Chapter IV. II.

[24] See Legrand, P. E., _Tableau de la comédie grecque pendant la période dite nouvelle_—κωμῳδία νέα; translated as _The New Greek Comedy_ by James Loeb, with introduction by John Williams White, London and New York, 1917. An earlier study quoted below is Lallier, R., _La comédie nouvelle, introduction à l’étude du théâtre de Térence_ (leçon d’ouverture), Toulouse, 1876.

Recent English translations of Plautus are: by Paul Nixon in the Loeb Classical Library (2 volumes issued); by E. H. Sugden of _Amphitruo_, _Asinaria_, _Aulularia_, _Bacchides_, _Captivi_, London, 1893; by H. O. Sibley and F. Smalley of _Trinummus_, Syracuse, N. Y., 1895; by B. H. Clark of _Menæchmi_, New York, 1915. W. H. D. Rouse has reprinted William Warner’s Elizabethan translation of _Menæchmi_ with the Latin text for the study of Shakspere’s _Comedy of Errors_, London, 1912.

A second edition of F. Leo’s _Plautinische Forschungen zur Kritik und Geschichte der Komödie_ appeared in Berlin, 1912. More recent studies are: Brasse, M., _Quatenus in fabulis Plautinis et loci et temporis unitatibus species veritatis neglegatur_ ... Greifswald, 1914 (Breslau thesis); Schild, Erich, _Die dramaturgische Rolle der Sklaven bei Plautus und Terenz_, Basel (thesis), 1917; Blancké, W. W., _The dramatic values in Plautus_, Geneva, N. Y., 1918 (Pennsylvania thesis); Cole, Mrs. H. E., _Deception in Plautus_, a study in the technique of Roman comedy, with bibliography, Boston, 1920 (Bryn Mawr thesis).

A complete translation of Terence was privately printed for the Roman Society, 1900, 2 volumes, with brief notes and partial bibliography. The most useful available translation is that of the _Phormio_ by M. H. Morgan, Cambridge, Mass., 1894, with the Latin text and reproductions of the Vatican miniatures of costumes. This play has been translated also by Clark, B. H., New York, 1915; _The Self-tormentor_, by Shuckburgh, E. S., Cambridge, 1869, and by Ricord, F. W., New York, 1885. The Loeb Classical Library publishes the translation of John Sargeaunt in 2 volumes. See also Michaut, G., _Sur les tréteaux latins (histoire de la comédie romaine)_, Paris, 1912; Knapp, C., _References in Plautus and Terence to plays, players and playwrights_, Classical Philology, xiv, number 1 (Jan., 1919); and a charming popular study by Lemaître, J., “Térence et Molière,” in _Impressions de théâtre_, vi (1898) 15-27. The better to define ancient conceptions of comedy, Lane Cooper reconstitutes _An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus,’_ New York, 1922.

[25] See the quotation from Apuleius on page 228. The _Onomasticon_ of Julius Pollux enumerates 44 masks sufficient for all the rôles and all the situations of the New Comedy: 10 for old men, 10 for young men, 7 for slaves, 3 for old women, 14 for young women. There are even stock names, e.g., Davos and Chremes. _Miles gloriosus_ was taken over by Latin comedy and again by French seventeenth-century comedy, though in fact neither society had this Athenian type. Over against him is the parasite, often the mover of the intrigue. The slave and he are the most active of the _personæ_. (This note is derived from Lallier.)

[26] The extreme case is the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus with its two Amphitryos and two Sosias. In _Menæchmi_ the servants are doubled; in _Bacchides_, the courtesans.

[27] Greenough’s translation of the argument, prefacing Morgan’s translation of the play.

[28] Plutarch, _Mor._, De gloria Atheniensium, 347 F.

[29] Michaut (139) cites Evanthius _De Fabula_ IV. 4 and Donatus. _Statarius_ seems to be used, in the prologue to the _Adelphi_ and in a passage cited by Michaut from Cicero’s _Brutus_ xxx. 116, of acting. Knapp cites the prologue to the _Self-tormentor_.

[30] “Qui sim, cur ad vos veniam paucis eloquar,” prol. to _Bacchides_; and the play opens with both ladies together on the stage, so that there can be no mistake. Terence, who devotes his prologue usually to rebuttal of detraction, sometimes devotes his whole first act to exposition.

II. NARRATIVE

A. THE _ÆNEID_

(1). _Epic_

Epic is now often divided into “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” epic, such as the _Iliad_, and “artistic,” or “literary” epic, such as the _Æneid_. Of the former the great example is Homer. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ remain, for us as for the ancients, supreme. Meantime the western European nations emerging in the early middle age expressed themselves in epics of original native force: the _Roland_, the _Beowulf_, the _Nibelungenlied_, and some of the Norse sagas. To put these beside Homer is to become aware of specific differences within a general likeness. Homer is both more ample and more finished. Primitive he certainly is not in any sense now recognized by anthropology. Even the word popular has for us implications quite inapplicable to the circulation of his day. The classification of certain epics as primitive, authentic, or popular is based on the idea that these are characteristically communal, expressing more the emotions of a whole homogeneous community, less those of the individual poet. It has even been held[1] that such epic began in aggregation of tribal lays, and that even the form in which it has come down to us is less the creation of any individual than the final artistic shaping of successive anonymous versions. The theory of communal composition, in this literal and extreme sense, has been sharply challenged. Without denying the use of traditional material and form, one may remain convinced that the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ is the work of a single man, whom we may as well continue to call Homer, and that he was not merely the mouthpiece of a community, but a conscious and skilful artist. That his art was not wasted on his community, that this community was far from primitive, there is ample evidence in the remains of its other arts.

The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are less finished than the _Iliad_; true, they show clearer traces of old war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are found to have had considerable illumination.

Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web, still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.

Later, or secondary, epic is not the transmission of legends still active, but the re-creation of a past already remote. Still appealing to a communal sense of the heroic, it adapts the old epic mode to an audience more sophisticated not only in life, but in poetic art. The poet is thus at once more imitative and more original. He binds himself by traditions of subject-matter, of form, and of style; but within this recognized mode he composes with more individual freedom and to a more definite end. Relying less on scenes in a series, he selects and manipulates toward more artistic sequence. Since his descriptions must be less immediate, he develops the art of narrative. Endeavoring to remain the spokesman of his people—for otherwise he must forfeit the communal mainspring of epic—he interprets their past by his own message for their future. Thus he may be all the more a poet, or maker. He cannot hope for the fresh immediacy of primary epic; but in compensation he has greater opportunity to move his people by his own vision. Milton’s conception, vast as is its scope, is essentially the same. He interprets the Bible as the epic of mankind in terms of a Puritan theocracy. Tasso re-creates a departed chivalry to animate a vision of devotion and redemption. Vergil, the great example of secondary epic, makes of the Trojan story, of Roman legend, of myth and cult and drama and history, of all that enriched the Roman past, a progressive vision of Roman destiny.

Primary epic and secondary epic, though thus distinguishable, are both epic. They are complementary. They reveal different capacities of a single artistic mode. Epic is constant. It was; it was again; it is; for aught that we can see, it will be. Extended poetic narrative of great deeds for communal inspiration, though it has never been common, has never been extinct. Primary epic seems inevitable. The minstrel in the hall of Hrothgar is poetically identical with the minstrel in the hall of Alcinous.[2] Both hint to us of what epic was made, and how; both show us its constancy. This primary form of epic can never, of course, recur. It has been civilized away. But meantime it has established a poetic art that is permanent. The word epic still connotes a distinct mode. To this Vergil deliberately conformed, and Milton. Secondary epic is still epic.

What, then, are seen to be in ancient practise the essentials of epic? First, its inspiration and its appeal are communal. By contrast the modern novel, which is also extended narrative and also within Aristotle’s definition of poetic, is seen to be individual; or, where in exceptional cases it is broader and simpler,[3] is often distinguished by criticism as having epic appeal. Then, epic is in style objective. It narrates habitually without interposition, by images visual, auditory, motor. Its scenery is merely the background of heroic activity. Its speeches are in primary epic for characterization, not for plot. There is no plot in the dramatic sense for the whole; and such as there is for component parts is only to bring out persons. The object of epic being persons, its commonest descriptive details are of personal activity: attitude, movement, speech, gesture. The method is to suggest that heroic life by its physical sensations, to make the characters, as Aristotle says,[4] reveal themselves. Epic gives few reflections. It does not comment even on Helen’s coming to the Scæan gates, or on Hector’s parting from Andromache; it merely describes. This objectivity is a main means of epic directness.

The characteristic form of epic[5] is for scope and variety. Drama is intensive; epic is extensive. It has time to give us a sense of the fulness of life; and its movement does not preclude excursions. We meet many people and see them in various aspects. We can linger over a scene for itself without being urged forward. Continuity may be but leisurely succession from scene to scene. A scene may within itself have dramatic progress; but the movement of the whole has not the dramatic causal compulsion. Drama has its characteristic force through unity. Unity in epic is neither compelling nor compulsory. In fact, to stretch the term unity over epic tends to deprive it of all force. No epic poet has ever composed more carefully than Vergil, or with keener awareness of the ways of drama. The _Æneid_ was composed as a whole; its parts were carefully adjusted to a plan, and its plan was controlled by a single idea. Epic has never gone further toward unity; and Homer never dreamed of going so far. But even such dramatization of epic as Vergil’s has time for the funeral games, and does not sacrifice to the story of Rome the story and the person of Dido. In poetic, unity means nothing unless it means unity of form. This epic cannot have as a whole. Nor does any one regret the lack, or think it a fault. The unity of drama is for intensity; the object of epic is the realization not of a crisis, but of great persons in a long and various course.

So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech. The epithets of the _Iliad_ or the _Beowulf_ are a poetical convention; and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic poets have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told greatly.

Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language. That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity” heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to wider import. Aristotle[6] remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius[7] even finds control of rhythms to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication, is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse.

(2). _The Conception and Scope of the Æneid_

The whole poetic art of ancient epic is exhibited in the _Æneid_. Setting aside those interesting historical questions of epic origins, growth, and transmission which in the study of Homer can hardly be ignored, and on the other hand including the whole range of epic, secondary as well as primary, we can learn best from the great poet who devoted his mature years to conceiving, planning, and reshaping the epic of Rome. The artistic scope of the _Æneid_, as well as its artistic eminence, long secure beyond cavil, has been reaffirmed by recent criticism. Sainte-Beuve calls Vergil “le poète de la Latinité tout entière.”[8] Mackail, whose studies have been primarily Greek, exalts the _Æneid_ afresh.[9] Woodberry, whose criticism has been mainly of English literature, says: “The distinctive feature of the ‘Æneid’ is the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports,” and again, “The ‘Æneid’ is, I think, the greatest single book written by man because of its inclusiveness of human life, of life long lived in the things of life.”[10]

The idea of Roman destiny, animating the _Æneid_ throughout, is something larger than the nationalism of other epics. It is imperialism, and of a spirit generous enough to win the sympathy of Dante. It has not the occasional character of such a nationalist story, for instance, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s _Historia Regum Britanniæ_. In a time of corrupt politics it is above political opportunism. Its Rome is not merely the throne of Augustus; it is the government of the world. Its Romanism is less political than religious. “Pius Æneas” is more typical than “much-enduring Odysseus” of the struggle of man for an abode of justice and peace. This, more than the personal glory that humanism centuries afterward read from the classics, is the conception of the _Æneid_. The destiny of Rome reveals the hope of mankind; and the _Æneid_ has the whole epic scope. Hardly less than Milton, Vergil justifies the ways of God to man.

(3). _The Narrative Movement of the Æneid_[11]

That the _Æneid_ has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.[12] Salience is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance, are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.[13] The slaughter of the last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,[14] in order to give salience to those other emotions which for the _Æneid_ as a whole were leading. Æneas does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the queen who among Vergil’s _personæ_ is the great individual; but even so strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission.

The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic; they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen at once as determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For not only has the _Æneid_ a more consistent theology than the _Iliad_; it is also more religious.

The most frequent examples of Vergil’s subordination are in his fine art of description. Picturesque with brilliant color, as well as with the Homeric light and motion,[15] and as precise as they are vivid, his descriptions are rarely separable. Not only are they contributory to the action; they are also inwoven.[16] Vergil’s sensitiveness to the details of nature transpires in a sentence, even in single words,[17] which describe while they narrate. Here he discerned the artistic rightness by which Homer describes every thing movable as in motion,[18] and applied the principle with more careful attention to narrative continuity. He dispenses with Homer’s superfluous mechanism of transition.[19] Memorable as are the descriptions—and nothing in the _Æneid_ is better remembered—very few can be detached from the context for separate admiration.[20] The detailing of architecture and decoration, though it unduly seized the fancy of the middle ages, is hardly an exception. The Carthaginian pictures of Troy, the palace of Latinus, are there not for scene-painting, but for historic suggestion. They serve the story. Thus Vergil’s descriptive art is at once less ample than Homer’s and more specifically subsidiary. The Hellenistic tableau—ἔκφρασις is its ominous name—appears in the glittering conventional pauses of Ovid. Vergil had put it aside. This is the more remarkable because the ancients seem generally to have regarded certain scenes—battle, for instance, conflagration, storm, thwarted love—as rather description than narration.[21] Vergil, while he works even more than Homer to make us realize a scene by sharing in it as actors,[22] works also to avoid interruption of the story.

Similar is the constant care to avoid interruption of time or place.[23] Vergil’s unremitting prevision and revision have obviated any time-lapse that is insignificant for the action. The Homeric device of bringing in antecedent action by retrospective narrative is used more artistically. While it covers ground, extending the time-lapse beyond the stage, the narrative of Æneas heightens the love of Dido before our eyes.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed; And I loved her that she did pity them.

It is a larger achievement, one of the greatest,[24] to heighten epic by suggesting vast reaches of time, from tribal wanderings through wars of conquest to the reign of law. Here is the artistic significance of the visit in Book VI to the world of the dead and the unborn, which, as Mackail says, “slips in the keystone.” To compare the visit of Odysseus to the shades is to see Vergil’s higher art of composition. But the suggestion of the great loom of time (_tot volvere casus_) is not confined to a single artistic device; it is pervasive from the opening words through a hundred careful allusions; and it makes the _Æneid_ wider than the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ by making it constantly suggestive of the whole struggle of history. It reveals more explicitly the struggles of heroic men as the struggle of man.

Thus the oft-repeated objection that the _Æneid_ breaks into halves is superficial. The break would not have been thought of if Vergil had not been seen to be working for a continuity stricter than Homer’s. Stated baldly by Tyrrell, the idea that the _Æneid_ is an _Odyssey_ plus an _Iliad_ presupposes a sort of imitation to which Vergil shows himself everywhere superior. It would be as near the truth to reply that the _Æneid_ is neither an _Odyssey_ nor an _Iliad_. But prototypes aside, how and how far is the _Æneid_ held together? Surely by the most careful articulation ever seen in epic, but surely not to the degree of drama. Among the evidences of revision are indications that the plan for the wanderings of Æneas was first achieved[25] when much of the poem was already written. The adjustment of this part to the whole course, a technic hardly explored by Homer, and the abbreviations of the wanderings by careful selection, are of a piece with the consistent connection by repetition of the theme, from the opening lines,

Trojæ qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus,

throughout the whole poem. True, the seventh book invokes Erato for scenes of battle.

Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo; Maius opus moveo.

The following scenes are different, but not the theme. The art that deliberately avoided Homer’s succession of battles by interposing such scenes as Evander’s achieved more than variety. It suggests again and again what the battles were for. The close upon the tragic death of Turnus becomes more than the personal victory of the hero; it is the triumph, over _violentia_, over such individual prowess as Homer glorified, over personal ambition thwarting the state, of fortitude bringing in religion and law.

But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the _Æneid_ should be unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope.

How, then, is the _Æneid_ dramatic? In the composition of the whole only by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such articulation as had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the parts singly his art is more dramatic. The _Æneid_ as a whole is not dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.[26] For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again, the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his own epic mission—_dux femina facti_. Follows his view of the city, big already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace. Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to a waiting stage and a waiting audience, _enter Dido_.[27] Moreover in the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry[28] and became a rhetorical commonplace with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility, in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above. For the fourth book of the _Æneid_, as fully as the _Antigone_, is tragic in its purgation of pity and fear.

Thus to apply drama to narrative without sacrificing the typical epic opportunities of fulness and scope is among the greatest achievements of poetic. It is an art so far beyond any other ancient narrative as to remain solitary until Dante; and Dante’s guide was Vergil. It guided also the creative hand of Milton. And not for epic only, but for all imaginative story, the art of the _Æneid_ remains a test and a guide. In this sense he who became for medieval Latinists _the_ poet, as Cicero was _the_ orator, remains Master Vergil.

(4). _Characterization in the Æneid_

To turn from the narrative movement to the persons is to descend. At once we feel that the achievement is less and that the method is less fruitful for narrative art because it is less distinctively poetic. Vergil’s narrative composition has universal validity; but his characterization, for the most part, is only Latin. It had none the less influence on the middle ages—perhaps all the more; but it had the less inspiration for later creations.

To estimate Vergil’s characterization fairly, it is necessary first to remove certain misconceptions. He has been reproached for leaving in our minds few outstanding figures: Turnus, Evander, Mezentius, Pallas, Nisus and Euryalus. Some of these, like the Camilla whom Dante remembers, are only sketched; and most of them are secondary. Now though this is paucity beside the populous pages of Homer, we must remember that Vergil’s whole roster of heroes is smaller deliberately because, much more than Homer’s, they are _dramatis personæ_. He makes the dramatic innovation of focusing on a few and of subordinating the development even of these to the development of the theme.

A more frequent objection is that throughout the latter part of the poem the hero is no longer Æneas, but Turnus. This is to use the word hero in a sense that Vergil would hardly have understood. Seeing Turnus through centuries of romance, we are so occupied with his _bravoure_ as readily to forget that Vergil’s Æneas is not meant to have the interest or the significance of King Arthur. Nor, we should add, is he meant to have the interest of Achilles. His individual prowess is only incidental to his dominant fortitude. The achievement of personal glory is behind him. “He has outlived his personal life.”[29] His work is to found the Roman people. The characterization of Æneas, moreover, shows a certain development.[30] He shows more growth than “much-enduring Odysseus.” The battle frenzy of the return to the doomed city (_arma amens capio_), the vacillation at Carthage, are put forever behind. He becomes progressively more steadfast. Always _pius_, he enlarges his _pietas_ into calm assurance of mission. As for the story, so for the characterization of the hero, the sixth book is the critical stage of a progress.

The creative power of Vergil is amply vindicated by Dido. One may feel that she is too vivid for her function, that she takes the stage, as actors say, away from Æneas, that through her the nice planning of the whole is quite warped. We shall doubtless never be able to judge this as Romans. Perhaps even they were more absorbed than Vergil intended in his tragic queen.[31] Perhaps Vergil himself was swerved by his own creation. But all this only reinforces the testimony to a compelling characterization. There may be difference of opinion as to Dido’s part in the story; there can be none as to Dido herself.

But our estimates thus duly corrected, we cannot but feel that Dido stands out among the figures of the _Æneid_ because she is exceptional. We feel her to be drawn not only better, but often differently. And this should lead to scrutiny of Vergil’s habitual method. To begin with, it is everywhere apparent that he cares less than Homer for individuality. A certain expansiveness in Homeric dialogue often keeps the story waiting to give the individual his say. Vergil shifts the proportions. He rejects long dialogues because he is more interested in narrative economy than in personal expressiveness. Further, the speeches are often more reasoned than Homer’s, more orderly, less like conversation and more like oratory.[32] Sinon’s are very naturally elaborate pieces of special pleading, and the rhetoric of Drances against Turnus is appropriate in a deliberative assembly; but the making of successive points, and the careful adaptation of style not only to the speaker, but to the hearer, are habitual, as even in the speech of Allecto to Turnus. In this reasoned order, rather than in any mere elaboration, Heinze finds Vergil to be rhetorical. Instead of following the pace of emotional utterance, abrupt and disjointed, he sometimes holds even violent emotion to a steady course. By thus composing emotional expression he sometimes sacrifices directness of characterization.[33]

Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types. Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic preoccupations;[34] but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric[35] fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious fictions by the _declamatores_. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises above the schools. Vergil was too great to move on that level; but even he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method. He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization inferior to his composition.

(5). _Epic Diction_

Generations have felt in the _Æneid_, first of all, high and constant beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful. The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.[36]

atque arida circum Nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam. Tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerealiaque arma Expediunt fessi rerum; frugesque receptas Et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo.

I. 175.

This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery. Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and, besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No, the plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes more oratorical[37] than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there. But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few blemishes!

Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the _Æneid_ ten years.[38] No style is more highly charged. It is made to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual[39] is characteristic of an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper a ritualist,”[40] he is continually suggesting the significance of traditional forms. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are in a special dialect. The _Faery Queene_ has a language of its own. To achieve such suggestions in the _Æneid_ with but the slightest resort to archaism is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate, wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages, unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the world.”[41]

(6). _Originality in Imitation_

The notion that imitation must be subversive of originality betrays a crude conception of both. Yet it lingers in such criticism as thinks the _Æneid_ to be a Latin _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. To measure it so is to miss not only the art of a single great poem, but much of all poetic art. For since all art works in forms received and recognized, less by invention than by transformation, it is of cardinal significance to distinguish, in a poem conspicuously imitative and conspicuously original, just what artistic imitation is. Therefore what has been implied in the preceding sections may here be drawn together in summary.

Imitation is always of movement or style; it has nothing to do with material. To preface this should be superfluous; but many quests for “sources” have left some confusion. Vergil took much of the Trojan story from Homer. To be sure, he used other sources too. Nothing is more remarkable in the _Æneid_ than the wealth and variety of its material. Its sources are beyond the dreams of Homer. But even if Vergil’s material were all Homeric, he would not on that account be the more imitative. Ancient literature, and mediæval too, generally make freer with preceding stories than modern. The material is not thought to be any one’s property. In this respect Vergil is singularly independent. He uses more sources; he is more selective; and what he adopts is often a composite. He works in the modern way rather than in the ancient; but he is not on that account either more or less imitative. Some of Shakspere’s plays derive their plots from single sources; some are in plot composite; but all are alike original. A modern French tragedy took the plot not only of an ancient story, but of the best known of all ancient plays. It is none the less original; and its imitation, as all artistic imitation, is of the ancient technic.

Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated in Brunetière’s _évolution des genres_, evidently epic meant something controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits _personæ_ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material, but the epic form, to a new end. His Sinon[42] is a typical instance of artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he has become through his new function and motivation creatively original. Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but Vergil does not rely on the general _mêlée_; he modifies it subtly in the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the present. The _Æneid_ is not a Latin _Iliad_; it is a Roman epic.

Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer in the direction of drama.[43] How, and how far, imitation of drama can serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.[44] Epic diction, he discerns, in order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom.

B. THE NARRATIVE POETRY OF OVID

Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no one suffers more than Ovid.[45] Yet he who presented the gods without seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them, has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose influence spread over western Europe.

That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial[46] from the first and instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon alliteration and other consonance;[47] and his use of refrain suggests those stanza patterns set centuries later by French courtly makers in rondel[48] and ballade.[49] For though he knows the subtlest spells of sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul, and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head.

Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action, but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar. Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods, are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund.

For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea[50] lacks none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,[51] no appropriate gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,[52] and the golden age[53] make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?” was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had the art to repeat it[54] when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself became the pattern of these things for centuries. Not only is he forever the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must thou haste?”[55] echoed across Europe,[56] was heard in the cry of Chaucer’s Troilus[57] and Shakspere’s Juliet,[58] and still reverberates.

The Alexandrian[59] dilation of such description[60] appears also in the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.[61] The fixing of this as a literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of _declamatio_,[62] where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form even by Roman schoolboys, developed by _declamatores_ in exhibitions of virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,[63] is only a more extended and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical personification with myth[64] shows him rather as a rhetorician[65] than as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great Unknown[66] thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate and sometimes vivid, are not alive.

More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell[67] says of the _Metamorphoses_: “The skill with which different legends are woven into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of transition? To call the _Metamorphoses_ a long heroic poem suggests a cruel comparison with the _Æneid_, and partly begs the question. What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections. His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.

The “vivid inventiveness” and “unflagging animation” urged by Owen[68] as characteristic of Ovidian narrative may be accepted without discussion, and should not be undervalued. Inventiveness was overvalued, indeed, in the melodramatic fictions of _declamatio_, and implies an art rather facile than creative; but it is none the less sure of popularity. As for animation, whatever else a story may be, it may not be dull. Here Ovid often wins by his very levity. He makes no demands. No one can be followed more easily; for he moves on the surface. Where he skates on thin ice, he does so quite simply for excitement. There is none of the modern pretense of exploration. His problems are purely artistic, problems not of motive, but of interesting mood and attitude, of appropriate and various utterance. His animation, partly rhythmical, partly descriptive, is more largely unflagging expressiveness. Always expressive, his people can always be understood without effort. He holds attention without provoking thought.

The “rapid movement” claimed by Owen is often mere succinctness, rarely the speed gained by modern narrative use of dramatic technic. For that he usually has too much separable description, too much soliloquy, too little motivation. He seeks intensity less often than expansiveness. Nevertheless, though he pauses deliberately for description or _tirade_, he does not lag. There is no clumsy prosing or deviation. He has the art, more valued in ancient and medieval times than in modern, of lucid, fluent narrative, the art of the tale. That he does not follow it oftener is due to his readers’ fondness, and his own, for dilation. The onward movement of poetic is thus sacrificed to rhetoric. The parts become more important than the whole. For Ovid was a rhetorician, not only bred in the schools, but habitually thinking of poetry less as composed movement than as lucid and brilliant, as ample and harmonious style.

C. THE METAMORPHOSES OF APULEIUS

Sighting from the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid through the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius,[69] one clearly discerns the coming of the Greek Romances. So runs the Alexandrian narrative line from decorative description and expansive emotion, through exciting incident and uncontrolled variety,[70] to sheer violence. Ovid’s stories are sometimes like dreams; the Greek Romances are nightmares. Apuleius, between the two, already seeks the violent and the bizarre. His metamorphoses are no longer mythical, nor in the least allegorical; they are mere sorcery. The appetite of his time for horrors and other excitement had been both fed and whetted by _declamatio_.[71] Ovid, too, knew _declamatio_; but Apuleius, himself a rhetor, was less restrained by earlier literary standards from giving rein to the sensational.

Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his _Metamorphoses_ are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as there is eddies in harangues, _tirades_ and decorative descriptions. The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting _prosopopœia_ suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness. Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style, though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention.

During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the _Babylonica_, or Rhodanes and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the _Chæreas and Calirrhoe_ (before 200).[72] Thus was established the mode followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness to the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of narrative seems to lapse.

FOOT-NOTES:

[1] See F. B. Gummere’s _Beginnings of Poetry_. The controversy which was spread by the Homeric studies of Wolf, has lately shifted to the popular ballad. See G. L. Kittredge’s introduction to his one-volume selection of the _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ from the collection of Child, Boston, 1904, and the recent studies of Professor Louise Pound. J. A. Scott maintains _The Unity of Homer_ in his University of California Lectures, 1921.

[2] C. S. Baldwin, _Introduction to English Medieval Literature_, New York, 1914, pages 16-18.

[3] As I write, Knut Hamson’s _The Growth of the Soil_ has just been called epic.

[4] _Poetic_, xxiv.

[5] Aristotle, _Poetic_, xxiv. See page 158 above.

[6] _Poetic_, xxiv.

[7] See above, page 106.

[8] Opening of the _Étude sur Virgile_.

[9] _Lectures on Poetry_, London, 1911.

[10] “Vergil,” in _Great Writers_, New York, 1912.

[11] W. Y. Sellar in _The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Virgil_, Oxford (3d edition), 1908, analyzes under convenient headings Vergil’s position in Latin literature. Henry Nettleship’s discussions in _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1875, 1885, have not been superseded, though they have evidently been suggestive to more recent critics. Sainte-Beuve’s _Étude sur Virgile_, Paris, n. d., and T. R. Glover’s _Virgil_, London, 1904 (4th edition, 1920), appeal more to the general reader. R. Y. Tyrrell’s chapter in his _Latin Poetry_, Boston, 1895, is unsympathetic with Vergil the artist. Most of the innumerable editions of the _Æneid_ have little to say of his poetic art. This is specifically the subject of M. Marjorie Crump’s _The Growth of the Æneid_, Oxford, 1920, which, though little developed, is a distinct contribution to technical study. But _the_ book on Vergilian epic is the exhaustive work of Richard Heinze, _Virgils epische Technik_, Leipzig, 1902 (2d edition. 1908, 3d edition, 1915). References are to pages of the third edition.

[12] Heinze, 319, compares in this aspect the Homeric duel of Paris and Menelaus with _Æneid_ xii. Typically, he points out, Vergil’s “Handlung fortschreitet,” and the composition is “szenenhaft.”

[13] Paul LeJay, _L’Énéide_, Paris, 1919, page lix. Heinze, 381, shows the minuteness of this care in cases where two scenes are chronologically parallel. One of the two is always subordinated; and the first to be presented is always carried to a state of rest before turning to the second.

[14] Heinze, 361.

[15] The exactness, brilliancy, and range of Vergil’s color words are studied by T. R. Price, _The Color-System of Vergil_, American Journal of Philology, volume 4, number 13 (1882). See the more extensive work of Hugo Blümner, _Die Farbenbezeichnungen bei den römischen Dichtern_, Berliner Studien, volume 13 (1891).

[16] This is the technical secret of the distinction that Sainte-Beuve expresses as “sobriété ... rien que le nécessaire,” _Étude sur Virgile_, 93.

[17] Glover, 16, repeats Henry’s praise of

Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna. VI. 270.

Surcharged precision intensifies

Lucet via longo Ordine flammarum, et late discriminat agros. XI. 143.

But the same distinctness, at once precise and picturesque, may be found almost anywhere in the _Æneid_; it is Vergil’s habit, and it is never obtrusive.

[18] Lessing, _Laokoön_, especially chapters xvi and xvii.

[19] Heinze, 406.

[20] The famous description of the harbor under the cliffs (Est in secessu longo locus. I. 159) is really less characteristic than

Adspirant auræ in noctem, nec candida cursus Luna negat; splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus. VII. 8.

[21] Heinze, 396.

[22] Heinze, 374.

[23] Heinze cites the handling of Fama in IV, and of Allecto in VII.

[24] See above, page 199.

[25] Heinze, 94. Miss Crump analyzes the probable changes of revision. Her theory that Book III survives from an earlier plan in which it stood first, and that Vergil probably intended to revise it entirely, has grave difficulties.

[26] Paul LeJay, _L’Énéide_, lxviii; Heinze, 263. For the detail of the composition of single books and groups see also Heinze, 180, 448, 453. For instances of peripety, see Heinze, 223, 323.

[27] Heinze, 120, is hardly extravagant in maintaining that this is beyond any other ancient achievement of the kind.

[28] Heinze, 133.

[29] Woodberry, 132. See also J. R. Green, “Æneas, a Virgilian Study” in _Stray Studies from England and Italy_, 227.

[30] Heinze, 271 seq.; W. Warde Fowler, _The Religious Experience of the Roman People_, lecture xviii.

[31] Ovid (_Tristia_, II. 535) says that the fourth book was the most popular.

[32] Sellar, 395. For careful discussion of this whole aspect of Vergil’s diction, see Heinze, 410-427.

[33] That even Dido’s desperate plea, as well as the calm reply of Æneas, proceeds from point to point, not all readers will agree with Heinze (425-6, on _Æneid_ IV. 305). The variations of rhythm in this passage would surely be used by a sympathetic reciter to suggest agitation. But Vergil’s general neglect of the familiar means of asyndeton and hyperbaton (see, for example, _De sublimitate_, xxi-xxii) to suggest emotional disorder shows a characteristic distrust of incoherence.

[34] Heinze, 279.

[35] How freely Latin authors transferred it to poetic may be seen in Horace’s _Ars Poetica_ (see below, Chapter viii). Compare Plutarch, _Quomodo adolesc._, x, below, page 244.

[36] Sellar, 101, quotes Comparetti: “an elaboration of language which disdains or is unable to say a plain thing in a plain way.”

[37] See above, page 210.

[38] “During all the years in which Virgil brooded over it and wrought upon it, he kept his material ... in fusion, not crystallized and hardened into final shape” (Mackail, 78); i.e., he continued to adjust.

[39] _Eximios tauros_, _farre pio_, etc., noted, among other critics, by E. Nageotte, _Histoire de la littérature latine_, 334. Apropos of Vergil’s incomparable command of the resources of his language, Nageotte adds happily that a “tache de rouille antique a son effet prévu dans la gamme des couleurs environnantes” (324).

[40] Woodberry, 125.

[41] Woodberry, 111.

[42] See above, page 206.

[43] See above, page 205.

[44] See above, page 203.

[45] Ovid has a large place in every comprehensive history of Latin literature (e.g., in W. Y. Sellar’s volume on _Horace and the Elegiac Poets_ in his _Roman Poets of the Augustan Age_, Oxford, 1892), and is discussed at least briefly in the compends (e.g., C. T. Cruttwell’s _History of Roman Literature_, American edition, New York, 1890). The last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has an extensive appreciation by S. G. Owen, whose critical edition of _Tristia_ provides a bibliography of Ovidiana. Of English translations the most accessible are those in the Loeb Classical Library: of _Heroides_ and _Amores_ by Grant Showerman, of _Metamorphoses_ by F. J. Miller, both with introductions and bibliographical notes.

[46]

Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, Et quod tentabam dicere versus erat.

_Tristia_, IV. x. 25.

is almost as familiar as “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

[47]

Morsque minus pœnæ quam mora mortis habet.

_Heroides_, x. 82.

[48]

Ilia, pone metus; tibi regia nostra patebit, Teque colent amnes. Ilia, pone metus. Tu centum plures inter dominabere nymphas; Nam centum aut plures flumina nostra tenent.

_Amores_, iii. 6, 61.

Rime in Latin elegiac poetry is well summarized by K. P. Harrington in his volume of edited selections, _The Roman Elegiac Poets_, New York, 1914, page 61.

[49] E.g., at the close of _Heroides_, ix, Impia quid dubitas Deianira mori? in line 146 is repeated in lines 152, 158, 164, i.e., in every sixth line.

[50] E.g., _Metam._ xi. 494.

[51] _Metam._ vii. 826.

[52] _Ars Amat._ i. 729.

[53] _Metam._ i. 89, _Amores_, iii. 8, 35.

[54] _Metam._ iv. 320.

[55] _Amores_, i. 13. 3.

[56] See, for example, Rudolph Schevill, _Ovid and the Renascence in Spain_, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 4, number 1 (November, 1913), pages 24 and 95.

[57] _Troilus and Criseyde_, iii. 1415-1470.

[58] _Romeo and Juliet_, III. v.

[59] Owen in Encyclopedia Britannica speaks of Ovid as “the most brilliant representative of Roman Alexandrinism.”

[60] A typical ἔκφρασις is “dira lues” in _Metam._ vii. 523.

[61] E.g., Byblis in _Metam._ ix. 474, Myrrha in _Metam._ x. 320.

[62] Discussed above in Chapter IV. II. Cruttwell says of the _Heroides_: “They are erotic suasoriæ, based on the declamations of the schools.” _History of Roman Literature_, 306; and Heinze, “die Gattung der poetischen _declamatio_ inaugurierte.” _Virgils epische Technik_, 434. Cf. Sellar, 331, 356; Carl Brück, _De Ovidio scholasticarum declamationum imitatore_, Munich, 1909.

[63] _Metam._ ii. 33.

[64] Iris, Tisiphone, Luctus, Pavor, Terror. _Metam._ iv. 480. The method seen more largely in Invidia (_Metam._ ii. 760), essentially a school exercise, passed through the _Roman de la Rose_ into medieval habit.

[65] Heinze discusses more generally the rhetorical habit of Ovid in _Virgils epische technik_, 434.

[66] See above, page 126.

[67] _History of Roman Literature_, 309.

[68] Encyclopedia Britannica.

[69] Apuleius, born about 125 A.D., and probably educated at Carthage, where he passed much of his life, became a rhetor at Rome about 150, and soon thereafter published the _Metamorphoses_. _Florida_ is the title given to a collection of excerpts from what we should call his lectures (see Chapter VIII, 230). Nettleship (in an essay on Nonius Marcellus, _Lectures and Essays_, 282) calls him “a very striking representative of his age.” Though his work is largely translation or compilation, he has caught the fancy of several English _literati_, and was made by Pater one of the _personæ_ in the twentieth chapter of _Marius the Epicurean_. Adlington’s translation (1566) of the _Metamorphoses_ has been reprinted with an introduction by Seccombe, and revised for the Loeb Classical Library by Gaselee. The separable Cupid and Psyche chapters (Books IV-VI), often translated, appear in the fifth chapter of Pater’s _Marius_, and have been again translated by Purser (London, 1910), with a suggestive introduction on Apuleius as a rhetor. Butler has translated also the _Florida_.

[70] “L’art de composition faiblit, comme il arrive toujours quand la sincérité du sentiment diminue; car c’est la préoccupation sincère d’une idée dominante qui maintient d’un bout à l’autre l’unité de ton et l’harmonie; quand le bel esprit l’emporte, il s’amuse aux détails, il s’attache au ‘morceau,’ et n’a plus la force de lier l’ensemble.” Croiset, _Histoire de la littérature grecque_, vol. V (_Période Alexandrine_), page 158.

[71] See Chapter IV. II.

[72] These dates are taken from Wolff’s admirable summary of the Greek Romances as an Alexandrian derivative in the opening chapter of his _Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction_ (New York, 1912, Columbia University Press).