INTRODUCTION THE ÆNEID WHEN Rome, torn and bleeding from a century of civil, wars, turned to that wise judge of men, the second Cæsar, and acquiesced as, through carefully selected ministers, he gathered the reins of power into velvet-clad fingers of steel, she did wisely. Better one-man power than anarchy! It became the part of true patriotism for the citizen and of statesmanship for the politician to bring to the aid of the First Man of the state all the motives that could harmonize the chaotic elements, and start Republican Rome on the path of a new unity — the unity of the Empire. 1 For already "far away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating horses' hoofs and marching feet of men. They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, mustering and marshalling her peoples." In his great task Augustus, with the aid of Mæcenas, very cleverly drew to his help writers whose work has since charmed the world. We can almost pardon fate for destroying the Republic - it gave us Virgil and Horace. 66 Pleasant indeed had it been for Virgil to sing in emulation of his great teacher Lucretius! As for me," he says, "first of all I would pray that the charming Muses, whose minister I am, for the great love that has smitten 1 "Like footsteps upon wool."-Tennyson, Enone. me, would receive me graciously, and teach me the courses of the stars in heaven, the various eclipses of the sun and the earth, what is the force by which the deep seas swell to the bursting of their barriers and settle down again on themselves why the winter suns make such haste to dip in ocean, or what is the retarding cause which makes the nights move slowly." Pleasant, too, to spend his "chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase "in picturing "the liberty of broad domains, grottos and natural lakes, cool Tempe-like valleys, lawns and dens where wild beasts hide, a youth strong to labor and inured to scanty fare." "Let me delight in the country and the streams that freshen the valleys - let me love river and woodland with an unambitious love." "Then, too, there are the husbandman's sweet children ever hanging on his lips his virtuous household keeps the tradition of purity." Ah, yes, to Virgil most attractive was the simple life of the lover of nature, and charmingly did he portray it in his Eclogues and Georgics! But Augustus, recognizing the genius of Virgil, and realizing the supreme need of a reinvigorated patriotism, urgently demanded an epic that should portray Rome's beginnings and her significance to the world. Reluctantly then Virgil took up this task. Even at his death he considered it unfulfilled. Indeed it was his wish that the manuscript be destroyed. Almost immediately the Æneid became the object of the closest study, and ever since it has evoked the deepest admiration. Perhaps no other secular writing has so profoundly affected literature. VIRGIL'S LIFE Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), born in the rural district near Mantua, a farmer's son, was given by his loving father a careful education. Of his father Virgil says, "those whom I have ever loved and above all my father." The regard of his hero Æneas for his father Anchises not merely illustrates the early Roman filial affection it suggests Virgil's relation to his own parent. In north Italy Virgil studied at Mantua, Cremona, and Milan, and at seventeen took up his wider studies at Rome itself in the year 53 B.C. Catullus had died the year before, Lucretius was dead two years. At Rome Virgil had the best masters in Greek, rhetoric, and in philosophy, a study in which he especially delighted. In forming his own poetic style Virgil was profoundly influenced by Lucretius, whose great poem On Nature treated of the wondrous physical universe, and by the subtly sweet young Catullus, "Tenderest of Roman poets.". TENNYSON. But in 41 B.C. In such studies Virgil spent ten years. he appears again in north Italy and this time in storm and stress. In the year of Philippi the triumvirs, settling their victorious legions, confiscated lands about Cremona, and Virgil, attempting to resist dispossession, came near to losing his life. Through fellow-students of the Roman days he secured an introduction to Octavius and was compensated - either recovering his own farm, or receiving in lieu of it an estate in Campania. Virgil relates his experience in two of his ten Eclogues which were published in their present form in 38 B.C. These charming poems were especially loved by Milton and Wordsworth. Macaulay indeed considered them the best of Virgil's works. At Rome they met immediate success with the people and with Octavius and his wise minister Mæcenas, Horace's patron. In them Virgil tenderly sings love of friends, home, and country. Then Virgil spent seven years on the four books of the Georgics, publishing them in 29 B.C., two years after Actium. The Georgics Merivale calls "the glorification of labor." In them Virgil hymns the farmer's life in beautiful Italy. "Hail to thee, land of Saturn, mighty mother of noble fruits and noble men! For thee I essay the theme of the glory and the skill of olden days." Virgil was now acknowledged the greatest poet of Italy. In the year 26 B.C., one year after the title Augustus had been conferred on Octavius, we find the emperor writing Virgil the most urgent letters begging the poet to send him, then in Spain, some portion of the projected Eneid. It was, however, considerably later when Virgil read to Augustus the second, fourth, and sixth books, for the young Marcellus, the emperor's nephew, died in 23 B.C., and we are told that Octavia, his mother, fainted on hearing the poet read the immortal lines about her son in the sixth book: "Child of a nation's sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant's shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow.' Virgil, "who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes," had already spent some ten years on the Æneid, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the "famous cities" and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to "Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples, "That delicious Bay Parthenope's Domain Virgilian haunt; Illustrated with never dying verse And by the Poet's laurel-shaded tomb, INFLUENCE OF THE NEID As to the success of the Eneid, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil's death Horace writes in his Secular Hymn : — "If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town; And o'er the ocean waves in safety fled, Destined from him, though of his home bereft, A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left." - Translated by MARTIN. Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther's translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature. When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion, - degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition, it |