THE ÆNEID.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.
The Æneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of Troy. The fascination of that remarkable cycle of legend had not weakened after the lapse of ten centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment, but he goes to him for his subject. He even makes his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to the Iliad—at least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject of this latter poem is the wanderings and final establishment in his native country of the Greek hero Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the story of the escape of a Trojan hero from the ruin of his city, and the perils by land and sea which he encountered, until his final settlement in the distant west, in the land which the gods had promised him. Æneas, like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes and sufferings; and like him, though he has the justice and the deliberate counsels of heaven all on his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permitted to vex and thwart liim for many long years. This Æneas—reputed son of the goddess Venus by a mortal husband, Anchises—had played no unimportant part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been told that King Priam had no less than fifty sons, it might have been said that he stood very near the throne. For he was the representative of the younger branch of the house of Dardanus—the family of Assaracus—as Priam was of the elder branch, that of Ilus.[1] A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round him in the Iliad. He is there addressed as "counsellor of the Trojans;" they honoured him, we are told, "equally with the godlike Hector;" and Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has rejected the house of Priam, but that "Æneas, and his sons, and his sons' sons" should hereafter reign over the Trojans."[2] Some Homeric critics have even fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer's poem, a jealousy between Æneas and the sons of Priam. But this surely arises from reading Homer by the light of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of events, when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam's kingdom, the prince of the house of Assaracus should rebuild the Trojan fortunes on the far-off shores of Italy.
Like Homer, Virgil dashes at once into the heart of his story. This is how he introduces his hero:—
"Arms and the man I sing, who first, By fate of Ilian realm amerced, To fair Italia onward bore, And landed on Lavinium's shore."[3]
He tells us nothing, however, for the present, of the escape from Troy and the embarkation of the fugitives, or of the guiding oracles in obedience to which they had sailed forth in quest of this new home. He only shows us Æneas on the sea, having just set sail from Sicily, where the angry Queen of Heaven catches sight of him. Juno, we must remember—Virgil, apparently, has no idea that any one could need reminding of it—Juno has never forgotten or forgiven that scene upon Mount Ida, where the Trojan Paris preferred the fascinations—or the bribes—of Venus to her own stately charms. She had persuaded her royal consort, the king of gods and men, to consent to the downfall of the accursed race; and she persecutes this unhappy remnant, now on its voyage, with unrelenting hate. Even the poet, who makes use of her persecution as one of the mainsprings of his story, professes his astonishment at its bitterness,—
"Can such deep hate find place in breasts divine?"[4]
She had another reason, too, for her present jealous feelings. The city of Carthage, where she was especially honoured, she had hoped to make the mistress of the world. And now—so the inexorable Fates have woven it in their web—this new brood from Troy are to destroy it in the years to come. Rome, and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey to his readers, is to have this universal empire.
But they have not reached Latium yet, these hateful Trojans. They never shall. The Queen of Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds, where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of Æolia, controlling his boisterous subjects:—
"They with the rock's reverberant roar
Chafe blustering round their prison door:
He, throned on high, the sceptre sways,
Controls their moods, their wrath allays.
Break but that sceptre, sea and land
And heaven's ethereal deep
Before them they would whirl like sand,
And through the void air sweep."
At Juno's request Æolus lets loose his prisoners. Out rush the winds in mad delight.
"All in a moment, sun and skies
Are blotted from the Trojans' eyes:
Black night is brooding o'er the deep,
Sharp thunder peals, live lightnings leap:
The stoutest warrior holds his breath,
And looks as on the face of death.
At once Æneas thrilled with dread;
Forth from his breast, with hands outspread,
These groaning words he drew:
'O happy thrice, and yet again,
Who died at Troy like valiant men,
E'en in their parents' view!
O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray,
Why passed I not the plain that day,
Yielding my life to you,
Where, stretched beneath a Phrygian sky,
Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon, lie:
Where Simois tumbles 'neath his wave
Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?'"
The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are cast on the rocks; one goes down with all its crew before their leader's eyes. But Neptune, the sea-god, comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as Juno is hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King of the Winds in his dominions—he knows by whose instance he has dared this outrage. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern authority:—
"Back to your master instant flee,
And tell him, not to him but me
The imperial trident of the sea
Fell by the lot's award;
His is that prison-house of stone,
A prison, Eurus, all your own;
There let him lord it to his mind,
The jailer-monarch of the wind,
But keep its portal barred."
So the tempest is stilled, and Æneas, with seven ships, the survivors of his fleet of twenty, runs into a land-locked harbour on the coast of Carthage. The crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn, while Æneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and kills deer to mend their meal. Wine they have good store of—the parting gift from King Acestes, late their host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to the fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in words of good cheer:—
"You that have seen grim Scylla rave,
And heard her monsters yell,—
You that have looked upon the cave
Where savage Cyclops dwell,—
Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;
This suffering may yield us yet
A pleasant tale to tell."
Æneas has his advocate, too, in the celestial council. His goddess-mother Venus pleads with her father Jupiter to have pity on her offspring. And Jupiter—very open to influence of this kind now, as in Homer's story—reveals for her comfort the secrets of fate, Æneas shall reach Latium safely, and reign there three years. His son Iulus—or Ascanius, as he is otherwise called—shall succeed him, and transfer the seat of power from Lavinium to his own new-founded city, Alba Longa. Three hundred years his race shall rule there, till in due course the twin-brothers Romulus and Remus shall be born to the war-god Mars, and the elder brother shall lay the foundations of Rome. To the glories of this new capital the Father of the gods will assign neither limit nor end. The wrongs of Troy shall be redressed. The sons of the East, in their new home, shall avenge themselves on their enemies.
"So stands my will. There comes a day,
While Rome's great ages hold their way,
When old Assaracus's sons
Shall quit them on the Myrmidons,
O'er Phthia and Mycenæ reign,
And humble Argos to their chain.
From Troy's fair stock shall Cæsar rise,
The limits of whose victories
Are ocean, of his fame the skies;
Great Julius, proud that style to bear,
In name and blood Iulus' heir."
Thus, before lie has concluded the first book of his great poem, the poet has taken us into his counsels as to the purport of the song. It is not a mere epic romance, in which we are to be charmed with heroic deeds and exciting adventures; it is, like some of our modern novels, a romance with a purpose; and the purpose is the claiming for the great house of Julius the rightful empire of Rome, and the celebration of the glories of that house in the person of Augustus. And as the Iliad of Homer, beyond the mere vocation of the poet to arouse and charm a warlike audience by the recital of deeds of arms, had its own purpose also—the glorification of the Greek nation—so the Roman poet may be said to have written a counter-Iliad, to extol the later fortunes of the royal house of Troy in the descendants, as he is pleased to imagine them, of Iulus. For any historic foundation of such a genealogy we may look in vain. King Brute stands upon much the same historical level, as the ancestor of the Britons, as can be claimed for Iulus of Troy as the founder of the Julian house and of Rome. But, for the present, we must be content to assume his existence, and to follow the course of the narrative as the poet wills. The claim of Trojan descent is not an invention of Virgil's, though he may have been the first to work it out so much in detail It was a claim in which his countrymen always delighted, and there were not wanting traditions in its support. Another purpose, also, Virgil seems to have at heart. He does not care so much, after all, for the subjugation of Greece and the extension of the imperial rule of Rome. The empire of Augustus is to be peace. There has been enough, and more than enough, of war. In the prognostications of the future of his nation, even here we are reminded of the strains of the "Pollio." To the soul of the Roman poet—unlike his master Homer in this—war, and more especially civil war, is absolutely hateful. He can describe it, when needed for his purpose, and describe it well; but it is as the scourge of nations, or at best the terrible remedy for greater evils;—not, as the Greek poet calls it, "the strife which is the joy of men."
Venus loses no time in furthering, so far as she may, the counsels of Jupiter. She puts into the heart of the Queen of Carthage, on whose shores Æneas and his crews have now been cast, feelings of pity and compassion towards the shipwrecked strangers. She comes in person, also, to comfort her son Æneas in his trouble. Attended by his faithful friend Achates, he is exploring, like a careful leader, the strange coast on which he finds himself—
"When in the bosom of the wood
Before him, lo, his mother stood,
In mien and gear a Spartan maid,
Or like Harpalycè arrayed.
Who tires fleet coursers in the chase,
And heads the swiftest streams of Thrace.
Slung from her shoulders hangs a bow;
Loose to the wind her tresses flow;
Bare was her knee; her mantle's fold
The gathering of a knot controlled.
And 'Saw ye, youths,' she asks them, 'say,
One of my sisters here astray;
A silver quiver at her side,
And for a scarf a lynx's hide;
Or pressing on the wild boar's track
With upraised dart and voiceful pack?'"
There is in this description a happy reminiscence of an earlier legend. In such guise—not with any of the meretricious attractions assigned to the goddess of Cyprus and of Paphos, but as a simple mountain nymph—had she won her mortal lover, the Trojan shepherd Anchises, from whom this her dear son was born. So ran the fable; and it was added that she had enjoined her lover never to disclose the secret of the child's birth, nor to boast of the favour shown him by a goddess, but to bring the boy up in the forests of Ida, as the offspring of a wood-nymph. Anchises, in his pride, had neglected or forgotten her warning, and was punished by premature weakness and a helpless old age.
Professing herself to be but a Tyrian damsel, Venus replies to her son's questions as to the inhabitants of the land. They are a colony from Tyre; their queen, Dido, has fled from the treachery of her false brother Pygmalion, who, after murdering her husband Sichæus, had possessed himself of the kingdom. Hither she has escaped with her husband's wealth, and is founding a new city on the coast of Africa. Æneas tells her in return his own sad story, and is comforted by the assurance that all his fleet, though scattered, are safe—all but one unhappy vessel and her crew. Then, as she turns to leave him, the disguised divinity becomes apparent.
"Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed;
Her falling robe her footsteps swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept."
Æneas and his companion mount the crest of the hill, whence they look down upon the half-finished walls of Carthage, and the swarming bands of workmen. They are digging out the harbour, planning that most essential structure in a city of any pretension, an amphitheatre for public spectacles, and building a magnificent temple to Juno. Girt with a mist of invisibility which Venus has thrown round them,—like Ulysses in the court of Phæacia—the strangers enter the brazen gates of the temple. All is magnificent and wonderful. But, marvel of marvels! both walls and doors are sculptured with a history which Æneas knows only too well. Even here is recorded, on this distant and unknown shore, the story of stories—the Tale of Troy. With eager and tearful eyes the Trojan chief peruses the several groups, and identifies the various incidents. Here the Greeks fly to their ships, hard pressed by Hector and the Trojans: there, again, the terrible Achilles drives the Trojans in slaughter before him. The death of young Troilus, hurled from his chariot, is there; and, to match the picture, Hector dragged at Achilles's chariot-wheels round the city walls. Memnon the Ethiopian and the amazon Penthesilea also find a place; and there, amidst the foremost combatants, Æneas can recognise himself.
While the Trojan chief and his companion Achates are reading this sculptured history, the queen herself approaches. And while they admire her majesty and grace, conspicuous amongst all her train, lo! the missing comrades of Æneas make their appearance before her as suppliants. They tell the story of their shipwreck on the coast: and they think Æneas is lost, as he had thought they were. Then the mist in which Venus had wrapped the hero and his comrade dissolves, and the two parties recognise and welcome each other. Dido, like all the world, has heard of the name of Æneas, and the sufferings of the heroes of Troy. She can pity such sufferings from her own bitter experience:
"Myself not ignorant of woe,
Compassion I have learnt to show."
The sentiment has been adopted by modern writers in all languages. "She had suffered persecution and learnt mercy," says Sterne in a like case: and even in Sterne's mouth, the sentiment is natural and true.
The strangers are hospitably welcomed, and offered every facility for refitting their fleet, and preparing for the continuance of their voyage. Æneas sends down to his ships for presents worthy of so kind a hostess: and, with a father's pride, he sends also for his young son to introduce him to the queen. The evening is devoted to feasting and revelry. The royal bard—that indispensable figure in all courts, Trojan or Tyrian or Greek—sings to the assembled guests. It is to be remarked that his lay is not, as we might expect, of heroes and their deeds: it is the song of Silenus, in the Pastorals, over again—the favourite subject of the poet, the wonders of nature and creation.
"He sings the wanderings of the moon,
The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon;
Whence humankind and cattle came,
And whence the rain-spout and the flame,
Arcturus and the two bright bears,
And Hyads weeping showery tears;
Why winter suns so swiftly go,
And why the winter nights move slow."
All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who, at his false mother's bidding, has assumed the shape of Æneas's young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus's machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the passion which is to be her ruin, Æneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on Othello's:—
"Much of great Priam asks the dame,
Much of his greater son;
Now in what armour Memnon came,
Now how Achilles shone."
Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story—his escape and his seven years' wanderings. And Æneas begins; and, with an exact imitation of Homer's management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal night of Troy.
- ↑ The following pedigree is mythical—as pedigrees often are:
Tros. Ilus. Assaracus. Laomedon. Capys. Priam. Anchises. Æneas. - ↑ Iliad, xx. 306.
- ↑ The extracts are in all cases (where not otherwise marked) from Mr Conington's translation, and are made with the permission of his representatives and publishers.
- ↑ Milton has translated the line almost literally:—
"In heavenly spirits could such perversion dwell?"
—Par. Lost, vi.