when it has passed into a purpose. This appears to me to have been suggested by that celebrated change of feeling in the Ajax of Sophocles, who in one scene breathes nothing but self-destruction, and in the next is won to a calmness which the subtlety of modern critics will not allow to be altogether feigned. Of such slight matters as the actual appropriation of phrases and forms of expression, this is not the place to speak. They are far from numerous, and will be found noticed, so far as I have observed them, in the notes. But it is not less true that Virgil's debts for language and phraseology, to one at least of the masters of Athenian tragedy, are real and great. That which is so remarkable a feature of Virgil's style, his practice of employing combinations of words so constructed as to remind the reader of other and yet other combinations, could hardly be better illustrated than by a comparison of the language of Virgil with the language of Sophocles'. The Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius would have their value for the critic of the Aeneid, if only as the single representative which has come down to us of the later epic poetry of Greece. A poet like Virgil, studious to embody in himself all that was best in previous culture, could not be wholly independent of writers whose conception of their art was so far analogous to his own, that they strove to represent the Homeric spirit under more modern forms: and the Alexandrian school in particular must have had singular attractions for the chief poetical artist of an era which itself displayed so many of the characteristics of a period of renaissance. But the connexion between Virgil and Apollonius is closer than could have been presumed from any mere general considerations. After the Iliad and Odyssey, the Argonautics is the only poem which the intelligent criticism of antiquity declares to have furnished an actual model to the author of the Aeneid, and the similarity is one which the reader of the two works does not take long to discover. Not only is the passion of Medea in Apollonius' Third Book confessedly the counterpart of the passion of Dido in Virgil's Fourth, but the instances are far from few where Virgil has conveyed an incident from his Alexandrian predecessor, altering and adapting, but not wholly disguising it. The departure of Jason from his father and mother resembles the departure of Pallas from Evander; the song of Orpheus is contracted into the song of Iopas, as it had already been expanded into the song of Silenus; the reception of the Argonauts by Hypsipyle is like the reception of the Trojans by Dido, and the parting of Jason from the Lemnian princess reappears, though in very different colours, The influence of the Greek drama on the Aeneid is briefly noticed by Heyne, Dissertatio de Carmine Epico Vergiliano, p. 15 of vol. ii. of Wagner's edition of Heyne's Virgil. in the parting of Aeneas from the queen of Carthage; the mythical representations in Jason's scarf answer to the historical representations which distinguished the shield of Aeneas from that of Achilles; the combat of Pollux with Amycus is reproduced in the combat of Entellus with Dares; the harpies of Virgil are the harpies of Apollonius, while the deliverance of Phineus by the Argonauts may have furnished a hint for the deliverance of Achemenides by the Trojans, an act of mercy which has another parallel in the deliverance of the sons of Phrixus ; Phineus' predictions are like the predictions of Helenus; the cave of Acheron in Asia Minor suggests the cave of Avernus in Italy; Evander and Pallas appear once more in Lycus and Dascylus; Here addresses Thetis as Juno addresses Juturna; Triton gives the same vigorous aid in launching the Argo that he gives to the stranded vessels of Aeneas, or that Portunus gives to the ship of Cloanthus in the Sicilian race. Minor resemblances of thought or expression are easily detected by a very cursory perusal of the Argonautics; I have myself noted at least fifty of them, which will be found in their places in my notes on the Aeneid. Altogether it might naturally be supposed that we possess what every critic would admit to be an invaluable treasure, a poem occupying a middle position between the Homeric epics and the Aeneid, and making the transition from the one to the other intelligible. Yet I am greatly mistaken if the reader of the Argonautics will find any such expectations fulfilled in any adequate sense. The similarities of detail are there, doubtless more than I have enumerated or discovered: but the poem, taken as a whole, does not remind us of the Aeneid, or enable us to understand the form under which Virgil has chosen to represent Homer. Virgil resembles Homer far more strongly than he resembles the supposed intermediary. It is a signal instance of the kinship of genius asserting itself against the rival affinities of outward condition and circumstance. The style of Apollonius is a literary style, the epic language of Homer reproduced and modified by a modern student: but though it is sometimes graceful and ingenious, compared with the style of Virgil it is the mere jargon of a grammarian, seeking to revive a mode of speech of which he had no living appreciation. His treatment of his subject makes us think of the Iliad and the Aeneid, but it is by way of contrast; where he is felicitous, the felicity is not of an epic character, and the general tenor of the narrative is tedious and uninteresting, and therefore neither Homeric nor Virgilian. A catalogue of heroes is in itself a sufficiently epic thing, yet we feel that neither Homer nor Virgil would have dreamed of commencing a poem with it, as the reader must be made to sympathize in the object of the muster before the muster-roll can have any meaning to him. The incidents of the voyage have either no interest at all, or an interest ROMAN unconnected with the main purpose of the poem. In the narratives of the Odyssey and the Aeneid everything bears on the fortunes of Ulysses and his crew, or on those of Aeneas regarded as the future founder of the Trojan nation; the voyages are sufficiently diversified, but the object of every event is to illustrate the action of the contending powers whose strife keeps the prince of Ithaca from his home, the chief of Troy from his destined kingdom. But in Apollonius there is little or nothing of this; the voyage was part of his poem; it had to be made an eventful one, and events are produced accordingly. We do not see the object of the sojourn in Lemnos, or of the fight between Pollux and Amycus; even Phineus seems to be introduced rather for his own sake than for the aid which his prophecy affords to the voyagers. They lose some of their comrades; but even the loss of Hercules scarcely impresses itself on us, and that of Tiphys is more easily remedied than we should have expected. The Third Book is the gem of the whole poem, and may be read with real pleasure, even by those whose recollection of Virgil is fresh and vivid. Virgil, indeed, has not chosen to contend directly with Apollonius; he concentrates his strength on the picture of Dido in her abandonment and despair, and touches more lightly the early approaches of the love that was to undo her. The object of Apollonius is different; Medea, the forsaken and desperate wife, formed no part of the argument of his poem; his Medea is a maiden in her father's palace, and he has to paint the steps by which, under the agency of the god of love, she resigns all her feelings for home, and is delivered heart and soul to the power of enchantments more mighty than her own. Accordingly, when she retires to her chamber we have her thoughts and also her dreams; the last not simply mentioned, like Dido's on the night after Aeneas's story, but recounted. She goes to her sister, who is fortunately as excited as she, though from a different cause; and even an arrangement which gives her hope of binding Jason to herself does not prevent her from passing the dreary midnight hours in an agony of hopeless longing, which she is at one time nearly ending by swallowing a drug from her own casket of poisons. Yet, though there is power and beauty here, it is not the power and beauty of Virgil. Even the passage in which Medea, with the casket lying open on her lap, is struck with a sudden horror of death, and feels as she never felt before, that "the light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing to behold the sun," deep as is its truth and pathos, does not affect us as we expect to be affected by an incident in an epic poem. It is too modern for Homer; Virgil might have owned the feeling, but he would have been content to indicate it in two or three lines. The conference of Here and Pallas, and their joint visit to Aphrodite, are evidently imitated from Here's visit to Aphrodite in the Fourteenth Book of the Iliad, and are as evidently Virgil's model in the scene between Venus and Cupid at the end of the First Aeneid, and that between Juno and Venus at the beginning of the Fourth; but they do not impress the reader as he is impressed by their Greek original, or by their Latin copy; they are graceful, fanciful, in a word, Ovidian; but they are not epic. The description of Love overreaching Ganymede at dice, the boy-god erect and radiant, his playmate pouting and pettish, is obviously made for painting; but the picture would not find a place in a heroic gallery. Nor is Apollonius writing in the 'grand style' when he introduces Aphrodite playfully pinching her son's cheek, and bribing him to attack Medea by a promise of the magic ball with which Zeus played when a babe in his cavern-nursery of Ida. The interview between Jason and Medea in the temple of Hecate is tender and touching; but Virgil would never have descended to the prettiness of the comparison of the two lovers, bashful and silent, to tall pine-trees at first standing still in the calm, and then breaking into a rustle under the agitation of the wind: a simile which Valerius Flaccus has to tone down and render less graphic in order to adapt it to the genius of his quasi-Virgilian imitation. When the voyage recommences, the poem again ceases to interest us. The treacherous murder of Absyrtus is narrated in a manner to excite pity and terror; but we have heard too little of the youth to feel much personal concern in his fate. The ineffectual appeal of Medea to the greater sorceress, Circe, is better in conception than in execution. The adventures of the suppliants in Phaeacia have rather the grotesqueness of romance than the dignity of epic narrative. The other incidents of the homeward voyage, like those of the voyage out, seem as if related for an emergency, not evolved by the internal necessities of the story; and the few lines in which the heroes are at last dismissed may perhaps show that the poet had come to be as weary of the subject as his readers. The Homeric poems, according to Longinus, contain many slips, the Argonautics none; yet, asks the critic, who would not rather be Homer than Apollonius? It required 5 τὼ δ ̓ ἄνεῳ καὶ ἄναυδοι ἐφέστασαν ἀλλήλοισιν Apoll. 3. 967, foll. In mediis noctis nemorisque tenebris Adsimiles, rapidus nondum quas miscuit Auster. Val. Flacc. 7. 403, foll. On the Sublime, § 33. but little confidence to put the question; but few, I imagine, would now accept the previous judgment on which it is based. If Homer sometimes nods, Apollonius may be said to be only occasionally awake, though his long fits of somnolency are relieved by fanciful and even attractive dreams. Of the earlier epic poetry of Rome we know still less than of the later epic poetry of Greece. We know, however, enough to assure us that it had some influence on Virgil; enough also to warrant us in assuming that its influence, could it be thoroughly estimated, would be found not to have penetrated very far. To inquire into the influence of Naevius. and Ennius upon Virgil is, in fact, as unfruitful a subject as to inquire into the influence of Chaucer and Spenser, or perhaps Cowley, upon Pope. Incidents and external colouring may occasionally have been borrowed; forms of expression and turns of rhythm may have been appropriated by a writer of whom it might be said, as it has been said of Pope, that "there is scarcely a happy combination of words, or a phrase poetically elegant, in his native language, which he has not inserted into his poems";" but the use he made of his predecessors cannot have borne any analogy to the use he made of Homer. In the one case it is an ancient conqueror who, having overcome a veteran worthy of his steel, converts his body into merchandise, and wears his armour as his own; in the other case it is a despot, who walks through the houses of his subjects, and takes away anything that strikes his fancy, for the adornment of his own palace. The same tradition which, as we have seen, makes Virgil speak of grappling with Homer as of attempting to rob Hercules of his club, tells us that he talked of his appropriations from Ennius as the gold which a man rakes from a dunghill. Almost all that we know of the actual obligations of Virgil to the Punic War of Naevius, is that in Naevius's poem, no less than in Virgil's, Aeneas is supposed to be questioned about his departure from Troy, that Naevius speaks of Dido and her sister Anna, from which it is inferred that the questioner of Aeneas is the Carthaginian queen, and that the consolation addressed by Aeneas to his crew in the First Aeneid and the discourse between Venus and Jupiter in the same book are, as we are told in words which must necessarily be understood with some latitude, 7 Watts, quoted in Johnson's Life of Pope, Donatus, § 18. 71. Serv. on Aen. i. 198: “O socii. . . et totus hic locus de Naevio belli Punici lib. translatus est." Macrob. Sat. 6. 2: "Sunt alii loci plurimorum versuum quos Maro in opus suum cum paucorum inmutatione verborum a veteribus transtulit. . . . In principio Aeneidos tempestas describitur, et Venus apud Iovem queritur de periculis filii, et Iuppiter eam de futurorum prosperitate solatur. Hic locus totus sumptus a Naevio |