BY
W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D.
LATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

IMPRESSION OF 1941
FIRST EDITION, 1877
THIRD EDITION, 1897

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO
E. L. LUSHINGTON, Esq., D.C.L., LL.D., etc.
LATE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW.

My dear Lushington,

Any old pupil of yours, in finishing a work either of classical scholarship or illustrative of ancient literature, must feel that he owes to you, probably more than to any one else, the impulse which directed him to these studies. It is with this feeling that I should wish to associate your name with this volume. Many of your former pupils can confirm my recollection that one of the happiest influences of our youth was the admiration excited by the union, in your teaching, of perfect scholarship with a true and generous appreciation of all that is excellent in literature. The intimate friendship of many subsequent years has afforded me, along with much else of still higher value, ample opportunities for verifying these early impressions.

Ever affectionately yours,

W. Y. SELLAR.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This volume has been written in continuation of one which appeared some years ago on the Roman Poets of the Republic. I hope in a short time to bring out a new edition of that work, enlarged and corrected, and afterwards to add another volume which will treat of Horace and the Elegiac Poets. I have reserved for this later volume the examination of the minor poems which have been attributed to Virgil, most of which belong to the Augustan Age.

Besides the special acknowledgments of ideas or information derived from various sources, which are made in notes at the foot of the page where an occasion for them arises, I have to make a general acknowledgment of the assistance I have received in my studies of the Augustan literature from the earlier volumes of Dr. Merivale’s ‘History of the Romans under the Empire,’ from the ‘History of Roman Literature’ by W. S. Teuffel, from M. Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Étude sur Virgile,’ and from the Introductions and Notes to Professor Conington’s edition of Virgil, and Mr. Munro’s edition of Lucretius. In the account given of the Alexandrian literature in Chapter I, I have availed myself of the chapters treating of that subject in Helbig’s ‘Campanische Wandmalerei’; in treating of the estimation in which Virgil was held under the Roman Empire, I have taken several references from the work by Sr. Comparetti, ‘Virgilio nel Medio Evo’; and in examining the order in which the Eclogues were composed, I have adopted the opinions expressed in Ribbeck’s Prolegomena. I have also derived some suggestions from the notes in the edition of Virgil by M. E. Benoist, and from the work of M. G. Boissier, ‘La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins.’ As the greater part of this volume was written before the appearance of Dr. Kennedy’s Virgil, I have not been able to make so much use of his notes as I should have wished: I have, however, profited by them to correct or to illustrate statements made before I had seen his work, and, in revising the Virgilian quotations for the press, I have followed his text.

I did not read Mr. Nettleship’s valuable and original ‘Suggestions Introductory to the Study of the Aeneid’ until I had finished writing all I had to say about that poem. I have drawn attention in the text or in notes at the foot of the page to some places in which I modified what I had originally written after reading his ‘Suggestions,’ to others in which my own opinions are confirmed by his, and to one or two points of divergence in our views.

Since the third chapter was printed off, I have received what seems a confirmation of the opinion expressed there as to the probable situation of Virgil’s early home, from a friend who recently visited the district, where I suppose it to have been. He writes of the country which he passed through—‘The result of my observations perfectly confirms what you had already supposed. The country south of the Lago di Garda for a distance of at least twenty miles is of a gently undulating character, and is intersected by long ranges of hills which gradually sink down towards the lake and the Mincio. The loftiest of these hills may perhaps reach a height of 1000 feet above the lake-level, but that is a point on which I cannot say anything certain.’

Edinburgh, Nov. 1876.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The only material change which I have made in this edition is that I have added translations of the passages quoted, for the convenience of any readers, who, without much knowledge of Latin, may yet wish to learn something about Latin literature. In the translations from Virgil, I have sometimes made use of expressions which I found in Conington’s prose Translation and in Mr. Papillon’s recently published edition of Virgil. I have also availed myself of Sir Theodore Martin’s Translation of the Odes of Horace. In correcting or supplementing some statements made in the first edition, I have occasionally profited by remarks made in criticisms on that edition which appeared shortly after its publication.

Edinburgh, March, 1883.

CONTENTS

[pg 1]

THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE

CHAPTER I.

General Introduction.

I.

The Augustan Age, regarded as a critical epoch in the history of the world, extends from the date of the battle of Actium, when Octavianus became undisputed master of the world, to his death in the year 14 A.D. But the age known by that name as a great epoch in the history of literature begins some years earlier, and ends with the death of Livy and Ovid in the third year of the following reign. Of the poets belonging to that age whose writings have reached modern times—Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—all were born, and some had reached manhood, before the final overthrow of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The earlier poems of Virgil and Horace belong to the period between that date and the establishment of the Empire. The age of the Augustan poets may accordingly be regarded as extending from about the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. to the death of Ovid 17 A.D.

The whole of this period was one of great literary activity, especially in the department of poetry. Besides the writers just mentioned, several others were recognised by their contemporaries as poets of high excellence, though there is no reason to doubt that the works which have reached our time were the [pg 2]most distinguished by original genius and finished execution. These works, though differing much in spirit and character as well as in value, have some common characteristics which mark them off from the literature of the Republic. It seems remarkable, if we consider the short interval which divides the Ciceronian from the Augustan Age, and the enthusiasm with which poetry was cultivated by the younger generation in the years immediately preceding the battle of Pharsalia, that so few of the poets eminent in that generation lived on into the new era. The insignificant name of Helvius Cinna is almost the only poetic link between the age of Catullus and the age of Virgil.[1] Perhaps, also, the Quintilius whose death Horace laments in the twenty-fourth Ode of Book I. may be the Varus of the tenth poem of Catullus. The more famous name of Asinius Pollio also connects the two eras; but in Catullus he is spoken of, not as a poet, but simply as ‘a youth of wit and graceful accomplishments[2],’ and in his later career he was more distinguished as a soldier, statesman, and orator than as a poet[3]. It is remarked by Mr. Munro that there are indications that the new generation of poets would have come into painful collision with those of the preceding generation had their lives been prolonged[4]. This spirit of hostility appears in the somewhat contemptuous notice of Calvus and Catullus in the Satires of Horace:—

Quos neque pulcher

Hermogenes unquam legit, neque simius iste

Nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum[5].

But it is rather in their political feelings and relations, and in the views of life arising out of these, than in the principles and practice of their art, that the new poets are separated from, and [pg 3]antagonistic to, the old. Had Calvus and Catullus survived the extinction of liberty, it would have been impossible for them to have adopted the tone of the poets of the following age. By birth, position, and all their associations and sympathies, they belonged to the Senatorian party. If they could have yielded an outward submission to the ascendency of Julius Caesar and Augustus, they never could have become sincerely reconciled to the new order of things, nor could they have employed their art to promote the ideas of the Empire. On the other hand, L. Varius, the oldest among the poets of the new era, seems first to have become famous by a poem on the death of Julius Caesar. Virgil, in the poem placed first in order among his acknowledged works, speaks of Octavianus in language which no poet of the preceding generation could have applied to a living contemporary: ‘O Meliboeus, it was a God that gave to me this life of ease.’ In the Georgics, planned, and, for the most part, composed before the establishment of the monarchy, the person of Caesar is introduced, not only as the centre of power in the world, but as an object of religious veneration; and the national and ethical teaching of that poem is entirely in harmony with the objects of his policy. And, although Horace in the Satires and Epodes, composed between the years 40 and 30 B.C., is so far true to the cause of his youth as to abstain from any direct declaration of adherence to the winning side, yet he attributes to his adviser Trebatius the counsel ‘to celebrate the exploits of the invincible Caesar[6];’ and his whole relation to Maecenas is one of the most characteristic marks of the position in which the new literature stood to the State and to its leading men.

Yet, while separated from the literature of the Republic in many of its ideas, and in the personal and political feelings on which it is founded, the poetry of the Augustan Age is, in form and execution, the mature development of the efforts of the previous centuries. Much of its literary inspiration is derived from the age immediately preceding it, and from still older [pg 4]native sources. The thought of Lucretius acted upon the mind of Virgil through the force both of sympathy and antagonism, as a strong original nature acts upon one which is at once receptive of influence and possessed of firm convictions of its own. The national sentiment of Ennius and the censorious spirit of Lucilius reappeared in new forms in the Augustan poetry; while the more humane and social feelings, and the enjoyment of beauty in Nature and art, fostered by Greek studies, as well as the taste for less elevated pleasures, stimulated by the life of a luxurious capital, are elements which the poetry of the early Empire has in common with that of the last years of the Republic.

But the poetry of the new era has also certain marked characteristics, the result not so much of antecedent as of concomitant circumstances, which proclaim its affinity with great literary epochs of other nations rather than with any period of the national literature. By Voltaire the Augustan Age at Rome is ranked with the Age of Pericles at Athens, that of Lorenzo de Medici at Florence, and that of Louis XIV. in France, as one of four epochs in which arts and letters attained their highest perfection. The affinity between the Augustan Age and those of Pericles and Lorenzo is more superficial than real. They were all indeed periods in which the cultivation of the arts to the highest degree of perfection was fostered by the enlightened patronage of the eminent men who have given their name to their eras. But the position of Augustus, as an absolute ruler, acted more directly and potently, as a modifying and restraining power, on the thoughts and feelings expressed in his age, than that of the leading men of a republic; and the unique position of Rome as the mistress and lawgiver of the civilised world gives to the literature of the Augustan Age an imperial character and interest, which the national literature of no other city or country, even though superior in other respects, can possess. Those who regard all Latin poetry as exotic and imitative have, with some plausibility, attempted to establish a parallel between the Alexandrine [pg 5]poetry of the third century B.C. and that of the Augustan Age. Nor can it be denied that the relation of the Augustan poets to the Emperor was somewhat parallel to that of the scholars and poets of Alexandria to the Ptolemies. The Alexandrine science and literature were also important factors in Roman culture; and the most eminent poets both of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it, with the exception of Horace and Lucretius, acknowledged, in the form as well as the materials of their art, the influence of this latest development of Greek poetry. The nature and amount of the debt incurred to the learned school of Alexandria will be considered later, and it will be seen that it does not seriously affect the originality of the best Roman writers. The age of Queen Anne and of the first George, again, has been called the Augustan Age of English literature. The parallel between the two eras consists in the relation which poets and writers held to men eminent in the State, and also in the finished execution and moderation of tone common to both. The writers of England in our Augustan Age had the advantage over those of Rome in the freedom with which they could express their thoughts; but, even with this advantage, and with the still greater advantage that the English race, in the long course of its literary annals, has given proof of a richer poetical faculty than any other race except the Hellenic, the blindest national partiality would scarcely claim as general and as durable an interest for any poetical work of that era as that claimed for the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and for the Odes and Epistles of Horace.

On the whole the closest parallel, in respect not so much of the substance and form of composition as of the circumstances and conditions affecting the lives and tastes of poets and men of letters, is to be sought in the age of Louis XIV. of France. The position and the policy of Augustus and of Louis XIV. were alike in some important features. As absolute rulers, the one over a great empire, the other over the most powerful and enlightened nation then existing, they each played the most [pg 6]prominent part in history during more than half a century. They were each animated by a strong passion for national and personal glory, and encouraged art and literature, not merely as a source of refined pleasure congenial to their own tastes, but as the chief ornament of their reigns, and as important instruments of their policy.

And not only the political but the purely literary conditions of the two epochs were in some respects parallel. They were both times, not of growth, but of maturity; not so much of the spontaneous inspiration of genius, as of systematic effort directed in accordance with the principles of art and the careful study of ancient models. In each time circumstances and mutual sympathies brought men of letters into close and familiar contact both with one another and with men of affairs and of social eminence. And, while the relation of patronage to literature is not in any circumstances favourable to original invention, and though, except under most advantageous conditions, its tendency is to produce a tameness of spirit, or even an insincerity of tone, yet it has its compensating advantages. It imparts to literature the tone of the world—of the world not only of social eminence, but of practical experience and conversance with great affairs. The good taste, judgment, and moderation of tone which have enabled the Augustan literature to stand successfully the criticism of nineteen centuries, as well as its deficiency in the highest creative power, when compared with such eras as the Homeric Age, the Age of Pericles, and the Elizabethan Age in England, mark the limits of the good influence which this relation between the great in worldly station and the great in genius can exercise on literature.

A further parallel might be drawn between the material conditions of the Augustan Age and those of the Age of Louis XIV. The aspect which the world they lived in presented to the writers of the two eras was that of a rich, luxurious, pleasure-loving city, the capital of a great empire or kingdom. And this aspect of the world acts upon the susceptible nature of the poet with both an attractive and a repellent force. He [pg 7]may feel the spell of outward pomp and magnificence and the attractions of pleasure; or he may be driven back on his own thought, and into communion with Nature, and to an ideal longing for simpler and purer conditions.

But, instead of tracing these resemblances further, it is more important to observe that, though the outward influences acting upon the poets of the two eras were in many respects parallel, yet in form and substance the poetry of the Augustan Age is quite different from that of the Age of Louis XIV. However striking the parallel between any two periods of history may at first sight appear, the points of difference between them must be much more numerous than those of agreement: and, though outward conditions have a modifying influence upon national temperament and individual genius, yet these last are much the most important factors in the creative literature of any age. The genius of ancient Italy was, in point of imaginative susceptibility, very different from that of modern France; and, though his countrymen recognise in Racine a moral affinity with Virgil, yet the works these poets have left to the world are as different as they well can be, in form, purpose, and character. The conditions indicated in the comparison between the two periods are to be studied as modifying, not as productive, influences. The forms which the highest spiritual life in an age or an individual assumes, the power of free and happy development which it obtains, or the limitations to which it has to submit, can, to a very considerable extent, be explained by reference, in the case of nations, to the political, social, and material circumstances of the age, and, in the case of the individual, to his early life and environment, his education and personal fortunes. But the quality and intensity of that spiritual force which manifests itself from time to time in the world, giving a new impulse to thought, a new direction to feeling, and a new delight to life, are not to be explained by any combination of circumstances. Yet, just as it is desirable to realise all that can be known of the life and fortunes of an individual poet before endeavouring to extract from his various [pg 8]works the secret of his power and charm, so it is desirable, before entering on a separate study of the various books which constitute the literature of any age, to take a general survey of the most important conditions affecting the lives, thoughts, and art of all who lived and wrote in that age. In the Augustan Age these conditions may be classified under four heads: (1) the political circumstances of the Empire and the state of moral and religious feeling resulting from them; (2) the social relation of men of letters to men eminent in the State; (3) the wealth, luxury, and outward splendour which met the eye and gratified the senses, in the great city itself, and in the villas scattered over the shores and inland scenes of central Italy; (4) the intellectual culture inherited from the preceding age and modified by the tastes and conditions of the new generation. These will be reviewed as conditions acting on the imagination, and forming the intellectual atmosphere in the midst of which the productions of poetical genius expanded into various shapes and dimensions of beauty and stateliness.

II.

The battle of Actium marked the end of a century of revolution, civil disturbances and wars, of confiscations of property, proscriptions and massacres, such as no civilised state had ever witnessed before. The triumph of Augustus secured internal peace and order for a century. The whole world was, as Tacitus says[7], exhausted, and gladly consented to the establishment of the Empire in the interests of peace. The generation to which Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius belonged had passed through one of the worst crises of this long period of suffering. The victors of Philippi, so far from following the example of clemency set to them by the great victor of Pharsalia, had emulated the worst excesses of the times of Marius and Sulla[8]. The poets whose works record the various [pg 9]phases of feeling through which that age passed had in their own person experienced the consequences of the general insecurity. Virgil, in addition to the loss of his paternal farm, had incurred imminent danger from the violence of the soldier to whom his land had been allotted. The language of Horace indicates that his life had been more than once in jeopardy—at the rout of Philippi, and in his subsequent wanderings by land and sea[9]—till he found himself a needy adventurer, ‘humilem decisis pennis,’ again at Rome. Tibullus lost the greater part of the estates which his ancestors had enjoyed for generations[10]. A similar calamity befell Propertius[11]. Their own experience must thus have deepened the horror of prolonged war and bloodshed natural to men of humane and unwarlike temper, as they all were; for Horace, who alone among them took part in the civil war, describes himself, a few years later, as ‘weak and unfit for war[12],’ and Tibullus pleads his effeminacy and timidity as a justification of a life devoted to indolent enjoyment[13]. The works of that age, composed between the dates of the battles of Philippi and Actium, express the deep longing of the world for rest: those written later express the deep thankfulness for its attainment. In Virgil the recoil from the cruel and violent passions of the time in which his early manhood was cast draws forth his tender compassion for all human suffering, and creates in his imagination the ideal of a life of peace—‘far from the clash of arms,’ the vision of a place of rest after toil and danger—‘where the fates hold out to us peaceful dwelling-places;’ just as the recoil from the political anarchy of his own age and from the cruel memories of the Marian times deepens the sense of human misery in Lucretius, and forces on his mind the ideal refuge from the [pg 10]storms of life in ‘the high and serene temples well bulwarked by the learning of the wise.’ In Horace the feeling of insecurity arising out of his early experience confirms the lessons of Epicurean wisdom, and teaches him not to expect too much from life, but to enjoy thankfully whatever good the passing hour brought to him. In all of them the sense of the real miseries from which the world had escaped, and of the real blessings which it enjoyed after the battle of Actium, induces an acquiescence in the extinction of liberty and in the establishment of a form of government which had been for centuries most repugnant to Roman sentiment.

Another influence reconciling men to the great political change which took place in that era was the restored sense of national union. With whatever feelings Octavianus may have been regarded in the early years of the Triumvirate, after the final departure of Antony from Rome he was looked upon both as the main pillar of order and as the champion of the national cause, the true representative of Italy, of the ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ against the motley hosts of the East, arrayed under the standards of Antony and his Egyptian queen:—

Hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar

Cum Patribus Populoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis.

* * * * * *

Hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis,

Victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro,

Aegyptum viresque Orientis et ultima secum

Bactra vehit, sequiturque, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx[14].

With the Romans in the later age of the Republic the feeling of the glory and greatness, the ancient and unbroken tradition, of their State was a more active sentiment than the love of political liberty. The care for the ‘Respublica Romana’ [pg 11]as a free commonwealth was in the last century of its existence confined to the leaders of the Senatorian aristocracy; the pride in the ‘Imperium Romanum’ was a feeling in which all classes could share, and which could especially unite to Rome the people of Italy, who had been admitted too late into citizenship, and were separated by too great a distance from the capital, to make the exercise of the political franchise an object of value in their eyes. They probably felt themselves more truly in the position of equal citizenship after the establishment of the monarchy than before it. This feeling of the pride of empire asserts itself much more strongly in the poets of the Augustan Age than in the writers of the preceding generation. It is scarcely, if at all, apparent in Lucretius and Catullus. It is only in the idealising oratory of Cicero, who, with all his devoted attachment to the forms of the constitution and the traditions of political freedom, still had a strong sympathy with the imperial spirit of Rome, that we find the expression of the same kind of sentiment which suggested to Virgil such lines as

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento[15],

and inspired the national Odes of Horace.

The majesty of the State, moreover, impressed the imagination more immediately and more deeply when it was visibly and permanently embodied in a single person than when the administration of affairs and the government of the Provinces were distributed for a brief tenure of office among many competitors. By enabling them to realise the unity and vast extent of their dominion, Augustus reconciled the prouder spirits of his countrymen to his rule, as by restoring peace, order, and material prosperity he enlisted their interests in his favour. At the same time the success of his arms over the still unsubdued tribes of the West, and of his diplomacy in wiping out the stain left on the Roman standards by the disastrous campaign of Crassus, continued to gratify the passion for military glory, without endangering the security and prosperity of Italy. [pg 12]The national sentiment of Rome was further gratified by the maintenance of the old forms of the constitution, by the revival of ancient usages and ceremonies, and by the creation of a new interest in the early traditions of the city, and in the ‘manners and men of the olden time[16].’ In his brief summary of the glories of the Augustan Age, Horace specifies this return to the ancient ways, ‘by which the Latin name and the might of Italy grew great,’ as one of the best results of Caesar’s administration. The revolution effected in the first century before our era, so far from seeking, as other revolutions have done, abruptly to sever the connexion between the old and the new, strove to re-establish the continuity of national existence. The Augustan Age impressed itself on the minds of those living under it as an era not of destruction but of restoration. Though in the early part of his career Augustus availed himself of the revolutionary passions of his time to overthrow the Senatorian oligarchy, yet he sought to establish his own power on the conservative instincts of society, and especially on the religious traditions intimately connected with these instincts[17]. The powerful hold which these instincts and the feeling of the vital relation subsisting between the past and the present had on the Roman nature was the secret of the great stability of the Republic and Empire. We shall find how largely this sentiment enters into the poetry of the age, how it is especially the animating principle of the great national Epic, as it was of the national commemorative poem of Ennius.

But the age witnessed a restoration of the past, not only in its action on the imagination, but in a more direct influence on opinion and conduct. Horace says of it, in the same passage as that referred to above,—‘It put a curb on licence violating all the rules of order, and caused ancient sins to disappear.’ The licence of the previous age in speculation, as [pg 13]in life, had provoked a moral and religious reaction. The idea of a return to a simpler and better life, and of a revived faith in the gods and in the forms and ceremonies of religion, existed at least as an aspiration, if it did not bear much fruit in action. This ideal aspiration finds its expression not only in the two great poems of Virgil, whose whole nature was in thorough harmony with it, who may be regarded almost as the prophet of a new and purer religion, but in many of the Odes of the sceptical disciple of Aristippus. It was part of the policy of Augustus, whether from sincere conviction or as an instrument of social and political regeneration, to revive religion and morality. Among the great acts of his reign commemorated by himself he especially mentions the building and restoration of the temples[18]. The ‘Julian laws’ aimed also at a social and moral restoration. There is no ground for attributing any hypocrisy to Augustus, as a legislator, or to Horace, as his panegyrist, though neither the life of the Emperor nor that of the poet showed a strict conformity with the object of these laws. Yet, if it failed to re-establish the ancient faith in the minds of the educated classes and to restore a primitive austerity of life, this revival affected the best literature of the time by the influence which it exercised on the deeper and more serious feeling of Virgil and the manlier sympathies of Horace, and by imposing at least some restraint on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid in the record of their pleasures[19].

The poets with whom our enquiry is concerned, and especially the two most illustrious of their number, thoroughly represent, as they helped to call forth, the spirit in which the Roman world passed through the great change from the Republic to the Empire. They give expression to the weariness and longing for rest, to the revival of Roman and Italian feeling, to the pride of empire, the charm of ancient memories and associations, the aspiration after a better life and a firmer faith. But, further, the expression of these feelings is made subordinate to the personal glory of Augustus, who stands out as the central and commanding figure in all their representations. He is celebrated as the restorer of the golden Saturnian age[20]; the closer of the gateway of Janus[21]; the leader of the men and the gods of Italy against the swarms of the East and her monstrous divinities[22]; the ‘father of his country[23];’ the ruler destined to extend the empire, on which ‘the sun never set,’ ‘beyond the Garamantians and Indians[24];’ the descendant and true representative of the mythical author of the Roman State[25]; the man in whom the great destiny of Rome and the great labours of all her sons were summed up and fulfilled[26]; the conqueror who raised three hundred shrines to the gods of Italy[27]; the legislator who by his life and his laws had reformed the corrupt manners of the State[28]. The sense of gratitude for the rest and prosperity enjoyed under Augustus, the admiration for the real power of intellect and character which made him the most successful ruler that the world has ever seen, the confidence in the unbroken good fortune which marked all his earlier career, may account, without the necessity of attributing any unworthy motive, for the eulogies bestowed upon him as a ruler and organiser of empire. But the language of admiration goes beyond these into a region in which modern sympathies can [pg 15]with difficulty follow it. Modern criticism may partially explain, but it cannot enable us to enter with sympathy into that peculiar phase of the latter days of Paganism which first appears in the literature and the historical monuments of the Augustan Age as the Deification of the Emperors. In the pages of Tacitus the worship of the Emperor appears as an established ‘cultus,’ as the symbol and the instrument of Roman domination over foreign nations[29]. The cities of Spain vie with the cities of the Asiatic Greeks in their desire to raise temples in honour of the living Emperor. Tacitus seems to regard it as even something discreditable in Tiberius that he disclaims divine attributes[30]. The origin of this ‘cultus,’ as it first established itself in the Greek cities of Asia, may be referred to a survival of the old Greek hero-worship, which led even in the Republican times to the offering of divine honours to Roman Proconsuls and to the excess of the monarchical sentiment among Asiatics, which had led to the worship of the successors of Alexander, and had prompted Alexander himself to claim a divine origin. This foreign vein of feeling united with a native vein,—the strong Roman faith in a secret invisible power watching over the destiny of the State, and revered as ‘Fortuna Urbis.’ This secret invisible divinity became as it were incarnate in the person of the supreme ruler of the world, wielding the whole power, representing the whole majesty of Rome.

The feeling with which the contemporary poets attribute to Augustus a divine function in the world, and anticipate for him a place and high office among the gods after death, is something different from this literal adoration of a living man as invested with the full power and attributes of Deity. But it is difficult to find any rational explanation of the tone adopted by them in such passages as Georg. i. 24–42, or Horace, Ode iii. 3. 11–12. There is, however, a striking coincidence in the manner in which Virgil and Horace suggest the blending of the mortal [pg 16]with the immortal, which seems to imply a common source of inspiration. Horace asserts the divinity of Augustus by claiming for him qualities and services equal to, or greater than, those which raised Castor, Pollux, Hercules, Bacchus, and Romulus to the dwelling-place of the gods[31]. Virgil, in one of the cardinal passages of the Aeneid, in which the action is projected into his own age, claims, for the restorer of order then, a vaster range of beneficent influence than that over which the civilising labours and conquests of Bacchus and Hercules had extended[32]. In another passage Horace speaks of the Roman as worshipping the ‘numen’ of Caesar along with the Lares, ‘even as Greece keeps Castor and mighty Hercules in memory[33].’ In all these passages the idea implied is that, as great services to the human race have in other times raised mortals from earth to heaven, so it shall be with Augustus after the beneficent labours of his life are over[34]. Probably the earliest suggestion of the idea in its manifestation at Rome came from the consecration of Julius Caesar after his death. The ‘Iulium Sidus’—‘the star beneath which the harvest-fields should be glad with corn’—is appealed to both by Virgil and Horace as a witness of the mortal become immortal. As the office of the deified Julius is to answer the prayers of the husbandman, such too will be the office of Augustus; and it is in this relation that he is invoked in the first Georgic among the deities whose function it is to watch over the fields. Both poets recall also the divine origin of the Emperor,—‘Augustus Caesar, of the race of heaven,’—as the descendant of Venus. Both too dwell on the especial protection of which he was the object. The divine care which had watched over Rome from its origin was now centred on him as the supreme head of the State, the heir and adopted son of the great Julius.

But, although we cannot ascribe to Virgil and Horace the ignorant superstition which raised temples to the living Emperor in the cities of Asia and in the various provinces of the Empire, it is difficult to extract from their language any germ of sincere conviction. And yet to condemn them of a base servility and hypocrisy would be to judge them altogether from a modern point of view. At such a time as the Augustan Age the minds of men were very variously affected by the different modes of religious belief, national and foreign, philosophical and artistic, which had been inherited from the past.[35] It must have been difficult for any one to be altogether unmoved by the innumerable symbols of religion visible around him, suggestive of a constant and immediate action of a supernatural power on all human, and especially all national, concerns: and it must have been equally difficult for any one trained in Greek philosophy to accept literally the incongruous fables of mythology, or to attach a definite personality to the imaginary beings of which it was composed. Horace and Virgil appear to stand at opposite extremes of incredulity and faith. Horace, in his Odes, accepts the beings of the Greek mythology as materials for his art, while, by his silence on the subject in his Satires and Epistles, he clearly implies that this acceptance formed no part of his real convictions. To Virgil, on the other hand, the gods of mythology appear to have a real existence, as manifestations of the divine energy, revealed in the religious traditions which connect the actual world of experience with a supernatural origin. So too Horace, in his Odes, treats the blending of the divine with the human elements in Augustus artistically or symbolically—represents him as drinking nectar between Pollux and Hercules, or as inspired with wisdom by the Muses in a Pierian cave—in much the same spirit as the great painters of the Renaissance introduced in their pictures living popes or patrons of art into the company of the most sacred personages. Virgil, to whose mind, in all things affecting either the State or the individual, the invisible world of faith [pg 18]appears very near the actual world of experience, seems sincerely to believe in the delegation of supernatural power and authority on the Emperor, and in the favour of Heaven watching over him. The divine energy diffused through all living things might appear to be united with the human elements in Augustus as it was in no other man, so that while still on earth he might be thought of, if not as a ‘praesens divus,’ yet as acting ‘praesenti numine,’ as the representative and vicegerent of omnipotence[36].

Some further light is thrown on this subject by considering the manifestation of this same spirit in other forms of the art of that age. The famous statue of the Emperor, found recently in the ruins of a villa of the Empress Livia, and at present seen among the statues of the Braccio Nuovo in the Vatican, has been critically examined by an eminent German scholar, as furnishing the best commentary on the language of the Augustan poets. In this statue the Emperor appears as blending the attributes of a Roman imperator with those of a Greek hero or demigod.[37] Beside him a Cupid, symbolical of the Julian descent from Venus, appears riding on a dolphin. The breast-plate represents, among other protecting deities, those whom Horace addresses in the Carmen Saeculare, Phoebus and Diana, and the Sun and Earth-goddess. In the centre there is a figure of Mars attended by the wolf, receiving back the standards from the Parthian; on either side are seen two figures, representative of races recently conquered, probably the Celtiberians and the tribes of the Alps. From the coincidence of its symbolism it may be inferred that the statue was produced at the same time as the Carmen Saeculare was composed. Its object is to impress on the minds of men the image [pg 19]of Augustus as at once a great earthly conqueror and a being of divine descent and possessed of more than mortal attributes: the especial object of care to the supreme God of Heaven; to Apollo, whom, since the victory of Actium, he claimed as his tutelary divinity; to the Earth-goddess, the giver of fruitfulness and prosperity; to Mars, the second divine ancestor of the Roman race, in whose honour the famous temple, of which the ruins are yet visible, had been raised after the battle of Philippi. The statue is of Greek workmanship; the Greek divinities are presented in the forms familiar to Greek art; but the idea is purely Roman, and born of the immediate circumstances of the age.

Other extant works of art illustrate the divine functions and attributes claimed for Augustus. In one cameo he is seen throned beside the goddess Roma, with the sceptre and lituus, symbolical of his secular and spiritual function, and the eagle of Jupiter at his side. In others both the Emperor himself and various members of his family are represented under the form of gods, goddesses, and demigods. Thus, in one in which the figure of Aeneas is introduced, the young C. Caesar (Caligula) appears as Cupid, and in another Germanicus and Agrippina are represented as Triptolemus and Ceres.[38] But still more important, as attesting not the idealising fancies of contemporary Greeks, but the native feeling with which the house of Caesar came to be regarded even in the early years of the Empire, is the one great extant monument of that age, a monument of Roman inspiration and Roman workmanship, the Pantheon, raised by Agrippa in honour of the deities connected with the Julian race.

The prominence given to this representation of Augustus in the poetry and in the art of his age is probably to be explained by his own character and policy. He was animated [pg 20]in no ordinary degree by that love of fame and distinction which very powerfully influenced the greatest Roman conquerors and statesmen, orators and poets. The disdain of such distinctions and the dislike of public spectacles are mentioned, in contrast to the tastes of his predecessor, among the causes of the unpopularity of Tiberius. The enumeration in the Ancyraean inscription of the honours and titles bestowed on him, recorded with ‘imperial brevity’ and dictated by a proud self-esteem, attests the strength of this ruling passion in the latter years of the life of Augustus. The direct pressure which he brought to bear on the most eminent poets of the time to celebrate his wars is sufficiently indicated in many passages in the Odes and familiar writings of Horace. Belonging by descent to the comparatively obscure families of the Octavii and Atii, Augustus attached peculiar importance to the glories of the Julian line, which he inherited through his great-uncle and adoptive father. Even Julius Caesar, notwithstanding his Epicurean disregard of the religious ideas of his age, had encouraged the belief in his divine descent, as marking him out for the special favours of fortune. There was moreover in Augustus, in contradistinction to Julius Caesar, a strong vein of religious or superstitious sentiment. His personal courage has been questioned, probably with injustice, but he appears to have been in a marked degree liable to supernatural terrors[39]. As happens not unfrequently with men who have been invariably successful in great and hazardous enterprises, along with a strong reliance in the resources of his own mind, he seems to have had faith in a supernatural guidance and assistance attending him. His politic understanding appreciated the use of such a belief to secure a divine sanction for his rule, which rested substantially on military force. He availed himself of the enthusiasm and willing services of the poets of the age, who regarded him as at once the saviour of the State and their own benefactor, to impress this idea of himself on the imagination of the cultivated classes, and at the same time to glorify the [pg 21]actual successes of his reign, to further his policy of national regeneration, and to make men feel the security of a divinely-appointed government, along with the pride of belonging to a powerful imperial State.

III.

The political revolution which transformed the Republic into the Empire, and the state of public feeling, which, arising spontaneously, yet received direction from the will and policy of Augustus, thus appear to be the most important conditions determining the character of the Augustan literature, and distinguishing it from that of the previous age. Poetic art was employed as it had never been in any former time as an instrument of government. If anything could have made the new order of things acceptable to the best representatives of the old Republican traditions, the purity and elevation imparted to the idea of the Empire in the verse of Virgil must have had this effect. The poetical imagination, susceptible as it is in the highest degree of emotions produced by the spectacle of ancient or powerful government or of a people nobly asserting its freedom, has little prophetic insight into the working of political causes. Nor need it be regarded as a sign of weakness or time-serving in the poets of the Augustan Age that they did not foresee the gloom and oppression which were destined to follow so soon after the prosperous dawn of the Roman Empire.

The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families, or men intimately associated [pg 22]with them; and they wrote to please themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.

Among the names of the patrons of literature that of Maecenas has become proverbial, but perhaps even more important than his patronage was that exercised by the Emperor himself. Not only was he a man of great natural gifts, but he had received a most elaborate education. He was a powerful and accomplished orator, and a practised writer[40]. As was not unusual with men who had received a thorough rhetorical training, he attempted the composition of a tragedy, and had the sense to treat his failure with good-natured humour[41]. He made other attempts in verse, and composed several works in prose, chiefly turning on the history of his own times. He showed in his composition an especial regard for purity and correctness of style. Suetonius tells us that he allowed no composition to be written on himself ‘except in a serious spirit and by the best writers.’ Horace testifies to this fastidiousness in the line,—

Cui male si palpere, recalcitret undique tutus[42].

Suetonius testifies further to his liberal patronage of genius; ‘ingenia saeculi sui omnibus modis fovit;’ a statement confirmed by Horace’s account of his liberality to Virgil and Varius,—

Dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae[43].

We are told also that in literary works he especially regarded ‘the inculcation of precepts and the exhibition of examples of a useful tendency for the state and for private life,’ which may partly account for the didactic and practical aim which the higher poetry of the age set before itself. He corresponded in terms of intimacy with Virgil, and made repeated advances, which were at first somewhat coldly received, to Horace, with the wish to number him among his familiar friends. But there was another side to the temper of Augustus, which those admitted to his favour did well not to forget. If he could be a liberal patron and genial companion, he could also be a hard and pitiless master. Literature, like everything else, had to be at his command, obedient to his will, and in harmony with his policy. The fate of Gallus, that of Iulus Antonius, and that of Ovid, prove that neither brilliant genius nor past favours and familiarity could procure indulgence for whatever thwarted his purpose or offended his dignity.

The relation between Maecenas and the members of his literary circle was one of more intimacy and unreserve. This circle included among its members Virgil and Varius, Horace and Propertius. The great works with which the name of Maecenas is inseparably associated,—the Georgics of Virgil, the first three books of the Odes of Horace, and the first book of his Epistles,—entitle him to be honoured as among the most enlightened and fortunate of all the patrons of literature. Virgil addresses him in language not only of loyal admiration, but of acknowledgment for the encouragement and guidance which he owed to him: and that such an influence may have been really exercised by the inferior over the superior mind is shown [pg 24]by the testimony given by Goethe of the stimulus which his genius derived from the encouragement of the Duke of Weimar[44]. Horace writes of Maecenas in the language not only of admiration and gratitude, but of warm and disinterested affection; and the favour shown to Propertius, a poet of a very opposite type, shows that his appreciation of genius was not limited by a narrow partisanship. His character seems to have left very different impressions on the minds of his contemporaries, according as they knew him intimately or merely from the outside. It is a proof of his capacity and his loyalty[45] that he was the one man thoroughly trusted by Augustus in all affairs of state, as Agrippa was in war: and that his qualities of heart were no less admirable appears not only from the poetical eulogies in the Georgics, the Elegies of Propertius, and the Odes of Horace, but also from the more natural tribute to his worth as a man and his sincerity as a friend contained in Horace’s Satires and Epistles. On the world outside his own immediate circle he produced the impression of an effeminate devotion to pleasure. His love of pleasure and his shrinking from death seem to be confirmed by the testimony of Horace:—

Cur me querelis, etc.

The sketch of him by Velleius Paterculus presents the view of his character suggested by the contrast between his ability as a statesman and the apparent indolence of his private life: ‘A man, who, while in all critical emergencies displaying sleepless vigilance, foresight, and capacity for action, yet, during intervals of relaxation, was in his indolent self-indulgence almost more effeminate than a woman[46].’ It is remarkable that Tacitus ascribes a similar character to the man in whom, after the death of [pg 25]Maecenas, Augustus most confided—Sallustius Crispus[47]. Perhaps the position of Maecenas, as the trusted confidant of a jealous and imperious master, required him to begin his career by playing a part which afterwards became habitual to him. Among the traits of his character indicated by Horace are knowledge of men, reticence, and indifference to the outward distinctions of birth and rank. Whatever ambition he had was to exercise real power as the minister of Augustus, not to enjoy official titles. He certainly used his position to direct the genius both of Virgil and Horace to public objects. There is no reason to doubt the fact noticed in the Life of Virgil, that he influenced him in the choice of the subject of the Georgics with the view to revive the chief among the ancient arts, ‘by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had grown great.’ But it was with Horace that he shared all his public interests and private feelings, and it is not a very hazardous conjecture to presume that many of the Odes and familiar writings of the latter poet reflect the tastes and sentiments of Maecenas, perhaps give back the very style and manner of his conversation. The alternation observable in the Odes of Horace between an apparent devotion to the lighter themes of lyrical poetry and the serious interest in great affairs, the irony disclaiming all lofty and austere pretension, the Epicurean taste for simplicity combined with the Epicurean love of pleasure, the indifference to outward state, and the urbanity and knowledge of the world, more conspicuous in Horace than in any other ancient poet, are suggestive of habitual contact with the worldly wisdom, the real power disguised under an appearance of carelessness, the refined enjoyment of life, the genial social nature, which were not only a great power in the State, a great charm in the life of a by-gone age, but have [pg 26]through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and beneficent influence on human culture.

Other names of men eminent among the ‘lights and leaders’ of the time are also intimately connected with its literature. The earliest patron by whom Virgil’s genius was recognised was not Maecenas but Asinius Pollio, who in his early youth had lived in the gay circle of Catullus; who, as the lieutenant of Antony, had governed the province of Cisalpine Gaul; who had filled the office of Consul, commanded an army, and obtained a triumph; who is mentioned by Horace in one of his early Satires as among the few critics whose appreciation he valued; who in later life obtained great distinction as an orator; to whose talent as a writer of tragedy both Virgil and Horace bear witness; who undertook the composition of a work the loss of which is one of the most irreparable gaps in historical records—a contemporary History of the Civil Wars ‘ex Metello consule;’—and who performed the important service to literature of being the first to establish a public library at Rome, and the more questionable service of instituting the practice of public recitations.

M. Valerius Messala, the next in importance among the patrons of letters, unlike Maecenas and Pollio, who, though of old provincial families, were ‘novi homines’ at Rome, was a representative of one of the oldest and most illustrious patrician houses. He had held high command in the Republican army at Philippi, and was distinguished as an orator, an author, and patron of literature. He became the centre of a literary circle the most brilliant member of which was Tibullus; which, though living in friendly relations with the circle of Maecenas, did not share with it the enthusiasm for the new régime. Men like Pollio and Messala are important as elements contributing to the general taste and culture of the age, but not as determining the political or ethical character stamped upon the literature.

No direct literary influence was exercised by Agrippa, who is described by the elder Pliny as ‘A man, whose manners more [pg 27]nearly approached rustic plainness than refinement of taste;’ but his military and naval successes, and still more the great works of utility and beauty erected under his superintendence, contributed to the same end as the poetry of Virgil and Horace, that of perpetuating the spell of the name of Caesar upon the imagination of the world.

Cornelius Gallus, like Pollio, was eminent both in action and in poetry, but his brilliant and erratic career was cut short too soon to enable him to obtain a foremost place either among poets or among literary patrons. Yet an undying interest attaches to his name from the evidence afforded in the Eclogues of his being the first and apparently the only one who inspired in Virgil that affection, partly of the heart, partly of the imagination, which fascinates and attaches the finer nature of the poet to the stronger or bolder nature of one in whom it recognises some ideal of heroism, combined with the qualities which unite men in friendship with one another. It is of Gallus alone that Virgil writes in such a strain as this:—

Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas

Quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus[48];

and it is to Gallus that he assigns the pre-eminence in his own especial province of poetry,—as he represents the shepherd-poet Linus presenting him with the reeds which the Muses had of old given to ‘the sage of Ascra[49].’

The Odes of Horace, addressed to men of high official station and ancient family, such as Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Aelius Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, still further illustrate the close connexion between the great world and the world of letters. His later Epistles, many of which are addressed to young men of rank devoting themselves to literary studies and pursuits, attest the continuance of the same tendency as time went on. And in the following generation Ovid and [pg 28]his contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas[50]. The chief cause of this close bond of union between social rank and literary genius was the fact that the men who in a former age would, from their birth and education, have had a great political career before them, were now debarred from the highest sphere of active life; while they were not yet, what they became under the systematic corruption of the later Caesars, too enervated and demoralised to continue susceptible of the nobler kinds of intellectual pleasure.

Probably in no other aristocratic or courtly society has there been so large a number of men possessing the ability and knowledge, the accomplishments and leisure, required for the appreciative enjoyment of a literature based on so fine and elaborate a culture. There are some circumstances which made the patronage of the earlier half of the Augustan Age more favourable to letters than that of other periods in which the same influence has been exercised. The chief literary patrons then were men who had played a prominent part in a revolutionary era,—men indeed of ancient birth or hereditary distinction, yet owing their pre-eminence to their talent, energy, and aptitude for the time, and thus open to new influences, and free from the prejudices of an old-established nobility. They had the culture and careful education of an aristocratic class, combined with the liberal tendencies of revolutionary leaders. The distance which in the preceding age would have kept apart men born into a high social and political position from men of genius of humble origin was easily passed in a time immediately succeeding that in which the great C. Julius had practically proclaimed the doctrine of ‘an open career to every [pg 29]kind of merit.’ Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially marked:—

Cum referre negas quali sit quisque parente

Natus, dum ingenuus[51].

The new men at the court of Augustus were naturally attracted to the new men in literature, sprung from quite a different class from that to which Lucretius, Catullus, or Calvus belonged, and yet, in respect of education, refinement, and even early associations, in no respect their inferiors.

Another bond of union between them was that they were nearly all of the same age, born with one or two exceptions between the years 70 B.C., and 60 B.C., and that several of them had studied under the same masters. The distinguished men of the Ciceronian Age had passed away, with the exception of one or two, such as Varro and Atticus, living in retirement, and consoling themselves with their farms and libraries for the changes they had witnessed. The leaders in action, as in literature, were all young men, beginning their career together in an altered world, the characters and destinies of which they were called upon to mould. One by one they dropped away, most of them before passing the period of middle life, leaving the Emperor almost the sole survivor among a younger generation who had grown up under the new order of things, and, while acquiescing in it as complacently, sharing neither in the energy nor in the enthusiasm of the early years (from about 27 B.C. to about 10 B.C.) during which the Empire left its greatest and happiest impression.

This relation of men of letters to the leaders of society under the Empire could not but exercise a strong influence both for good and evil on the literature of the age. Such a society,—able, versed in affairs, accomplished, fond of pleasure,—whatever [pg 30]else it may be, is sure to be characterised by good sense, a strong feeling of order and dignity, an acute perception of propriety in conduct and manners, an urbanity of tone restraining all arrogant self-assertion and violent animosity of feeling. Such a society is the determined enemy of all pedantry, eccentricity, and exaggeration, of all austerity or indecorum, of one-sided enthusiasm or devotion to a single idea. The ‘aurea mediocritas’ in feeling, conduct, thought, and enjoyment is the ideal which it sets before itself. Horace, except in his highest and most thoughtful moods, is the true representative of such a society; but its indirect influence may be noted also in the moderation, the invariable propriety and dignity, both of thought and language in Virgil, and in the tones of refinement with which Propertius and Ovid record the experience and preach the philosophy of pleasure. Yet literature probably lost as much from the limitation of sympathy imposed upon it as it gained from this acquired dignity and urbanity of tone. The Roman poets of this era, even while expressing national sentiments and ideas, were not like Homer, Pindar, or Sophocles, who, while putting a sufficiently high value on distinctions of birth and fortune, and on the personal qualities accompanying these distinctions, are yet, in a sense in which the poets of the Augustan Age are not, the poets of a whole people. Horace introduces that series of his Odes which most breathes a national spirit by disclaiming all sympathy with the ‘profanum vulgus.’ He looks upon it as one of the privileges of genius, ‘to scorn an ill-natured public.’ He did not wish his Satires to be thumbed by the multitude or by men of the class of Hermogenes Tigellius. He cared only for the appreciation of men belonging to the class in which all culture and regard for the traditions of Rome were now centred. The urban populace, as represented in literature, appears only as a rabble,—and this is still more the case in the days of Juvenal,—which had to be kept in order, fed, amused, and tended, like some dangerous wild beast. The middle class, absorbed in money-making and commercial adventure, supplies to Horace [pg 31]the representatives of the misers and parvenus whom he painted in his Satires for the amusement of his aristocratic readers. The tone of Virgil is equally anti-popular. The view of society which he delights to present is that of a paternal ruler giving laws to his people and caring for their welfare. His repugnance to the influence of the ‘popularis aura’ on government is indicated in such passages as the famous simile near the beginning of the Aeneid,

Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est

Seditio, saevitque animis immobile vulgus[52],

and in his representation of ‘the good King Ancus’ as he is called by Ennius and Lucretius, among the unborn descendants of Aeneas, as

iactantior Ancus

Nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris[53].

The encouragement and appreciation of the leaders of society involved on the part of the poets a position of deference or dependence; the relation between them had thus its limiting as well as its corrective effects; it tended to make literature tamer in spirit and thought, perhaps also less original in invention and more bounded in its range of human interest.

IV.

The great wealth and luxury of Rome, during the latter years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire, exercised also an influence on the life, the imagination, and the thoughts of the poets living in those times. Through commerce and conquest Rome had entered into the possession of the long accumulated wealth of the world, and, as generally happens in eras of advanced civilisation, the [pg 32]enjoyment of these was very unequally distributed. Nothing appears more remarkable in the social life of the latter days of the Republic than the great riches possessed and expended by a few individuals, such as Crassus, Hortensius, and the Luculli. One proof of the immense accumulation of money at that time is the large price which, as we learn from Cicero’s letters, was paid for the houses of the leading men among the nobility. The number of villas possessed by Cicero himself, the son of a provincial Eques, and debarred by stringent laws (though probably they were evaded) from turning his pre-eminence as an advocate to profit, and the sums spent by him in their adornment, suggest to us to what an extent the soil of Italy, the works of Greek art, and the natural and artificial products of the East, were at the disposal of the ruling aristocracy of Rome. Still more is this thought forced on us when we think of Proconsuls and Propraetors who came home glutted with the spoils of their provinces, which they squandered in the coarsest luxury. The change to the Empire, though it put a considerable check on this kind of plunder, did little to distribute wealth more generally, or to limit luxurious living. The appropriation during the Civil Wars of the sacred treasures long accumulated in the temples of the gods[54], and the great stimulus given to commerce by the establishment of peace, added largely to the wealth available at Rome for purposes of munificence, of ostentation, or indulgence. But the largest share in the disposal of the wealth of the world had passed from the representatives of the old governing class to the ruling powers of the new Empire, and this change was decidedly for the public advantage. Augustus and his ministers possessed the old Greek virtue of μεγαλοπρέπεια, and understood that immense wealth could be better expended on great public objects than on beautifying their villas and fish-ponds, or giving a more dangerous variety to their entertainments. The policy of Augustus in restoring and building the temples of the gods had an artistic as well as a religious purpose. He wished [pg 33]to make his countrymen proud of the outward beauty of Rome, as Pericles had made the Athenians proud of the beauty of Athens.

The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the noble ruins of temples and theatres—the visible monuments preserved from that age—is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of his two great works nearly twenty years of ‘unhasting and unresting’ labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens and streams of Tibur or by the bright shores of Baiae[55]. To the liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and freedom from the ordinary cares of life[56], which allowed them to give all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its most distinctive charm to their poetry—the beauty of Italian Nature. It is only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century. Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and more graceful words than these:—

Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae

Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile

Fessis vomere tauris

Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.[57]

Nor can any lines express better a real love for the actual beauty of familiar scenes combined with an imaginative longing for the ideal beauty consecrated by old poetic associations,—like to that which in modern times has often driven our Northern poets and artists across the Alps,—than the

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes;

Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi

Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis

Taygeta, etc.[58]

of the Georgics.

The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of Nature, latent in particular places, the only period [pg 35]of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’

The ease of their circumstances and the fact that they owed this ease to others (‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’) have impressed themselves in other ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the enjoyment of Nature is a passive rather than an active enjoyment derived from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then, as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery[59]. Horace expresses a shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of delight in the Odyssey.

The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger sense of the [pg 36]purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the

Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce

Aequo animo[60]

of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life. Experience had satisfied him that the ‘slight repast, and sleep on the grass by a river’s side[61],’ contributed more to his happiness in later life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The more active and energetic [pg 37]temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice of the topics treated in their poems.

V.

The conditions hitherto considered enable us to appreciate the prominence given to national and imperial ideas in the literature of the Augustan Age, and also to understand the chief differences in tone and spirit between that literature and the literature of the Ciceronian Age. Along with these marked differences, obvious points of agreement are also observable. The cultivated men of each time had the same refined enjoyment in Nature, art, literature, and social life. And in turning to the intellectual conditions affecting literary form and style, the later period will be seen to be still more closely connected with the earlier. The golden age of Latin poetry, commencing in the years preceding the overthrow of the Republic, reaches its maturity in the earlier part of the reign of Augustus, and then begins to decline, till under Tiberius the last poetic voice is silenced. Though Latin prose-literature had yet to be enriched by some of its greatest and most original works, yet neither the glory of the Empire, the charm of the Italian life, nor the vivifying ideas and creations of Greek genius were ever again able to revive the genuine poetical inspiration which ancient Italy once, and once only, enjoyed in abundant measure.

The half-century from about 60 B.C. to about 10 B.C. was, at once, one of those rare and germinative epochs in the history of the world, in which a powerful intellectual movement coincides with, influences, and is influenced by a great movement and change in human affairs; and it was at the same time a period of a rich and elaborate culture, in which the inheritance of Greek genius, art, and knowledge came for the first time into the full possession of the Romans. The earlier half of this [pg 38]period was more distinguished by original force of mind, the latter half by more complete and perfect culture. The age of Cicero was one of great energy in the chief provinces of human activity—in war and politics, in oratory, poetry, and philosophy. There is no intellectual quality so characteristic of his own oratory, of the poetry of Lucretius, of the military and political genius of Julius Caesar, as the ‘vivida vis,’—the energy, at once rapid and enduring in its action, as of a great elemental force. Among their contemporaries, though there was no man of high political capacity, yet there was a many-sided intellectual activity manifesting itself in the forum and senate-house, in social intercourse and correspondence, and in varied literary and philosophical discourse. As a result of this novel activity of mind, the Latin language developed then for the first time all its resources as a powerful organ of literature, inferior indeed to the language of Greece in the days of its purity, but much superior as the instrument of poetry and oratory, history and philosophy, to that language in its decay[62]. The writers of the Augustan Age received this language from their predecessors, in its most sensitive period of growth, while able to present to the mind in unimpaired freshness the immediate impressions from outward things and from the inner world of consciousness, but still capable of more delicate and varied combinations to fit it to become the perfectly harmonious organ of sustained poetical emotion. This further development was given to it by the Augustan poets, but not without some loss of native force and purity of idiom. They too felt the influence of the strong intellectual movement of the preceding age. But it came upon their minds with a less novel and vehement impulse. They are greater in execution than in creative design. They are more concerned with the results than with the processes of thought. Virgil may have been as assiduous a student of philosophy as Lucretius, but he does not feel the same need of consistency of view and firmness of speculative conviction; he [pg 39]shares with Lucretius the strong passion for poetry (‘dulces ante omnia Musae’), but neither he nor Horace, though each recognises the supreme claims of philosophy, shows the passion for enquiry which induced Lucretius

Noctes vigilare serenas,

Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum

Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,

Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis[63];

so that even in his dreams he describes himself as ever busy with the search after and exposition of truth,—

Nos agere hoc autem et naturam quaerere rerum

Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis[64].

The master-pieces of the Augustan literature were not the products of that vivid and rapidly-working creative energy which marked the Ciceronian Age. There never was an age in which great writers trained themselves so carefully for their office, strove so much to conform to recognised principles of art, reflected so much on the plan and purpose of their compositions, or used more patient industry in bringing their conceptions to maturity. The maxim ‘nonum prematur in annum’ illustrates the spirit in which the great artists of that age worked. The cultivated appreciation of Greek art and poetry—the essential condition of the creative impulse of Italy—then reached its highest point, produced its supreme effect in a national Roman literature of similar perfection of workmanship, and, after that, rapidly declined and passed away from the Roman world as a source of literary inspiration, leaving however the educating influence of this new literature in its place. The Greek language had indeed been studied at Rome for nearly two centuries before the Ciceronian Age. The earliest Roman writers—Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, etc.—had [pg 40]used the epic and dramatic poetry of Greece as a kind of quarry for their own rude workmanship. The age of Laelius had imbibed much of the humanity and wisdom of Greek speculation. But it was not till the age of Cicero and Catullus that the long process of education and the largely increased intercourse between the two nations had raised the Roman mind to a full sense and enjoyment of artistic excellence, as revealed both to the eye and to the mind. The men of that age, in the midst of all their active pursuits, were moved by this foreign influence as the men of the Renaissance were moved by the recovery of classical literature. In the case of some among them the passion for accumulating books and works of art became the absorbing interest in their lives. Though in some of the orators and men of letters, e.g. Memmius, as we learn from Cicero, their Greek tastes fostered an affected indifference to their own nationality, yet on the best minds, such as those of Cicero himself, Lucretius, and Catullus, this intimate contact with Greek genius acted with a vivifying power by calling forth the native genius of Italy. It was the peculiarity of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions from other nations with whom it came in contact, without sacrifice of the strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the Italian soil, ‘that it is most responsive to the care bestowed on it, since, through the energy of its cultivators, it has learned to yield the products of nearly the whole world[65],’ might be said with equal truth of the Italian mind. This adaptability to foreign influences, without loss of native genius and character, enabled Rome to exercise spiritual supremacy over the world for more than a thousand years after the loss of her temporal supremacy. In the age of Cicero and the following age this adaptability to another form of spiritual influence gave to Rome a great national literature.

Virgil, Horace, and their immediate contemporaries devoted themselves to Greek studies with even more ardour than their [pg 41]immediate predecessors. Education and preparation for a career in literature was a more elaborate process than it had ever been before, perhaps we might add, than it has ever been since. Virgil was still an unknown student, carefully preparing himself for the labour of his life almost till he reached the age at which Catullus died. Horace at the age of twenty-three was, to use his own words, still ‘seeking for the truth among the groves of Academus.’ The taste for literary leisure was greatly developed among the educated classes by the suppression of all active political life; while at the same time the establishment of public libraries made the access to books more easy and general. Women equally with men made themselves familiar with at least the lighter fancies of the learned Greeks. There are none of his Odes into which Horace is so fond of introducing his mythological allusions as those in which some real or fictitious heroine, Galatea or Asterie, Lyde or Phyllis, is addressed. The poems of Propertius which celebrate his love for Cynthia could only be appreciated by the possessors of much recondite learning.

Though the greatest poets of the Augustan Age drew much of their inspiration from the purer sources of Greek genius, especially from Homer and the early lyric poets, yet the period of Greek literature which was most familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age was the Alexandrian. It was nearest to them in point of time; it was most congenial to the taste of the learned Greeks who now gathered from the widely-scattered centres of Greek culture to Rome, as they had formerly done to Alexandria; it was of all the forms of Greek literature the most cosmopolitan, or rather the least national, in spirit, and thus most easily adopted by another race; it was moreover, like that of the Augustan Age, the literature of a courtly circle enjoying the favour and contributing to the glory of a royal patron. The earliest imitators of this poetry were Catullus and the other poets contemporary with him, such as Calvus, Caecilius, Cinna, and Varro Atacinus, the author of the epic poem of Jason. In the Augustan Age Gallus had not only [pg 42]obtained distinction as the author of original elegics in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a poem of Euphorion of Chalcis[66], whom Cicero holds up as the type of effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius[67]. Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.

This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms, from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante curiosity:—

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.[68]

The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis, Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax [pg 43]and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes[69], Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of Ephesus, a grammarian,—names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna, although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility to the beauty of Nature.

Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend, poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of which [pg 44]they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure. They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of ‘epyllia’ or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,—the childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.

The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers, endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history, botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and [pg 45]of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines

Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo,

Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer[70],

indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine models on which it was founded.

The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in its treatment of the passion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of Nature. These are, in unadventurous times and in eras of advanced civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus[71]. They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have illustrated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The passion of Medea for Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the Argonautics of Apollonius, as the passion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the [pg 46]most powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling in its intensity the ‘burning passion set to the lyre by the Aeolian maiden,’ is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim[72].

The love of Nature, though not then for the first time awakened,—for there are clear indications of the powerful influence of this sentiment, though in subordination to human interests, in the earlier epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry,—came then prominently forward as an element of refined pleasure in life, and as an inspiring influence both to poets and painters. The cause of the growth of this sentiment has been sought[73] partly in the rise of great cities, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Alexandria, which by debarring men from that free familiar contact with the forms, movement, and life of Nature enjoyed by the older Greeks, created an imaginative longing for a return to this communion as to a lost paradise. The longing to escape from the heat and confinement of a great southern city to the fresh sights and free air of woods and mountains must have been often felt by poets and artists who had exchanged their homes on the shores and the islands of the Aegean for the dusty streets of Alexandria. Probably the Metamorphoses of Ovid convey as good an idea as anything in Latin literature of the various influences active in the Alexandrine poetry; and the kind of scene which he takes most delight in painting in that poem is that of a cool and clear stream hidden in the thick shade of woods and haunted by the Nymphs. The taste for gardens within great cities, first developed at this time and afterwards carried to an extreme pitch of luxury in the early Roman Empire[74], further illustrates [pg 47]the need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.

Other causes have been suggested for the growth of this sentiment, as, for instance, the decay of the polytheistic fancies, which, by regarding each natural object as identified with some spiritual being, made it less an object of affection and curiosity for its own sake. The sudden growth of this sentiment in ancient times in an age of great luxury and culture is analogous to the great development and expansion of the feeling under similar circumstances in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In both cases the sentiment arose from the desire to escape from the tedium of an artificial life. The love of Nature is not, as we might naturally expect it to be, a feeling much experienced by those who live in constant contact and conflict with its sterner forces, as by husbandmen, herdsmen, and hunters; nor is it developed consciously in primitive times or among unsophisticated races. It is the accompaniment of leisure, culture, and refinement of life. Some races are more susceptible of this feeling than others; and perhaps the Greek with his lively social temper, and the tendency of his imagination to reduce all beautiful objects to a human shape, was less capable of the disinterested delight in the sights and sounds of the outward world than the Italian. It was apparently among Siculians, the kindred of the people of Latium, and not among men living in the mountains of Arcadia or Thessaly, that Theocritus found the personages of his rustic idyl. Whether it was from the greater susceptibility of their national temperament, or from the fact that they lived in the later times of the world, to which the sentiment was more congenial, the Roman poets of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it are the truest exponents of the love of Nature in ancient times; though it may be that, without the originating impulse given by the Greek mind in the Alexandrian period, and perpetuated by educated Greeks living in Southern Italy, this love of natural beauty might never have been consciously realised by them as a source of poetic inspiration.

The pursuit of literature in the Alexandrian Age was accompanied with great activity in the other arts, especially in sculpture and painting. These last continued to be carried on by Greeks in Italy after Rome had succeeded to Alexandria as the centre of human culture. Sculpture and carving on wood, works of art in bronze, and the graving on gems continued to perpetuate an aesthetic half-belief in the Olympian deities and in the other creations of the Greek theology. Painting seems to have treated the same kind of subjects and to have aimed at satisfying the same class of feelings as the poetry of the Alexandrian time. Many of its subjects it seems to have drawn directly from the works of poets[75]. The paintings recovered from Pompeii, which may be presumed to have continued the traditions of a somewhat earlier art, illustrate the same tastes which were gratified by the poetical treatment of mythological subjects, of landscape, and of the passion of love. The knowledge acquired by science seems also to have been pressed into this service by the artist. The frequent representations of wild animals originated in the same kind of interest which animated Nicander to the composition of the Θηριακά[76]. Realistic reproductions from common life seem also to have been frequently executed by ancient, as by modern, painters. If, as is not improbable, the ‘Moretum’ and the ‘Copa’ are translations or imitations of Greek originals, they exemplify still further the close connexion between the art of the poet and of the painter among the Alexandrian dilettanti.

The various kinds of art which bring human forms and scenes from outward nature before the eye, and especially the art of the painter, must accordingly be taken into account as means of making the creations of Greek fancy and the objects of Greek sentiment vividly present to the Roman imagination. They not only acted immediately on the mind of the poet by [pg 49]suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent illustrations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with what was most perfect in form, noblest in thought, feeling, and expression in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their originality might have been altogether overpowered by an exclusive study of the nobler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning, and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, passions, and experience of a new and more vigorous race.

One other circumstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of their [pg 50]friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably originated with the ‘Scipio’ of Ennius, but it had been especially cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces[77]. This play is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus. Quintilian says of it, ‘it may be compared with any work of the Greeks:’ but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia, written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom he wished his Satires to be approved, and to [pg 51]whom he addresses some of his Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men, such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the older poets and with those of his own standing[78]. The Alexandrine influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on grammatical and rhetorical subjects[79].

There is no feature in the social life of the Augustan Age so pleasant to contemplate as the brotherly friendship, free apparently from the jealousies of individuals and the petty passions of literary coteries, in which the most eminent poets and men of letters lived with one another. The only exception to the general state of good feeling of which there is any indication is an apparent coolness between Horace and Propertius. The latter poet neither mentions nor alludes to his illustrious contemporary, though both were friends of Maecenas and of Virgil; and Horace, though he does not mention Propertius by name, as he does Tibullus and most of the other distinguished poets of the time, probably alludes to him in a passage which was not intended to be complimentary[80]. But in general what Plato says of the souls engaged in the pursuit and contemplation of intellectual beauty—‘Envy stands aloof from the divine company’—was true of the ‘divine company’ of poets [pg 52]in the Age of Augustus. And the sincere and appreciative interest which they took in one another was not only a source of great happiness in their lives, but was able to fulfil the function of an enlightened and generous criticism. Poets were in the habit of reading their works to their friends before submitting them to the public. It is characteristic of the modesty of Virgil and of his unceasing aim at perfection that he was in the habit of reading to his friends chiefly those passages in his works of which he was himself distrustful. The fastidious taste of Horace sometimes rebelled against the importunity of those who desired to hear him read his own compositions. Yet the well-known testimony of Ovid proves that he was not averse to gratify an appreciative listener:—

Et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures,

Dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra[81].

The appreciation and criticism of cultivated friends, themselves authors as well as critics, must have stimulated and corrected the taste of the poets of the age. The genius which is most purely original in its activity, and which communicates an altogether novel impulse to the world, relies absolutely on itself, and may be little stimulated by sympathy or affected by criticism. Of such a type Lucretius in ancient and Wordsworth in modern times are probably the best examples, though Dante and Milton seem to approach nearer to it than to the type of those whose genius is equally great in receiving from, as in giving to, the world—the type of genius of Homer, Sophocles, Shakspeare, and Goethe. The great qualities of writers of the first type are force, independence, boldness of invention and speculation, absolute sincerity. They are at the same time liable to the defects of incompleteness, one-sidedness, disregard of the true proportion of things. Their works do not produce the impression of that all-pervading, perfectly-balanced sanity of genius, which the Greeks meant when they [pg 53]applied the word σοφοί to their poets, and which makes the great men of the second type not only powerful movers but also the wisest teachers of the world. The best poetry of the Augustan Age, if wanting in the highest mode of creative energy, is eminently free from the defects which sometimes result from the intenser form of imagination; it is in a remarkable degree pervaded and controlled by this sanity of genius. This excellence of the Augustan literature may be partly, as was said before, attributed to the familiar intercourse which men of letters enjoyed with men of action and large social influence; partly, and probably to a greater degree, to the cultivated and generous criticism which men of genius and fine accomplishment imparted to and received from one another.

Outside of this friendly circle of men eminent in letters and social position there were other literary and critical coteries hostile to them, who seem to have chosen the merits of the old writers as the battle-ground on which they engaged the new school of poetry and criticism. These critical coteries Horace treats, as Catullus treats his ‘vile poets, pests of the age,’ and as Pope treated Dennis and the other poetasters of his time. He was evidently sensitive to the envy excited by his genius and by the favour of Maecenas, and in his later years it afforded him pleasure to be less exposed than he had been to carping criticism:—

Romae principis urbium

Dignatur soboles inter amabiles

Vatum ponere me choros,

Et iam dente minus mordeor invido[82].

But with the final establishment of his reputation his fastidiousness suffered more from the pedantry and importunities of admirers and imitators:—

O imitatores, servum pecus, ut mihi saepe

Bilem, saepe iocum vestri movere tumultus[83].

Even the ‘mitis sapientia’ of Virgil has condescended to immortalise the names of Bavius and Maevius, as Pope has immortalised the heroes of the Dunciad. The often quoted line of Horace,—

Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim[84],

marks the beginning of that ‘cacoethes scribendi’ which continued to prevail till the days of Juvenal as a symptom of the ‘strenua inertia’ of life under the Empire.

VI.

The almost exclusive devotion to poetry on the part of the meanest as well as the greatest writers of the Augustan Age seems to demand some explanation. The natural genius of Rome was more adapted to oratory, history, and didactic exposition than to any of the great forms of poetry. In the previous generation prose literature had reached the highest degree of perfection. The style of Cicero is one of the most admirable and effective vehicles for the varied purposes of passionate invective or persuasive oratory, of familiar correspondence, and of popularising the results of ethical, political, and religious reflection. In Caesar and Sallust the record of great events in the national life had at last found a power of clear, terse, and chastened diction, superior as a vehicle of simple narrative to the style of the two great historians of later times, if not so rich and varied in colouring and in poetical and reflective suggestion. Of the prose literature of the Augustan Age we possess only one great monument, the extant parts of ‘the [pg 55]colossal master-work of Livy;’ and that was the product of the later and least brilliant period of this epoch.

The cause of the sudden and permanent decline of Roman oratory was the extinction of political life. Public speech could no longer be, as it had been for nearly two centuries, a great power in the commonwealth. Under the vigilant and judicious administration of Augustus there was not scope even for that kind of oratory which flourished under his successors, and became a very formidable weapon in the hands of the ‘delatores,’—that, namely, which is employed in the prosecution and defence of men charged with grave offences against the State. Neither was there scope or inclination for philosophical or historical composition. Such freedom of enquiry as Cicero allowed himself in his treatises De Legibus and De Republica would scarcely have been tolerated under the monarchy; and the world was in no mood for any severe strain of thought or any questioning of the first principles of things. The new era desired ease, an escape from care and the perplexities of thought, as well as peace and material well-being. The spirit of the age was announced in the pastoral strain, which celebrated its commencement in the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, ‘amat bonus otia Daphnis.’ Nor would it have been possible for any one to have composed or at least to have published a candid history of the times; and it may have been the discovery of this impossibility that induced Asinius Pollio to leave his work unfinished. It would indeed have been a gain for all time had a Roman Thucydides recorded the ‘movement in the State’ from the Consulship of Metellus till the battle of Actium with the accuracy and impartiality, the graphic condensation, the sober dignity, the sensitive perception of the varying phases of passion and character in states and individuals, the philosophical discernment of great political principles destined to act in the same way ‘so long as the nature of man remains the same,’ and the deep tragic pathos which make, even at the present day, the record of ‘the twenty-seven years’ war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians’ the most [pg 56]vividly interesting and permanently instructive historical work which the world possesses. But even had the genius of Rome been capable of producing a Thucydides, the circumstances of the time would have reduced him to silence. Tacitus regards the establishment of the Empire as equally fatal to the genius of the historian, as it was to the genius of the orator:—‘Postquam bellatum apud Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa ingenia cessere. Simul veritas pluribus modis infracta, primum inscitia rei publicae ut alienae, mox libidine assentandi[85].’

On the other hand, many circumstances contributed to give a great stimulus to poetical literature in its most trivial and transitory as well as its noblest and most enduring manifestations. It is remarked by a recent French writer[86], that poetry is the last form of literature to wither under a despotism. But it suffers from it most irretrievably in the end. The poetic imagination is able to deceive itself by turning away from what is painful and repulsive in the world, and by appearing to extract the element of good, of vivid life, or impressive grandeur out of things evil and fatal in their ultimate effects. Thus it is able to glorify the pomp and state of imperialism, just as it is able to glorify the charm to the senses or the attraction to the social nature afforded by the life of passion and pleasure. But, in the long run, the decay in the higher energies arising either from the loss of liberty or the loss of self-control is more fatal to the nobler forms of art and poetry than to any other products of intelligence.

Again, the mechanical difficulties of the art had been to a great extent overcome, in the previous age. The discovery of the new and rich ore of the Latin language, revealed and wrought into shapes of massive beauty and delicate grace by [pg 57]Lucretius and Catullus, awakened and kept alive in the great writers of this age the desire to perfect the work commenced by their predecessors, and to develope all the majesty, beauty, and harmony of which their native speech was capable. The education in grammar, rhetoric, and Greek literature, which in the later years of the Republic had trained men for the contests of public life, prepared them to recognise and appreciate the perfection of style and of rhythm which was now for the first time attained. But the attainment of this perfection was a stumbling block to writers of an inferior order, and to all the poets who came afterwards. The Augustan poets left to their successors, what they had not themselves received, the fatal legacy of an established poetical diction. The resources of the language for the highest purposes of poetry seem to have been exhausted by the supreme effort of this epoch. The golden perfection of the Augustan style gave place to the forced rhetoric and the sensational extravagance of the Neronian age and to the soberer but tamer imitations of the Flavian era.

In its inner inspiration, as well as its outward expression, the Augustan poetry was the maturest development of the national mind. The inspiring influences of Latin poetry were the idea of Rome, the appreciation of Greek art, the genial Italian life. We have seen how the first establishment of the Empire gave to the national idea a temporary importance and prominence which it had not had since Ennius first awoke his countrymen to the consciousness of their destiny. It was only in the Augustan Age, or during the few years preceding it, that the taste of the Romans was sufficiently educated to appreciate the perfect art of the Greeks. The whole of Italy was now for the first time united in one nation. A new generation had been born and grown to manhood since the Social War. The pride in Rome and the love of the whole land might now be felt by all men born between the Alps and the Straits of Sicily. The districts far removed from the capital, ‘by the sounding Aufidus’ or ‘the slow-winding Mincius,’ still kept [pg 58]alive the traditions of a severer morality and the habits of a simpler and happier life[87]. They were still able to nourish the susceptible mind of childhood with poetic fancies[88]. In the following generation the idea of the empire was one no longer of inspiring novelty, but rather of a dull oppression. The taste for Greek literature had lost its freshness and quickening power. The natural enjoyment of life, the susceptibility to beauty in art and nature, the love of simplicity, were no longer possible to minds enervated and hearts deadened by the unrelieved monotony of luxurious living.

[pg 59]

CHAPTER II.

Virgil’s place in Roman Literature.

Virgil is the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism. For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended. No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the education of three out of the four chief representatives of European culture—the Italians, the French, and the English—at various stages of their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present century.

Since that time, however, an undoubted reaction has set in against the prestige once enjoyed by Latin poetry. And from this reaction Virgil has been the chief sufferer. The peculiar [pg 60]gifts, social and intellectual, of Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works. But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of the Latin civilisation[89]. And in England, at the present time, the estimate of his genius, expressed both by writers of acknowledged reputation and in the current criticism of the day, is much more favourable than it was some thirty years ago.

It would be neither desirable nor possible to enter on a critical examination of the value of a writer, who has been so much admired through so long a time, without taking some account of the prestige attaching to his name. It may be of use therefore to bring together some of the more familiar evidences of his reputation and influence in former times, to show the existence of a temporary reaction of opinion and to assign causes for it, and to indicate the grounds on which his pre-eminence as the culminating point in Latin literature and his high position among the poets of the world appear to rest.

I.

It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action, that he was most esteemed in former times. [pg 61]The Aeneid may not have been regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such expressions as ‘ludere quae vellem,’ ‘carmina qui lusi pastorum,’ ‘in tenui labor[90],’ etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of the glory of Augustus—

Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim

Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora[91]—

coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he has been exposed in the present century.

The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the Iliad:—

Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii:

Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade[92].

The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth [pg 62]book of the Odes of Horace. The continuance of this influence is unmistakeable in Ovid, and there are also many traces of Virgilian expression in the prose style of Livy[93]. The author of the dialogue ‘De Oratoribus’ testifies to the favour which the poet enjoyed, even before the publication of his epic, both with the Emperor and with the whole people, who ‘on hearing some of his verses recited in the theatre rose in a body and greeted him, as he happened to be present at the spectacle, with the same marks of respect which they showed to the Emperor himself[94].’ He would thus appear, even in his lifetime, to have thoroughly ‘touched the national fibre[95],’ and to have gained that place in the admiration of his countrymen which he never afterwards lost. By the poets who came after him his memory was cherished with the veneration men feel for a great master, united to the affection which they feel for a departed friend. Lucan indeed rather enters into rivalry with him than follows in his footsteps; nor can there be any surer way of learning to appreciate the peculiar greatness of Virgil’s manner than by reading passages of the Aeneid alongside of passages of the Pharsalia. The new poets under the Flavian dynasty, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius, though they failed to apprehend the secret of its success, made the Aeneid their model, in the arrangement of their materials, in their diction, and in the structure of their verse. Statius, in bidding farewell to his Thebaid, uses these words of acknowledgement:—

Vive, precor, nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,

Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora[96];

and Silius, having occasion to mention Mantua, celebrates it as—

Mantua, Musarum domus, atque ad sidera cantu

Evecta Aonio, et Smyrnaeis aemula plectris[97].

Martial, among many other tributes of admiration[98] scattered over his poems, says of Virgil that he could have surpassed Horace in lyric, Varius in tragic poetry, had he chosen to enter into rivalry with them[99]. The younger Pliny[100], speaking of the number of books, statues, and busts possessed by Silius, adds these words: ‘of Virgil principally whose birthday he kept with more solemnity than his own, especially at Naples, where he used to visit his monument as if it were a temple.’ But the greatest proof of Virgil’s influence on the later literature of Rome is seen in many traces of imitation of his style in the language of the historian Tacitus, the one great literary genius born under the Empire. So great a master of expression would not have incurred this debt except to one whom he regarded as entitled above all others to stamp the speech of Rome with an imperial impress. In Juvenal there are many references and allusions to familiar passages in the Aeneid[101]: and it appears from him that the works of Virgil and Horace had in his time become what they have since continued to be, the common school-books of all who obtained a liberal education. It is one of the hardships of the schoolmaster’s life, described in his seventh Satire, to have to listen by lamplight to the ‘crambe repetita’ of the daily lesson,—

Quum totus decolor esset

Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni[102].

After the end of the first century A.D., even the imitative poets of Rome become rare; but the pre-eminence still enjoyed by [pg 64]Virgil is attested by the number of commentaries written on his works, the most famous of them being the still extant commentary of Servius, belonging to the latter part of the fourth century. The fortune of Virgil has in this respect been similar to that of his great countryman Dante. From the time of his death till the extinction of ancient classical culture, there was a regular succession of rhetoricians and grammarians who lectured and wrote treatises on his various poems. Among those who preceded Servius, the most famous names are those of Asconius Pedianus, Annaeus Cornutus, the friend of Persius, and Valerius Probus, in the first century A.D. These commentators supplied materials to Suetonius for the life on which that of Aelius Donatus, which is still extant, is founded. The frequent quotations from Virgil in the desultory criticism of Aulus Gellius and the systematic discussions in the Saturnalia of Macrobius attest the minute study of his poems in the interval between the second and the fifth centuries. Similar testimony to his continued influence is afforded by the early Christian writers, especially by Augustine. And though there may be traced in them a struggle between the pleasure which they derived from his poetry and the alienation of their sympathies owing to his paganism, yet it is probable that the favour shown to him and to Cicero during the first strong reaction from everything associated with the beauty of the older religion, was due as much to the pure and humane spirit of their teaching as to the fascination of their style: nor perhaps was this teaching inoperative in moulding the thought and giving form to the religious imagination of the Latin Church. The number and excellence of the MSS. of Virgil, the most famous of which date from the fourth and fifth centuries, confirm the impression of the continued favour which his works enjoyed before and subsequently to the overthrow of the Roman rule in the West. Wherever learning flourished during the darkest period of this later time, the poems of Virgil were held in special esteem. Thus we read in connexion with the literary studies of Bede: ‘Virgil cast over him the same spell [pg 65]which he cast over Dante: verses from the Aeneid break his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring[103].’ His works were taught in the Church schools: and the feeling with which he was regarded by the more tolerant minds of the mediaeval Church appears in a mass sung in honour of St. Paul at the end of the fifteenth century:—

Ad Maronis mausoleum

Ductus fudit super eum

Piae rorem lacrimae;

Quem te inquit reddidissem

Si te vivum invenissem

Poetarum maxime[104]!

The traditional veneration attaching to his name, among the classes too ignorant to know anything of his works, survived during the middle ages in the fancies which ascribed to him the powers of a magician or beneficent genius, appearing in many forms and at various times and places widely separated from one another.

With the first revival of learning and letters in different countries, the old pre-eminence of Virgil again asserts itself. In England ‘the earliest classical revival’ (to quote again the words of Mr. Green) ‘restored Cicero and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.’ One of the earliest works in Scottish literature is the translation of the Aeneid by Gawain Douglas. It is characteristic of the rudimentary state of learning at the time when this translation appeared that the Sibyl is represented as a nun, who directs Aeneas to tell his beads[105]. But the greatest testimony to the persistence of Virgil’s fame and influence in the western world is the homage which the genius of Dante pays to the shade of his great [pg 66]countryman. ‘May the long zeal avail me and the great love that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author. Thou art he from whom I took the good style that did me honour[106].’ The feeling with which Dante gives himself up to the guidance of Virgil through all the mystery of the lower realms is like that under which Ennius evokes the shade of Homer from the ‘halls of Acheron’ to interpret to him the secrets of creation. Dante combines the reverence for a great master, which seems to be more natural to the genius of Italy than to that of other nations, with a high self-confidence and a bold and original invention. Lucretius expresses a similar enthusiasm for Homer, Ennius, Empedocles, and Epicurus; and by Virgil the same feeling is, though not directly expressed, yet profoundly felt towards Homer and Lucretius. And in all these cases the admiration of their predecessors is an incentive, not to imitative reproduction, but to new creation. It was as the poet of ‘that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds’ that the poet of mediaeval Florence paid homage to the ancient poet of Mantua. The admiration of Dante, like that of Tacitus, is the more corroborative of the spell exercised over the Italian mind by the art and style of Virgil from the difference in the type of genius and character which these poets severally represent. The influence of Virgil was exercised, with a power more over-mastering and injurious to their originality, upon the later poets and scholars of Italy with whom the Renaissance begins. The progress of modern poetry was for a long time accompanied—and it would be difficult to say whether it was thereby more obstructed or advanced—by a new undergrowth of Latin poetry, for the higher forms of which Virgil served as the principal model. Petrarch attached more importance to his epic poem of ‘Africa,’ written in imitation of the rhythm and style of the Aeneid, than to his Sonnets. The influence of Virgil on the later Renaissance in Italy is abundantly proved in [pg 67]the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety editions of his works are said to have been published before the year 1500[107]. From Italy this influence passed to France and England, and was felt, not by scholars and critics only, but by the great poets and essayists, the orators and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was discussed as an open question whether the Iliad or the Aeneid was the greater epic poem: and it was then necessary for the admirers of the Greek rather than of the Latin poet to assume an apologetic tone[108]. Scaliger ranked Virgil above Homer and Theocritus. His prestige was greatest during the century of French ascendency in modern literature, that, namely, between the age of Milton and that of Lessing. The chief critical law-giver in that century was Voltaire, and no great critic has ever expressed a livelier admiration of any poem than he has of the Aeneid. It is to him we owe the saying, ‘Homère a fait Virgile, dit-on; si cela est, c’est sans doute son plus bel ouvrage[109].’ He claims elsewhere for the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid a great superiority over the works of all Greek poets[110]. He says also that the Aeneid is the finest monument remaining from antiquity. As Spenser was called the ‘poet’s poet,’ so Virgil might be called the orator’s poet. Even by a rhetorician of the second century the question was discussed whether Virgil ‘was more a poet or an orator[111].’ Bossuet is said to have known his works by heart[112]. In the great era of English oratory, no author seems to have been so familiarly known or was so often quoted. We read in a recent sketch of the life of Burke[113], ‘Most writers have constantly beside them some favourite classical author, from whom they [pg 68]endeavour to take their prevailing tone.... Burke, according to Butler, always had a ragged Delphin Virgil not far from his elbow.’ A vestige of the attraction which his words had for an older school of English politicians may be traced in the survival of Virgilian quotation in some of the parliamentary warfare of recent times. The important place which Virgil has filled in the teaching of our public schools—the great nurses of our classic statesmen—has perhaps not been without some influence in shaping our national history[114]. It would be no exaggeration to say that the poems of Virgil, and especially the Aeneid, have contributed more than any other works of art in modern times, not only to stamp the impression of ancient Rome on the imagination, but to educate the sensibility to generous emotion as well as to literary beauty. There is probably no author, even at the present day, of whom some knowledge may be with more certainty assumed among cultivated people of every nation.

II.

This unbroken ascendency of eighteen centuries, which might almost be described in the words applied by Lucretius to the ascendency of Homer—

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus

Sceptra potitus[115]—

is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer. If any one ever succeeded in securing that which [pg 69]Tacitus says ‘should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a happy memory of himself[116],’ that may be truly said of Virgil. Though his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that ‘he gave a new direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a critical period of the world’s history what the future would love.’

It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he made to Varius, before leaving Italy, ‘that if anything happened to him he should destroy the Aeneid.’ A letter written to Augustus is quoted by Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work of such vast compass ‘almost from a perversion of mind[117].’ No poet could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical self-disparagement of Horace.

The most obvious explanation of this passionate and pathetic desire that the work to which he had given eleven years of his maturest power should not survive him, is the unfinished state, in respect of style, in which the poem was left. He had set aside three years for the final revision of the work and the removal of those temporary ‘make-shifts,’ which had been originally inserted with full knowledge of their inadequacy, in order not to check the ardour of composition. After having devoted three years of his youth to the execution of a work so slight in purpose and so small in compass as the Eclogues, he might well feel depressed by the thought that a work of such high purpose and so vast a scope as the Aeneid—and a work of which such expectations as those expressed by Propertius were entertained—should be given to the world before receiving the final touch of the master’s hand.

Yet the words in the letter to Augustus,—‘that I fancy myself to have been almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a work’—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art, [pg 71]which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other. Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and running streams among the valleys.’

As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek epics is the probable explanation of Virgil’s own dissatisfaction with the Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures, was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil, at the approach of death, wished ‘to destroy what in those solemn moments he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false reputation[118].’ In the latter he says, ‘The [pg 72]whole of the Aeneid, from the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea.’ ‘Virgil is one of the remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling. His was lyric poetry.’ ‘It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the very work which was but a failure[119].’

Although the service rendered to the study of antiquity by the historical insight of Niebuhr is probably as great as that rendered by the genius of any scholar of this century, yet the opinions expressed by him on literature are often more arbitrary than authoritative. Still this verdict on the merits of the Aeneid was in accordance with the most advanced criticism of the time when it was written, both in Germany and England. The writer by whom the critical taste of England was most stimulated and enlarged about the same time was Coleridge; and in his ‘Table Talk’ such disparaging dicta as this occur more than once: ‘If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ The whole tone of the criticism which arose out of the admiration of German thought and poetry was thoroughly opposed to the spirit in which Latin literature had been admired. Mr. Carlyle also expressed in one of his earliest works—the Life of Schiller—an estimate of the value of Virgil, which was not uncommon among younger scholars at the Universities some thirty years ago. ‘Virgil and Horace,’ he writes, ‘he (Schiller) learned to construe accurately, but is said to have taken no deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and meek beauty of the first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of the last, the matchless elegance of both would of course escape his inexperienced perception; while the matter of their writings must have appeared frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible.’ Even the warmest admirers of Virgil about that time, such as Keble, are content to claim for him high excellence as the poet of outward nature. The late Professor Conington, while showing the finest appreciation of ‘the marvellous grace and delicacy, the evidences of a culture most elaborate and most refined,’ in the poet to the [pg 73]interpretation of whose works he devoted the best years of a scholar’s life, has questioned ‘the appropriateness of the special praise given to Virgil’s agricultural poetry, and conceded though with more hesitation to his pastoral compositions.’ He speaks also of it as an admitted fact that ‘in undertaking the Aeneid at the command of a superior, Virgil was venturing beyond the province of his genius.’ And he describes this disparaging estimate as the opinion ‘which is now generally entertained on Virgil’s claims as an epic poet[120].’ Mr. Keightley is also quoted by him as speaking of Virgil as ‘perhaps the least original poet of antiquity[121].’ It is certainly not in the spirit of an ardent admirer that the author of Virgil’s life in the ‘Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology’ approaches the criticism of his poetry. But it is by German critics and scholars that Virgil’s claim to a high rank among the poets of the world is at the present day most seriously impugned. Thus to take two or three conspicuous instances of their disparaging criticism: Mommsen in his History of Rome[122] speaks contemptuously of the ‘successes of the Aeneid, the Henriade, and the Messiad;’ Bernhardy in his Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur (1871) brings together a formidable list of German critics and commentators unfavourable to the merits of the Aeneid, in which the illustrious name of Hegel appears; Gossrau in his edition of the Aeneid quotes from Richter (as a specimen of the unfavourable opinions pronounced by many critics) the expression of a wish that, with the exception of the descriptions and episodes, the rest of the poem had been burned[123]; and W. S. Teuffel, among other criticisms which ‘damn with faint praise,’ has the following: ‘Aber er ist zu weich und zu wenig genial als dass er auf dem seiner Natur zusagendsten Gebiete hätte beharren und darauf Ruhm ernten können.’

The chief, as well as the most obvious, cause of the revolt against Virgil’s poetical pre-eminence, which, though yielding apparently to a revived sentiment of admiration, has not yet spent its force, is the great advance made in Greek scholarship in England and Germany during the present century. Familiarity with Latin literature is probably not less common than it was a century ago, but it is much less common relatively to familiarity with the older literature. The attraction of the latter has been greater from its novelty, its originality, its higher intrinsic excellence, its profounder relation to the heart and mind of man. The art of Homer and that of Theocritus are felt to be an immediate reproduction from human life and outward nature; the art of Virgil seems, at first sight, to be only a reproduction from this older and truer copy. The Roman and Italian character of his workmanship, the new result produced by the recasting of old materials, the individual and inalienable quality of his own genius, were for a time obscured, as the evidences of the large debt which he owed to his Greek masters became more and more apparent.

Again, the greater nearness of the Augustan Age, not in time only but in spirit and manners, to our own age, which in the last century told in Virgil’s favour in the comparison with Homer, tells the other way now. The critics of last century were interested in other ages, in so far as they appeared to be like their own. The rude vigour and stirring incident of the Homeric Age or the Middle Ages had no attraction for men living under the régime of Louis XIV. and XV. or of Queen Anne and the first Georges. What an illustrious living Frenchman says of the great representative of French ideas in the last century might be said generally of its criticism. ‘Voltaire,’ says M. Renan, ‘understood neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle Ages[124].’ And yet he was prepared to pronounce his judgment on them by the light of that admirable common [pg 75]sense which he applied to the questions of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation. Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness, and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.

Other causes connected with a great expansion of human interests acting on the imagination, and with the revolt against the prevailing poetical style, which arose about the beginning of the present century, have tended to lower the authority of writers who formed the standard of taste to previous ages. The desire of the new era was to escape from the exhausted atmosphere of literary tradition, and to return again to the simplicity of Nature and human feeling. The genius of [pg 76]Roman literature is more in harmony with eras of established order, of adherence to custom, of distinct but limited insight into the outward world and into human life, than to eras of expansive energy, of speculative change, of vague striving to attain some new ideal of duty or happiness. The genius of Greece exercised a powerful influence on several of the great English and German poets who lived in the new era. But neither Goethe nor Schiller, Byron nor Scott, Shelley nor Keats were at all indebted, in thought, sentiment, or expression, to the poets of the Augustan Age. Among the great poets of this new era the only one known to have greatly admired Virgil, and who in his poems founded on classical subjects was influenced by him, is the one who most decidedly proclaimed his revolt against the artificial diction and representation of the school of classical imitators,—the poet Wordsworth.

The very perfection of Virgil’s art, combined with the calmness and moderation of his spirit, was out of harmony with the genius of such a time. He seemed to have nothing new to teach the eager generation which regarded the world and speculated on its own destiny with feelings altogether unlike to those of the generations that went before it. The truth of his sentiment, its adaptation to the spiritual movement of his own age, in which it gained ascendency like a new revelation, had caused it to pass into the modes of thought and feeling habitual to the world. This too may be said of the ethical feeling and common sense of Cicero’s philosophical treatises. Moral speculation has been so long and so deeply permeated by the thought expressed in these treatises that it now appears trite and common-place. So too the moderation and unfailing propriety of Virgil’s language had no attraction of freshness or novelty to stimulate the imagination. The direct force of language in Homer or Lucretius never can become trite or common-place. It affects the mind now as powerfully and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to [pg 77]force the reader’s admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested, it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect. As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital force which it originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language. The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word ‘meditari,’ applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation—‘iustissima tellus.’ These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.

III.

Though some of the causes which tended to lower the estimation in which Virgil was held were only temporary in their operation, yet it can hardly be doubted that his claim to pre-[pg 78]eminence in Latin literature and to a high rank among the greatest poets of all times must, if put forward at all, be maintained on somewhat different grounds from those on which his position formerly rested. He never again can enter into rivalry with Homer as the inspired poet of heroic action. He cannot again enjoy the advantage of being widely known, while access to his predecessor is confined to a few scholars not much in sympathy with the poet of an age so far separated from their own. The art of Virgil in so far as it is a copy of the art of Homer has already produced all the effect on the culture of the world which it is destined to produce. The life of the heroic age will continue to be known to all future times as it was originally fashioned by the creative mind of Homer, not as it was modified by the after-thought of Virgil.

What charm Virgil had for his countrymen as the reviver of the early poetry of Greece and as the first creator of the early romance of Italy, what permanent value he has as one of the great interpreters of the secret of Nature and of the meaning of human life, will appear in the course of the detailed examination of his various poems. But there are some considerations, from an historical point of view, which may be stated provisionally as grounds for assigning to him the place of most importance in Latin literature. He is, more than any other Latin writer, a representative writer,—representative both of the general national idea and of the sentiment and culture of his own age. One clear note of this representative character is that he absorbs and supersedes so much of what went before him, and that he anticipates and also supersedes much that came after him. The interest which Rome and Italy have for all times, the interest which the Augustan Age has as the epoch of the maturest civilisation of ancient times and as a great turning-point in the history of mankind, will secure the attention of the world to an author who sets before it, in forms of pure art and with elaborate workmanship, the idealised spectacle of the marvellous career of Rome, and best enables it to feel the charm of natural beauty and ancient memories asso[pg 79]ciated with Italy; and who has interpreted, as no one else has done, the meaning and tendency of his age, and of the change which was then preparing for the human spirit and for the nations of the future.

(1.) The Aeneid brings home to us, in a way in which no other work of Latin literature can do, all those elements in the idea of the destiny, the genius, and character of Rome which most powerfully move the imagination, while it enables us for a time to forget those elements of hardness, unscrupulous injustice, and oppressive domination on which the historian is forced to dwell, and which alienate the sympathies as much as her nobler aspect compels the admiration of mankind. The grandeur and dignity of the Imperial State appear softened and mellowed by Virgil’s marvellous art and humane feeling. ‘The Aeneid,’ says Hallam, ‘reflects the glory of Rome as from a mirror[125].’ ‘It remains,’ says Mr. Merivale, ‘the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events and incidents[126].’ ‘Virgile,’ writes M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘a été le poëte du Capitole[127].’ ‘Dans ce poëme,’ writes M. de Coulanges of the Aeneid, ‘ils (les Romains) se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs croyances, leur Empire[128].’ M. Patin again describes the same poem as ‘expression de Rome, de Rome entière, de la Rome de tous les temps, de celle des Empereurs, des Consuls, des Rois[129].’ He might have added that it had anticipated the idea of the Rome of the Popes, in some at least of its aspects. The type of character which Virgil has conceived in Aeneas is more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual Consuls and Imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of [pg 80]the Roman State. It has been said of him by another Frenchman that he was more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an Empire. Virgil’s object is to make his readers believe in the mission of Rome, as appointed by Divine decree, for the ultimate peace and good government of the world. The work of Rome in the past, the present, and the future is conceived by him as a manifestation of the Deity in his justice, authority, and beneficence.

(2.) The spell which Rome exercises over the imagination is quite distinct from the charm which the thought of Italy has for the hearts of men. The love of Italy was a sentiment as deeply rooted in Virgil’s nature as his pride in Rome. This sentiment pervades all his works and inspires some of his noblest poetry. In his pastoral poems, under all the borrowed imagery of the Greek idyl, it reveals itself in his sensibility to the beauty of the Italian climate (‘caeli indulgentia’), to the charm of the various seasons, to the distinctive graces of the plants and wild flowers native to the soil, and in the expression of the deep attachment with which the peasant-proprietor clung to his little plot of ground as the sphere alike of his cares and of his happiness. In the Aeneid this patriotic feeling shows itself, as a similar feeling shows itself in the poetry of Scott, in the enthusiasm with which the martial memories of famous towns and tribes are recalled in association with the picturesque features of the land. But by no work of art, ancient or modern, is the complete impression, moral and physical, of the old Italian land and people,—

Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae[130],—

produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry[131] as well as in her warlike energy; that he should [pg 81]cherish for the whole land, now united as one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source of pleasure[132] to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek. Some sympathy with the ‘Itala virtus’—the courage and discipline of the Marsian and other Sabellian races—Ennius had already expressed in his national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close of one of his noblest passages,—

Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,

Magna virum[133].

(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age, were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems, better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration. The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new organisation [pg 82]to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy, Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively recent period, continued to be the master-force in European politics,—apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free national life on a large scale,—finds its earliest expression. And the loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil’s time faith in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the necessary bond of civil order and union.

(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane and sympathetic emotions, ex[pg 83]pressed by the word ‘humanitas,’ continued to prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word pietas, as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our ‘piety’ and of our ‘pity.’ The Power above man is regarded by him not as an unreal phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.

This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in reconciling these various factors of belief. The ‘Fates,’ which are the medium through which man’s happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings. But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems, in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin, in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political sentiment, ‘il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce [pg 84]qu’aimerait l’avenir.’ If it was as a great national poet, the rival of Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus, that he exercised the most powerful spell over his contemporaries, it was rather as the ‘pius vates,’ the prophetic teacher, that, in spite of themselves, he gained ascendency over the cultivated minds of the early Latin and the mediaeval Churches[134].

(5.) Though other periods of ancient history, and notably the fifth century B.C. in Greece, were richer in genius and enjoyed a happier and nobler life than the Augustan Age, yet this latter age, as the latest of the great literary epochs of antiquity, inherited the science, wisdom, power, and beauty stored up in all the art and writings of the past. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of culture, and Virgil was pre-eminently the most cultivated man belonging to the age. In early youth he had learned from Greek masters all they could teach him in poetry and rhetoric, in science and philosophy; and through all his life he combined the productive labours of an artist with the patient diligence of a student. He was familiar with the successive schools of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod down to the epic and didactic poets of Alexandria. He was acquainted with all the physical sciences known in his time, especially, it is said, with astronomy and medicine. His earlier writings show the influence of the philosophical system of Epicurus, while his later convictions are more in agreement with the Platonic philosophy. The oratory of the later books of the Aeneid breathes the spirit of Stoicism. We are told that he proposed to devote the years that might remain to him after the completion of the Aeneid to the further study of philosophy, perhaps with the view of writing a great poem, which might rival and answer Lucretius. The extant fragments of Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Attius, and Lucilius, and of later and obscurer writers such as Hostius and Varro Atacinus, show [pg 85]that he had read their works, and could skilfully adapt what he found in them to his own national epic. The Georgics, again, show a careful study and assimilation of the thought and language of Lucretius. And to the pursuits of a scholar he united the research of an antiquary. He collected from many sources the myths and traditions connected with the origin of ancient customs and ceremonies, or attaching to the towns and tribes of Italy, famous in early times. He was especially well versed in the ceremonial lore of the Priestly Colleges. Thus, in addition to his higher claims on the admiration of his countrymen, his poems were prized by them as a great repertory of their secular and sacred learning. Many fancies and dim traditions of a remote antiquity, many vestiges of customs and ceremonies which have disappeared from the world, many thoughts and expressions of men who have left scarcely any other memorial of themselves, still survive, because the mind of Virgil discerned some element of interest in them which fitted them to contribute to the representative character of the work to which his life was dedicated.

(6.) Virgil’s pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil, alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance with which a long continuous poem, epic [pg 86]or didactic, could as a whole gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive, meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil’s influence over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth, tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in vital force.

In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters, having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious littérateurs of the Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought and feeling. The repre[pg 87]sentation thus established gains ascendency over the future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius, and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are refreshed:—

Illa cadens raucum per levia murmur

Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva[135].

The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.

IV.

Whether the gifts of intellect and feeling by which Virgil represented his country and his age entitle him to a place among the greatest poets of the world, will be answered variously according to the degree in which men recognise in him the presence of that diviner faculty of imagination which no analysis can explain. If we look to him for the original force of creative imagination which we find in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles on the one hand, and in the greatest poets of modern times on the other, we shall fail to establish his equality with them. But as there have been various types of philosophical intellect in the world, so there have been various types [pg 88]of imaginative power. And among these types we may distinguish those characteristic of the Hellenic, the Germanic, and the Italian races. The genius of the ancient Latin race is further removed from that of the modern Germanic race, than either is from the genius of ancient Greece. The peculiar richness of our own poetic literature arises from its combining some of the great characteristics of each type. While Scott and Byron, for instance, are among the greatest representatives of the purely modern imagination, the works of Pope and Gray are essentially of the Latin type; and those of Dryden, Milton, and Spenser blend Roman strength or the culture of Latin ideas with English boldness and modern exuberance of fancy: while, again, Shelley, Keats, and all the greatest among our living poets have received a powerful impulse from Greek art and Greek ideas. It must be admitted by students of Latin literature that the intellectual movement and sensibility of the present time has a closer affinity with the ancient Greek than with the ancient Latin culture. Students of Homer and Aeschylus, as well as those who have once felt the spell of

‘Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force,’

of Wordsworth’s contemplative elevation and the impassioned ideality of Shelley, find, in turning to Virgil, that their range of feeling and of contemplation has become narrower. They no longer enjoy the same illimitable prospect, they no longer breathe the same keen air, which buoyed them up on the higher altitudes of poetry. Greek and modern works of imagination manifest a profounder feeling, a more varied contemplation of the mystery of life, than is compatible with the more realistic tendencies of Latin poetry. And though the representation of the outward world in Virgil is, in its serene beauty, suggestive of a secret unceasing life which appeals to the human spirit in its more tranquil moods, yet it does not move the mind to that profounder sense of an affinity between the soul of man and the soul of Nature which the great modern poets awaken. The charm and power of Latin poetry consists, for the most part, [pg 89]in the vital strength of feeling with which it invests a limited and definite range of interests. What the Roman poets cared for they cared for with all their heart, and strength, and mind. They seem to have written from more enduring, if less abundant, sources of affection than other poets. Their hearts thoroughly realised what they idealised in imagination. This strong realism and constancy of feeling explains the labour with which they perfected their art, as the strong love of his small portion of land explains the labour which the ideal husbandman of the Georgics bestows on it. Through that vividness of feeling with which they cherished the thought of what gave actual joy to their lives, Catullus and Horace were able to invest the names of Sirmio, of Lucretilis and Digentia, with an interest which attaches to the favourite residences of no other poets: though perhaps future generations will find a similar classic charm attaching to the homes of Wordsworth and of Scott, and to the hills, dales, and streams which they have endowed with the wealth of their strong affection. The human objects of their passionate love excited in several of the Roman poets this same vital warmth of feeling. The ‘spirat adhuc amor’ is still true of all the poetry which the love of Lesbia and of Cynthia inspired. Even Ovid, whose want of seriousness and profound feeling is the chief flaw in his poetic temperament, had the most vivid sense of the pleasure and of the pain of his own existence. It is this capacity in the imagination of being vitally interested in and possessed by its object, which enabled Lucretius to breathe the breath of enduring life into the dry bones of the atomic philosophy. And that this strong realism of feeling is a characteristic of the race to which these poets belonged is proved by the pathetic force of the numerous sepulchral epitaphs of persons altogether undistinguished, preserved from the times of the early Empire. It is owing to the power of producing a strong and abiding impression that Latin has retained the function of being the language of great epitaphs and of great inscriptions in modern times.

Virgil too possessed this gift of vividly realising the objects [pg 90]which interested him; and his singularly receptive nature enabled him to feel a much larger number of interests than the other poets of his country. What his speculative system was to Lucretius in its power of concentrating on itself all his capacity of feeling; what ‘Lesbia’ and ‘Sirmio’ and the few objects associated with the happiness and pain of his life were to Catullus; what the valley in the Sabine hills was to Horace[136]; what Cynthia in life and death was to Propertius; what the remembrance of past joy in the midst of sorrow was to Ovid; that the thought of Rome and the memories associated with it, the charm of the land and air of Italy, the strength and sanctity of human affection, the mystery of the unseen world, were to Virgil. The necessities of his art require him to introduce into his poem materials which touch his own nature less deeply, and which come to him through the reflex action of literary association; and these, though he always treats them gracefully, he does not invest with the same sense of reality. But when his imagination is moved by the thought of Rome, of Italy, of a remote antiquity, of human affection, of the unseen world, then his art becomes truly and vividly creative. The depth of feeling with which these things affect him reveals itself in the blended majesty and sweetness, the tenderness and pathos of his tones, occasionally in some more solemn cadence and a kind of mystic yearning.

If a return to the high admiration once felt for Virgil involved any detraction from the high admiration with which the great poets of Greece and of the modern world are regarded, anything like his claims to his old rank would generally be set aside. If for no other reason, yet because they have more in common with the general ideas and movement of the modern world, these last-named poets have a stronger hold on students of literature in the present day. But, happily, the ‘sacrum litterarum studium’—to use a phrase of Macrobius—[pg 91]the religion of the world of letters, is not a jealous or intolerant faith. The object of that religion is to keep alive the sentiment of reverence for every kind of excellence which has appeared in the literature of the world. That Virgil was once the object of the greatest reverence is a reason for not lightly putting his claims aside now. In our study of the great writers of old, it is well to realise the true lesson taught in the sad beauty of the lines,—

Οὐχ ἁμὶν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται εἶμεν

οἳ θνατοὶ πελόμεσθα τὸ δ’ αὔριον οὐκ ἐσορῶμες[137].

The course of time brings with it losses as well as gains in sensibility. Though the thoughts of the Latin poet may not help us to understand the spirit of our own era, they are a bond of union with the genius and culture of Europe in other times. If poetry ever exercises a healing and reconciling influence on life, the deep and tranquil charm of Virgil may prove some antidote to the excitement, the restlessness, the unsettlement of opinion in the present day. And as it is by the young especially that the imaginative art of Virgil, in comparison with the imaginative art of other great poets, is most questioned, they may be reminded that the words of such a writer are best understood after long study and experience of life have enabled us to feel ‘their sad earnestness and vivid exactness[138].’ The wise and generous counsel of Burke should induce some diffidence in their own judgment on the part of those to whom the power and charm of this poet have been slow in revealing themselves.

‘Different from them are all the great critics. They have taught us one essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge as well as perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere applied it or something like it in his own profession. It is this, that if ever [pg 92]we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on[139].’

[pg 93]

CHAPTER III.

Life and Personal Characteristics of Virgil.

I.

The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times. In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome, in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus[140],’ mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief authority [pg 94]to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate, told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence available to the former, and the sensational character of the story itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.

In addition to these materials for the biography of Latin writers, in some few cases the imagination is assisted in realising their character and genius by the preservation from ancient times of their statues, busts, images impressed on gems, or other kinds of portraiture. But in the case of men of letters, it is not often that reliance can be placed on the authenticity of such memorials, except in such instances as that of Cicero, where a great name in literature was combined with prominence in public life.

The data for a knowledge of the life, circumstances, and personal characteristics of Virgil are supplied partly by direct statements contained in his poems or inferences founded on them; partly by the indirect impression of himself stamped on these poems; partly by casual notices in the works of other poets, and especially of Horace; and partly by statements in the Life of the poet originally prefixed to the Commentary of Aelius Donatus,—a grammarian who flourished in the fourth century A.D.,—and founded on, if not an actual reproduction of, the Life originally contained in the work of Suetonius.

The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two of the minor poems published among the Catalepton[141], which may without hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to philosophical studies[142]. The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that supplied by Horace, [pg 96]Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge derived from other sources.

The Georgics and those parts of the Aeneid which are specially ethical and didactic, as that part of Book VI. from line 264 to 751, throw most light on Virgil’s spiritual nature and on his convictions on the questions of most vital interest to man. But in these parts of his works Virgil has not revealed himself with such distinctness and consistency as Lucretius has done in his great philosophical poem. The personality of Lucretius was simpler and more forcible: the passion to utter his strong convictions prevailed in him over all considerations of art. The colouring of his own heart and spirit, of his enthusiasm or melancholy, appears in Virgil rather as a pervading and subtly interpenetrating influence, than as the direct indication of his true self. His artistic taste enforced on him reserve in expressing what was personal to himself; his nature was apparently more open to varied influences of books and men than that of Lucretius; he was endowed with the many-sided susceptibility of a poet, rather than with the simpler, more energetic, but narrower consistency of a philosophical partisan. Equally with Lucretius he throws his whole heart and being into the treatment of his subject; but in Lucretius the two streams of what is personal to himself and what is inherent in his subject are still distinguishable. In Virgil the imaginative sentiment of the poet and the strong tender heart of the man seem to be inseparably united. It would be impossible to distinguish them by analysis,—to abstract from the bloom of his poetry the delicate sweetness which may have pervaded his performance of the common duties and his share in the common intercourse of life.

Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the clearness of [pg 97]his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to his art had chosen

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae[143],

and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world, enjoyed all that was illustrious, brilliant or genial, in the society of his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate associates he greets with hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without assuming the airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only two—unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one more to the number, Aelius Lamia—in connexion with whom he uses the language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil. Whatever may have been the date or circumstances connected with the composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words ‘animae dimidium meae’ establish the futility [pg 98]of the notion, that the subject of this Ode is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine of Cales.

Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important, prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse, written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life based on that of Suetonius[144]. What then were the materials available to Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, entitled ‘De ingenio moribusque Vergilii.’ Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the ‘memorials which the friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.’ Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a statement that ‘in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an uneducated man’—a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison. Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests of the direction given to the poet’s genius in the choice of the subject of the Georgics.

A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedianus, born at the commencement of our era, who wrote ‘Contra obtrectatores Vergilii.’ These ‘maligners,’ beginning with those whose names have been condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had assailed the art of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who could have known anything about the matter[145].

The certainty that the biographical notices of Virgil and the accounts transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline Museum, or of the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil.

II.

The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be known[146]. Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to change the abbreviation so [pg 100]long established in all European literature into the unfamiliar Vergil. He was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festival[147]. The year of his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious contemporaries.

This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil’s childhood and early youth were passed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world. The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no [pg 101]scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:—

At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta

Una dies dabat exitio[148].

His birth-place was in the ‘pagus,’ or ‘township,’ of Andes in the neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a ‘vicus,’ and there it is said to be distant from Mantua ‘xxx milia passuum.’ The word pagus, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be used as equivalent to vicus, but as a ‘country-district,’ which might include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the characteristic features of Virgil’s early home. The immediate neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the first Eclogue,

Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae[149],

or

Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras[150],

can apply.

The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil’s early years appear to have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics. From the fact that [pg 102]the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side nearest Cremona. The use of the word ‘depellere’ (Ecl. i. 21) might perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation of ‘driving our weaned lambs’ forbids our attaching much force to this problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10:—

Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles

Incipiunt mollique iugum demittere clivo,

Usque ad aquam et veteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos,

Omnia carminibus vestrum servasse Menalcan[151].

There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for introducing the hills gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond ‘the picturesque hill and castle of Vallegio,’ about fifteen miles higher up the river than Mantua. Eustace, in his Classical Tour, finds many of the features introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds, like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as

Tamen veniemus in urbem;

Aut si nox pluviam ne colligat ante veremur[152],—

seem inapplicable to the shorter distance between Pietola and Mantua.

The ‘sacri fontes’ which are spoken of in Eclogue I., the existence of which is further confirmed by the

Non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina deerunt[153]

in the description from the Georgics (ii. 200), of the pastoral land which Mantua lost, are more naturally to be sought in the more picturesque environment of the upper reaches of the river than in the level plain in the midst of which Mantua stands[154]. The accurate description of the lake out of which the Mincio flows—

Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino[155],—

the truth of which is attested by many modern travellers, Goethe among others—may well be the reproduction of some actual impression made in some of Virgil’s early wanderings not far distant from the home of his youth. The passage in the Georgics just referred to, in which, speaking of the land most suitable for rearing herds and flocks, he introduces the lines

Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum,

Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos[156],

proves the tender affection with which he recalled in later life the memory of his early home.

Some analogy has been suggested between the quiet beauty of the scenery which first sank into his soul, and the tranquil meditative cast of his genius. And though it is easy to push such considerations too far, and to expect a closer correspond[pg 104]ence than ever exists between the development of genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions, whose days from childhood to death were closely bound ‘each to each by natural piety,’ in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining type.

The district north of the Po, of which Virgil was a native, had enjoyed the ‘ius Latii’ since the end of the Social War, but did not obtain the full rights of Roman citizenship till the year 49 B.C., when Virgil was in his twenty-first year. The national poet of the early Empire, like the national poet of the Republic, had thus in all probability no claim by birth to be a member of the State of whose character and destiny his voice has been the truest exponent. It may be doubted whether Virgil belonged by birth to the purely Italian stock. He claims for Mantua a Tuscan origin[157]; but the Etruscan race in the region north of the Po had for a long time previously given way before the settlements of the Gauls; and, although Roman conquest had established several important colonies north of the Po, the main stock between that river and the Alps must have been of Celtic blood, although assimilated in manner of life and culture to the purely Italian inhabitants of the Peninsula. Zeuss, in his Celtic Grammar, recognises the presence of a Celtic root, which appears in other Gallic names, and which he supposes to be the root also of virgo, and virga, and Vergiliae, in the name Vergilius[158]. Some elements in Virgil’s nature and genius which seem to anticipate the developments of modern feeling, as, for instance, his vague melancholy, his imaginative sense of the mystery of the unseen world, his sympathy with the sentiment, as distinct from the passion, of love, [pg 105]the modes in which his delight in nature manifests itself, the vein of romance which runs through his treatment of early times may perhaps be explained by some subtle intermixture of Celtic blood with the firmer temperament of the old Italian race. Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged.

It is to be noticed that, while in the Ciceronian Age the names of the men eminent in literature belong, with one or two exceptions, either to the pure Roman stock or to the races of central Italy which had been longest incorporated with Rome, in the last years of the Republic and in the Augustan Age Northern Italy contributed among other names those of Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Quintilius Varus, Aemilius Macer, Virgil, and the historian Livy to the roll of Latin literature. Since the concessions which followed the Social War the whole people inhabiting the Peninsula had become thoroughly united in spirit with the Imperial city, and Latin literature as well as the service of the State thus received a great impulse from the liberality with which Rome, at different stages in her history, extended the privileges of her citizenship. The culture of which Rome had been for two generations the centre became now much more widely diffused; and as the privilege of citizenship, or of that modified citizenship conferred by the ‘ius Latii,’ was more prized from its novelty, so the attractions of literary studies and the impulses of literary ambition were felt more strongly from coming fresh and unhackneyed to a vigorous race. It was a happier position for Virgil and for Horace, it fitted them not only to be truer poets of the natural beauty of Italy, but also to feel in imagination all the wonder associated with the idea of the great city, to have spent their earliest and most impressible years among scenes of peace and beauty, remote from contact with the excitement, the vices, the routine of city life, than if, with the friend of Juvenal, they could have [pg 106]applied to themselves the words—‘our childhood drank in the air of the Aventine.’

There is still one point to be noticed in connexion with the district in which Virgil was born and passed his early youth. It was from Julius Caesar that Gallia Transpadana received the full Roman citizenship. But before he established this claim on their gratitude, the ‘Transpadani,’ as we learn from Cicero’s letters, were thoroughly devoted to his cause[159], and it was among them that his legions were mainly recruited. One of the spiteful acts by which the aristocratic party showed its animosity to Caesar was the scourging of one of the inhabitants of the colony of Novum Comum (Como) by order of the Consul Marcellus,—an act condemned by Cicero on the ground that the victim of this outrage was a ‘Transpadanus[160].’ Caesar was in the habit of passing the winters of his proconsulate in this part of his province, especially at Verona, where he was the guest of the father of Catullus. The name of Caesar must thus have become a household word among this people. They must have soon recognised his greatness as a soldier, and felt the fascination of his gracious presence. They must have been grateful for his championship of the provinces against the oppressive rule of the Senate, and for the protection afforded by his army from dangers similar to those from which their fathers had been saved, after many disasters, by his great kinsman, Marius. They did not share the sentiments of distrust excited among the aristocracy at Rome by Caesar’s early career, and had no reason to regard the permanent ascendency of one man as a heavier burden than the caprices of their temporary governors. From the favour which Virgil received from leaders of the Caesarean cause before his fame was established, and from his intimacy with Varius the panegyrist of Julius Caesar, it may be inferred that in adhering to the cause of the Empire he was true to the early impressions of his boyhood. He was one of the first to feel and make others feel the spell which the [pg 107]name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world.

Latin literature in the Augustan Age drew its representatives not only from a wider district than the preceding age, but also from a different social class. The men eminent as poets, orators, and historians in the last years of the Republic were for the most part members of the great Roman or Italian families. They were either themselves actively engaged in political life, or living in intimacy with those who were so engaged. Whatever tincture of letters was found in any other class was confined to freedmen or learned Greeks, such as Archias and Theophanes, attached to the houses of the nobility. The fortunes of the two great poets of the Augustan Age prove that no barrier of class-prejudice and no necessary inferiority of early education prevented free-born men of very humble origin from attaining the highest distinction, and living as the trusted friends of the foremost men in the State. Virgil and Horace were the sons of men who by the thrift and industry of a humble occupation had been able to buy small farms in their native district. Virgil’s father had not indeed, like the father of Horace, risen from a servile position. He is said to have begun life as a hired assistant to one Magius, who, according to one account, was a potter, according to another a ‘viator’ (or officer whose duty it was to summon prisoners before magistrates). He married the daughter of his master, being recommended to him, as is said by his biographer, by his industry (ob industriam). The name of Virgil’s mother was Magia Polla. His father is said to have increased his substance among other things by keeping bees (silvis coemendis et apibus curandis),—a fact which perhaps explains the importance given to this branch of rural industry in the Georgics. Virgil thus springs from that class whose condition he represents as the happiest allotted to man, and as affording the best field for the exercise of virtue and piety. He and Horace, after living in the most refined society of Rome, are entirely at one in their appreciation of the qualities of the old Italian husbandmen or [pg 108]small landowners,—a class long before their time reduced in numbers and influence, but still producing men of modest worth and strong common sense like the ‘abnormis sapiens’ of the Satires, and like those country neighbours whose lively talk and homely wisdom Horace contrasts with the fashionable folly of Rome; and true and virtuous women, such as may have suggested to the one poet the lines—