In the account of the gathering of the Italian clans in the seventh book, and of the Etruscans and the Northern races in the tenth, the warlike sentiment of the land is appealed to in association with the names of ancient towns, mountain districts, lakes, and rivers : Quique altum Praeneste viri, quique arva Gabinae and again : and also : Qui Tetricae horrentis rupes montemque Severum Qui saltus, Tiberine, tuos, sacrumque Numici Qua Saturae iacet atra palus, gelidusque per imas This union of patriotic sentiment with the love of Nature and with the romantic associations of the past, Virgil has in common with the most distinctively national of the poets of the present or change our vigour: our hoary hairs we press with the helmet, and it is our joy ever to gather fresh booty and to live by foray.' ix. 603-613. The men who dwell in high Praeneste and the tilled land where Gabii worships Juno, and the Hernican rocks, sparkling with streams, they whom rich Anagnia and thou, father Amasenus, feedest.' vii. 682-5. They who dwell among the crags of grim Tetrica, and the mount Severus, and Casperia and Foruli and the river of Himella; they who drink of the Tiber and Fabaris, whom cold Nursia sent, and the hosts of Horta and the Latin tribes; and those whom Allia, name of ill omen, divides with its stream flowing between them.' vii. 713-7. They who plough thy glades, Tiberinus, and the hallowed shore of Numicius, and work the Rutulian hills with the ploughshare, and the ridge of Circeii, the fields of which Jove of Anxur is guardian, and Feronia glorying in her green grove-where the black marsh of Satura lies, and where with cold stream through the bottom of the vales Ufens gropes his way and hides himself in the sea.' vii. 797-802. century, from whom in the other characteristics of his art and genius he is widely removed. The national sentiment to which Virgil and the other contemporary poets give expression is thus seen to be the sentiment of the Italian race1. For two centuries the principal members of that race had looked to Rome as their chief glory, rather than as their old rival and antagonist. The thought of Rome as their head had become to the other Italian tribes their basis of union with one another and the main ground of their self-esteem in relation to other nations. To that self-esteem and sense of superiority Virgil was fully alive. He is not altogether free from the narrowness of national prejudice. He has not the largeness of soul which enables Homer, while never losing his sense of the superiority of the Greeks over the Trojans, yet to awaken feelings of admiration and of generous pity for Hector and Sarpedon, for Priam and Andromache. Yet if Virgil has not this largeness of soul he has the tenderness. of human compassion: Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt 2. He might have maintained a stronger sympathy for his hero, and have gratified a sentiment still fresh in the minds of his countrymen, by attributing to Dido the shameless licence as well as the dangerous fascination of Cleopatra; or he might have painted the Carthaginians in traditional colours of cruelty and treachery, in which Roman writers represented the most formidable among the enemies of Rome. But Virgil's artistic sense or his humaner feeling saved him from this ungenerous 1 This view of Virgil's pride in the qualities of the Italians is not incompatible with the fact to which Mr. Nettleship has drawn attention (Sugges tions Introductory to a Study of the Aeneid, pp. 13 et seq.), that Virgil represents their earlier condition as one of turbulent barbarism. Virgil seems to have regarded 'the savage virtue of his race,' although requiring to be tamed by contact with a higher civilisation, as the incrementum out of which the martial virtue and discipline of the later Italians was formed: Sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago. 2 Tears to human sufferings are due, and hearts are touched by the common lot.' gratification of national prejudice. Yet while more just or tolerant than other Roman writers to the Carthaginians, and especially to the memory of their greatest man, he indicates something like antipathy to the Greeks. The triumph of Rome over her Greek enemies is made prominent in the announcement of her future glories: Veniet lustris labentibus aetas, and again : Eruet ille Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas, Ipsumque Acaciden, genus armipotentis Achilli 2. The bitterness of national animosity is especially apparent in his exhibition of the characters of Ulysses and Helen. The superiority of the Greeks in the arts and sciences is admitted not without some touch of scorn ('credo equidem') in contrast with the superiority of Rome in the imperial arts of conquering and governing nations. It may appear strange that the only race to which Virgil is unjust or ungenerous is the one to which he himself, in common with all educated Romans, was most deeply indebted. But it is to be remembered that there was a dramatic propriety in the expression of this hostility in the mouth of Aeneas and of Anchises. The championship of the cause of Troy demanded an attitude of antagonism to her destroyer. The Greek tragedians had themselves set the example of a degraded representation of two of the most admirable of Homer's creations; and Virgil's mode of conceiving and delineating character is much nearer to that of Euripides than to that of Homer. The original error of Helen and the craft in dealing with his enemies, which is one of many qualities in the versatile humanity of Odysseus, gave to these later artists There will come a time as the years glide on, when the house of Assaracus will reduce to bondage Phthia and famous Mycenae, and lord it over vanquished Argos.' Aen. i. 283-5. 2 He shall overthrow Argos and the Mycenae of Agamemnon, and the king himself of the line of Acacus, descendant of the puissant Achilles.' vi. 839-40. $1] FEELING AGAINST THE GREEKS 335 the germ, in accordance with which the whole character was conceived. They did not adequately apprehend that the most interesting types of nobleness and beauty of character as imagined by the greatest artists are also the most complex, and the least capable of being squared with abstract conceptions of vices or virtues. The full truth of Homer's delineations of character was apparently not recognised by the most cultivated of his Roman readers. It is enough for Virgil that Ulysses is 'fandi fictor,' as it is for Horace that Achilles is 'iracundus, inexorabilis, acer:' although the worldly wisdom of the last-named poet makes him comprehend better Homer's ideal of intelligent than his ideal of emotional heroism : Rursus quid virtus et quid sapíentia possit, Juvenal exhibits the virulence of national animosity towards the Greeks of his time, as well as a well-founded scorn of the moral baseness of character exhibited by many of them. The contempt of Tacitus is shown for their intellectual frivolity, combined with their assumption of intellectual superiority ('qui sua tantum mirantur 2') based on the renown of their ancestors. The deference which Virgil and Horace might pay to the genius of early Greece was not due to the shadow of that genius as it existed in their own time. But the contemporary Greek littérateurs were not likely to resign their claim of precedence in favour of their new rivals. Neither Greek art nor Greek criticism seems ever to have made any cordial recognition of the literary genius of Italy. The light in which Virgil represents the Greek character may thus perhaps owe something to the wish to repay scorn with scorn. 'Again he has set before us in Ulysses a profitable example of the power of courage and wisdom.' Ep. i. 2. 17, etc. 2 Annals, ii. 88. 3 It is remarked by Helbig, in his 'Campanische Wandmalerei,' that among the many paintings found at Pompeii dealing with mythological and similar subjects, only one is founded on the incidents of the Aeneid. II. The confidence which the Romans felt in the continued existence of their Empire and in their superiority over all other nations was closely connected with their religious feeling and belief. Horace has expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and conciseness in the single line, Dis te minorem quod geris imperas 2. (And it was Virgil's aim in the Aeneid to show that this edifice of Roman Empire, of which the enterprise of Aeneas was the foundation, on which the old Kings of Alba and of Rome and the successive generations of great men under the Republic had successively laboured, and on which Augustus placed the coping-stone, was no mere work of human hands, but had been designed and built up by divine purpose and guidance, The Aeneid expresses the religious as it does the national sentiment of Rome. The two modes of sentiment were inseparable. The belief of the Romans in themselves was another form of their absolute faith in the invisible Power which protected them. This invisible Power was sometimes recognised by them under the name of Fortuna Urbis,'-the spiritual counterpart of the city visible to their eyes. The recognition of this divinity was not only compatible with, but involved the recognition of, many other divinities associated with it in this protecting office. But to these numerous divinities no very distinct personality was attached. It was the awe of an ever-present invisible Power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain definite observances, capable of being alienated for a time by any deviation from these observances, and of being again appeased by a right reading of and humble compliance with its will, and working out its own purposes through the agency of the Roman arms and the wisdom of Roman counsels, that was the moving power of Roman religion. The Jove of the 1 Cp. Mr. Nettleship's Suggestions, etc., p. 10, and the passages from' Cicero there quoted. 2 Thou rulest the world by bearing thyself humbly towards the Gods.' |