¹ Aen. 1. 294–6 (calm expression: 254 f.).

² Griffin, J., Homer (1980), 46Google Scholar. Though, anyway, it is only in a limited sense that the Iliad is more like real life than the Odyssey. The Iliad is concerned with greatness, with exceptional human beings; the Odyssey is a transfiguration of ordinary life, which through the strange medium of folktale and heroic myth has profound things to say about man and woman, man alone and man in society. None of us is an Achilles, each of us is to some degree an Odysseus.

³ I include the musical examples for the sake of the observation that music critics do not seem to be embarrassed, as their literary counterparts so often are, by the expression of confidence, serenity or joy. Nor do the art critics appear anxious to underplay the joyousness found in some of the works of (say) Titian or Tiepolo. There may be a certain parochialism about those literary critics who search for the half light upon all occasions.

⁴ Sophocles the Dramatist (1951), 123, 125Google Scholar.

⁵ A distinction nicely brought out by Tovey's observation that contemporaries objected to the titles of Brahms's Tragic Overture and Tchaikovsky's Symphonic Pathétique but that in either case the composer knew best (Essays in Musical Analysis (1935), vol. 2, 151.

⁶ Aen. 2. 767–95.

⁷ ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ (1857).

⁸ In Wilkinson's, L. P.The Georgics of Virgil (1969Google Scholar the chapter on ‘Political and Social Ideas’ includes a section entitled ‘Augustanism’; rightly so.

⁹ A general observation, however: I do not know how one could do justice to Virgil without using terms like ‘ambivalent’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘equivocal’ and so on. But if we insist that all good poetry must have such qualities in more or less ample measure, we shall miss both the individual character of Virgil's work and his capacity for variety. In view of the influence exercised by Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity it may be worth making two points. First, Empson was a mischievous man who admitted that he used ‘ambiguity’ to mean whatever he liked and that his first type alone covered virtually everything of literary importance (op. cit., introduction to the second edn.). Secondly, he did not make the common mistake of thinking that ambiguity was necessarily a good thing: he censured Wordsworth's Lines written above Tintern Abbey for being ambiguous where ambiguity was out of place (ch. 4).

¹⁰ Vita Vergili 46.

¹¹ Not to mention the roles of Hypsipyle and Medea from Apollonius' Argonautica and of Ariadne from Catullus 64.

¹² Aen. 1. 498–504; cf. Od. 6. 102–9.

¹³ Aen. 7. 45.

¹⁴ Il. 6. 146–9.

¹⁵ Mimnermus fr. 2.

¹⁶ Aen. 6. 309 f.; Inf. 3. 112 ff.; Paradise Lost I. 302 ff.

¹⁷ I would myself go still further. In Britain a view of the Iliad has predominated which represents it as a moral drama pivoting upon the ninth book. According to this view Achilles goes wrong when he rejects the offer made by the embassy and remains in the wrong until he recovers himself in his final scene with Priam. Some have thought otherwise, among them Goethe, who rightly held Homer's Achilles to be the supreme portrayal of human greatness in literature: it is the greatness of Achilles' character, not its weakness, that leads him to treat the embassy as he does. In other words, it is his very greatness which directs him to a course that entails the death of his beloved Patroclus; thus his particular situation is sheerly tragic, complementing the Iliad's tragic view of the human condition in general. Those who disagree with this interpretation will at least allow that the Iliad is for other reasons a tragic poem; those who agree will see it as more deeply and remorselessly tragic still.

¹⁸ Aen. 1. 11.

¹⁹ Aen. 1. 279–82.

²⁰ Il. 4. 51 ff.

²¹ Aen. 12. 503 f.

²² Aen. 10. 457 ff.

²³ Aen. 10. 466 ff.

²⁴ Il. 16. 431 ff.

²⁵ Aen. 10. 470 f.

²⁶ Carm. 1. 24. 19.

²⁷ Tennyson's Ulysses recalls the sentiment: ‘Death closes all; but something ere the end, | Some work of noble note may yet be done, | Not unbecoming men that strove with gods’ (Ulysses, 51–3).

²⁸ Il. 12. 310–28.

²⁹ Il. 22. 166–87.

³⁰ Il. 22. 38–76, esp. 56 f. and 60–5.

³¹ Aen. 9. 598–620.

³² ibid., 595.

³³ ibid., 634–6.

³⁴ Aen. 4. 215–17; 12. 97–100.

³⁵ Aen. 4. 188 and 190.

³⁶ Geo. 2. 472.

³⁷ Aen. 6. 847–53.

³⁸ For example, Cicero's Pro Flacco 9: ‘verum tamen hoc dico de toto genere Graecorum: tribuo illis litteras, do multarum artium disciplinam, non adimo sermonis leporem, ingeniorum acumen, dicendi copiam, denique etiam, si qua sibi alia sumunt non repugno’; but the Greeks lack ‘religio’ and ‘fides’. (The double way in which Greece was regarded is developed at 61 ff.: the ‘vera atque integra Graecia’ of the past is contrasted with the degenerate present, and there is warm praise of the beauty and glories of Athens: the city's fame still sustains the nation's broken reputation.)

³⁹ Horace, Epp. 2. 1. 156 f.

⁴⁰ Aen. 6. 846, cf. Ennius, Ann. 370 V.

⁴¹ Tentatively one might suggest another conclusion. Anchises says nothing about poetry: perhaps Virgil wanted concision here, or perhaps he refused to acknowledge another people's superiority in this field. But we may wonder whether Virgil would have wished, even on behalf of Lucretius and himself, to dispute the crowns of Homer and Aeschylus. May it not rather be that in the very silence about poetry there is another stab? Anchises cannot bring himself to identify the Greeks by name—‘alii’, he says; and likewise perhaps the thought that in poetry too, even in poetry, the Greeks will forever stand supreme is too unkind for utterance.

⁴² Aen. 6. 771, 779, 791.

⁴³ ibid., 832–5.

⁴⁴ ibid., 841.

⁴⁵ Aen. 8. 730.

⁴⁶ Note especially Aen. I. 272–7.

⁴⁷ Inf. 3. 1–9.

⁴⁸ Inf. 4. 25–45.

⁴⁹ Geo. 3. 40 ff.

⁵⁰ ibid., 34 ff.

⁵¹ Ecl. 10. 70–2, 75–7.

⁵² Ecl. 10. 1: ‘Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem.’

⁵³ An ambiguity caught by Milton at the end of Lycidas: ‘At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.’ Will tomorrow bring more pastoral poetry or poetry of another kind? As a further subtlety, the rhythm puts the stress upon ‘woods’ in the first phrase, upon ‘new’ in the second.

⁵⁴ Geo. 2. 116 ff.

⁵⁵ ibid., 136–9.

⁵⁶ Lucr. 2. 600–60; 3. 894–930.

⁵⁷ Il. 24. 664–7.

⁵⁸ Il. 22. 338–43.

⁵⁹ Aen. 12. 931–8.

⁶⁰ It may be debated how fully and immediately Juno commits herself to Rome: some take Virgil's implication to be that she will not be completely on the Roman side until after the Punic Wars (there are recent treatments of this topic by D. C. Feeney, ‘The reconciliations of Juno’, CQ n.s. 34 (1984), 179–94 and Harrison, E. L., ‘The Aeneid and Carthage’, in Poetry and politics in the age of Augustus, ed. Woodman, T. and West, D. (1984), 95–115)Google Scholar. My own conviction is that Juno, while maintaining her hostility to the Trojan name and civilization, now commits herself fully to the Latins and the future Roman state. Crucial are II. 826 f.: ‘sit Latium, sint Albani per saecula reges, ÷ sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago.’ It is strained to take these lines as spoken in a grudging tone; rather, they mark a rhetorical climax. We should note too Juno's joy at the news that the Romans will honour her above all other people (840 f.). If there is an ‘inconcinnity’ in Virgil's picture, it is rooted in the facts of history: for Juno was indeed both a great Roman goddess and (being identified with Tanit) the presiding deity of Carthage. But whether the transformation of Juno's attitude be supposed fast or slow, it cannot be denied that transformation there is, or that the reconciliation between men is permanent and complete.

⁶¹ Aen. 12. 838 f.

⁶² Inf. 1. 106–8.

⁶³ And what of Turnus? One supposes that Virgil wanted him to be the tragic focus of the poem's second half, as Dido of the first. But if so, his execution did not match his intention: Turnus' death is sad, not in the proper sense tragic. The truth is that he is just not interesting enough, and we see only his surface. He has not the size or the depth to sustain a tragic role.

⁶⁴ Aen. 1. 265 f.; 6. 764.

⁶⁵ Aen. 12. 794; an important point, often ignored.

⁶⁶ A certain amount depends on the interpretation of 7. 498, ‘nec dextrae erranti deus afuit’ (of Ascanius' aim). If the ‘deus’ is Allecto, the fact that Ascanius hit the mark (though not apparently the fact that the stag he had lighted upon was Silvia's) was at least partly the goddess's doing. If (as seems preferable) the reference to a ‘deus’ is little more than an epic manner of saying that Ascanius was successful, the divine malignancy is limited to exploiting the incident once it has happened; and Allecto, in this place at least, seems not far different in kind from the simple personification of Rumour in the fourth book.

⁶⁷ Aen. I. 33.

⁶⁸ Separately, these judgements have been made before now. ‘I am … a violent Tory of the old school;—Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's’ (Ruskin, Praeterita 1. 1); ‘The Aeneid is a Whig poem’ (Burrow, J. W., A Liberal Descent (1081), 197)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ There is an especial difficulty of terminology. ‘Optimist’ suggests credulity, ‘pessimist’ cantankerous gloom. Other antitheses are no happier: ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative’ sound morally superior to ‘negative’. When I use such terms (since I can find none better), they should be understood as having a purely descriptive sense and no evaluative content.

⁷⁰ Paradise Lost 12. 641–7.

⁷¹ Geo. 1. 121 ff.