THE GEORGICS.

“Teste David cum Sibylla;”

and in an old Latin mystery-play of the eleventh century, when the witnesses are summoned to give evidence as to the Nativity, there appear among them, in company with the Hebrew prophets, Virgil and the Sibyl, who both join in a general “Benedicamus Domino” at the end. St. Augustine quotes twenty-seven Latin verses (which, however, seem very fragmentary and unconnected) as actual utterances of the Sibyl of Erythræ, which contain prophecies, more or less clear, of the great Advent. The original, he says, was in Greek, and the initial letters of each verse formed a sentence, “Jesus Christ the Son of God the Saviour.”[7]Whatever truth there may be in anyspecial predictions of this nature as existing in the heathen world, it is at least certain that there prevailed very largely, about the date of the Christian era, a vague expectation of some personal advent which should in some way regenerate society.

The new “cycle of centuries,” which the poet supposes to begin with the birth of the Child, refers to the doctrine held by Plato and his disciples (possibly of Etruscan origin) of an “Annus Magnus,” or Great Year. It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long intervals, in which the history of the world repeated itself.[8]A curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his life of Sulla.

“While the horizon was clear and cloudless, there was heard suddenly the sound of a trumpet, shrill, prolonged, and as it were wailing, so that all men were startled and awed by its loudness. The Etruscan soothsayers declared that it foreboded the coming of a new generation and the revolution of the world. For that there were eight generations of man in all, differing from each other in habits and ways of life, and each had its allotted space of time, when heaven brought round again the recurrence of the Great Year, and that when the end of one and the rise of another was at hand, some wondrous sign appeared in earth or heaven.”—Plutarch, Sulla, c. 7.

Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of the genius and character of Virgil’s pastoral poetry.It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said to have now become obsolete. English poets were at one time strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton, Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,—the last perhaps the most successful,—were all more or less imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity again.

TheGeorgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod—“Works and Days”—which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world, with its five ages of the human race—the gold, the silver, the brazen, “the age of heroes,” and the present—which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced.

From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem“On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really composed with a view to their practical instruction.

He addresses his poem to his noble patron Mæcenas. And amongst the long list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.

“Thou, Cæsar, chief, where’er thy choice ordain,To fix ’mid gods thy yet unchosen reign—Wilt thou o’er cities stretch thy guardian sway,While earth and all her realms thy nod obey?The world’s vast orb shall own thy genial power,Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower;Before thy altar grateful nations bow,And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow.O’er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail,Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail?Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves,While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves?Wilt thou ’mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise,And, a new star, illume thy native skies?Scorpius, e’en now, each shrinking claw confines,And more than half his heaven to thee resigns.Where’er thy reign (for not if hell inviteTo wield the sceptre of eternal night,Ne’er would such lust of dire dominion moveThee, Cæsar, to resign the realm of Jove:Though vaunting Greece extol th’ Elysian plain,Whence weeping Ceres wooes her child in vain)Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide,O’er the rude swain’s uncertain path preside;Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth,And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth.”—Sotheby.

The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over—advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,—squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,—he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. TheRoman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet, would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to Cæsar as the hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English ear:—

“Ye home-born deities, of mortal birth!Thou, father Romulus, and mother Earth,Goddess unmoved! whose guardian arms extendO’er Tuscan Tiber’s course, and Roman towers defend;With youthful Cæsar your joint powers engage,Nor hinder him to save the sinking age.O! let the blood already spilt atoneFor the past crimes of curst Laomedon!Heaven wants thee there; and long the gods, we know,Have grudged thee, Cæsar, to the world below;Where fraud and rapine right and wrong confound;Where impious arms from every part resound,And monstrous crimes in every shape are crowned.The peaceful peasant to the wars is prest;The fields lie fallow in inglorious rest;The plain no pasture to the flock affords,The crooked scythes are straightened into swords:And there Euphrates her soft offspring arms,And here the Rhine rebellows with alarms;The neighbouring cities range on several sides,Perfidious Mars long-plighted leagues divides,And o’er the wasted world in triumph rides.So four fierce coursers, starting to the race,Scour through the plain, and lengthen every pace:Nor reins, nor curbs, nor threat’ning cries they fear,But force along the trembling charioteer.”

The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the vineyard, but especially of the latter. The apple, the pear, the olive, all receive due notice from the poet; but upon the culture of the vine he dwells with a hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air than those which he gives out upon other branches of cultivation. The soil, the site, the best kinds to choose, the different modes of propagation, are all discussed with considerable minuteness. It would seem that in those earlier times, as now, the vintage had a more poetical aspect than even the harvest-field. The beauty of the crop, the merriment of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it has gone through the usual process of conversion, gave, as is still the case in all wine-producing countries, a holiday character to the whole course of cultivation. All other important crops contribute in some way to supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly its enjoyments. And when, at the beginning of the book, the poet invokes the god of wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however temperate his own habits might be, he had notadopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for “the dark red wine:” they might have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:—

“Come, Father Bacchus, come! thy bounty fillsAll things around; for thee the autumn hills,Heavy with fruit, blush through their greenery;In the full vats the vintage foams for thee:Come, Father Bacchus, come! nor yet refuseTo doff thy buskins, and with noble juiceTo stain thy limbs, and tread the grapes with me.”

But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second book:—

“Colchian bulls with fiery nostrils never turned Italian field,Seed of hydra’s teeth ne’er sprang in bristling crop of spear and shield;But thy slopes with heavy corn-stalks and the Massic vine are clad,There the olive-groves are greenest, and the full-fed herds are glad.In thy plains is bred the war-horse, tossing high its crest of pride;Milk-white herds, O fair Clitumnus, bathe them in thy sacred tide—Mighty bulls to crown the altars, or to draw the conqueror’s carUp the Sacred Way in triumph when he rideth from the war.Here the spring is longest, summer borrows months beyond her own;Twice the teeming flocks are fruitful, twice the laden orchards groan.In thy plains no tigers wander, nor the lions nurse their young;Evil root of treacherous poison doth no wretched gatherer wrong,Never serpent rears its crest, or drags its monstrous coils along.Lo! where rise thy noble cities, giant works of men of old,Towns on beetling crags piled heavenward by the hands of builders bold—Antique towers round whose foundations still the grand old rivers glide,And the double sea that girds thee like a fence on either side.. . . . . . . . . .Such the land which sent to battle Marsian footmen stout and good,Sabine youth, and Volscian spearmen, and Liguria’s hardy brood;Hence have sprung our Decii, Marii, mighty names which all men bless,Great Camillus, kinsmen Scipios, sternest men in battle’s press!Hence hast thou too sprung, great Cæsar, whom the farthest East doth fear,So that Mede nor swarthy Indian to our Roman lines come near!Hail, thou fair and fruitful mother, land of ancient Saturn, hail!Rich in crops and rich in heroes! thus I dare to wake the taleOf thine ancient laud and honour, opening founts that slumbered long,Rolling through our Roman towns the echoes of old Hesiod’s song.”[9]

The Third Georgic treats of the herd and the stud. The poet’s knowledge on these points must be strongly suspected of being but second-hand—rather the result of having studied some of the Roman “Books of the Farm,” than the experience of a practical stock-breeder. Such a work was Varro’s ‘On Rural Affairs,’ which Virgil evidently followed as an authority. From that source he drew, amongst other precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays down in this formula:—

“An ugly head, a well-fleshed neck,Deep dewlaps falling from the chin,Long in the flank, broad in the foot,Rough hairy ears, and horns bent in.”

Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our modern judges of stock. But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with an eye to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow of the present day would not be considered by us a handsome animal. Besides, the object of the Roman breeder was to obtain animals which would be “strong to labour,”—good beasts under the yoke; not such as would lay on the greatest weight of flesh at the leastpossible cost, for the purposes of the butcher. His points of a good horse are entirely different, and approach more nearly our own ideal—“Fine in the head, short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in the chest.” Bay and dapple-grey he chooses for colour; white and chestnut he considers the worst. He had not reached the more catholic philosophy of the modern horse-dealer, that “no good horse was ever yet of a bad colour.”

The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows the poet to indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of pastoral life under the hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or shepherd drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying with him all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a campaign; and again of his winter life in some vague northern region which he calls by the general name of Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of wine, as the southern poet compassionately phrases it) some kind of beer or cider. But the most remarkable of these passages is that which closes the book, and describes the ravages of some terrible pestilence which, beginning with the flocks and herds, extended at last to the wild beasts and to the birds, and even to the fish. There is no historical account of such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that Virgil used his licence as a poet to embellish with imaginary details some ordinary epidemic, in order to present to his readers a companion picture to that of the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by his favourite model Lucretius.

There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also—and with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a poet—minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be afact in natural history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old preliminary caution—“Firstcatchyour bee:” but an experienced bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful.[10]

The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon bee-keeping.

The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,—of his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a nobler kind—“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer expresses it.[11]He compares its details, in more than one passage, with thoseof the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.

“First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven”—

is his instruction to his pupils—“From Jove all things begin.” His motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days adopted—“Ora et labora”—“Pray and work.” It has been commonly said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English poet’s words,

“Lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind.”

But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and beauties, as the “skirts” of a divine glory. In all his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics.

It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of Mæcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of theirfarms. Whether it had that result may well be doubted: the discharged soldier, however heartily he might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as his instructor. The practical influence of these treatises in any way is equally doubtful. “It would be absurd to suppose,” says Dean Merivale, “that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time, and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyment.”[12]

TheÆneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of Troy. The fascination of that remarkable cycle of legend had not weakened after the lapse of ten centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment, but he goes to him for his subject. He even makes his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to the Iliad—at least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject of this latter poem is the wanderings and final establishment in his native country of the Greek hero Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the story of the escape of a Trojan hero from the ruin of his city, and the perils by land and sea which he encountered, until his final settlement in the distant west, in the land which the gods had promised him. Æneas, like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes and sufferings; and like him, though he has the justice and the deliberate counsels of heaven all on his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permittedto vex and thwart him for many long years. This Æneas—reputed son of the goddess Venus by a mortal husband, Anchises—had played no unimportant part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been told that King Priam had no less than fifty sons, it might have been said that he stood very near the throne. For he was the representative of the younger branch of the house of Dardanus—the family of Assaracus—as Priam was of the elder branch, that of Ilus.[13]A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round him in the Iliad. He is there addressed as “counsellor of the Trojans;” they honoured him, we are told, “equally with the godlike Hector;” and Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has rejected the house of Priam, but that “Æneas, and his sons, and his sons’ sons” should hereafter reign over the Trojans.”[14]Some Homeric critics have even fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer’s poem, a jealousy between Æneas and the sons of Priam. But this surely arises from reading Homer by the light of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of events, when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam’s kingdom, the prince of the house of Assaracus should rebuild the Trojan fortunes on the far-off shores of Italy.

Like Homer, Virgil dashes at once into the heart of his story. This is how he introduces his hero:—

“Arms and the man I sing, who first,By fate of Ilian realm amerced,To fair Italia onward bore,And landed on Lavinium’s shore.”[15]

He tells us nothing, however, for the present, of the escape from Troy and the embarkation of the fugitives, or of the guiding oracles in obedience to which they had sailed forth in quest of this new home. He only shows us Æneas on the sea, having just set sail from Sicily, where the angry Queen of Heaven catches sight of him. Juno, we must remember—Virgil, apparently, has no idea that any one could need reminding of it—Juno has never forgotten or forgiven that scene upon Mount Ida, where the Trojan Paris preferred the fascinations—or the bribes—of Venus to her own stately charms. She had persuaded her royal consort, the king of gods and men, to consent to the downfall of the accursed race; and she persecutes this unhappy remnant, now on its voyage, with unrelenting hate. Even the poet, who makes use of her persecution as one of the mainsprings of his story, professes his astonishment at its bitterness,—

“Can such deep hate find place in breasts divine?”[16]

She had another reason, too, for her present jealous feelings. The city of Carthage, where she was especially honoured, she had hoped to make the mistress of the world. And now—so the inexorable Fates have woven it in their web—this new brood from Troy are to destroy it in the years to come. Rome, and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey to his readers, is to have this universal empire.

But they have not reached Latium yet, these hateful Trojans. They never shall. The Queen of Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds, where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of Æolia, controlling his boisterous subjects:—

“They with the rock’s reverberant roarChafe blustering round their prison door:He, throned on high, the sceptre sways,Controls their moods, their wrath allays.Break but that sceptre, sea and landAnd heaven’s ethereal deepBefore them they would whirl like sand,And through the void air sweep.”

At Juno’s request Æolus lets loose his prisoners. Out rush the winds in mad delight.

“All in a moment, sun and skiesAre blotted from the Trojans’ eyes:Black night is brooding o’er the deep,Sharp thunder peals, live lightnings leap:The stoutest warrior holds his breath,And looks as on the face of death.At once Æneas thrilled with dread;Forth from his breast, with hands outspread,These groaning words he drew:‘O happy thrice, and yet again,Who died at Troy like valiant men,E’en in their parents’ view!O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray,Why passed I not the plain that day,Yielding my life to you,Where, stretched beneath a Phrygian sky,Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon, lie:Where Simois tumbles ’neath his waveShields, helms, and bodies of the brave?’”

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. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern authority:—

“Back to your master instant flee,And tell him, not to him but meThe imperial trident of the seaFell by the lot’s award;His is that prison-house of stone,A prison, Eurus, all your own;There let him lord it to his mind,The jailer-monarch of the wind,But keep its portal barred.”

So the tempest is stilled, and Æneas, with seven ships, the survivors of his fleet of twenty, runs into a land-locked harbour on the coast of Carthage. The crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn, while Æneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and kills deer to mend their meal. Wine they have goodstore of—the parting gift from King Acestes, late their host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to the fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in words of good cheer:—

“You that have seen grim Scylla rave,And heard her monsters yell,—You that have looked upon the caveWhere savage Cyclops dwell,—Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;This suffering may yield us yetA pleasant tale to tell.”

Æneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council. His goddess-mother Venus pleads with her father Jupiter to have pity on her offspring. And Jupiter—very open to influence of this kind now, as in Homer’s story—reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate. 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. The sons of the East, in their new home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.

“So stands my will. There comes a day,While Rome’s great ages hold their way,When old Assaracus’s sonsShall quit them on the Myrmidons,O’er Phthia and Mycenæ reign,And humble Argos to their chain.From Troy’s fair stock shall Cæsar rise,The limits of whose victoriesAre ocean, of his fame the skies;Great Julius, proud that style to bear,In name and blood Iulus’ heir.”

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. 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. For any historic foundation of such a genealogy we may look in vain. King Brute stands upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of Troy as the founder of the Julian house and of Rome. But, for the present, we must be content to assume his existence, and to follow the course of the narrative as the poet wills. The claim of Trojan descent is not an invention of Virgil’s, though hemay have been the first to work it out so much in detail. It was a claim in which his countrymen always delighted, and there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also, Virgil seems to have at heart. He does not care so much, after all, for the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of Rome. The empire of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough, and more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the “Pollio.” To the soul of the Roman poet—unlike his master Homer in this—war, and more especially civil war, is absolutely hateful. 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. Attended by his faithful friend Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader, the strange coast on which he finds himself—

“When in the bosom of the woodBefore him, lo, his mother stood,In mien and gear a Spartan maid,Or like Harpalycè arrayed,Who tires fleet coursers in the chase,And heads the swiftest streams of Thrace.Slung from her shoulders hangs a bow;Loose to the wind her tresses flow;Bare was her knee; her mantle’s foldThe gathering of a knot controlled.And ‘Saw ye, youths,’ she asks them, ‘say,One of my sisters here astray;A silver quiver at her side,And for a scarf a lynx’s hide;Or pressing on the wild boar’s trackWith upraised dart and voiceful pack?’”

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. Anchises, in his pride, had neglected or forgotten her warning, and was punished by premature weakness and a helpless old age.

Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus replies to her son’s questions as to the inhabitants of the land. They are a colony from Tyre; their queen, Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false brother Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichæus, had possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she has escaped with her husband’s wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa. Æneas tellsher in return his own sad story, and is comforted by the assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are safe—all but one unhappy vessel and her crew. Then, as she turns to leave him, the disguised divinity becomes apparent.

“Ambrosial tresses round her headA more than earthly fragrance shed;Her falling robe her footsteps swept,And showed the goddess as she stept.”

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. But, marvel of marvels! both walls and doors are sculptured with a history which Æneas knows only too well. Even here is recorded, on this distant and unknown shore, the story of stories—the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the Trojan chief peruses the several groups, and identifies the various incidents. Here the Greeks fly to their ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans: there, again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in slaughter before him. The death of young Troilus, hurled from his chariot, is there; and, to match the picture, Hector dragged at Achilles’s chariot-wheels roundthe city walls. Memnon the Ethiopian and the amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst the foremost combatants, Æneas can recognise himself.

While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates are reading this sculptured history, the queen herself approaches. And while they admire her majesty and grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the missing comrades of Æneas make their appearance before her as suppliants. They tell the story of their shipwreck on the coast: and they think Æneas is lost, as he had thought they were. Then the mist in which Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves, and the two parties recognise and welcome each other. Dido, like all the world, has heard of the name of Æneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy. She can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience:

“Myself not ignorant of woe,Compassion I have learnt to show.”

The sentiment has been adopted by modern writers in all languages. “She had suffered persecution and learnt mercy,” says Sterne in a like case: and even in Sterne’s mouth, the sentiment is natural and true.

The strangers are hospitably welcomed, and offered every facility for refitting their fleet, and preparing for the continuance of their voyage. Æneas sends down to his ships for presents worthy of so kind a hostess: and, with a father’s pride, he sends also for his young son to introduce him to the queen. The evening is devoted to feasting and revelry. The royal bard—that indispensable figure in all courts, Trojan or Tyrian or Greek—sings to the assembled guests. It is to be remarked that his lay is not, as we might expect, ofheroes and their deeds: it is the song of Silenus, in the Pastorals, over again—the favourite subject of the poet, the wonders of nature and creation.

“He sings the wanderings of the moon,The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon;Whence humankind and cattle came,And whence the rain-spout and the flame,Arcturus and the two bright bears,And Hyads weeping showery tears;Why winter suns so swiftly go,And why the winter nights move slow.”

All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who, at his false mother’s bidding, has assumed the shape of Æneas’s young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus’s machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the passion which is to be her ruin. Æneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on Othello’s:—

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