740 Primaque, libato, summo tenus attigit ore; though they appear to be glanced at 8. 737.] 'Libato,' not "honore libato," but the impersonal participle used absolutely. See Madvig, § 429. With summo tenus attigit ore comp. Eur. Iph. A. 950, äyerai ovd' eis añрav xeîp'. “Labrorum tenus" Lucr. 1. 940. 738.] Bitias is a Carthaginian name. Comp. Sil. 2. 409. Serv. refers to Livy for the fact that a Bitias commanded the Carthaginian fleet. The cup seems to be passed to the Carthaginians, because it was chiefly from them that the pledge of hospitality was required. Increpitans,' bidding him be quick ('inpiger'). "Aestatem increpitans seram Zephyrosque morantis" G. 4. 138. 'Hausit' and 'se proluit' are opposed to 'summo tenus attigit ore.' There is playful humour in the contrast, which is too lightly touched to be undignified, as some have thought, even if Virg. could not appeal to the example of Hom. in speaking of the Phaeacian court. 739.] Pleno se proluit auro." "Swilled himself with the full gold." Trapp. See Apoll. R. 1. 470. The commentators comp. Hor. 1 S. 5. 16, "multa prolutus vappa." 740.] The bard is introduced at the feast in imitation of Hom., Od. 1. 325 foll. and 8. 499 foll. Mr. Gladstone must have forgotten this passage, and also 9.774 foll., when he notices (Homeric Studies, vol. 3, p. 532) as a significant fact that Virg. "has nowhere placed on his canvas the figure of the bard among the abodes of men."-Crinitus.' Long hair was part of the costume of bards, in imitation of Apollo. See Cerda's note. Serv. on v. 738 says “Iopas unus de procis Didonis, ut Punica testatur historia.” If this is not an error for 'Iarbas,' we must suppose that Virg. here as elsewhere has chosen to take a hint from chroniclers to whom it did not suit him to incur a larger debt. 741.] 'Personat,' fills the hall. Comp. Tac. A. 16. 4, "Plebs personabat certis modis plausuque conposito." "Quem' is the reading of Med., Rom., Pal., and other MSS. adopted by the later editors. Heyne and formerly Wagn. read 'quae,' which has the authority of Serv., "quae legendum est, non quem," and some MSS. Were the change worth making, the MSS. would scarcely stand in the way, as 'e' is often written for 'ae,' and QVEMAXVMVS might be interpreted either way (see on G. 2. 219). Atlas in Hom. Od. 1. 52 knows the depths of the sea, and supports the pillars of earth and heaven, the epithet given to him being oλoóppwv. He seems also to have been a sort of mythical representative or progenitor of physical philosophers, among whom he is recorded by Diogenes Laertius. Being identified with the African mountain, he is naturally chosen by Virg. here as the instructor of a Carthaginian bard. For the conception of Iopas see note on G. 2. 477, and comp. the song of Orpheus Apoll. R. 1. 496 foll., and that of Virg.'s own Silenus, which is imitated from it, E. 6. 31 foll. 742.] Errantem lunam,' the revolutions of the moon. G. 1. 337, "Quos ignis caeli Cyllenius erret in orbis." For 'solis labores' see on G. 2. 478. Henry's attempt to make 'labores' here mean simply revolutions is refuted by that passage and by Prop. 3. 26. 52, there quoted, and not supported by Sil. 14. 348, "atque una pelagi lunaeque labores," which is merely a zeugma. 'Labores,' as he says, are toils; but an eclipse may be one of the moon's toils, as a storm of the sea's. 743.] Unde hominum genus,' &c. This is among the first subjects of the songs of Orpheus and Silenus. 'Imber' the element of water. Comp Lucr. 1. 714, 66 Et qui quattuor ex rebus posse omnia rentur, Ex igni terra atque anima procrescere et imbri." 744.] 'Pluvias' is a translation of Hy. adas.' Comp. note on v. 293. Some inferior MSS. give "Pleiadas" or "Pliadas" for 'pluvias.' 'Triones:' see on G. 3. 381: 106 P. VERGILI MARONIS AENEID. LIB. I. 745 Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa; 750 here the Great and Little Bear are meant. 745.] For this and the next line see G. 2. 481, 482 and note. 747.] Ingeminant plausu' like "ingeminant hastis," 9. 811. Some inferior MSS. give 'plausum,' with the Schol. on Lucan 1. 133. The natives are naturally made to set the fashion, the strangers to follow it, as Serv. remarks. 748.] "Traherent per talia tempus" 6. 537 note. See also on G. 3. 379, where I have explained "noctem ducere," "trahere," of speeding along. But it is very difficult to say, as the more usual sense of "trahere" when applied to time is to protract (see the Lexicons), and the reference here may be to the length to which the conversation continued into the night. Perhaps Virg. intended to blend the two notions, in spite of their apparent inconsistency, meaning no more than that the conversation lasted the whole night long. 749.] She drank in love with the words of Aeneas. Longum' probably refers to the notion of length contained in 'trahebat.' 66 Longum amorem "3. 487 note. Serv. says "Alludit ad convivium. Sic Anacreon, pwта ivwv:" but this can hardly be meant. 750.] "Multa super Lauso rogitat" 10. 755 10.567). Serv. thinks that these are meant to be the descendants of the flesh-eating horses of Diomedes of Thrace, Lucr. 5. 29. It is possible that there may be some confusion between the names; it is possible too that Virg. may have remembered the prowess of Diomede's horses in the chariotrace without recollecting that they were once Aeneas' own. Generally too he may have remembered that Diomede was in a chariot when he encountered Aeneas. That he refers to this encounter and also to that of Achilles with Aeneas is almost certain from 10. 581, where Liger says to Aeneas, "Non Diomedis equos, non currum cernis Achilli."Quantus,' how terrible in war. Comp. "quantus In clipeum adsurgat" 11. 283, said by Diomede himself of Aeneas. The notion of bulk is prominent, but not, as Henry thinks, the only one. 753.] Immo,' nay rather, instead of answering more questions in detail, tell us the whole story from the first. 754.] Tuorum' and 'tuos' are distinguished, as in the one case Dido is thinking of those who perished at Troy, in the other of Aeneas who escaped. In answering the question 2. 10 Aeneas classes himself with his friends, "casus nostros." 755.] Portat errantem' should be taken closely together. "Septuma post Troiae excidium iam vertitur aestas, Cum freta, cum terras omnis . . ferimur" 5. 626. The form of Dido's words shows that she knew the time of the fall of Troy not from Aeneas, but from Teucer (v. 623), or from common fame. The general mean. ing is, 'You have the experiences of seven years to tell it will be better that we should hear them continuously, the story being as long as it is.' P. VERGILI MARONIS AENEIDOS LIBER SECUNDUS. THE voice of criticism has unanimously fixed on this book, along with the Fourth and Sixth, as affording the best evidence of the true greatness of Virgil. Whether or no we believe the story told in Donatus' biography, that the poet himself chose these three books to read to Augustus as a specimen of his work, it indicates at any rate the judgment passed by antiquity; and modern opinion has not been slow to ratify the verdict. The conception of the present book is eminently fortunate. Homer had made Ulysses tell the story of his wanderings to Alcinous, and so had supplied the canvas on which the younger artist might work: but the tale of Troy taken forms no part of the narrative of the Odyssey: it is briefly sung by a bard, whose strains move the tears of Ulysses, as the Trojan portraits at Carthage have moved those of Aeneas; but that is all. It was open to Virgil to make his hero tell the whole story of the destruction of Troy without trespassing on Homer's ground; and he seized the opportunity. The subject could not fail to be most impressive, and it is introduced with perfect propriety. Dido, it is true, knew the main incidents of the siege; but that was all the more reason why she should wish to hear them from the chief living witness on the side of Troy. Virgil too has shown his wisdom not only in what he has said, but in what he has left unsaid. Dido's curiosity would naturally extend over the whole ten years; but the poet knew that a detail of the siege, natural as it might be, would weary his readers. He tells us that the queen asked of Priam and Hector, of Diomedo and Achilles; but he does not require us to listen to Aeneas till he can concentrate our attention on the last agony of Troy,' the one night in which the city was taken and sacked. The taking of Troy was, as might be expected, a favourite subject with poets before Virgil. It formed part of the epic cycle; it was treated by the masters of the Greek drama. Of these works the only one that has come down to us is the Troades of Euripides; and even that has its scene laid after the catastrophe, which it deals with only by way of retrospect. We know enough of the others to be assured that the main incidents in Virgil's narrative-the story of the Trojan horse, the introduction of Sinon, the tragic death of Laocoon-are taken from his predecessors. It would have been unnatural if it had not been so. Custom bound Virgil to follow the legend in its main bearings as he had received it, though it left him quite free, as I have contended in the general Introduction to the Aeneid, to vary minor details, and give his own colour to the whole. How far Virgil is original in the minutiae of his treatment, we cannot tell. Macrobius indeed makes one of his interlocutors (Sat. 5. 2) speak of it as a fact known to every schoolboy, that the story of this book is taken almost word for word from one Pisander, who wrote a mythological history of the world in verse; but though the charge is circumstantially made, it is discredited by the silence of other authorities, whose ignorance contrasts strangely with this schoolboy knowledge; and Heyne, in his first Excursus to this book, has made it more than probable that the plagiarism of the poet is really the blunder of the critic, who is supposed to have confounded two Pisanders, one who lived before Virgil, but did not write the mythologicohistorical poem, and another who did write the poem, but lived after Virgil1. The little that we know from Servius and others about the treatment of the stories of Laocoon and Sinon by earlier writers points rather to difference from Virgil's version than to identity with it: and though we must not build so much on this, as it is the wont of such witnesses to dwell rather on points of dissimilarity than on points of agreement, we may take it as showing that Virgil did really exercise his privilege of varying the smaller circumstances of the narrative, especially as his successors, Quinctus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus, who are supposed to have been diligent copyists of the early writers, differ from him considerably in their manner of treatment. At any rate, whatever may have been Virgil's obligations to his predecessors for the incidents of his narrative, we cannot doubt that the golden thread which runs through the whole, the feeling of Aeneas himself, is substantially his own. The steps by which the hero comes to realize his position as an inhabitant of a captured city, a partisan of a cause against which the gods have finally declared,-steps indicated with such subtlety that it is only of late that they have been fully recognized (see on vv. 322, 402),—are not likely to have been transmitted by legend, while they bear in themselves the strongest marks of the poet's peculiar art. : Perhaps there is no better way of estimating the greatness of Virgil in this book than by glancing at the manner in which the subject has been treated by the three later poets, Smyrnaeus, Tryphiodorus, and Tzetzes. With his example before them, not to mention the other writers whom they probably followed, they have yet contrived to divest a most stirring and pathetic story of a large part of its interest. Smyrnaeus bestows two of his fourteen books, the twelfth and the thirteenth, on the capture of Troy. He goes over much the same ground as Virgil; but his narrative is flat and lifeless the incidents do not flow out of each other, and sometimes, instead of incident, we are put off with the tedious generality of a mere historical abridgment. Calchas advises the Greeks to try stratagem rather than force: Ulysses on the moment strikes out the notion of the wooden horse with all its details: Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, like Milton's Moloch, are for open war, and attempt to lead their people to battle at once, but are checked by a thunderbolt from Zeus, which quite overawes them; an incident briefly despatched, and apparently introduced for no object whatever. Soon after we hear that the gods are at war with each other, as in the twentieth Iliad, hurling as missiles the hills of Ida; but we are expressly told that while all nature is convulsed, the human combatants are unconscious of what is going on, and even this invisible warfare is soon terminated by another thunderbolt from Zeus, so that, as before, we are at a loss to understand the relevancy of the incident. When the horse is made, Sinon is left with it, having expressed to the Greeks his willingness to undergo burning alive, or any torture that the Trojans may inflict. Accordingly, he stands silent while the enemy surrounds him, trying him first with mild words of inquiry, afterwards with the harsher methods of mutilation and burning: and then, having given this undoubted proof of his courage, he voluntarily tells his story. Laocoon, who disbelieves him, is struck blind on the spot, the state of his eyes being described with a sickening minuteness of detail; yet even in this condition he continues urging his countrymen to burn the horse, and so the serpents are sent to destroy his children by his side. Cassandra then takes his 1 Welcker, Epischer Cyclus, p. 91, thinks that there may have been a spurious poem on the subject forged in the Alexandrian age, and attributed to the earlier Pisander ; -rather a hypothetical mode of saving Macrobius' credit. place in denunciation, but is gibed at by the Trojans: she tries herself to burn or break open the horse, but torch and weapons are wrested from her. A paragraph is spent in enforcing the statement that the Greeks suffered during the sack as well as the Trojans, and the modes of their deaths are enumerated with statistical particularity. Some, we are told, were hit by goblets, others by tables, others by torches and spits with meat adhering to them, others by hatchets: some have their fingers cut off in trying to ward off blows: some are bruised with stones, and some pierced with lances, which the Trojans were able to wield in spite of the wine they had drunk. We are told of Aeneas' escape, which it appears was owing partly, as in Virgil, to the protection of his mother, who warded off the weapons of the enemy, but partly also to a speech of Calchas to the Greeks, ordering them to spare him on account of his signal piety in taking his father and son with him rather than his treasure. But perhaps the greatest piece of flatness is found in Pyrrhus' speech to old Priam, who has been praying for death at his hands : ὦ γέρον, ἐμμεμαῶτα καὶ ἐσσύμενόν περ ἀνώγεις· Tryphiodorus is a writer of a somewhat lower stamp, perhaps equal in power to Smyrnaeus, but inferior in taste and judgment. He concentrates himself chiefly on the wooden horse and the events immediately connected with it, fifty lines being given to a minute description of all its parts, from which it appears that it was a costly as well as elaborate performance,-its eyes being made of beryl and amethyst, and its teeth of silver. Ulysses, as in Smyrnaeus, lays down the programme of operations: the heroes rise one after another, as at the challenge of Hector in the seventh book of the Iliad, and volunteer in the service; and when they are lodged in the horse, Pallas provides them with ambrosia; immediately after which they are aptly compared to beasts running down a rock to escape a winter torrent, and waiting in their den, famished with hunger. Sinon is left, mangled, like Ulysses in Helen's story in the fourth Odyssey, with stripes from his own hand, and tells a similar story to that in Virgil, except that he represents himself as having been scourged by his comrades because he refused to fly with them. The dragging of the horse into the city is detailed at tedious length,— the agency of the gods, which duly appears later in the poem, being tastelessly anticipated, and Here being made to open the gates wider than usual, while Poseidon knocks down part of the stonework of the entrance. Cassandra protests, as in Smyrnaeus, and is severely upbraided by her father, who sends her to her chamber. Helen's story in Homer is again put under requisition, and the adulteress is made to address the Greeks within the horse in the tones of their respective wives; but the incident is an isolated one, and no attempt is made to harmonize it with the rest of the story. For the rest of the book the narrative proceeds more rapidly, the different events of the sack being despatched each in a few lines, without any attempt at pictorial narrative. The poet cannot, he says, tell all that happened on that night; that is a business for the Muses: he feels himself to be a chariot-driver nearing the goal. Tzetzes need hardly detain us a moment, as his narrative of the sack of Troy is utterly contemptible, with no pretension to poetry, and very little to style or metre. He is fortunately brief, and in fact presents a condensed résumé of the story as told by his various predecessors, Virgil included, the absence of detail enabling him in general to avoid the points in which they differ. There is however quite enough to distinguish him from them, or from any other writer professing to be a poet. When the heroes get into the horse, he takes the opportunity of telling us the personal characteristics of the leading Greeks, in lines like these: |
