of wolves.’

‘Doubtless too the time will come when in those lands the husbandman, as he upheaves the earth with his crooked plough, will find javelins eaten away by rough rust, or with his heavy mattock will strike on empty helmets, and marvel at the huge bones in their tombs, now dug open.’

‘There is no due honour now to the plough, the fields are desolate, and those who tilled them are gone, and the crooked pruning-hooks are forged into the stiff sword.’

‘This land has reared a valiant race of men, the Marsi and Sabellian youth, the Ligurian trained to hardship, and the Volscian spearmen.’

‘This too bore the Decii and the great Camilli, the Scipios, men of iron in war, and thee, great Caesar, who now, ere this victorious in the furthest coasts of Asia, art turning away the unwarlike Indian from the hills of Rome.’

‘It is in thy honour that I enter on the task of treating an art of ancient renown.’

‘Besides many famous cities, with their massive workmanship, many towns piled by the hand of man on steep crags, and rivers gliding beneath walls that have been from of old.’

‘Though no lofty mansion with proud portals pours forth from all its chambers its wave of those who pay their court in the morning.’— ‘Though there are no golden statues of youths through their chambers, holding blazing torches in their right hands.’

‘They revel in the bloodshed of their brethren.’

‘By the bloodshed of their fellow-citizens they amass an estate, and covetously double their riches, heaping murder upon murder: they take a cruel joy in the sad death of a brother; and hate and fear the board of their kinsmen.’ Lucret. iii. 70–73.

‘Meantime his dear children hang with kisses round his lips; a pure household keeps well all the laws of chastity.’

‘Soon no longer shall thy home receive thee with glad greeting, nor thy most excellent wife, nor thy dear children run to meet thee to snatch the first kiss.’

The most classical of our own poets seems to combine both representations with the thought and representation of an earlier passage of the Georgics

(Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.)

in the familiar stanza—

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care;

No children run to meet their sire’s return,

And climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

‘Hence he supports his country and his humble home, hence his herds of cattle, and his well-deserving steers.’

Cp. ‘Le mot triste et doux de Virgile: “O heureux l’homme des champs, s’il connaissait son bonheur” est un regret, mais, comme tous les regrets, c’est aussi une prédiction. Un jour viendra où le laboureur pourra être aussi un artiste, si non pour exprimer (ce qui importera assez peu alors) du moins pour sentir le beau.’ G. Sand.

Virgil rightly connects this greatness with the site of Rome in the line,

Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.

It was from the necessities imposed by that site that Rome at an early period became the largest urban community in Italy, and was forced, in consequence of the contiguous settlements of other races, to begin that incorporating and assimilating policy which ultimately enabled her to establish universal empire. Cp. ‘Rome herself, like other cities of Italy, Gaul, and elsewhere, grew out of the primitive hill-fortresses; the distinction between Rome and other cities, the distinction which made Rome all that she became, was that Rome did not grow out of a single fortress of the kind, but out of several.’ Historical and Architectural Sketches, by E. A. Freeman, D.C.L., etc.—Walls of Rome, p. 160.

Cf. ‘Itaque in hoc Latio et Saturnia terra, ubi Dii cultus agrorum progeniem suam docuerunt.’ Columella.

‘Such was the life that the old Sabines lived long ago, such the life of Remus and his brother; thus in truth brave Etruria grew strong and Rome became the glory of the world, and though a single city enclosed seven hills within her wall. Nay, even before the Sovereign-lord, born on Dicte, wielded the sceptre, and an unholy generation feasted on slaughtered steers, this was the life of Saturn on earth in the golden age. Not yet had men heard the blare of the war-trumpet, not yet had they heard the clang of the sword on the hard anvil.’

‘Come then, ye tillers of the soil, learn the special modes of husbandry, each according to its kind.’

E.g. Col. iv. 9: ‘Nam illam veterem opinionem damnavit usus non esse ferro tangendos anniculos malleolos, quod aciem reformidant, quod frustra Vergilius, et Saserna, Stolonesque et Catones timuerunt.’ Virgil is there quoted along with the recognised authorities on agriculture. This is often done in matters on which Columella agrees with him, e.g. i. chap. 4: ‘Si verissimo vati velut oraculo crediderimus dicenti.’

Cp. Gisborne’s ‘Essays on Ancient Agriculture,’ and ‘Forest Trees and Woodland Scenery,’ by W. Menzies, Deputy Surveyor of Windsor Forest and Parks. The following extracts from the last-named work—a work which combines thorough practical knowledge with true poetical feeling—support the statement in the text: ‘All the methods, both natural and artificial, of propagating trees are described in graphic language. Virgil also fully describes the self-sowing of trees, artificial sowing, propagating by transplanting of suckers, propagating by pegging down the branches till they strike root at the point of contact with the earth, and propagating by simply cutting off a small branch from the top and placing it in the moist warm earth. All these are correct. Indeed, the art is little advanced since the time of Virgil,’ p. 46. Mr. Menzies suggests an ingenious explanation of Virgil’s mistake as to what trees could be grafted on one another. In speaking of the Aeneid he bears further testimony to the accuracy of Virgil’s observation: ‘The poet was equally great and observant of the details of woodcraft, and must have watched keenly the details of the foresters around him,’ p. 50. This remark reminds us of the fact that one of his father’s means of livelihood was ‘silvis coemendis.’ At p. 53 Mr. Menzies draws special attention to the description of the mistletoe in Book vi, and of the aged elm under which the Shades are described as resting.

Cp. Holdsworth’s Remarks and Dissertations on the Georgics.

Compare the distinction drawn out by De Quincey, and originally suggested by Wordsworth, between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.

‘A Venetian born of peasant parents, reared in a rough woodland country.’ Macrobius, v. 2.

‘To listen to their elders, to point out to younger men the ways by which their substance might be increased, the passions that lead to ruin be weakened.’ Ep. ii. 1. 106–107.

Georg. i. 56–59.

E.g. iii. 408:—

Aut impacatos a tergo horrebis Hiberos.

Ἔργ. κ. Ἡμ. 310.

‘This retreat—charming to me, nay, if you believe me, even beautiful in itself.’

‘Sweet interchange

Of hill and valley, rivers, woods, and plains.’

Paradise Lost, Book ix. II. 115–116.

‘Such as we often look down on in some mountain dale.’

‘In early spring when chill waters are streaming down from the hoary sides of the hills, and the clod breaks up and crumbles beneath the west wind.’

‘Whirling whole forests in its mad eddies, Eridanus, monarch of rivers, swept them before it, and bore over all the plains herds of cattle with their stalls.’

The lines,

‘And now we passed

From Como, when the light was gray,

And in my head for half the day,

The rich Virgilian rustic measure

Of Lari Maxume, all the way,

Like ballad-burthen music, kept,’ etc.,

are so familiarly known that they hardly need to be quoted in support of this statement. But among other testimonies to the power of Virgilian associations, one may be quoted from another great poet, whose mind was less attuned to Latin than to Greek and English poetry. Goethe, in his ‘Letters from Italy,’ mentions, on coming to the Lago di Garda, that he was reminded of the line,

Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens, Benace, marino.

He adds this remark: ‘This is the first Latin verse, the subject of which ever stood visibly before me, and now, in the present moment, when the wind is blowing stronger and stronger, and the lake casts loftier billows against the little harbour, it is just as true as it was hundreds of years ago. Much, indeed, has changed, but the wind still roars about the lake, the aspect of which gains even greater glory from a line of Virgil.’

‘All gods and goddesses whose task it is to watch over the fields.’

Cp. Mommsen, book i. chap. 2: ‘As the Greek when he sacrificed raised his eyes to Heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the prayer of the former was vision, that of the latter reflection.’ Cf. also Lucret. v. 1198:—

Nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri

Vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras;

and Virg. Aen. iii. 405–409:—

Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu.

* * * * *

Hunc socii morem sacrorum, hunc ipse teneto;

Hac casti maneant in religione nepotes.

‘Meanwhile cheering her long task with song his wife runs over her web with shrill-sounding shuttle.’

Compare the double meaning of ‘moenia’ and ‘munia,’ as illustrated by Mommsen.

Cp. Mommsen, book i. chap. 2.

‘The characters and tasks and hosts and battles.’

‘They themselves supply the sovereign and tiny citizens of the community.’

‘So great is their passion for flowers, so great is their pride in producing honey.’

‘But the stock remains eternal, and through long years the fortune of the house stands steadfast, and the grandsires of grandsires are counted up.’

Compare with this the character of the Italian race given in the speech of Remulus, Aen. ix. 603, etc.:—

Venatu invigilant pueri, etc.

‘There are forests and the lairs of wild beasts, a youth inured to hardship and accustomed to scanty fare, worship of the gods and reverence yielded to parents.’

This abstinence is indirectly inculcated and illustrated in such passages as iii. 209, 524, iv. 197, etc.

It is among the blessings of the countryman’s lot enumerated in the passage ‘O fortunatos,’ etc., that he is removed from the painful sight of the contrasts between poverty and riches which the life of a great city presents—

neque ille

Aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti.

Il. xxi. 257–262.

‘Out of the tranquil deep current of ocean.’ Professor Lushington’s Inaugural Lecture delivered to the Students of the Greek Classes in the University of Glasgow, November, 1838.

‘Which rolling over rocks in stream purer than amber makes for the plain.’

‘Forthwith as the winds are rising, either the channels of the sea begin to boil and swell, and a dry crashing sound to be heard on the lofty mountains, or the shores to echo far with a confused noise, and the uproar of the woods to wax louder.’ G. i. 356–9.

E.g. those of Lucretia, Virginia, Coriolanus, Brutus, T. Manlius, etc.

Cf. Annals, iii. 5, ‘Veterum instituta ... meditata ad virtutis memoriam carmina,’—quoted by Teuffel.

Cf. Horace’s Ode, ‘Scriberis Vario,’ etc., which shows at least that Agrippa desired to have a poem written in honour of his exploits.

Diomedes, quoted by Teuffel.

Rumoresque serit varios ac talia fatur. Aen. xii. 228.

Furius in decimo:

Rumoresque serunt varios et multa requirunt.

Nomine quemque vocans reficitque in proelia pulsos. Aen. xi. 731.

Furius in undecimo:

Nomine quemque ciet; dictorum tempus adesse

Commemorat.

Deinde infra:

Confirmat dictis simul atque exuscitat acres

Ad bellandum animos reficitque ad proelia mentes.

Pro Arch. 11.

Ep. ad Att. i. 16: ‘Epigrammatis tuis, quae in Amaltheo posuisti, contenti erimus, praesertim quum et Chilius nos reliquerit, et Archias nihil de me scripserit; ac vereor, ne, Lucullis quoniam Graecum poema condidit, nunc ad Caecilianam fabulam spectet.’

Also one on his exile.

Epist. ad Q. Fratrem, lib. ii. 16.

‘Though anxious to do so, worthy father, I have not strength enough; for it is not every one who can describe the lines bristling with pikes, nor the Gauls dying in the fight with broken spear point, or the wounded Parthian falling from his horse.’

‘Nor should I choose rather to write prosaic discourses than to treat of historic deeds, and to describe the scenes of other lands and rivers and castles perched on mountains, and barbarous realms, and the wars brought to an end over the whole world under thy auspices.’

‘Or whether gorged with rich tripe (al. with huge paunch distended) Furius will spit his white snows over the Alps in winter-time.’ The ‘Furius’ mentioned here is supposed to be M. Furius Bibaculus, the reputed author of a poem on the Gallic War, as well as of the Epigrams, ‘referta contumeliis Caesarum,’ of which Tacitus speaks (An. iv. 34).

‘While blustering Alpinus strangles Memnon, and disfigures and bemires the source of the Rhine by his description.’

Sat. i. 10. 46.

‘Such love songs Varro too composed after finishing his Jason, Varro, the great passion of his own Leucadia.’

Schwabe, Quaestiones Catullianae, p. 279.

‘For my strain seems not yet to be worthy of Varius or Cinna, but to be as the cackling of geese amidst the melody of swans.’

Mentioned by W. S. Teuffel. Perhaps the best known poem in our own literature of this type is ‘The Campaign’ of Addison.

‘Who takes on himself to write the story of Augustus’ deeds, who perpetuates to distant ages the memory of wars waged and the peace concluded?’

‘If our song be of the woods, let the woods be worthy of a consul.’

‘I must essay a way by which I too may be able to rise above the ground, and to speed triumphant through the mouths of men.’

‘So vast a toil it was to build up the Roman people.’

‘And now the mighty Aeneas shall rule over the Trojans, and his children’s children who may be born hereafter.’

‘Aeneas with those belonging to him starting for Hesperia.’

Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 298.

The account here given of the development of the legend is taken from Schwegler, Römische Geschichte.

The growth of this legend is discussed with learning and ability by Professor Nettleship in his ‘Vergil,’ pp. 46–61.

Suetonius says of the Emperor Claudius, ‘Iliensibus, quasi Romanae gentis auctoribus, tributa in perpetuum remisit, recitata vetere epistula Graeca Senatus populique Romani Seleuco regi amicitiam et societatem ita demum pollicentis, si consanguineos suos Ilienses ab omni onere immunes praestitisset.’ For these and other official recognitions of the connexion between Rome and Ilium, see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 305 et seq.

Mommsen (book iii. ch. 14) quotes these two lines from an Epigram composed in the name of Flamininus:—

Αἰνεἀδας Τίτος ὕμμιν ὐπέρτατον ὤπασε δῶρον

Ἑλλήνων τεύξας παισὶν ἐλευθερίαν.

Livy, xxv. 12.

Aen. v. 117–123.

‘When old Priam fell beneath the Pelasgian host.’

‘From Jove is the origin of our race: in Jove, as their fore-father, the Dardan youth exults; our king himself the Trojan Aeneas is of the high lineage of Jove.’ Aen. vii. 219–221.

‘Lo the star of Caesar sprung from Dione hath advanced’—‘wreathing his brows with the myrtle sacred to his mother.’ Cf. Sic fatus velat materna tempora myrto. Aen. v. 72.

‘There shall be born of an illustrious line a Trojan Caesar, destined to make ocean the boundary of his empire, the stars the boundary of his fame, Julius, a name handed down from mighty Iulus.’ Aen. i. 286–288.

‘Oxus forgetting the bright speed he had

In his high mountain cradle in Pamere.’

Sohrab and Rustum.

Cf. Hor. Od. iii. 17. 2–4:—

Quando et priores hinc Lamias ferunt

Denominatos, et nepotum

Per memores genus omne fastos, etc.

‘The place was called Ardea long ago by our fathers: and now Ardea, a name of might, haunts the spot.’

‘And after suffering much in war too, before he could found a city, and find a home for his gods in Latium—from whom is the Latin race, and the lords of Alba, and the walls of lofty Rome.’

‘Nay, but it is Poseidon, the girdler of the earth, that hath been wroth continually with quenchless anger for the Cyclops’ sake whom he blinded of his eye.’ Butcher and Lang.

‘Who in understanding is beyond mortals and beyond all men hath done sacrifice to the deathless gods who keep the wide heaven.’ Butcher and Lang.

Lucret. iii. 836.

‘There was a city of old, dwelt in by settlers from Tyre, Carthage,—that this should hold the empire of the world, if by any means the fates should allow, is even then the fond desire and purpose of the goddess. Yet she had heard that a new race was issuing from Trojan blood, destined hereafter to overthrow the Tyrian towers,—and from them should spring a people, wielding wide sway, and of proud prowess in war, who should come to lay waste Libya—so did the Parcae roll on the circling events.’

‘There shall come a fitting time for fight, seek not to hasten it on, when fierce Carthage shall hurl against the Roman towers a mighty ruin, through the open gateways of the Alps.’

‘There remains deeply rankling in her heart the memory of the decision of Paris, and of the wrong of her slighted beauty, of the hated family, and the honours of the ravished Ganymede.’

‘Through varied accidents, through so many perils, we hold our course to Latium, where the Fates reveal to us a peaceful settlement.’

‘Who should hold sea and land in universal sway.’

‘Iulius a name handed down from mighty Iulus.’

‘Looking down on the sail-winged sea, and low-lying lands, and the coasts and wide nations.’

‘Smiling on her with that look with which he clears the sky and the storms, the father of men and gods,’—

‘Within unhallowed Rage, seated on a heap of cruel arms, and bound with a hundred knots of brass behind his back, will chafe wildly with blood-stained lips.’ Cf. the note on the passage in Servius: ‘In foro Augusti introeuntibus ad sinistram fuit bellum pictum et furor sedens super arma aenis vinctus, eo habitu quo poeta dixit.’

‘There is a place named by the Greeks Hesperia, a land of old renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil—the Oenotrians dwelt in it. Now the story is that their descendants have called the nation Italia from the name of their leader.’

Sat. v. 2. 4.

‘And you will come to the land Hesperia, where Lydian Tiber flows between rich fields of men with tranquil stream.’

The line

Quod per amoenam urbem leni fluit agmine flumen

occurs among the fragments of Ennius, and has been imitated also by Lucretius (v. 271).

Serv. Comment. on line 486.

‘An ancient city, that held empire through long years, is falling in ruins.’

‘Let their descendants piously observe this ceremony.’

‘Whether they are preparing to bring all the woes of war on the Getae, or the Hyrcanians, or the Arabs, or to hold their way to the Indians, and to go on and on towards the dawn, and to claim back the standards from the Parthians.’

‘And the good apart, and Cato giving to them laws.’

Audire est operae pretium procedere recte

Qui rem Romanam Latiumque augescere vultis.

‘Yes, let her spread her name of fear,

To farthest shores; where central waves

Part Africa from Europe, where

Nile’s swelling current half the year

The plains with plenty laves.

* * *

Let earth’s remotest regions still

Her conquering arms to glory call

Where scorching suns the long day fill,

Where mists and snows and tempests chill,

Hold reckless bacchanal.’ Martin.

‘To them I assign no goal to their achievements, no end,—I have given empire illimitable.’ i. 278–9.

‘The Romans, lords of the world, and the people clad in the gown.’ i. 282.

‘Here the house of Aeneas shall rule in all coasts, and their sons’ sons, and they who shall be born from them.’ iii. 97–8.

‘We, who under thy protection have traversed the heaving sea in thy fleet, we shall raise to the stars thy descendants in days to come, and shall give empire to thy city.’ iii. 157–9.

‘But that he should be one to rule over Italy the mother of empire, echoing with the roar of war, who should transmit a race from the high line of Troy, and bring the whole world beneath his laws.’ iv. 229–31.

‘Thine be the task, O Roman, to sway the nations with thy imperial rule—these shall be thy arts—to impose on men the law of peace, to spare those who yield, and to quell the proud.’ vi. 852–4.

‘Strangers shall come as thy sons-in-law, destined by mingling their blood with ours to raise our name to the stars—whose descendants shall see all things, where the Sun beholds either Ocean in his course, overthrown beneath their feet and governed.’ vii. 98–101.

‘While the house of Aeneas shall dwell by the Capitol’s immoveable rock, and a Roman lord hold empire.’ ix. 448–9.

‘Rightly shall all the wars destined to come hereafter subside in peace beneath the line of Assaracus.’ ix. 642–3.

‘The race that mixed with Ausonian blood shall arise from them, thou shalt see transcend men, nay even gods in piety; nor shall any people equally pay homage to thee.’ xii. 838–40.

vii. 219, etc.

Hor. Od. iii. 5. 9.

The Latin name seems rather associated with the thought of the other great distinguishing characteristic of the Romans, their capacity for law. Cf. Hor. Od. iv. 14. 7, ‘Quem legis expertes Latinae,’ etc. Virgil may intend to indicate this peaceful attribute of the Latins, in contradistinction to the warlike energy of the other Italian races, in the line (Aen. vii. 204),—

Sponte sua veterisque dei se more tenentem.

‘The men in whom even then the Italian land rejoiced as her sons, and their fiery spirit in war.’ vii. 643–4.

iii. 539:—Bellum, O terra hospita, portas.

‘A hardy stock, we bear our new-born sons to the rivers, and harden them with the chill cold; as boys they ply the chase and give the woods no rest: it is their pastime to rein the steed and aim their arrows from the bow. But our warrior youth, patient in toil and inured to scanty fare, either subdues the soil with the harrow or makes towns shake by their assault. Each period of life wears away in arms, and with the butt end of the spear we goad the steer; nor does the lethargy of age impair our spirit or change our vigour: our hoary hairs we press with the helmet, and it is our joy ever to gather fresh booty and to live by foray.’ ix. 603–613.

‘The men who dwell in high Praeneste and the tilled land where Gabii worships Juno, and the Hernican rocks, sparkling with streams, they whom rich Anagnia and thou, father Amasenus, feedest.’ vii. 682–5.

‘They who dwell among the crags of grim Tetrica, and the mount Severus, and Casperia and Foruli and the river of Himella; they who drink of the Tiber and Fabaris, whom cold Nursia sent, and the hosts of Horta and the Latin tribes; and those whom Allia, name of ill omen, divides with its stream flowing between them.’ vii. 713–7.

‘They who plough thy glades, Tiberinus, and the hallowed shore of Numicius, and work the Rutulian hills with the ploughshare, and the ridge of Circeii, the fields of which Jove of Anxur is guardian, and Feronia glorying in her green grove—where the black marsh of Satura lies, and where with cold stream through the bottom of the vales Ufens gropes his way and hides himself in the sea.’ vii. 797–802.

This view of Virgil’s pride in the qualities of the Italians is not incompatible with the fact to which Mr. Nettleship has drawn attention (Suggestions Introductory to a Study of the Aeneid, pp. 13 et seq.), that Virgil represents their earlier condition as one of turbulent barbarism. Virgil seems to have regarded ‘the savage virtue of his race,’ although requiring to be tamed by contact with a higher civilisation, as the ‘incrementum’ out of which the martial virtue and discipline of the later Italians was formed:—

Sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago.

‘Tears to human sufferings are due, and hearts are touched by the common lot.’

‘There will come a time as the years glide on, when the house of Assaracus will reduce to bondage Phthia and famous Mycenae, and lord it over vanquished Argos.’ Aen. i. 283–5.

‘He shall overthrow Argos and the Mycenae of Agamemnon, and the king himself of the line of Aeacus, descendant of the puissant Achilles.’ vi. 839–40.

‘Again he has set before us in Ulysses a profitable example of the power of courage and wisdom.’ Ep. i. 2. 17, etc.

Annals, ii. 88.

It is remarked by Helbig, in his ‘Campanische Wandmalerei,’ that among the many paintings found at Pompeii dealing with mythological and similar subjects, only one is founded on the incidents of the Aeneid.

Cp. Mr. Nettleship’s Suggestions, etc., p. 10, and the passages from Cicero there quoted.

‘Thou rulest the world by bearing thyself humbly towards the Gods.’

‘The destinies of thy descendants remain unchanged, nor does my purpose make me waver.’

‘King Jove is impartial to all: the Fates will find their own way.’ x. 112–3.

‘All-powerful fortune and fate from which there is no escape.’

‘As the doom of the empire was pressing on to its accomplishment.’ i. 33.

‘Nations were subdued, kings were taken prisoners, and Vespasian made known to the fates.’ Agric. 13.

‘The leadership of Mucianus, the name of Vespasian, and the fact that nothing was too difficult for the fates to accomplish.’ Hist. ii. 82.

‘The irony of human affairs.’ Ann. iii. 18; cf. the lines of Lucretius. v. 1233–5:—

Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam

Opterit et pulchros fascis saevasque secures

Proculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.

‘The instability of fortune, which confounds the highest with the lowest.’ Hist. iv. 47; Hor. Od. i. 34. 12.

‘A night bright with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.’ Ann. xiv. 5.

Ann. iv. 28.

Ib. i. 30.

Ib. xii. 43.

Ib. iv. 1.

‘All which events happened with such entire indifference on the part of the gods, that Nero continued his career of empire and crime for many years afterwards.’ Ann. xiv. 12.

Cf. Tac. Ann. xi. 24: ‘Quid aliud exitio Lacedaemoniis et Atheniensibus fuit, quamquam armis pollerent, nisi quod victos pro alienigenis arcebant?’ etc.

‘Her sacred emblems and her gods Troy commits to thy care—take these as the companions of thy fates.’

‘With his comrades and his son, the Penates and the great gods.’

Aen. viii. 679.

‘The rites of religion and the new Gods shall come from me—let the power of arms be with my father-in-law Latinus—let him keep his established rule.’ Aen. xii. 192–3.

‘We mark it gliding above the topmost roof of the house, hide itself in a bright stream in the forest of Ida, marking out the way.’ Aen. ii. 695–7.

‘Cease to hope that the determinations of the Gods can be turned aside by prayer.’

i. 543.

‘May the gods, if any Powers regard the merciful, if righteousness and a pure conscience avail aught anywhere, bring to thee a worthy recompense.’ i. 603–5.

‘Almighty Jove, if thou hast not yet utterly hated the Trojans to the last man, if thy mercy as of old still regards human troubles.’ v. 687–9.

‘May the gods, if there is any pity in heaven to take heed of such things, thank thee as thou deservest and make due recompense to thee who hast made me to behold my son slain before my face, and hast stained a father’s countenance with the pollution of death.’ ii. 536–9.

‘Here they by whom their brethren were hated, while life was with them, or a father struck, or a client dealt with treacherously, or who brooded alone over some discovered treasure and assigned no share to their kindred—and they are the greatest multitude—and they who were put to death as adulterers, and they who followed to war an unholy standard, and they who feared not to be false to the fealty they owed their lords, imprisoned await punishment.... Here is one who sold his country for gold, and made it subject to a powerful master; another made and unmade laws for a bribe; another violated a daughter’s bed in forbidden wedlock—all men who dared some monstrous deed of sin, and enjoyed its fruits.’ vi. 608–14, 621–4.

‘Here a company, who received wounds fighting for their country, and they who were pure priests, while life was with them, and they who were holy bards and who spoke in strains worthy of Phoebus, or they who improved life by their discoveries, and who by their good deeds made others keep them in memory.’ vi. 660–4.

Cf. At Tiberius, nihil intermissa rerum cura, negotia pro solatiis accipiens. Tac. Ann. iv. 13.

iii. 132–7:—

Ergo avidus muros optatae molior urbis

Pergameamque voco, et laetam cognomine gentem

Hortor amare focos, arcemque attollere tectis,—

* * * * *

Iura domosque dabam.

‘The funeral was most remarkable for the display of ancestral images, as the founder of the Julian house, Aeneas and all the Alban kings, and Romulus founder of the city, and after them the Sabine lords, Attus Clausus, and the other images of the Claudii, in a long line passed before the eyes of the spectators.’ Ann. iv. 9.

‘And do we still hesitate to find by our deeds a wider field for our valour, or does fear hinder us from establishing ourselves on Ausonian soil?’ vi. 807–8.

‘Then the ages of cruel strife will become gentle, and war be laid aside: hoary faith, and Vesta, Quirinus with his brother Remus, shall give laws.’ i. 291–3.

‘Augustus Caesar, of descent from a god: who shall establish again the golden age of Latium over fields where Saturn once reigned.’ vi. 793–5.

‘Him hereafter, laden with the spoils of the East, thou shalt welcome in heaven and feel no fear longer; he too will be invoked with prayers.’ i. 289–90.

‘By the manners of the olden time and its men the Roman State stands firm.’

Il. xx. 105.

For an instance of the number of slaves in a single household in the reign of Nero compare the speech of C. Cassius in Tac. Ann. xiv. 43: ‘Quem numerus servorum tuebitur, cum Pedanium Secundum quadringenti non protexerint?’ The simplicity of the old Roman life which Virgil idealises in the Georgics, as compared with the luxurious indulgence of the later Republic and the Empire, was in a great measure due to the comparative rarity of slavery in the earlier ages of Roman history.

Cf. ‘Virgil’s Aeneis war der früheste Versuch in dieser künstlichen oder phantastischen Fassung des Epos, das erste romantische Heldengedicht, und machte den Uebergang zu den gleich zwitterhaften Epen der modernen Zeit.’ Bernhardy, Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur.

It is probably too early to institute a comparison between the epic of Virgil and any recent work of imagination, but not too early to indicate adherence to those critics who find a parallel not in art and genius only, but in the simplicity and sincerity of nature revealed in their works, between the author of the Aeneid and the author of the ‘Idylls of the King.’

This intention was well brought out in an article in Fraser’s Magazine, which has since been republished by Mr. Froude in his ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects.’

‘Her robe flowed down to her feet, and she was revealed by her movement as indeed a goddess.’ ‘But I who move in state as the queen of the gods.’

‘To each man his own day is appointed: brief and irrecoverable is the time of life to all; but to spread one’s name widely by achievements, this is the work of valour.’ Aen. x. 467–9.

‘Looking forth from the deep he raised his calm head from the surface of the wave.’ Cf. Weidner’s Commentary on the First Two Books of the Aeneid.

‘Apollo of Actium, marking this, was bending his bow from above.’

‘Speed well, O boy, in thy young valour; such is the way to the stars, thou child of the gods and sire of gods to be: rightly shall all the wars that are destined to be, cease under the sway of the line of Assaracus: nor is Troy wide enough to hold thee.’ Aen. ix. 641–4.

ix. 717.

‘Forthwith she thus addressed the sister of Turnus, she a goddess, her a goddess of the meres and sounding rivers; such the hallowed office that Jove, high king of Heaven, bestowed on her as the price of her love.’ Aen. xii. 138–41. This passage, with its monotonous and rhyming endings—sororem—sonoris—honorem,—is probably one of those which Virgil would have altered had he lived to give the ‘limae labor’ to his work.

vii. 81, etc.

‘Then the queen of the Gods gliding from Heaven, with her own hand pushed the lingering gates, and, as the hinge moved, she, with the might of Saturn’s daughter, bursts open the iron-fastened doors of War.’ vii. 620–2.

‘In her true semblance as a Goddess, in form and size as she is wont to appear to the dwellers in Heaven.’

‘The awful forms become visible and the mighty majesty of the Gods hostile to Troy.’

Cp. De Coulanges, La Cité Antique.

‘Even then the dread solemnity of the spot awed the frightened peasants: even then they trembled before the wood and rock. This grove, he says, this hill with leafy summit, some God—what God we know not—inhabits: the Arcadians believe that they have beheld even Jove himself, when oft-times he shook the blackening aegis in his right hand, and summoned the storm clouds.’ viii. 349–54.

‘That it may not be able to be received within the gates or drawn within the walls, nor to guard the people beneath its ancient sanctity.’ ii. 187–8.

‘Quitting shrines and altars, all the Gods by whom this empire stood fast, have departed.’ ii. 351–2.

‘With his own hand he bears the sacred emblems and the defeated Gods and drags his little grandson.’ ii. 320–1.

‘We bear bowls foaming with warm milk, and saucers of sacred blood, and lay his spirit to rest in the tomb, and call him for the last time with a loud voice.’ Aen. iii. 66–8. The passage is referred to by M. de Coulanges in one of the early chapters of ‘La Cité Antique.’

‘O light of the Dardan land, most trusted hope of the Trojans, why hast thou tarried so long? from what shores, Hector, dost thou, the object of much longing, come? how, after many deaths of thy kinsmen, after manifold shocks to the city and to those who dwell within it, do we, in our utter weariness, behold thee? what cruel cause hath marred thy calm aspect, or why do I behold these wounds?’ ii. 281–6.

‘He makes no reply, nor detains me by answer to my idle questions, but with a deep groan from the bottom of his breast, “Ah fly,” he says, “Goddess-born, and wrest thyself away from these flames: the enemy holds the walls; Troy falls in ruins from its lofty summit; enough has been granted to my country and to Priam; could Pergama have been defended by any single hand even by this it should have been defended. Troy commits to thee her sacred emblems and household Gods: take them as companions of thy destinies, seek a fortress for them, which thou shalt raise of mighty size after thy wide wanderings over the deep are over.”’

‘At a time when Andromache, in a grove in front of the city by the stream of Simoeis—not the true Simoeis—happened to be bringing the yearly offering of food, a melancholy gift to the dead, and to be calling his Manes to the tomb of Hector—the empty mound of green turf which she had hallowed with the two altars, which gave food for her tears.’ iii. 301–5.

‘Besides there was within the palace a marble chapel in memory of her former lord, which she cherished with marvellous reverence, wreathing it with snow-white fillets and festal leaves.’ iv. 457–9.

‘The Manes send unreal dreams to the world above.’

‘Where her former husband Sychaeus sympathises with all her sorrows and loves her with a love equal to her own.’

Cp. ‘Un Poëte Théologien,’ in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

Cf. Aen. v. 236:—

Vobis laetus ego hoc candentem in litore taurum

Constituam ante aras, voti reus, extaque salsos

Porriciam in fluctus, et vina liquentia fundam.

viii. 273:—

Quare agite, O iuvenes! tantarum in munere laudum

Cingite fronde comas et pocula porgite dextris.

Created out of his ships.

‘Nay when thy fleet, after crossing the seas, shall have come to anchor, and, after raising altars, thou shalt pay thy vows upon the shore, then veil thy head with a purple robe, lest, while the consecrated fires are burning in the worship of the Gods, the face of some enemy may meet thee, and confound the omens.’ iii. 403–7.

‘Highest of Gods, Apollo, guardian of holy Soracte, in whose worship we are foremost, in whose honour the heaped-up pinewood blazes, while we, thy worshippers, with pious trust, even through the midst of the flame plant our steps deep in the embers.’ xi. 785–8. Cp. the Beltane fires which are said to be still kept up among remote Celtic populations, and which seem to be a survival of a primitive Sun-worship.

‘Idle superstition, which knows not the ancient Gods.’

Ann. iv. 33.

It is true, as Gibbon remarks in his Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, that the expression ‘dare iura’ is only once applied to Aeneas—but it is the regular expression used of a ruler of a settled community, as for instance of Dido. It is applied at the end of the Georgics to Augustus, ‘per populos dat iura.’

‘While the house of Aeneas shall dwell by the steadfast rock of the Capitol, and the fatherly sway of a Roman shall endure.’ Cp. the application of ‘pater’ as an epithet of Aeneas, and Horace’s line in reference to Augustus—

Hic ames dici pater atque princeps.

‘A palace, august, vast, propped on one hundred columns, stood in the highest place of the city, the royal abode of Laurentian Picus, inspiring awe from the gloom of woods and old ancestral reverence., Here it was held auspicious for kings to receive the sceptre and first to lift up the fasces: this temple was their senate-house, this the hall of their sacred banquets; here after sacrifice of a ram the fathers used to take their seats at the long unbroken tables.’ vii. 170–6.

‘After the Powers on high determined to overthrow the empire of Asia and the nation of Priam that deserved no such fate, and proud Ilium fell, and Troy built by Neptune is reduced utterly to ashes.’ iii. 1–3.

‘An ancient city, that held empire through many years, is falling in ruins.’ ii. 363.

‘Such was the final doom of Priam; this the end allotted to him, while he saw Troy on fire and its citadel in ruins,—Troy that formerly held proud sway in Asia over so many peoples and lands.’ ii. 554–7.

‘I have lived, and finished the course that fortune gave me; and now my shade shall pass in majesty beneath the earth; I have founded a famous city, I have seen my own walls arise.’ iv. 653–5.

The Peloponnesian war, which united the Dorian and oligarchical States of Greece under the lead of Sparta against Athens and her allies, admits, as is indicated by Thucydides in his Introduction, of the best parallel to the Trojan war, as represented by Homer.

‘In rough guise, armed with javelins and wearing the skin of a Libyan bear.’

‘And seated him on a couch of leaves and the skin of a Libyan bear.’

‘Here others lay the broad foundations for theatres, and hew out from the rocks huge columns, the high ornaments of a future stage.’ i. 427–9.

‘Bronze was the threshold with its rising steps, bronze-bound the posts, of bronze the doors with their grating hinges.’ i. 448–9.

‘And marvels at the skill of the artists working together and the toil with which their works are done, he sees the whole series of the battles fought at Troy and the war whose fame was already noised through all the world.’ i. 455–7.

‘Burning lamps hang from the roof of fretted gold, and torches with their blaze banish the night.’

‘Youth of surpassing spirit, the higher thou risest in thy towering courage, the more fit is it that I take earnest counsel and weigh anxiously every chance.’ xii. 19–21.

‘The care thou hast for my sake, I pray thee, Sire, for my sake to lay aside, and allow me to hazard my life for the prize of honour. I too,’ etc.

‘Thou too, O Turnus, would’st now be standing a huge trunk with thy arms upon thee, were but thy age equal to his and the strength derived from years the same.’ xi. 173–4.

‘But why, in my misfortune, am I detaining the Trojans from deeds of arms—go, and mindful bear these commands to your king.’ i. 561, etc.

‘Banish fear from your hearts, ye Trojans, lay aside your cares, our hard lot and my new rule force me to take such anxious measures, and to guard my realm on all its wide frontiers. Who cannot have heard of them who follow Aeneas and of the city Troy, its men and manful prowess, or the fires that raged in that mighty war? Not so dull are the hearts of us the people of Phoenicia, nor is it so far away from our Tyrian city that the Sun yokes his horses.’

‘His woolly sheep follow him; this is his sole joy and solace of his suffering.’ iii. 660–1.

‘We see standing by him, all of no avail, the stern-eyed brothers dwelling on Etna, bearing their heads high in air, a grim assembly.’ iii. 677–9.

‘But not even thus though hard-bestead did he forget the raft, but springing after it laid hold of it among the waves, and sat down in the middle, thus escaping the issue of death.’

‘We leave the harbours of Ortygia and scud over the open sea, and skirt the coasts of Naxos, on whose ridges the companies of Bacchus revel, and green Donysa, Olearos, and snow-white Paros, and the Cyclades spread over the sea, and the narrow waters studded with frequent isles. The mariner’s cheer arises with varying rivalry.’ iii. 124–8.

‘On the fourth day for the first time the land at length appeared to rise up, to open up the view of its distant mountains, and to send its rolling smoke on high.’ iii. 205–6.

‘And now the stars had disappeared, and in the first blush of dawn we see far off the dim outline of the hills and the low land of Italy.’ iii. 521–3.

‘The longed-for breezes blow stronger, and the harbour now nearer opens up, and the temple of Minerva comes into sight on the cliff.’ iii. 530–1.

‘Soon we leave out of sight the airy heights of the Phaeacians, and skirt the shores of Epirus and draw near the Chaonian harbour, and approach the lofty city of Buthrotum.’ iii. 291–3.

‘Camarina comes into sight far away, and the plains of the Gela, and vast Gela called from the name of the river—after that high Acragas shows its mighty walls afar—in old days the breeder of high-mettled steeds.’ iii. 701–4.

‘To these he adds Amaster son of Hippotas, and follows plying them with his hurled spear Tereus and Harpalycus and Demophoon and Chromis.’ Aen. xi. 673–5.

‘To whom Zeus gave from youth even to old age the grievous task of war, till we each should die.’ Il. xiv. 85–7. The fascination which the poem has even for modern readers is due, in no slight degree, to the spell which some aspects of war exercise over the imagination in all times.

‘They ply their spears with redoubled force, both the Trojans and Mnestheus himself with the flash of lightning.’

‘There is here, here a spirit that recks not of life.’

Cf. viii. 510:—

ni, mixtus matre Sabella,

Hinc partem patriae traheret.

‘Us the fates summon hence to other scenes of woe, to the same grim wars.’ xi. 96–7. Cf. the epithet ‘lacrimabile,’ which he applies to war.

‘Press not further in thy hate.’

‘The short-lived and ill-starred loves of the Roman people.’

‘If in any way thou canst break the cruel bonds of fate, thou too shalt be a Marcellus.’

‘And the sword-point pierced through the shield, slight defence in his menacing onset, and the tunic which his mother had interlaced with threads of gold.’ x. 817–8.

‘But then, when he beheld the look and face of the dying youth, he, the son of Anchises, that face so wondrous pale, he uttered a deep groan in his pity, and held out his hand, and the thought of all his love for his father came over his mind.’ x. 821–4.

‘Ye too fell in the Rutulian fields, Larides and Thymber, twin sons of Daucis, most like to one another, indistinguishable to your own family, and a most pleasing cause of confusion to your parents.’ x. 390–2.

‘Immediately the whiz of the arrow and the sound of the air were heard by Arruns at the same moment as the iron fixed in his body. Expiring and uttering his last groan, forgotten by his comrades, he is left on the unheeded dust of the plain; while Opis flies aloft to high Olympus.’ xi. 863–7.

‘Between it Tiberinus with his fair stream, in rapid eddies and yellow with much sand bursts forth into the sea.’

‘There was a custom in Hesperian Latium which from that time onward the Alban cities observed, and now Rome, mistress of the world, observes.... With his own hand, arrayed in the robe of state of Quirinus, his toga girt with the Gabian girding, the Consul unbars the creaking gates: with his own voice he calls for battle; the rest of the warlike youth echo him, and the brazen horns combine with their hoarse accompaniment.’ vii. 601–15.

‘Rhaebus, we have lived long, if aught is long to mortals,’ etc. Aen. x. 861, etc.

Trist. ii. 533–4.

‘Whate’er it be, every fortune must be conquered by endurance.’

‘Then he cheers his comrades and soothes the fears of sad Iulus, telling them of their destinies.’

‘And now higher rises the fierce rage of the Trojan leader.’

‘A great deed has been done, my warriors,—let all fear be banished.’ This contrast was suggested by Mr. Nettleship’s interpretation of the character of Turnus (‘Suggestions,’ etc., pp. 15 et seq.). As will appear later, I am inclined to think that he insists too exclusively on the ‘violentia,’ which is undoubtedly a strong element in the character of the Italian hero. The antagonism of Turnus to Aeneas, as of the Italians to the Trojans, he justly regards as an instance of the strife of passion with law. If the Greek drama suggested the ethical aspect of this strife, a comparison with Horace, Ode iii. 4, of which Ode the leading idea is the superiority of the ‘vis temperata’ over the ‘vis consili expers,’ as illustrated in the wars of the Olympian Gods with the Titans, and in the triumph of Augustus over the elements of disorder opposing him, suggests that the political inspiration of the idea came from ‘the stately mansion on the Esquiline’—

‘Molem propinquam nubibus arduis.’

‘Nor shall it irk me to remember Elissa, while I can remember my own self, while breath animates my frame.’

‘But my longing for thee, the thought of all thy cares, noble Odysseus, and of all thy gentleness bereft me of sweet life.’

La Cité Antique.

‘And now that I am a man, and know it from the lips of others, and feel my spirit wax strong within me.’

‘And his spirit was wroth that the stranger tarried long at the door.’

‘Where the white lilies blush with the mingling of many roses.’

‘For my rest is assured, my haven is close at hand—it is of happy funeral rites that I am bereft.’

‘Now be each mindful of wife and home: recall now the mighty deeds, your fathers’ renown.’

‘I give back Pallas even as was due to him; whatever respect there is to a tomb, whatever comfort in burial, I freely bestow.’ Cp. the contrast:—

ἦ ῥα καὶ Ἕκτορα δῖον ἀεικέα μήδετο ἔργα.

‘The Aetolian and Arpi will not aid us, but Messapus will and fortunate Tolumnius.’

‘For you and my father-in-law Latinus, I, Turnus, second to none of the men of old in valour, have devoted this my life: “me only Aeneas challenges”—ay, let him challenge me; nor let Drances rather, if this is the anger of Heaven, pay the penalty by his death, or if it is a call to valour and glory, let the valour and glory be his.’ Aen. xi. 440, etc.

Napier’s Peninsular War, Death of Sir John Moore.

‘Is death then so sad a doom? Be ye merciful to me, spirits of the dead, since the favour of the Powers above is turned from me; a spirit, pure and untainted by that shame, I shall pass to you, never dishonouring my mighty ancestors.’ Aen. xii. 644–8.

‘It is the Gods that terrify me, and the enmity of Jove.’

‘He who first won my love has taken it with him: let him keep it and treasure it in his tomb.’

‘Often his own heroic spirit, often the glory of his race, recur to her mind: his looks remain deep-printed in her heart, and his words, nor does her passion allow her to rest.’

‘That forsooth is the task of the Powers above; this trouble vexes their tranquil state.’

‘I trust indeed, if the pitiful Gods avail aught, that among the rocks in mid sea thou shalt drink deep of the cup of retribution, and often call on Dido by name; I, from far away, will follow thee with baleful fires, and when chill death has separated my spirit from my frame, my shade will haunt thee everywhere; heartless, thou shalt suffer for thy crime: I shall hear of it, and this tale will reach me among the spirits below.’

‘Arise thou, some avenger, out of my bones, who with brand and sword mayest chase the settlers from Troy, now, hereafter, whensoever there shall be strength to bring thee forth.’

‘I have built a famous city: I have seen my own walls arise: avenging my husband, I exacted retribution from an unkind brother; fortunate, alas! too fortunate, had not the Trojan keels ever touched our shore.’

‘I shall die unavenged,’ she says, ‘still let me die—it is thus, thus, I fain would pass to the shades: may the cruel Trojan drink in with his eyes the sight of this fire from the deep, and carry along with him the omen of my death.’

‘Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood,

Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern

From her false friend’s approach in Hades, turn,

Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.’

The Scholar Gipsy, by Matthew Arnold.

‘At length she started away and fled unforgiving into the shades of the forest, where her former husband, Sychaeus, feels with all her sorrows and loves her with a love equal to her own.’

Landor’s Pentameron.

‘It was when their first sleep begins to weary mortals.’

‘The broad waters of Sigaeum reflect the fire.’

‘There is dread on every side, while the very silence awes the mind.’

‘But some way off in a lonely bay the Trojan women apart were weeping for their lost Anchises, and as they wept were gazing on the deep—“Ah, to think that so many dangerous waters, so vast an expanse of sea remained still for them, the weary ones!” was the cry of all.’

‘In her dreams Aeneas himself fiercely drives her before him in her frenzy; and she seems ever to be left all alone, ever to be going uncompanioned on a long road, and to be searching for her Tyrians on a desert land.’

‘Powers whose empire is over the spirits of the dead, and ye silent shades.’

‘Behind his war-horse Aethon, with all his trappings laid aside, goes weeping, wetting his face with great drops. Others bear his spear and shield—the rest of his armour Turnus keeps—then follow in mournful array the Trojans, and all the Tyrrhenian host, and the Arcadians with arms reversed.’

iv. 143, etc. Referred to in the ‘Parallel Passages’ in Dr. Kennedy’s notes.

Referred to by M. Benoist.

‘Or with the grandeur of father Appenninus himself, when he makes his waving ilexes heard aloud, and is glad as he towers with snowy summit to the sky.’

‘Either on the banks of the Po, or by the fair Adige.’

‘As Ganges swelling high in silence with its seven calm streams, or the Nile when with its fertilising flood it ebbs from the plains, and has already subsided within its channel.’ ix. 30–2.

‘As many as the leaves that fall in the woods at the first cold touch of autumn, or as many as the birds which are gathered to the land from the deep, when the chill of the year banishes them beyond the sea, and wafts them into sunny lands.’ vi. 309–312.

‘Like the moon when one sees it early in the month, or fancies he has seen it rise through mists.’

‘So to see, as when one sees or fancies he has seen the dim moon in the early dawn.’

‘As when a purple flower cut down by the plough pines and dies, or as poppies droop their head wearily, when weighed down by the rain.’

‘Like a delicate violet, or a drooping hyacinth, when plucked by a maiden, from which the bloom and the beauty have not yet departed—but the earth does not now nourish it and supply its forces.’

‘Ac ne quid impetum moraretur quaedam imperfecta transmisit, alia levissimis versibus veluti fulsit, quos per iocum pro tibicinibus interponi aiebat ad sustinendum opus, donec solidae columnae advenirent.’ Donatus, quoted by Ribbeck in the Life prefixed to his smaller edition of Virgil.

‘But I the stately Queen of the Gods.’

‘And first Achates struck a spark from a flint, and caught the light in some leaves, and cast dry sticks about them to feed them, and blew the spark within the fuel into a flame.’

‘Worthy to be happier in a father’s command and to have another father than Mezentius.’

‘Yield not thou to thy hardships, but advance more boldly against them.’

‘Learn from me, my child, to bear thee like a man and to strive strenuously, from others learn to be fortunate.’

‘Have the courage, stranger, to despise riches, and mould thyself too to be a fit companion of the God.’

‘Ah! fly that cruel land, fly that covetous coast.’ Mentioned by Mr. Symonds in his History of the Renaissance in Italy.

Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman, D.D.

To attempt to translate these ‘pathetic half-lines’ etc., apart from their context, would only be to spoil them, without conveying any sense of the feeling latent in them.

Aut videt, aut vidisse putat.

Footnotes