II—
The Models
The fact that Virgil depended on tradition in the way just described has little or
nothing to do with the question of his originality. It is not the free invention of new
249 material that constitutes originality – how few great poetic masterpieces would
count as original if that were so! – but rather, to a great extent, the successful
appropriation or remoulding of tradition. Let us say nothing of the Athenian trage-
dians; even the Hellenistic poets (who stood in much the same relationship to
tradition as Virgil himself) were still able to find, if they were true poets, plenty of
scope for the exercise of their own creative powers; and for Virgil, too, the tradition
provided little more than the bare bones of the action – as for example in the case of
Dido. The fact that the general outlines of his material have been firmly established
does not cramp the imagination of a great poet; rather, he is upheld, uplifted and
borne along by it; he actually seeks out figures from legend and history to use as
vehicles for his own powerful emotions, or as a trellis to support the luxuriant
tendrils of his invention as they constantly burgeon forth in all their sweetness from
the rich soil of his imagination. Virgil's creative activity is of a different kind:
between the tradition and his own imagination stands his model . This fact does not
need proving, but perhaps it is necessary to define more precisely the how and the
why of it.
Dependency on a model affects, first, the outward form, and would seem to make
total freedom impossible. A heroic epic written in anything other than Homeric
metre and style was inconceivable, and Homeric style in Latin that was independent
of Ennius was equally inconceivable. Virgil never translates directly from the
Greek, and seldom takes more than isolated words and turns of phrase from his
Roman predecessors; but he scatters clear and intentional allusions to them through-
out his work. Virgil searches out opportunities to use Homeric epithets and phrases,
metaphors and images, and to display stylistic jewels from Ennius in new settings.
Of course, he has his own stylistic ideals, and no-one would deny that the personal
style that he created was a magnificent achievement; but even in this case he was not
creating from scratch, but sorting through the ancient building-stones with infinite
patience and tireless judgement to decide which of them could be re-used in his new
construction.
External form is closely linked with a second major area of imitation. The world
which Virgil depicted in the style of Homer had to be the world of Homer. The
250 inhabitants of his earth and of his heaven were taken from Homer; therefore they
must behave and act in a Homeric manner. The great Hellenistic poets had come to
the same conclusion; and because they did not on that account wish to be denied the
opportunity to take up again the tradition of heroic poetry, they avoided as far as
possible those areas which Homer had made his own for ever, such as descriptions
of battles; they placed in the foreground characters who had played only minor roles
in the tradition; they were fond of depicting passions and emotions, which must
have existed in archaic Greece, but about which early epic had remained silent,
since they were alien to its elevated style; in short, they transferred the ancient
stories from the sphere of myth to a familiar, human setting – yet the result of all
these changes was still no more than a compromise. Virgil also made a compromise:
he does not suppress his own views about life, the world, the gods and his own
emotions, but the means by which he expresses them are Homeric, and, as though he
wishes to introduce the modern elements as unobtrusively as possible, he follows his
model all the more faithfully in all those details which make no great difference to
him.
However, this, too, is basically a question of style which is not inextricably
linked with the question of creativity. It is creativity that we will now proceed to
consider.
Virgil rarely describes landscape. The few extended descriptions that do appear
in the Aeneid , however, are imitations: the harbour on the Libyan coast is modelled
on the harbour of Phorcys in the Odyssey (13.96ff.); the Gorge of Ampsanctus
(7.563ff.) is modelled on the Cave of Acheron in Apollonius (2.736ff.); Etna with its
terrors (3.57ff.) is modelled on Pindar ( Pyth . 1.34). Of course in all three cases
Virgil has produced a more powerful effect than his predecessor, and has re-
fashioned the description in his own style; but his starting-point is his source, not
personal observation. The description of the storm at sea in Book 1 almost wilfully
avoids any detail that might suggest personal experience. The material that he uses
in his similes, in so far as they describe natural phenomena, is almost all borrowed;
Virgil has no qualms about borrowing such a striking and unusual simile as the
comparison of a vacillating mind with the reflection of trembling sunlight on the
surface of water in a basin (8.22: Apollonius 3.754). These references to the natural
251 world are not an important part of the epic, but these instances are typical of Virgil's
practice throughout the whole narrative.
On the whole, then, we may say that Virgil takes the material of his story from
the tradition, and in the broad outlines he sticks more or less closely to his models.
And we may add that the most characteristic examples of this are to be found, not in
the major and most important themes, for which the Odyssey and Iliad serve as
models: the fact that Games are celebrated at the tomb of Anchises as at the tomb of
Patroclus; that Aeneas, like Odysseus, descends into the Underworld; that in Latium,
too, beached ships are defended, a city besieged, a woman fought for – such things
as these are general motifs which tell us nothing about the independence of the poet
who is making use of them: but when in the Games in the Aeneid there is a boxer
who has difficulty in getting an opponent to come forward, as in the Games in Iliad
23; when victory in the footrace depends on the slip and fall of one competitor;
when a bow-shot hits the cord that holds the dove instead of the bird itself; when
Aeneas in the Underworld meets and speaks to a friend who has recently suffered an
accidental death, and an unreconciled enemy, and an old comrade-in-arms; when
Turnus, like Achilles, is drawn away from his opponent by a phantom, and the
decisive duel is divided into the same three phases as in Homer – then it is clear
beyond a shadow of doubt that Virgil, far from avoiding motifs used by others, in
fact consistently and deliberately uses them as a starting-point, and introduces allu-
sions to them throughout his work. When he reaches some part of his story that he
wishes to develop in epic style, then he does not let this scene grow out of the soil of
his own invention, either unaided or fertilized by the poetry of others, but, on the
contrary, he searches through other works until he finds analogous scenes, and
re-shapes them to meet the requirements of his own story.
This practice is not restricted to the broad outlines of the action. When Virgil
wants to describe Aeneas' emotions during the mortal peril of the sea-storm he does
not invent a vivid metaphor of his own for it, but considers to what extent he can use
for his own purposes Odysseus' expression of his emotions in a similar situation.
When he has to describe Dido's misery and despair, these feelings do not emerge in
a vivid and intuitive form from his own emotional experiences; on the contrary, he
looks around for existing images which have been created by other poets and with
252 which he can adorn this particular situation. He does not often go as far as he does in
the case of Dido, but there are traces of this process throughout the Aeneid .
The way in which Virgil imitates his predecessors is very different in each
individual case, but it falls between two extremes. The simplest case is when a
passage of some other poet, usually Homer, is used as it stands as the basis for a
corresponding passage in Virgil: the oath and its violation, or the duel at the end of
Book 12, may serve as examples. This technique is used at greatest length for the
competitions at the Games. The most complicated case is when we can no longer
speak of imitation of the whole of a particular scene, but when motifs and details
from a great variety of sources have been woven together so as to form a new whole:
I cite as examples of this the adventures involving the Harpies and Polydorus, the
scene of Allecto with Turnus, but above all the story of Dido, whose character
combines traits taken from a number of poetic models without completely resem-
bling any one of them.
There are of course some scenes in Virgil's poem which we may safely regard as
his own free invention; I would count among them, for example, the scene in
Anchises' house, a splendid piece of imaginative writing. But when we think of
these scenes, we observe that little or nothing actually happens; they describe en-
counters and conversations rather than actions, situations rather than events or
psychological developments: think of Creusa's appearance in Book 2, Aeneas' en-
counter with Andromache in Book 3, Ilioneus and Latinus in Book 7, Aeneas and
Evander in Book 8: in these cases and others the essential innovation is not what is
done, but what is said and felt, even in the scenes with Evander, which are depicted
with greater liveliness and vividness than practically any other passages that are
Virgil's own free invention.
What is the reason for this very remarkable phenomenon? As we have already
seen, the answer is not to be found in any theory that a poet was not permitted to
indulge in free invention. It is difficult to draw the line between lack of desire and
lack of ability in this case; but, in the final analysis, Virgil did not exercise much
originality in re-shaping his material simply because, like his fellow-Romans gener-
ally, his powers of imagination were not very strong. That is the common factor in
the various degrees of imitation which we have been enumerating: they all point to a
253 basic lack of the intuitive ability to conceive things in visual terms, which irresis-
tibly drives other artists to express their emotions in new poetic creation. Of course,
like the other great Roman poets, Virgil experienced powerful and overwhelming
emotions: he was sensitive to the sorrow of an aged father at the loss of his only son,
or the misery and humiliation of a proud princess who is deserted by her beloved, as
deeply as he sensed the greatness of the Augustan principate and the blessings of the
pax Augusta ; but his imagination was too weak to give any original expression to
these feelings, and that is why he resorted to the works of his predecessors – just as
Propertius could only express his burning passion in the traditional forms of Hellen-
istic erotic poetry, though I have no doubt that this passion was genuine enough; or
even like Lucretius, who of all Latin poets had the strongest imagination; his gen-
uine enthusiasm for the philosophical teachings in his poem and for Epicurus, the
master of this philosophy, is evident in every line; nevertheless, when he writes a
hymn in praise of this master, he adorns it with images taken over from other poets.
This characteristic weakness of imaginative power, which must on no account be
confused with lack of feeling, is evident not only in Roman poetry: it has left its
mark on all the intellectual life, art and science, religion and philosophy, of Rome,
and it even had a clear effect on politics and warfare: the imperium Romanum
[Roman empire] is the work of men whose power of imagination, by comparison
with their force of character and other mental faculties, was not strong enough to
enable them, like a Napoleon, to seize total mastery for themselves.[21]
As a result of this characteristic cast of mind, the Roman people lacked not only
the ability but also the appetite for original poetry. It is not so much the phenomenon
of poetic imitation that is surprising, but the fact that continual dependence on
foreign models was not felt to be a weakness, nor lamented as being a shortcoming
which they would try to conceal as far as possible whenever it was unavoidable.
Exactly the opposite is the case. Horace, for example, does not even attempt to win
254 recognition for his own talent; instead, he takes more pride in his claim that he was
the first Roman to interpret the poetry of Archilochus, Alcaeus and Sappho, and he
regards Greek poetry as superior to Roman not because it was original but because it
was more perfect in form. There is nothing in Virgil that suggests that he was
attempting to free himself from the influence of Homer and other models, or to
conceal his dependence on them; on the contrary, he gives the impression that he
wants this dependence to be as obvious as possible to every reader. Nor did his
contemporaries think of criticizing him on this account. They criticized him when he
seemed to fall short of his model; they praised him when he seemed to surpass it. If
an imitative passage was ineffective, they excused him on the grounds that he had
gone too far in an effort to do what was in itself laudable.[22] It seems that doubts were
expressed only over one question, whether it was beneath the poet's dignity to have
taken over numerous passages word for word: Virgil himself openly acknowledged
such borrowing, and did so with pride.[23] In Rome, poetry had never been inde-
pendent of models, nor was there any concept of such poetry; imitation was not
regarded as a failure to achieve independence, but as an improvement on mere
translation; personal style, not personal creativity, is the boast of the Roman poet
over the centuries. But not even the surge of intellectual activity in the Augustan age
255 broke away from tradition, and the reason for this may to some extent have been the
tendency of all Greek literature during the Hellenistic period to imitate the ancients,
who – at least as far as style was concerned – seemed to have exhausted every
possibility in poetry and prose, and to have achieved the highest degree of perfection
already. It is certainly true that the nature and extent of the dependence of the poets
of the Augustan age on their predecessors varies greatly from one poet to another;
but it is equally true that in seeking to escape the exclusive influence of the Alexan-
drians and to gain access to the genuine classics of epic, drama and lyric, they
believed that they were only doing what they had seen their erstwhile teachers
doing. The only difference of which they were conscious was that their own task
was much more difficult since they were imitating the creations of a foreign civiliza-
tion and for this purpose they needed to start by hammering their own language into
shape, regulating, enriching and refining it. But in this task and its achievement they
found a new reason for pride: by imitating these foreign classics they Romanized
them, they 'captured' them, so to speak, for Rome. Virgil was too modest and intelligent
to suppose that he could rival Homer, let alone surpass him, but he was certainly
striving to create something which could mean almost as much to a Roman as
Homer meant to a Greek. In so doing he would have thought that it was senseless to
reject splendid passages from Homer simply in order to be original; on the contrary,
he believed that he must imitate the finest and most splendid passages of his Greek
predecessor and so 'capture' it for his own nation. Imitation, in his view, was not a
makeshift to be ashamed of, but a patriotic action and therefore a cause of pride.