And how pure appears the love of country still moving the august shade in the world below, in the lines which follow Ille nihil, nec me quaerentein vana moratur, Under the influence of the same feelings of affection and reverence, Andromache is introduced bringing annual offerings to the empty tomb and altars consecrated to the Manes of her first husband Sollemnis cum forte dapes, et tristia dona Ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam, Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem Et geminas, caussam lacrimis, sacraverat aras1. Similar honours are paid by Dido to the spirit of Sychaeus Praeterea fuit in templis de marmore templum Coniugis antiqui, miro quod honore colebat, The long account of the 'Games' in Book V., which, from a Roman point of view, might be regarded as a needless excrescence on the poem, is justified by the consideration that they are celebrated in honour of the Manes of Anchises. The whole of the Sixth Book-the master-piece of Virgil's creative invention is inspired by the feeling of the greater spiritual life which awaits man beyond the grave. The conceptions and composition of that Book entitle Virgil to take his place with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato among the four great religious teachers,—the 'pii vates' who, in transmitting, have illumined the spiritual intuitions of antiquity. The sense of devout awe is the chief mark of dis2 iv. 457-9. 1 iii. 301-5. tinction between the 'Inferno' of Virgil and that of Homer, the conception of which is due to the suggestive force of natural curiosity and natural affection. The dead do not appear to Virgil merely as the shadowy inhabitants of an unsubstantial world,—νεκύων ἀμένηνα κάρηνα,—but as partakers in a more august and righteous dispensation than that under which mortals live. The spirit of Virgil is on this subject more in harmony with that of Aeschylus than of Homer, but his thoughts of the dead are happier and of a less austere majesty than those expressed in the Chöephoroe. The whole humanising and moralising influence of Greek philosophy, and especially of the Platonic teaching, combines in Virgil's representation with the primitive fancies of early times and the popular beliefs and practices transmitted from those times to his own age. But just as he fails to form a consistent conception of the action of the powers of Heaven out of the various beliefs, primitive, artistic, national, and philosophical, which he endeavours to reconcile, so he has failed to produce a consistent picture of the spiritual life out of the various popular, mystical, and philosophical modes of thought which he strove to combine into a single representation. Perhaps if he had lived longer and been able to carry further the 'potiora studia' on which he was engaged simultaneously with the composition of the Aeneid, he might have effected a more specious reconcilement of what now appear irreconcileable factors of belief. Or, perhaps, in the thought which induces him to dismiss Aeneas and the Sibyl by the gate through which falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes we may recognise a trace, not certainly of Epicurean unbelief, but of that sad and subtle irony with which the spirit of man inwardly acknowledges that it is baffled in its highest quest. The august spectacle which is unfolded before Aeneas,-that too like the vision of Er the son of Armenius, is but a μôlos,—a symbol of a state of being, which the human imagination, illuminated by conscience and affection, shadows forth as an object of hope, but which it cannot grasp as a reality. In the grandeur of moral belief which inspires Virgil's shadowy representation, in his recognition of the everlasting distinction between a life of righteousness and of unrighteousness, of purity and of impurity, he but reproduces the profoundest ethical intuitions of Plato. But in the indication of that trust in a final reunion which has comforted innumerable human hearts coniunx ubi pristinus illi Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem the Roman poet is moved by the tender affection of his own nature, and follows the light of his own intuition. Ancient commentators have drawn attention to the large place which the account of religious ceremonies occupies in the Aeneid, and to the exact acquaintance which Virgil shows with the minutiae of Pontifical and Augural lore. It is in keeping with the character of Aeneas as the hero of a religious epic, that the commencement and completion of every enterprise are accompanied with sacrifices and other ceremonial observances. M. Gaston Boissier1, following Macrobius, has pointed out the special propriety of the offerings made to different gods, of the peculiar use of such epithets as 'eximios' applied to the bulls selected for sacrifice, of the ritual application of the words 'porricio 2' and 'porrigo,' and of the words addressed to Aeneas by the River-Nymphs 3,-'Aenea, vigila,'—which would recall to Roman ears those with which the commander of the Roman armies, on the outbreak of war, shook the shields and sacred symbols of Mars. Other 1 Cp. Un Poete Theologien,' in the Revue des deux Mondes. 2 Cf. Aen. v. 236:— viii. 273 Vobis laetus ego hoc candentem in litore taurum Porriciam in fluctus, et vina liquentia fundam. Quare agite, O iuvenes! tantarum in munere laudum passages would remind the readers of Virgil of the ceremonial observances with which they were familiar, as for instance that in which Helenus prescribes to Aeneas the peculiarly Roman practice of veiling the head in worship and sacrifice Quin, ubi transmissae steterint trans aequora classes, Et positis aris iam vota in litore solves, Purpureo velare comas adopertus amictu; Nequa inter sanctos ignis in honore deorum There are traces also of a worship, which from its wider diffusion, and its late survival, seems to belong to a remoter antiquity than the peculiar ceremonial of Rome,as in the prayer offered to the god of Soracte Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo, The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil's imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,-as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature, as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum, but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. 1 iii. 403-7. 2 xi. 785-8. Cp. the Beltane fires which are said to be still kept up among .remote Celtic populations, and which seem to be a survival of a primitive Sunworship. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later. III. Representation of Political and Social Life, etc. in the Aeneid. While the various religious elements in Virgil's nature find ample scope in the representation of the Aeneid, his apathy in regard to active political life is seen in the tameness of his reproduction of that aspect of human. affairs. In the Homeric ẞovλn and ayopá we recognise not only the germs of the future political development of the Greeks, but the germs out of which all free political life unfolds itself. To the form of government exhibited in the Aeneid, the words which Tacitus uses of a mixed constitution might be more justly applied,—'laudari facilius quam evenire, vel, si evenit, haud diuturna esse potest. And even if the Virgilian idea could be realised in some happy moment of human affairs, it does not contain within itself the capacity of any further development. The difficulties of the problem of government are solved in Virgil by the picture which he draws of passive and loyal submission on the part of nobles and people to a wise, beneficent, and disinterested ruler and legislator2. The idea of the ruler in the Aeneid is the same as that of the 'Father.' It is under such a rule, exercised from 1 Ann. iv. 33. 2 It is true, as Gibbon remarks in his Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, that the expression dare iura' is only once applied to Aeneas—but it is the regular expression used of a ruler of a settled community, as for instance of Dido. It is applied at the end of the Georgics to Augustus, 'per populos dat iura.' |