Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/21

 "That delicious Bay Parthenope's Domain—Virgilian haunt; Illustrated with never dying verse And by the Poet's laurel-shaded tomb, Age after age to pilgrims from all lands Endeared."—.

As to the success of the Æneid, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil's death Horace writes in his Secular Hymn:—

"If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands Upon the Etruscan shore have won renown, That chosen remnant, who at thy command Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town; If all unscathed through Ilion's flames they sped           By sage Æneas led, And o'er the ocean waves in safety fled, Destined from him, though of his home bereft, A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left."

—Translated by.

Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words, with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther's translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature.

When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion,—degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition,—it