CHAPTER II.
ÆNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY.
It has been said that this poem is a kind of supplement to the Iliad. Æneas tells us what was not there told by Homer, but what is presupposed in his Odyssey,—the later history of the siege and capture of Troy. He relates at length the stratagem of the Wooden Horse, by which the Greeks at last outwitted their enemies. The fleet, which had seemed to sail for home, had withdrawn, and lay concealed in the harbour of Tenedos. The wooden fabric—dedicated to Minerva, as the tale went—was left standing outside the city. It was suggested to bring it within the walls, when the priest Laocoon rushed to prevent it—suspecting some such stratagem as in truth had been contrived. He even hurled his spear against its side, and might have thus made a beginning of its destruction, when behold, a prisoner was brought in. It was the treacherous Sinon; a Greek who had undertaken to play the dangerous part of a double spy. The tale he told his captors was this: that he, though a Greek, was a fugitive from Greek vengeance—especially from the hated Ulysses. He had been fixed upon as a victim to propitiate the offended gods; for there had come an oracle from Apollo, that as the blood of a virgin had to be shed to propitiate the gales on the expedition to Troy, so blood—that of a Greek—must purchase their return. Ulysses had contrived that Sinon should be the victim, and it was to escape this doom that he had thus fled.
The Trojans were moved to pity—they spared the traitor's life; only, in return. King Priam adjured him to tell them the true intent of the Horse. Sinon declared that the Greeks had meant to set it up themselves, an offering to Minerva, within the Trojan citadel when they should have captured it; it behoved the Trojans now to seize it and drag it within the walls: for, if this were done, then—so ran the oracles—Asia should avenge itself upon Europe, and the Greeks in their turn should be besieged in their homes.[1]
The traitor's tale was all too easily believed. There came, too, a fearful omen, which hurried the Trojans to adopt this false counsel. The priest Laocoon, who had dared to strike the wooden monster, was seized, while offering sacrifice to Neptune, with his two sons, by two huge sea-serpents (so old is the belief, false or true, in these apocryphal monsters), which came sailing in to the beach from the direction of Tenedos. In the description which the poet gives of their movements at sea, we seem to be reading a versified extract from the log of some modern sea-captain:—
"Amid the waves they rear their breasts,
And toss on high their sanguined crests;[2]
The hind-part coils along the deep,
And undulates with sinuous sweep."
The two unhappy youths are first caught and strangled—then the father. The legend is well known to others besides students of the Æneid, from the marble group of the Laocoon; which, however, does not tell the story in the same way, or in so probable a shape, as the poet does, since it represents the reptiles as embracing all three victims at once in their folds. Then, with glad shouts and songs of youths and maidens, the huge monster was dragged over a breach made purposely in the walls of Troy. Yet not without a voice of warning, disregarded, from Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, who had the gift of prophecy, and whose fate it was, like so many prophets in their own families, to prophesy in vain—nor without dificulties which might in themselves have well been considered presages of evil:—
"Four times 'twas on the threshold stayed;
Four times the armour clashed and brayed;
Yet press we on, with passion blind,
All forethought blotted from our mind,
Till the dread monster we install
Within the temple's tower-built wall."
Inside, the fabric is full of armed Greeks. How many there were in number has been disputed—though possibly, in a legend of this kind, the question of more or fewer is scarcely relevant. It is a question, however, which derives some interest from the fact that it was one of the difficulties which exercised the mind of the first Napoleon during his exile. Studying the siege of Troy as if it were a mere prosaic operation in modern warfare, he was struck by the improbability of the whole stratagem. How "even a single company of the Guard" could be hid in such a machine, and dragged from some distance inside the city walls, the French Emperor was unable to conceive, and regarded the story as an infringement of even a poet's licence. Napoleon was not much of a Latin scholar, and, so far as the main point of his criticism went, had depended too implicitly upon French translators. Segrais, discussing the question in a note, thought there might be perhaps some two or three hundred. Indeed most of our English translators have gone out of their way to exaggerate the number. But Virgil himself, as has been pertinently remarked by Dr Henry, only makes nine men actually come out of the horse, all of whom he mentions by name. The poet certainly does not say in so many words that these were all, but he, at least, is not answerable for a larger number. Among the nine are the young Neoptolemus, surnamed Pyrrhus—"Red-haired,"—son of the dead Achilles, and now his successor in the recognised championship of the force; Sthenelus, the friend and comrade of Diomed (for whose absence it seems hard to account); Machaon, the hero-physician, whom one hardly expects to find selected for such a desperate service; Epeus, the contriver of the machine; and Ulysses, without whose aid and presence no such stratagem would seem complete.
At dead of night the traitor Sinon looked out to sea, and saw a light in the offing. It was the fire-signal from Agamemnon's vessel; the Greek fleet had come back under cover of the darkness from its lurking-place at Tenedos. Then he silently undid the fastenings of the horse, and the Greek adventurers, as has been said, emerged from their wooden prison.
In the visions of the night Æneas saw the ghastly spectre of the dead Hector stand before him,—
"All torn by dragging at the car,
And black with gory dust of war.
******
Ah, what a sight was there to view!
How altered from the man we knew,
Our Hector, who from day's long toil
Comes radiant in Achilles' spoil,
Or with that red right hand, which casts
The fires of Troy on Grecian masts!
Blood-clotted hung his beard and hair,
And all those many wounds were there,
Which on his gracious person fell
Around the walls he loved so well."
Virgil seems to have followed the more horrible tradition, which appears also in some of the Greek dramatists, that Achilles fastened Hector to his chariot while still alive.
The shade of the dead hero had come to warn Æneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Æneas, as the hope of his race, the prince of the house of Priam formally intrusts the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of Vesta, to be carried into the new land which he shall colonise. It is a formal transfer of the kingdom and the priesthood to the younger branch—the line of Assaracus.
Æneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within the city. Already the storming-party had attacked and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,—to whom Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first point which Menelaus made for. Æneas himself is summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point the Latin "Fuimus,"—"We have been—and are not," for this is understood.[3] "Fuimus Troes"—Mr Conington's translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:—
"We have been Trojans—Troy has been—
She sat, but sits no more, a queen."
It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the word "Vixi"—"I have lived"—in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the turn of the expression is due to that euphemism which refrained from using any words of direct ill omen.
"The father of the gods," says Panthus, "has transferred all our glory to Argos." There was a story (alluded to in one of the lost tragedies of Sophocles, of which we have but a fragment) that on the night of the capture of Troy the tutelary deities departed in a body, taking their images with them. It is a singular parallel to the well-known tradition, that before the fall of Jerusalem supernatural voices were heard in the night exclaiming, "Let us depart hence!" The Romans had a regular formula for the evocation of the gods from an enemy's city, and inviting them, with promises of all due honours and sacrifices, to transfer their seat to Rome; and to attack any city without these solemn preliminaries was held to bring a curse on the besiegers.[4]
Æneas is anxious to assure his fair listener that, in spite of Hector's adjuration to fly, he did all that man might do in defence of his king and his countrymen. He had rallied a band of brave men, and for a while made head against the enemy. They were favoured by the mistake made by a party of Greeks, who took them for friends in the darkness, and whom they cut to pieces, and having arrayed themselves in their armour, dealt destruction in the enemy's very ranks. But all resistance was in vain. The appearance of Neoptolemus—Pyrrhus—the "Red-haired"—and the comparison of the young warrior in his strength and beauty to the serpent who comes forth after casting its winter slough, is fine in the original, and finely translated:—
Full in the gate see Pyrrhus blaze,
A meteor, shooting steely rays:
So flames a serpent into light,
On poisonous herbage fed,
Which late in subterranean night
Through winter lay as dead:
Now from its ancient wounds undressed,
Invigorate and young,
Sunward it rears its glittering breast,
And darts its three-forked tongue."
And the fate of the unhappy Priam is an equally beautiful picture, of a different tone:—
"Perhaps you ask of Priam's fate:
He, when he sees his town o'erthrown,
Greeks bursting through his palace-gate,
And thronging chambers once his own,
His ancient armour, long laid by,
Around his palsied shoulders throws,
Girds with a useless sword his thigh,
And totters forth to meet his foes."
Hecuba, who with her women is clinging to the altar, rebukes her husband for this mad attempt to match his feeble strength against the enemy. Still, when Pyrrhus rushes into the hall in pursuit of one of Priam's sons, Polites, and slays him full in the father's sight, the old man hurls a javelin at the Greek chief, with a taunting curse upon his cruelty. But it is
"A feeble dart, no blood that drew;
The ringing metal turned it back,
And left it clinging, weak and slack."
And the ruthless son of Achilles drags the old king to the altar, and slays him there.
One more episode of that terrible night Æneas relates to his hostess:—
"I stood alone, when lo! I mark,
In Vesta's temple crouching dark,
The traitress Helen: the broad blaze
Gives me full light, as round I gaze.
She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate,
Made frantic by their city's fate,
Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,
The vengeance of her injured lord,—
She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend,
Sat cowering, by the altar screened.
My blood was fired: fierce passion woke
To quit Troy's fall by one sure stroke."
But his goddess-mother, Venus, stays his hand, and bids him think rather of saving his wife, and aged father, and infant son. Virgil gives us no hint of the other story of Helen's discovery by her angry husband Menelaus, who was lifting his sword to kill the adulteress, when his arm fell powerless before the fascination of her beauty.
Obedient to the goddess, says Æneas, he went to seek his father Anchises, that he might carry him with him in his flight. But the old man refused to move. He would die, he said, in Troy. Life might be dear to the young; but for himself, even the tender mercies of the enemy would give him all he seeks, though they leave his corpse unburied,—
"He lacks not much that lacks a grave."
The desperate entreaties of his son were all in vain, until there came an omen from heaven. While Æneas was threatening—since the old man would not be saved—to rush himself again into the fight and meet a warrior's death, his wife Creusa placed their young son Iulus in his arms. Lo! on the child's head there played a lambent light of flame. The mother and Æneas would have sought to extinguish it, but Anchises recognised in it a sign from heaven. Virgil reads us no special interpretation, but surely he meant his Roman readers to understand that the seal of sovereignty was thus early set upon the founder of the great house of Julius. Thunder on the left hand—always the best of auguries—and a meteor flashing across the sky and pointing out their path to the fugitives, confirm the omen.
So the old man was lifted on his son's shoulders, Iulus walking by his side, and Creusa following at some distance. They were to meet outside the city, at the temple of Ceres. Anchises bore in his hands the little images of the household gods (like Laban's teraphim) and the sacred fire; for Æneas himself, red-handed from the battle, might not touch them. But soon the steps of their enemies were heard in pursuit; and Æneas, making his way with his precious burden through by paths to the place of rendezvous, reached it only to find that though many other fugitives, men, women, and children, had assembled there, the unhappy Creusa had not followed him. Cursing men and gods alike in his agony, he retraced his steps towards Troy, and even penetrated unharmed into the wreck of Priam's palace, crying aloud his wife's name. Suddenly her shade appeared to him, and bade him not continue so vain a search, or grieve for a loss which was but the fulfilment of the counsels of heaven. She is content to know the future glories which are in store for her husband, and thankful that her own fate has been death (we are left to suppose, at the hands of the Greeks) rather than captivity and slavery. Æneas listened, and at once, obedient to the recognised voice of the gods, whether for good or evil, as is his character throughout, yielded to his fate, and hid himself with his little band of fugitives in the forests of Mount Ida. There they had spent the winter months in building themselves a little fleet of galleys out of the abundant pine-wood; and with the early summer launched upon the seas, wholly in ignorance of their destination, but awaiting confidently the guidance of heaven towards their promised resting-place.
- ↑ Dante in his Inferno punishes Sinon with an eternal sweating-sickness: a singular penalty, which is shared only by Potiphar's wife.—Inf. xxx.
- ↑ Nay, the "crests" spoken of seem to have been (as reported of the modern sea-serpent) of actual hair; since Pindar, as Conington has noted, calls them "manes."
- ↑ The French word "feu," used of a person deceased, is probably from this Latin use of "fui."
- ↑ For this reason, says Macrobius, the real name of Rome and of its guardian deity was always kept a secret.