The Aeneid is thus at once the epic of the national life under its new conditions and an epic of human character. The true keynote of the poem is struck in the line with which the proem closes Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.
The idea which underlies the whole action of the poem is that of the great part played by Rome in the history of the world, that part being from of old determined by divine decree, and carried out through the virtue of her sons. The idea of universal empire is thus the dominant idea of the poem. With this idea that of the unbroken continuity of the national life is intimately associated. The reverence for old customs and for the traditions of the past was a large element in the national sentiment, and has a prominent place in the Aeneid. So too has the feeling of local attachment and of the power of local association over the imagination. The poem is also characteristically Roman in the religious belief and observances which it embodies. Behind all the conventional machinery of the old Olympic gods there is the Roman apprehen sion of a great inscrutable power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain observances, working out its own secret purposes through Roman arms and Roman counsels.
The idealization of Augustus is no expression of servile adula tion. It is through the prominence assigned to him that the poem is truly representative of the critical epoch in human affairs at which it was written. The cardinal fact of that epoch was the substitution of personal rule for the rule of the old commonwealth over the Roman world. Virgil shows the imaginative significance of that fact by revealing the emperor as chosen from of old in the counsels of the supreme ruler of the world to fulfil the national destiny, as descendant of gods and heroes of old poetic renown.
Virgil's true and yet idealizing interpretation of the imperial idea of Rome is the basis of the greatness of the Aeneid as a repre sentative poem. It is on this representative character and on the excellence of its artistic execution that the claim of the Aeneid to rank as one of the great poems of the world mainly rests. The inferiority of the poem to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a direct representation of human life is so unquestionable that we are in danger of underrating the real though secondary interest which the poem possesses as an imitative epic of human action, manners and character. In the first place it should be remarked that the
action is chosen not only as suited to embody the idea of Rome, but as having a peculiar nobleness and dignity. of its own. It brings before us the spectacle of the destruction of the city of greatest name in poetry or legend, of the foundation of the im perial city of the western seas, in which Rome had encountered her most powerful antagonist in her long struggle for supremacy, and that of the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome itself. It might be said of the manner of life represented in the Aeneid, that it is no more true to any actual condition of human society than that represented in the Eclogues. But may not the same be said of all idealizing restoration of a remote past in an age of ad vanced civilization? The life represented in the Oedipus Tyrannus or in King Lear is not the life of the Periclean nor of the Eliza bethan age, nor is it conceivable as the real life of a prehistoric age. Where Virgil is least real, and most purely imitative, is in the battle-scenes of the later books.
But the adverse criticisms of the Aeneid are chiefly based on Virgil's supposed failure in the crucial test of the creation of char acter. And his chief failure is pronounced to be the "pious Aeneas." Is Aeneas a worthy and interesting hero of a great poem of action? Not, certainly, according to the ideals realized in Achilles and Odysseus, nor according to the modern ideal of hero ism. Virgil wishes to hold up in Aeneas an ideal of pious obedience and persistent purpose—a religious ideal belonging to the ages of faith combined with the humane and self-sacrificing qualities belonging to an era of moral enlightenment. His own sympathy is with his religious ideal rather than with that of chivalrous romance. He felt that the deepest need of his time was not mili tary glory, but peace, reconciliation, restoration of law, and piety.