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and cities, and have to procure subsistence, comfort, and security by energy of body and the inventive resources of their minds; and when their hearts are alive to every natural emotion, not deadened by routine or enervated by excess of pleasure. Hence it is that all Homer's accounts of war and battles, of sea-adventure, of debates in the council of chiefs or in the assemblies of the people, of games and contests of strength, are so full of living interest. Hence too comes the vivacity with which all the details of procuring food, the enjoyment of eating and drinking and sinking to sleep, the arming or clothing of heroes, the management of a ship at sea, the ordinary occupations of the hunter or the herdsman are described. To the same cause is due the truth and appropriateness of all the descriptions from Nature,-of the dawn and sunrise, of storms, of the gathering of clouds, of the constellations, of the stillness of night, of the habits of wild animals, of the more violent forces of the elements, of the omens which suddenly appear to men engaged in battle or assembled in council in the open air and awaiting a sign for their guidance.

An image of this Homeric life Virgil has to reproduce from the midst of a state of society utterly unlike it. The Augustan age was pre-eminently an age of order and material civilisation, in which great results were produced, not by individual force, but by masses and combinations of men directed by political sagacity and secret council; in which the life of the richer class was passed in great cities and luxurious villas; in which the comforts of life were abundantly supplied through the organisation of commerce and the ministrations of a multitude of slaves1; in which the outward world was enjoyed as a beautiful

1 For an instance of the number of slaves in a single household in the reign of Nero compare the speech of C. Cassius in Tac. Ann. xiv. 43: Quem numerus servorum tuebitur, quum Pedanium Secundum quadringenti non protexerint?' The simplicity of the old Roman life which Virgil idealises in the Georgics, as compared with the luxurious indulgence of the later Republic and the Empire, was in a great measure due to the comparative rarity of slavery in the earlier ages of Roman history.

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spectacle rather than as a field of active exertion and personal adventure; in which the belief in the supernatural was fixed in imposing outward symbols, but was no longer a fresh source of wonder and expectation; an age too, in which the natural emotions of the heart and imagination were becoming deadened by satiety and the 'strenua inertia' of luxurious living.

The art of Virgil is thus powerless to produce a true image of the life and manners of the Homeric age. Yet he does surround the actors in his story with an environment of religious belief and observances, of political and social life, of material civilisation, of martial movement and sea-adventure, formed partly out of his poetical and antiquarian studies, partly out of the familiar spectacle of his own age, partly out of his personal sympathies and convictions. And this representation, though it necessarily wants the vital freshness and vigour of Homer's representation, has a peculiar dignity and charm of its own. It must be accepted as an artistic compromise, and not as the idealised picture of any life that has ever been realised in the world. It is one of the earliest and most interesting products of that kind of imagination which has in modern times created the literature of romance'. The work in English poetry which comes most near to the Aeneid in the union of modern ethical and political feeling with the spectacle of the martial life and the ideas of the supernatural belonging to a much earlier time, is 'The Faery Queen2:' though the allegorical meaning of that poem is as different as possible from the solid basis of fact-the marvellous career of Rome

1 Cf. 'Virgil's Aeneis war der früheste Versuch in dieser künstlichen oder phantastichen Fassung des Epos, das erste romantische Heldengedicht, und machte den Uebergang zu den gleich zwitterhaften Epen der modernen Zeit.' Bernhardy, Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur.

2 It is probably too early to institute a comparison between the epic of Virgil and any recent work of imagination, but not too early to indicate adherence to those critics who find a parallel not in art and genius only, but in the simplicity and sincerity of nature revealed in their works, between the author of the Aeneid and the author of the Idyls of the King.'

on which the Aeneid is founded. Virgil produces much more than Spenser the illusion of a kind of life not absolutely withdrawn from mundane experience. The scenes through which he guides the personages of his story are the familiar places of central Italy, of Sicily, of the Greek islands, of the shores of Africa. These personages are engaged in important transactions, such as make up the actual history of early nations,-wars, alliances, intermarriages, and the like. Even the supernatural element in the poem produces the illusion, if not of conformity with the belief of men in the age in which the poem was written, yet of conformity with that stage in the whole growth and decomposition of ancient beliefs which, through the works of art and poetry, has made the deepest impression on the world. Thus if Virgil's representation of scenes, persons, incidents, modes of life, supernatural belief, etc. wants both the freshness and naïveté of Homer and the ideality and exuberance of fancy characteristic of Spenser, it is yet a solid creation of the classical mind, exercised for the first time on a great scale in bodying forth an imaginary foretime, peopling it with the personages of earlier art or of the poet's fancy, and filling up the outlines of tradition with the sentiment, the interests, and the ideas of the age in which the poem was written.

In addition to his great knowledge of antiquity and his gift of living in the creations of earlier art and poetry, Virgil possessed in his own imaginative constitution elements of power which enabled him to give solidity and beauty to the world of his invention. Among these elements of power his feeling of religious awe, his sense of majesty investing the forms of government, his veneration for antiquity, his susceptibility to the associations attaching to particular places, are conspicuous. His sympathy with the primary human affections suggests to him the details of many pathetic situations. He has a Roman admiration for courage, endurance, and magnanimous bearing. His refined perceptions, perfected by a life of

studious culture and by familiarity with the social life of men inheriting the traditions of a great governing class, enable him to make the various actors on his stage play their parts with grace and dignity.

By some of these sources of imaginative power Ennius also was moved in the composition of his epic. In that which is Virgil's strength, sympathy with the primary human affections, it would have been impossible for any poet who came after them to have surpassed Homer, Sophocles, or Lucretius. But in Homer this sympathy is combined with a sterner, in Sophocles with a severer mood. In Lucretius the feeling is identified with the general melancholy of his thought. The feeling of humanity in Virgil is as original and pervading as the feeling with which Nature affects him. From all these elements of inspiration, his imagination is able to body forth the world of his creation in the remote border-land of history and mythology, and to impart to it not only solidity and self-consistency, but also grandeur of outline and beauty of detail.

II.

Supernatural Agencies, Observances, and Beliefs in the Aencid.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural 'machinery,' consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian gods in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts assigned to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil's epic. If these

deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute1. He seems to feel that they are above man's questioning; that it is for him 'parere quietum;' and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appetites and more ferocious passions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal passions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing

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The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the ẞons of Cicero's Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The mother of the Aeneadae' combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character. The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet some

1 This intention was well brought out in an article in Fraser's Magazine which appeared a year or two ago.

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