Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/25

 his Letters to Dead Authors) a vital difference that has made Virgil's the higher influence: "Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch 'the Sibyl doth to singing man allow,' and might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it permitted to see and sing 'mothers and men, and the bodies outworn of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men borne to the funeral fire before their parents' eyes.' The endless caravan swept past him—'many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives them o'er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands.' Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown. Ah, not frustra pius was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. In him, we fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience."

The purpose of the epic is to indicate the divinely ordained origin and history of Rome as a conquering, civilizing, and organizing government, destined to replace both anarchy and tyrannical despotism by liberty under law. As the real world-historic reason for Rome's existence is so commonly overlooked, let us recall Mommsen's words in the introduction to his Provinces of the Roman Empire": "It fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing If an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present