Chapter XI (3)

Others again are suggested by his subtle and sympathetic discernment of the conditions of inward feeling; as the comparison at iv. 70, etc. of Dido to the hind, which, unsuspecting of danger, has received a mortal wound from a hand ignorant of the harm which it has inflicted—

haeret lateri letalis harundo.

The awe and mystery of the unseen world suggest the comparison of the crowd of shades pressing round Charon’s boat to innumerable leaves falling in the woods, or to flocks of birds driven across the sea by the first cold of autumn—

Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto
Quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus
Trans pontum fugat et terris inmittit apricis(678).

The point of comparison in this simile is not merely the obvious one of the number of leaves falling or birds flying across the sea in autumn, but rather the inner likeness between the passive helplessness with which the leaves have yielded to the chill touch of the year, and that with which the shades—νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα—have yielded to the chill touch of death. Nor perhaps is it pressing the language of Virgil too far to suppose that in the words ‘terris inmittit apricis’ he means to leave on the mind a feeling of some happier possibilities in death than the certainty of ‘cold obstruction.’ One of the most characteristically Virgilian similes—that at vi. 453—

qualem primo qui surgere mense
Aut videt, aut vidisse putat per nubila Lunam—

is almost a translation of the lines of Apollonius (iv. 1447)—

τὼς ἰδέειν, ὥς τίς τε νέῳ ἐνὶ ἤματι μήνην
ἢ ἴδεν, ἢ ἐδόκησεν ἐπαχλύουσαν ἰδέσθαι(679),—

but the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower world. Other images are suggested by the poet’s delicate sense of grace in flower or plant, combined with his tender compassion for the beauty of youth perishing prematurely. Such are those which enable us more vividly to realise the pathos of the death of Euryalus and of the burial of Pallas. Yet though these images are characteristically Virgilian, they also bear unmistakeable traces of imitation. The lines—

Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo
Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur(680);

and again—

Qualem, virgineo demessum pollice, florem,
Seu mollis violae, seu languentis hyacinthi,
Cui neque fulgor adhuc, nec dum sua forma recessit;
Non iam mater alit tellus, viresque ministrat(681)—

recall not only the thought and feeling of Homer—

μήκων δ’ ὣς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν etc.,

but the cadences and most cherished illustrations of Catullus, in whose imagination the grace of trees and the bloom of flowers are ever associated with the grace and bloom of youth and youthful passion.

Had Virgil lived to devote three more years to the revisal of his work, there is no reason to suppose that he would have added anything to its substance. Some inconsistencies of statement, as, for instance, that between iii. 256 and vii. 123, would have disappeared, and some difficulties would have been cleared up. But the chief part of the ‘limae labor’ would have been employed in bringing the rhythm and diction of the poem to a more finished perfection than that which they exhibit at present. The unfinished lines in the poem would certainly have been completed and more closely connected with the passages immediately succeeding them. There is no indication that these lines were left purposely incomplete in order to give emphasis to some pause in the narrative. Virgil was the last poet likely to avail himself of so inartistic an innovation to give variety to his cadences. For the most part they appear to be weak props (‘tibicines’(682)) used provisionally to fill up the gap between two passages, and indicating but not completing the thought that was to connect them.

What more of elegance, of compact structure, or of varied harmony Virgil might have imparted to his rhythm, it is impossible to determine. We might conjecture that his aim would have been, as regards both expression and metrical effect, to act on the maxim ‘ramos compesce fluentes,’ than to give them ampler scope. In a long narrative poem like the Aeneid that perfect smoothness and solidity of rhythmical execution which characterise the Georgics—in which poem the position and weight of each single word in each single line is an element contributing to the whole effect—is hardly to be expected. A narrative poem demands a more easy, varied, and even careless movement than one of which the interest is contemplative, and which requires to be studied minutely line by line and paragraph by paragraph, before its full meaning is realised. If the movement in the Aeneid appears in some place rougher, or less compact, or more languid than in others, this may be explained not only by the imperfect state in which the poem was left, but by the difficulty or impossibility of maintaining the same uniform level of elevation in so long a flight. Yet it cannot be said that there is any loss of power, any trace of contentment with a lower ideal of perfection in the general structure of the verse of the Aeneid. The full capacities of the Latin hexameter for purposes of animated or impressive narrative, of solemn or pathetic representation, of grave or impassioned oratory, of tender, dignified, or earnest appeal to the higher emotions of man, are realised in many passages of the poem. Virgil’s instrument fails, or, at least, is much inferior to Homer’s, in aptitude for natural dialogue or for bringing familiar things in the freshness of immediate impression before the imagination. The stateliness of movement appropriate to such utterances as

Ast ego quae Divom incedo regina(683)

does not readily adapt itself to the description of the process of kindling a fire or preparing a meal—

Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates,
Suscepitque ignem foliis atque arida circum
Nutrimenta dedit rapuitque in fomite flammam(684).

To English readers the verse of the Aeneid may appear inferior in majesty and fulness of volume to that of Milton in his passages of most sustained power; but it is easier and less encumbered and thus more adapted to express various conditions of human life than the ordinary movement of the modern epic. It flows in a more varied, weighty, and self-restrained stream than the more homogeneous and overflowing current of Spenser’s verse. The Latin hexameter became for Virgil an exquisite and powerful medium for communicating to others a knowledge of his elevated moods and pensive meditativeness, and for calling up before their minds that spectacle of a statelier life and a more august order in the contemplation of which his spirit habitually lived.

The last revision would also have removed from the poem some redundancies, obscurities, and weakness of expression. There is a greater tendency to use ‘otiose’ epithets than in the Georgics, and a minute criticism has taken note of the number of times in which such words as ‘ingens’ and ‘immanis’ occur in the poem. Though the interpretation of the meaning of the Aeneid as a whole is probably as certain as that of any other great work of antiquity, yet there are passages in it which still baffle commentators in deciding which of two or three possible meanings was in the mind of the poet, or whether he had himself finally resolved what turn he should give his thought. As there are lines left incomplete, so there are lame conclusions to lofty and impassioned utterances of feeling. Such for instance is the prosaic and tautological conclusion of the passage in which Lausus is brought on the scene—

dignus, patriis qui laetior esset
Imperiis et cui pater haud Mezentius esset(685).

But it is only a microscopic observation of the structure of the poem that detects such blemishes as these. In the Aeneid Virgil’s style appears as great in its power of reaching the secrets of the human spirit, as in the Georgics it proved itself to be in eliciting the deeper meaning of Nature. He combines nearly all the characteristic excellences of the great Latin writers. His language appears indeed inferior not only to that of Lucretius and Catullus but even to that of Ennius in reproducing the first vivid impressions of things upon the mind. The phrases of Virgil are generally coloured with the associations and steeped in the feeling of older thoughts and memories. Yet if he seems inferior in direct force of presentation, he unites the two most marked and generally dissociated characteristics of the masters of Latin style,—the exuberance and vivacity of those writers in whom impulse and imagination are strong, such as Cicero, Livy, and Lucretius,—the terseness and compactness of expression, arising either from intensity of perception or reflective condensation, of which the shorter poems of Catullus, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the writings of Sallust, and the memorial inscriptions of the time of the Republic and of the Empire afford striking examples. Virgil’s condensation of expression often resembles that of Tacitus, and seems to arise from the same cause, the restraint imposed by reflexion on the exuberance of a poetical imagination. By its combination of opposite excellences the style of the Aeneid is at once an admirable vehicle of continuous or compressed narrative, of large or concentrated description, of fluent and impassioned, or composed and impressive oratory. It possesses also the power, which distinguishes the older Latin writers, of stamping some grave or magnanimous lesson in imperishable characters on the mind—

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.
Disce puer virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis.
Aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum
Finge deo(686).

But Virgil is not only great as a Latin writer. The concurrent testimony of the most refined minds of all times marks him out as one of the greatest masters of the language which touches the heart or moves the manlier sensibilities, who has ever lived. A mature and mellow truth of sentiment, a conformity to the deeper experiences of life in every age, a fine humanity as well as a generous elevation of feeling, and some magical charm of music in his words, have enabled them to serve many minds in many ages as a symbol of some swelling thought or over-mastering emotion, the force and meaning of which they could scarcely define to themselves. A striking instance of this effect appears in the words in which Savonarola describes the impulse which forced him to abandon the career of worldly ambition, which his father pressed on him, in favour of the religious life. It was the voice of warning which he ever heard repeating to him the words—

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum(687).

And while his tenderness of feeling has made Virgil the familiar friend of one class of minds, his high magnanimous spirit has equally gained for him the admiration of another class. The words of no other poet, ancient or modern, have been so often heard in the great debates of the English Parliament, which more than any other deliberations among men have reproduced the dignified and masculine eloquence familiar to the Roman Senate. One of the greatest masters of expression among living English writers has pointed, as characteristic of the magic of Virgil’s style, to ‘his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which is the experience of her children in every time(688).’ It is in the expression of this weariness and deep longing for rest, in making others feel his own sense of the painful toil and mystery of life and of the sadness of death, his sense too of vague yearning for some fuller and ampler being, that Virgil produces the most powerful effect by the use of the simplest words in their simplest application.

‘O passi graviora—’
‘Vobis parta quies—’
‘Dis aliter visum—’
‘Di, si qua est caelo pietas—’
‘Heu vatum ignarae mentes—’
‘Iam pridem invisus superis et inutilis annos
Demoror—’
‘Si pereo hominum manibus periisse iuvabit—’
‘Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis—’
‘Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda—’
‘Impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum—’
‘Quod te per caeli iucundum lumen et auras—’
‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore—’
‘Securos latices et longa oblivia potant—(689)’

these and many other pregnant sayings affect the mind with a strange potency, of which perhaps no account can be given except that they make us feel, as scarcely any other words do, the burden of the mystery of life, and by their marvellous beauty, the reflexion, it may be, from some light dimly discerned or imagined(690) beyond the gloom, they make it seem more easy to be borne.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

1 Eclog. ix. 35.

2 ‘Leporum
Disertus puer ac facetiarum.’ Catullus xii. 8.

3 The name of Trebatius also, though one associated with law rather
than literature, may be added as a connecting link between the
friends of Cicero and of Horace.

4 Munro’s Lucretius, Introduction to Notes, ii. page 305.

5 ‘These writers your fine Hermogenes never reads, nor that ape, whose
whole art is to repeat the songs of Calvus and Catullus.’ Hor. Sat.
i. 10. 17–19.

6 Hor. Sat. ii. 1. 11.

7 Ann. i. 1; Hist. i. 1.

8 Cf. Juv. ii. 28: In tabulam Sullae si dicant discipuli tres.

9 Od. iii. 4. 28.

10 Cf. Eleg. i. 41–42:—

Non ego divitias patrum fructusque requiro
Quos tulit antiquo condita messis avo.

11 Cf. v. 1. 129–130:—

Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci
Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.

12 ‘Imbellis et firmus parum.’ Ep. i. 16.

13 Eleg. i. 1; i. 10.

14 ‘On the one side Augustus leading the Italians into battle with the
Senate and people, the Penates and the great Gods—on the other
Antonius with a barbaric and motley host, advancing in triumph from
the peoples of the dawn and the shore of the Red Sea, bears with him
Egypt, and the might of the East, and furthest Bactria, and
following in his train,—sin accursed!—an Egyptian bride.’ Aen. viii.
678 _et seq._

15 ‘Be it thine, O Roman, to govern the nations with thy imperial
rule.’

16 ‘Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.’ Ennius.

17 In the Ancyraean inscription we find the following passage (Bergk’s
reading): ‘Legibus novis latis multa revocavi exempla maiorum
exolescentia iam ex nostra civitate,’ etc.

18 Cf. Ancyraean inscription: ‘Templum Apollinis in Palatio cum
porticibus, aedem Divi Iulii, Lupercal,’ etc. (where we notice the
recognition of the divinity of Julius Caesar, along with the old
Olympian and national gods, Apollo, Jupiter Tonans and Feretrius,
Quirinus, the Lares and Penates, and with the deified abstractions
Libertas and Juventas).

19 A similar influence is attributed by M. Sainte-Beuve to Louis XIV.
After speaking of the freedom and licence of French literature under
the patronage of Fouquet, he adds, ‘Le jeune roi vint, et il amena,
il suscita avec lui sa jeune littérature; il mit le correctif à
l’ancienne, et, sauf des infractions brillantes, il imprima à
l’ensemble des productions de son temps un caractère de solidité, et
finalement de moralité, qui est aussi celui qui règne dans ses
propres écrits, et dans l’habitude de sa pensée.’

20 Aen. vi. 795.

21 Hor. Od. iv. 15. 9.

22 Aen. viii. 678 _et seq._

23 Hor. Od. i. 2. 50.

24 Aen. i. 287; vi. 796; Hor. Od. iv. 15. 15.

25 Aen. i. 288.

26 Georg. ii. 170.

27 Aen. viii. 716.

28 Hor. Od. iv. 5. 20; Ep. ii. 1. 2.

29 ‘Ad hoc templum divo Claudio constitutum quasi arx aeternae
dominationis aspiciebatur.’ Tac. Ann. xiv. 31.

30 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

31 Od. iii. 3. 9, etc.; Ep. ii. 1. 5.

32 Aen. vi. 801.

33 Od. iv. 5.

34 These comparisons may be more naturally referred to Roman
‘Euhemerism,’ than to the survival of the spirit of hero-worship,
which, although still active in Greece, was a mode of feeling alien
to the Roman imagination.

35 Cp. infra, chap. vi.

36 The belief in the divinity of the genius attending on each
individual, and also the custom of raising altars to some abstract
quality in an individual, such as the ‘Clemency of Caesar,’ help
also to explain this supposed union of the god and man in the person
of the Emperor. The language of Virgil in Eclogue IV. also throws
light on the ideas possible as to the union of the divine with human
nature.

37 This is indicated by the bare feet.

38 The substance of these remarks is taken from the late O. Jahn’s
‘Höfische Kunst und Poesie unter Augustus,’ published in his
‘Populäre Aufsätze.’ The account of the cameos is given solely on
his authority. Several ideas on the whole subject of the deification
of the Emperors are derived from the same source.

39 Sueton. De Vita Caesarum, ii. 90 _et seq._

40 ‘Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia ab aetate prima et cupide et
laboriosissime exercuit.’ Sueton. ii. 84.

‘Augusto prompta ac profluens, quaeque deceret principem, eloquentia
fuit.’ Tac. Ann. xiii. 3.

41 ‘Aiacem tragoediam scripserat, eandemque, quod sibi displicuisset,
deleverat. Postea L. Varius tragoediarum scriptor interrogabat eum,
quid ageret Aiax suus. Et ille, “in spongium,” inquit, “incubuit.”’
Macrob. ii. 4. 2.

42 Sat. ii. 1. 20.

43 Ep. ii. 1. 248.

44 Essays Literary and Theological, by R. H. Hutton.

45 Cf. Propert. El. iv. 9. 34:—

Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides.

Do. ii. 1. 36:—

Et sumta et posita pace fidele caput.

46 Velleius ii. 88.

47 Tac. Ann. iii. 30: ‘Ille quamquam prompto ad capessendos honores
aditu, Maecenatem aemulatus sine dignitate senatoria multos
triumphalium consulariumque potentia anteiit, diversus a veterum
instituto per cultum et munditias, copiaque et affluentia luxu
propior: suberat tamen vigor animi ingentibus negotiis par, eo
acrior quo somnum et inertiam magis ostentabat.’

48 ‘Gallus for whom my love grows from hour to hour even as the green
alder-tree shoots up in the early spring.’

49 Eclog. vi. 70, etc.

50 Sat. vii. 93, 94.

51 ‘When you say it makes no matter what a man’s father was, provided
he is of free-birth.’ Sat. i. 6. 7–8.

52 ‘And as when often in a mighty multitude discord has arisen and the
base rabble storms with passion.’

53 ‘Ancus, unduly vain, even already delighting too much in the veering
wind of the people’s favour.’

54 Cp. Merivale’s Roman Empire.

55 Vester, Camenae, vester in arduos
Tollor Sabinos; seu mihi frigidum
Praeneste, seu Tibur supinum,
Seu liquidae placuere Baiae. Od. iii. 4. 21–24.

56 Cf. the lines of Juvenal, vii. 66–68, in especial reference to
Virgil:—

Magnae mentis opus nec de lodice paranda
Attonitae, currus et equos, faciesque Deorum
Aspicere, et qualis Rutulum confundat Erinnys, etc.

57 ‘’Gainst flaming Sirius’ fury thou
Art proof, and grateful cool dost yield
To oxen wearied with the plough,
And flocks that range afield.’ Martin.

58 ‘May my delight be in the fields and the flowing streams in the
dales; unknown to fame may I love the rivers and the woods. O to be,
where are the plains, and the Spercheos, and the heights, roamed
over in their revels by Laconian maidens, the heights of Taygetus.’

59 Cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 470: ‘Mollesque sub arbore somni.’
Hor. Ep. i. 14. 35: ‘Prope rivum somnus in herba.’
Virg. Eclog. ii. 40: ‘Nec tuta mihi valle reperti.’
Hor. Ep. i. 11. 10: ‘Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem.’

60 ‘It is great riches for a man to live sparingly with a contented
mind.’

61 Ep. i. 14. 34–35.

62 Compare Munro’s Lucretius, p. 306 (third edition).

63 ‘To be sleepless through the calm nights, searching by what words
and verse I may succeed in holding a bright light before your mind,
by which you may be able to see thoroughly things hidden from view.’

64 ‘While I seem ever to be plying this task, to be searching into the
nature of things, and revealing it, when discovered, in writings in
my native speech.’

65 iii. 8.

66 Virg. Eclog. vi. 72; x. 50.

67 Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

68 ‘All other themes which might have charmed the idle mind in song,’
etc.

69 Born at Alexandria, but afterwards settled at Rhodes. He ultimately
returned to Alexandria.

70 ‘Often did Macer, now advanced in years, read to me his poem on
birds, and of the serpent whose sting is deadly, and of the herb
that heals.’ Trist. iv. 10. 43–44.

71 Sueton. De Viris Illustribus.

72 ‘Lead him home from the city, my strain, lead Daphnis home.’

73 Woermann, Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und
Römer; Helbig, Campanische Wandmalerei.

74 Cf. ‘Senecae praedivitis hortos.’ Juv. ‘Pariterque hortis inhians,
quos ille a Lucullo coeptos insigni magnificentia extollebat.’ Tac.
Ann. xi. 1.

75 The substance of these remarks is derived from Helbig’s Campanische
Wandmalerei.

76 Cf. Plautus, Pseudolus, i. 2. 14:—

Neque Alexandrina beluata conchuliata tapetia.

77 Scholium quoted by W. S. Teuffel in his account of L. Varius.

78 Tristia, iv. 10. 41, etc.

79 W. S. Teuffel.

80 Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius: ille meo quis?
Quis nisi Callimachus? Si plus adposcere visus,
Fit Mimnermus, et optivo cognomine crescit. Ep. ii. 2. 99.

Propertius may have been dead at the time when these lines were
published; but we may remember that the famous lines on ‘Atticus’
did not see the light till after the death of Addison.

81 ‘And the musical voice of Horace charmed my ears, while he makes his
polished song resound on the Ausonian lyre.’

82 Od. iv. 3. 13. 16:—

‘At Rome, of all earth’s cities queen,
Men deign to rank me in the noble press
Of bards beloved of man: and now, I ween,
Doth envy’s rancorous tooth assail me less.’ Martin.

83 Ep. i. 19. 19–20.

‘O servile crew! how oft your antics mean
Have moved my laughter, oh, how oft my spleen.’ Martin.

84 Ep. ii. 1. 117.

‘’Tis writing, writing now is all the rage.’ Martin.

85 ‘After the result of the campaign of Actium, when the interests of
peace demanded that supreme power should be conferred on one man,
those great geniuses disappeared. Truth too suffered in many ways,
at first from ignorance of public life, as a matter with which men
had no concern, and soon from the spirit of adulation.’ Hist. i. 1.

86 E. Quinet.

87 Traditum ab antiquis morem. Hor. Sat. i. 4. 117.

88 Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, etc. Hor. Od. iii. 4. 9.

89 ‘Virgile depuis l’heure où il parut a été le poëte de la Latinité
tout entière.’ Sainte-Beuve.

90 ‘To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,’ ‘who sang the idle songs
of shepherds,’ ‘my task is on a lowly theme.’

91 ‘I must strive to find a way by which I may raise myself too above
the ground, and speed to and fro triumphant through the mouths of
men.’

92 ‘Give place, all ye Roman writers, give place, ye Greeks: some work,
I know not what, is coming to the birth, greater than the Iliad.’
Eleg. iii. 32, 64–65.

93 Cf. Wölflin in the Philologus, xxvi, quoted by Comparetti.

94 Tac. De Oratoribus, ch. xiii.

95 ‘Si Virgile faisait aux Romains cette illusion d’avoir égalé ou
surpassé Homère, c’est qu’il avait touché fortement la fibre
Romaine.’ Sainte-Beuve.

96 ‘Live then, I pray, yet rival not the divine Aeneid, but follow it
from afar, and ever reverence its track.’ Thebaid xii. 816.

97 ‘Mantua, home of the Muses, raised to the stars by Aonian song, and
rival of the music of Smyrna.’ Silius, Punic. viii. 595.

98 E.g. iv. 14. 14; xii. 4. 1; xiv. 186; v. 10. 7; viii. 56, etc.

99 viii. 18. 5–9.

100 Ep. iii. 7.

101 E.g. i. 162; iii. 199; v. 45, 138, vi. 434, etc.; vii. 66, 226, 236,
etc.

102 ‘When the whole Horace had lost its natural colour, and the soot was
sticking to the blackened Virgil.’ vii. 226.

103 Green’s History of the English People, p. 37.

104 Quoted by Comparetti; and also in Bähr’s Römische Literatur.

105 Works of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, by John Small, M.A., vol.
i. p. cxlv.

106 Carlyle’s Translation of the Inferno.

107 Mr. Small, in his account of the writings of Bishop Gavin Douglas,
says, ‘The works of Virgil passed through ninety editions before the
year 1500.’

108 See Conington’s Introduction to the Aeneid.

109 Appendix to the Henriade.

110 Dict. Philos., art. Epopée.

111 Quoted by Comparetti.

112 Sainte-Beuve, ‘Causeries du Lundi.’

113 By Mr. Payne, in the Clarendon Press Series.

114 ‘Who shall say what share the turning over and over in their mind,
and masticating, so to speak, in early life as models of their Latin
verse, such things as Virgil’s

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,

or Horace’s

Fortuna saevo laeta negotio,

has not had in forming the high spirit of the upper class in France
and England, the two countries where Latin verse has most ruled the
schools, and the two countries which most have had, or have, a high
upper class and a high upper class spirit?’ High Schools and
Universities in Germany, by M. Arnold.

115 ‘Add too the companions of the Muses of Helicon, amongst whom Homer,
the peerless, after holding the sceptre—.’

116 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

117 i. 24. 11.

118 Vol. i. p. 197, Hare and Thirlwall’s translation.

119 Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii. p. 131 _et seq._ (London,
1855.)

120 Conington’s Virgil, Introduction to vol. ii.

121 Introduction to Eclogue v.

122 Book iii. chap. xiv.

123 He adds the comment, ‘Equidem dubito num legerit. Nam et philologos
ita iudicare audivi de Virgilio ut non legisse eos appareret.’

124 Questions Contemporaines. L’Instruction Supérieure en France.

125 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v.

126 Roman Empire, chap. xli.

127 Étude sur Virgile.

128 La Cité antique.

129 Études sur la Poésie latine.

130 ‘A land of old renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil.’

131 ‘Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini
Quirites atavique Romani,’ etc. Columella.

132 Cf. Lucretius, iii. 105–106:

Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum
Cum redeunt felusque ferunt variosque lepores.

133 ‘Hail mighty mother of harvests, Saturnian land, mighty mother of
men.’

134 ‘Virgile fut en effet une des âmes les plus chrétiennes du
Paganisme. Quoique attaché de tout son cœur à l’ancienne religion,
il a semblé quelquefois pressentir la nouvelle, et un Chrétien pieux
pourrait croire qu’il ne lui manqua pour l’embrasser que de la
connaître.’ Gaston Boissier.

135 ‘As it falls it awakens a hoarse murmur among the smooth stones, and
with its bubbling waters cools the parched fields.’

136 It is in the poems connected with this theme that Horace writes most
from the heart; yet even where he writes chiefly from the head he
imparts the same vital realism to the results of his reflection.

137 ‘We are not the first to whom things of beauty appear beautiful,—we
who are mortal men, and behold not the morrow.’

138 Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman.

139 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

140 Quoted by Reifferscheid in his Suetonii Reliquiae.

141 For the name _Catalepton_ cp. Professor Nettleship’s _Vergil_ in
_Classical Writers_, p. 23.

142 ‘Sed tanta inchoata res est, ut paene vitio mentis tantum opus
ingressus mihi videar, cum praesertim alia quoque studia ad id opus
multoque potiora impertiar.’ Macrob. Sat. i. 24. 11. The ‘potiora
studia’ seem clearly to mean the philosophical studies, to which his
biographer says he meant to devote the remainder of his life after
publishing the Aeneid.

143 ‘A way remote from the world and the path of a life that passes by
unnoticed.’

Cp. ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.’

144 Cf. Reifferscheid, Quaestiones Suetonianae, p. 400. Hagen, De
Donatianae Vergilii vitae Codicibus, prefixed to his edition of the
Scholia Bernensia. De vita et scriptis P. Vergili Maronis narratio,
prefixed to Ribbeck’s text in the Teubner edition of Virgil.

145 Ribbeck, Prolegomena, cap. viii.

146 Gossrau, in his edition of the Aeneid (1876), argues and quotes
authorities in favour of retaining the older form _Virgilius_.

147 Cf. Pliny, Ep. iii. 7. Martial, xii. 67:—

Octobres Maro consecravit Idus.

148 ‘But no single day used then to give to their doom many thousands of
men marshalled under their standards.’ Lucret. v. 999.

149 ‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

150 ‘From here, under some high rock, the song of the woodsman will rise
into the air.’

151 ‘I had indeed heard that from the spot where the hills begin to draw
themselves away from the plain, sinking down with a gentle slope, as
far as the river and the old beeches, with their now withered tops,
your Menalcas had saved all his land by his songs.’

152 ‘Yet we shall reach the town: or if we fear that night may first
bring the rain—’

153 ‘The herds will not lack their clear springs, nor their pasture.’

154 Cf. Eustace, vol. i. chap. v. Compare also the following
characteristic passage quoted from Dickens by Mr. Hare in his Cities
of Northern and Central Italy: ‘Was the way to Mantua as beautiful
when Romeo was banished thither, I wonder? Did it wind _through
pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams_, and
dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees? _Those purple mountains
lay on the horizon_, then, for certain.’ Dickens certainly was not
looking for Virgilian reminiscences in writing this description.

155 ‘And thou, Benacus, uprising with waves and roar like that of the
sea.’

156 ‘And such a plain as ill-fated Mantua lost, a plain which fed its
snow-white swans on its weedy river.’

157 Aeneid, x. 204.

158 ‘Vergilius—nomen vix dubiae originis Gallicae. Cf. Vergiliae
(stellae), Propert. i. 8. 10, Plin. fq. Οὐεργιλία (Oppid. Hispan.),
Ptol. 2. 5. Radix vetust. Camb. _guerg._ (efficax) gl. Ox. extat
etiam in vetusto nomine apud Caes.’ Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica, p.
11, edit. altera: Berol. 1871.

159 Cic. Epp. ad Att. vii. 7; ad Fam. xvi. 12.

160 Cic. Epp. ad Att. v. 2.

161 ‘But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,
His cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,
Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride
Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills.’ Martin.

162 ‘Meanwhile, cheering her long task with song, his wife runs over the
web with her sounding shuttle.’

163 Ferunt infantem, cum sit editus, neque vagisse, et adeo miti vultu
fuisse, ut haud dubiam spem prosperioris geniturae jam tunc
indicaret.

164 Siquidem virga populea more regionis in puerperiis eodem statim loco
depacta ita brevi evaluit tempore ut multo ante satas populos
adaequasset, quae arbor Virgilii ex eo dicta atque etiam consecrata
est summa gravidarum ac fetarum religione.

The resemblance of the name to the word virga is probably at the
root of this story.

165 ‘You will now be to him what Mantua and Cremona were before.’

166 ‘Hence, away, empty phrases of the Rhetoricians, words swollen with
water not from a Greek source, and you, ye Stilos, and Tarquiti, and
Varros, tribe of grammarians oozing over with fat, away hence
tinkling cymbal of our empty youth.... I shape my course to the
blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siron, and
will redeem my life from every care.’

167 ‘For, I shall own the truth, ye were dear to me.’

168 ‘But me a passionate delight hurries along over the lonely heights
of Parnassus.’

169 ‘When I would sing of kings and battles, Apollo pulled my ear and
warned me.’

170 ‘Cottage that belonged to Siron, and poor plot of ground, although
deemed great riches by your former owner.’

171 Hor. Ep. ii. 1. 246.

172 ‘Tenderness and grace have been granted to Virgil by the Muses who
delight in the country.’

173 ‘Maecenas goes to play at fives, Virgil and I to sleep, for that
game does not agree with those suffering from dyspepsia and weak
eyes.’

174 ‘Yet there will remain some vestiges of the ancient sin, which will
induce men to tempt the sea in ships.’

175 ‘No more sincere souls has the earth ever borne, nor any to whom
there is a more devoted friend than I.’

176 ‘I then had my home in sweet Parthenope, happy in the pursuits of an
inglorious idleness.’

177 ‘You sing, beneath the pine-woods of the shaded Galaesus, Thyrsis
and Daphnis on your well-worn reeds.’

178 Cf. supra, p. 69.

179 ‘Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat,
sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.’ Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle:
‘Il lui était utile même d’avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la
bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.’

180 Cp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem
of Catullus.

181 The German historians of Roman literature are more just in their
judgment of Virgil’s character than of his genius. Thus W. S.
Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous
remark—‘Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen
Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer
amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an
Vergil unbegreiflich war.’

182 ‘He was gentle here on earth, and is gentle there.’ Aristoph. Frogs,
82.

183 Cf. Reifferscheid, p. 67.

184 ‘Whatsoever it shall be, every fortune must be mastered by bearing
it.’
‘Learn, my son, from me to bear yourself like a man and to strive
earnestly, from others learn to be fortunate.’

185 Compare the lines of Coleridge on hearing ‘The Prelude’ read aloud
by Wordsworth:—

‘An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.’

186 ‘I, the idle singer of a pastoral song, who in the boldness of youth
made thee, O Tityrus, beneath the shade of the spreading beech, my
theme.’

187 The lines of Propertius—

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus,

might suggest the inference that the seventh was composed at the
time when Virgil was residing in the neighbourhood of Tarentum. But,
at the time when Propertius wrote, Virgil was engaged in the
composition of the Aeneid, not of the Eclogues. The present ‘canis’
seems rather to mean that Virgil, while engaged with his Aeneid, was
still conning over his old Eclogues. Yet he must have strayed
‘subter pineta Galaesi’ some time before the composition of the last
Georgic. It has been remarked by Mr. Munro that the ‘memini’ in the
line

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis

looks like the memory of a somewhat distant past. Could the villa of
Siron have been in the neighbourhood of Tarentum? (a question
originally suggested by Mr. Munro); may it have passed by gift or
inheritance into the possession of Virgil, and was he in later life
in the habit of going to it from time to time? or was the distance
too great from Mantua for him to have transferred his family
thither?

188 ‘This taught me “the fair Alexis was loved by Corydon,” this too
taught me “whose is the flock? is it the flock of Meliboeus?”’

189 viii. 56. 12.

190 Ep. ad Att. i. 12.

191 Dr. Kennedy refers to no less than seventeen parallel passages from
Theocritus, many of them being almost literal translations from the
Greek poet.

192 ‘Look, the steers are drawing home the uplifted ploughs.’

193 ‘O that it would but please you to dwell with me among the “homely
slighted” fields and lowly cottages, and to shoot the deer.’

194 ‘The Gods too were dwellers in the woods, and Dardanian Paris. Leave
Pallas to abide in the towers which she has built; let our chief
delight be in the woods.’

195 Dr. Kennedy refers to twenty-seven parallels from Theocritus.

196 ‘Pollio loves my song, though it is but a shepherd’s song.’ ‘Pollio
himself too is a poet.’

197 ‘Who hates not Bavius may he be charmed with thy songs, O Maevius!’

198 ‘Menalcas Vergilius hic intelligitur, qui obitum fratris sui Flacci
deflet, vel, ut alii volunt, interfectionem Caesaris.’ Comment. in
Verg. Serviani (H. A. Lion, 1826).

199 See Conington’s Introduction to this Eclogue.

200 ‘No beast either tasted the river or touched a blade of grass.’

201 Compare M. Benoist’s note on the passage.

202 ‘Proximis diebus equorum greges, quos in traiciendo Rubicone flumine
consecrarat ac vagos et sine custode dimiserat, comperit
pertinacissime pabulo abstinere ubertimque flere.’ Sueton. lib. i.
c. 81.

203 ‘As to Bacchus and to Ceres so to thee shall the husbandmen annually
make their vows; thou too wilt call on them for their fulfilment.’

204 ‘The star beneath which the harvest-fields should be glad in their
corn-crops, and the grapes should gather a richer colour on the
sunny hill-sides.’

205 ‘Graft your pears, Daphnis: your fruits will be plucked by those who
come after you.’

206 Kennedy.

207 ‘Here the green Mincio fringes its bank with delicate reeds, and
swarms of bees are buzzing from the sacred oak.’

208 ‘This I remember, and that Thyrsis was beaten in the contest: from
that time Corydon is all in all with us.’

209 Cf.

Ergo _tua_ rura manebunt—
Ille _meas_ errare boves—
Multa _meis_ exiret victima saeptis.

210 Candidior postquam tondenti barba cadebat—
Fortunate senex.

211 See Kennedy’s note on the passage.

212 ‘Though all your land is choked with barren stones or covered with
marsh and sedge.’—P.

213 ‘And larger shadows are falling from the lofty mountains.’

214 M. Benoist.

215 ‘Shall some unfeeling soldier become the master of these fields, so
carefully tilled, some rude stranger own these harvest-fields? see
to what misery fellow-countrymen have been brought by civil strife!’

216 ‘Now in defeat and sadness, since all things are the sport of
chance.’

217 ‘Me too the shepherds call a bard, but I give no ear to them; for as
yet my strain seems far inferior to that of Varius and of Cinna, and
to be as the cackling of a goose among tuneful swans.’ Compare the
lines which Theocritus applies to Lycidas:—

Καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν Μοισᾶν καπυρὸν στόμα, κἠμὲ λέγοντι
πάντες ἀοιδὸν ἄριστον· ἐγὼ δέ τις οὐ ταχυπειθής,
οὐ Δᾶν· οὐ γάρ πω κατ’ έμὸν νόον οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλόν
Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω, οὐδὲ Φιλητᾶν
ἀείδων, βάτραχος δὲ ποτ’ ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω.
Theoc. vii. 37–41.

218 ‘Varus, thy name provided only Mantua be spared to us.’ ‘Daphnis,
why gazest thou on the old familiar risings of the constellations?’

219 ‘And now you see the whole level plain [sea?] is calm and still.’

220 i. 496.

221 Compare Gaston Boissier, La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins:
‘Il y a pourtant un côté par lequel la quatrième églogue peut être
rattachée à l’histoire du Christianisme; elle nous révèle un certain
état des âmes qui n’a pas été inutile à ses rapides progrès. C’était
une opinion accréditée alors que le monde épuisé touchait à une
grande crise et qu’une révolution se préparait qui lui rendrait la
jeunesse.... Il regnait alors partout une sorte de fermentation,
d’attente inquiète et d’espérance sans limite. “Toutes les créatures
sonpirent,” dit Saint Paul, “et sont dans le travail de
l’enfantement.” Le principal intérêt des vers de Virgile est de nous
garder quelque souvenir de cette disposition des âmes.’

222 Any child born of this marriage in the year 40 B.C. must have owed
its birth, not to Antony, but to Marcellus, the former husband of
Octavia.

223 The application of the words ‘magnum Iovis incrementum’ by the
author of the Ciris (398) to Castor and Pollux suggests a doubt as
to Mr. Munro’s interpretation of the words, accepted by Dr. Kennedy;
though at the same time there is nothing improbable in the
supposition that Virgil gave a meaning to the words which was
misunderstood by his imitator.

224 ‘And will rule the world in peace with his father’s virtues.’

225 Fuit enim hic poeta, ut scrupulose et anxie, ita dissimulanter et
clanculo doctus, ut multa transtulerit quae, unde translata sint,
difficile sit cognitu. Sat. v. 18.

226 Quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset. Ib. 22.

227 De Graecorum penitissimis literis hanc historiam eruit Maro. Ib. 19.

228 ‘Receive a song undertaken at your command.’

229 ‘When the dew on the tender blade is most grateful to the flock.’

230 ‘I shall hurl myself headlong into the waves from the high
mountain’s crag.’

231 ‘But I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those
five which begin—

Saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala.

I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that
Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil.’ Life
and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol. i. pp. 371, 372.

232 ‘It was within our orchard I saw you, a child, with my mother
gathering apples, and I was your guide: I had but then entered on my
twelfth year. I could just reach from the ground the fragile
branches: the moment I saw you how utterly lost I was, how borne
astray by fatal passion.’

233 ‘I loved you, maiden, when first you came with my mother wishing to
gather hyacinths from the mountain, and I guided you on the way: and
since I saw you, from that time, never after, not even yet, can I
cease loving you; but you care not, no, by Zeus, not a whit.’

234 Compare 85–86 with Lucret. ii. 355, etc.:—

At mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans.

235 ‘And would that I had been one of you, and had been either shepherd
of your flock or the gatherer of the ripe grape.’

236 ‘I am resolved rather to suffer among the woods, among the wild
beasts’ dens, and to carve my loves on the tender bark of the
trees.’

237 ‘First my Muse deigned lightly to sing in the Sicilian strain, and
blushed not to dwell among the woods.’

238 ‘Nor need you be ashamed of your flock, O Godlike poet; even fair
Adonis once fed his sheep by the river-banks.’

239 Compare the following passage from one of the prose idyls of G.
Sand: ‘Depuis les bergers de Longus jusqu’à ceux de Trianon, la vie
pastorale est un Éden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du
tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier. L’art, ce grand
flatteur, ce chercheur complaisant de consolations pour les gens
trop heureux, a traversé une suite ininterrompue de _bergeries_. Et
sous ce titre, _Histoire des bergeries_, j’ai souvent désiré de
faire un livre d’érudition et de critique où j’aurais passé en revue
tous ces différents rêves champêtres dont les hautes classes se sont
nourries avec passion.’ François le Champi.

240 ‘Among the lonely haunts of the shepherds and the deep peace of
Nature.’

241 ‘One may not now hold converse with him from a tree or from a rock,
like a maid and youth, as a maid and youth hold converse with one
another.’

242 Compare the account of the origin of pastoral poetry in Müller’s
Literature of the Greeks.

243 ‘But I attune the plaintive Ausonian melody.’ Incertorum Idyll. 1.
100–101. (Ed. Ahrens.)

244 Compare Symonds’ Studies of Greek Poets, First Series, The
Idyllists.

245 Wordsworth’s great pastoral ‘Michael’ is a marked exception to this
general statement. So, too, love can hardly be called the most
prominent motive in Tennyson’s ‘Dora.’

246 ‘Poured forth its rustic banter in responsive strains.’

247 Idyl vii. 97, vi. 2.

248 Idyl xi. 2–6, xiii. 2.

249 Preface to Poems by M. Arnold, First Series.

250 vii. 19, 20:—

καί μ’ ἀτρέμας εἶπε σεσαρώς
ὄμματι μειδιόωντι, γέλως δέ οἱ εἴχετο χείλευς.

251 x. 41:—

θᾶσαι δὴ καὶ ταῦτα τὰ τῶ θείω Λιθυέρσα.

252 ‘Next well-trimm’d
A crowd of shepherds, with as sunburnt looks
As may be read of in Arcadian books;
Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o’erflowing die,
In music, through the vales of Thessaly.’

And again:—

‘He seem’d,
To common lookers on, like one who dream’d
Of idleness in groves Elysian.’
Keats, Endymion.

253 ‘Often, I remember, when a boy I used to pass in song the long
summer days till sunset.’

254 ‘Then he tells in song how Gallus as he strayed by the streams of
Permessus was led by one of the sisters to the Aonian mount.’

‘All those strains, which when attuned by Phoebus, Eurotas heard,
enraptured, and bade his laurels learn by heart, he sings.’

255 Compare for this use of _mollis_ in the sense of ‘impressible’
Cicero’s description of his brother Quintus (Ep. ad Att. i. 17):
‘Nam, quanta sit in Quinto fratre meo comitas, quanta iucunditas,
quam mollis animus et ad accipiendam et ad deponendam iniuriam,
nihil attinet me ad te, qui ea nosti, scribere.’

256 ‘Fundit humo facilem victum _iustissima_ tellus.’

257 ‘There all alone he used to fling wildly to the mountains and the
woods these unpremeditated words in unavailing longing.’

258 ‘He, his snow-white side reposing on the tender hyacinth,—’

259 ‘We leave the dear fields’—‘Therefore you will still keep your
fields, large enough for your desires’—‘He allowed my herds to
wander at their will, even as you see’—‘Ah! the hope of all my
flock, which she had just borne, she left on the bare flint
pavement’—‘Go on, my she-goats, once a happy flock, go on.’

260 This is the tone of the whole of the first Elegy of Tibullus, e.g.

Ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites
Rusticus et facili grandia poma manu.
Nec tamen interdum pudeat tenuisse bidentem, etc.

261 ‘You are but a clown, Corydon, Alexis cares not for gifts.’

262 ‘As if this could heal my madness.’

263 ‘Ah! may the rough ice not cut thy tender feet.’

264 ‘Shall I see you from afar hang from some bushy rock.’
‘Here green Mincio forms a fringe of soft reeds along his bank.’

265 ‘I shall not yield in song either to Thracian Orpheus or to Linus,
though he be aided by his mother, he by his father, Orpheus by
Calliope, Linus by the fair Apollo. Even Pan, should he strive with
me with all Arcadia as umpire, even Pan would say that he was
vanquished, with Arcadia as umpire.’

266 ‘On this side, with its old familiar murmur, the hedge, your
neighbour’s boundary, on all the sweets of whose willow blossom the
bees of Hybla have fed, will often gently woo you to sleep; on that
from the foot of a high rock the song of the woodman will rise to
the air; nor meanwhile will your darlings, the hoarse wood-pigeons,
cease to coo, nor the turtle-dove to moan from the high elm-tree.’

267 Poems by Matthew Arnold. Memorial Verses:—

‘He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round,’ etc.

268 ‘Such charm is in thy song for us, O Godlike poet, as is to weary
men the charm of deep sleep on the grass, as, in summer heat, it is
to quench one’s thirst in a sparkling brook of fresh water.’

269 ‘What gifts shall I render to you, what gifts in recompense of such
a strain: for neither the whisper of the coming south wind gives me
such joy, nor the sound of shores beaten on by the wave, nor of
rivers hurrying down through rocky glens.’

270 Coleridge’s Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 411.

271 Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 371.

272 From the similarity between the lines in Hor. Sat. i. 1. 114,

Ut cum carceribus missos,

and those at the end of Georg. i. 512,

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,

it has been argued that Georgic i, at all events, must have appeared
before the first Book of the Satires. Ribbeck supposes that the
lines of the Georgics may have been seen or heard by Horace before
the appearance of the poem, and imitated by him. But is it likely
that Horace would have appropriated an image from an _unpublished_
poem? Is it not as probable that Virgil was the imitator here, as in
other passages where he uses the language of contemporaries, e.g. of
Varius, Ecl. viii. 88?

273 Compare the contrast drawn by him between Ennius and the
contemporary ‘Cantores Euphorionis,’ Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

274 Cf. also W. F. Teuffel’s History of Roman Literature, chap. i. note
1.

275 ‘You sing the lore of the old poet of Ascra, of the field on which
the corn, the hill on which the grape grows.’ iii. 32. 77–78.

276 ‘The city which is called Rome, O Meliboeus, I thought, in my folly,
was like this city of ours.’

277 ‘For safe the herds range field and fen,
Full-headed stand the shocks of grain.’

278 ‘Now each man basking on his slopes
Weds to the widowed trees the vine.’

279 ‘Thy era, Caesar, which doth bless
Our plains anew with fruitfulness.’ Martin.

280 Compare Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire, chap.
xli. ‘The tradition that Maecenas himself suggested the composition
of the Georgics may be accepted, not in the literal sense which has
generally been attached to it, as a means of reviving the art of
husbandry and the cultivation of the devastated soil of Italy; but
rather to recommend the principles of the ancient Romans, their love
of home, of labour, of piety, and order; to magnify their domestic
happiness and greatness, to make men proud of their country on
better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and the extent of its
conquests. It would be absurd to suppose that Virgil’s verses
induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or to 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, amidst the vices and corruptions of
the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyments, of
which, as we journey onward, we shall rejoice to catch at least
occasional glimpses.’

281 E.g.

Aus_im_ vel tenui vitem committere sulco;

and again,

Neve _tibi_ ad solem vergant vineta cadentem, etc.

282 De Senectute, xv. xvi.

283 ‘What makes the cornfields glad, beneath what constellation,
Maecenas, is right to turn up the soil, and wed the vine to the
elms,’—

284 De Re Rustica, i. 2.

285 Georg. ii. 145, etc.; Aen. iii. 537.

286 ‘Nec dubium quin, ut ait Varro, ceteras pecudes bos honore superare
debeat, praesertim autem in Italia, quae ab hoc nuncupationem
traxisse creditur, quod olim Graeci tauros Ἰταλοὺς vocabant.’

287 ‘Although neither Calabrian bees produce honey for me, nor does my
wine grow mellow in a Formian jar, nor fleeces grow rich in Gallic
pastures.’ Compare too

Ego apis Matinae
More modoque, etc.

The importance of honey as a source of wealth is referred to by
Mommsen in his History of Rome, book v. chap. xi. ‘A small
bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-garden, not larger
than an acre, in the neighbourhood of Falerii, honey to an average
annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces (100_l._).’

288 ‘Illis enim temporibus proceres civitatis in agris morabantur.’
Columella.

289 ‘I shall not here detain you with any tale of fancy, and winding
digressions and long preambles.’

‘The other themes that might have charmed the vacant mind, are all
hackneyed now.’

290 Cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 59–61: ‘M. Silano, L. Norbano consulibus
Germanicus Aegyptum proficiscitur _cognoscendae antiquitatis_.’ The
whole account of the tour of Germanicus illustrates the cultivated
taste for foreign travel among the Romans of the later Republic, the
Augustan Age, and early Empire, and also the mysterious interest
which has attached to Egypt from the earliest times known to
history.

291 This is distinctly stated by Servius in two places, his introductory
comments on Eclogue x, and on Georgic iv, and seems sufficiently
attested. Besides, the introduction into the Georgics of such an
episode as the ‘Pastor Aristaeus’ requires some explanation.

292 Both the nexus of the sense and the rhythm condemn the latitude of
transposition which Ribbeck allows himself. Perhaps the only
alteration which is absolutely demanded is at iv. 203–205. The lines
there, as they stand, clearly interrupt the sense, and are more in
place either after 196 or after 218. The strong line,

Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis,

is a fitting conclusion for the fine paragraph beginning

Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse, etc.

Either of these places seems more suitable for the lines than that
after 183. It is possible that the conjecture which Ribbeck adopts
from Wagner, ‘absoluto iam opere in marginem illos versus a poeta
coniectos esse,’ may give the true explanation of the misplacement
of the lines, though this does not seem to apply to any other
passage in the poem. Such bold changes as those introduced by
Ribbeck at ii. 35–46, and again at iii. 120–122, are not required by
the sense, and are condemned by rhythmical considerations. The line
119,

Exquirunt calidumque animis et cursibus acrem,

is weak for the concluding line of the paragraph, which ends much
more naturally with that transposed from 122 to 99,

Neptunique ipsa deducat origine gentem,

as it is Virgil’s way to introduce his mythological illustrations
after his real observations are finished. The paragraph of four
lines, Quare agite o proprios ... Taburnum, stands bald and bare in
the position Ribbeck assigns it, between 108 and 109. The minor
changes for the most part disturb old associations and throw no new
light on the poet’s thought.

293 ‘While charmed with the love of it, we travel round each detail.’

294 ‘To invest these poor interests with a new glory.’