d despair, and the
self-immolation of its victims."[893] He enforces this view with great
learning, and all he writes about it is of value; but I must confess
that he has not convinced me that this was Virgil's chief motive. He
seems to me to leave out of account two important considerations: first,
that though the poet drew freely on every available source, Greek and
Roman, for the enrichment of his subject and its treatment, yet the
whole design and purpose of the _Aeneid_ is Roman and not Greek, and the
introduction of a love-story _as such_ would have been foreign to that
design, and also to the aims and hopes of Augustus and the best men of
the age. Secondly, Heinze seems to forget, like so many others who have
written about the Dido episode, that Virgil had before his very eyes
facts sufficiently striking, a romance quite sufficiently appalling, to
suggest the adoption of the form of the story as we have it in the
fourth book. Twice in his own lifetime did a single formidable woman
work a baleful spell upon the destinies of the Roman empire. In neither
case did the spell take fatal effect; Julius escaped in time from the
wiles and the splendour of Cleopatra; Antony failed indeed to escape,
but brought himself and her to fortunate ruin. It is to me inexplicable,
considering how all Virgil's poems abound with allusions to the events
of his time, and with side-glances at the chief agents in them, that
neither Heinze nor Norden should have even touched on the possibility
that Cleopatra was in the poet's mind when he wrote the fourth book. It
is perhaps difficult for one who puts the poem on the dissecting-board,
and whose attention is continually absorbed in the investigation of
minute points in the fibre of it, to bear in mind the extraordinary
events of the poet's lifetime,--the civil war, the murder of Julius, the
division of the Roman world, the distraction of Italy, the attempt of
Antony, or rather, indeed, of his enslaver, to set up a rival Oriental
dominion, and the rescue of Romanism and civilisation by Augustus. Had
Lucretius himself lived in that generation, he could hardly have escaped
the influence of these appalling facts. Whoever will turn to the late
Prof. Nettleship's essay on the poetry of Virgil, appended to his
_Ancient Roman Lives of Virgil_,[894] can hardly fail to be convinced
that on the later poet's mind they had produced a profound impression,
the effects of which are traceable throughout the wh