Introduction
The Æneid
When Rome, torn and bleeding from a century of civil wars, turned to that wise judge of men, the second Cæsar, and acquiesced as, through carefully selected ministers, he gathered the reins of power into velvet-clad fingers of steel, she did wisely. Better one-man power than anarchy! It became the part of true patriotism for the citizen and of statesmanship for the politician to bring to the aid of the First Man of the state all the motives that could harmonize the chaotic elements, and start Republican Rome on the path of a new unity—the unity of the Empire.
For already “far away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating horses’ hoofs and marching feet of men. They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool;A there was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, mustering and marshalling her peoples.” In his great task Augustus, with the aid of Mæcenas, very cleverly drew to his help writers whose work has since charmed the world. We can almost pardon fate for destroying the Republic—it gave us Virgil and Horace.
Pleasant indeed had it been for Virgil to sing in emulation of his great teacher Lucretius! “As for me,” he says, “first of all I would pray that the charming Muses, whose minister I am, for the great love that has smitten me, would receive me graciously, and teach me the courses of the stars in heaven, the various eclipses of the sun and the earth, what is the force by which the deep seas swell to the bursting of their barriers and settle down again on themselves—why the winter suns make such haste to dip in ocean, or what is the retarding cause which makes the nights move slowly.” Pleasant, too, to spend his “chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase” in picturing “the liberty of broad domains, grottos and natural lakes, cool Tempe-like valleys, lawns and dens where wild beasts hide, a youth strong to labor and inured to scanty fare.” “Let me delight in the country and the streams that freshen the valleys—let me love river and woodland with an unambitious love.” “Then, too, there are the husbandman’s sweet children ever hanging on his lips—his virtuous household keeps the tradition of purity.” Ah, yes, to Virgil most attractive was the simple life of the lover of nature, and charmingly did he portray it in his Eclogues and Georgics!
But Augustus, recognizing the genius of Virgil, and realizing the supreme need of a reinvigorated patriotism, urgently demanded an epic that should portray Rome’s beginnings and her significance to the world. Reluctantly then Virgil took up this task. Even at his death he considered it unfulfilled. Indeed it was his wish that the manuscript be destroyed. Almost immediately the Æneid became the object of the closest study, and ever since it has evoked the deepest admiration. Perhaps no other secular writing has so profoundly affected literature.