III—
Virgil's Personal Contribution
This technique of using and imitating sources that we have been discussing would
have produced no more than a mechanically derivative piece of work if it had been
carried out without thought and feeling, reflection and taste. It would have been a
256 cheap and nasty patchwork with all its joins showing, its colours clashing and its
outlines lacking in clarity and in character, expressing nothing but the incompetence
of its maker. Countless readers have been well aware that the Aeneid is no such
clumsy hotchpotch, and, in particular, those whose opinions on questions of literary
craftsmanship deserve to be taken seriously have borne witness to it time and time
again. The excellence of a work of art can only be demonstrated – if at all – to the
extent that the poet's personal feelings, thoughts and artistic inclinations are open to
inspection; I have attempted to do this in my analysis in Part I, and in Part II I shall
summarize and develop this analysis. For a rigorous scholarly investigation will
show that Virgil was no mere mechanical imitator. Of course, there are occasions
when he failed to achieve his aim; sometimes the situation which he is using as his
model has too little in common with what he has to describe, so that not even all the
artistry at his disposal can conceal the incongruity; more often, the fusion of dis-
parate elements into a new whole leads to contradictions or obscurities; finally, and
perhaps worst of all, the poet's own intentions suffer because they have been trans-
mitted through a foreign medium, so that only too frequently they do not leap to the
reader's eye but only reveal themselves after careful consideration. None of this can
be denied, and an objective list of such instances is essential for a proper evaluation
of the whole poem;[24] however, we should not pronounce judgement on a poet's
257 failure to achieve his artistic intentions before we have established what these
intentions were, and given due credit to the passages that are successful. Let us now
briefly list the different areas in which the poet's original contributions are to be
sought. In the present context I shall not deal with any matter of style in the
narrower sense.
We said above that the broad outline of the plot of the Aeneid was taken over
from others. We must now formulate this more precisely: Virgil often takes a scene
from elsewhere and develops it in his own manner – he develops it, so to speak,
backwards or forwards, by giving it either a motivation or consequences that differ
from those which it had in his source. For example, in the case of his description of
the fight for the camp, he has a striking image at hand in Homer's description of the
fight at the wall: one gate of the camp is opened, and on either side of the entrance
stands an enormous guard. In Homer ( Iliad 12.120ff.) they are holding the gate open
to allow retreating soldiers to enter; in Virgil (9.672ff.), since those besieged in the
camp have been forbidden to risk a sortie, the guards have opened the gate so as to
mock the attackers and dare them to enter; with defiant bravado they challenge them
to a hand-to-hand fight. Or again, Virgil wants to describe how Aeneas and Dido
were first united in love. He drew on Apollonius for the scene: Apollonius describes
how Jason and Medea, in a cave on Corcyra, constrained by necessity, consummate
their marriage in secret (4.1130f.). Virgil uses this situation, but in order to give it a
new motivation he invents the hunt and the storm (4.129ff.). And now an example of
developing the consequences of a scene: in a race, one of the runners slips and falls,
and therefore forfeits the prize. This is in Homer ( Iliad 23.773ff.) and in Virgil
(5.327ff.); but in the former that is the end of it; in the latter Nisus makes use of the
fall which prevents him from winning, to help Euryalus to victory. Or again: two
heroes, sent on a night-time reconnaissance, enter the enemy's camp and kill some
of their number, in Homer (Book 10) they come home safely; in Virgil (Book 9)
their carelessness brings about their death. In all the examples we have cited, it is
not only the outward action which has been remodelled, but its psychological con-
tent as well; and this is another extremely important point. We have touched on
258 many instances of this kind already; I would remind you of the last scene of the
Aeneid : Turnus pleads in vain; externally this is absolutely identical with the corre-
sponding scene in the Iliad , but what happens in the minds of both Turnus and
Aeneas is something completely new. Again, when the hero is telling his host about
his wanderings, how different Dido's emotions are from those of Alcinous! And
from a psychological point of view, the violation of the oaths in Book 12 is totally
different from that in Book 4 of the Iliad ; and so forth. But this remodelling also
occurs even where Virgil is imitating not just the course of the action, but also the
expression of emotion: the feelings that Aeneas expresses in his speech during the
storm at sea (1.198ff.) are quite different from those of Odysseus in the same
situation; and in the story of Dido the psychological development which leads from
her discovery of Aeneas' betrayal to her death is, in this form, Virgil's own, how-
ever dependent he is on others for individual details.
The new and original motivation and so forth that we have mentioned stemmed
from the practical requirements of the plot and of the characters. The second import-
ant area that we shall explore is the purely artistic one – we might say that it is a
matter of artistry of form. Virgil aims at clearly-defined and easily demonstrable
artistic effects with the aid of a technique developed with great sensitivity and
especially suited to this particular purpose; and if occasionally his intentions as
regards the plot are not realised with all the sharpness and clarity that we might wish
for, his artistic intentions never fail to achieve their aim. We can grasp them best in
those instances where his model is available for comparison; to mention only one of
the examples that we have already discussed, consider how he re-shaped Homer's
account of the violation of the treaty; we shall encounter many more examples as we
proceed. Obviously, here too we can trace the influence of earlier poets on Virgil –
when was an artistic technique ever created out of nothing? – but it is impossible to
maintain that Virgil was a mere imitator in this respect: he learned from his prede-
cessors, but as far as we know none of them had attempted or achieved what he was
aiming at. In the history of narrative art, Virgil's Aeneid marks a watershed.[25]
259 We shall explore both these tendencies in the following chapters, and our dis-
cussion should lead to a sharper definition of the aims of Virgil's epic technique.
The great impact which his work has made is largely due to another factor which
deserves at least a mention in any discussion of Virgil's personal contribution: that
is, on the one hand, the warmth of his sympathy with the emotions of his characters,
and on the other hand the strength of his moral and religious sentiments and of his
260 national feelings – it is the combination of these two characteristics that forms the
central pillar that supports his poem. To describe them in more detail is not our
purpose here; our concern is with Virgil's ars [art, technical skill], not his ingenium
[native talent].