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times nods, Apollonius may be said to be only occasionally awake, though his long fits of somnolency are relieved by fanciful and even attractive dreams.

Of the earlier epic poetry of Rome we know still less than of the later epic poetry of Greece. We know, however, enough to assure us that it had some influence on Virgil; enough also to warrant us in assuming that its influence, could it be thoroughly estimated, would be found not to have penetrated very far. To inquire into the influence of Naevius and Ennius upon Virgil is, in fact, as unfruitful a subject as to inquire into the influence of Chaucer and Spenser, or perhaps Cowley, upon Pope. Incidents and external colouring may occasionally have been borrowed; forms of expression and turns of rhythm may have been appropriated by a writer of whom it might be said, as it has been said of Pope, that "there is scarcely a happy combination of words, or a phrase poetically elegant, in his native language, which he has not inserted into his poems";" but the use he made of his predecessors cannot have borne any analogy to the use he made of Homer. In the one case it is an ancient conqueror who, having overcome a veteran worthy of his steel, converts his body into merchandise, and wears his armour as his own; in the other case it is a despot, who walks through the houses of his subjects, and takes away any thing that strikes his fancy, for the adornment of his own palace. The same tradition which, as we have seen, makes Virgil speak of grappling with Homer as of attempting to rob Hercules of his club, tells us that he talked of his appropriations from Ennius as the gold which a man rakes from a dunghill'. Almost all that we know of the actual obligations of Virgil to the Punic War of Naevius, is that in Naevius's poem, no less than in Virgil's, Aeneas is supposed to be questioned about his departure from Troy, that Naevius speaks of Dido and her sister Anna, from which it is inferred that the questioner of Aeneas is the Carthaginian queen, and that the consolation addressed by Aeneas to his crew in the First Aeneid and the discourse between Venus and Jupiter in the same book are, as we are told in words which must necessarily be understood with some latitude",

Watts, quoted in Johnson's Life of Pope.
Donatus, § 18. 71.

7 Serv. on Aen. i. 198: "O socii... et totus hic locus de Naevio belli Punici lib. translatus est." Macrob. Sat. 6. 2: "Sunt alii loci plurimorum versuum quos Maro in opus suum cum paucorum inmutatione verborum a veteribus transtulit.... In principio Aeneidos tempestas describitur, et Venus apud Iovem queritur de periculis filii, et Iuppiter eam de futurorum prosperitate solatur. Hic locus totus sumptus a Naevio est ex primo libro belli Punici. Illic enim aeque Venus Troianis tempestate laborantibus cum love queritur, et sequuntur verba Iovis filiam consolantis spe futurorum.” Niebuhr (Hist., Eng. T., vol. i. p. 192) thinks Virgil took the hint of Aeneas's shield

they do not impress the reader as he is impressed by their Greek original, or by their Latin copy; they are graceful, fanciful, in a word, Ovidian; but they are not epic. The description of Love overreaching Ganymede at dice, the boy-god erect and radiant, his playmate pouting and pettish, is obviously made for painting; but the picture would not find a place in a heroic gallery. Nor is Apollonius writing in the 'grand style' when he introduces Aphrodite playfully pinching her son's cheek, and bribing him to attack Medea by a promise of the magic ball with which Zeus played when a babe in his cavern-nursery of Ida. The interview between Jason and Medea in the temple of Hecate is tender and touching; but Virgil would never have descended to the prettiness of the comparison of the two lovers, bashful and silent, to tall pine-trees at first standing still in the calm, and then breaking into a rustle under the agitation of the wind; a simile which Valerius Flaccus has to tone down and render less graphic in order to adapt it to the genius of his quasi-Virgilian imitation. When the voyage recommences the poem again ceases to interest us. The treacherous murder of Absyrtus is narrated in a manner to excite pity and terror; but we have heard too little of the youth to feel much personal concern in his fate. The ineffectual appeal of Medea to the greater sorceress, Circe, is better in conception than in execution. The adventures of the suppliants in Phaeacia have rather the grotesqueness of romance than the dignity of epic narrative. The other incidents of the homeward voyage, like those of the voyage out, seem as if related for an emergency, not evolved by the internal necessities of the story; and the few lines in which the heroes are at last dismissed may perhaps show that the poet had come to be as weary of the subject as his readers. The Homeric poems, according to Longinus, contain many slips, the Argonautics none; yet, asks the critic, who would not rather be Homer than Apollonius? It required but little confidence to put the question; but few, I imagine, would now accept the previous judgment on which it is based. If Homer some

3 τὰ δ ̓ ἄνεῳ καὶ ἄναυδοι ἐφέστασαν ἀλλήλοισιν
ἢ δρυσὶν ἢ μακρῇσιν ἐειδόμενοι ἐλάτῃσιν
αἵτε παράσσον ἕκηλοι ἐν οὔρεσιν ἐρρίζωνται
νηνεμίῃ· μετὰ δ ̓ αὖτις ὑπὸ ῥιπῆς ἀνέμοιο
κινύμεναι ὁμάδησαν ἀπείριτον· ὡς ἄρα τώγε
μέλλον ἅλις φθέγξασθαι ὑπὸ πνοιῇσιν ̓́Ερωτος.

Apoll. 3. 967, foll.

In mediis noctis nemorisque tenebris

Inciderant ambo attoniti iuxtaque subibant,
Abietibus tacitis aut inmotis cyparissis

Adsimiles, rapidus nondum quas miscuit Auster.

Val. Flacc. 7. 403, foll.

On the Sublime, § 33.

times nods, Apollonius may be said to be only occasionally awake, though his long fits of somnolency are relieved by fanciful and even attractive dreams.

Of the earlier epic poetry of Rome we know still less than of the later epic poetry of Greece. We know, however, enough to assure us that it had some influence on Virgil; enough also to warrant us in assuming that its influence, could it be thoroughly estimated, would be found not to have penetrated very far. To inquire into the influence of Naevius and Ennius upon Virgil is, in fact, as unfruitful a subject as to inquire into the influence of Chaucer and Spenser, or perhaps Cowley, upon Pope. Incidents and external colouring may occasionally have been borrowed; forms of expression and turns of rhythm may have been appropriated by a writer of whom it might be said, as it has been said of Pope, that "there is scarcely a happy combination of words, or a phrase poetically elegant, in his native language, which he has not inserted into his poems';" but the use he made of his predecessors cannot have borne any analogy to the use he made of Homer. In the one case it is an ancient conqueror who, having overcome a veteran worthy of his steel, converts his body into merchandise, and wears his armour as his own; in the other case it is a despot, who walks through the houses of his subjects, and takes away any thing that strikes his fancy, for the adornment of his own palace. The same tradition which, as we have seen, makes Virgil speak of grappling with Homer as of attempting to rob Hercules of his club, tells us that he talked of his appropriations from Ennius as the gold which a man rakes from a dunghill'. Almost all that we know of the actual obligations of Virgil to the Punic War of Naevius, is that in Naevius's poem, no less than in Virgil's, Aeneas is supposed to be questioned about his departure from Troy, that Naevius speaks of Dido and her sister Anna, from which it is inferred that the questioner of Aeneas is the Carthaginian queen, and that the consolation addressed by Aeneas to his crew in the First Aeneid and the discourse between Venus and Jupiter in the same book are, as we are told in words which must necessarily be understood with some latitude",

Watts, quoted in Johnson's Life of Pope.

Donatus, § 18. 71.

7 Serv. on Aen. i. 198: "O socii... et totus hic locus de Naevio belli Punici lib. translatus est." Macrob. Sat. 6. 2: "Sunt alii loci plurimorum versuum quos Maro

in

opus suum cum paucorum inmutatione verborum a veteribus transtulit. . . . In principio Aeneidos tempestas describitur, et Venus apud Iovem queritur de periculis filii, et Iuppiter eam de futurorum prosperitate solatur. Hic locus totus sumptus a Naevio est ex primo libro belli Punici. Illic enim aeque Venus Troianis tempestate laborantibus cum love queritur, et sequuntur verba Iovis filiam consolantis spe futurorum." Niebuhr (Hist., Eng. T., vol. i. p. 192) thinks Virgil took the hint of Aeneas's shield

' entirely' taken from the old poet. It must be confessed that the two or three lines quoted by Servius in exemplification of the hints which Naevius gave to Virgil do not suggest the notion of any very close imitation. When Naevius says of the wives of Anchises and Aeneas— "Amborum uxores

Noctu Troiad exibant capitibus opertis

Flentes ambae abeuntes lacrimis cum multis,"

we are not obliged to think that but for them Virgil could not have written

"Litora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo
Et campos ubi Troia fuit 8."

And we feel that the Virgilian Aeneas might have represented himself as wondering at the multitude" of those who followed his fortunes 'animis opibusque parati,' even if Naevius, speaking of the same gathering, had not specified the three points of numbers, 'eorum sectam sequuntur multi mortales,' bravery, 'multi alii e Troia strenui viri,' and wealth, ubi foras cum auro illi exibant'.' Nor is it likely that the Saturnian measure, 'the barbarous utterance of wood-gods and bards,' should have had more charms for Virgil, the perfecter of the Latin hexameter, than it had for Ennius, who was the first to supplant it by the stately Grecian exotic.

The identity of metre at once establishes a closer affinity between Virgil and Ennius than can ever have existed between the poet of the Aeneid and the poet of the Punic War. As a matter of fact we know that many lines in the Aeneid are taken, more or less changed, from the Annals; indeed, we owe the preservation of not a few of Ennius's hexameters to the early critics who pointed out the imitations of them in Virgil. Every reader of the Aeneid will remember lines resembling "Qui caelum versat stellis fulgentibus aptum," "Teque pater Tiberine tuo cum flumine sancto," "Cum superum lumen nox intempesta teneret," "Ansatis concurrunt undique telis," "Romani scalis summa nituntur opum vi," "Quis potis ingentis oras evolvere belli ?" "Semianimesque micant oculi lucemque requirunt ;" lines, some of which, when we meet them in Virgil, strike us with no want of smoothness or finish, while others, though somewhat rougher, serve to vary the harmony which they do not really interrupt. The Latin hexameter, under all its modifications, has characteristics which distinguish it from the Greek; and as from Naevius, whom he further supposes him to have followed in making Romulus the grandson of Aeneas (Lect. vol. i. ed. 1844, p. 26); but the first notion rests on an arbitrary interpretation of Naevius, the second on a misunderstanding of Virgil. 9 Aen. 2. 797. Serv. ad loc.

Aen. 3. 10. Serv. ad loc.

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1 In the quotations from Naevius I have followed Vahlen's edition: Cn. Naevi De Bello Punico Reliquiae,' Leipsic, 1854,

Ennius was its originator, he may claim to be the author of Virgil's versification, even in cases where nothing like imitation can be pretended. Ennius did not naturalize his new importation until the language into which it was introduced had lost some portion of its original plasticity; he had accordingly, as has been ably shown by a German writer, to adopt a certain conventionalism of expression, innovating here, paraphrasing there, in order to avoid obvious words which happened to be unsuitable to his metre; and though Virgil was not likely to follow him in his harsher 'tours de force,' his 'saxo cere- comminuit -brum,' or his 'replet te laetificum gau-,' the same necessity which pressed on the elder poet pressed on the younger also, making him fall into the style of epic commonplace which already existed, and augment it by a thousand new and ingenious devices of his own. All this we may admit, as we have made similar admissions in the case of Apollonius; yet it may still be true that Virgil's debt to Ennius is so trifling as to be scarcely worth computation. We know too little of Ennius to be able to estimate his merits as a narrator; hundreds of his verses have come down to us, but very few passages which exceed three or four lines, and of these scarcely any can be called pieces of narrative. There is indeed a description of an invincible tribune in the Histrian war, bathed in sweat and exposed to a hailstorm of javelins, which Virgil doubtless had before him while painting Turnus at the end of the ninth Aeneid; but the model is itself a copy from the single-handed resistance of the Homeric Ajax in the sixteenth Iliad, which would sufficiently account for Virgil's imitation if the fragment of the Annals had never been preserved by Macrobius', while it leaves us no means of judging how Ennius would have treated such a situation if he had not had Homer to draw from. The account of Romulus and Remus waiting for the augury, preserved by Cicero in the first book of his De Divinatione, is not a very remarkable specimen of narrative power. Homer would have introduced more details; Virgil would have treated those which Ennius gives in a more artificial way, dwelling on one or two, and hinting the rest; both would probably have thrown in some short speech, directly or indirectly expressed, to show the feeling of the rival brothers and the attendant multitude. But without venturing further on the precarious ground of hypothetical criticism, we need scarcely doubt that there was nothing in Ennius' conception of his art which Virgil was likely to welcome as a help towards improving upon Homer. Living in a pre-historic time, Homer (I use the name for convenience' sake, not as taking a side in the controversy about his personality) is

2 Köne, Ueber die Sprache der Römischen Epiker. Münster, 1840.
Sat. 6. 3.

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