He had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul, and wrote a poem on the war against the Sequani in the traditional form. He also opened up to his countrymen that vein of epic poetry which had been wrought by the Alexandrians. The most famous poem of this kind in the literature of the Republic was the Jason of Varro, imitated probably from the Argonautics of Apollonius. Propertius speaks of this poem in a passage where he classes Varro also among the writers of amatory poetry before his own time, such as Catullus, Cinna, Gallus, and Virgil in his Eclogues :

Haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro,

Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae'.

He is thus as a writer of epic poems, on the one side, of the native school of Ennius and the Annalists; on the other, he is the originator of that other type of Roman epic which appears under the Empire in the Thebaid and Achilleid of Statius and the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus.

The

The two great poets of the later Ciceronian era introduced a great change into Roman poetry,-the practice of careful composition. They are the first artistic poets of Rome. rapidity of composition which characterised all the earlier writers was, in the rude state of the language at that time, incompatible with high accomplishment. We read of Cicero writing five hundred hexameters in a night, and of his brother Quintus writing four tragedies in sixteen days. The true sense of artistic finish first appeared in Lucretius, and to a greater degree in Catullus, and the younger men of the Ciceronian Age, Licinius Calvus, Helvius Cinna, etc. The contempt with which the younger school regarded the old fashion of composition appears in Catullus' references-neither delicate nor complimentary to the Annales Volusi,' the ponderous annalistic epic of his countryman (conterraneus) Tanusius Geminus 2. But in this younger school, poetry separated itself entirely from

1 'Such love songs Varro too composed after finishing his Jason, Varro, the great passion of his own Leucadia.'

2 Schwabe, Quaestiones Catullianae, p. 279.

VIII]

DESPISED BY THE YOUNGER POETS

293

the national life, or dealt with it only in the form of personal epigrams on the popular leaders and their partisans. The dignity of the hexameter was reserved by them for didactic or philosophic poetry and short epic idyls treating of the heroic legends of Greece. Didactic poetry, directing the attention to contemplation instead of action, established itself as a successful rival to the old historical epic, in the province of serious literature.

The latter, however, still found representatives in the following generation. Thus Anser, the panegyrist of Antony, is familiarly known, owing to one of the few satiric allusions which have been attributed to Virgil:

Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores1.

Varius, with whom he is by implication contrasted in those lines, is characterised by Horace as 'Maeonii carminis ales,' at a time when Virgil was only famous as the poet of rural life. He was the author of a poem on the death of Julius Caesar. We hear also of other specimens of the contemporary epic produced in the Augustan Age, one by Cornelius. Severus treating of the Sicilian Wars, one by Rabirius treating of the Battle of Actium, and one by Pedo Albinovanus treating of the voyage of Germanicus 'per oceanum septentrionalem 2.'

We find Horace repeatedly excusing himself with selfdisparaging irony, while exhorting younger poets to the task of directly celebrating the wars of Augustus,-e. g. Epist. i. 3.7:

Quis sibi res gestas Augusti scribere sumit?

Bella quis et paces longum diffundit in aevum 3 ?

Horace does indeed celebrate some of the military as well as 1 For my strain seems not yet to be worthy of Varius or Cinna, but to be as the cackling of geese amidst the melody of swans.'

Mentioned by W. S. Teuffel. Perhaps the best known poem in our own literature of this type is The Campaign' of Addison.

Who takes on himself to write the story of Augustus' deeds, who perpetuates to distant ages the memory of wars waged and the peace concluded?'

the peaceful successes of the Augustan Age, in the only form in which contemporary or recent events admit of being poetically treated, viz. lyrical poetry. But considering how eager Augustus was to have his wars celebrated in verse and how strong in him was the national passion for glory, and considering that Virgil and Horace were pre-eminently the favourite poets of the time and the special friends both of the Emperor himself and his minister, it is remarkable how they both avoid or defer the task which he wished to impose on them. This reluctance arose from no inadequate appreciation of his services to the world, but from their high appreciation of what was due to their art. Virgil had been similarly importuned in earlier times by Pollio and Varus, and had gracefully waived the claim made on him by pleading the fitness of his own muse only for the lighter themes of pastoral poetry. He seems to have hesitated long as to the form which the celebration of the glories of the Augustan Age should take. How he solved the problem, how he sought to combine in a work of Greek art the inspiration of the national epic with the personal celebration of Augustus, will be treated of in the following chapter.

CHAPTER IX.

FORM AND SUBJECT OF THE AENEID.

I.

THE motives and purpose influencing Virgil to undertake the composition of the Aeneid are to be sought partly in his own literary position, partly in the state of public feeling at the time when he commenced his task, and partly in the direction given to his genius by the personal influence of Augustus. As the author of the Georgics he had established his position as the foremost poetic artist of his time. He had achieved a great success in a great and serious undertaking. He had entered into competition with Greek poets of acknowledged reputation, and had surpassed them in their own province. He had accomplished all that could be accomplished by him as the poet of the peaceful charm of country life. But while in his two earlier works he limits himself to that field assigned to him by Horace, that over which the 'gaudentes rure Camenae' presided, the stirring of a larger ambition is observable in both poems:

Si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae :

and again :

Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora1.

He had yet to find a fuller expression for his sympathy with his age, which had deepened with the deepening significance of the

1 If our song be of the woods, let the woods be worthy of a consul.' 'I must essay a way by which I too may be able to rise above the ground, and to speed triumphant through the mouths of men.'

times, and for that interest in the contemplation of human life which becomes the dominant influence in all great poets whose faculty ripens with advancing years. He might still aspire to be the Homer, as he had proved himself to be the Theocritus and the Hesiod of his country. The rudeness of the work of Ennius, the limited and temporary scope of the works of Varius, -his only competitor in epic song,-left that place still unappropriated. Virgil's whole previous career prepared him to be the author of a poem of sustained elevation and elaborate workmanship. The composition of the Georgics had trained his faculty of continuous exposition and of massing together a great variety of details towards a common end. It had given him a perfect mastery over the only vehicle suitable to the dignity of epic poetry. He had indeed still to put forth untried capacities, -the faculties of dealing with the passions and movement of human life as he had dealt with the sentiment and movement of Nature, of expressing thought and feeling dramatically and oratorically, and of imparting living interest to the actions and fortunes of imaginary personages. But he was now in the maturity of his powers. He had long lived with the single purpose of perfecting himself in art and knowledge. He had no other ambition but to produce some great work, which should perpetuate his own fame, and be a monument of his country's greatness.

The completion of the Georgics and the first conception of the Aeneid coincided in point of time with the event which not only established a sense of security in the room of the long strain of alarm and anxiety and a sense of national unity in the room of internecine strife in the Roman world, but which, to those looking back upon it after nineteen centuries, appears to be one of the most critical turning-points in all history. The enthusiasm of the moment found expression by the voice of Horace :

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
Pulsanda tellus.

But Virgil represents more truly the deeper tendencies of his