Theocritus, or the primitive simplicity of Hesiod. He approp their form boldly and openly, and does not ask himself wheth has reproduced their spirit. To be the Roman Homer; to wri sequel of the tale of Troy, not as an inferior, but as an equal, a younger son of the victorious race, but as the heir of those ages which had lifted the conquered people to a height far abov conquerors; to combine the glories of the heroic age with the antiquities of his own nation; this was an ideal which migl captivate a mind like Virgil's, and which less partial voices tha of an applauding court might have told him that he was a attain.9

The chasm which separates the Aeneid from the Iliad and Ody undoubtedly one which is not easily spanned. It is true that su account has not always been taken of the numerous intervening which break the distance and afford resting-places to the eye substance of the Homeric poetry, the conduct of the action a conception of the actors, came to Virgil modified by the intern agency of the Greek drama. His view of the form may hav similarly affected by the example of those later Greek epics of the poem of Apollonius is the only surviving specimen, and by t cepts of that critical fraternity of which the author of the Argo was no undistinguished member. But the unsurpassed emin the two writers, the bard or bards of pre-historic Greek and t of Augustan Rome, will always make them prominent objects parison or contrast; and the parallel is itself one which Vi from avoiding, has done his utmost to challenge. To a modern the exactness of the parallel only serves to make the contras and more unmistakable. Mr. Gladstone says nothing which not sworn, like himself, absolutely to the service of Homer, ne tate to admit, when he calls attention to the extraordinary an admitted imitation and obvious similarity on the surface of the and pronounces nevertheless that the poem stands in almos fundamental particular in the strongest contrast to the Iliad. features, the identity and the diversity, are, as I have ju sufficiently familiar to us; we have seen them in Virgil's tr of Theocritus and Hesiod, and we shall not be surprised to me again in his treatment of Homer. On the identity, indeed, but little for me to say which has not been anticipated in wha 9 [For the verdicts of ancient criticism on the Aeneid, see vol. edition), pp. xxix. foll.-H. N.]

1 Studies on Homer, vol. iii. p. 502. I may here express my obligati rally to this part of Mr. Gladstone's work, which has in fact suggested the present Essay, though I have mostly found myself unable to agre views.

advanced in my Introduction to the Eclogues.

The diversity is a

more complex question, and may well occupy us somewhat longer. The production of the Aeneid was part of that general burst of literary enthusiasm which distinguishes the Augustan period. Roman literature had always been imitative; Pacuvius and Attius had set themselves to make the best they could out of Sophocles and Aeschylus; and it was doubtless in his own judgment, as well as in that of eulogistic critics, that Ennius appeared to be wise and brave, and a second Homer. But the period which witnessed the establishment of the empire generated new hopes and aspirations among the poets of Rome. The fervour of an age, half revolutionary, half organic in its character, had produced intellectual activities which the imperial system was not slow to welcome and cherish. The writers of the new era saw that Greece had as yet yielded but few of her spoils to her semi-barbarous invaders; and they planned fresh expeditions, which should be undertaken under more exalted auspices, and return crowned with greener and more luxuriant laurels. The ebullition of anticipated triumph which opens the Third Georgic doubtless represents the real feeling of the poet, though the vision which he there professes to see does not correspond in its details with that which his better genius afterwards revealed to him. Greece was to be conquered, and conquered with her own weapons. The games were to be the veritable Olympic games, transplanted to the banks of the Mincio, those games of which the race and the caestus are the type; and the ceremonial of the day is to be varied with the accessories of a Roman triumph. It was in this spirit that he addressed himself to the task of reproducing Homer. The imitation of externals was a thing not to be avoided or dexterously concealed, but to be openly and boldly embraced; and it was the hitherto unapproached excellence of the model which was held to constitute the glory of the success. Even in his own day there appear to have been critics, probably rival versifiers, who reproached him with having taken so much from Homer; and the answer which he is said to have made shows the light in which he wished his own labours to be regarded. "Let them try to steal for themselves as they say I have stolen for myself, and they will find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his club than to rob Homer of a

2 Hor. 2 Ep. 1. 161 foll.

Hor. 2 Ep. 1. 50 foll. The 'somnia Pythagorea' are evidence enough of what he thought of his relation to Homer.

⚫ [Suetonius, Vita Vergilii 46. "Asconius Pedianus libro quem contra obtrectatores Vergilii scripsit pauca admodum obiecta ei proponit, eaque circa historiam fere et quod pleraque ab Homero sumpsisset; sed hoc ipsum sic defendere adsuetum ait, 'Cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent ? verum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere.'”—H. N.]

single verse." It was an act of high-handed brigandage, which, rightly appreciated, carried with it its own justification. In the long hours of laborious days, paring down and refining the verses which had been poured out in the exuberance of the morning," he had grappled with the Grecian Hercules, and had again and again wrested from him that weapon which had so long been the terror of meaner freebooters. I have elsewhere remarked on Virgil's absolute silence about Homer, who, throughout the Aeneid, is never named or even indicated; but no one would interpret it as the silence of a writer anxious to ignore or conceal his obligations. Even were epic narrative as favourable to the introduction of personal notices as pastoral dialogue or didactic disquisition, it would have been superfluous to mention Homer in a poem which invites comparison with the Iliad and Odyssey in its whole external form, and even in its very title, and contains an imitation or translation from Homer in almost every page.

This avowed rivalry, I venture to think, should be borne in mind in estimating, not only the similarity of the Homeric and Virgilian epics, but their discrepancies. When we require that Virgil, drawing as he does his characters from the circle of Homeric legend, should exhibit them as they are exhibited in Homer, we are not only forgetting, what Virgil could scarcely have forgotten if he would, the changes which those characters underwent as they passed under the hands of Attic and Alexandrian schools of poetry, but we are mistaking the whole attitude assumed by Virgil with reference to his illustrious predecessor. Homer, in his eyes, is not the father alike of history and of poetry, the sole authority for all our knowledge about the Greeks and the Trojans, their ethnology, their polity, their moral relations to each other; he is the rival poet of a rival nation, the party chronicler of a quarrel which the Trojans had bequeathed to their successors, and those successors, after many centuries, had pushed to a victorious issue. Was it likely that a Trojan would have accepted the Homeric estimate of his nation and his nation's cruel enemies? and was it to be expected that the heir of the Trojans should dwarf his representation of Trojan worth and Trojan valour to a Homeric standard? The lions had at last come to be the painters; and though they could not represent their progenitor as victorious over the man in that great legendary struggle, they could

5 Gellius, 17. 10, Suetonius 22. Quintilian, Inst. 10. 3, cites Varius for the statement that the number of verses composed by Virgil daily was very small. "That this view of the character of Virgil's imitations was taken by the ancients themselves is shown by a passage in the Third Suasoria' of the elder Seneca (quoted by Heyne, Dissertatio de Carmine Epico Vergiliano), who says, speaking of a supposed appropriation of Virgil's words by Ovid, "fecisse quod in multis aliis versibus Vergilius fecerat, non surripiendi causa sed palam imitandi, hoc animo ut vellet adgnosci."

portray it as a contest of fraud and cruelty with heroic endurance and genuine bravery; they could poise the event more doubtfully in the balance, and call down indignation on the crimes that stained the hour of triumph; they could point to the retribution which fell, even within the period of the legend, on the homes of those who had made others homeless, and shadow forth in prophetic vision the yet more terrible recompense which history was to bring in the fulness of time. Aeneas 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 is 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 chronicler, 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 advocε answers to which have been lost. The image is indeed sor more than a mere metaphor. We know that in the Greek scl rhetoric attempts were frequently made to overturn the verd only of history, but of fable; and we may recall with a smile that it was not merely sophistical acumen, but real sympathy friendly nation, which led Greek orators to rehabilitate Busi purge Egypt from the stain of a legendary participation in t of human sacrifices. Virgil has obtained leave to reargue the his countrymen; and all that is required of him is that his fa inferences should be such as would have been credible to a warrior. Bearing this in mind, we may remember that if Aen Ulysses "fell," "relentless," and "the inventor of crime," it he is speaking of the sack of Troy, or of the carrying off of th which made Troy impregnable. If Sinon represents him as cherous, artful glozer, it is when he is describing plots laid aga friend's life and his own. If Deiphobus knows him only as t sellor of deeds of wrong, we may pardon the one-sided judgm person who has been hewn by him as a carcase fit for hou continues mangled even in his ghostly body. Such men v likely to sympathize with the admiration expressed by the Antenor, as, on the day that was to bring the war to a peacef he recalled the impression made on him by his illustrious gue gone years, before the war began. Nor is it less perfectly in that the Rutulians should disparage the wiles of Ulysses in con of their own more daring exploits, at the same time that it to admire the art of the poet, who has thus condemned formidable enemies of Troy out of the mouth of other enem were destined to prove less formidable. As little could it be that the Aeneas of Virgil should appreciate the lights and sh tributed over the character of the Homeric Helen. How he her during the siege we are not told; he may have shared t feeling of admiration and disapproval which the old men on express in their hour of respite; he may have partaken of the repulsion with which, as she tells us in her wail over Hector looked upon by all in Troy; but as his eye fell upon her at the of the sack of the royal palace, and the savage slaughter of old king, thoughts of hatred and vengeance could hardly f uppermost in his mind; and he may well have needed a sup interposition to teach him to distinguish between the auth terrible a ruin and its wretched instrument." Let us once f

7 [This assumes the genuineness of the lines Aeneid 2. 567-588. B notes on the passage.-H. N.]