Influence of the Æneid
As to the success of the Æneid, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil’s death Horace writes in his Secular Hymn:—
“If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands
Upon the Etruscan shore have won renown,
That chosen remnant, who at thy command
Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town;
If all unscathed through Ilion’s flames they sped
By sage Æneas led,
And o’er the ocean waves in safety fled,
Destined from him, though of his home bereft,
A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left.”
—Translated by Martin.
Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words, with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther’s translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature.
When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion,—degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition,—it was evidence of Virgil’s grip on humanity that the poet of poets became the wizard of wizards. Even under the Antonines, the Sors Vergiliana (Virgilian prophecy) was practised. The Æneid was opened at random, and the first verse that struck the eye was considered a prophecy of good or bad portent. “The mediæval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the Roman, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the perfect in style, with whom no other writer could be compared; the Philosopher, who grasped the ideas of all things; the Wise One, whose comprehension seemed to other mortals unlimited. His writings became the Bible of a race. The mysteries of Roman priestcraft, the processes of divination, the science of the stars, were all found in his works.”
True indeed are the words of Professor MacMechan: “Beginning the Æneid is like setting out upon a broad and beaten highway along which countless feet have passed in the course of nineteen centuries. It is a spiritual highway, winding through every age and every clime;” and these of Professor Woodberry: “The Æneid shows that characteristic of greatness in literature which lies in its being a watershed of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that clothes it with the past of imagination, character and event, and forward to Christian times in all that clothes it with emotion, sentiment, and finality to the heart.”
As we approach modern literature, the great Italian Dante consciously takes Virgil as his “master and author.” “O glory and light of other poets! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love, that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author.” On English literature the influence of the Æneid has been so potent that our space will hardly suffice to convey the barest hint of its direct and indirect lines. Celtic story developed from it a voyage of Brutus who founds a new Troy, or London. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century sets forth this tale in his history. It was believed down to the seventeenth century and is reported by Milton. Elizabethan literature has frequent references to it. Chaucer in his House of Fame outlines the Æneid, emphasizing the Dido episode, which interested also Nash, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Spenser teems with allusions and indeed translations, so—
“Anchyses sonne, begott of Venus fayre,”
Said he, “out of the flames for safegard fled
And with a remnant did to sea repayre;
Where he, through fatall errour, long was led
Full many yeares, and weetlesse wandered
From shore to shore emongst the Lybick sandes
Ere rest he fownd.”
—F. Q., III., ix., 41.
and—
“Like a great water-flood, that, tombling low
From the high mountaines, threates to overflow
With suddein fury all the fertile playne,
And the sad husbandmans long hope doth throw
Adown the streame, and all his vowes make vayne,
Nor bounds nor banks his headlong ruine may sustayne.”
—F. Q., II., xi., 18; cf. Æn. II., 304 ff.
Bacon calls Virgil “the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” “Milton,” writes Dryden, “has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.” But beside this indirect influence, and that through the Italian school, Virgil’s direct influence on Milton is attested by many an allusion. Dryden, Cowper, with his “sweet Maro’s matchless strain,” Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, with his “sweet, tender Virgil,” freely acknowledge the debt they owe our poet. Dryden and Morris translated the Æneid into verse.
Tennyson, “the most Virgilian of modern poets,” gives the following tribute, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil’s death:—
“Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,
Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre,
Landscape lover, lord of language more than he that sang the Works and Days,
All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase,
Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd,
All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word,
Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers,
Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherds bound with flowers,
Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be,
Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea,
Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind,
Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind,
Light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this phantom shore,
Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more,
Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar’s dome—
Tho’ thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome—
Now the Rome of slaves hath perished, and the Rome of freemen holds her place,
I, from out the Northern Island, sundered once from all the human race,
I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”
It is a lover of Horace (and who is not a lover of Horace?), the brilliant Andrew Lang, who points out (in his Letters to Dead Authors) a vital difference that has made Virgil’s the higher influence: “Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch ‘the Sibyl doth to singing man allow,’ and might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it permitted to see and sing ‘mothers and men, and the bodies outworn of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men borne to the funeral fire before their parents’ eyes.’ The endless caravan swept past him—‘many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives them o’er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands.’ Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown. Ah, not frustra pius was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. In him, we fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience.”