Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

The immense and untold amount of imitation in Virgil has perhaps tended to make us less than duly sensible of his vast original powers; and the mean and feeble effects produced by the character, if we can call it a character, of his Æneas, cheat us into an untrue supposition that he could not have possessed a real power of this the highest kind of delineation.

Character of Æneas.

It is perhaps hardly possible to exhaust the topics of censure which may be justly used against the Æneas of Virgil. His moral deficiencies are not (so to speak) hidden amidst the accomplishments of a manly intellect, nor his intellectual mediocrity redeemed by any fresh and genuine virtues. He is not, to our knowledge, a statesman; nay more, he is not a warrior; for we feel that his battles and feats of war are the poet’s, and not his: and when he appears in arms we are tempted to ask, ‘Son of Venus, what business have you here?’ The violent exaggerations, by which Virgil attempts to vamp up his hero’s martial character, only produce the ψυχρὸν of Longinus; a cold reaction, approaching to a shudder, through the reader’s mind. As, for instance, when in the Shades below, the poet represents the Greek chieftains882 as trembling and flying at the sight of him, the nobleness of the verses cannot excuse either the tasteless solecism of the thought, or the profanation offered to the memory of Homer in the person of his heroes, who indeed often made Æneas tremble, but never trembled at him themselves. But Virgil goes further yet, when he makes Diomed assert883 that, having been engaged in single combat with Æneas, he knows by experience how terrible a warrior he will prove; and that, had there been two more such men, Troy would have conquered Greece, and not Greece Troy. Now, Æneas never in the Iliad even once executes a real feat of war; and as to the single combat between the two chiefs, Diomed first knocked him down with a stone884, and then, after he had been carried off and apparently set to rights by his mother, he was thrice saved from the deadly charge of the same warrior by the single intervention of Apollo, who by divine force arrested the attack. In passing, it may be observed that, since Virgil could, with impunity, as it appears, so far as his popularity was concerned, thus mutilate and falsify the author from whose wealth he so largely borrowed, either the knowledge of Greek literature in its head and father, Homer, must have been very low among even the educated Romans, or else their standard of taste must have been seriously debased before they could accept such compliments.

It is common to find fault with Æneas for his vile conduct to Dido, and for the wretched excuse he offers in his own behalf, when he encounters her offended spirit in the regions of Aidoneus and Persephone. But the truth is, that this fairly exhibits and illustrates not only the total unreality of this particular character, but, as will be further noticed presently, the feeble and deteriorated conception of human nature at large, which Virgil seems to have formed. Man has been treated by him as, on the whole, but a shallow being: he had not sounded the depths of the heart, nor measured either the strength of good or the strength of evil that may abide in it. The Virgilian Æneas is a made up thing, far fitter to stand among the νεκύων ἀμένηνα κάρηνα, than among men of true flesh and blood.

Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;Thou hast no speculation in those eyesWhich thou dost glare with885.

Nor can we draw an apology for the defects of this primary character in Virgil from the Æneas of Homer. The Dardanian Prince is indeed in the Iliad, as to everything essential, a taciturn and background figure. He is placed very high in station and authority, and, as we have seen886, he may probably have been, by the dignity of lineal descent, the head of the whole Trojan race. But Homer pays him off with generalities; for, as no Poet is greater in the really creative work of character, so none better understands how, where the purpose of his poem requires it, to take a lay figure, and stuff him out with straw. In what may be called the vital action of the Iliad, Æneas has no considerable share, either martial or political. He is very far indeed behind the noble Sarpedon in the first capacity, and Polydamas in the second, as well as Hector in both. Still, if there is in the Homeric Æneas nothing grand, nothing vigorous, nothing profound, there is on the other hand nothing over-prominent or pretentious, and therefore nothing mean, nothing inconsistent, nothing untrue. All the Homeric characters, down to Thersites, are drawn each in its way with a master’s hand; Æneas forms no exception: on the contrary, we have to admire the skill with which, in a kind of middle distance, his outline is filled up, and he is kept entirely clear of any confusion with either those greater characters on the Trojan side, who have been named, or with the effeminate Paris. This is the more worthy of note, because, as the favourite child of Venus, he bore a qualified and dim resemblance to her chief minion; as we may see by certain traits of his very negative bearing in the field, and by Apollo’s putting him (if the phrase may be allowed) to bed in Pergamus887, when he had been rescued from Diomed, just as Venus had done with Paris, after she had saved him in the Third Book from Menelaus888.

Neither did Virgil fail in the delineation of his hero, or ‘protagonist,’ from simple want of power to portray human character. No such want can be ascribed to the poet of the Fourth Book of the Æneid. And if it be true that, amidst all the stormy wildness and intensity of the passion of Dido, there is something not quite natural – something that recalls the very remarkable imitation of it in the ‘Duchesse de la Vallière’ of Madame de Genlis, and leaves us almost at a loss to say which of the two has most the character of a copy, and which of an original – what are we to say of the genuine and manly character of Turnus? The whole of that sketch is as good and true as we can desire; and the noble speech in particular, in which he rebukes the trim cowardice of Drances, is a work of such extraordinary power and merit, that it is fit (and this I take for the summit of all eulogies) even to have been spoken by the Achilles of Homer. In vigorous reasoning, in biting sarcasm, in chivalrous sentiment, and in indignant passion, it presents a combination not easily to be matched; and it is, as a whole, admirably adapted to the oratorical purpose, for which it is presumed to have been delivered. But, indeed, from our first view of Turnus to our last, we do not find in him a single trait feeble in itself, or unworthy of the masculine idea and intention of the portrait, except where, in the very last passage of his life, his free agency seems to be taken, as it were by force, out of his hands.

The false position of Virgil.

The failure in the Æneas of Virgil cannot be compared with the case of any modern romance, such as the Waverley or Old Mortality of Scott, where the hero may be an insipid person. All the greater modern inventors have been compelled to lay their foundations in the palpable breadth of some historic event: it was the prouder distinction of the Homeric epic, that it had a living centre; it hung upon a man; there was enough of vital power in Homer for this end: his Achilles and his Ulysses were each an Atlas, that sustained the world in which they also moved. Virgil made his poem an Æneid, instead of following the example of the Cyclic poets; he thus pledged himself to his readers, that Æneas should be its centre, its pole, its inward light and life. But he did not keep his word: he had drawn the bow of Homer without Homer’s force. He marks perhaps the final transition from the old epic of the first class to the new. After him we have the epics of fact, the Pharsalia, the Thebaid, and so forth. But Æneas stands before us with the pretensions of Achilles and Ulysses; and the failure is great in proportion to the gigantic scale of the attempt. When, in the Italian romance, the character of the ideal man, as shown in Orlando, again became the basis of new epic poems, we again find in the protagonist great weakness indeed, as compared with Achilles and Ulysses; but strength and success as compared with the Æneas of Virgil.

Upon the whole we are thrown back on the supposition that this crying vice of the Æneid, the feebleness and untruth of the character of Æneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus. As the entire poem, so the character of its hero, was, before all other things, an instrument for glorifying the Emperor of Rome. It at once followed, that in all respects must that character be such as to avoid suggesting a comparison disadvantageous to the person whose dignity, for political ends, had already been elevated even into the unseen world; nay, whose forestalled divinity was to be kept in a relation of absolute and broad superiority to the image of his human ancestor. Æneas is himself addressed in the action of the Æneid, as

Dîs genite, et geniture deos.

In order to arrive at the disastrous effects of this mental servitude, take, first, the measure of the cold and unheroic character of Augustus; then estimate the degree of relative superiority, which it was essential to Virgil’s position that he should preserve for him throughout; and thus we may come to some practical conception of the straitness of the space within which Virgil had to develop his Æneas, or, in other words, to run his match against Homer. All the faults, and all the faultiness, of his poem may be really owing, in a degree none can say how great, to this original falseness of position.

On account of the personal principle on which the ancient epic was constructed, failure in the character of the hero must almost of necessity have entailed failure in the poem. Most of all would this follow in a case where, as in the Æneid, the hero is never out of view, and where the action does not, as in the Iliad, travel away from his person, in order then to enhance the splendour and effectiveness of his reappearance. Thus the falseness of Virgil’s position was not confined to an individual character, but extended to his entire work. Living, too, in an age less natural and more critical than that of Homer, he provided against criticism, so far as regarded its merely technical functions, more, and he studied nature less. He had to construct his epic for a court, and a corrupt court, not for mankind at large; it followed, that he could not take his stand upon those deep and broad foundations in human nature itself, which gave Homer a position of universal command. Hence as a general rule he does not sing from the heart, nor to the heart. His touches of genuine nature are rare. Such of them as occur have been carefully noted and applauded, for he is always studious to set them off by choice and melodious diction. For my own part, I find scarcely any among them so true as the simile of the mother labouring with her maidens at night, which he owes to Homer889:

Castum ut servare cubileConjugis, et possit parvos educere natos890.

As to religion, liberty, and nationality.

With rare exceptions, the reader of Virgil finds himself utterly at a loss to see at any point the soul of the poet reflected in his work. We cannot tell, amidst the splendid phantasmagoria, where is his heart, where lie his sympathies. In Homer a genial spirit, breathed from the Poet himself, is translucent through the whole; in the Æneid we look in vain almost for a single ray of it. Again, Virgil lived at a time when the prevailing religion had lost whatever elements of real influence that of Homer’s era either possessed in its own right, or inherited from pristine tradition. It was undermined at once by philosophy and by licentiousness; and it subsisted only as a machinery, a machinery, too, already terribly discredited, for civil ends. Thus he lost one great element of truth and nature, as well as of sublimity and pathos. The extinction of liberty utterly deprived him of another. Homer saw before him both a religion and a polity young, fresh, and vigorous; for Virgil both were practically dead: and whatever this world has of true greatness is so closely dependent upon them, that it was not his fault if his poem felt and bears cogent witness to the loss. Even the sphere of personal morality was not open to him; for what principle of truth or righteousness could he worthily have glorified, without passing severe condemnation on some capital act of the man, whom it was his chief obligation to exalt?

And once more. Homer sang to his own people of the glorious deeds of their sires, to whom they were united by fond recollection, and by near historic and local ties. This was at once a stimulus and a check; it cheered his labour, and at the same time it absolutely required him to study moral harmony and consistency. Virgil sang to Romans of the deeds of those who were not Romans, and whom only a most hollow fiction connected with his hearers, through the dim vista of a thousand years, and under circumstances which made the pretence to historical continuity little better than ridiculous. Or rather, he sang thus, not to Romans, but to their Emperor; he had to bear in mind, not the great fountains of emotion in the human heart, but his town-house on the Esquiline, and his country-house on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli. In dealing with Greeks, with Trojans, with Carthaginians, he again lost Homer’s double advantage: he had nothing to give a healthy stimulus to his imagination, and nothing to bring him or to keep him to the standard of truth and nature. And here, perhaps, we hit upon some clue to the superior character and attractions of Turnus. The Poet was now for once upon true national ground: he was an Italian minstrel, singing to Italians, whether truly or mythically is of less consequence, about an Italian hero. Thus he had something like the proper materials to work with; and the result is one worthy of his noble powers, though it has the strange consequence of setting all the best sympathies of his readers, and of implying that his own were already set, in direct opposition to the ostensible purpose of his poem.

It appears, however, as if this great and splendid Poet, being thrown out of his true bearings in regard to all the deeper sources of interest on which an epic writer must depend, such as religion, patriotism, and liberty, became consequently reckless, alike in major and in minor matters, as to all the inner harmonies of his work, and contented himself with the most unwearied and fastidious labours in its outward elaboration, where he could give scope to his extraordinary powers of versification and of diction without fear of stumbling upon anything unfit for the artificial atmosphere of the Roman court. The consequence is, that a vein of untruthfulness runs throughout the whole Æneid, as strong and as remarkable as is the genuineness of thought and feeling in the Homeric poems. Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight. Homer gives us figures that breathe and move, Virgil usually treats us to waxwork. Homer has the full force and play of the drama, Virgil is essentially operatic. From Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.

Homer is misapprehended through Virgil.

But more. Virgil is at once the copyist of Homer, and, for the generality of educated men, his interpreter891. In all modern Europe taken together, Virgil has had ten who read him, and ten who remember him, for one that Homer could show. Taking this in conjunction with the great extent of the ground they occupy in common, we may find reason to think that the traditional and public idea of Homer’s works, throughout the entire sphere of the Western civilization, has been formed, to a much greater degree than could at first be supposed, by the Virgilian copies from him. This is only to say, in other words, that it has been sadly impaired, not to say seriously falsified; for there is scarcely a point of vital moment, in which Virgil follows Homer faithfully, or represents him either fairly or completely. Now this traditional idea is not only the stock idea that governs the indifferent public, but it is likewise the idea with which the individual student starts, and which governs him until he has reached such a point in his progress as to discover the necessity, and be conscious moreover of the strength, to throw it off. This, however, is a point that, from the nature of human life and its pursuits, very few students indeed can reach at all. Elsewhere we shall see, with what evil and untrue effect Virgil has handled some of the Homeric characters. It is the same in every minor trait; and it seems strange that so great a Poet should not have had enough of reverence for another Poet, greater still and enshrined in almost the worship of all ages, to have restrained him from such constant and wanton, as well as wilful, mutilations of the Homeric tradition. It would, however, appear that Virgil’s miscarriages are not all due to carelessness, in the common sense of it. In many instances, unless so far as they can be referred to the necessities that press upon a courtier, it would seem as if they must be ascribable to torpor in the faculties, or defect in the habit of mind, by which Homer should have been appreciated. Nay, sometimes he appears to have been moved simply by metrical convenience to alter the traditions of Homer. Let us take first a minor instance to test this assertion.

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 Book892, 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 ἀμβροσίη893, 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 mentions894 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:

καὶ Σιμόεις, ὅθι πολλὰ βοάγρια καὶ τρυφάλειαικάππεσον 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 undisScuta 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 latter895; 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 Odyssey896, 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 sky897, 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.

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 Pelasgi898. 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 castra899. 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 Calydon900, 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 Æolides901, though Homer has given the descent of Ulysses902 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.