INTRODUCTORY IN the seventh Aeneid Virgil begins the long story of the war which was to plant his hero firmly on the soil of Italy, and thus to open a way for the Roman dominion that was to be. Aeneas lands with good heart and good omens, and at first all goes well with him. His hundred envoys are well received by the King Latinus, who offers him his daughter's hand. Then Juno, ever the enemy of Trojans, fiercely determines to oppose the adventurer; she summons the Fury Allecto, and bids her stir up anger and war against the strangers. This is soon done; Lavinia's mother is driven to take the part of the Rutulian Turnus as a suitor for her daughter, to the exclusion of Aeneas. Turnus himself vows vengeance on Aeneas and the Latins aiding him; and finally Ascanius, Aeneas' youthful son, while hunting near the Trojan camp, kills unknowingly a pet stag belonging to the Latin maiden Silvia. All this is done through the wiles of Allecto, at the bidding of Juno; and it succeeds. The wrath of the Italian folk is kindled, and Ascanius has to be rescued from hostile hands. The long struggle begins, and the Italian tribes are summoned. Latinus has to bend to the war-spirit, and retires in grief into the inner chambers of his palace. At this point, line 601, my notes begin. All central Italy has been roused by the war-horn of the Fury," et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos." All is ready for the Gates of War to be thrown open; and then, as if they had passed through them in some mystic sense, the Italian princes and their warriors pass before the reader in a magnificent pageant. It is interesting to compare this pageant with similar episodes in the Iliad, in the eighth book of the Punica of Silius Italicus, who wrote about a century after Virgil, and Milton's Paradise Lost, book i. The comparison will help us to understand Virgil's object here, apart from the mere desire to imitate or surpass Homer. An epic poet would naturally be expected, and would expect it of himself, to follow the Homeric track in the treatment of episodes; but it was inevitable that one of Virgil's quality, a rare poetic soul of true Italian tone, should turn the old expedient, as with the Games and the Descent into Hades, to new and national advantage. Virgil's methods, whether in poetic architecture or poetic expression, were never entirely simple; and in this pageant we find the usual complexity. Here the most obvious motive in the poet's craft is the wish to move the feeling of his Italian reader as he sees the stately procession of Italian warriors passing before him, or perchance to fill his mind with pride and pleasure at finding among them the ancient representatives of his own city or district. Italians have always been curiously proud of the reputation of their birthplace; even in our own time they have searched Mommsen's "History of Rome" for some allusion to their homes, and treasured up the reference with gratitude. "Ha parlato bene del nostro paese," they would exclaim, as he travelled through their town in later days. The Homeric "catalogue "2 doubtless had an object of the same kind, but it is far more a catalogue than a pageant, and it ends with a list of what we should now call "enemy cities." Its psychological effect, I imagine, was inferior to that of Virgil's picture, if only because the Roman poet set himself to support with all his gifts the definite Italian policy of Augustus,3 at a time when Italy's need for national satisfaction and hope were greater than they had ever yet been. This, I think, was the poet's primary motive, but in the execution he was confronted by serious difficulties which made his task a complex one. We have to remember that all the peoples of the procession were the enemies of the Trojans, and summoned to resist the establishment in Italy of Aeneas and his host, and therein also to resist the decrees of Fate which were to make Rome eventually the mistress of Italy. Here was a difficulty calling for an artist of 1 Theodor Mommsen," von C. Bardt, p. 8. Berlin, 1903. 2 Iliad, ii. 484 ff. See the comparison of the two catalogues in Macrob., v. 15. 14 ff. 3 It was from the late Prof. Pelham that we in England first learnt what this meant. I may refer to his " Outlines of Roman History," p. 411, for a brief account of it. Probably Julius had first suggested the idea that Rome and Italy taken together were henceforward to be the centre of civilization. consummate skill, who could find no help in his Iliad. Virgil had to hold firmly together the sympathies of Romans and Italians. Someone may ask, where was the difficulty? Surely they were by his time united in feeling. No; if that had really been so, Augustus' policy would have been superfluous. Italy is not a country that lends itself easily to unification, as Italians know well at the present day; and only twenty years before Virgil was born, the peoples of central Italy had been engaged in deadly strife with Rome, and had forced her to treat them as her equals. The Italian policy of Augustus was in truth a new one, and I have no doubt whatever that in this episode Virgil believed himself to be aiding it. Thus the poet might not too plainly treat his Italians as the enemies of the Roman spirit and empire, nor on the other hand might he engage the sympathy of his reader too absolutely for Aeneas and the invaders: "dextrum Scylla latus, laevum implacata Charybdis obsidet. . . . Let us see how he surmounts the difficulty, and achieves the feat of keeping Rome and her solemn destiny in our minds while he shows us the bloom and vigour of Italy in a series of splendid pictures.1 1 The difficulty was increased by the fact that Italy was practically new ground for an epic poet. Interest in Italy and the Italians must be roused: here the old epic ground is left behind, and the gathering of the clans is an old episode in a new setting. On this point see Boissier, " Promenades Archéologiques," second series, p. 261 ff. First, the sixth book, and especially the prophetic close of it, has left the reader in full conviction of the religious destiny of Aeneas and Rome, and this definite impression cannot possibly be obliterated by any amount of Italian heroism in the rest of the poem. Again, in this seventh book, before the pageant opens, it is made plain that this is a bad war, stirred up by the ever-unscrupulous Juno-Hera (of whom more directly) through an offensive and grisly agent, the Fury Allecto: hence and "saevit amor ferri et scelerata insania belli :" 'ilicet infandum cuncti contra omina bellum And when in the following lines Latinus is forced to give way with a deep sigh for rest, this sigh is accompanied by a fierce curse on the head of Turnus: 66 te Turne nefas, te triste manebit supplicium, votisque deos venerabere seris." A Roman of Augustus' day would think of other bad wars and another reckless leader, Antony. Yet the Italian spirit is skilfully safeguarded, as we shall see as we follow the pageant. Cities, rivers, local deities, and many local touches and legends, combine to delight the Italian municipalis, who will be reminded of the Homeric catalogue he read in 1 The keynote is sounded strongly again just before the pageant begins: "Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit. . . .” (601 ff.). |