of the gods. With a deeper reverence, he has a deeper sense of justice; he believes more in moral law; conscience and sin are greater realities to him; the idea of sacrifice is more fully developed; the offerings to the gods are both propitiatory and vicarious: unum pro multis dabitur caput. Poet as he is of the Roman Empire, and believer as he is in its divine mission to embrace the world, he is notwithstanding conscious of the crimes that have marked those hideous years of foreign con quest and of internal strife; he fears divine judgment; he counsels piety and a return to the ways of virtue and peace. So it is not without a meaning that his hero is the pious Æneas-pious, not only toward the gods, but toward his father and his race. The mission of Æneas is to bring the Trojan gods to Italy, and to find for them a lasting home.

All this is a distinct advance on Homer. Virgil has sounded depths in the human soul that Homer knew not of. Neither courage nor adventure can for Virgil any longer give sufficient charm to character. The true man is one who identifies himself with institutions, and builds his life into the life of his time. In both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," the interest is chiefly personal; the author is not specially on the side of the Greeks. But, in the "Eneid," the interest is chiefly national; Virgil is always and everywhere on the side of Rome. He makes fidelity to Rome a sort of religion. He clothes the Empire with an imaginative halo that impressed men's minds for ages after.

It is certain that the Roman people would never have endured the rule of such monsters of cruelty and license as Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, and Domitian, if the

THE APOTHEOSIS OF AUGUSTUS

89

Empire had not seemed to be the manifestation in human affairs of invisible powers, and the emperor himself to be in some sort divine. In the apotheosis of the emperors, accompanied as it was by temples and sacrifices and worship in their honor, we have indeed a most convincing proof of man's forgetfulness of the true God and of his disposition to worship and serve the creature more than the Creator. Though the Hebrews called their judges "gods," because they were God's representatives, they never identified them with God, or called them immortal, or paid them worship. These very judges were told that they should die like men, and they were bidden to fall down in worship before Jehovah. The very climax of heathen sacrilege and idolatry was thought to be reached when the images of the emperor which the Roman legions carried upon their standards underneath their eagles of bronze or silver, and which every soldier of the legion was required to worship, were set up in the holy place of the temple at the final siege of Jerusalem; that was "the abomination of desolation."

But Virgil lived in the times of ignorance, which God winked at, and which we ought to wink at too. The words deus and divus did not mean so much then as they mean to us. In Homer the Manes of the departed had been invoked in prayer; in Virgil's time these Manes were commonly called divi, or divine. It was not so great a thing to be a god, when popular belief held that there were many gods, instead of one. A half-pantheistic confounding of the world with God had made it easy to regard the actual ruler of the world as divinity made visible.

Alexander the Great had claimed not only a divine parentage, but also a divine nature, and had sent an order to the Republic of Greece to recognize his divinity. The answer of the Lacedemonians shows just how much meaning they attached to it. "Since Alexander desires to be a god," they said, "let him be one!" So among the Romans, Romulus had been deified, and Julius Cæsar after his death had been similarly exalted. Virgil applied all this to Augustus, even before his earthly life had ended. He invested the Roman Empire with divine sanctions. It is doubtful whether the existence of that Empire in form at least until 1806, when the last Roman emperor, Francis, king of Germany, permitted it to die, can be explained without taking into account the influence of Virgil.

In thus making the motives of his epic a larger justice and a larger humanity, Virgil did not depress the tone of poetry, he only enlarged its sphere. So he has been truly called a precursor of modern civilization. He is the most feminine of all the great poets; he first acknowledges and does reverence to the feminine in true manhood. Courtesy, pity, love, sympathy with misfortune, resignation in suffering, have almost no place in the "Iliad," but they are marked traits in the principal characters of the "Eneid." Triumph in defeat, success in apparent failure, the judging of life not by what it accomplishes but what it aims at, these ideas, of which Robert Browning is the great modern representative, are already hinted at by Virgil.

Homer has a joy in battle; he delights to chronicle the most ghastly wounds; compassion to a fallen foe he regards as only weakness. Of Zeus he sings:

VIRGIL'S THEOLOGICAL IDEAS

Apart from the rest he sate, and to fill his eyes was fain,

91

With the gleam of the brass and the fate of the slayers and them that were slain.

Virgil too, out of deference to Homer, gives us more than one battle scene. But his heart is evidently not in it. Touches of pathos and of pity light up the cloud of war, and the interest lies, not so much in the bloodshed, as in the tender emotions that mitigate its ferocity. When Pallas slays the twin sons of Danaus, as a reviewer has pointed out, Virgil thinks of their parents, who, "sore perplexed, each for the other took, nor wished the sweet uncertainty resolved." When Æneas slays Lausus, his weapon "rent the vest his mother's hand had broidered o'er with gold." Virgil has pity for the vanquished and the sorrowful. He thinks it worth

his while to justify his hero's desertion of Dido by the stern compulsion of fate, and to recompense the lovelorn queen by reuniting her to her husband in the world of shades.

Here, indeed, is another mark of theological progress. Homer punishes the bad in Hades, but he gives only the faintest intimations that there are rewards for the good. Virgil believes in an Elysium:

Here sees he the illustrious dead

Who fighting for their country bled;
Priests, who while earthly life remained
Preserved that life unsoiled, unstained;
Blest bards, transparent souls and clear,
Whose song was worthy Phoebus' ear;
Inventors, who by arts refined
The common life of human kind,
With all who grateful memory won
By services to others done :

A goodly brotherhood, bedight

With coronals of virgin white.

Virgil is an imitator of Homer, but Dante was almost equally an imitator of Virgil. Each improved upon his predecessor, while he drew without stint from his stores. Dante does well in the "Inferno" to take Virgil for his guide, for Virgil had mapped out the ground for him long before. He copies from Virgil the approach of night in the underworld:

Another sun and stars they know,

That shine like ours, but shine below.

From Virgil he gets the cue for his limbo of infants:

Whom portionless of life's sweet bliss,

From mother's breast untimely torn,

The black day hurried to the abyss

And plunged in darkness soon as born.

From Virgil he takes his hopes for those who die in youth:

Towards the ferry and the shore
The multitudinous phantoms pour;
Matrons and men, and heroes dead,
And boys and maidens yet unwed,
And youths who funeral pyres have fed

Before their parents' eye,

Dense as the leaves that from the treen
Float down when autumn first is keen,
Or as the birds that thickly massed
Fly landward from the ocean vast,

Driven over sea by wintry blast
To seek a sunnier sky.

It would almost seem as if Dante had taken from Virgil his ideas of purgatorial suffering, though in the