MASTER NEGATIVE NO. 91-80249 MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the Foundations of Western CivUization Preservation Project Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made witiiout permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fiilfilhnent of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: RAND, E. K. TITLE: VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA PLACE: S.L DA TE : [1908] COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative it \t BIBLIOGRAPHIC MTrRQFORM TARCFT Restrictions on Use: Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record BKS/PROO Books FUL/BIB NYCG91 -R7«;AftQ a ^ • ^ FIN ID NYrR9i-R7c;AQQ D^ ^ , NYLUVi B75688 Acq Maintenance NYCQ-NEH T^ hiN ID NYCG91-B75688 - Record 1 of 1 - Record updated today ID:NYCG91-B75688 CC:9668 BLTram CP:nyu PC:r MMD: 040 100 10 245 10 260 1 300 LOG QO RR: MS SNR FIC FSI COL ? 7 EL ATC CON ILC EML RTYP:a ST:p FRN: OCF:? CSC:? MOD: L:eng INT:? GPC:? BID-? PD:1991/1908 REP:? CPI-? OR: POL: DM: NNCi:cNNC Rand, E. K. Virgil and the dramai:h[microforin].{:cPart I and II [1908]. 22-33, 51-61 p. ORIG 08-21-91 A0:08-21-91 U0:08-22-91 ??? ???? MEI:? II:? GEN: BSE: ■ .f TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: //^^ FILM SIZE:__^^A:^A^ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA^II^ IB IIB DATE FILMED: ^jT^ INITIALS HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE^T c Association for Information and image {Management 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 Silver Spring. Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 /- i V vs. 209. 30 THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL Italy, not of my wiU, I foUow on." These last words resume in brief compass the elements of the tragedy that confronts Aeneas: Italiam, his mission, non sponte, his love, sequor his resolution. Those who object to what they deem the impassiveness of Virgil's hero should note that Dido in her retort makes precisely the same charge.' Rock-bom she calls him, the nursling of tigers. " Had he a sigh for my weeping ? Turned he his eyes to me ? Did he yield and shed tears ? Did he pity her that loved him ? " Virgil, we see, was not blind to the opportunity. He might have evoked compassion from Aeneas at this moment— if he had chosen. And when Dido, kindling to the sense of her lover's ingratitude, scoffs, with just a touch of blasphemy, at his divine mission, proudly bids him go, and exults at the doom which she, as minister of the furies, will visit on him— when faint from such excess of feeling she is borne off by her attendants, Aeneas in anxiety for her,' can hold back passion no longer. But loyal Aeneas, though he would fain soften her grief with words of conso- lation and assuage her cares, deeply grieving, his whole heart upheaved with his great love, fulfils for all that the mandates of the gods and again repaire to his Ueet. ilwwr— passion: that is the word that Virgil has not spoken till now. After Dido's final appeal— the messages sent by Anna— Virgil gathers up in one simile the impressions made thus f ar m an ascend- ing scale. We have learned of the hero's amazement and his fixed resolve at the moment of the Tevelsition—obmutuit; we have seen that his outer calmness disguised deep anguish— cwrow sub corde pre- mebat; he has made virtual confession to Dido that love is the fee exacted by obedience— /toWaw non sponte sequor; finally the anguish that masters him is openly called love— magnoque animum labef actus anwre. Allusive description and the gradual approach— these are methods characteristic of a peculiarly Vkgilian quality, to which Mr. R. S. Conway has done justice in a recent paper,^ reticence and » Vss. 365 s, » Vss. 390 f.: mulia metu cunctantem et muUa paranUm \ dicere. Some editors again stage this scene for comedy, seeing in metu "the dread of arousing her wrath still fur- ther." 3 "An Unnoticed Aspect of Virgil's PersonaUty," Proceedings of the English Classical Association, 1907. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 31 32 THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL artistic reserve. It is perhaps the most fascinating and distinctive trait of Virgil's personality, one which his reader greets on page after page; it reveals in the written word the same impulse that prompted the shy poet to take refuge in the nearest doorway, when passers-by pointed him out in the streets of Rome. After the last of Dido's messages, we are told — He, though, is touched by no laments, nor is he pliant to hear her supplica- tion. The fates oppose: God shut the hero's steadfast ears. And even as an oak, mighty with years of strength, now here, now there is tossed by the blasts of Alpine Boreas who struggles to uproot it— loud it creaks, and as its trunk is shaken, deep-piled leaves clutter the earth: the tree clings to the rocks, and as far as it stretches its crown into the higher air, so deep its roots toward Tartarus are stretching— even so the hero on this side and on that, bears the blows of entreaty and knows anguish in his great heart. His will abides unshaken; and tears are showered in vain. I believe with St. Augustine and Servius against many editors from Heyne down, that these are the tears of Aeneas. They need not be for the point of VirgiPs characterization, as this appears in the line precedmg— wagno persentii pectore curas. But these falling tears are to match the falling leaves— outer symbol of the inner stress; the simile is exact in all its parts. A modem commentator queries why tears of Aeneas should be inanes; ''iusta causa non appareV he remarks.' Incomprehensible certainly, granted a hero who has no cause for regret. But there is a battle on between Aeneas' emotions and his will. One more passage in Book iv gives indications of the hero's feelings— a passage susceptible of gross mismterpretation. After those liquid Imes on the calm of night,» brought in painful contrast with the anguish of the queen, it is said of Aeneas^ that "he, in his high ship, determined, now, on going, was plucking the flower of sleep, all being now in readiness." Carpebat somnuTn^-en]oymg sleep to the full. Is this a sign of heartlessness ? Rather, after the anguish of his own struggle and the pain of his sympathy with Dido's grief, he gains that peace which succeeds a bitter fight, and » Forbiger on vs. 449. aVss. 522!. 3Vss.5S4f. yields to his exhaustion when all has been done that he can do— iam certus eundiy rebus tarn rite paratis,^ It would be easy to cite throughout the narrative of the fourth book, and especially toward the end, the various bits of incident or description by which Virgil suggests that the external setting, the scenic adornment of the story is that of the tragic stage. » These details would mean little, however, if the inner plot were not of the essence of tragedy, as it is. It brings us face to face with the ancient motive of the Greek drama, the conflict between human will and an overruling fate; tragedy lies in the bitter conclusion that the actors, though pursuing right paths, or at least natural paths, run into disaster despite themselves. They cannot be viUains, else tragedy would not purge the emotions with the thrill of pity and fear, but merely awaken indignation and suggest an obvious remedy— the flaying of the villain. Not that the actors need be spotless. We demand not a triumphant, logical insight into every move in the ethics of the narrative, but pity and fear at the calamities of creatures like ourselves, involved in the play of forces passing their control. Both Aeneas and Dido are faithless to an absolute moral standard and their own ideals, but their infidelity is so natural, almost irre- sistible, that we are ready to condone. Si fuit errandum, causas habet error. Thus Dido pleads for herself in Ovid's HeroU, and Vurgil, too, acquits her in his closing words necfato merita nee morte perihat, sed miser a ante diem subitoqtie accensa furore. Dante acquits her by placing her at the entrance of the Inferno, not in the seventh circle of the lower hell. Aeneas' yielding to so reasonable a temptation at the moment of utter dejection is pardon- able too; many a reader will allow that, who cannot pardon his return to duty, who does not see that his struggle with his heart- ' Lucan has a similar situation at the beginning of his third book. Pompey, sailing away from his foes at Brundisium, "Solus ab Hesperia nonfltxit lumina terra until the last speck of land has passed from view—dum duhios cernit vanescere monies. Not till then soporifero cesserunt languida somno \ membra ducts. So too the sleep of Ariadne and of Andromeda as described by Propertius i. 3. i flf. In fact we are dealing here with a traditional motive in both literature and art. a A point well illustrated by N. W. DeWitt in Classical Journal, II, 283 flf. 1 ! I I ) VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 33 shaking emotions and his mastery of them are as tragic for him as for Dido. His passion and hers, natural and condoned, clash with the purpose of a righteous and irresistible fate. This makes the tragedy. No other ending could be conceived save that which Virgil gives; Aeneas must sail away. George Meredith, with a strikingly similar plot in his Lord Ormont, ends in revolt and — a curious consequence — ^banality: his Aeneas stays in Carthage and "throws his sceptre at the injurious gods." But Virgil is writing tragedy. {To be continued] VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA. PART H By E. K. Rand Harvard University We must not forget that the gods take part in the drama of the Aeneid. A measure of Dido's guilt reverts to Venus— not all, for Dido, it would seem, had been ready of her own accord. But VirgiPs gods are not merely human passions writ large, addmg nothing to the plot but epic mechanism and the contrast of shifted scenes. They are larger human actors, more powerful, but sub- missive, like men, to the fates. Standing in rank midway between, they descend to the human plane, help or retard, and withdraw. Their action has interest in itself and their characters have person- ality. Thus Venus in the first book seems charmingly unintelligent in encouraging her son to run so great a peril: she thinks, apparently, of Dido merely as an enemy who may flay the shipwrecked Trojans if she is not enamored of Aeneas in time. The goddess does not consider that the hero's infatuation delays the fates and his ultimate triumph. Juno has more sober sense : she will entangle him in the very trap that Venus has set. Pretending indignation at such arti- fice, she proposes to her fair rival that the passion which Venus has aroused be further strengthened by wedlock.* Now thou hast what thou soughtest with all thy heart. Dido is a-fire with love and has sucked passion to the marrow of her bones. Let us, therefore, you and I, rule with equal auspices this race conjoined. Let her be slave to a Phry- gian lord, and entrust her Tyrians as dowry to thine hand. Venus, perceiving the trick, answers with a smile: Who so mad as to spurn an o£fer like this, or prefer instead to take up arms against thyself— if only good fortune may attend the plan that thou proposest? But I drift doubtful of the fates— whether Jove will that there should be one city for the Tyrians and the voyagers from Troy, or approve the union of their tribes and bonds of federation. Thou art his spouse, thou hast the right to test his temper with entreaty. Lead on: and I will follow. Juno, oblivious to the delicious irony and coquetry of Venus' assent, « iv. 93 s. SI I'll m sa THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL undertakes to arrange things by herself. She sets the stage for the fatal hunt and the storm, for the meeting in the cave, for the liturgy which she will improvise to sanction the act. She presents the plan explicitly to Venus. And Venus "opposed not her request, but nodded, and smiled at the invention of such a snare." Venus smiles first at the cleverness of Juno's plans— for it is a downright good trick— but also because she perceives that it will all come back on Jimo in the end. In short Venus is far more sagacious than the reader suspected at the start. This incident shows well enough the purpose of the divine machinery in Virgil's drama. Gods complicate the plot, appearing as super- human actors. They help or hinder mortals without being mere personifications of their qualities; they hasten or retard the fates, without being mere symbols of ukimate purpose. Their coming shifts the scene to the radiancy of Olympus and gives the relief of contrast. In the scene before us, and elsewhere in the Aeneid, as in Homer, they afford comic relief for the setting of tragedy. Comedy for the gods; tragedy is reserved for mortal men — miseri mortales — whom VirgiPs gods can sometimes pity too. Ill The fifth Aeneid, that counterpoise of graceful comedy to the tragedy of the fourth, gives us further insight into the character of the hero. After this book, in which he appears at the games as a dutiful son and princely entertainer, and after the following book, we are ready for the summary of his qualities that Dante gives in his Convivio^—Lealta, Cprtesia, Amore, Fortezza, Temperanza. The meeting of Aeneas with Dido in the Mournful Fields of the under- world shows us directly again what the fourth book has developed in a careful climax of explicitness— that deep feeling underlay the severity which it was kindness to assume. When the Trojan hero saw her dimly through the shadows, even as one who at the month's beginning sees or thinks he sees the rising moon, he poured forth tears' and with sweet love addressed her: "Hapless Dido, had then true message come to me that thou wert dead, and with the sword hadst taken desperate measures? Was it, alas, to the grave I t IV. 26. * These tears, at least, seem to be those of Aeneas. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 53 brought thee ? By the stars I swear, by gods above, and whatsoever fate is beneath the earth, against rtiy will, oh queen, I left thy court. But the man- dates of the gods that impel me now to go through these shades, through places grisly with decay, through profound night, then forced me to their will; nor could ' I think I brought thee grief like this at my departure. Stay thy steps and with- draw not from my look. Whom dost thou flee ? The last word fate allows me with thee is even this." Thus did Aeneas, as she stood with fire-glaring eyes, seek to calm her spirit and summoned tears. She with eyes fixed on the ground bent away, unmoved in aspect at the words essayed, as though she stood a hard flint-rock or a Mar- pesian cliff. At length she flung herself away, and fled defiant into the shadow- bearing grove, where her consort of old days, Sychaeus, answered her grief with his and mated her love. But none -the less Aeneas, overwhelmed at her unjust fate, followed her from afar with tears and pitied her as she went.' Relations have been exactly reversed. Aeneas, now that the divine will has been fulfilled and Dido's act is past recall, may give utterance to what he feels and felt : it is Dido's turn to be relentless. In another way, further, the sixth book, apart from its own deep meaning, is related directly to the tragedy of the fourth. We have found tragedy there in the clash of human wills, righteous in the main, with an over-ruling fate. Pathos is not excluded thereby. On the contrary, the more human the actors, the more poignantly does their disaster move pity and fear. If Aeneas is fate itself mas- querading as epic hero, "the passive recipient," as Sellar' finds, "both of the devotion and of the reproaches of Dido," if Dido is simply delenda Carthago, Virgil should have written plain history m prose. A touch of the allegorical, and in Dido's case, direct allusion to the Punic wars, are evident, but the main interest in the fourth book is in human beings and then* battle with fate. Now this fate, as the reader feels at the time, is a power essentially for the good. It is not a malignant arbiter, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy: it is not what Hardy misconceives Aeschylean fate to be. Aeneas is fulfilling divine destiny, and that destiny is the fatum Romanum. But the nature of this principle needs elaboration. The reader might ponder the story of the fourth Aeneid alone and find, as Sellar finds,3 merely "the doctrine of predestination in its hardest form." Roman fate conceived in the abstract has, indeed, even less personality than Calvin's deity— an idol of wood or stone. But in the sixth book » vL 450 ff. • VirgU, p. 398. 3 Ibid. p. 344. 54 THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL the vision is summoned into the clear light ; all history sweeps before the hero; a sublime apocalypse connects the remote past with the triumph of imperial Rome. Something more than "seven hills by a river" is cause of Dido's suffering; it is a principle of justice and civilization— the Roman temperament, actively and beneficently at work in human history. This is not, I believe, a conception "much inferior both in intellectual subtlety and in ethical value to that of the Fate of Greek tragedy in conflict with human will."* It is a different conception and a noble one: it is none the less a spring for true tragedy. The Fate of the Greek drama had in a way no moral development. In Aeschylus it is the accumulation of guilt which involves the partly innocent: hence the battle, and pity and fear for those who are doomed to defeat. But the triumph of Zeus and Apollo is the triumph of personal theism and the twilight of the Fates; the closing scene of the Eumenides would be conceived by Dante as commedia. In Sophocles, most clearly in his Oedipus, righteous humanity is brought to ruin through conflict with divine law. One cannot repress the query, hovering on the poet's lips, it would seem, whether this law can be just. The query grows more urgent still for Euripides: it is no righteous divinity that sends Hippolytus to his doom. A new motive is thus introduced into the dramatic problem — human revolt at these helpless conflicts. If too much is made of this element, indignation drives out pity and fear, and thus the very principle of tragedy. Now in Virgil here and there are touches of protest against the iniquus casus in which several of the actors are involved: many of these occur in Book ii, where the indignation of the narrator is dramatically appropriate. These are the sum total of Virgil's inheritance from Euripides, so far as tragic plot is con- cerned. He is akin to Euripides in his pathos and his far-reaching humanitarian sympathies, but in both his art and his theology he is bound by far closer ties to Sophocles.* What indeed is the "ideal truth of Sophocles — the ideal of final purification and reconcilement of a noble human nature with divine nature"^ but the theology that Anchises teaches his son in the fields of Elysium? Nor is « Virgil, p. 344. • Mr. Glover's remarks on this matter are only partly true (pp. 49 ^0* i Sellar, p. 344. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 55 personality neglected by the Roman ideal. It is not true that the Fates act "irrespective of right and wrong, regardless of personal happiness or suffering,"' and that thus the Aeneid ia,\\s of the highest rank as a work of art because it " does not touch the heart or enlighten the conscience." The Fates consider right and wrong, for both Aeneas and Dido, though acting naturally, and, to sympathetic humanity, pardonably, have crossed the moral law: retribution fol- lows as inexorably as it would in Aeschylean tragedy. There is plenty of moral edification in the story of Aeneas, as Dante and all the Middle Ages were only too well aware. What Virgil has done is to mfuse into the idea of Fate an ethical content that it did not display in previous drama. He identifies it with all that is best and most sacred in the Roman ideal and the fulfilment of this ideal in past and present history. Its clash with human wills is as tragic as before, but the reason is at hand in human error and sin, however natural. The final solution, therefore, brings us still farther away from Euripides: it is essentially, though forces and ideals are differ- ently named, the solution of Aeschylus— the rational vindication of the moral law. This is the Fate, then, revealed in the sixth book of Virgil's poem, which is therefore an indispensable guide to the tragedy of the fourth. IV It would be strange if Virgil had given dramatic structure to the first half of his poem and devoted the remainder to epic of a simple type; it would be difficult to achieve harmony with such a scheme. Even as it is, according to Professor Woodberry," "the dramatic power in the episode of Dido threatens to overbear the moral unity of the structure." Possibly the reason why certain critics — Pro- fessor Woodberry is not among them — find the latter books an anti- climax is that they are imaware of the essentially dramatic plot and its connection with that of the first half of the poem. Voltaire, in Candide, indulges in lavish vituperation of all but the second, the fourth, and the sixth Aenetd, and Mr. Saintsbury, perhaps subcon- sciously influenced by this very passage, refers in his History of Criticism,^ to the seventh book as « Ihid,, p. 354. a In an appreciative essay on Virgil in his Great Writers, 1907, p. 135. 3 1. 339- 56 THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL the point where to modern readers the interest in the Aeneid is all but over, and the romantic wanderings of Aeneas, the passion of the fourth book, the majesty and magnificence of the sixth, are exchanged for the kite-and-crow battles of Trojan and Rutulian, the doll-like figure of Lavinia, and the unjust fate of the hero Tumus at the hands of a divinely helped invader. Mr. Saintsbury is a facile maker of phrases; his criticisms are always good reading. But pertinence is also a virtue of the critic, and hardly one of the above characterizations is to the point. How human we are after all 1 Mr. Saintsbury's indignation at the " divinely helped invader" is not far removed from that of the rustic at the villain in the play, with whom Macaulay also is at one, in his cry of " Poltroon 1" when Aeneas sails on from Carthage. Righteous wrath at injustice is the beginning of literary appreciation in such situations as these, but the rustics should first be sure that they have caught the right villain and even then not descend upon the poet with their flails. Virgil himself did not feel that his work was over at the seventh book. Toward the beginning he declares maius opus moveo. His first problem in the ensuing Iliad of war is to create an antagonist worthy of Aeneas. It is no easy task to match the splendid strength and reserve of the hero's character. Yet Virgil is so successful that the sympathies of not a few readers, besides Mr. Saintsbury, are enlisted for Tumus. Like Dido, Tumus has a vigorous and imme- diately engaging personality. He is young and goodly to see, brave and aristocratic — "potent in grandsires and greatgrandsires," ' and above all, patriotic and Italian. By careful suggestion, by deliberate contrast with other characters like that of the plausible but weak- spirited Drances, Virgil prepares us for his final array of qualities at the end of the poem.* In one breast, reverence and madness, mingled with grief, fury-driven love and conscious valor. No reader gainsays when Tumus cries out that he descends to the shades a "sacred soul."^ it is the fate of Tumus that makes up the tragedy of the latter books: the drama is worked out step by step. The seventh book presents the issue, the z vii, vs. 56: avis aiavisque potens. 3 zii, vs. 648. s zii, vss. 666 fif. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA SI combat for Lavinia, to which Tumus is impelled not only by the Fury but by his own resolve. The eighth interposes dramatic delay in the embassy of Aeneas to Evander; the ninth records the hero's aristeia, his deeds of valor within the Trojan camp. In the tenth, the slaying of the lad Pallas marks the acme of the ascending series, for Aeneas' vow of revenge, sworn sacredly to Evan- der, means Turnus' death. The eleventh book fixes once for all the character of Tumus as the splendid champion of a lost cause. At a moment of utter discouragement, when the Latin envoys return from their fruitless mission to Diomede, when the king, as ever, wavers, and Drances has presented cogent arguments for peace, Turnus breaks through all opposition and carries the day for war. The disasters in the ensuing fight, especially the death of Camilla, prophesy the tragic outcome, and the agreement of the armies to stake all upon a single combat draws the toils still more closely about Turnus. From this point the action proceeds rapidly to the catas- trophe. One quality of Tumus repels the reader from the start, his violentia^ vfipi^^ which, in keeping with the tragic conception, calls down divine vengeance {arri) on the transgressor. For this, Allecto is not wholly responsible, any more than Venus is for Dido's passion, for Tumus has a crude barbarian strain in his nature, which is con- trasted at various points with the courtesy and chivalry of Aeneas. But from the moment when the Furies descend upon their victim,' Turnus has our sympathies. There is no further mention of violen- tia; his actions are no longer under his own control. He arms him- self madly — like Macbeth in a similar situation — ^though the night is coming on. In the first combat his very manhood ebbs away: he moves as in a dream, raises a rock and can scarcely throw it. His qualities desert him, even his bravery: he is hardly more than a shade when he is put to death. His death is inevitable; it is a stern duty laid upon Aeneas by his pledge to Evander. At the last, when his chivalry prompts him to spare, the sight of the belt of Pallas on his foe calls forth the final stroke. But this act is not the punishment of a villain; it is the victory of the good over the good, as in the slaying of Hector, a deed fated but lamentable. The soul of Tumus "flies « xii, vs. loi. • S8 THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL t\ reproachful to the shades." It utters the reproach of humanity laid low by a fate that it does not altogether deserve — so Dido had fled, "defiant" from Aeneas in the mournful fields.' The fate is, however, inevitable and a power for the final good. It is the same fate which controls the drama of the fourth book, and whose nature is revealed in the sixth. But apart from this personal tragedy which furnishes the external plot of the later books, a larger drama is on, the play of ideal forces, which bear the ultimate meaning of the poem. The struggle is not merely between the chieftains of heroic quality, it is between the native strength of Italy and all the influences of foreign civiliza- tion that developed a rude and primitive nationality into imperial Rome. This element adds new significance to the drama of Tumus and intensifies the tragedy of his fate. The seventh and the eighth books present the actors in this larger drama. The first of them has a distinctly Italian coloring. The mustering of the native forces has a deeper tone of patriotism than the Homeric catalogue of the ships, the epic model for Virgil's description. The book, more than any other of the Aeneid, has the simple pastoral charm of the Eclogues and the GeorgicSj and in its patriotic sentiment recalls the latter poem. The eighth is a Roman book. The embassy of Aeneas to Evander skilfully transports the reader to a new scene, where the rude huts on the Palatine suggest by contrast the splendor of imperial Rome. The legend on the heaven-wrought shield has the same purpose as the vision of heroes in the Inferno of Book vi, presenting the sweep of Roman history down to the triumph of Augustus himself. Tumus with the Latins and Rutulians, therefore, represent native Italy, Aeneas and the Trojans the influence of civilizing forces from with- out. I need hardly add that Virgil does not set forth this allegory baldly or mechanically; his heroes are persons, not types. But the larger ideas shimmer through the narrative, and are suggested clearly enough, in Virgil's way. Both of these ideal forces are bone and marrow of the Rome that had developed in the poet's time : the com- batants, engaged in inevitable struggle with one another, are fighting for the same goal. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 59 Di quel umile Italia fia salute Per cui mori la vergine Cammilla Eurialo e Turao e Niso di ferute — Dante saw that the latter books of the Aeneid had other battles than those of "crows and kites." In Book ix, the general coloring is that of sorrow and defeat for the Trojan side during the absence of its leader. In Book x, hope brightens for them as Aeneas returns and renews the fight. In the eleventh book, the sadness of the nmth is deeply reinforced: it is sorrow and defeat for the Italians now, as well. The last book effects the reconciliation of the warring principals, and reveals Virgil's final estimate of the Roman temperament and Roman achieve- ment. It supplements the famous lines of Book vi:' Others shall chisel more delicately the breathing bronze, so I believe, and draw features from marble; plead causes better; mark with the rod the courses of the sky and name the rising stars. Remember thou, O Roman, to subject the nations to thy sway— for such shall be thine arts— and to add law to peace, to spare the humble and beat down the proud. The splendid poetry of these lines is proof in itself that the Romans were capable of other artes besides that of war. The passage empha- sizes what is most appropriate for the immediate setting, and it gives, I believe, only part of Virgil's meaning. For the rest, we must look to the later books of the poem. Sacra deosque dabo, says Aeneas,* socer arma Latinus habeto. Military strength is a national characteristic, but it is to be enriched by other elements introduced from without. By "religion" I under- stand not merely the ancient ceremonies that Augustus was so anxious to revive, but spiritual enlightenment in general. "They are to bring to Italy," says Mr. Glover,^ " all that is signified to a Trojan by Troy, all that Evander found wanting in the old life of the coun- try— wo5 et cidtus:' May we imagine further that Virgil is thinking here of the part played by Greece in Rome's development ? In any case his meaning here is larger than that of the prophecy of Anchises. More important still is the ultimate effect that foreign influence is to have on national character; it is not to lead to servile imitation, the abandonment of native traits. — ^Juno insists upon that. ' VI, VI. 472. « Vss. 847 flf. a xii, vs. 192. 3 p. 115. 6p THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL Sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago; Occidit occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia.^ Jupiter smiles assent: commixti cor pore tantum subsident Teucri. Virgil differs from Horace, it would seem, in his reading of the intellectual history of Rome: not Graecia but Italia capta takes its capturer captive. These words of Jupiter announce the dinouement of the larger plot of the later books— that is, the main idea of VirgiPs epic. Here, surely, the gods are not mere epic adornment: the divine actors convey a message that could hardly be given by anybody else. By disposing first of the ideal problem, Virgil can keep the personal tragedy, the fate of Turnus, for the end of the poem — certainly a triumph in dramatic arrangement. Here is one important detail in which Virgil diverges from his epic model, the Iliad of Homer: for even if those are right who regard the last two books of the Iliad as later additions, the poet of the twenty-second book does not end with the moment of Hector's death. An analysis of the Aeneid in the light of the foregoing discussion reveals an epic poem presenting a unified narrative and yet con- structed of two tragedies, the tragedy of Dido and the tragedy of Turnus. These tragedies are linked together by the sixth book, which is indispensable for the plot of either, as it sets forth the nature of the fate that controls both. The larger ideas in which personal action is set are disclosed with completeness only in the later books — maius opus moveo. And though the tragedies are both sincere, though human pathos and woe are an undercurrent in VirgiPs feeling, I cannot find with Professor Woodberry,^ that the Aeneid is a "iwwerere, following the gloria of his fourth eclogue as manhood follows youth," or that the structure of the poem presents a series of defeats — ^that of Troy, that of Dido, that of Turnus, and almost that of Aeneas him- self. The poem throbs with the tender sympathy and infinite pity of one who has sounded sorrow to its depths, but it ends with a twofold triumph, the triumph of Italy and the triumph of Rome. Per varios casus^ per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium, X xii, vs. 827. a p. 133. VIRGIL AND THE DRAMA 61 This is not a shallower, it is a deeper reading of life than that of him who has merely *' tears for things." A bare summary of the events in the narrative •of the Aeneid — a storm at sea, funeral games, a hero's story of his adventures, a hero's descent to the lower world — suggest the influence of Homer at every turn. Despite these details, despite the echoing of beautiful phrases and imagery — which is not " imitation," but a part of the ancient poet's sacred function — the discerning reader is astonished to find that there is nothing Homeric in the total effect of the poem or its total plan. One great difference is the strong national sentiment of the Aeneid y whereas the Iliad and Odyssey both are essentially per- sonal narratives. Another difference, more striking still, is the element I have discussed in this paper. For the poem is not solely epic: in structure it is a fusion of epic and of Attic tragedy, which later Virgil enriches by creating a new conception of fate. The poem is indeed alta tragedia, as was said by one who "knew it all in all." Whatever the plays of Varius and Ovid may have been, Virgil's Aeneid alone is proof that the Augustan Age still cherished the drama. I