Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 20.djvu/97

* VERGIL. 71 VERGIL. mother, Venus, who has appealed to Jupiter and received from him assurance of her son's great mission and its fulfillnient, n])pcars to ,Kneas in the guise of a huntress and advises him to seek the protection of Dido. He does so, and on reach ing lier palace finds messenfjers from the rest of his ships, which have all been saved but one. Venus meanwhile induces Cupid to in- spire Dido with a passion for .Kneas. Dido re- ceives the Trojans kindly and entertains them at a magnificent banquet. Here ^"Eneas tells the story of the capture of Troy by thi; stratagem of the wooden horse, of the sack of the citj^ and his escape. He tells of his attempts to found a city in Tliracc and in Crete, and of the oracles and portents which pointed to Italy as his destined goal, of his meeting with Helenus and Andro- mache in Epirus, of his adventure with the Cyclops, and of his final arrival in Drcpanum, where he lost his father, Anchises, l)v death. Then the story goes on from the night of the banquet. ^-Eneas lingers for some time in Carth- age, forgetful of his mission, beguiled by Dido's love. At last by the command of Jupiter he sets sail for Italy without the knowledge of the Carthaginian Queen. Dido kills herself and as she dies prays that there may lie everlasting hatred between the Carthaginians and the de- scendants of -Eneas. He is driven by contrary winds to Sicily, where he is welcomed by his countryman Acestes, and celebrates funeral games on the anniversary of his father's death. During the games the Trojan women, weary of their apparently endless wanderings, set fire to the ships, but the fiames are extinguished by rain sent in answer to the prayers of -Eneas. After leaving with Acestes those of his com- panions who wish to remain behind, ^Eneas sails to Cumte. By the aid of the Sibyl he gains access to the lower world, and consults Anchises, who tells him the glorious destiny of the race which he is to found. -Eneas then proceeds to the mouth of the Tiber, where Latinus. King of that region, receives him hospitably, forms an alliance with the Trojans, and promises their leader his daughter Lavinia in marriage. Juno now makes a last attempt to prevent Mneas from carrying out his purpose. She involves the Trojans in a quarrel with the people of Latinus, while at the same time Turnus, King of the Rutuli, one of Lavinia's disappointed suitors, prepares to make war on them. The resiilt is that Turnus forms a coalition against the Trojans, who are aided by Evandcr. an Arcadian king who has foimded a city called Pal- lanteum on the site afterwards occupied by Rome. A long struggle follows with varying for- tunes. The Trojans are finally victorious and Turnus is slain in single combat by -Eneas. The Jlilneirl is unequal in its execution and in its interest for the general reader. Certain episodes stand out prominently from the rest of the work, and in particular the last six books, in which the numerous battle scenes demanded by literary tradition are somewhat tedious, are less generally known than the rest of the poem. They are, however, full of lieautiful episodes, and the greatness of Vergil's acliieve- mcnt can only bi> fully appreciated when the JEneid is carefully studied as a complete work of art. iEneas, the hero of the poem, is through- out the man of destiny, with whom everything else is subordinated to his mi.ssion of founding a mighty empire. The episode of the unhappy Dido, which has most strongly appealed to the readers of all times, has many of the elements of a GrcH'k tragedy. She, loo, has her great task to perform, and love forms no part of her plans, but to save /Eneas she is made the victim of the wiles of Venus, although she knows from --Eneas's story of his wanderings that the gods have willed that he should fulfill his destiny on Italian soil, she ath'nipts (o turn him aside "from liis purpose, not of her own will, but through the infiuence of a mighty power. His desertion of her is justified and even praiseworthy, since it is the result of suliinission to the command of the king of gods and men, and the episode fur- nishes a tragic motive for the Punic Wars, that titanic struggle for the mastery of the world which took so strong a hold on the imagination of the successors of the victors. -Eneas typifies the old Roman virtues, which Horace celebrates in the first six odes of his third book, and his escape from the wiles of the enchantress must have recalled to the Romans of the Augustan -ige the yielding of Antony to the charms of Cleopatra. The struggle for supremacy in Italy was that of the higher civilization against semi- barbarism. The anti-type of .Eneas is the violent and godless Turnus, allied with Jlezentius, the conteniptor dirorum, and other such men. So far as the outw^ard form of the poem is concerned, it is generally agreed that in the .Jineid Vergil brought the hexameter, "the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man," to the highest degree of perfection' of which it was capable. Even in his earliest works he surpassed his pre- decessors, Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus, and his progress in the mastery of his chosen verse was constant, reaching its culmination in the last six books of the JEneid. He is particularly suc- cessful in adapting sound to sense; the swing of the C.yclops' hammers, the trampling of horses and the like are imitated, not only in single lines, but in longer passages. A recent critic says : "He has been perhaps more successful than any other poet in fusing together the expressed and the suggested emotion; he has discovered the hidden music wdiich can give to every shade of feeling its distinction, its permanence, and its charm." The JEneid was hailed with acclamation im- mediatel.y on its publication, and its author was regarded as the inspired bard of his native land, the Roman Homer. A few feeble voices were raised in opposition to the general chorus of praise, but without effect. The influence of the poem was widespread and lasting, not only on the later Roman poetry, but on prose as well, and strongly aff'ectcd c'ven such writers as Livy and Tacitus. No poet ventured to handle the same theme, but the later epic writers for the most part drew heavily on Vergil for inspiration and material, and fully acknowdedged his preemi- nence. His works became text-liooks in the Ro- man schools at an early period, and lines from the JEneid have come to light which were scrib- bled on the walls of Pompeii by schoolboys. No works were more extensively quoted. They came to be regarded as canons of grammatical and sty- listic usage; they are extensively cited and dis-