ed confession that his
philosophy has failed to solve the problems of animate nature.

XV

THE AENEID

While Caesar Octavian, now grown to full political stature, was reuniting
the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of
the _Georgics_. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the
poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar,
unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing
now that Rome was saved and the empire restored. Vergil's youthful
enthusiasm for Rome, which had sprung from a critical reading of her past
career, seemed fully justified; he began at once his _Arma virumque_.

The _Aeneid_ reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have
reiterated, an unsurpassed range of reading. But it is not necessary
to repeat the evidence of Vergil's literary obligations in an essay
concerned chiefly with the poet's more intimate experiences. In point of
fact, the tracking of poetic reminiscences in a poet who lived when no
concealment of borrowed thought was demanded does as much violence to
Vergil as it does to Euripides or Petrarch. The poet has always been
expected to give expression to his own convictions, but until recently it
has been considered a graceful act on his part to honor the good work of
his predecessors by the frank use, in recognizable form, of the lines
that he most admires. The only requirement has been that the poet should
assimilate, and not merely agglomerate his acceptances, that he should as
Vergil put it, "wrest the club from Hercules" and wield it as its master.

In essence the poetry of the _Aeneid_ is never Homeric, despite the
incorporation of many Homeric lines. It is rather a sapling of Vergil's
Hellenistic garden, slowly acclimated to the Italian soil, fed richly by
years of philosophic study, braced, pruned, and reared into a tree of
noble strength and classic dignity. The form and majesty of the tree
bespeak infinite care in cultivation, but the fruit has not lost the
delicate tang and savour of its seed. The poet of the _Ciris_, the
_Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the _Bucolics_ is never far to seek in the
_Aeneid_.

It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the
seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.[1] The note of intimacy,
unexpected in an epic, the occasional drawing of the veil to reveal the
poet's own countenance, an un-Homeric sentimentality now and then,