other nations was closely connected with their religious feeling and belief1. Horace has expressed the national faith in this connexion with Roman force and conciseness in the single line, Dis te minorem quod geris imperas. 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. 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 Capitol in early times, the living Emperor under the Empire, were the visible representatives of this mysterious Power. But its influence was acknowledged throughout 1 It Cp. Mr. Nettleship's Suggestions, etc., p. 10, and the passages from Cicero there quoted. all Roman history in the importance attached to the great priestly offices, and especially to that of Pontifex Maximus, which became inseparably united to the office of Emperor; in the scrupulous regard paid to the auspices through which this Power was believed to communicate its will; in the ominous interpretation put on all appearances of departure from the ordinary course of Nature; and in the reference to the Sibylline books in all questions of difficulty. This impersonal Power is to the Romans both the object of awe and the source of their confidence. They seem never to distrust the steadfastness of its favour. They rather feel themselves its willing instruments, co-operating with it, blindly sometimes and sometimes remissly, and for every failure of intelligence or vigilance, punished by temporal calamities. The word by which Virgil recognises the agency of this impersonal, or perhaps we should rather say undefined, Power, is 'Fatum,' or more often in the plural, 'Fata.' It is by the Fates' that the action is set in motion and directed to its issue. The human and even the divine actors in the story are instruments in their hands; some more some less conscious of the part they are performing. Even Jupiter is represented rather as cognisant of the Fates than as their author. Sometimes indeed they are spoken of as 'Fata Iovis ;' and to the assurance given by him to Venus 'manent immota tuorum Fata tibi,' he adds the words 'neque me sententia vertit.' But again, while his will is suspended in a great crisis of the action, their operation is persistent and inevitable : Rex Iuppiter omnibus idem : Fata viam invenient1. The original relation between this impersonal agency and the deliberate purpose of Jupiter is left undefined. But there is no collision between them. While the prayers of men are addressed to a conscious personal being, Iuppiter omnipotens,' the sovereignty of an impersonal Power over the fortunes of nations is acknowledged, as in the line Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum. Every reader of the Aeneid must feel the predominance of this idea in the poem, and the constantly recurring and even monotonous expression of it. In the first three books, for instance, the word 'Fatum' or 'Fata' occurs more than forty times. Aeneas starts on his wanderings 'fato profugus.' Juno desires to secure the empire of the world to Carthage 'Si qua fata sinant.' She struggles against the conviction of her powerlessness to prevent the Trojan settlement in Italy, 'Quippe vetor fatis.' Aeneas comforts his companions by the announcement of the peaceful settlements awaiting them,— Ostendunt. sedes ubi fata quietas Venus consoles herself for the destruction of Troy by the thought of the destiny awaiting Aeneas, 'fatis contraria fata rependens.' Jupiter reassures her after the storm with the words 'manent immota tuorum Fata tibi;' and he reveals to her one page in their secret volume,—' fatorum arcana movebo.' Mercury is sent to prepare the reception of Aeneas in Carthage, Finibus arceret. ne fati nescia Dido Aeneas describes himself as starting from Troy 'data fata secutus.' A hundred more instances might be given of the dominating influence of this idea in the poem. It is the 'common-place' of the Virgilian epic. While it adds impressiveness to the historical significance of the poem, it detracts largely from the personal interest by the limits which it imposes on the free agency of the divine and human actors playing their part in it. The same idea is often expressed by Tacitus, but it does not in him dominate so absolutely over human will, nor is it asserted with the same firmness of conviction. His conception of the regulating power over all human, or at least over all national existence, seems to waver between this idea of some unknown power steadily working out its purpose, of an element in human affairs baffling all calculation-the Tapáλoyos of Thucydides and the 'Fortuna saevo laeta negotio' of Horace—and of the gods generally as personal avengers of crime, and sometimes as the kind protectors of the State. Thus in the Germania1 the earliest foreboding of the danger which threatened and ultimately overthrew the fabric of the Empire is indicated in the words 'urgentibus imperii fatis :' in the Agricola the result of the invasion of Britain under Claudius is summed up in the words 'domitae gentes, capti reges, et monstratus fatis Vespasianus2:' in the 'Histories' the grounds of confidence on the part of the Vespasians in taking arms against the Vitellians are summed up in the words 'dux Mucianus et Vespasiani nomen ac nihil arduum fatis3. But elsewhere he speaks of 'ludibria rerum humanarum,' in language reminding us of Lucretius, and, in almost the very words of Horace, of 'instabilis fortunae summaque et ima miscentis 5.' Like Horace, he seems to acknowledge the supremacy of chance or an ironical spirit over individual fortunes, and, like Virgil, that of Fate over the national destiny. But in the Annals, his latest work, he seems to incline more to the belief in the personal agency of the gods, and especially in their agency as the avengers of guilt. Thus he opens the passage of the deepest tragic gloom in all his sombre record with the words, ‘Noctem sideribus illustrem quasi convincendum ad scelus dii praebuere.' So too he speaks of appealing to the ultores deos";' and of the 'formido caelestis irae.' Occasionally indeed he speaks of 'deum benignitas",' but more often of their wrath or their indifference. Thus he attributes the ascendency of Sejanus not to any superior ability on his own part, but to 'deum ira in rem Romanam 10 10;' 1 i. 33. 2 Agric. 13. 4 An. iii. 18; cf. the lines of Lucretius, v. 1233-5:- 3 Hist. ii. 82. and, in recounting a number of omens which followed on the murder of Agrippina, he makes the sarcastic comment, 'quae adeo sine cura deum eveniebant, ut multos post annos Nero imperium et scelera continuaverit'.' In a writer like Tacitus it is impossible to distinguish with certainty between the pure expression of his convictions and the rhetorical and poetical colouring of his style. Yet both the frequency with which such passages recur, and the earnestness of their tone even when they seem most ironical, leaves no doubt that, like Thucydides, he was not indifferent to these questions, although 'perplexed in the extreme' by the apparent absence, or at least uncertainty, of any steadfast moral order in the award of happiness and calamity to men. The Fatum' or 'Fata' of Virgil can scarcely be said to act with the aim of establishing right in the world, or of punishing wrong. Their action is purely political, neither ethical, though its ultimate tendency is beneficent, nor personal. Yet in the prominence which is given to this determining element in national affairs Virgil is expressing the strongest and most abiding belief of the Roman people, just as the Greek poets and historians of the fifth century B. C., in the prominence they give to the element of uncertainty in the world, the irony in human affairs, or the Nemesis of the gods excited against great prosperity even when not misused or gained by crime,— expressed the dominant idea in the minds of their contemporaries. Mr. Grote traces the origin of this last idea to the experience of the rapid vicissitudes from one extreme of fortune to the other, brought about by the great prosperity of the Greek states on the one hand and their incessant wars and political feuds on the other. The origin of the other idea is to be found in the almost unbroken success of Rome in all her enterprises, from the burning of the city by the Gauls till the full establishment of empire. There is no history in which chance plays 1 An. xiv. 12. |