Vergil As A Guide In Italy

( Originally Published 1922 )

IN my year in Italy as I found time to read with leisure and to select among my old literary friends the companionship of those who had most to give me, the one who was oftenest by my side was Vergil. As I lingered by the Italian lakes, walked through olive. groves and vineyards, climbed to ancient walls encircling hilltops, looked at prehistoric weapons in museums, stood on the Campidoglio in Rome, the lines of Vergil constantly running through my mind finally made me recognize that for me as for Dante, the poet had become the guide who bearing the golden branch to singing men allowed was leading me to the heart of old and new Italy. Let me show you by rambling jottings, light reminiscences, and pictures of the country where I read Vergil, how the Augustan poet is a better guide than Baedeker to the spirit of Italy.

On August ninth I started from Mantua in search of Vergil's birth-place. The road to Pietole was intolerably hot and dusty so that there was little poetry about the train ride and alighting at Pietole I could not see or hear the water of the great Mincius which slowly winds and wanders, fringing his banks with delicate reeds. Yet there in a tiny green enclosure towered a statue of the poet and while a midget of a girl ran to hunt the key to the park's iron gate, I was made welcome in the kitchen of the Albergo Virgilio at the roadside. Never before had I been part of such a genre picture. In a great niche-hearth over live coals a huge black pot hung simmering. The wall cupboard was full of bright wine-bottles. My hostess, the cook, a jolly, fat, swarthy woman was preparing dinner at a long table littered with meat and vegetables and as she threw bits of food to the dog and cat at her feet, she addressed gay fragments of Italian to me. All I could think of was Vergil's Copa if indeed we may now believe that this and other minor poems are Vergil's early work. Certainly the Copa seemed written there in Andes.

"Syrisca, the inn-keeper, wearing on her head a Greek kerchief, taught to move her swaying body with the click of her castanets, half-drunk and wholly wan-ton, dances in the smoky tavern, beating her loud-voiced bits of wood against her elbow and crying: ' What's the joy of staying outside in summer's dust when you are tired? Why not rather lie on this soft grassy bed?' "

I did not stay inside to eat her cheeses, waxen plums, chestnuts and sweetly blushing apples, but soon stood alone in the green park before the noble statue of Vergil that towers up between two slim poplars. There on the base I read how Pietole had erected this monument in 1884 and the inscriptions they had carved on it:

Primus idumeas ref cram tibi Mantua palmas,
"First I will bring back to thee, Mantua, the palm of Idumaea."

Et nunc servat honos sedem tuum,
"And now your own honor guards your home."

Then, too, I read the magnificent address which Carducci delivered here for the unveiling of the statue and heard the Italian poet interpret to the people of the country Vergil's old-new message.

"I will take the poet," said he, "away from the schools of the learned, from the academies of the scholars, from the halls of the powerful, and I will restore him to you, O people of farms and of laborers, O true people of Italy. He is always yours, your spirit : he is a brother of old, a countryman, a farmer, an Italian workman who from the banks of the Mincio ascended to the Campidoglio and from the Campidoglio to Olympus." Then, to those fellow-countrymen of the poet's he poured out Vergil's glorification of labor on the land and of the staunch support for Italy, the great mother, that the countryman can give.

"Here once," he ended, "here once among the songs of children, among the peaceful lowing of oxen, in scenes of. beauty, of strength, of tranquillity, I felt in my heart the spirit of Vergil and I kept saying: 'O Italians, elevate and free agriculture. Bring peace to the country side. Chase famine from the furrows, disease from the bodies, ignorance from the spirit. Bring peace to the countryside and the laborers. And the Roman eagle again shall spread its wings and guide over the mountains and over the seas our power and the victorious arms of Italy.' "

One cannot find any site for Vergil's farm that satisfies the imagination as does the valley of the Licenza for Horace's Sabine refuge. Perhaps the configuration of the Mantuan country has changed and indeed Vergil gives but a slight sketch of the spot "where the hills begin to rise, then lower their ridge in a gentle slope even to the water and the aged beeches, points now shattered."

But the eclogues which describe the heart-broken misery of the dispossessed peasant are records not only of Vergil's love for his birthplace, but an expression for all time of the devotion of the contadino to the land and the tragedy of war that wrests him from the soil. The first eclogue had a new poignancy read during the Great War when exiles from the Trentino and Friulia were pouring down towards Rome : Meliboeus' lament was so tragically true.

"Ah I Shall I ever again in time far distant marvel at my country's bounds, at the turf-covered roof of my poor but, seeing my realm,--a few harvests? Shall a godless soldier possess these acres, so carefully tended? Shall a barbarian possess these crops?"

In these recent years as in Vergil's time, the mitigating circumstances of the horrors of war have been the Italian's faith in Rome "rearing her head as high among other cities as the cypress towers above the low bushes" (Ec. 1, 24-5), and the friendly hospitality of brother to brother. In Italy Tityrus still says to Meliboeus:

"This night at least you could rest with me on bed of green leaves. I have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts, pressed cheeses in abundance; and now the smoke rises from the highest roofs of the houses near, and the longer shadows fall from the high mountains" (Ec. 1, 79-83).

The city of Mantua at first seemed to me to have naught to do with our poet. The Mincius spreads out about it in flat, shallow lakes, mud-edged. The buildings display the magnificence of the d'Estes and Gonzagas. Yet I knew that a yearly fete in honor of Vergil showed that the city did not forget the ancient associations of its name, and at last in my walking I came upon Vergil himself in the little Piazza del Broletto, a thirteenth century niche-monument in the wall of a pal-ace, the quaintest and happiest figure, lifting from his reading a smile to all Mantua.

I had expected to find Vergil in Mantua. I had not realized that all through Italy his words would be the perfect expression of the country life that I saw in my walks. Yet he was ever with me. When I climbed Soracte on the rocky path under the strong old olives I remembered:

"Hard lands and unfriendly hills where there is thin clay and a pebbly soil, in fields of low bushes, take delight in Pallas' grove of long-lived olive-trees." Cumae with its vineyards reminded me of how Bacchus loves the open hills (Georg. 2, 112-3) and as I ate the sweetest of golden grapes on the curving slope below the town of Nemi above Diana's mirror-water, I read:

"A rich soil, fortunate in sweet moisture, abounding in verdure, a level richly fertile (such as we often look down on in a mountain nook) where from the rocks above the streams run down, bringing fertile earth, such a soil will make strong vines flowing with the wealth of the grape" (Georg. 2, 184-190). In the irrigated grain-fields of the Lombard plain, I saw the peasant who "after scattering the seed joins in combat with the soil and levels the hillocks of unfertile sand, then brings to his crops the obedient rivulets." And when, near every little Tuscan town, I saw the gardens that Italian thrift works out of a tiny plot of land, I thought of the one where Simylus, the rustic worker of a small farm, gathered the various herbs which he pounded into his famous dish of moretum. I had seen all his store behind many a sheltering fence of osiers and slender reeds, the cabbage and the beets, the lettuce and the pointed radish, the swelling gourds, the red onion and the garlic, and I had seen how such a garden, small in extent but rich in various herbs, made its master lack nothing that a poor man's need demands. Then the flowers ! How many times near some bright patch of color I thought of the old Corycian gardener in the Georgics (4, 125-146), who in his few acres, not rich enough for plough, or flocks, or vines, made white lilies blossom and the slender poppy, roses and soft hyacinths, and who with his flowers, his fruit-trees and his honey-bees felt himself as rich as princes.

The bees! It is not only Hymettus that still yields his honied wealth ! In Italy today where sugar is still scarce and costly, the honey is especially a gift from heaven-

aerii mellis caelestia dona
(Georg. 4, 1).

But always with the olive and the grape-vine, the honey-bee has been part of Italy's wealth. And it was Vergil who once for all the world, centuries before Maeterlinck, wrote the Epic of the Bees. Who can forget his heroic strains of the little folk, their home-making, their communal life, their industry, their illnesses, their valiant fighting, their loyal devotion to their sovereign? Vergil's life of the bees is an epyllion within an epic, immortalizing the glory of the honey-makers.

This gift of throwing a golden aureole about the commonplace Vergil used also for the animals. Not that he canonized them, but his vignettes portray them with a sympathy that strikes an answering chord and makes the lines reecho in Italy as we see "the ox groaning over the deep-driven plough" (Georg. 1, 45-6), the pitiful mother goat, who, driven into exile with her master, in hard travail had lost twins on bare rocks (Ec. 1, 14-5), the sheep and the goats called by zephyr's breezes in joyous summer to the glades and meadows and cool streams (Georg. 3, 322-3), the slow little donkey, his sides overladen with oil or cheap fruits (Georg. 1, 273-4), who sweats so wearily and should be spared, for he is Vesta's darling (Copa 25-6). There is incorporate the tenderness of the. Biblical treatment of the sparrow, "Not one of them falls to the ground without His knowledge."

These flashes of sympathy are turned not only on the beasts, but on their master. Take, for example, the part the winds play in a peasant's life. I never thought much about the effect of weather on fortune until in Dalmatia I saw granite mountain sides that had been stripped of vegetation by the terrible Bora and in Fiume witnessed that northern blast suddenly smite the water in the quiet harbor to cause turmoil of wave and air. The Sirocco, too, has its lesser, but nerve-racking horrors. I see now why Vergil wrote of how he himself had seen all the battling of the winds and why he bade the farmer watch the weather-signs. As old Hesiod knew, works in the country now and always must be governed by days and he is a poor farmer who does not protect his crops from the blight and his beasts from the disease that bad weather may bring in its train.

Vergil makes us see all the diflîculties, all the hard labor of the Italian peasant's life, but he shows us more than that in it. "Fortunate," he says, "is he who knows the rural gods, Pan and old Silvanus, and the sister nymphs. Superbly content with his lot, the farmer does not pity the poor man or envy the rich.

He breaks the earth with crooked plough. With this is' the year's work, with this he supports his country and his little grand-children, with this his herds of cattle and his noble bullocks. Always the year yields wealth of apples, younglings of the flock and sheaves of Ceres' grains, loading the furrows with increase and bursting the granaries. Winter comes : the olive is crushed in the stones, the happy swine come in from their acorns, the woods give arbutus-berries, autumn drops varied fruits and high on sunny rocks ripens the luscious grape. Meanwhile dear children come thronging for his kisses. His pure home guards its honor. His cows yield rich milk. The fat kids in happy pastures playfully contend with butting horns. The farmer himself makes holiday and full length on the grass in a group about a fire where his friends crown the bowl, with a libation he calls on thee, god of the wine-press" (Georg. 2, 493-4, 499, 513-29).

The worst charge that Vergil has against war is that it destroys such joys as these : "the plow receives no fitting honor, the lands bereft of cultivators lie waste, and the curved pruning-knives are beaten into stiff swords" (Georg. 1, 506-8). This same call to the plow has been coupled with the call of the sea by the great poet of Italy's last war, D'Annunzio :

"Italia, Italia
sacra alla nuova aurora
con l'aratro e la prora."

In Italy one reads Vergil not only for his picture of the Italian peasant's daily life in which the poet's slogan 'back to the land' aided Augustus' great work of reconstruction. As the traveller in Italy gives himself up little by little to the spell of the divine and ageless beauty which no scars of conflict have marred, no industrial struggles have defaced, he remembers that to Vergil perhaps beyond all other poets the Muses vouchsafed a perfect song of the glories of his native land, and those unforgettable lines from the second Georgic return:

"This land . . . heavy crops and Bacchus' Massic wine enrich; this land is the home of the olive-tree and the happy herds. . . Here is eternal spring and summer in months not her own. Twice a year the sheep give birth to their young, twice à year the apple-tree yields its fruit." I gathered pink cyclamen and straw-berries by Lake Nemi in November, saw baby lambs gamboling in the Campagna in December, and found roses blossoming outdoors for Christmas.

"Then reflect, too, on the famous cities, the towns piled high by human hands on lofty crags, the rivers flowing under ancient walls." We climbed to the magnificent site of Norba, never rebuilt since Sulla's time, to cool Praeneste, to lofty Tusculum, but your minds outstrip my words as you think of all the hill-towns in Italy and the rivers flowing by.

"Then the seas," Vergil continues. "Shall I sing of the twain that wash the upper and the lower shore ?" His words start my mind off on a boat with a golden sail, on which I coasted along the eastern shore from Nero's palace at Anzio to Cicero's villa at Astura. Then my kaleidoscope shift and I am crossing the Adriatic from the lovely curving harbor of Ancona to Italian Zara with her jewelled islands and her white mountains. Then Vergil rushes me on to other memories, the great lakes "thee Larius, greatest of all, and thee, Benacus, rising with the waves and the roar of the ocean," and I dream of a day on Como and a week at Lago di Garda where the Lydian laughter of the turquoise water made me glad under the olives that all Benacus is now Italian. Again my guide shifts my memory to the Lucrine and the Avernus, wrought for Julius Caesar into one great harbor. But this wealth of earth's products and this glory of her beauty is not all of Italy's treasure: the strength of Italy then as always is in her people and Vergil ends proudly with her vigorous tribes and her great heroes, greeting his country at last as the eternal mother of earth's blessings and of mortal men :

"Salve magna parens frugum Saturnia tellus, magna virum."
(Georg. 2, 136-174 in part.)

A poet is naturally a guide to beauty, but not so often an antiquarian. Yet to Vergil as often as to Livy I turned for the early history of Rome and; it was he-who led my feet to many a site. It would be a wonderful thing if one could land in Italy at Cumae where the Greeks first came and where Aeneas first glided upon the Hesperian shore. That being impossible I went out from Naples and walked up the narrow foot-path through the terraced vineyards to the height over which Apollo in his lofty seat presided. Little remains of Cumae's historic past: a Roman road, broken pieces of statues and carved marble, a temple platform, but the place has its awe and there is a cave where many steps ascend to a sacred seat and secret passage cut in the dark heart of the mountain. In its atmosphere one thinks only of the frenzied Sibyl, the expectant Trojan, the immanent god.

We could not follow Aeneas to Avernus, but we saw Misenum and Gaeta to which the death of nurse Caieta gave eternal fame and we went for Aeneas' sake to the shore of Circe's land. Monte Circeo is a day's trip from Terracina. One jogs slowly in carriage over rough country roads, crossing marshes and little rivers, passing the capanne villages where the prehistoric life of Italy is reproduced in the straw huts of today and finally one alights at the tiny walled village of Sant' Oreste, part way up the hill. The walk from there up the mountain was magical though we heard not the ceaseless singing of the daughter of the Sun nor the angry roaring of the lions and the howling of the wolves and the snorting of the swine, her transformed victims. We gathered sprigs of pink heather for amulets in lieu of Odysseus' moly and safely reaching the top of the narrow ridge enjoyed its double view of the sea. Another height, too, we scaled from Terracina for Vergil's sake, Monte Angelo, where "Jupiter of Anxur watched over the fields" and from that magnificent temple precinct looked down on the green grove where Feronia may have presided and Satura's low-lying black marsh and the chill river Ufens winding its way through the valley to the sea (Aen. 7, 799-802).

All the last six books of the Aeneid lure to such epic wanderings, for Vergil has illumined by the great white reflector of epic poetry the facts and traditions of Rome's early history. In this first war waged for the founding of Rome, the first struggle towards Italian Unity, Vergil draws his pictures of alliés and foes alike with the same vividness and comprehension, playing the light of his imagination over the early history so that we see the ranks go forth to battle with their curious weapons and insignia, we know something of the gods they worship, the towns from which they come, the legends which their families cherish.

In Aeneid VII, a "magnificent pageant" of war passes before the reader, Mr. Warde Fowler says in his illuminating volume, "The Gathering of the Clans," and he goes on to show that the object of the seventh Aeneid is more than "the obvious motive . . to move the feeling of his Italian reader as he sees the stately procession of Italian warriors pressing before him, or perchance to fill his mind with pride and pleasure at finding among them the ancient representatives of his own city or district" (p. 27). Vergil "set himself to support with all his gifts the definite Italian policy of Augustus, at a time when Italy's need for national satisfaction and hope were greater than they had ever yet been." In the execution of this motive "he was con-fronted by serious difficulties which made his task a complex one. We have to remember that all the peoples of the procession were the enemies of the Trojans and summoned to resist the establishment in Italy of Aeneas and his host, and therein also to resist the decrees of Fate which were to make Rome eventually the mistress of Italy. Here was a difficulty calling for an artist of consummate skill who could find no help in his Iliad. Vergil had to hold firmly together the sympathies of Romans and Italians. Some one may ask, where was the difficulty? Surely they were by this time united in feeling. No, if that had really been so, Augustus' policy would have been superfluous. Italy is not a country that lends itself easily to unification as Italians know well at the present day; and only twenty years before Vergil was born, the peoples of central Italy had been engaged in deadly strife with Rome, and had forced her to treat them as equals. The Italian policy of Augustus was in truth a new one, and I have no doubt whatever that in this episode Vergil believed himself to be aiding it.

"Vergil meets the difficulties of his plan by emphasizing the religious destiny of Aeneas and Rome, by showing that the war against him is a bad war, stirred up by the unscrupulous Juno and a reckless leader and by safeguarding the Italian spirit by the proud honors given to local traditions. Cities, rivers, local deities, and many local touches and legends combine to delight the Italian municipalis who will be reminded of the Homeric catalogue he read in his youth and feel that here 'nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.' The poet does all he can to secure variety, to make this city or that with its surrounding region stand out clearly in the picture, and take the right coloring for the delectation of its descendants. Then how splendid and martial is the tone throughout, how perfect the consummation in the figures of Turnus and Camilla, the hero and heroine of these last books! It is with the perfection of his artistic resources that Vergil solves his greatest difficulty" {pp. 28-31).

Such living interpretation of the seventh book made me take my tiny blue pocket Aeneid to many a site which Vergil had made memorable for me and perhaps you will indulgently follow my whims of selection as I travel among the Latins, Etruscans, Volscians and Rutulians. Vergil himself in his catalogue followed no geographical order, and we follow him for the spirit, not for topography.

And what spirit he brings out of some small town by his vignette of a few lines ! At Tibur he makes us recall not only Horace's praeceps Anio and the well-watered orchards in the Sabine hills, but those twin-brothers, Catillus and Coras, who left Tibur's walls, sweeping down in the front ranks amid the dense spears like two cloud-born centaurs, galloping down from some high mountain peak, while great forest trees make way for them and round their gallant heads circle all the stories of great twin brethren, Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus. Tivoli-Tibur today shows no prehistoric ruins, but besides the great beauty of the Anio valley the city now displays archaeological finds of Vergil's time,-two rooms with rich marble pavement, one with a newly discovered seated statue of Augustus, its beautiful marble head perfect. A different reward is offered by Praeneste's steep heights, Cyclopean walls and a magnificent acropolis site which shows the power of the city that was a proud rival of Rome in spite of the fact that her legions are stamped by Vergil as rustic, and her founder, King Caeculus, son of Vulcan, was born (legend avers) among the country-herds and found on a hearth (Aen. VII, 678-82). Other similar Roman slurs on the countrymen of provincial Praeneste are explained by a visit to the site and the chance to see how from her superb citadel Praeneste could command the trade route down the valley between the Alban and Volscian mountains. Thus does topography shape jealousies.

Vergil writes more poetry for Egeria's grove and no one who visits Diana's mirror-lake at Nemi can fail to think of his happy ending to the tragedy of Hippolytus how after he perished by his step-mother's guile and satisfied a father's vengeance, mangled by terror-stricken steeds, he came again to the starlight and heaven's upper air, recalled by the Healer's herbs and Diana's love. In a secret grove the devoted goddess has hidden her beloved that there alone in Italian woods he may live on unknown under the new name of Virbius (Aen. VII, 761-77). Diana's munificent bestowal of healing and immortality on her love, is a happy contrast at Nemi for the terrible religious rite of

"The priest who slew the slayer
And must himself be slain."

Such stories of the Tiburtine twins, Praeneste's Fire-Son, Diana's votary, are slight compared to the tremendous pictures of Etruscans, Volscians and Rutulians. Mr. Warde Fowler is inclined to wonder why in the pageant of Aeneid VII, Vergil begins the war with Mezentius, but this arrangement for me has significance. The Etruscans were the greatest rival of Rome. The amalgamation of Etruscan and Roman civilization had to be explained. Livy's account of Tanaquil and Tarquinius coming to the royal power is one method. Vergil uses another, picturing one impious and sacrilegious Etruscan chieftain as a powerful enemy of the Romans, but the people in revolt against him joining under Tarchon in alliance with Aeneas, for his future kingdom. The power of the race for evil and for good is thus exhibited. As I visited the great Etruscan sites, Veii, Caere, Orvieto, Faleri, Corneto and as I studied the Etruscan collections in the Museo Archeologico of Florence and the Gregoriano and Papa Giulia in Rome, I found that a new humanity was infused for me into massive city walls, dark graves, bronze armor, heavy statues by Vergil's living Etruscan characters. All that I had found fearful, mysterious, domineering, repellent in the faces of human beings and gods as the Etruscans represented them in their sculpture is reproduced in the Mezentius who had no reverence for gods or men so that finally even his subjects revolted against his barbarities, slew his followers, fired his palace. But the magnificence of his type! Lucifer in Milton's hell is not more splendid than this sublime outcast whom Vergil with a wealth of imagery likens to a cliff which endures all the violence of the sky and sea, to a wild boar keeping all enemies at bay, to a hungry lion stalking his victim, to vast Orion walking through mid-ocean but towering above the waves. It is this superman who is broken by one simple human loss so that he cries to Aeneas: "Why do you try to terrify me now that my son is taken from me ? That was the only way in which you could destroy me." After that father's lament, he receives the sword in his throat.

Tarchon, the leader of the opposition in Agylla, Mezentius' city, is almost as powerful, he is the lightning flash across the plain, the eagle soaring high in heaven with its victim, and he has the courage to up-braid his own men with taunts of their pusillanimity and defection and dissipation until he rallies them by his personal courage. How many a tomb fresco in Corneto illustrates Tarchon's description of the Etruscan days!

"Why do we carry in our hands the sword and these vain weapons? You are not so languorous in love or his nocturnal battles or when the curved pipe calls to Bacchus' dance. Wait then for feasts and goblets on bounteous boards, for this is your love, your passion" (Aen. XI, 735-9). As I thought of these epic stories in Corneto and Cerveteri, the feasts and the dances painted on the tomb-walls became those of living per-sons, and the mighty bronze weapons in the collections were the armor of epic heroes. Vergil had a line even for mortuary musings in the Museums:

"Yes, and a time shall come when in these lands the farmer cultivating the earth with his crooked plough shall come upon spears corroded with rust and with his heavy hoe shall strike empty helmets and shall wonder at great bones in opened sepulchres" (Georg. 1, 493-7) .

It would be too long a tale to tell how in the Rutulian country I followed with Vergil the vicissitudes of great Turnus as with crimson crest upborne by chimera and with polished shield whereon horned Io shone he flew forward on his Thracian steed in advance of his columns, or in forced retreat like savage lion kept his foes at bay, or in high council before Latinus' throne proudly rejected the old king's prudence and Drances' pacifism, or in the conflict accepted on equal terms and with princely welcome the maiden-warrior Camilla, or called to his final struggle, his friend the spear that had never failed him, or at last, before his fate, as one who in a dream makes mighty effort but cannot move or speak one word, he sensed his doom under Aeneas' weapon. Ardea becomes more than a name from such a son and 'twere no wonder that a goddess sister left heaven to fly to his aid.

In the Forum Romanum in the precinct of Juturna, the goddess who watches over pools and singing streams, I turned from her bubbling spring to the little chapel where on fragment of marble entablature one reads IVTVRNAI and where on marble altar in the figures of warrior and of woman side by side imagination pictures Turnus and his devoted sister, Juturna. In such comradeship she stood by him as his charioteer, guiding his steeds through the midst of the enemy until the raucous cries and whirring wings of the ominous Fury in the air destroyed her hopes and forced from her lips bitter lament because Jupiter would grant no further recompense for her lost virginity than an immortality forever sorrowful without her brother.

A word about another woman whose fate was interwoven with Turnus' fortunes and whose fame makes the Volscians live for us. I thought of Camilla as I stood on Norba's superb height within the massive city walls that show the early Volscian power. But this was not her birthplace. It was from Priverno back in the valley of the Amasenus that her father fled into exile, carrying his baby girl, and it was across this river that he launched his spear with the babe bound to it, dedicating her forever to Diana. if the goddess saved her life. But in these mountains the father reared his tiny Amazon and here in dress of tiger skin she hurled her little darts and with her sling struck down the birds. No wonder, after such an open-air childhood, she was fit to lead the squadron of Volscian horsemen to Turnus' side, a warrior-maid whose fingers had never twirled the distaff or held the needle, a maid strong to endure battles and yet so light of foot that she could have flown over a field of ungarnered grain without bending it and skimmed the wave's crest without sinking. Easily she whirled the battle-axe over her head or sped the arrows from her golden bow. Alas! The pity that the gleam of a foe's golden armor and a woman's love of such booty could lure her to the death that sent an uproar to the golden stars, destroyed Volscians and routed Rutulians.

Such are some of the varied and proud pictures in Vergil's war pageant by which he made appeal to the imagination of various peoples and supported Augustus' work for Italian unity. He had a difficult task when, with enemies made so valiant, he essayed description of Aeneas' allies and the early builders of Rome, but his picture of father and son in Palatium has a poignant charm. The place to read the story is on the southwestern part of the Palatine, the Cermalus, where lie the oldest ruins found on the hill, in the very district to which tradition assigned them. This network of old gray-green walls, drains, cisterns, graves, stone circles that perhaps once were foundations for thatched huts cannot be identified, much less labelled today, yet fancy would see in them traces of the site where an Evander ruled and in the ancient roadway up the hill-slope would find the stairs of Cacus, that robber fire-god whose encounter with Hercules the old king Evander narrated to his guest. To us too here Evander may tell the story and point out the traditional spot of the great grove where Romulus madehis Asylum, the Lupercal, the precinct dedicated to Lycaean Pan, the cattle grazing in the Forum, and across the valley the Capitol, a place full of religious awe, not then a temple topped with gold, yet a god's home (Aen. VIII, 343-350). It is with thoughts of Evander too that on the Palatine of today we approach the capanna italica, the little thatched hut which Commendatore Boni has had erected as a model of early Italic life and as we look at its foundation ring of stones, its straw roof, its low door, we hear Evander's words to Aeneas, the eternal expression of Italian rustic hospitality:

"Dare, my guest, to scorn riches, shape yourself also to be worthy of deity and come graciously to my poor fortune." (Aen. VIII, 364-5.)

It was such a host who sent his adored son, Pallas, to share Aeneas' fortunes in battle and when the brave young warrior fell, it was the thought of that devoted father's loss that dealt the most poignant blow of the war to Aeneas' soul and armed his merciless hand against Turnus, his slayer, in the closing conflict of the Epic. The story of Evander and Pallas stands out in all time never more clearly than in our last terrible years as a perfect expression of the glory and the pity of death in war for the Young, the tragedy and the fortitude of the sorrowful Old at home.

On the Palatine Hill today, it is not only of little Palatium, Evander's fine hospitality and heroic fortitude that Vergil makes us think. Among the magnificent ruins of the lately uncovered Augustan palace, the thought of the growth of Rome down to Augustus' time is brought before us by the poet who so sincerely and staunchly celebrated the work of his Emperor for the Roman world. Archaeologists cannot certify for us on which of these temple sites Augustus erected the great shrine of solid marble to his patron god Apollo, but perhaps it was here on the south, overlooking that stretch of land where Carducci has pictured Rome herself,-

"la dea

Roma qui dorme.
Poggiata il capo al Palatino augusto,
tra'I Celio aperte e l'Aventin le braccia,
per la Capena i forti omeri stende a l'Appia via."

At any rate, before this temple Vergil pictures, on the shield of Aeneas, Augustus at the beginning of his reign of peace. "Caesar, riding through the walls of Rome in triple triumph, to the gods of Italy offered his immortal votive gift, three hundred great shrines throughout the city. With happiness, with games and with applause the roads reëchoed. In all the temples were bands of matrons, in all were altars, and before the altars slain victims strewed the ground. He himself seated on the white threshold of shining Phoebus received the gifts of the nations and hung them on proud doors. In long pageant advanced the conquered peoples of many tongues, of many garbs and weapons" (Aen. VIII, 714-23). From south and east and west they stand before the victor of Actium in the center of the great picture shield of Rome's history and here, with the close association of Apollo and Augustus at the shrine, Vergil seems to be elaborating the idea which he stated so simply in the first eclogue :

Deus nobis haec otia fecit,
"It is a god that brought us this peace."

Augustus had erected a temple of marble to commemorate Apollo's aid in establishing that end of all wars which Vergil makes the god predict to Ascanius under the rule of his house (Aen. IX, 642-3). Vergil has built here in the Aeneid that temple of poetry which in the third Georgic he had designed, and in the center he has placed his Caesar and he possesses the shrine. The worship offered to him is to the Sovereign, almost to the god, who has established peace for the Roman world. This is what Jupiter prophesies as his fame in the first Aeneid (286-94)

"Trojan Aeneas shall be born of this fair line and he shall bound his Empire by the Ocean, his fame by the stars. . . . Then wars shall cease and the terrible years shall be softened . . . with close-fitting bolts of iron the dread portals of war shall be barred." It is this reign of peace that again is foretold by Anchises in Aeneid six (791-4) : "This is the man, this is he ... Augustus Caesars scion of a god, who shall restore the golden age to Latium in the lands where Saturn once reigned."

We know from the Monumentum Ancyranum, the Emperor's own account of his reign, how anxious he was to be considered an emperor of reconstruction, emphasizing the fact that he had waged only righteous wars (C. 26), that he had closed the Templeof Janus three times (C. 13) , and that the Senate had decreed in his honor the erection of the Altar of Peace (C. 12), and Cassius Dio assures us that of all the honor the Senate bestowed upon him, he was pleased most by the fact that the senators closed the gates of Janus, implying that all their wars had ceased (51, 19-20). To my mind this is further evidence of what I have tried to show in another place ("An Inspired Message in the Augustan Poets" A. J. P. 1918), that Vergil as a loyal supporter of the new régime consciously sought to em-body in his poetry the ideals of the Emperor and as a great and patriotic poet-laureate was no less an asset to Augustus than the warrior Agrippa. The epics of Vergil are a more enduring and magnificent monument to the peace of Augustus than that Ara Pacis Augustae before whose beautiful fragments in the Terme Museo in Rome we stand with such awe.

For poetry is the monument more lasting than bronze or marble and it is not without significance to my mind that one. word in the Latin language, vates, carried the meaning of bard and seer. The true poet who sees into the heart of his nation's life writes with a vision that makes his work prophetic and vital for all time. For Italy today Vergil is deeply true in his songs of an after-war time when the people must go back to the land and make it yield its fruits for the nation, the race must increase, Italian unity must be attained by conscious effort, and peace, hardly won, must be preserved. In the Piazza Venezia in Rome on November 4, 1920, the anniversary of Vittorio Veneto, Italy's final victory in the World War, I saw the regiments of the army and navy sweep up the white steps of the monument of Vittorio Emmanuele to present their banners to the King before the Altar of the Country that he for Italy might decorate the victorious tricolor, and as the aeroplanes circled overhead and the mothers of combatants placed a golden wreath upon the altar in memory of the fallen, I felt with the great crowd in the Piazza that the strength of Italy which Vergil pictured before the Em- peror Augustus on the Palatine was here born anew, consecrated by the blood of her dead, and assured by the devotion of her sons. We Americans in our young nation often fail in understanding Italy because we have no conception of the tremendous and steadying power that great traditions of thousands of years of history have upon the descendants of Romulus.

If I may be pardoned one last vagary, a postscript on the delights of pursuing the idea of the continuity of literary experience, I would hint to you the joys I had with Vergil-lovers of other times. In the Laurentian Library in Florence I was allowed to enjoy the priceless treasure of their fourth century manuscript of Vergil, to read its clear black letters and brood over the painstaking devotion that made so fair a copy. In the Vatican Library in Rome I hung over the case where pages from the fourth and fifth century manuscripts are exhibited, delighting in their clear capitals and quaint illustrations.

Then in an antiquarian's shop in Rome I found my own Vergil. About the size of a Webster's unabridged dictionary, it contains the major works of Vergil and 26 minor poems, some wholly new to me, and the commentators, Servius, Donatus, and Ascensius, all listed under a dedication to the Muses. More than the delight it affords me by its beautiful paging and black print, is the joy of its illustrations, the quaint wood-cuts which attest the delight inspired in some artist of the early fifteenth century by the poems that I too have loved My ending shall be these links of affection between reader and poet which join generation to generation in the common bond of culture.