who is heroic as an
individual, but not as a pioneer of civilisation divinely led; that
there is no real heroine, for feminine passion would be here out of
place and un-Roman, and the courtship of Lavinia is undertaken, so to
speak, for political reasons. The role of Aeneas, as the agent of
Jupiter in conquest and civilisation, would appeal to a Roman rather
than to a modern, and it was reserved for the modern critic to complain
of a lack of individual interest in him. So, too, it is in Jewish
history; we feel with Esau more than with Jacob, and with David more
than with Moses, who is none the less the grandest typical Israelite in
the Old Testament. And, indeed, Virgil's theme here is less the
development of a character or the portraiture of a hero than the
idealisation of the people of the Italy which he loved so well, who
needed only a divinely guided leader and civiliser to enter upon the
glorious career that was in store for them.

I cannot escape the belief, as I read again through these books, that
Virgil did intend to depict in Aeneas his ideal of that Roman character
to which the leading writers of his day ascribed the greatness of their
race. His _pietas_ is now confirmed and enlarged, it has become a sense
of duty to the will of the gods as well as to his father, his son, and
his people, and this sense of duty never leaves him, either in his
general course of action or in the detail of sacrifice and propitiation.
His courage and steadfastness never fail him; he looks ever forward,
confident in divine protection; the shield he carries is adorned--a
wonderful stroke of poetic genius--with scenes of the future, and not of
the past (viii. 729 foll.):

talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis,
miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet
attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum.

He is never in these books to be found wanting in swiftness and
vigilance; when he cheers his comrades it is no longer in a half-hearted
way, but as at the beginning of the eleventh book, with the utmost
vigour and confidence, "Arma parate, animis et spe praesumite bellum"
(xi. 18).

His _humanitas_ again is here more obvious than in his earlier career,
and it is plainly meant to be contrasted with the heroic savagery of
Mezentius and Turnus. So keenly did the poet feel this development in
his hero's character, that in his descriptions of the death of Lausus
and the burial of Pallas--noble and beautiful youths whom he loved in
imag