link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus. But besides the foreign and prosaic origin of the story, there is great vagueness and indistinctness in the incidents and personages connected with it. Homer indeed has supplied a definite, though not a marked, outline to the character of Aeneas; and Stesichorus, in shaping the family group of Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius flying from Troy with their household-gods, may have suggested to Virgil the leading characteristic of his hero. But these were nearly all the elements in the legend derived from primitive poetical sources. There was no individuality of character attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early imaginative invention associated with the dim tradition of his wanderings. The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,— some supplied by poetical invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, seme suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome, some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character. But, on other grounds, the judgment of Virgil may be justified in the choice of this legend, vague, composite, and unpoetical as it was, as most adapted to his own genius and to the purpose of his epic poem. It was the only subject, of national significance, connected with the Homeric cycle of events. Not only the epic and dramatic poets of Greece, but the Roman tragic poets had recognised the heroic legends of Greece as the legitimate material for those forms of poetry which aimed at representing human action and character with seriousness and dignity. The personages and events connected with the Trojan War had especially been made familiar to the Romans by the works of their early dramatic poets. The Romans themselves had no mythical back-ground, rich in poetic associations, to their own history. It was impossible for a poet of a literary age to create this background. But it was possible for him to give substance and reality to the shadowy connexion, existing in legend and in the works of older national writers, between the beginnings of Roman history and this distant region of poetry and romance. Virgil's imagination, as was seen in the examination of the Georgics, was peculiarly susceptible of the impressions produced by a remote antiquity and by old poetic associations. If he was deficient in spontaneous invention, he possessed a remarkable power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the invention of a new world of wonder and adventure, a work most difficult of accomplishment in a late stage of human development, the most attractive aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving, under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial passions of an earlier and ruder age. Although there is no evidence that the connexion of Rome with Troy had sunk deeply into the popular nd before the time of Virgil, yet it had been recognised in official acts of the State for more than two centuries. So early as the First Punic War the Acarnanians had applied to the Romans for assistance against the Aetolians, on the ground that their ancestors alone among the Greeks had taken no part in the Trojan War. The Senate had offered alliance and friendship to King Seleucus on condition of his exempting the people of Ilium, as kinsmen of the Romans, from tribute1. T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the Aeneadae 2. In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans : Amnem Troiugena Cannam Romane fuge3. So early as the time of Timaeus, i. e. before the First Punic War, the connexion of Aeneas with the worship of the Penates at Lavinium had been recognised. His own worship also established itself in the religion of the State by his identification with Jupiter Indiges, who seems to have had a temple on the banks of the river Numicius. Many families among the Roman aristocracy, as for instance the Cluentii, Sergii, Memmii, claimed to be descended from the followers of Aeneas. From the time of Naevius this account of the origin of the Romans had been the accepted belief in all Latin literature. Ennius begins his annals from the date Quum veter occubuit Priamus sub Marte Pelasgo. The poet Attius had written a tragedy called Aeneadae. The Roman annalists started with the tradition as an accepted fact. Thus Livy in reference to this belief uses the expression 'satis constat.' The great antiquarian Varro wrote a treatise on the Trojan origin of Roman families. Cicero in his Verrine orations (act ii. 4. 33) speaks of the relationship of the people of Segesta in 1 Suetonius says of the Emperor Claudius, Iliensibus, quasi Romanae gentis auctoribus, tributa in perpetuum remisit, recitata vetere epistula Graeca Senatus populique Romani Seleuco regi amicitiam et societatem ita demum pollicentis, si consanguineos suos Ilienses ab omni onere immunes praestitisset.' For these and other official recognitions of the connexion between Rome and Ilium, see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 305 et seq. 2 Mommsen (book iii. ch. 14) quotes these two lines from an Epigram composed in the name of Flamininus: 3 Livy, xxv. 12. Αἰνεάδας Τίτος ἔμμιν ὑπέρτατον ὤπασε δῶρον Ἑλλήνων τεύξας παισὶν ἐλευθερίαν. Aen. v. 117-123. Sicily, which claimed to be a colony founded by Aeneas, with the Roman people. Even Lucretius, who stands apart from the general traditional beliefs of his countrymen, begins his poem with the words 'Aeneadum genetrix.' Virgil's poem appealed not to the popular taste, but to the national, religious, aristocratic, and literary sympathies of the cultivated classes. The legend of Aeneas, if less ancient and less popular, assigned a more august origin to the Roman race than the tale of the birth of Romulus : - Ab Iove principium generis, Iove Dardana pubes These considerations may have recommended this subject to Virgil, as the most suitable symbol of the idea of Rome, from both a national and religious point of view. But the circumstance which must have absolutely determined his choice was the claim which the Julian gens made to be directly descended from Iulus, Aeneas, and the goddess Venus. This claim Virgil had already acknowledged in the line (Ecl. ix. 47), Ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum, and again (Georg. i. 28), cingens materna tempora myrto 2. Even Julius Caesar had shown the importance which he attached to it by taking the words 'Venus Victrix' for his watchword at the battle of Pharsalia. A greater tribute was paid to the qualities of Augustus, a more august consecration was conferred on his rule by representing that rule as a prominent object in the counsels of Heaven a thousand years before its actual establishment, than could have been bestowed on him by the most detailed and ornate account of his actual successes. The 1 Aen. vii 219-220. 2 Cf. Sic fatus velat materna tempora myrto.-Aen. v. 72. personal, as distinct from the national motive of the poem, is revealed in the prophetic lines attributed to Jupiter, Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, While the vagueness of the tradition and the absence of definite incident and individual character associated with it were conditions unfavourable to novelty and vividness of representation, yet they allowed to Virgil great latitude in carrying out his purpose of giving body and substance to all that unknown and shadowy past, which survived only in names, customs, and ceremonies. He was not limited to any particular district or period. His plan enabled him to embrace in the compass of his epic the dim traditions connected with the origins' of the famous towns and tribes of Central Italy and of several of the great Roman families; it enabled him to imagine the primitive state of places which had a world-wide celebrity in his own time; to invoke, as an element of poetic interest, the veneration paid to the ancient rites of religion; and to cast an idealising light on events, personages, families, or customs familiar to his own age, by associating them with the sentiment of an immemorial past. One great excellence of the Aeneid, as a representative poem, is the large prospect of Roman and Italian life which it opens up before us. The vague outlines of the story which he followed enabled Virgil to enlarge his conception with an ampler content of local and national material, than if he had been called upon to recast a more definite and more vital tradition. The want of individuality in the personages of his story justified him in exhibiting their character in accordance with his own ideal; in conceiving of Aeneas as the type of antique piety combined with modern humanity, and of Turnus as the type of the haughty and martial spirit animating the old Italian race. 1 Aen. i. 286-288. |