committee on arrangements for Buck Fanshaw's funeral, and the urbane cleryman, man of kind heart and sesquipedalian verbiage. Neither understands the language of the other. Finally, the preacher, bewildered by his visitor's picturesque slang, begs him to "restrict himself to the categorical statements of fact, unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and allegory." It was thus that from Servius down to the present century critics groped through the mist of allegory in their quest for the facts about Vergil's life. Ribbeck, though rejecting many of the absurdities of the ancient commentators, was still completely enough under their spell to see in the Alexis of the Second Eclogue Pollio's slave, Alexander. Nettleship insisted that in the First Eclogue Tityrus is a lightningchange artist, now Vergil, now a rustic libertus. This view is as old as Servius. It is especially in connection with the First Eclogue that the glamor of the old notions lingered longest. Now, thanks largely to a pioneer work of Leo, by which other scholars have been guided, we have come to see how tenuous is the fabric of the Tityrus-Vergil theory. The First Eclogue is, to be sure, a picture of what was happening in Vergil's distressful country. It is a study in contrasts. The sorrows of the exiled peasant-farmer are depicted as a foil to the jubilations of the recipient of Octavius's clemency. Tityrus is not Vergil; at most, he may be the spokesman of the poet's gratitude,58 or of his hope. For it is certainly unsafe to infer, as does Kroll, that, because Tityrus in the poem regained his farm, Vergil also was reinstated. This is but a tempered application of the method of the ancient critic. Indeed, the Eclogue, far from being the expression of thanks for a fait accompli, may well be an appeal dictated by the woes of "misera Mantua " in general.0 To me the lorn Meliboeus is the real hero, not the smugly satisfied Tityrus.

59

57

Of course, everybody knows that in the Eclogues Vergil, following the precedent of Theocritus in Idyll Seven, blended often the

51 Hermes XXXVI (1903), pp. 1-18.

58 So Leo in the article just referred to.

"Op. cit., p. 50.

Birt, Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie Vergils, Leipzig and Berlin, 1910, p. 87, is, perhaps, the most out-spoken of the new school of critics against the old methods of interpretation: "Vergil schildert da wirkliche Hirten, er schildert nicht sich."

world of Arcady with the world of men; as in the cycloramic battlepainting of thirty years ago material objects were fused with painted canvas in one cunning perspective. Furthermore, ancient biographers and scholiasts had a reckless proclivity for imparting autobiographical value to those writings of an author that might seem to belong to the subjective category. Thus, in the Suetonian Life of Vergil and in the works of the commentators, goodly portions are reared on a substructure no firmer than inference drawn from the contents of those poems of the triad in which the poet shows, or seems to show, most of himself and his environment, that is the Eclogues and the Georgics. The scientific application of this axiomatic truth has been the contribution which the last fifteen years have made to the reconstruction of Vergil's biography.

We have, therefore, learned the necessity of caution in utilizing the data of the ancient Life. Until recently, historians and critics were not prone to ask themselves whether a given statement in the Life might be the result of exegesis from the poems. The pen of the modern biographer went merrily over his page if the words of Donatus were humanly possible, inherently probable, traceable to a source not far removed from Vergil's time, and especially when they could be brought into connection with a passage in the Eclogues or the Georgics. It is precisely here, where it has been thoughtlessly assumed that there are two independent sources, mutually corroborative, that pitfalls lie. In such cases, we may have one source onlythe poems. What the Life contains, is merely, in the final analysis, the fruit of inference based on the poems. Let me venture to cite two illustrations.

In the first five lines of the Sixth Eclogue, written at the close of the forties, critics have wellnigh universally seen the first premonitions of Vergil's ambitions to write the Roman epic. It is tempting to believe that, in the prime of his young manhood, many years before arma virumque cano fell on the ears of an expectant world, Vergil cherished a plan of epic composition, which, temporarily abandoned after a false start, was again taken up-witness lines 1-48 of the Third Georgic-and finally bodied forth in modified form in the Aeneid. This attractive theory of an epic evolution is not a priori impossible. At any rate, this is not the place in which to consider the skepticism of Jahn, who regards the passage

Ber. Phil. Woch. 1910, 744f.

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in the Eclogue as a conventional recusatio and not the record of a serious poetic attempt, or the attitude of Leo, who suggested that doubts were in order as to whether Vergil actually cherished the plan of treating the deeds of Augustus in an epic, the proemium of the Third Georgic to the contrary notwithstanding. I am merely concerned with chronicling the unanimity with which, until the last decade and a half, the sentence mox cum res Romanas inchoasset, offensus materia ad Bucolica transiit, Vit. Donat. 19 Diehl, has been quoted as separate testimony, confirmatory of the allusion in the Eclogue. The sole critical value of the sentence amounts to this: It shows how the ancient biographer or his source understood those much discussed lines of the poem.

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64

Again: we read in the Life (Sect. 1, Diehl) that Vergil's father increased his substance by keeping bees. Hence, critics have been moved, to quote Mr. Glover, to the "pleasant reflection," that many details furnished by the experience of boyhood are woven into the Fourth Georgic. Perhaps although Vergil in many a passage found it necessary to put his Aristotle and his Varro into poetry. Fixation of cause and effect is not so simple a matter. There is the disturbing thought to reckon with that the ancient biographer made Vergil's father a bee-keeper because of the content of the Georgic. It is the part of a wise conservatism not to base conclusions upon passages in the Life the nature of which is such that they could originate in inference and happy guesses. The burden of proof has now shifted to the shoulders of those critics who would implicitly accept them.

Along with our newly acquired intelligence in using the ancient lives and the biographical details found in the commentators, another factor has largely contributed to a saner portraiture of Vergil, namely, the higher criticism of the Appendix Vergiliana. Never in the annals of Vergilian scholarship has the study of the Minor Poems usurped a place so commanding as that which it has maintained since the publication in 1901 of Franz Skutsch's booklet entitled Aus Vergils Frühzeit. Ciris, Culex, and Catalepton have

Die römische Literatur des Altertums, in Kult. der Gegenwart, 3d ed. 1912, p. 44.

For typical instances see Haverfield's revision of the Conington-Nettleship Vergil, I, p. 74; T. R. Glover, Virgil, p. 78.

Virgil, p. 14.

become names for students of Vergil in all countries to conjure with. Since the appearance in 1910, of Birt's remarkable book, Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie Vergils, the first commentary on Catalepton worthy of the name, these little poems have come into their rights as a preferred source of knowledge for Vergil's life. The writer of the Suetonian Life did not use this collection of poems; hence in relation to the Life they have, unlike the Eclogues, the authority of a separate source. As the years go by, the credentials presented by Culex, Ciris, and Catalepton 65 to hold the place assigned to them by external evidence as genuine works of Vergil, seem more and more indubitable.

The study of the poems of the Appendix has necessarily precipitated discussion of cognate biographical and chronological questions. From it all there has been born a new Vergil. Vergil has ceased to be, as through previous centuries he has tended to be regarded, the creator merely of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. We have come to see that the Vergil whom the world has known best, the authorized mouthpiece of economic reform and religious revival, the champion of the divine right of the Julii, the prophet of the high mission of the Roman state, is the poet in the last stages of his development. One who aspires really to know Vergil must not isolate the poet of the Second Triumvirate and the First Principate, the bard of the grand monde. He must form a composite in which will figure the Vergil of North Italy, a youth responsive to the dominant literary and philosophical influences of the late fifties and the early forties; that is to say, Lucretianism and Alexandrinism; a Vergil who, like many another tiro in poetry, tried his prentice hand at parody and skit, wrote rakish verses of which he may have been afterwards ashamed-a new Vergil and a more human Vergil.

Princeton University.

Compare the views expressed on these questions by two American scholars in recent articles: Frank, Vergil's Apprenticeship, Class. Phil. xv (1920), 23-38; 103-119; 230-244; Rand, Young Virgil's Poetry, Harvard Studies, XXX (1919), 103-185.

THE REVELATION OF AENEAS'S MISSION

BY GEORGE HOWE

The mission of Aeneas to carry his household gods to Latium and to build a city "whence came the Latin race, the lords of Alba, and the walls of lofty Rome" is the central thread binding together the several parts of the Aeneid. The critical literature has of course recognized its supreme importance to a proper understanding of the poem, and has discussed it from almost every possible point of view. It has raised, and sought to answer, questions of the character of the mission, of its bearing on the portrayal of the hero, of its success or failure in supplying an adequate principle of unity, of its artistic merit, of its source, and of parallels in other narrative poems. But, despite the attention it has received and the mass of discussion it has given rise to, one phase of the matter has been passed over with but scant notice-namely, the poet's method of revealing the mission to the hero himself.

For it is a thing that had to be revealed to Aeneas. It did not spring from his own impulses, his ambitions, his nature. The impelling force driving him relentlessly on to his destiny was not within the man, but was exercised upon him from without. His will came into play only in his loyalty to the principle of obedience, in holding true to the accomplishment of the divine purpose in the face of the extreme perils of sea and love and war. He was a man of destiny, but rather in the sense of a perfect instrument than of a molder of destiny. The poet, so conceiving him, is under the necessity of unfolding the plan of fate not only to the reader, but also to the hero himself.

To make it known to the reader was a comparatively simple matter. The poet announces it directly in the opening sentence, and he reminds us of it frequently all through the poem by statement or comment on the action. He informs us of it through the mouth of Aeneas himself and in the dialogues of the gods who direct the decrees of fate. Indeed the entire action of the main story is an elaborate exposition of it.

1

But it was a much more difficult matter to make clear Aeneas's

1 Translation here and throughout is by Fairclough in the Loeb Library.