Book I. 1

II. 26 III. 51 IV. 74 V. 96 VI. 122 VII. 150 VIII. 176 IX. 198 X. 222 XI. 250 XII. 277

NOTES 305

INDEX TO NOTES 345

INTRODUCTION

THE ÆNEID

When Rome, torn and bleeding from a century of civil wars, turned to that wise judge of men, the second Cæsar, and acquiesced as, through carefully selected ministers, he gathered the reins of power into velvet-clad fingers of steel, she did wisely. Better one-man power than anarchy! It became the part of true patriotism for the citizen and of statesmanship for the politician to bring to the aid of the First Man of the state all the motives that could harmonize the chaotic elements, and start Republican Rome on the path of a new unity—the unity of the Empire.

For already “far away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating horses’ hoofs and marching feet of men. They were coming, they were nearing, _like footsteps heard on wool_;[A] there was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, mustering and marshalling her peoples.” In his great task Augustus, with the aid of Mæcenas, very cleverly drew to his help writers whose work has since charmed the world. We can almost pardon fate for destroying the Republic—it gave us Virgil and Horace.

Pleasant indeed had it been for Virgil to sing in emulation of his great teacher Lucretius! “As for me,” he says, “first of all I would pray that the charming Muses, whose minister I am, for the great love that has smitten me, would receive me graciously, and teach me the courses of the stars in heaven, the various eclipses of the sun and the earth, what is the force by which the deep seas swell to the bursting of their barriers and settle down again on themselves—why the winter suns make such haste to dip in ocean, or what is the retarding cause which makes the nights move slowly.” Pleasant, too, to spend his “chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase” in picturing “the liberty of broad domains, grottos and natural lakes, cool Tempe-like valleys, lawns and dens where wild beasts hide, a youth strong to labor and inured to scanty fare.” “Let me delight in the country and the streams that freshen the valleys—let me love river and woodland with an unambitious love.” “Then, too, there are the husbandman’s sweet children ever hanging on his lips—his virtuous household keeps the tradition of purity.” Ah, yes, to Virgil most attractive was the simple life of the lover of nature, and charmingly did he portray it in his _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_!

But Augustus, recognizing the genius of Virgil, and realizing the supreme need of a reinvigorated patriotism, urgently demanded an epic that should portray Rome’s beginnings and her significance to the world. Reluctantly then Virgil took up this task. Even at his death he considered it unfulfilled. Indeed it was his wish that the manuscript be destroyed. Almost immediately the _Æneid_ became the object of the closest study, and ever since it has evoked the deepest admiration. Perhaps no other secular writing has so profoundly affected literature.

VIRGIL’S LIFE

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), born in the rural district near Mantua, a farmer’s son, was given by his loving father a careful education. Of his father Virgil says, “those whom I have ever loved and above all my father.” The regard of his hero Æneas for his father Anchises not merely illustrates the early Roman filial affection—it suggests Virgil’s relation to his own parent. In north Italy Virgil studied at Mantua, Cremona, and Milan, and at seventeen took up his wider studies at Rome itself in the year 53 B.C. Catullus had died the year before, Lucretius was dead two years. At Rome Virgil had the best masters in Greek, rhetoric, and in philosophy, a study in which he especially delighted. In forming his own poetic style Virgil was profoundly influenced by Lucretius, whose great poem _On Nature_ treated of the wondrous physical universe, and by the subtly sweet young Catullus,

“Tenderest of Roman poets.”

—TENNYSON.

In such studies Virgil spent ten years. But in 41 B.C. he appears again in north Italy and this time in storm and stress. In the year of Philippi the triumvirs, settling their victorious legions, confiscated lands about Cremona, and Virgil, attempting to resist dispossession, came near to losing his life. Through fellow-students of the Roman days he secured an introduction to Octavius and was compensated—either recovering his own farm, or receiving in lieu of it an estate in Campania.

Virgil relates his experience in two of his ten _Eclogues_ which were published in their present form in 38 B.C. These charming poems were especially loved by Milton and Wordsworth. Macaulay indeed considered them the best of Virgil’s works. At Rome they met immediate success with the people and with Octavius and his wise minister Mæcenas, Horace’s patron. In them Virgil tenderly sings love of friends, home, and country.

Then Virgil spent seven years on the four books of the _Georgics_, publishing them in 29 B.C., two years after Actium. The _Georgics_ Merivale calls “the glorification of labor.” In them Virgil hymns the farmer’s life in beautiful Italy.

“Hail to thee, land of Saturn, mighty mother of noble fruits and noble men! For thee I essay the theme of the glory and the skill of olden days.”

Virgil was now acknowledged the greatest poet of Italy. In the year 26 B.C., one year after the title Augustus had been conferred on Octavius, we find the emperor writing Virgil the most urgent letters begging the poet to send him, then in Spain, some portion of the projected _Æneid_. It was, however, considerably later when Virgil read to Augustus the second, fourth, and sixth books, for the young Marcellus, the emperor’s nephew, died in 23 B.C., and we are told that Octavia, his mother, fainted on hearing the poet read the immortal lines about her son in the sixth book:—

“Child of a nation’s sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant’s shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow.”

Virgil,

“who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes,”

had already spent some ten years on the _Æneid_, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the “famous cities” and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to

“Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge, Whole and intact on the Attican borders Faithfully guarding the half of my soul.”

Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples,

“That delicious Bay Parthenope’s Domain—Virgilian haunt; Illustrated with never dying verse And by the Poet’s laurel-shaded tomb, Age after age to pilgrims from all lands Endeared.”

—WORDSWORTH.

INFLUENCE OF THE ÆNEID

As to the success of the _Æneid_, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil’s death Horace writes in his _Secular Hymn_:—

“If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands Upon the Etruscan shore have won renown, That chosen remnant, who at thy command Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town; If all unscathed through Ilion’s flames they sped By sage Æneas led, And o’er the ocean waves in safety fled, Destined from him, though of his home bereft, A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left.”

—Translated by MARTIN.

Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words, with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther’s translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature.

When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion,—degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition,—it was evidence of Virgil’s grip on humanity that the poet of poets became the wizard of wizards. Even under the Antonines, the _Sors Vergiliana_ (Virgilian prophecy) was practised. The _Æneid_ was opened at random, and the first verse that struck the eye was considered a prophecy of good or bad portent. “The mediæval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the _Roman_, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the _perfect in style_, with whom no other writer could be compared; the _Philosopher_, who grasped the ideas of all things; the _Wise One_, whose comprehension seemed to other mortals unlimited. His writings became the Bible of a race. The mysteries of Roman priestcraft, the processes of divination, the science of the stars, were all found in his works.”

True indeed are the words of Professor MacMechan: “Beginning the _Æneid_ is like setting out upon a broad and beaten highway along which countless feet have passed in the course of nineteen centuries. It is a spiritual highway, winding through every age and every clime;” and these of Professor Woodberry: “The _Æneid_ shows that characteristic of greatness in literature which lies in its being a watershed of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that clothes it with the past of imagination, character and event, and forward to Christian times in all that clothes it with emotion, sentiment, and finality to the heart.”

As we approach modern literature, the great Italian Dante consciously takes Virgil as his “master and author.” “O glory and light of other poets! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love, that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author.” On English literature the influence of the _Æneid_ has been so potent that our space will hardly suffice to convey the barest hint of its direct and indirect lines. Celtic story developed from it a voyage of Brutus who founds a new Troy, or London. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century sets forth this tale in his history. It was believed down to the seventeenth century and is reported by Milton. Elizabethan literature has frequent references to it. Chaucer in his _House of Fame_ outlines the _Æneid_, emphasizing the Dido episode, which interested also Nash, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Spenser teems with allusions and indeed translations, so—

“Anchyses sonne, begott of Venus fayre,” Said he, “out of the flames for safegard fled And with a remnant did to sea repayre; Where he, through fatall errour, long was led Full many yeares, and weetlesse wandered From shore to shore emongst the Lybick sandes Ere rest he fownd.”

—_F. Q._, III., ix., 41.

and—

“Like a great water-flood, that, tombling low From the high mountaines, threates to overflow With suddein fury all the fertile playne, And the sad husbandmans long hope doth throw Adown the streame, and all his vowes make vayne, Nor bounds nor banks his headlong ruine may sustayne.”

—_F. Q._, II., xi., 18; cf. _Æn._ II., 304 ff.

Bacon calls Virgil “the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” “Milton,” writes Dryden, “has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.” But beside this indirect influence, and that through the Italian school, Virgil’s direct influence on Milton is attested by many an allusion. Dryden, Cowper, with his “sweet Maro’s matchless strain,” Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, with his “sweet, tender Virgil,” freely acknowledge the debt they owe our poet. Dryden and Morris translated the _Æneid_ into verse.

Tennyson, “the most Virgilian of modern poets,” gives the following tribute, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil’s death:—

“Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre, Landscape lover, lord of language more than he that sang the Works and Days, All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase, Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd, All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word, Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers, Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherds bound with flowers, Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea, Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind, Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind, Light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this phantom shore, Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more, Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar’s dome— Tho’ thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perished, and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island, sundered once from all the human race, I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”

It is a lover of Horace (and who is not a lover of Horace?), the brilliant Andrew Lang, who points out (in his _Letters to Dead Authors_) a vital difference that has made Virgil’s the higher influence: “Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch ‘the Sibyl doth to singing man allow,’ and might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it permitted to see and sing ‘mothers and men, and the bodies outworn of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men borne to the funeral fire before their parents’ eyes.’ The endless caravan swept past him—‘many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives them o’er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands.’ Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown. Ah, not _frustra pius_ was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. In him, we fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience.”

THE EPIC ITSELF

The purpose of the epic is to indicate the divinely ordained origin and history of Rome as a conquering, civilizing, and organizing government, destined to replace both anarchy and tyrannical despotism by liberty under law. As the real world-historic reason for Rome’s existence is so commonly overlooked, let us recall Mommsen’s words in the introduction to his _Provinces of the Roman Empire_: “It fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing.... If an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove in favor of the present.” Virgil states the function of Rome clearly in the famous passage of the sixth book wherein Greek and Roman are compared:—

“Forget not, O Roman, thy fate—to rule in thy might o’er the nations: This is to be thine art—peace to the world to give.”

So the hero Æneas, himself of divine birth, is preserved by divine intervention when Troy falls, and mid dire perils for seven years’ voyagings, and all the bitter warring in Italy, “to bring the gods unto Latium,” “to found a city,” to teach Italy religion and a virile civilization. “Whence Rome mighty in her defences,” “a task of so great magnitude it was to build the Roman nation.” Twice,—once in fields Elysian from the lips of sainted Anchises, and again, portrayed on the shield that Vulcan made for Æneas, is rehearsed the long line of legendary and historical Roman heroes down to Augustus himself. “On this side is Augustus Cæsar, leading the Italians to conflict, with the senate and the people, the home-gods and their mighty brethren, standing aloft on the stern.” “But Cæsar ... was consecrating to the gods of Italy a votive tribute to deathless gratitude, three hundred mighty fanes the whole city through.” “Such sights Æneas scans with wonder on Vulcan’s shield ... as he heaves on his shoulder the fame and the fate of grandsons yet to be” (end of eighth book). Incidentally ground is given, in compensating fate, for Rome’s conquest of Greek lands—she is but loyal to her Trojan ancestry!—and for the duel to the death with Semitic Carthage—whose queen once was the stately Dido, left by King Æneas at Jove’s command! Incidentally, too, Virgil draws from Trojan origins governmental forms, religious rites, yes, even games.

While this great task of glorifying patriotism and harmonizing it with loyalty to Cæsar is ever present to Virgil, he cannot lose two qualities that make him the most modern of ancient poets—his love of nature and his pathos. As examples—of the former, it suffices to cite the charming harbor scene succeeding storm and wreck, in the first book; and, of the latter, the death-scene of the immortal twain, Nisus and Euryalus (in Book nine).

“Down falls Euryalus in death; over his beauteous limbs gushes the blood, and his powerless neck sinks on his shoulders; as when a purple flower, severed by the plough, pines in death, or poppies with faint necks droop the head, when rain has chanced to weigh them down. But Nisus rushes full on the foe ... and dying robs his foe of life. Then he flung himself on his breathless friend, pierced through and through, and there at length slept away in peaceful death.

“Happy pair! if this my song has ought of potency, no lapse of days shall efface your names from the memory of time, so long as the house of Æneas shall dwell on the Capitol’s moveless rock, and a Roman father shall be the world’s lord.”

THE STORY

The story on which Virgil builds is, briefly, the fall of Troy, the voyaging of Trojan refugees under Æneas, and the successful wars of Æneas with Italian barbarians.

According to the ancient legend the Greeks had warred ten years under Troy’s walls, because the Trojan prince, Paris, having awarded the prize of beauty to Venus as against Juno and Minerva, and, having been promised as reward by Venus Helen the beautiful wife of the Greek Menelaus, had eloped with that fatal beauty to Troy, and his father King Priam had refused to make restitution.

The story then, as related by Æneas to Queen Dido in her palace at Carthage, takes up (in the second book of the Æneid) the downfall and destruction of Troy, with the escape of Æneas, his father and son, together with a band of Trojans. Then (in the third book) are depicted their voyagings, unsuccessful attempts to found cities, and arrival in Sicily. Here father Anchises dies. From Sicily they sail in the endeavor to reach Latium in Italy.

It is at this point that the epic begins. So after his invocation and introduction (in Book one), Virgil makes unrelenting Juno, through the storm-king Æolus, let loose upon the Trojan fleet a fierce tempest, which drives the remnant of the fleet far away to the Carthaginian coast. Æneas, directed by his disguised mother Venus, comes to the court of Dido by whom he is kindly received, banqueted; and at her request narrates (in Books two and three) his harsh experiences.