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is drawn by Homer at a time when, from the nature of the case, he could only play a secondary part in the action; yet Homer admits his reputation among his countrymen, and grudgingly concedes his real prowess, while he makes the Trojan hero's future the special concern of destiny, provided for even by those gods who are the fiercest enemies of Troy. Virgil takes up his story when he is left alone as the one surviving protector of his country, the forlorn hope of those who sought to resist, during the sack of the city, the recognized leader of the Trojan migration. Worsted as he had been by Achilles, and even by Diomed, it was no less true that he had been a terror to the lords of the Danaans and the armies of Agamemnon; nor was there any reason why he and his Trojans should not prove too strong for the Italian nations, though they had proved too weak for the forces of Greece. Even in Homer it easy to see that the character of Ulysses has more sides than one: he is the prince of policy, because with him every species of fraud is lawful; and it is natural that his stratagems should be differently estimated by those in whose favour they are exercised and those to whom they brought havoc, exile, and death. Virgil, it is true, represents his Ulysses as engaging in crimes from which the Homeric Ulysses would probably have shrunk; but we must not judge a poet as we should judge a historian who were to invent actions in order to support a preconceived theory of character. If the right of independent treatment be conceded, it must be allowed to extend, not only to the interpretation of character, but to the invention of incident. Regarding Homer as a party chroni cler, Virgil was not bound to assume that he has recorded all the actions of his hero, any more than that he has given a true colour to those actions which he has recorded. And so the poet of Troy, having taken such a measure as it was in the nature of a Trojan to take of Troy's subtlest enemy, might fairly avail himself of any post-Homeric tradition which might serve the cause that he had to advocate, or even create for himself new traditions, so long as they were plausible and consistent. "Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenientia finge." To be plausible and consistent are a poet's sole historical duties; and in this instance plausibility and consistency are to be estimated, not according to the view which sets up Homer as the one record of historical truth, but according to that which regards his poems as pieces of advocacy, the answers to which have been lost. The image is indeed something more than a mere metaphor. We know that in the Greek schools of rhetoric attempts were frequently made to overturn the verdict, not only of history, but of fable; and we may recall with a smile the fact that it was not merely sophistical acumen, but real sympathy with a friendly nation, which led Greek orators to rehabilitate 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 remains 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 by-gone 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 dis. approval 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 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.

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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 themselves 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

4 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 any thing 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 heroic 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.

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His long forbearance towards Lausus, and the revulsion of feeling when he sees him dead, contrast 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 receiving 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

Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 525.

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