Part 12 (1/2)
Videtur his ostendisse aliud esse fata, aliud Jovem[6]
[Footnote 6: Serv _ad loc_ MacInnis, _Class Rev_ 1910, p 172, cites several other passages to the point in refutation of Heinze]
Again, contrary to the Stoic creed, the poet conceives of his hu action and even of thwarting fate
Aeneas in the second book rushes into battle on an iet his fates and reht also ree, and explains fully why he does not; and Dido, if left _nescla fati_,herself before her time[7] (IV, 696) The Stoic hypothesis seees
[Footnote 7: See Matthaei, _Class Quart_ 1917, p 19]
Can we assume an Epicurean creed with better success? At least in so far as it places the _foedera naturae_ above the Gods and attributes some freedom of will and action to rees with Lucretius But there is one apparent difficulty in that Vergil, contrary to his teacher's usual practice, permits the interference of the Gods in human action The difficulty is, however, only apparent, if, as Vergil does, we conceive of these Gods simply as heroic and super-hue in order to keep the ancient atination ever since Homer first spoke of him As such characters they have the power of initiative and the right to interfere in action that Epicurus attributes to men, and in so far as they are of heroic stature their actions o, and e This is, of course, not the sail adopted the Gods in imitation of Homer or that he needed Olympic machinery because he supposed it a necessary part of the epic technique Surely Vergil was gifted with as much critical acumen as Lucan But he had to accept these creatures as subsidiary characters the moment he chose Aeneas as his hero, for Aeneas was the son of Venus ith the celestials at least a part of the time Her presence in turn involved Juno and Jupiter and the rest of her daily associates Furthero, the characters must naturally behave as the characters of that day ont to do, and there were old books like Homer and Hesiod from which every schoolboy had become familiar with their behavior If the poet wished to make a plausible tale of that period he could no more undertake to modernize his characters than could Tennyson in his _Idylls_ The would-be Gods are in the tale not to reveal Vergil's philosophy--they do not--but to orient the reader in the at They perform the same function as the heroic accoutreil visited ancient temples and studied Cato
Had he chosen a contemporary hero or one less blessed with celestial relatives there is no reason to suppose that he would have ees at all If this be true it is as uncritical to search for the poet's own conception of divinity in these personages as it would be to infer his taste in furniture froive his hero at Evander's hovel In the epic of primitive Rome the claims of art took precedence over personal creed, and so they would with any true poet; and if any critic were prosaic enough to object, Vergil ht have answered with Livy: Datur haec venia antiquitati ut ustiora faciat, and if the inconsistency with his philosophy were stressed he could refer to Lucretius' proemium It is clear then that while the conceptions of destiny and free-will found in the _Aeneid_ are at variance with Stoic creed at every point, they fit readily into the Epicurean scherant what any Epicurean poet would readily have granted that the celestials eneral subordinated to the sas
What then are we to say of the Stoic coloring of the sixth book? In the first place, it is not actually Stoic It is a syncretism of mystical beliefs, developed by Orphic and Apocalyptic poets and roup of hellenistic writers, popularized by the later less logical Stoic philosophers like Posidonius, and gaining in Vergil's day a wide acceptance a il contributed so these beliefs upon early Christianity, though they were no more essential to it than to Stoicis was here adopted because the poet needed for his own purposes[8] a vision of incorporated souls of Ro which neither Epicurean nor orthodox Stoic creed could provide So he created this _mythos_ as Plato for his own purpose created a vision of Er[9] The dramatic purpose of the _descensus_ was of course to coressive revelation of his h the third book,[10]
to give the hero his final cole[11] Then the poet realized that he could at the same time produce a powerful artistic effect upon the reader if he accoreat heroes presented in review by Anchises froe in which Ro proud of her history But to do this he must have a _mythos_ which assumed that souls lived before their earthly existence A Hoil also availed himself of that in order to recall the friends of the early books) With this in view he builds his home of the dead out of what Servius callsin details here and there even froes so that the readeris not to be taken literally, for of course neither he nor anyone else actually believed that prenatal spirits bore the attributes and garments of their future existence Nor is the poet concerned about the eschatology which had to be assuh afforded an opportunity to find expression through the characters of the scene, are not allowed to be circumscribed by them; they are his own deepest convictions
[Footnote 8: No one would atte of his _Christ in Hades_]
[Footnote 9: Vergil indeed was careful to warn the reader (VI, 893) that the portal of unreal dreaery of the sixth book to fiction, and Servius reiterates the warning On the employment of myths by Epicureans see chapter VIII, above]
[Footnote 10: See Heinze, _Epische Technik_, pp 82 ff]
[Footnote 11: This Vergil indicates repeatedly: _Aen_ V, 737; VI, 718, 806-7, 890-2]