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. 66 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 modification, has characteristics which distinguish it from the Greek; and as 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,' 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, 6 Köne, Ueber die Sprache der Römischen Epiker. Münster, 1840. 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 farther 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 prehistoric time, Homer (I use the name for convenience' sake, not as taking a side in the controversy about his personality) is the only poet who has attained the grace and finish of a literary period; he is the only primeval poet so complete in himself that it might be questioned whether it would have been an advantage to him to have lived later. There may conceivably be one or two touches in Ennius which appear to show a more modern feeling than Homer's, a keen sense of colour, an appreciation of philosophy and literature as such; for an age, even when relatively less advanced than some former age, is yet in a certain sense the heir of all that have gone before it, and the age of Ennius in particular possessed the rudiments of criticism and aspired after culture; but, regarded in the gross, Homer is mature and articulate, while Ennius is still crude and infantine, and it was not to be expected that the large utterance of the divine foretime of Greece should come mended to Virgil's ear when repeated by the stammering lips of his Italian ancestors. Virgil may have believed, as Ennius did, that the soul which dwelt in his own breast had once animated Homer; but he probably would not have recognized Ennius as the intermediate channel of its transmission. 9 It is needless to say anything of the rest of the earlier Roman epic writers, who are indeed mere names to us; to speculate on the extent to which Virgil's impressions of Apollonius' poem have been modified by the version of Varro Atacinus, of which five unimportant frag 7 Sat. 6.3. 8 e.g. 'Russescunt frundes,' Ann. 7. fr. 20 (Vahlen's edition). In somnis vidit prius quam sam discere coepit."-Ann. 7. fr. 2. ments remain,1 or to inquire whether the Aeneid is likely to have benefited by the example of Hostius' work, De Bello Histrico, in any other respect than in the multiplication of the "ten tongues" of the second Iliad into a hundred. As little necessity is there to speak of the possible effect of Roman tragedy on the Aeneid, as, though there are evident proofs that Virgil did not disdain to imitate individual passages, his real obligations are not to Ennius, Pacuvius, or Attius, but to the great Athenian masters whom they copied as Ennius copied Homer. The result of our inquiry then is this. Virgil imitated Homer, but imitated him as a rival, not as a disciple; his object was not to give a faithful interpretation of his great master, but to draw forth his own genius and satisfy the age in which he lived; and accordingly he modified the Homeric story at his pleasure, according to the thousand considerations that might occur to a poetical artist, a patriot, and a connoisseur of antiquarian learning. Of later influences, the only one which seems to have taken a really powerful hold of him is Greek tragedy, which was in fact the only instance of a genius and culture commensurate with his own, operating in a sphere analogous to his. The epics of Alexandria and of early Rome may furnish occasional illustrations to the commentator on the Aeneid; but his more continuous studies will be better devoted to the poetry of Homer and to the tragic drama of Greece. 1 Seneca (Controv. 16, p. 238) says that Julius Montanus praised Virgil for having improved (in his description of night, A. 8. 27, foll.) on two lines of Varro : "Desierant latrare canes, urbesque silebant : Virgil, however, is not nearer to Varro than he is to Varro's original, Apoll. 3. 749, foll. 2 “ Homeri est οὐδ ̓ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ ̓ εἶεν. Hunc secutus Hostius poeta in libro secundo Belli Histrici ait: Non si mihi linguae Centum atque ora sient totidem vocesque liquatae. Hinc Vergilius ait: Non mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum." Macrob. Sat. 2. 3. It is worth noting that Pope, professing to translate Homer, has turned the ten tongues into a thousand. He had, however, some provocation, as Ogilby had made them a hundred. See on A. 2. 237, 281, 499, &c. THE STORY OF AENEAS' WANDERINGS.1 [Originally contributed to the “Journal of Philology."] SELDOM has a great poet had a less promising subject to deal with than Virgil when he undertook to write the Aeneid. The growth of the Roman empire, and with it the spread of a civilization higher, if we take it all in all, than any which had been previously known in the ancient world, was indeed a fact all-important for the historian and the statesman, and inspiring enough to the imagination of a poet. The problem was how to give poetical form and vitality to the great idea. The springs of the native Italian literature had, in the Augustan age, been long choked up. The Italian poets had left Naevius far behind them, and went to Homer for their metre and the handling of their subject. But instead of the fresh and living creations of the Hellenic fore-time, the Romans found, in the legend of Aeneas, only a lifeless mythology, the spirit of which was true to nothing but the vanity of the Greek historians who invented it. In the following remarks an attempt will be made to trace the origin of the story of Aeneas' wanderings, and the various forms which it assumed before Virgil made it classical. The name Αἰνείας is in formation parallel to Ερμείας, Αὐγείας, and perhaps Bopéas, and would seem to be a patronymic from Alvos or Αΐνη, as Αὐγείας is formed from Αὐγή and Ερμείας from Έρμα οι Sarama. It may be worth while to put together some other traces of the same root which occur in the names of places. The mythical founder of Cyzicus was Alveus, whose name is another patronymic from the same base; in the Troad itself, if we may believe Strabo (13. 1), there was a township called Aivea and a river Aivov. Coming further west, we find the Thracian town Alvos at the mouth of the Hebrus-it is worth while in this connexion to remember Strabo's remark that there were many names common to Thrace and the Troad 'As these sheets are going through the press, an interesting essay on the Legend of Aeneas by M. Gaston Boissier (Revue des deux Mondes, September 15, 1883) has come into my hands. M. Boissier, among a great number of striking remarks, observes that the story of Aeneas does not seem to have been illustrated by painters or sculptors until about the time of Virgil. —and yet further west the town Aeneia in Chalcidice. South-west of Thessaly we meet with the Aiviâves, or as Pliny (4. 6) calls them, the Aenienses; on the coast of Illyricum was a town called Aenona. reminding us in the termination of its name of Salona, Nerona, Verona, Cremona; Pliny (5. 137) mentions an island Aenare in the neighbourhood of Ephesus, and a kindred name to this appears in that of the well-known island Aenaria off the coast of Campania. It would perhaps be rash to mention the ancient name of the river Inn, Aenus, in this connexion. It is natural and easy to connect the patronymic Aiveías with these names: but this connexion only makes darkness visible. The meaning of the base Aivo- it is for Greek etymologists to decipher; but before leaving it it is necessary to notice the adjective Aivatás, genitive Αινειάδος, a title of Aphrodite. Temples to this Αφροδίτη Αἰνειάς are mentioned as existing in his own time by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1. 49) in Leucas, at Actium near another to the coì μcyáλoi, at Ambracia, and (ib. 53) at Elymus in Sicily. That the ancients should have connected these temples with a supposed presence of Aeneas and his mother in these places was natural enough; but it must surely be remarked by a modern observer that Αφροδίτη Αἰνειάς, cannot mean Aphrodite the mother of Aeneas, but must signify either Aphrodite the daughter of Aeneas on the analogy of Βορεάς the daughter of Βορέας, or (which I think more likely) Aphrodite of Aeneia or Aeneium, just as Ziyalás (Strabo, 13. 1) means of Sigeum. Klausen in his Aeneas und die Penaten, and Preller in his handbooks of mythology, have not, so far as I have seen, noticed this point; but, small as it may appear, it has, I think, an important bearing on the subject before us. For if Aivatás as a title of Aphrodite is a mere local epithet, or at any rate a title associated with the goddess in some way not at present ascertainable, the connexion of this Aphrodite with the hero of the Aeneid will appear to have arisen from a misinterpretation of names, and the words Aiveías and Aivatás to have no more in common than their kinship with the words Aenus or Aeneia. I do not think that the attempts of Klausen and of Fick in his Personennamen to connect Aiveiás with aiveiv, to comply, or to consent, can be regarded as successful. The title of gracious, consenting, complying, placabilis, might, no doubt, be well applied to Aphrodite, but more evidence should be forthcoming before the question can be taken as settled, especially in the case of a proper name the antiquity of which may, for all that we know, have removed it altogether out of the reach of modern inquiry. The connexion between Αἰνείας and 'Αφροδίτη Αἰνειάς appears then to be only collateral, not derivative. And, if Aiveías is in form a local |