THE SOUL HOLDS A HIGHER PLACE

93

"Eneid" purgatorial suffering prepares, not for entering into paradise, but for returning once more to the life of earth. Here in Virgil is a transmigration of souls which is found neither in Dante nor in Homer. Homer had regarded the body as more important than the soul; without the body the soul was but phantom and shadow; Achilles had rather be a slave on earth than the monarch of all the dead. But to Virgil the soul is the superior thing; the body is its place of imprisonment and source of defilement; only when it escapes from its earthly prison will the caged eagle soar into its native air. Æneas wonders that Anchises, after he had tasted the repose and the liberty of Elysium, should ever desire to return to earth.

Evidently, Pythagoras and Plato have contributed to Virgil's theology quite as much as Homer has. Homer puts his hell far away-Ulysses has to go to the extremity of the immense ocean to find it. Virgil's underworld is much more accessible-the grottos of Lake Avernus in Southern Italy, with their sulphurous odors and volcanic aspect, furnish gateways to it. Not only in point of space, but in point of meaning, is Virgil's Hades nearer to us than Homer's. Virgil's is the Hades of philosophy, as well as of poetry. The spiritual at last overtops the physical. All souls indeed are but forms of an anima mundi that breathes through all things.

Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main,
The moon's pale orb, the starry train,

Are nourished by a soul,

A bright intelligence, which darts

Its influence through the several parts

And animates the whole.

T

Empire had not seemed to be the manifestation in human affairs of invisible powers, and the emperor him. self to be in some sort dvine. In the apotheosis of the emperors, accompanied as it was by temples and sacrifices and worship in their brain, 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."

It

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. 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.

Thence souls of men and cattle spring,
And the gay people of the wing,

And those strange shapes that ocean hides
Beneath the smoothness of his tides.

So penal sufferings they endure

For ancient crime, to make them pure :

.

All these, when centuries ten times told
The wheel of destiny have rolled,

The voice divine from far and wide

Calls up to Lethe's river-side,

That earthward they may pass once more,
Remembering not the things before,

And with a blind propension yearn
To fleshly bodies to return.

The

I have for once, and only once, given a long specimen of Conington's translation. The ballad metre, though it is flowing, does not represent the stately sweetness of Virgil's hexameters; Dante's "Purgatory" is the best literary analogue to the Hades of the "Æneid." early part of the passage I have quoted has a sound very like Lucretius, but the latter part witnesses to a doctrine of immortality and of penalty at which Lucretius scoffed. Dante learned from Virgil that a heathen might realize the depth of the abyss into which transgression brings the soul, without being able to discover the way of escape from it. And yet we should miss one of the chief aspects of Virgil's genius if we failed to consider him in his character as a prophet of Christianity. To a certain extent Virgil did predict the way of escape, when he wrote his fourth "Eclogue." Let us remember that this was composed a whole half-century before Christ's work was accomplished, and we shall at least be struck with

SOURCES OF VIRGIL'S PREDICTIONS

95 its remarkable correspondence with the future facts and its equally remarkable likeness to Hebrew prophecy.

The poet begins by calling on the muses of Sicily-that is, those who have inspired the genius of Theocritus-to aid him now in work higher than any he has yet attempted. A virgin is coming, and the reign of Saturn; the earlier ages are to return. The chaste Lucina, whose emblem is the moon, is invoked in behalf of the babe soon to be borne. Pollio himself, to whom the "Eclogue" is dedicated, shall see the opening of the glorious time now foretold. Under his guidance, if any vestiges of human wickedness remain, they shall at least cease to cause terror to the world. The coming child shall overthrow the age of iron and shall found a golden race; he shall take on himself a divine nature; he shall see heroes mingling familiarly with the gods; he shall himself be one of them. Under his mild government men shall recover their ancestral virtues. The timid flocks shall no longer fear the lion. Serpents shall perish and poisonous herbs disappear. From the very cradle of the babe shall spring living flowers; the earth everywhere shall be alike fruitful; the soil shall not need the harrow, nor the vine the pruning-hook; the plowman shall release the ox from the yoke. Best of all, the Fates declare that this age of peace shall endure forever.

When Constantine recited a part of this "Eclogue to the assembled fathers at the Council at Nice, it was with the view of showing that heathenism had predicted its own downfall, that the deliverer it looked forward to was nothing less than divine, and that this Desire of all nations had come. So Virgil came to be enrolled, like Balaam, among the prophets. His statue was placed among them in the cathedral of Spanish Zamora in the Middle Ages, and he was invoked as "prophet of the Gentiles," at Limoges and Rheims in France. "Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis," we hear at one time; and Buddha is canonized as St. Josaphat at another.