Dido's hand. Mercury is sent with peremptory orders to rouse Aeneas to his duty: he is to sail; that is all; tell him that from Me.' Aeneas is seized with remorse and horror and prepares sadly to obey, though he dreads to tell Dido, and deems it wise to fit his fleet for sailing before he confesses his intention. But, of course, she learns it otherwise-' quis fallere possit amantem ?'-and then she turns upon Aeneas, reproaching him and beseeching him to stay. It is in this speech (cf. below, p. 87) that Vergil strikes the keynote of the story and invites our pity for Dido as the victim of a betrayal.

When Aeneas refuses to listen she wildly turns upon him, professing disbelief in the divine command which he alleges, and prophesying bitter vengeance and her own death. At the height of this second passionate outburst she falls fainting into her servants' arms. Aeneas, though shaken by the great tide of his love' and longing to comfort her, still pursues, as in a dream, the divine bidding, which his followers for their part gladly execute. In the days that follow, Dido sends entreaties to him by her sister Anna, but in vain; his purpose stands firm as an oak rooted in the hollows of an Alpine cliff. Dido is overwhelmed by her calamity and prays for death, sick of gazing on the vaulted sky; and with the cunning of madness she frames her fatal design. Her bridal bed and all the gifts and possessions of Aeneas which he had left, she bids be carried forth and set on a great funeral pyre in the inner court of her palace, professing that it is a magical charm to bring about the death of her betrayer. One more sleepless night is spent in pondering whether she dare leave her kingdom and accompany Aeneas alone, or summon her subjects and bid them follow him to a new kingdom in Italy, deserting their half-built city; but she concludes that death is the only escape, a fitting punishment,' she cries, 'for breaking my faith with Sychaeus.' Next day, when she sees the fleet of Aeneas actually under way, she curses him and all the race that he is to found, and then stabs herself upon the pyre, praying with her last utterance that Aeneas may see the flames that will consume her.

One thing then at least is clear; the real subject of the drama is a conflict between rival claims-the claims of a woman and the claims of public duty. The tragedy Vol. 234.-No. 464.

F

lies in the ruin brought upon a great woman and her work by the shipwreck of her love. The problem is put clearly in the reply of Aeneas to Dido's appeal (1.333). He begins by acknowledging his debt, and, with strong feeling, in a line of swift and passionate movement ('dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus '), declares that her memory will be always a joy to him while life or consciousness remain.

'I will speak briefly,' he continues, as the occasion demands. I never thought to conceal my flight by stealth-think not such evil of me; nor did I ever bring to your door a bridegroom's torches nor come to enter into such a covenant.' (Aeneas does not deny that he has done wrong; he has left undone what he ought to have done, his duty to his son Ascanius; and what he has done was not what he intended.) 'I did not promise to be your consort' (though I have drifted into the position); I did not deliberately enter into these ties' (though I have hitherto accepted them). If the fates had suffered it, I should first have sought to revive what was left of my own city of Troy. But divine commands laid upon me, and the thought of my son Ascanius, whom I am robbing of his promised land, drive me on. . . . I seek Italy not of my own will.' This is all perfectly true; but it is somehow unsatisfying, and some of us at least will not think that Vergil meant it to be taken as the whole truth. Indeed, its very brevity, standing alone between Dido's passionate appeals, like a point of rock in the midst of tossing surge, suggests that it was not the whole story to Vergil's mind, nor even the most important part of it.

Let us hear the effect which it has produced on a distinguished modern scholar, Dr T. E. Page, who exclaims :

'Once only Aeneas exhibits human frailty, and then it is to show that as a human being he can be contemptible. He accepts the love of Dido and then abandons her to despair and death. There is no need to emphasise his crime; Vergil himself has done that sufficiently. The splendid passage which describes the final interview between Aeneas and the Queen is a masterpiece. To an appeal which would move a stone, Aeneas replies with the cold and formal rhetoric of an attorney. Dido bursts into an invective which, for concentrated scorn and tragic grandeur, is almost unequalled.

Aeneas is left stammering and "preparing to say many things," a hero who had, one would think, lost his character for ever. But Vergil seems unmoved by his own genius. . . . How the man who wrote the lines placed in Dido's mouth could immediately afterwards speak of "the good* Aeneas" is . . . inexplicable.'

Let us at least look further for the explanation which Dr Page cannot find. His comment expresses the first feeling which the Book must leave on the mind of every modern reader. Nor is the impression of pain peculiar to moderns. St Augustine repeated more than once the confession that he had wept over the sorrows of Dido when he ought to have been weeping over his own sins; from which it is clear that that powerful and most human bishop felt his reading of Dido's story to be one of the great experiences of his life. Did any one ever weep over Calypso or Circe? And why have none of our wise commentators (before Dr J. W. Mackail) noted, with Shakespeare,† that Vergil has carefully departed from the Homeric story in making Aeneas a widower and Dido a widow? That departure in itself is significant for those who would like to estimate truly Vergil's view of women.

What is the sting and bitterness of Dido's tragedy? Just this: that Aeneas, having yielded to his love for Dido and having by degrees decided to abandon his political duty for her, is driven by divine reproof to change his mind and to sacrifice her to his political duty. The problem is old and new; and, if we want to understand justly what Vergil has to suggest about it, we must look at it from an historical standpoint. The answer which the question has received in different ages has varied with the conception of the ordinary relations of public and private duty in either sex, and with the

Dr Page no doubt refers to pius Aeneas in 1. 393; but pius means more (and less) than 'good.' It has not, I think, been observed that this is the first time that the epithet is used in this Book; and it is deliberately placed here to mark the hero's repentant return to himself, to his 'faithful' pursuit of duty. Earlier, as he enters the cave (1. 165), he is merely 'dux et Troianus'; and in the same passage the sinister power of his mother and of the old Trojan world upon him and upon Dido is subtly suggested by the title of Ascanius.-' Dardanius que nepos Veneris' (1. 163).

+ Shakespeare's comment is in 'The Tempest,' II, i, 74.

conception of the general position of women in human life. Of the first we all know in general the ancient view, that the happiness of individuals could not be weighed against the claims of the city, the Tóλç; and to Vergil the city meant the empire, the civilising and humanising of the world.

On the second point, namely, the public conception of the position of women, the growth of human sentiment has been finely described in our own day. In a pamphlet entitled 'Homo sum,' the distinguished archæologist, Dr Jane Harrison, suggests (p. 15) with unanswerable truth (in view of the anthropological evidence) that a true measure of the progress of civilisation in every period and place may be found in the degree in which women have been regarded and treated in virtue of the qualities by which they are human and which they share with men, and have ceased to be thought of merely in regard to those qualities and powers which are peculiar to their sex. Homines sunt-'Women are human as well as women'; and the progress of the human family, so far as it has gone along the road to sanity and order and goodness in its united life, is measured by the degree in which this is believed. What we call the age of Chivalry, succeeding to the barbarism of the Dark Ages, marked a bright milestone on this road. By chivalry we understand the kind of spirit which charmed us as boys in the Black Knight of Ivanhoe or in Quentin Durward, the spirit in which men accept it as their duty to protect women, not because they themselves are to reap any personal reward, but because women are human creatures whose weakness needs defence. This conception was rare in the ancient world, where, for instance, in the time of Cæsar no less than that of Pericles, whenever a town was captured, the women were spared from slaughter only to be sold as slaves.

Now on these two points-the claim of society as against that of the individual in general, and as against that of women in particular, both of which are enforced against Dido-let us ask specifically what was the view of Vergil's age, and what was the attitude of Vergil. The answer to these questions, we shall find, will supply the answer to the others which we have to face, viz. who was to blame, if any one was to blame, for the tragedy

of Dido; and if so, on what precise ground did Vergil mean blame to be adjudged? Let us consider briefly the answers respectively given to them by the politicians, by the general society of Vergil's time, and by Vergil himself.

The answer of the politicians of Vergil's century would have been brief and reassuring. If we had the privilege of cross-examining Mark Antony or Augustus as to what they thought of such a case as Dido's, Antony would have replied with the brutal frankness that appears in a letter of his recorded by Suetonius; and Augustus, no doubt, with a genial air of philosophic detachment. But their answer would have been the same-that nobody need be blamed save possibly Dido herself; another moth's wings had been singed, that was all. Women, of course, were things with which the politician must reckon, indeed, they were often very useful; but, when his use for them was over, the less said the better.

Now we must admit that there had been some excuse for this cynical view in the parts which certain women, like Clodia and Fulvia, had played in the last thirty years of the Republic. They had been prominent and active, but, speaking broadly, they had done nothing but mischief, and this for one clear reason; they had used their sex as a political weapon. Above all, there was Cleopatra, whose beauty had nearly ruined Julius Cæsar and quite ruined Antony. From all this Augustus, as we know, had learnt wisdom. He refused to see Cleopatra, though he had taken her prisoner; this was the immediate cause of her suicide; and of this circumstance it is impossible not to see a reflexion in the picture of Dido's death when Aeneas had departed, having steadfastly refused to see her again. But Augustus had learnt more positive lessons. Was there ever a ruler in East or West who made more heartless use of women to further his political schemes? He was himself betrothed four times and married thrice; and the repudiation or divorce in each case was made by him. His treatment of his sister, his daughter, and his heirs was no more scrupulous. His sister Octavia had been married to C. Marcellus, had borne him two

Suet., 'Augustus,' 69.