inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea
with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but
wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the
character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the
sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies
frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his
poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of
instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of
revolutions. The grandest picture in the AEneid reflects the terror of
that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the
galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the
dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed,
lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman
sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the
interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this
was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman
peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which
Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally
on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was
already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors
were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality,
the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.

It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and
the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are
accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration
and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of
compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization
of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of
Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high
mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the
colder "piety" of Caesar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new
Rome, the AEneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war
had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a
peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later,
the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work
to be done, which lifted the cold, pas