CHAPTER IX.
ÆNEAS MAKES ALLIANCE WITH EVANDER.
The turn of events gives the Trojan chief much natural disquiet. All Latium is in arms against his little force of adventurers. He Hes down within his lines to a disturbed and anxious rest, where he has a remarkable vision. A figure rises, wrapped in a grey mantle, with his brows crowned with reed. It is "Father Tiber," the tutelary genius of the Rome that shall be. He bids his visitor be of good cheer: his coming has been long looked for. He renews, for his encouragement, the old oracle of Anchises:—
"On woody banks before your eye
A thirty-farrowed sow shall lie,
Her whole white length on earth stretched out,
Her young, as white, her teats about,
Sign that when thirty years come round
'White Alba' shall Ascanius found."
He will find allies, too, within reach. A colony from Arcadia have migrated to Italy under their king Evander, and have founded in the neighbouring mountains a city called Pallanteum. He will reach the place by sailing up the stream, and from them, ever at feud with their Latian neighbours, he will get the aid he requires.
Æneas wakes from sleep, arms the crews of two of his galleys, and begins his voyage up the course of the friendly Tiber, who purposely calms his waves and moderates his current. The sow with her thirty young is soon found, and duly sacrificed, as the river-genius has warned him, to propitiate the wrath of Juno. Evander, with his son Pallas and all his people, is keeping high festival to Hercules, when the masts of the Trojan galleys are suddenly seen among the trees as they turn a bend of the river. The strangers are hailed by Pallas; and Æneas, bearing in his hand the olive-bough of a suppliant, is led by the young chief before his father. In a well-studied speech he claims kindred with the Arcadian hero, albeit a Trojan and Greek might at first sight seem natural enemies. Dardanus of Troy traced his descent from Atlas—Evander's genealogy goes back to the same great ancestor. Their mutual enmity with the Latians should be also a bond of union: and lo! Æneas has shown his goodwill and confidence in thus placing himself fearlessly in Evander's power. Evander is the Nestor of the Æneid;—somewhat given to long stories and reminiscences of his own youth. He had known his present visitor's father well, in the years gone by, when the Trojan court had visited the country of Priam's sister Hesionè.
"A boy was I, a stripling lad,
My cheek with youth's first blossom clad;
I gazed at Priam and his train
Of Trojan lords, and gazed again:
But great Anchises, princely tall,
Was more than Priam, more than all.
With boyish zeal I schemed and planned
To greet the chief, and grasp his hand.
I ventured, and with eager zest
To Pheneus brought my honoured guest.
A Lycian quiver he bestowed
At parting, with its arrowy load,
A gold-wrought scarf, and bridle-reins
Of gold, which Pallas still retains."
He tells his visitor also, at very considerable length, the story of Hercules slaying the monster Cacus, son of Vulcan, half man and half beast, whose breath was as flames of fire, and whose diet was human flesh—the prototype of the giants of later fiction. He points out also to his guest the local features of the country—for they are standing on the site which is to be Rome, and Pallanteum is to become the Palatine mount of future history. Whatever of mythical legend the poet mixed up in his topography, he knew the interest with which his patrician audience—for antiquarianism was almost as fashionable in the court of the Cæsars as it is now—would listen while, by the mouth of Evander, he dwelt on the old historic localities of the imperial city: the Carmental gate, named after the nymph who was Evander's mother; the grove where Romulus in after-days made his first "Asylum" for the motley band whom he gathered round him; the Tarpeian rock; the hill on which was to stand the Capitol; the Janiculum, with its Saturnian walls, the key of Rome's defences. "Now"—says the poet, speaking in his own person of the glories of the great city in his own day,—
"Now all is golden—then 'twas all
O'ergrown with trees and brushwood tall.
E'en their rude hinds the spot revered:
******
Here in this grove, these wooded steeps,
Some god unknown his mansion keeps;
Arcadia's children deem
Their eyes have looked on Jove's own form,
When oft he summons cloud and storm,
And seen his aegis gleam."
A league is made between the Trojans and their new friends. King Evander confesses that his own power is small, but Æneas has arrived at a fortunate conjuncture. The Etruscans of Agylla, who have just expelled their tyrant Mezentius for his cruelties, have determined to pursue him to the death. But they have been warned by their soothsayer to choose a foreign leader; and here they are at the gates of Pallanteum, come to beseech Evander to head their expedition. He is himself too old—his son Pallas too inexperienced; he at once presents to them Æneas as a heaven-sent leader. The omens are all favourable, and both troops and commander are well pleased. Æneas selects the best of his crew, whom Evander furnishes with war-horses; the rest he sends back in the galleys to bear the tidings of his own movements to his son Iulus, and to charge him and the Trojans to keep close within their rampart, in case of attack during his absence. Taking command of his Etruscan allies, and followed by four hundred Arcadian horse under the young Pallas, whom his father gladly sends, as the youths of noble houses were sent in the days of knighthood, to learn the art of war under so great a captain, Æneas sets out on his march for Turnus's capital. The old king does not part from his son without sad misgivings; he has trusted Æneas with more than his life.
Venus has not been neglectful of her son. She has persuaded Vulcan to forge for him weapons and armour of such sort as only the immortal smith can make. The fire-god can never resist her blandishments; and he goes down to the forge where the Cyclops are ever at work, in the caverns beneath the Lipari Is- lands, off the coast of Sicily. There is much business in hand there already. Some of the one-eyed workmen are forging bolts for Jupiter, composed of four elements,—
"Three rays they took of forky hail,
Of watery cloud three rays,
Three of the wingèd southern gale,
Three of the ruddy blaze."[1]
Some are finishing a war-chariot for Mars; others are shaping an ægis for Minerva—a shield of dragon's scales and rings of gold. But their master bids them put all these tasks aside; War, and Wisdom, and even Government itself, must be content to come to a standstill, until the behests of Beauty have been obeyed.
The idea of the Shield of Æneas, which Venus comes and lays before him while he sleeps, is of course borrowed directly from Homer's Shield of Achilles. But the working out of it is quite original. Vulcan's subject, in this case, is not, as in the Shield of the Iliad, an epitome of human life, but a prophetic history of Rome. The whole passage in which it is elaborately described is of remarkable beauty even to our modern taste, and upon a Roman's ear and imagination must have had a wonderful effect. The story is told in eight (or perhaps nine) compartments, filled with the leading events in the great city's existence. The two first contain the birth of Romulus, and the union of the Romans with the Sabines, which began with the seizure of the Sabine women:—
"There too the mother-wolf he made
In Mars's cave supinely laid:
Around her udders undismayed
The gamesome infants hung,
While she, her loose neck backward thrown,
Caressed them fondly, one by one,
And shaped them with her tongue.
Hard by, the towers of Rome he drew
And Sabine maids in public view
Snatched 'mid the Circus games:
So 'twixt the fierce Romulean brood
And Tatius with his Cures rude
A sudden war upflames.
And now the kings, their conflict o'er,
Stand up in arms Jove's shrine before,
From goblets pour the sacred wine,
And make their peace o'er bleeding swine."
The doom of Mettius the Alban, and the keeping of the Tiber bridge by Horatius against Lars Porsena, occupy the two next compartments. Next comes the defence of the Capitol against the Gauls by Manlius:—
"A silver goose in gilded walls
With flapping wings announced the Gauls;
And through the wood the invaders crept,
And climbed the height while others slept.
Golden their hair on head and chin:
Gold collars deck their milk-white skin:
Short cloaks with colours checked
Shine on their backs: two spears each wields
Of Alpine make: and oblong shields
Their brawny limbs protect."
In the succeeding compartments are wrought the procession of the Salii with the sacred shields, and the regions of the world below, where Catiline lies in torment, while Cato has his portion with the just. And within the whole, round the umbo or boss of the shield, there runs a sea of molten gold in which sport silver dolphins, framing the centre design—the glories of Augustus:—
"There in the midmost meet the sight
The embattled fleets, the Actian fight:
Leucate flames with warlike show,
And golden-red the billows glow.
Here Cæsar, leading from their home
The fathers, people, gods of Rome,
Stands on the lofty stern:
The constellation of his sire
Beams o'er his head, and tongues of fire
About his temples burn,
With favouring Gods and winds to speed
Agrippa forms his line:
The golden beaks, war's proudest meed,
High on his forehead shine.
There, with barbaric troops increased,
Antonius, from the vanquished East,
And distant Red-sea side,
To battle drags the Bactrian bands
And Egypt; and behind him stands
(Foul shame!) the Egyptian bride."
There the gods of Rome—conspicuous amongst whom is the archer Apollo, the tutelary deity of the house of Cæsar—put to flight the dog-headed Anubis, and the other monstrous gods of Egypt. There, too, is blazoned the "triple triumph" of Augustus, graced by a long procession of captives of all tribes, from Scythia to the Euphrates.
"Such legends traced on Vulcan's shield
The wondering chief surveys:
On truth in symbol half revealed
He feeds his hungry gaze,
And high upon his shoulders rears
The fame and fates of unborn years."
- ↑ The thunderbolt is usually represented on ancient coins and medallions with twelve rays.