Busiris, and purge Egypt from the stain of a legendary participation in the guilt of human sacrifices. Virgil has obtained leave to reargue the case of his countrymen; and all that is required of him is that his facts and inferences should be such as would have been credible to a Trojan warrior. Bearing this in mind, we may remember that if Aeneas calls Ulysses "fell," "relentless," and "the inventor of crime," it is when he is speaking of the sack of Troy, or of the carrying off of the statue which made Troy impregnable. If Sinon represents him as a treacherous, artful glozer, it is when he is describing plots laid against his friend's life and his own. If Deiphobus knows him only as the counsellor of deeds of wrong, we may pardon the one-sided judgment of a person who has been hewn by him as a carcase fit for hounds, and continues mangled even in his ghostly body. Such men were not likely to sympathize with the admiration expressed by the Homeric Antenor, as, on the day that was to bring the war to a peaceful close, he recalled the impression made on him by his illustrious guest in bygone years, before the war began. Nor is it less perfectly in keeping that the Rutulians should disparage the wiles of Ulysses in comparison of their own more daring exploits, at the same time that it leads us to admire the art of the poet, who has thus condemned the most formidable enemies of Troy out of the mouth of other enemies, who were destined to prove less formidable. As little could it be expected that the Aeneas of Virgil should appreciate the lights and shades distributed over the character of the Homeric Helen. How he regarded her during the siege we are not told; he may have shared the mixed feeling of admiration and disapproval which the old men on the wall express in their hour of respite; he may have partaken of the sense of repulsion with which, as she tells us in her wail over Hector, she was looked upon by all in Troy; but as his eye fell upon her at the moment of the sack of the royal palace, and the savage slaughter of the good old king, thoughts of hatred and vengeance could hardly fail to be uppermost in his mind; and he may well have needed a supernatural interposition to teach him to distinguish between the authors of so terrible a ruin and its wretched instrument. Let us once fix in our minds that Homer is the poet of the Greeks, and that his action is laid during the siege, that Virgil is the poet of the Trojans, and that his action is laid after the burning of the city, and we shall not, I think, be disposed to charge Virgil with mere wanton depravation of the Homeric characters. The same notion of independent rivalry will explain Virgil's neglect of Homeric traditions in other matters where patriotic feeling or dramatic propriety was not concerned. Virgil doubtless held himself bound to follow Homer's narrative only so far as that narrative had taken hold of the popular mind of Rome. He was not the interpreter of an ancient record, bound to minute and painstaking accuracy; he was the reviver of an old story, which in its broad features was familiar to all lovers of poetry. The relative position of the various members of the royal family of Troy, the distinctions of races among the hosts that respectively made up the Greek and Trojan armies, the extent of the names Pergamus, Ilion, and Dardania, the comparative importance of the Scamander and the Simois, the geographical details of countries which few Romans had ever visited,―these were not points that interested the Roman readers of the Iliad and Odyssey, nor were they likely to be scrutinized by Roman readers of the Aeneid. The very care which Virgil has taken to construct his own catalogue of the Italian forces, might naturally be thought to absolve him from the duty of minutely studying catalogues with which even an educated Roman felt he had no concern. The indifference of the Romans to the history of other countries is a known feature in their character; curious about the antiquities of their own nation, they had but little of that historical spirit which impels a student to investigate records entirely unconnected with himself; and Virgil was a type of his countrymen, alike in his learning and in his carelessness or ignorance. Besides, the body of knowledge already existing at Rome, and the habits of ordinary speech, would have been a serious. impediment to Virgil, even if he had wished to follow Homer faithfully. As he was obliged to talk of Jupiter, Juno, and Mars, to a nation which had agreed to identify the Greek gods with those whom they were thenselves worshipping daily, so he could hardly have avoided calling the Greeks by that generic name by which the Romans knew them, though it had no existence in Homer's time, and had never really belonged to more than an infinitesimally small part of the Greek people. If we, with our appreciation of historical criticism, find it impossible not to talk of Greece and the Greeks, what would it have been to a Roman, to whom the name was a contemporary fact, and who spoke of 'Graecia' and Graeci' as we speak of Germany and Germans? With this cardinal offence against history and ethnology staring him in the face, Virgil would have found it in vain to affect or aim at accuracy. Accordingly, he appeals indifferently to all the associations of his readers, whether vague or exact. Here he takes advantage of an obscure tradition; there, of a loose popular identification. He talks of Dorians at a time when the Dorians were scarcely known, and confers on the Trojans the name of their Phrygian neighbours. He generalizes from a part to the whole, and then comes down from the whole to some other part; just as where, in describing the Trojan horse, he first speaks of it as pine-wood, then as maple, and lastly as oak; not, I think, from confusion or forgetfulness, but as an assertion of the poet's privilege to 5 See Bunsen, Egypt, vol. i. pp. 152 foll. (Cottrell's translation.) represent, in as many ways as he pleased, the general notion of wood. In short, he is an artist, an Italian antiquary, a Roman of the Augustan period, speaking to the average educated intelligence of his own day; he is anything rather than what modern admirers of Homer would wish him to be, a hierophant of "the inner Homeric world," an expounder of "primitive history, philosophy, policy, and religion"," as contained in Homer. Such a course of independent rivalry, however, could hardly be pursued without provoking the consequent Nemesis. A story of the h ic time of Greece, treated in an essentially modern and Roman spirit, was sure to leave a sense of incongruity on the mind, not only of a Homeric student, but of a more popular reader. A reader of this sort might be utterly unconscious of a thousand inaccuracies of costume; he might feel the loss of primitive simplicity of manner to be compensated by the greater stateliness of the modern heroic; but he could scarcely fail to be struck with an essential want of consistency in the drawing of the principal figures, which, being Homeric, must necessarily be old, and being Virgilian, must as necessarily be new. It is this, I think, which constitutes the secret of the dissatisfaction which is generally felt with the character of Aeneas. To represent him, as some modern critics have done, as simply mean and feeble, unmanly and unheroic, is unjust, and even absurd. His appearances in Homer ought not to prejudice our opinion about his appearances in Virgil; nor perhaps would they, were it not for an error in judgment committed by the poet himself, who, in his spirit of dramatic fair dealing towards his hero's enemies,— a spirit which will call for our notice again very shortly, makes them taunt him with his Homeric escapes and evasions of danger, allowing them, at the same time, to confound what Homer never would have confounded, and identify a warlike Trojan with an effeminate Phrygian. We are wearied, it must be confessed, by being continually reminded of his piety; though that may be partly owing to our misapprehension of the use of the epithet, which was doubtless intended to be a Homeric one, attached to the name as a sort of prefix, and to be taken as a matter of course; but his piety is not merely nominal; it shows itself in his whole feeling and conduct to the gods, his father, and his son. Heyne, who had a soul to admire and reverence both Homer and Virgil, remarks on the dignity and beauty of Aeneas's address to Evander. His faithfulness to the memory of Pallas is all the more noble, as apparently being not, like that of Achilles to his dead friend, grounded on strong personal affection, but rather the offspring of generous selfreproach for his own involuntary failure to discharge a sacred trust. Gladstone, vol. i. pp. 11, 12. His long forbearance towards Lausus, and the revulsion of feeling when he sees him dead, contrasts strangely with the "genuine manliness" with which Turnus exults in the prospect of killing Pallas, and glories over him when killed. But the greater the tenderness and grace of these traits of character, the harsher the jar with which we find the hero of the Aeneid exhibiting at other times the savage, indomitable spirit of the hero of the Iliad. There is tenderness, deep tenderness, mingled with the ferocity of Achilles; yet we are not surprised when, after recing Priam graciously, and losing his own sorrows in sympathy with the poor old king, he is roused to momentary fury by a word spoken out of season. But the temper of Aeneas is less impulsive, and his gentleness more abiding and untroubled, so that our feelings are shocked when we see him plunging his hands in blood as deeply as a Homeric warrior, and reserving the sons of two families to be sacrificed alive on the funeral pile of his friend. It is in keeping with the manners of the heroic age; but it is not in keeping with the humanity with which the poet's modern spirit has led him to invest the rest of the character. It is this inconsistency between the heroic and the modern type which we feel in Aeneas's treatment of Dido. Stripped of its accessories, the conduct of Aeneas to Dido is not very unlike that of Ulysses to Calypso, if not to Circe. He is thrown on her coast; he is treated hospitably; he accepts the position of a husband; he leaves her that he may go to his natural home. It can hardly be said that the deity of Calypso constitutes an essential difference between her and Dido. If she is a goddess, her words show that she feels the love and even the jealousy of a woman; and the criticism' which contrasts Ulysses's farewell to her with the language of Aeneas to Dido might perhaps have been spared, if it had been recollected that in Homer she herself receives the order from the gods to part with Ulysses, while in Virgil the whole burden is thrown upon Aeneas, who has not only to justify himself for going, but to vouch for the supernatural compulsion under which he goes. But for a hero to leave a mortal love was no novelty in the heroic age, as the titles of Ovid's Heroic Epistles sufficiently show. The novelty is in the interest which Virgil has excited in the situation and feelings of his forsaken heroine. He has struck the chord of modern passion, and powerfully has it responded; more powerfully, perhaps, than the minstrel himself expected. Had Homer written of Dido, we should probably have been called on to sympathize with her but little; our feelings would have been with the hero whom she strove to keep from the home whither he was bound. There were reasons which might have induced Virgil to give a similar colour to his narrative. All his sympathies are 7 Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 525. Roman; and the breach between Dido and Aeneas is the symbol and the prophecy of the quarrel of Carthage and Rome. It is hard, too, to suppose that in sketching the Carthaginian queen, who endeavours to keep Aeneas from his kingdom, he did not think again and again of the Egyptian enchantress to whom Antony would have transferred the sceptre of the western world, whose blandishments had prevailed over the great Julius, and had been successfully resisted by Octavianus alone. Circe might have supplied the legendary framework, Cleopatra the animating historical spirit; and even though the Trojan Ulysses had yielded to the allurements of the charmer, we might have hailed the flash of his drawn sword, and sent our hearts along with him in his journey from the enchanted shore. But Virgil has not chosen to paint a picture like this. Following in the track of Apollonius, he has lavished all his art on the presentation of a vivid portrait of female passion. Dido's flame has been kindled, not from within, but from without, by a supernatural power; the generosity of her nature has already shown. itself in the princely hospitality which she extends to Aeneas and his shipwrecked comrades; but, after all, we sympathize with her simply as a woman; it is the mere exhibition of the depths of a woman's heart that stirs our own so powerfully. Other heroes have loved and left as Aeneas does; few have had as strong a justification as he can plead for his flight but no one seems to us so traitorous as Aeneas, except it be Jason; and the reason lies in the depth of colouring with which Virgil, like Euripides, has painted the agonies of the abandoned queen. : The relation of Virgil to Homer, as I have said already, unquestionably furnishes the most important point of view from which the Aeneid can be regarded by one who wishes to estimate the surrounding circumstances which told upon the genius of the Augustan poet. The expectation of an unknown birth which should be greater than the Iliad was doubtless the vision which illuminated the later years of Virgil's own life, as we know it to have occupied the mind of his contemporaries. But it was not simply by contemplating Homer, by studying him intently and gradually appropriating his beauties, that Virgil hoped to rival him; he was to be encountered principally indeed with his own weapons, but partly also with those supplied to the hands of a younger competitor by long centuries of subsequent culture. The extent and variety of these appliances are only imperfectly known to us. Virgil probably had access to the whole of what had been written by any author of note from Homer's time to his own; in the remains that have come down to us whole classes of composition are entirely wanting, and those which we have exist only in specimens more or less numerous. The cyclic poets and the other epic writers of Greece proper are mere |