'entirely taken from the old poet. It must be confessed that the two or three lines quoted by Servius in exemplification of the hints which Naevius gave to Virgil do not suggest the notion of any very close imitation. When Naevius says of the wives of Anchises and Aeneas "Amborum uxores Noctu Troiad exibant capitibus opertis Flentes ambae abeuntes lacrimis cum multis," we are not obliged to think that but for them Virgil could not have written "Litora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo And we feel that the Virgilian Aeneas might have represented himself as 'wondering at the multitude of those who followed his fortunes 'animis opibusque parati,' even if Naevius, speaking of the same gathering, had not specified the three points of numbers, 'eorum sectam sequuntur multi mortales,' bravery, 'multi alii e Troia strenui viri,' and wealth, ubi foras cum auro illi exibant. Nor is it likely that the Saturnian measure, 'the barbarous utterance of wood-gods and bards,' should have had more charms for Virgil, the perfecter of the Latin hexameter, than it had for Ennius, who was the first to supplant it by the stately Grecian exotic. The identity of metre at once establishes a closer affinity between Virgil and Ennius than can ever have existed between the poet of the Aeneid and the poet of the Punic War. As a matter of fact we know that many lines in the Aeneid are taken, more or less changed, from the Annals; indeed, we owe the preservation of not a few of Ennius's hexameters to the early critics who pointed out the imitations of them in Virgil. Every reader of the Aeneid will remember lines resembling "Qui caelum versat stellis fulgentibus aptum," "Teque pater Tiberine tuo cum flumine sancto," "Cum superum lumen nox intempesta teneret," "Ansatis concurrunt undique telis," "Romani scalis summa nituntur opum vi," "Quis potis ingentis oras evolvere belli ?" "Semianimesque micant oculi lucemque requirunt ;" lines, some of which, when est ex primo libro belli Punici. Illic enim aeque Venus Troianis tempestate laborantibus cum love queritur, et sequuntur verba Iovis filiam consolantis spe futurorum." Niebuhr (Hist., Eng. T., vol. i. p. 192) thinks Virgil took the hint of Aeneas's shield from Naevius, whom he further supposes him to have followed in making Romulus the grandson of Aeneas (Lect. vol. i. ed. 1844, p. 26); but the first notion rests on an arbitrary interpretation of Naevius, the second on a misunderstanding of Virgil. 1 Aen. 3. 10. Serv. ad loc. 2 Aen. 2. 797. Serv. ad loc. In the quotations from Naevius I have followed Vahlen's edition: Cn. Naevi De Bello Punico Reliquiae,' Leipsic, 1854. we meet them in Virgil, strike us with no want of smoothness or finish, while others, though somewhat rougher, serve to vary the harmony which they do not really interrupt. The Latin hexameter, under all its modifications, has characteristics which distinguish it from the Greek; and as Ennius was its originator, he may claim to be the author of Virgil's versification, even in cases where nothing like imitation can be pretended. Ennius did not naturalize his new importation until the language into which it was introduced had lost some portion of its original plasticity; he had accordingly, as has been ably shown by a German writer, to adopt a certain conventionalism of expression, innovating here, paraphrasing there, in order to avoid obvious words which happened to be unsuitable to his metre; and though Virgil was not likely to follow him in his harsher' tours de force,' his 'saxo cere- comminuit -brum,' or his 'replet te laetificum gau-,' the same necessity which pressed on the elder poet pressed on the younger also, making him fall into the style of epic commonplace which already existed, and augment it by a thousand new and ingenious devices of his own. All this we may admit, as we have made similar admissions in the case of Apollonius; yet it may still be true that Virgil's debt to Ennius is so trifling as to be scarcely worth computation. We know too little of Ennius to be able to estimate his merits as a narrator; hundreds of his verses have come down to us, but very few passages which exceed three or four lines, and of these scarcely any can be called pieces of narrative. There is indeed a description of an invincible tribune in the Histrian war, bathed in sweat and exposed to a hailstorm of javelins, which Virgil doubtless had before him while painting Turnus at the end of the ninth Aeneid; but the model is itself a copy from the single-handed resistance of the Homeric Ajax in the sixteenth Iliad, which would sufficiently account for Virgil's imitation if the fragment of the Annals had never been preserved by Macrobius, while it leaves us no means of judging how Ennius would have treated such a situation if he had not had Homer to draw from. The account of Romulus and Remus waiting for the augury, preserved by Cicero in the first book of his De Divinatione, is not a very remarkable specimen of narrative power. Homer would have introduced more details; Virgil would have treated those which Ennius gives in a more artificial way, dwelling on one or two, and hinting the rest; both would probably have thrown in some short speech, directly or indirectly expressed, to show the feeling of the rival brothers and the attendant multitude. But without venturing farther on the precarious ground of hypothetical criticism, we need scarcely 4 Köne, Ueber die Sprache der Römischen Epiker. Münster, 1840. 7 doubt that there was nothing in Ennius's conception of his art which Virgil was likely to welcome as a help towards improving upon Homer. Living in a pre-historic time, Homer (I use the name for convenience' sake, not as taking a side in the controversy about his personality) is the only poet who has attained the grace and finish of a literary period; he is the only primeval poet so complete in himself that it might be questioned whether it would have been an advantage to him to have lived later. There may conceivably be one or two touches in Ennius which appear to show a more modern feeling than Homer's, a keen sense of colour, an appreciation of philosophy and literature as such; for an age, even when relatively less advanced than some former age, is yet in a certain sense the heir of all that have gone before it, and the age of Ennius in particular possessed the rudiments of criticism and aspired after culture; but, regarded in the gross, Homer is mature and articulate, while Ennius is still crude and infantine, and it was not to be expected that the large utterance of the divine foretime of Greece should come mended to Virgil's ear when repeated by the stammering lips of his Italian ancestors. Virgil may have believed, as Ennius did, that the soul which dwelt in his own breast had once animated Homer; but he probably would not have recognized Ennius as the intermediate channel of its transmission. It is needless to say anything of the rest of the early Roman epic writers, who are indeed mere names to us; to speculate on the extent to which Virgil's impressions of Apollonius' poem may have been modified by the version of Varro Atacinus, of which five unimportant fragments remain, or to inquire whether the Aeneid is likely to have benefited by the example of Hostius' work, De Bello Histrico, in any other respect than in the multiplication of the "ten tongues" of the second Iliad into a hundred. As little necessity is there to speak of the 6 e. g. 'Russescunt frundes,' Ann. 7. fr. 20 (Vahlen's edition). 7 "Nec quisquam sophiam sapientia quae perhibetur In somnis vidit prius quam sam discere coepit."-Ann. 7. fr. 2. Compare also fr. 1, the celebrated lines about Naevius. 8 Seneca (Controv. 16, p. 238) says that Montanus Julius praised Virgil for having improved (in his description of night, A. 8. 27, foll.) on two lines of Varro : "Desierant latrare canes, urbesque silebant: Omnia noctis erant, placida conposta quiete." Virgil, however, is not nearer to Varro than he is to Varro's original, Apoll. 3. 749, foll. 9 « Homeri est οὐδ ̓ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ ̓ εἶεν. Hunc secutus Hostius poeta in libro secundo Belli Histrici ait: Non si mihi linguae Centum atque ora sient totidem vocesque liquatae. Hinc Vergilius ait: Non mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum." Macrob. Sat. 2. 3. It is worth noting that Pope, professing to translate Homer, has turned the ten tongues into a thousand. He had, however, some provocation, as Ogilby had made them a hundred. possible effect of Roman tragedy on the Aeneid, as, though there are evident proofs that Virgil did not disdain to imitate individual passages', his real obligations are not to Ennius, Pacuvius, or Attius, but to the great Athenian masters whom they copied as Ennius copied Homer. The result of our inquiry then is this. Virgil imitated Homer, but imitated him as a rival, not as a disciple; his object was not to give a faithful interpretation of his great master, but to draw forth his own genius and satisfy the age in which he lived; and accordingly he modified the Homeric story at his pleasure, according to the thousand considerations that might occur to a poetical artist, a patriot, and a connoisseur of antiquarian learning. Of later influences, the only one which seems to have taken a really powerful hold of him is Greek tragedy, which was in fact the only instance of a genius and culture commensurate with his own, operating in a sphere analogous to his. The epics of Alexandria and of early Rome may furnish occasional illustrations to the commentator on the Aeneid; but his more continuous studies will be better devoted to the poetry of Homer and to the tragic drama of Greece. See on A. 2. 237, 281, 499, &c. P. VERGILI MARONIS AENEIDOS LIBER PRIMUS. THE subject of the Aeneid, as propounded in the opening lines, is the settlement of Aeneas in Italy, after years of wandering, and a short but sharp final struggle. It is however only of the events preceding the settlement that the poet really treats,—of the wanderings and the war. In that, as in other things, he follows Homer, who does not show us Ulysses "an idle king, matched with an aged wife, meting laws to a savage race," but leaves him fresh from the slaughter of the suitors, from the first embrace of his wife and father, and from the conquest of his disaffected subjects. Accordingly, the poem divides itself into two parts, the wanderings being embraced by the first, the Italian war by the second. But the two parts naturally involve different modes of treatment, comprehending as they do periods of time widely differing in length, the one seven years, the other apparently a few days. Here again the example of Homer is followed. The long period of wanderings is taken at a point not far from its conclusion; enough is told in detail to serve as a specimen of the whole, and the rest is related more summarily by the help of an obvious expedient, the hero being made to narrate his past adventures to the person whose relation to him is all the time forming one adventure more. This peculiarity of the Homeric story is noticed by Horace in a well-known passage of his Art of Poetry (vv. 146 foll.), and recommended to the adoption of Epic writers generally; but he does not clearly indicate the reason of it, which doubtless is the wish to avoid that fatal dryness which seems to be inseparable from all narratives where the events of many years are told continuously in a short compass. The First Book of the Aeneid may be said to perform well the objects which it was no doubt intended to accomplish,—those of interesting us in the hero and introducing the story. After a brief statement of the subject, we have a view of the supernatural machinery by which it is to be worked out; and this, though imitated from Homer, where the solitary rancour of Poseidon against Ulysses answers to the solitary rancour of Juno against Aeneas, is skilfully contrived so as to throw a light on the subsequent history of the Roman descendants of Aeneas, by the mention, even at that early time, of their great enemy, Carthage. It is probable, as I have said in the general Introduction to the Aeneid, that the merit of this thought may be due to Naevius, who seems to have been the first to commit the felicitous anachronism of bringing Aeneas and Dido together; but it must be allowed to be in strict accordance with the spirit of Virgil's poem, which is throughout that of historical anticipation. Like Ulysses, Aeneas is shipwrecked in the voyage which was to have been his last, the main difference being that the Grecian hero is solitary, having long since lost all his companions, while the Trojan is still accompanied by those who followed his fortunes from Troy. The machinery by which the storm is allayed is perhaps managed more adroitly by Virgil |