Vergil Part 11

While Caesar Octavian, now grown to full political stature, was reuniting the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of the _Georgics_. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar, unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing now that Rome was saved and the empire restored. Vergil's youthful enthusiasm for Rome, which had sprung from a critical reading of her past career, seemed fully justified; he began at once his _Arma virumque_.

The _Aeneid_ reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have reiterated, an unsurpa.s.sed range of reading. But it is not necessary to repeat the evidence of Vergil's literary obligations in an essay concerned chiefly with the poet's more intimate experiences. In point of fact, the tracking of poetic reminiscences in a poet who lived when no concealment of borrowed thought was demanded does as much violence to Vergil as it does to Euripides or Petrarch. The poet has always been expected to give expression to his own convictions, but until recently it has been considered a graceful act on his part to honor the good work of his predecessors by the frank use, in recognizable form, of the lines that he most admires. The only requirement has been that the poet should a.s.similate, and not merely agglomerate his acceptances, that he should as Vergil put it, "wrest the club from Hercules" and wield it as its master.

In essence the poetry of the _Aeneid_ is never Homeric, despite the incorporation of many Homeric lines. It is rather a sapling of Vergil's h.e.l.lenistic garden, slowly acclimated to the Italian soil, fed richly by years of philosophic study, braced, pruned, and reared into a tree of n.o.ble strength and cla.s.sic dignity. The form and majesty of the tree bespeak infinite care in cultivation, but the fruit has not lost the delicate tang and savour of its seed. The poet of the _Ciris_, the _Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the _Bucolics_ is never far to seek in the _Aeneid_.

It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.[1] The note of intimacy, unexpected in an epic, the occasional drawing of the veil to reveal the poet's own countenance, an un-Homeric sentimentality now and then, the great abundance of sense-teeming collocations, the depth of sympathy revealed in such tragic characters as Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, the insistent study of inner motives, the meticulous selection of incidents, the careful artistry of the meter, the fastidious choice of words, and the precision of the joiner's craft in the composition of traditional elements, all suggest the habits of work practiced by the friends of Cinna and Valerius Cato.

[Footnote 1: For a careful study of this subject see Duckett, _h.e.l.lenistic Influence on the Aeneid,_ Smith College Studies, 1920.]

The last point is well ill.u.s.trated in Sinon's speech at the opening of the second book. The old folktale of how the "wooden horse," left on the sh.o.r.e by the Greeks, was recklessly dragged to the citadel by the Trojans satisfied the unquestioning Homer. Vergil does not take the improbable on faith. Sinon is compelled to be entirely convincing. In his speech he uses every art of persuasion: he awakens in turn curiosity, surprise, pity, admiration, sympathy, and faith. The pa.s.sage is as curiously wrought as any episode of Catullus or the _Ciris_. It is not, as has been held, a result of rhetorical studies alone; it reveals rather a native good sense tempered with a neoteric interest in psychology and a neoteric exactness in formal composition. And yet the pa.s.sage exhibits a great advance upon the geometric formality of the _Ciris_. The incident is not treated episodically as it might have been in Vergil's early work. The pattern is not whimsically intricate but is shaped by an understanding mind. While its art is as studied and conscious as that of the _Ciris_, it has the directness and integrity of Homeric narrative. Yet Vergil has not forgotten the startling effects that Catullus would attain by compressing a long tale into a suggestive phrase, if only a memory of the tale could be a.s.sumed. The story of Priam's death on the citadel is told in all its tragic horror till the climax is reached. Then suddenly with astonishing force the mind is flung through and beyond the memories of the awful mutilation by the amazingly condensed phrase:

jacet ingens litore truncus avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

There Vergil has given only the last line of a suppressed tragedy which the reader is compelled to visualize for himself.

Neoteric, too, is the accurate observation and the patience with details displayed by the author of the _Aeneid_. In his youth Vergil had, to be sure, avoided the extremes of photographic realism ill.u.s.trated by the very curious _Moretum_, but he had nevertheless, in works like the _Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the eighth _Eclogue_, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant. To realize the precision of his strokes even then one has but to recall the couplet of the _Copa_ which in an instant sets one upon the dusty road of an Italian July midday:

Nunc cantu crebro rumpunt arbusta cicadae nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet.

Throughout the _Aeneid,_ the patches of landscape, the retreats for storm-tossed ships, the carved temple-doors, the groups of accoutred warriors marching past, and many a gruesome battle scene, are reminders of this early technique.

What degrees of conscientious workmanship went into these results, we are just now learning. Carcopino,[2] who, with a copy of Vergil in hand, has carefully surveyed the Latin coast from the Tiber mouth, past the site of Lavinium down to Ardea, is convinced that the poet traced every manoeuvre and every sally on the actual ground which he chose for his theatre of action in the last six books. It still seems possible to recognize the deep valley of the ambuscade and the plain where Camilla deployed her cavalry. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that for the sake of a heroic-age setting Vergil studied the remains and records of most ancient Rome. There were still in existence in various Latin towns sixth-century temples laden with antique arms and armor deposited as votive offerings, terracotta statues of G.o.ds and heroes, and even doc.u.ments stored for safe-keeping. In the expansion of Rome over the Campus Martius unmarked tombs with their antique furniture were often disclosed. It is apparent from his works that Vergil examined such material, just as he delved into Varro's antiquities and Cato's "origins" for ancient lore. His remarks on Praeneste and Antemnae, his knowledge of ancient coin symbols, of the early rites of the Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work. It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast h.o.a.rd of material. There is never, as in the _Culex_ and _Ciris_, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic. Wherever the work had received the final touch, the composition shows a flawless unity.

[Footnote 2: Carcopino, _Virgile et les origines d'Ostie_.]

The poet's response to personal experience reveals itself nowhere more than in the political aspect of the _Aeneid_ a fact that is the more remarkable because Vergil lived so long in Epicurean circles where an interest in politics was studiously suppressed.

What makes the poem the first of national epics is, however, not a devotion to Rome's historical claims to primacy in Italy. The narrow imperialism of the urban aristocracy finds no support in him. Not the city of Rome but Italy is the _patria_ of the _Aeneid_, and Italy as a civilizing and peace-bringing force, not as the exploiting conqueror.

Here we recognize a spirit akin to Julius Caesar. Vergil's hero Aeneas, is not a Latin but a Trojan. That fact is, of course, due to the exigencies of tradition, but that Aeneas receives his aid from the Greek Evander and from the numerous Etruscan cities north of the Tiber while most of the Latins join Turnus, the enemy, cannot be attributed to tradition. In fact, Livy, who gives the more usual Roman version, says nothing of the Greeks, but joins Latinus and the Latian aborigines to Aeneas while he musters the Etruscans under the Rutulian, Turnus. The explanation for Vergil's striking departure from the usual patriotic version of the legend is rather involved and need not be examined here.

But we may at any rate remark his wish to recognize the many races that had been amalgamated by the state, to refuse his approval of a narrow urban patriotism, and to give his a.s.sent to a view of Rome's place and mission upon which Julius Caesar had always acted in extending citizenship to peoples of all races, in scattering Roman colonies throughout the empire, and in setting the provinces on the road to a full partic.i.p.ation in imperial privileges and duties. With such a policy Vergil, schooled at Cremona, Milan, and Naples, could hardly fail to sympathize.

It has been inferred from the position of authority which Aeneas a.s.sumes that Vergil favored a strong monarchial form of government and intended Aeneas to be, as it were, a prototype of Augustus. The inference is doubtless over-hasty. Vergil had a lively historical sense and in his hero seems only to have attempted a picture of a primitive king of the heroic age. Indeed Aeneas is perhaps more of an autocrat than are the Homeric kings, but that is because the Trojans are pictured as a migrating group, torn root and branch from their land and government, and following a semi-divine leader whose directions they have deliberately chosen to obey. In his references to Roman history, in the pageant of heroes of the sixth book, as well as in the historical scenes of the shield, no monarchial tendencies appear. Brutus the tyrannicide, Pompey and Cato, the irreconcilable foes of Caesar, Vergil's youthful hero, receive their meed of praise in the _Aeneid_, though there were many who held it treason in that day to mention rebels with respect.

It is indeed a very striking fact that Vergil, who was the first of Roman writers to attribute divine honors to the youthful Octavian, refrains entirely from doing so in the _Aeneid_ at a time when the rest of Rome hesitated at no form of laudation. Julius Caesar is still recognized as more than human,

vocabitur hic quoque votis,

but Augustus is not. The contrast is significant. The language of the very young man at Naples had, of course, been colored by Oriental forms of expression that were in part unconsciously imbibed from the conversations of the Garden. These were phrases too which Julius Caesar in the last two years of his life encouraged; for he had learned from Alexander's experience that the shortest cut through const.i.tutional obstructions to supreme power lay by way of the doctrine of divine royalty. In fact, the Senate was forced to recognize the doctrine before Caesar's death, and after his death consistently voted public sacrifices at his grave. Vergil was, therefore, following a high authority in the case of Caesar, and was drawing the logical inference in the case of Octavian when he wrote the first _Eclogue_ and the prooemium of the _Georgics_. This makes it all the more remarkable that while his admiration for Augustus increased with the years, he ceased to give any countenance to the growing cult of "emperor worship." That the restraint was not simply in obedience to a governmental policy seems clear, for Horace, who in his youthful work had shown his distrust of the government, had now learned to make very liberal use of celestial appellatives.

Augustus, then, is not in any way identified with the semi-divine Aeneas.

Vergil does not even place him at a post of special honor on the mount of revelations, but rather in the midst of a long line of remarkable _principes_. With dignity and sanity he lays the stress upon the great events of the Republic and upon its heroes. We may, therefore, justly conclude that when he wrote the epic he advocated a const.i.tution of the type proposed by Cicero, in which the _princeps_ should be a true leader in the state but in a const.i.tutional republic.

It is the great past, ill.u.s.trated by the pageant of heroes and the prophetic pictures of Aeneas's shield, that kindles the poet's imagination. His sympathies are generous enough to include every race within the empire and every leader who had shared in Rome's making, from the divine founder, Romulus, and the tyrannicide, Brutus, to the republican martyrs, Cato and Pompey, as well as the restorers of peace, Caesar and Augustus. He has no false patriotism that blinds him to Rome's shortcomings. He frankly admits with regret her failures in arts and sciences with a modesty that permits of no reference to his own saving work. What Rome has done and can do supremely well he also knows: she can rule with justice, banish violence with law, and displace war by peace.

After the years of civil wars which he had lived through in agony of spirit, it is not strange that such a mission seemed to him supreme. And that is why the last words of Anchises to Aeneas are:

Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tragedy of Dido reveals better perhaps than any other portion of the _Aeneid_ how sensitively the poet reflected Rome's life and thought rather than those of his Greek literary sources. And yet the irrepressible Servius was so reckless as to say that the whole book had been "transferred" from Apollonius. Fortunately we have in this case the alleged source, and can meet the scholiast with a sweeping denial. Both authors portray the love of a woman, and there the similarity ends.

Apollonius is wholly dependent upon a literal Cupid and his shafts.

Vergil, to be sure, is so far obedient to Greek convention as to play with the motive--Cupid came to the banquet in the form of Ascanius--but only after it was really no longer needed. The psychology of pa.s.sion's progress in the first book is convincingly expressed for the first time in any literature. Aeneas first receives a full account of Dido's deeds of courage and presently beholds her as she sits upon her throne, directing the work of city building, judging and ruling as lawgiver and administrator, and finally proclaiming mercy for his shipwrecked companions. For her part she, we discover as he does, had long known his story, and in her admiration for his people had chosen the deeds of Trojan heroes for representation upon the temple doors: Sunt lacrimae rerum. The poet simply and naturally leads hero and heroine through the experience of admiration, generous sympathy, and grat.i.tude to an inevitable affection, which at the night's banquet, through a soul-stirring tale told with dignity and heard in rapture, could only ripen into a very human pa.s.sion.

The vital difference between Vergil's treatment of the theme and Apollonius' may be traced to the difference between the Roman and the Greek family. Into Italy as into Greece had come, many centuries before, hordes of Indo-European migrants from the Danubian region who had carried into the South the wholesome family customs of the North, the very customs indeed out of which the transalpine literature of medieval chivalry later blossomed.

In Greece those social customs--still recognizable in Homer and the early mythology--had in the sixth century been overwhelmed by a back-flow of Aegean society, when the northern aristocracy was compelled to surrender to the native element which const.i.tuted the backbone of the democracy.

With the re-emergence of the Aegean society, in which woman was relegated to a menial position, the possibility of a genuine romantic literature naturally came to an end.

At Rome there was no such cataclysm during the centuries of the Republic.

Here the old stock though somewhat mixed with Etruscans, survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern customs welling up from below, at least not until the plebeian element won the support of the founders of the empire, and finally overwhelmed the n.o.bility. At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the s.e.xes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, made the father of the family responsible for civil order, no inferences were drawn to the detriment of the mother's position in the household.

Nepos once aptly remarked: "Many things are considered entirely proper here which the Greeks hold to be indelicate. No Roman ever hesitates to take his wife with him to a social dinner. In fact, our women invariably have the seat of honor at temples and large gatherings. In such matters we differ wholly from the Greeks."

Indeed the very persistence of a n.o.bility was in itself a favorable factor in establishing a better position for women. Not only did the acc.u.mulation of wealth in the household and the persistence of courtly manners demand respect for the _domina_ of the villa, but the transference of n.o.ble blood and of a goodly inheritance of name and land through the mother's hand were matters of vital importance. The n.o.bility of the senate moreover long controlled the foreign policy of the empire, and as the empire grew the men were called away to foreign parts on missions and legations. At such times, the lady in an important household was mistress of large affairs. It has been pointed out as a significant fact that the father of the Gracchi was engaged for long years in amba.s.sadorial and military duties. The training of the lads consequently fell to the share of Cornelia, a fact which may in some measure account for the humanitarian interests of those two brilliant reformers. The responsibilities that fell upon the shoulders of such women must have stimulated their keenest powers and thus won for them the high esteem which, in this case, we know the sons accorded their mother. One does not soon forget the scene (Cicero, _Ad Att_. XV, II) at which Brutus and Ca.s.sius together with their wives, Porcia and Tertia, and Servilia, the mother of Brutus, discussed momentous decisions with Cicero. When Brutus stood wavering, Cicero avoiding the issue, and Ca.s.sius as usual losing his temper, it was Servilia who offered the only feasible solution, and it was her program which they adopted. Is it surprising that Greek historians like Plutarch could never quite comprehend the part in Roman politics played by women like Clodia, Porcia and Terentia? In sheer despair he usually resorts to the hypotheses of some personal intrigue for an explanation of their powerful influence.

It is in truth very likely that had Roman literature been permitted to run its own natural course, without being overwhelmed, as was the Italian literature of the renaissance, it would have progressed much farther on the road to Romanticism. Apollonius was far more a restraining influence in this respect than an inspiration. As it is, Vergil's first and fourth books are as unthinkable in Greek dress as is the sixth. They const.i.tute a very conspicuous landmark in the history of literature.

Vergil does not wholly escape the powerful conventions of his Greek predecessors: in his fourth book, for instance, there are suggestions of the melodramatic "maiden's lament" so dear to the music hall gallery of Alexandria. But Vergil, apparently to his own surprise, permits his Roman understanding of life to prevail, and transcends his first intentions as soon as he has felt the grip of the character he is portraying. Dido quickly emerges from the role of a temptress designed as a last snare to trap the hero, and becomes a woman who reveals human laws paramount even to divine ordinance. Once realizing this the poet sacrifices even his hero and wrecks his original plot to be true to his insight into human nature. The confession of Aeneas, as he departs, that in heeding heaven's command he has blasphemed against love--_polluto amore_--how strange a thought for the _pius Aeneas_! That sentiment was not Greek, it was a new flash of intuition of the very quality of purest Romance.

The _Aeneid_ is also a remarkably religious poem to have come from one who had devoted so many enthusiastic years to a materialistic philosophy.

Indeed it is usual to a.s.sume that the poet had abandoned his philosophy and turned to Stoicism before his death. But there is after all no legitimate ground for this supposition. The _Aeneid_ has, of course, none of the scientific fanaticism that mars the _Aetna_, and the poet has grown mellow and tolerant with years, but that he was still convinced of the general soundness of the Epicurean hypotheses seems certain. Many puzzles of the _Aeneid_ are at least best explained by that view. The repet.i.tion of his creed in the first _Aeneid_ ought to warn us that his enthusiasm for the study of _Rerum natura_ did not die. Indeed the _Aeneid_ is full of Epicurean phrases and notions. The atoms of fire are struck out of the flint (VI, 6), the atoms of light are emitted from the sun (VII, 527, and VIII, 23), early men were born _duro robore_ and lived like those described in the fifth book of Lucretius (VIII, 320), and Conington finds almost two hundred reminiscences of Lucretius in the _Aeneid_, the proportion increasing rather than decreasing in the later books.[3]

[Footnote 3: Servius, VI, 264, makes the explicit statement: ex majore parte, Sironem, id est, magistrum Epicureum sequitur.]

It is, however, in the interpretation of the word _fatum_ and the role played by the G.o.ds[4] that the test of Vergil's philosophy is usually applied. The modern equivalent of _fatum_ is, as Guyau[5] has said, _determinism_. Determinism was accepted by both schools but with a difference. To the Stoic, _fatum_ is a synonym of Providence whose popular name is Zeus. The Epicurean also accepts _fatum_ as governing the universe, but it is not teleological, and Zeus is not identified with it but is, like man, subordinated to it. Again, the Stoic is consistently fatalistic. Even man's moral obligations, which are admitted, imply no real freedom in the shaping of results, for though man has the choice between pursuing his end voluntarily (which is virtue) or kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks (which is vice), the sum total of his accomplishments is not altered by his choice: _duc.u.n.t volentern fata, nolentem trahunt_. On the other hand, Vergil's master, while he affirms the causal nexus for the governance of the universe:

nec sanctum numen _fati protollere fines_ posse neque adversus naturae foedera niti

[Footnote 4: The pa.s.sages have been a.n.a.lyzed and discussed frequently.

See especially Heinze, _Vergils Epische Technik_, 290 ff., who interprets Zeus as fate; Matthaei, _Cla.s.s. Quart_. 1917, pp. 11-26, who denies the ident.i.ty; Drachmann, Guderne kos Vergil, 1887; MacInnis, _Cla.s.s. Rev_.

1910, p. 160, and Warde Fowler, _Aeneas at the Site of Rome_, pp. 122 fF.

For a fuller statement of this question see _Am. Jour_. Phil. 1920.]

[Footnote 5: _Morale d'Epicure_, p. 72.]

(Lucr. V, 309), posits a spontaneous initiative in the soul-atoms of man:

quod _fati foedera rumpat_ ex infinite _ne causam causa sequatur_.

(Lucr. II, 254). If then Vergil were a Stoic his Jupiter should be omnipotent and omniscient and the embodiment of _fatum_, and his human characters must be represented as devoid of independent power; but such ideas are not found in the _Aeneid_.

Jupiter is indeed called "omnipotens" at times, but so are Juno and Apollo, which shows that the term must be used in a relative sense. In a few cases he can grant very great powers as when he tells Venus: Imperium sine fine dedi (I, 278). But very providence he never seems to be. He draws (sort.i.tur) the lots of fate (III, 375), he does not a.s.sign them at will, and he unrolls the book of fate and announces what he finds (I, 261). He is powerless to grant Cybele's prayer that the ships may escape decay:

Cui tanta deo permissa potestas? (IX, 97.)

He cannot decide the battle between the warriors until he weighs their fates (XII, 725), and in the council of the G.o.ds he confesses explicitly his non-interference with the laws of causality:

Sua cuique exorsa laborem Fortunamque ferent. Rex Jupiter omnibus idem.

Fata viam invenient. (X, 112.)

And here the scholiast navely remarks: