Chapter XIX: Part 19

Nothing can be more marked than the prominence of the Scamander as compared with the Simois in Homer. The Simois is named by him only six times, and none of the passages show it to have been a considerable stream. In the Twenty-first Book[892], Scamander invites Simois to join him in pouring forth the flood which was to bear away Achilles, but his ‘brother’ neither replies, nor takes part in the action. It would appear, indeed, from geographical considerations, which belong to the topography of the Troad, that in the summer Simois was probably dry. This entirely accords with the passage in which this river supplies ἀμβροσίη[893], a figure, as may be presumed, of grass, for the horses of Juno. At any rate, that passage is at variance with the idea of the river as a tearing torrent. Again, Homer mentions[894] that many heroes fell, he does not say in, but about, the stream: above all, he does not say they fell into its waters, but in the dust of it, or near it:

[892] Il. xxi. 307, et seqq.

[893] Il. v. 777.

[894] Il. xii. 22.

καὶ Σιμόεις, ὅθι πολλὰ βοάγρια καὶ τρυφάλειαι
κάππεσον ἐν κονίῃσι.

Again, Scamander is personified as the god Xanthus, and plays a great part in the action: Simois is not personified at all. Scamander is δῖος, διοτρεφὴς and much besides: Simois has no epithets. Simoeisius is the son of Anthemion, a person of secondary account; but Scamandrius is the name given by Hector to his boy. Simois, for all we know, may have been either a dry bed, or little better than a rivulet; but armed men are thrown into Scamander, and whirled by him to the sea. Lastly, the plain where the Greek army was reviewed is λειμὼν Σκαμάνδριος, πέδιον Σκαμάνδριον. Now a right conception of these rivers is not altogether an insignificant affair, but is material to the clearness of our ideas upon the military action of the poem. What then has Virgil done with them? He has simply reversed the Homeric representation. Xanthus is with him the unmarked river, Simois is the mighty torrent. Witness these passages:

Mitto ea, quæ muris bellando exhausta sub altis,
Quos Simois premat ille viros. (Æn. xi. 256.)

Again:

Victor apud rapidum Simoenta sub Ilio alto. (Æn. v. 261.)

And most of all, the passage which he has directly carried off from Homer, and corrupted it on his way (Æn. i. 104):

Ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis
Scuta virûm galeasque et fortia corpora volvit.

And why all this? Plainly, I apprehend, because, while Scamander was a word disqualified from entering into the Latin hexameter, Xanthus also was somewhat less convenient than Simois for the march of his resounding verse. Now this is a sample in small things of what Virgil has done in nearly all things, both small and great.

~_Νεκυΐα of Homer and Virgil._~

There are instances in which Virgil is popularly thought to profit by the comparison with Homer, and where, notwithstanding, a full consideration may lead to a reversal of the sentence. The νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, for example, is thought inferior to that of the Sixth Æneid. To bring them fairly together, we should perhaps put out of view the philosophical and prophetical part of the latter[895]; but whether we do it or not is little material in the comparison. In either way, the _Inferno_ of Virgil is, upon the whole, a stage procession of stately and gorgeous figures; but it has no consistent or veracious relation to any idea of the future or unseen state actually operative among mankind. Yet there existed such an idea, at least in the times of which Virgil was treating, if not at the period when he lived. It was surely a subject of the deepest interest, and of the most solemn pathos. What we are as men here depends very much on our conception of what we are hereafter to be. There is nothing more touching in all the history of the race of Adam, than its blind and painful feeling after a future still invisible. There is no witness to the comparative degradation of a race or age, so sure as its having ceased to yearn towards any thing beyond the grave. Homer has shown us in the Eleventh Odyssey[896], that, together with his keen sense of the present and visible, he felt the full force of this mysterious drawing towards the unseen. He is plainly as much in earnest here, as in any part of the poems. Virgil, on the other hand, succeeds in investing his hell with almost unequalled pomp, approximating at times to splendour. Homer attempts nothing of the kind; but he produces a perfect and profound impression of those regions, according to the idea in his own mind: they are shadowy, gloomy, cold, above all, and in one word, dismal. Virgil contrives to leave the reader convinced that _he_ is a very great artist: Homer lets all such matters take care of themselves. But while Virgil creates no impression at all on the mind as to the World of Shades, no image of the timid, vague, and dim belief that was entertained respecting it, Homer has set it all before us with a truthfulness never equalled or approached. And yet Virgil abounds in details and measurements which Homer avoids. Tartarus is twice as deep as the distance from earth to sky[897], and the Hydra has fifty mouths. Yet the details of the one give no impression of reality, while the utter local vagueness and dreaminess of the other is far more definite in its effect, because it is made to minister to the appropriate ideas of sadness, sympathy, and awe. As to particular passages, the appearance of Dido is full of grandeur; but her silence, the basis of it, is borrowed from that of Ajax; while in the Odyssey the striding of Achilles in silence over the meadow of asphodel, when he swells with exultation upon hearing that his son excelled in council and in war, is perhaps one of the most sublime pieces of human representation, which Homer himself ever has produced.

[895] Æn. vi. 724-893.

[896] We cannot safely assume the second Νεκυΐα of Od. xxiv. to be free from interpolations.

[897] Homer has used this figure; but in an entirely different connection, Il. viii. 13-16.

~_Ethnological dislocations._~

Let us now give an instance of Virgil’s utter indifference to historic truth and consistency. It is the more remarkable, because as he was pretending to derive the Julian family from the stock of Æneas, there would apparently have been some advantage in adhering strictly to the Homeric distinctions as to races on both sides in the Trojan war. But this appears to be entirely beneath his attention. For instance, he calls the Homeric Greeks Pelasgi[898]. It may be said he was guided by the Italian traditions, which connected the Greek and Pelasgian names as early colonists of that country. But first, some regard should be paid to Homer in matters which concern Troy; and it is rather violent to call the Greeks Pelasgi, when the only Pelasgi named in the war by the Poet are placed on the side of their enemies. Secondly, as it was his purpose throughout to depress the Greeks, why should he thus thrust them into view as one with an Italian race? Above all, why do this in a case, where Homer had himself supplied a link between Italy and Troy? Again, Virgil calls the Greek camp _Dorica_ castra[899]. But the Dorians at the period of the Trojan war were utterly insignificant, and are never once named by Homer in connection with the contest. Again, Virgil calls Diomed, and the city of Arpi founded by him, Ætolian, and makes him complain that he was not allowed to go back to Calydon[900], simply because his father Tydeus, as a son of Œneus, had been of Ætolian extraction; though he commanded the Argives, and had nothing whatever to do with the Ætolians of Homer. Again, following a late and purposeless tradition, he calls Ulysses Æolides[901], though Homer has given the descent of Ulysses[902] without in any manner attaching it to the line of the Æolids, a collection of families whose descent, on account probably of their historical importance, he is more than ordinarily careful to mark.

[898] Æn. vi. 503.

[899] Æn. ii. 27. vi. 88.

[900] Æn. xi. 239-270.

[901] Æn. vi. 529.

[902] Od. xvi. 118.

With cases of simple inaccuracy, to which I do not seek to attach undue weight, we may connect the manner in which he confounds, on the other side, the distinctions of the Trojan races, so accurately marked by Homer. In the Twentieth Iliad, the genealogy of the reigning families of Troy and of Dardania is given with great precision. The distinction between Trojans and Dardanians is preserved through the Iliad, though the Trojan name is sometimes, but rarely, used to include the whole indigenous army, and sometimes it even signifies the entire force, including the allies, which opposed the Greek army. We might here, however, suppose that it would have been in the interest of Virgil’s aim to maintain, or even sharpen, the distinction between the Dardanian line, which was at most but indirectly worsted by the Greeks, and the line of Ilus, which fatally both sinned and suffered in the conflict of the _Troica_. But, on the contrary, he is still less discriminating in the use of names here, than he has been for the Greeks. The companions of Æneas are sometimes Teucri, Trojani, or Trojugenæ--sometimes Æneadæ, sometimes Dardanidæ. In the first of these names he entirely contravenes Homer, who produces a Teucer eminent among the Greeks, but nowhere connects the name with Troy, while Virgil makes a Cretan Teucer[903] the founder of the Trojan race. I grant that he here founds himself upon what may be called a separate tradition, though it is vague and slender, of a Teucrian race in Troas. In the two last appellations, without any authority, he wholly alters the effect of the Greek patronymic, and changes the mere family-name into a national appellation. Then again they appear as the Pergamea gens[904]. But Pergamus in Homer was simply the citadel of Troy, and is a correlative to πύργος[905]: the English might almost as well be called the people of the Tower. Not content yet, he will also have the Trojans to be Phryges:

[903] Æn. iii. 104.

[904] Æn. vi. 63.

[905] Scott and Liddell, in voc.

Phrygibusque adsis pede, diva, secundo[906];

[906] Æn. x. 255. Cf. i. 618, Phrygius Simois; vii. 597, _et alibi_.

though in Homer the Phrygians are a people both ethnologically and politically separate[907] from the Trojan races. Again as to Æneas himself. He is called Rhæteius heros[908]; but if Virgil chose thus to designate his hero by reference to a single point of the Trojan territory, it should have been one with which he was locally connected, whereas the dominions of his family were not near the promontory or upon the coast, but among the hills at the other extreme of the country. Then again Æneas is Laomedontius heros[909]; but Laomedon was of the branch of Ilus, while Æneas belonged to that of Assaracus; and was moreover perjured, while the line of Assaracus was marked with no such taint. So we have again--

[907] Il. iii. 184.

[908] Il. xii. 436.

[909] Il. viii. 18.

Dardanus, Iliacæ primus pater urbis et auctor[910];

[910] Ibid. 134. Cf. vi. 650.

but Dardanus founded Dardania, while Ilium did not exist until the time of his great grandson Ilus. And here Virgil seems wholly to forget that he had himself made Teucer the head of the race[911]. In describing the migration of this hero from Crete to Troas, he says:

[911] Æn. iii. 104.

Nondum Ilium et arces
Pergameæ steterant; habitabant vallibus imis[912].

[912] Æn. iii. 109.

Here he not only rejects Homer, who places Dardanus and the original settlement among the mountains, but likewise represents what is in itself improbable, since eminences, and not bottoms, were commonly sought by the first colonists with a view to security. Choosing to depart from Homer, he does not even agree with Apollodorus[913]. Lastly, he is not less neglectful of the actual topography; for he implies that Ilium is among the hills, while it was, according to Homer’s express words and according to universal opinion, on the plain as opposed to the hills. Again we have from Virgil the allusion--

[913] Apollod. III. xii. 1.

quibus obstitit Ilium, et ingens
Gloria Dardaniæ[914].

[914] Æn. vi. 63.

Here is another case of metre against history, and in all such cases history must go (as is said) to the wall. _Ilium_ would not satisfactorily admit the genitive case; there could therefore be no glory of Ilium, and on this account Virgil liberally assigns vast renown to Dardania, which was a place of no renown whatever. But he is quite as ready, it must be admitted, to contradict himself as he is to contradict Homer. In Æn. ii. 540, he gives it to be understood that the city of Troy alone was the kingdom of Priam, and that the Greek camp was beyond it, for he makes Priam say of his return from the camp,

meque in mea regna remisit.

But a very little further on he calls Priam (v. 556),

tot quondam populis regnisque superbum
Regnatorem Asiæ.

Each account is alike inaccurate: Priam had more than a city, but his dominions were confined to a mere nook of Asia Minor. And again, before quitting this part of the subject, let us observe how, in the case of Anchises, he departs from Homer, even where it would have served the purpose of his story to follow him closely. The Anchises of Homer is an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν; he does not appear at Troy among the δημογέροντες of the city, or of Priam’s court, which would have made him a secondary figure; he resides at Dardania as an independent sovereign, and it seems not unlikely that in lineal dignity, at least, he was even before Priam. But the Anchises of Virgil is resident in Troy[915]; and is therefore, of course, to be taken for a subject of Priam. Here the alteration very much lowers the rank of Æneas, and so far, therefore, of Augustus.

[915] Æn. ii. 634.

The effect of all this is, without any real gain either moral or poetical, entirely to bewilder the mind of the reader of the Æneid, in regard to a subject of real interest both historical and ethnological, with respect to which Homer has left on record a most careful and clear representation. It must indeed be admitted, that the intervening poets had set many examples of similar license; indeed they had made irregularity a rule; but they had no such powerful reasons as Virgil had for imitating, in some points at least, the precision of Homer, and besides, he has perhaps exceeded them all in the multitude and variety of his departures from it. On the other hand, some allowance, I admit, should be made for the less flexible character of the Latin tongue, which might have made the peculiar accuracy of Homer a real difficulty to Virgil.

I have thus minutely traced out this course of inconsistency and contradiction in particular instances, because they are highly illustrative of the character of Virgil’s work, if not of his mind. After the political and courtly idea of the poem, he seems to have abandoned all solicitude except for its form and sound, and to have been totally indifferent as to presenting any veracious, or if that word imply too much credulity, any self-consistent pattern, of manners, places, events, or characters.

Virgil must, materially at least, have saturated himself with the Iliad before he planned the Æneid, for his borrowing is alike incessant and diversified; and this it is which renders it so singular that he should at once have exposed himself to the double charge of servilely imitating and of gratuitously disfiguring his original.

If we look to the action of the Twelfth Book of the Æneid, it is all made up from Homer cut in pieces and recast. It begins with the idea of the single combat, borrowed from the Third and Seventh Iliads. Then come the pact and the breach of it by Juturna, under Juno’s influence, which are borrowed from the treachery of Pandarus, prompted by Minerva, under the same instigation. Next, the flight of Turnus before Æneas is borrowed from that of Hector before Achilles. After this, Turnus is disabled by a divine agency, like Patroclus before Hector; a downfall brought about in the one case, as in the other, without peril and without honour, so that here we have a copy even of one among the few points where the Iliad was little worthy to be imitated. Lastly, the thought of Pallas in the mind of Æneas (more highly wrought, however, and very effective), plays the part of the recollection of Patroclus[916] in the mind of Achilles.

[916] Il. xxii. 331-47.

~_Unfaithful imitations of detail._~

Both here and elsewhere, the imitations in detail are too numerous to be noted. Some of them even descend to a character which, independently of their minuteness, approaches the ludicrous. The very dung, in which the Oilean Ajax loses his footing[917], in the Twenty-third Iliad, is reproduced in the Fifth Æneid, that Nisus may flounder in it. But even here we may note two characteristic differences. Homer trips up a personage, whom he has no particular occasion to set off favourably. Virgil chooses for the object of derision Nisus, on whom, in the beautiful episode which soon after follows, he is about to concentrate all the tenderest sympathies of his hearers. And again, Homer makes Ajax slip where, as he says, the oxen had just been slain over Patroclus: Virgil has no such probable cause to allege for the presence of the obnoxious material[918], but says _cæsis forte juvencis_. Now the Trojans had in fact left the tomb of Anchises, and had gone to a chosen spot to celebrate the foot-races[919]; so that even his gore and ordure are quite out of place.

[917] Il. xxiii. 775-81. Æn. v. 333, 356.

[918] Ibid. 329.

[919] Ibid. 286-90.

So again, of all the _formulæ_ in Homer, it is not very clear why Virgil should have chosen to recall the rather commonplace line

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδήτυος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο

in his own more ambitious and resounding verse,

Postquam exemta fames, et amor compressus edendi[920];

[920] Æn. viii. 185.

but it is still more singular that, instead of saying that hunger and thirst were satisfied, he should leave out thirst altogether, and fill up his hexameter by mentioning hunger twice over.

Still it seems not a little strange, notwithstanding the power of the disabling causes which have been enumerated, that, with so vast an amount of material imitation, Virgil should not have acquired, even by accident or by sheer force of use, some traits of nearer resemblance in feeling, and in ethical handling, to his great original.

His maltreatment of the Homeric characters is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the instance of Helen. This case, indeed, deserves a separate consideration of the causes which have reduced a beautiful, touching, and remarkably original portrait to a gross and most common caricature. But Ulysses, as the prince of policy, had perhaps a better claim to be comprehended by a Roman at the court of Augustus. Yet the Ulysses of Virgil simply represents the naked ideas of hardness, cunning, and cruelty. He is never named but to be abused; and, though the mention of him is not very frequent, it is easy to construct from the poem a pretty large catalogue of vituperative epithets, unmitigated by any single one of an opposite character. He is _durus_, _dirus_, _sævus_, _pellax_, _fandi fictor_, _artifex_, _inventor scelerum_, and _scelerum hortator_. Even physical circumstances, however, and those too of the broadest notoriety, Virgil entirely overlooks. Nothing can be more at variance with the effeminate character of the Homeric Paris, his impotence in fight, and his distinction limited to the bow, which was then the coward’s weapon, than to represent him as possessed of vast physical force. Yet even on this Virgil has ventured. In the games of the Fifth Book, when Æneas invites candidates for the pugilistic encounter, the huge Dares immediately presents himself, and he is described as the only person who could box with Paris[921]!

[921] Æn. v. 370.

Solus qui Paridem solitus contendere contra.

Heyne urges by way of apology the authority of Hyginus, who was no more than the contemporary of Virgil himself; and presumes that Virgil followed authorities now lost: a sorry defence, because the representation is inconsistent not merely with the facts, but with the essential idea of the Paris of Homer, and therefore proves that Virgil did not try or care to understand the character, or to be faithful to his master.

~_Maltreatment of Mythology and Ethics._~

But it is time to give some instances, which show an utter disregard of either mythological or moral consistency.

In the Eighth Æneid, Æneas and Anchises are much troubled in mind; and so it appears they must have continued,

Nî signum cœlo Cytherea dedisset aperto;
Namque improviso vibratus ab æthere fulgor
Cum sonitu venit[922].

[922] Æn. viii. 523.

This idea of a _Cytherea tonans_ is as incongruous as it is novel. To preserve the characteristic attributes of the several deities of the Pagan mythology contributes to beauty, and was therefore at least an obligation imposed by the poetic art; but Virgil is not content with simply departing from it by taking the management of thunder and lightning out of the hands of Jupiter and the highest deities; he cannot be satisfied without giving it to Venus. With her Homeric character, and with any consistent conception of her attributes, it is utterly irreconcilable.

But again, in the Second Æneid, Virgil makes Venus address to her son the following majestic lines, when he was about to slay Helen amidst the conflagration of Troy:

Non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacænæ
Culpatusve Paris: Divûm inclementia, Divûm
Has evertit opes, sternitque a culmine Trojam[923].

[923] Æn. ii. 601.

In which he plainly imitates the words of Priam,

οὔτι μοι αἰτίη ἐσσὶ, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν,
οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν[924].

[924] Il. iii. 164.

Now, even with reference to the acquittal of Helen, the cases are quite dissimilar. What Homer puts into the mouth of Priam, Virgil stamps with the authority of a deity: what Priam says of the Homeric Helen, who had been carried off by Paris, and whose general character was very far from depraved, the Venus of Virgil says of a hardened traitress as well as adulteress. Again, what Priam says relative to himself, ‘_I_ do not blame thee,’ seems in the Æneid to resemble the unlimited enunciation of an abstract proposition. But, above all, let us notice how lamentably Virgil has mauled the sentiment by introducing Paris into the passage, of whose moral guilt, if there be such a thing as moral guilt upon earth, there could be no doubt, and whom Homer, with true poetic justice, has taken care to punish by making him the object of the general reprobation and hatred of his countrymen[925]. In acquitting such an offender, and throwing the charge of his crimes upon the Immortals, by the mouth, too, of one belonging to their number, Virgil has given into the worst form of fatalism, that namely which annihilates all moral sanctions and ideas as applicable to human conduct.

[925] Il. iii. 453, and elsewhere.

And this he has done with no plea whatever which might have been drawn, _valeat quantum_, from the exigencies of his poem. Paris was not before the eye of Æneas: Venus was not dissuading her son from taking vengeance upon Paris; he is forced into our sight; the allusion is as irrelevant with reference to the purpose of the passage, as it is blameworthy in an ethical point of view; and in all probability the mention of him is introduced for no other reason than that it supplied Virgil with a hemistich to fill up a gap in an extremely fine passage, and to secure its prosodial equilibrium, to which the balance of moral sanctions is sacrificed without remorse.

As it is with the management of his gods, so with his conception of human nature; Virgil seems to have lost the sight of its higher prerogatives, and especially of the great and noble truth, that it is susceptible of divine influences without the loss of its free agency. The poems of Homer, notwithstanding their copious theurgy, are throughout eminently and entirely human. Their human agency is adorned and elevated (as well as unhappily lowered and darkened), it is even modified and controlled, but never inwardly mutilated, curtailed or superseded, by the interference of the Immortals. But, in regard to his relations with the deities, Æneas is a mere puppet; and the gallant spirit of Turnus on his last battlefield is, as it were, put down within him by main force from heaven.

~_Æneas and Dido in the Shades._~

Thus for example, Virgil is not ashamed to introduce to us Æneas in the shades below apologizing to Dido for his black desertion of her by saying, ‘he could not help it, the gods compelled him; and really he never thought she would take it so much to heart.’

Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi;
Sed me jussa deûm ...
Imperiis egere suis; nec credere quivi
Hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem[926].

[926] Æn. vi. 460.

Compare with this the extraordinary truth, beauty, and manfulness of the speech, in which Ulysses takes his farewell of Calypso[927]. This is its tenour: ‘Be not incensed; I know Penelope is less beautiful than thou; yet is my desire, from day by day, towards my home; and if I be wrecked upon my way, this too I will endure, even as I have endured much before.’ In Virgil’s hands, the chief would probably have shuffled off the responsibility from himself upon the shoulders of the gods. Never shall we find one of Homer’s heroes doing this, either beforehand, as by saying, ‘I do not wish to do it, but I am ordered,’ or retrospectively. There is one exception; it is when Agamemnon says that Ἄτη, the goddess of Mischief, with Jupiter, had misled him[928], and that he was not himself to blame. But Agamemnon, alone among the Greek heroes, had in his character a strong element of what we call shabbiness; and what is more, he uses this plea only after making reparation, and not, as Æneas does, in lieu of any. To resume, however, the thread. Sometimes the Homeric heroes are pious, sometimes disobedient; sometimes bold, and sometimes fearful; sometimes they submit to overpowering force, sometimes they struggle even against destiny; but they never appear before us shorn of the first attribute of manhood, its free will.

[927] Od. v. 215-24.

[928] Il. xix. 86. When Achilles (270) as it were countersigns this, it is evidently in his character of a high-bred gentleman; a character, of which he gives so many proofs in the poem.

It seems then that Virgil really did not care to form the habit, and thus commonly failed in the power, of working the higher springs of our nature. He puts the clay into the fire, but the pitcher does not always come out such as he intended it; not even when, instead of trusting, like Homer, to simple action as the vehicle of his meaning, he uses the precautionary measure of describing it.

Thus he prepares us to expect in Mezentius a monster of impiety, cruelty, and brutality, from the account and the epithets by which he is introduced to us[929]. In words scattered here and there, this ‘contemptor divûm’ is made to sustain his impious character. _Dextra mihi deus_, he says; and again _nec divûm parcimus ulli_[930]. But these are really mere black patches, set upon a character with which they do not accord; they remain patches still, and not parts of it. Practically, Mezentius proceeds in the poem only as an affectionate father, and as a gallant warrior, should do; and there is no more of real impiety in him, than there is of real piety in Æneas. Nay, here again Virgil shows his contempt of consistency. For, when Mezentius slays Orodes, who prophesied that his conqueror would meet with a similar fate upon the field of battle, Mezentius replies in the most decorous manner (copying the very language of Achilles to the dying Hector[931]),

[929] Æn. vii. 648; viii. 7, 482.

[930] Æn. x. 773, 880.

[931] Il. xxii. 365.

Nunc morere. Ast de me divûm pater atque hominum rex
Viderit[932].

[932] Æn. x. 743.

~_Woman characters of Homer and Virgil._~

Though Virgil is esteemed a woman-hater, he has availed himself of the use of female characters to a degree only exceeded, so far as I recollect, by the highly susceptible Tasso. His celestial machinery is principally worked by Juno and by Venus: we miss altogether in him that jovial might of the Homeric Jupiter, which is recalled in the historic portraits of king Henry the Eighth of England. Of mortals we have, besides the mute Lavinia, and minor or transitory personages, Dido, Juturna, Amata, Camilla. All these play very marked parts in the poem; indeed, they supply the mainsprings of the action; and the characters of all are drawn with great spirit and success, while the Passion of Dido will probably always be quoted as the most magnificent witness, which the whole range of the poem affords, to the original power and genius of its author. Yet even in these, his signal successes, it is curious to notice the dissimilarity between Virgil and Homer. Homer, too, has been eminently successful in his women. His greater studies of Helen, Andromache, and Penelope are fully sustained by the truth and force of all the less conspicuous delineations: Hecuba, Briseis, the incomparable Nausicaa, the faithful Euryclea, the pert and heartless Melantho. But how different are the works of the two poets! In all Virgil’s women (as on the other hand his men are apt to be effeminate) there is a tinge of the masculine. Many a woman would stab herself for love like Dido; but none, not even in France, with her pomp, apparatus, and self-consciousness. Their fates, too, are all of a violent character. Amata, as well as Dido, commits suicide; Camilla is slain; Juturna is immortal indeed, but is dismissed from earth with what for her comes nearest to an image of death; with defeat, mortification, shame. But on the contrary, the feminineness of Homer’s women has never been surpassed. In Hecuba alone, at one single point in the story, there is an apparent exception; yet it is no great violence done to nature, if we find in her after Hector’s death the wild ferocity of the dam deprived of her offspring, and if revenge then drives her for a moment into the temper of a cannibal. Elsewhere beyond doubt, even in Melantho, the feminine character is not wholly obliterated, but is left at the point where in actual life licentiousness and vanity might leave it. In Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa, it reaches a perfection which has never been surpassed, unless by Shakespeare, in human song. There is, however, something to be observed, which is more striking and characteristic. The Virgilian delineations of women tell us absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the social position of womankind either at the epoch of Æneas or at any other; a matter which has stood so differently in different ages and states of mankind, yet which has at all times been one of the surest tests for distinguishing a true and healthy from a hollow civilization. But the Homeric poems furnish a picture of this interesting subject not a whit less complete than any other picture they contain. The Woman of the heroic age of Greece stands before us in that immortal verse no less clear, no less truly drawn, no less carefully shaded, than the Warrior, the Statesman, and the King.

These are great matters: but Virgil is also as careless, as Homer is careful, of minor proprieties. For instance, he describes the Italian smiths engaged in preparing suits of armour upon the invasion of Æneas. Some, he says, make breastplates of brass; and he continues,

Aut leves ocreas lento ducunt argento[933].

[933] Æn. vii. 633.

Here, we presume, his purpose was to represent the hammering process by a heavy spondaic line--in evident imitation of Homer, who has done it still more completely in the

θώρηκας ῥήξειν δηΐων ἀμφὶ στήθεσσιν[934].

[934] Il. ii. 544.

But Homer always gains his metrical objects without injuring the sense; Virgil, on the contrary, has committed an error, by representing silver (a most rare and valuable metal, especially in the Trojan times) as used in large masses for making armour; and a grosser solecism, by representing the greaves as made of far finer material than the breastplates. Perhaps he was helped into this error by a careless reminiscence, that Homer had in some way connected silver with the greaves. This is not, however, in armour as generally used, but in the case of some of the greatest chiefs, including Paris, whose dandyism, we know, extended particularly to his arms. Nor are even his greaves made of, or even plated with, silver, but only the clasps of them:

κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκεν
καλὰς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας[935].

[935] Il. iii. 330.

Virgil is careful enough as to geography, when he deals with countries under the eye of his hearers. But he can scarcely be excused for inverting the Homeric order of the mountains piled up by the giants. Homer places Mount Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus:

Ὄσσαν ἐπ’ Οὐλύμπῳ μέμασαν θέμεν, αὐτὰρ ἐπ’ Ὄσσῃ
Πήλιον εἰνοσίφυλλον[936].

[936] Od. xi. 315.

This description is in conformity with the proportionate heights of the mountains, among which Olympus is the highest, Ossa the next, Pelion the least. But Virgil makes Pelion the base, and Olympus the _apex_:

Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam
Scilicet, atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum[937].

[937] Georg. i. 281.

It is not simply that Homer is here geographically accurate, and Virgil the reverse. Homer has adopted the pyramidal structure, which satisfies the eye, and lays a firm and obvious road, so to speak, to the skies. Virgil does not. He subjoins to his description the verse,

Ter pater extructos disjecit fulmine montes.

But Jupiter might have spared himself the trouble: the mountains would have tumbled of themselves.

~_Confusion of natural Phenomena._~

Before parting from the subject, it may be well to give another example of the indifference of Virgil to the association between poetry, and the order of external nature as such. In the Fourth Æneid, he speaks of Mercury as passing over Mount Atlas on his way to Carthage; from what point I do not now inquire. The lines are these[938];

[938] Æn. iv. 248-51.

Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris
Piniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;
Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mento
Præcipitant senis, et glacie riget horrida barba.

His pine-bearing head, girt with clouds, is beaten by wind and rain. So far so good. But while such is the temperature of the air at the summit, it grows colder, not warmer, as we descend: for snow covers his shoulders. This is the second image. Next, we mount again to his mouth, which discharges rivers over his chin: and not even here have we done with incongruity, for his beard, although thus watered from above, is rough and stiff with ice. Now such a confusion, as is here exhibited, of images which nature always exhibits in a fixed and very imposing order, is, we may be assured, no mere casual error, but indicates a rooted indifference about matters which the poets of nature study, not only with accuracy, but with an accuracy which is the fruit of their reverence and love.

The Dolopes of Homer are a part of the Myrmidons, for they are the subjects of Phœnix[939], and Phœnix commands the fifth division of the Myrmidons: they are named by Virgil as a separate race[940]. The Rhadamanthus of Homer appears to have been conceived by the Poet as a mild and benevolent character, for he is placed in the Plains of the Blest, while Minos administers severer justice in the under-world. But the Rhadamanthus of Virgil is the judge of the infernal regions, and is the image of rigour; while his Minos[941] has the very mild and also secondary function of dealing, in the vestibule of the Shades, with the cases of such persons as had been unjustly condemned on earth[942]. Again, where Homer uses exaggeration to enhance effect, Virgil carries it far into caricature. In the Iliad, Diomed[943] heaves a stone, of a weight that ‘two men such as are nowadays (οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι) could scarcely lift.’ He allows for a short interval since the Trojan war, and says that two ordinary men of his day could scarcely lift what warriors of extraordinary strength, by an extraordinary effort, then raised and hurled. In another place, Ajax flings a stone, such as even a man in the fullest vigour could now scarcely hold[944]. Again, Hector discharges against the Greek rampart one which two strong men could hardly raise with a lever; but then he is specially aided by Jupiter[945]. Now in the Fifth Æneid, Æneas gives to Mnestheus, as a prize, a breastplate which he himself had won, the spoil of Demoleos. This Demoleos[946] was no hero, for he is never named by Homer; again, the Demoleos of Virgil wore the breastplate when he chased the Trojans flying in all directions (‘palantes,’ Æn. v. 265), so that it must have been light to him: there was no time at all for human degeneracy, since they are still his contemporaries that are on the stage; and yet such was the weight of this breastplate, that two men together could scarcely carry it on their shoulders.

[939] Il. ix. 484, and xvi. 196.

[940] Æn. ii. 7.

[941] Æn. vi. 432.

[942] Although it may be a deviation from the direct path, yet, having noticed in so much detail the unfaithfulness of Virgil to his original, I will also give an instance of the accuracy of Horace. In the Seventh Ode of the First Book, he has occasion to refer to the places made famous in Homeric song; and Athens with him is Palladis urbs; so Argos (ἱππόβοτον) is _aptum equis_, Mycænæ (πολύχρυσος) _dites_, Larissa (ἐριβώλαξ) _opima_. Lacedæmon is _patiens_, an epithet corresponding with no particular word in Homer, but not contradicted by any; it had acquired the character since his time.

[943] Il. v. 303. See also Il. xx. 285.

[944] Il. xii. 382.

[945] Ibid. 445-50.

[946] Homer names a Demoleon, son of Agenor; but he is slain fighting for the Trojans. Il. xx. 395.

‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebant
Multiplicem, connixi humeris[947].’

[947] Æn. vi. 233.

Let it not be thought that the varied examples, which have here been quoted, are either irrelevant or without serious significance. There cannot, surely, be a more decided error than to treat accuracy in matters of this kind as a matter of sheer indifference. It is not only inseparable from the function of the primitive Poet as the historian of his subject, but it appertains also to the perfection of his poetic nature, that he should have a nice sense of proportion even in figurative language. I have dwelt, however, upon minor points, not for their own sake, but because the manner in which Virgil handles them appears to throw no unimportant light upon the frame and temper of his work at large, and of the later as compared with the earliest poetry.

~_Contrast of principal aims._~

In diction, Virgil is ornate and Homer simple; in metre, Virgil is uniform and sustained, Homer free and varied; in the faculty of invention, for which the historical office of early poetry still leaves ample room, Homer is inexhaustible, while, from the needless accumulation of imitations in every sort and size, Virgil gives ground to suspect that he was poor, at least by comparison. The first thought of Homer was his subject, and the second his nation; the first thought of Virgil was his Emperor and the court around the throne, the second the elaboration of his verse. Characters, feelings, facts, were used by Virgil for producing on the mind the effect of scenic representation; the end of Homer, on the contrary, was to give adequate vent, in and through these things poetically conceived and handled, to his own yearnings, and to the sympathies of his hearers[948]. The intercommunion of spirit between the poet and those to whom he sang, was not in him a sordid quest of popularity; it was only an expression of the truth that he founded both his composition and his hopes upon the basis of a great effort to be the organ of the general heart of mankind. All this we may discern in his notices, informal as they are, of the profession of the minstrel:

[948] The aim of the poet as such is finely, but somewhat too exclusively, expressed in the Sonnet of Filicaja, _Dietro a questi ancor io_.

ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδὸν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων[949]·

[949] Od. xvii. 385.

in the names he assigns to them, where they were not historical characters, Δημόδοκος, and Φήμιος Τερπιάδης; in the moral uprightness with which he invests them; for, though it was the office of Phemius to delight, his heart was never with the licentious and guilty band that held the palace of Ulysses:

ὅς ῥ’ ἤειδε μετὰ μνηστῆρσιν ἀνάγκῃ[950].

[950] Od. xxii. 331.

And again, in the offices of guardianship which they exercised; for Agamemnon, when he left his home for Troy, carefully enjoined upon the bard of his palace the care of Clytemnestra; and his advice, with her own right sense, for a time stood her in good stead[951]. Such was the bard in the living description of Homer; such he was represented in the Poet himself, never thrust into view, but ever understood, ever perceived, through his works. On the other hand, the character of the bard, as exhibited in Virgil, is what may be termed professional: the fire and power of genius may be in him, but they must work only under conventional forms, and for ends prescribed according to the spirit of that lower and narrower utility which is, not logically perhaps, but yet very effectively, denominated utilitarianism. A remarkably high form of exterior art, with a radical inattention to substance, both of facts and laws, has been the result in the case of Virgil. And it is rather significant, that this great Poet has nowhere placed upon his canvass the figure of the bard amidst the abodes of man; as if the very type had perished from the earth in those degenerate days, and the memory of him could not be recalled. An effete and corrupted age could no longer conceive a mind like the mind of Homer; an Æolian harp so finely strung, that it answers to the faintest movement of the air by a proportionate vibration: with every stronger current its music rises, along an almost immeasurable scale, which begins with the lowest and softest whisper, and ends in the full swell of the organ.

[951] Od. iii. 267.

~_Change in the idea of the Poet’s office._~

By a false association of ideas, we have come to place accuracy and genius in antagonism to one another. It is Homer who may best undeceive us: except indeed that most complete solution which the mind gladly perceives when, ascending to the Author of all being, it finds in Him alone the source and the perfection, alike of Order and of Light; alike of the most minute, and of the most gigantic operations. But among men Homer best exemplifies this union. It is not indeed the precision of dry facts, terminating upon itself: it is the precision of sympathies, of sympathies with nature and with man, to which the minute and scrupulous adjustments of Homer are to be referred; and this precision is probably due by no means to conscious effort, but to the spontaneous operations of the soul. In this view his far-famed, but not even yet fully fathomed, accuracy is no deduction from his greatness, but is in truth a proof of the near approach to perfection in the organization of his faculties. The later poets have too often torn asunder, what in him was harmoniously combined. They have conferred upon their art a deadly gift, in claiming first an exemption _ad libitum_ from the laws, not only of dry fact, but of Truth in its higher sense, of harmony and self-consistency, and of all, except a merely external beauty, which was meant to be the vehicle and not the substitute for all those great and discarded qualities. In this work of laceration, Virgil has borne no secondary share.

Upon the whole, though it is doubtless natural that Virgil should be compared with Homer, the mind is astonished at finding that he should so often even have gained a preference. We may account for his being chosen as Dante’s guide, by their being countrymen, and by the almost universal ignorance of Greek when Dante wrote. It is far more staggering to find Saint Augustine emphatically call him[952] _Poeta magnus omniumque præclarissimus atque optimus_; for he was no stranger to Greek influences, inasmuch as the philosophy of Plato had a very high place in his estimation[953]. Nor can this be readily accounted for, except by the advantage which Virgil had through writing in the Latin tongue, and by the very great decay of poetical tastes and perceptions.

[952] De Civ. Dei, i. 3.

[953] Ibid. viii. 4-11.

Still let us not do wrong to the memory of him, who thrilled with an immeasurable love, as he bore the sacred vessels of the Muses; and who has received so unequivocally the seal of that approbation of mankind, prolonged through ages, which comes near to an infallible award. It is but fair to admit, that we must not measure the relative rank of Homer and Virgil simply by the comparative merits of their epic works. Homer lived in the genial and joyous youth of a poetic nation and a poetic religion, and amid the influences of the soul of freedom: Virgil among a people always matter-of-fact rather than poetical, in an age and a court where the heart and its emotions were chilled, where liberty was dead, where religion was a mockery, and the whole higher material of his art had passed from freshness into the sear and yellow leaf. Whether Virgil, if he had lived the life of Homer in Homer’s country and Homer’s time, could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, may be more than doubtful; but it is indisputably clear that Homer could not have produced them, if it had been his misfortune to live at the date and in the sphere of Virgil.

I pass on now to make some attempt at comparison between the work of Tasso and the Iliad of Homer. But although the relation between the subjects appears to recommend the choice of Tasso for this purpose rather than any other Italian poet, I have to confess, that as far as the qualities of the men are concerned, both Bojardo and Ariosto are in my estimation more Homeric than Tasso; as being nearer to nature in its truest sense, as not conveying the same impression of perpetual effort and elaboration, as exempt from the temptation to the conceits so unhappily frequent in the _Gerusalemme_, and generally as working with a freer and broader touch, and exhibiting a more vigorous and elastic movement.

~_The War of Troy and the Crusades._~

There is, however, a striking resemblance between the relation in which the Trojan war stood to Greece, and that of the Crusades to Western Europe. The political unity and collective existence of Greece was greatly due to the first, that of Christendom to the second. The combination of races and of chiefs, the arduous character and extraordinary prolongation of the effort, the chivalry displayed, the disorganizing effects upon the countries which supplied the invading army, the representation in each of Europe against Asia, of Western mankind meeting Eastern mankind in arms, and the proof of superior prowess in the former, establish many broad and deep analogies between the subjects of these poems. In both struggles, too, the object purported to be the recovery of that which the East had unrighteously acquired: and into both what is called sentiment far more largely entered, than is common in the history of the wars which have laid desolate our earth.

~_Exaggeration as used by Homer and by Tasso._~

As Godfrey is Tasso’s version of Agamemnon, so the Rinaldo of Tasso occupies a place in the Jerusalem, similar to that of Achilles in the Iliad. Now the whole character of Achilles, mental and corporeal, which ranks at least among the most wonderful of all the works of Homer, is colossal and vast, but is not unduly exaggerated. Although the son of Peleus evidently was of great bodily size, yet Homer never calls him by the epithets μέγας and πελώριος, but reserves them for Ajax, because they suggest a predominance of the animal over the incorporeal element, which, in the case of Achilles, the Poet utterly eschews. The character of Rinaldo as a warrior (and in no other respect does he present any salient point) is, as will be shown, exaggerated unduly, but yet does not leave the impression of the vast or colossal, because the excess beyond common nature is not in harmony with the rest of the delineation.

Thus the strength of Achilles is the very highest; none can use his spear. But Rinaldo, in the assault of the Tower, does the work of a battering-ram. He takes up and carries a beam, of which we are told,

Nè così alte mai, nè così grosse
Spiega l’ antenne sue ligura nave[954].

[954] Gerus. xix. 36.

With this he breaks the bars, and beats down the gates; and the stanza proceeds:

Non l’ ariète di far più si vanti,
Non la bombarda, fulmine di morte[955].

[955] Ibid. 37.

No such excess of muscular power as this is ascribed to Achilles; and yet a much more lively impression of grandeur in his martial character is left upon the mind of the reader; the fact being that mere exaggeration freezes, while the adjusted representation of greatness warms.

The largest size assigned by Homer to any even of his mythological personages who are in relations with man, and this only in the Shades below, is in the case of Otus and Ephialtes. At nine years old, when they were put to death, they were nine cubits broad, nine fathoms (fifty-four feet) high[956]. These were they, who piled the mountains up to heaven. They are among the few figures absolutely gigantic, which appear in Homer; but they hover only in the distance through the mists of the Under-world, and in describing even them he has adhered strictly to the limits of what may be termed the gigantesque. Further on, he describes Tityus as reaching over nine acres; but he nowhere presents any such person to us in active motion, or in any relation with man on earth. In Il. xxi. however, occurs a passage which it is more easy to impugn; for Mars, who had marched about among the Trojans and the Greeks in battle without driving either friends or foes from their propriety by his bulk, and had fought with Diomed in the plain of Troy on terms favourable to that hero, when overthrown by Minerva in the battle of the gods, covers seven acres (407). Although Homer has skilfully avoided localizing the conflict, this may be thought to wear the aspect of a poetical incongruity; because in the Mars of the Theomachy we cannot wholly forget the Mars of the plain. As a general rule, however, Homer does not employ vast size, except in cases where it can suggest no comparison with objects of ordinary dimensions, and where, accordingly, it in no way jars with our customary standard.

[956] Od. xi. 311.

But if there be incongruity in the dimensions of the prostrate Mars of Homer, what shall we say to Tasso, who, carefully setting out in detail that his infernal assembly is held within the four walls of the palace of Pluto, describes the sub-terranean monarch, when he sits in actual council, as exceeding in mass, and that immeasurably, any mountain whatever?

Nè tanto scoglio in mar, nè rupe alpestra,
Nè pur Calpe s’ innalza, o ’l magno Atlante,
Ch’ anzi lui non paresse un picciol colle[957].

[957] Gerus. iv. 6.

Thus, where Homer is in excess, Tasso multiplies upon him by a thousandfold. This is not grandeur, but extravagance; nor is it vastness, but indistinctness, of which an impression is left upon the mind. The passage is followed by a description of the countenance and gorge of Pluto, which all readers must remember, but which all readers must likewise wish they could forget. In general it is curious to compare the very sparing use which Homer has made of mere bulk as a poetical engine, with the boundless redundance of it, not only even to nausea in such writers as Fortiguerra, who vulgarize everything they touch, but even in a patriarch of Italian romance like Bojardo.