[104] A great part of this book is borrowed from Apollonius Rhodius; and the reader may observe the great judgment and distinction tion of our author, in what he borrows from the ancients, by comparing them. I conceive the reason why he omits the horse-race in the funeral games, was, because he shows Ascanius afterwards on horseback, with his troops of boys, and would not wear that subject thread-bare, which Statius, in the next age, described so happily. Virgil seems, to me, to have excelled Homer in those sports, and to have laboured them the more in honour of Octavius, his patron, who instituted the like games for perpetuating the memory of his uncle Julius: piety, as Virgil calls it, or dutifulness to parents, being a most popular virtue among the Romans.
[105] Dr Carey reads grace; but Dryden here uses place, for eminence of rank. Ascanius was the last in order, but the first in dignity; this, by the way, is an Ovidian point superinduced upon the simplicity of Virgil:
ARGUMENT.
The Sibyl foretels Æneas the adventures he should meet with in Italy. She attends him to hell; describing to him the various scenes of that place, and conducting him to his father Anchises, who instructs him in those sublime mysteries of the soul of the world, and the transmigration; and shews him that glorious race of heroes, which was to descend from him and his posterity.