W. Lucas Collins

“ Powerless to stem the popular current, he nevertheless delivers his own soul, and abdicates his sovereignty. The guilt of the blood that shall be shed must rest on those who stir the war. He warns Turnus that he may yet live to rue the part he has taken, when too late: for himself, death will soon put an end to all troubles.
By an old tradition,—handed on, as the poet will have it, from these old days of Latium to the Rome of Augustus,—the powers of War were held to be confined within the gates of Janus, the porter of the Immortals, only to be let loose by solemn act of state authority. ”

“ Æneas and his companion mount the crest of the hill, whence they look down upon the half-finished walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that most essential structure in a city of any pretension, an amphitheatre for public spectacles, and building a magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist of invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,—like Ulysses in the court of Phæacia—the strangers enter the brazen gates of the temple. All is magnificent and wonderful. ”

“ ÆNEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER. The turn of events gives the Trojan chief much natural disquiet. All Latium is in arms against his little force of adventurers. He lies down within his lines to a disturbed and anxious rest, where he has a remarkable vision. A figure rises, wrapped in a grey mantle, with his brows crowned with reed. It is “Father Tiber,” the tutelary genius of the Rome that shall be. He bids his visitor be of good cheer: his coming has been long looked for. He renews, for his encouragement, the old oracle of Anchises ”

“ There is in this description a happy reminiscence of an earlier legend. In such guise—not with any of the meretricious attractions assigned to the goddess of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain nymph—had she won her mortal lover, the Trojan shepherd Anchises, from whom this her dear son was born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she had enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of the child’s birth, nor to boast of the favour shown him by a goddess, but to bring the boy up in the forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood-nymph. ”

“ The occupation of Anchises in these regions is much more philosophical than that which is assigned to the other shades. He is contemplating the unborn rulers of the Rome that is to be; the spirits, as yet incorporeal, which are soon to receive a new body, and so go forth into upper air. Deep in a forest lies the river Lethe, and a countless multitude of forms are seen thronging its banks, to drink of the water of forgetfulness. Oblivious of all their past lives, they will thus take their place once more, in changed bodies, among the inhabitants of earth. ”

“ Juno’s relentless hatred is stirred once more. Will neither fire nor sword kill, nor water drown, these accursed Trojans? Shall she, the Queen of Heaven, be baffled by a mortal like Æneas? If it be written in the fates that he is to wed Lavinia, her marriage-dower shall be paid in Trojan and Latian blood. Venus shall find that she, like Hecuba, has borne a firebrand—that Æneas, like Paris, shall light a flame that shall consume his nation. If the powers of heaven will not take her part, she will seek aid from{134} hell. ”

“ All who cross his path, veteran chiefs and young aspirants to glory, alike go down before him, and no appeal for mercy checks his hand. Eight prisoners he takes alive; but only with the intent to slay them as victims at the funeral pile of Pallas. But the rival champions do not meet as yet. Juno, fearing the issue of an encounter with Æneas in his present mood, cheats the eyes of Turnus with a phantom in his enemy’s shape. When Turnus meets it in the fight, the shape turns and flies towards the ships, pursued by him with bitter taunts on Trojan cowardice. ”

“ But a hero who could be false to a woman, and who was to find in that falsehood the turning-point to fame and success,—he might befit the loose tale with which the rybauder raised a laugh round the camp-fire, but he was the subject of no lay to which noble knight or dame would listen. The passion might be only pars amours, but it must be loyal. ”

“ Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil or Homer. We find in their verse none of those finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance, that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy, as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely of much older birth, has given now for centuries to poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. ”

“ Then, while Æneas is led to the camp, faint and bleeding, by his son lulus and his faithful Achates,—while the aged leech, Iapis, vainly tries all his skill upon the wound—for the barb will not quit the flesh,—Turnus spreads slaughter among the Trojan ranks. But only for a while. Venus drops a healing balsam into the water with which her son’s wound is being bathed; at once the arrow-head drops out, and the hero stands up sound and whole. Again he dons the Vulcanian armour, and re-enters the battle. ”

“ Æneas shall reach Latium safely, and reign there three years. His son Iulus—or Ascanius, as he is otherwise called—shall succeed him, and transfer the seat of power from Lavinium to his own new-founded city, Alba Longa. Three hundred years his race shall rule there, till in due course the twin-brothers Romulus and Remus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome. To the glories of this new capital the Father of the gods will assign neither limit nor end. The wrongs of Troy shall be redressed. ”

“ She addresses herself at once to the goddess of love—not without a sneer at the success of her snares in poor Dido’s case; a sorry triumph it is indeed—two divinities pitted against a weak woman! But come—suppose in this matter they agree to act in concert; let there be a union between the two nations, and let Carthage be the seat of their joint power; its citizens shall pay equal honours to the queen of heaven and the queen of love. Venus understands perfectly well that Juno’s motive is at any cost to prevent the foundation of Rome ”

“ Suicide was no crime in the early pagan creed; but Virgil has to a certain degree adopted the Platonic notion, that to take away one’s own life was to desert the post of duty. It is remarkable how thoroughly he adopts Homer’s view of the incomparable superiority of the life of the upper world to the best possible estate in the land of shadows. We have here again the sad lament of Achilles in the Iliad—that the life of a slave on earth was more to be desired than the colourless existence of the heroes in Elysium. ”

“ Thus, before he has concluded the first book of his great poem, the poet has taken us into his counsels as to the purport of the song. It is not a mere epic romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic deeds and exciting adventures; it is, like some of our modern novels, a romance with a purpose; and the purpose is the claiming for the great house of Julius the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of the glories of that house in the person of Augustus. ”

“ He will take all hazards, then, upon himself: there shall be no more blood shed of Latin or Rutulian—unless it be his own. He declares his intention to Latinus—he will meet Æneas in single combat. The old king is reluctant to allow it: Queen Amata, with tears and prayers, begs him to forego his resolution. Lavinia herself—such is the entire reticence of the maiden nature in epic story—speaks no word throughout the whole. But, as modern critics have long discovered, there is no question but that she has a sentiment for Turnus. ”

“ Taking command of his Etruscan allies, and followed by four hundred Arcadian horse under the young Pallas, whom his father gladly sends, as the youths of noble houses were sent in the days of knighthood, to learn the art of war under so great a captain, Æneas sets out on his march for Turnus’s capital. The old king does not part from his son without sad misgivings; he has trusted Æneas with more than his life.
Venus has not been neglectful of her son. She has persuaded Vulcan to forge for him weapons and armour of such sort as only the immortal smith can make. ”

“ Two Trojan sentinels have watched anxiously every sound and movement in the enemy’s lines. They are Nisus and his young friend Euryalus,—late among the competitors in the foot-race—inseparable in peace or war. Nisus sees, as he thinks, an opportunity for stealing through the Rutulian guards, and bearing news to Æneas at Pallanteum of the peril in which his son and his companions lie. He is a keen sportsman, and knows the forest by-paths well. He confides his design to Euryalus, but has no notion of taking the youth with him to share the danger. ”

“ But, as the poet goes on to say, “Who can cheat the eyes of love?” Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly with his “baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Æneid—“The Passion of Dido,” as it has been called—is of a very high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and curses against her false lover, now she condescends to pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief’s defence, such as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium. ”

“ Only those who have received all due rites of burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at once; those unhappy ones who from any cause lie unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the Sibyl explains to Æneas, when he marks with surprise{112} how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his own companions who had perished in the storm off the coast of Carthage. ”

“ Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach the “Mourning Fields,” in which the poet places all the victims of love. If there was any doubt as to his view of the passion—that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be reprobated or pitied according to circumstances—it would be set at rest by the characters of those victims with whom he peoples this unlovely region. ”

“ He is a reputed son of Jupiter; and now, furious at seeing this wanderer from Troy—“this second Paris,” as he calls him—preferred to himself, he appeals for vengeance to his Olympian parent. The appeal is heard, and Mercury is despatched to remind Æneas of his high destinies, which he is forgetting in this dalliance at Carthage. If he has lost all ambition for himself, let him at least remember the rights of his son Ascanius, which he is thus sacrificing to the indulgence of his own wayward passions. ”

“ But as it is, amidst a storm of shouts, the Scylla wins. The turning-point of victory is one which does not approve itself to modern readers. The sea-deities interfere. Standing high upon his quarter-deck, Cloanthus lifts his prayer to the powers of ocean, not to permit his prize to be snatched from him at the last. He vows an offering of a milk-white bull and libations of red wine if they will help him at his need. ”

“ The Trojan matrons are gathered near them, making moan for the good Anchises—for the games are a{102} spectacle for men. They are looking wistfully, too, across the sea, thinking how far they have sailed already, and how far they may yet have to sail. The watchful hate of Juno sees her opportunity. She despatches Iris down to them in the shape of one of their number—Beroe. She harangues them eloquently. How long will they be content to live this wandering life, in search of a distant home—which possibly has no existence but in deceitful prophecies? ”

“ And as the Iliad of Homer, beyond the mere vocation of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike audience by the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also—the glorification of the Greek nation—so the Roman poet may be said to have written a counter-Iliad, to extol the later fortunes of the royal house of Troy in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them, of Iulus. ”

“ He can describe it, when needed for his purpose, and describe it well; but it is as the scourge of nations, or at best the terrible remedy for greater evils;—not, as the Greek poet calls it, “the strife which is the joy of men.”
Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she may, the counsels of Jupiter. She puts into the heart of the Queen of Carthage, on whose shores Æneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of pity and compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also, to comfort her son Æneas in his trouble. ”

“ The shepherd’s horn sounds out its summons to the whole neighbourhood; and the angry rustics, when they hear the story, seize axes, staves, and such rude weapons as come first to hand, and attack the young prince and his hunting-party. The Trojans come out from their intrenchment to rescue their friends, and the fray now becomes a regular battle, no longer fought with stakes and hunting implements, but with sword and spear. Blood is soon shed; the rustic weapons are no match for the Trojan steel ”

“ If a fall deserves a prize, who has so good a claim as the man who fell first? Again the generosity of Æneas answers the appeal, and Nisus is presented with a shield of the finest workmanship, another Greek trophy. Successful knavery, if the knave be somewhat of a humourist withal, always wins a sort of sympathy from the public—in the Augustan epic as well as in modern comedy. ”

“ Will the prince promise her solace and protection, should harm befall Euryalus on the way? The answer of Iulus is given in tears; he has no mother left, and the mother of Euryalus shall be to him as his own. He girds the youth with the sword from his own side, and the friends set out upon their perilous errand, escorted to the gates by the Trojan captains with prayers and blessings.
The enterprise might have succeeded, had not the two friends been tempted, by the helpless state in which they found the Rutulian camp, to slaughter their sleeping enemies as they passed. ”

“ A tall wooden flanking-tower is set on fire by Turnus, and falls over, with its defenders, among the enemy. Two only survive the fall, one of whom—a slave-born warrior, who bears a blank shield—flings himself into the Rutulian ranks, and dies there fighting against overwhelming numbers. The other, Lycus, a swift and active runner, reaches the rampart of the intrenchment, and nearly succeeds in climbing over amongst his friends, when Turnus grasps him and bears him off, in spite of the missiles showered down by his sympathising comrades. ”

“ Landing next on the sacred isle of Delos, they consulted the oracle there as to their future home. Apollo was as enigmatical as his wont—he bade them “seek out their ancient mother.” They understood this to be spoken of the ancient cradle of their race; Anchises thought the phrase pointed to Crete, the birthplace of their ancestral hero Teucrus, and where stood the ancient Mount Ida, from which the mountain in the Troad derived its name. And Idomeneus, the king of Crete, who had joined the war against Troy, had been driven from his kingdom, and left a vacant throne. ”

“ The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are cast on the rocks; one goes down with all its crew before their leader’s eyes. But Neptune, the sea-god, comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as Juno is hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King of the Winds in his dominions—he knows by whose instance he has dared this outrage. ”