out the following pages. "Nowhere," he says, "not even in the visit to Hades, is the aristocratic spirit of Virgil manifested more plainly than in this account of the Latin armament." He sees the aristocratic spirit of Virgil thus strongly manifested, in contrast to Homer's "true spirit of a democrat "; for the Italian gives us successive pictures of the leaders of the tribes, hardly mentioning the rank and file at all, while in Homer the people are described first, and their leaders follow. But what is the general tenor of the Iliad? Surely not democratic; it is a story of the deeds of the chiefs and their protecting deities while the people look on or fight unnoticed. If the rank and file come first in Homer, I think it is chiefly because the main object of the list is to glorify the individual Greek cities and their wealth and resources, not to uphold the democratic principle; and if the chiefs come first in Virgil, I think it is because he knew very well what treatment would give his art its best chance. The result is, in Dr. Henry's own words (p. 593), with which I cordially agree, that "while Virgil enriches the Aeneid with a chapter second in interest and poetical beauty to none in the whole work, Homer encumbers the Iliad with, to say the best of it, a long dry table of statistical details." I think Dr. Henry was led to his views about our poet's anti-democratic mental attitude by the curious omission of a subject to 'gerunt" in line 664. After telling us about the prince or leader Aventinus, Virgil goes on abruptly: "pila manu saevosque gerunt in bella dolones," which Dr. Henry explains as an open expression of contempt for the crowd. With all my admiration for Dr. Henry, I am convinced that he is quite wrong here. There are a good many signs in book vii. of unfinished workmanship, though the highly finished parts are as fine as any in the whole poem; and I think this may very well reckon as one of these signs, unless indeed, as I shall presently suggest, these lines are not in their proper place. At any rate I cannot persuade myself that Virgil left out the subject to "gerunt" in order to pour contempt on the Italian rank and file. It is curious to find Dr. Henry going far to refute his own argument by remarking that Milton, though democrat and regicide, follows Virgil's method and not Homer's. If Milton did so, and made "the promiscuous crowd" stand all aloof, we may be sure that he did so for artistic reasons, not for political ones. He had no use for the promiscuous crowd, except, when his list of the chiefs is ended, to send up, at sight of the unfurling of the imperial ensign of hell, "A shout that tore Heaven's concave, and beyond, and thus to introduce a passage of such sublime splendour as is hardly to be found either in Homer or Virgil. The old Puritan was a consummate artist and knew very well where his artistic interest lay; this was his compass all through his long voyage, and beyond all doubt it was Virgil's too. Lines 607 #f." The Gates of War": "Sunt geminae Belli portae (sic nomine dicunt) There are two or three points in Virgil's treatment of this episode which invite me to dwell on it for a moment. Archæologically he seems to be right on one point and quite wrong on another. This is, on the whole, the right account of what we used once to call the temple of Janus. It was really a double gateway, i.e., a building with two openings to right and left, connected by a solid wall1 like the Porta Carmentalis in historical times. Whether it was ever really a gate of the city may be doubted; it may have been an archway for religious purposes, like the Porta triumphalis, through which the army passed on its return from a war.2 double gateway suggests that the host went out through one opening and returned through the other; and as in the story of the Fabii in Liv. The Religion und Kultus der Römer," second 2 Josephus, "Bell. Jud.,' " vii. 5, 4. I have dealt with this matter in an article entitled " Passing under the Yoke," Classical Review, vol. xxvii., p. 49. ii. 49 the unlucky archway of the Porta Carmentalis was the right-hand one, we may perhaps guess that the army went out through the left-hand one, returning by the other, which would then also be on their left hand. Mars, so far as we know, had nothing to do with this gate, and his name is here, I think, hardly more than the synonym for war, with which all Romans were by Virgil's time familiar. Janus is rightly presented as the spirit guarding the gate, not as a deity to whom it served as temple. We know of no sacrifice performed at this gate, nor any rite that could suggest its use as a fanum; the sacrifice of a ram to this numen on January 9 took place in the Regia. So far Virgil is historically right. But when he goes on to describe the opening of the gate, he carries out the unhistorical idea of which he has already given us a hint in the lines quoted above, that it was normally closed, fastened in fact by bolts and bars, a hundred of them, so that the strength of a mortal king or consul could hardly force them open. Virgil knew well enough that till his own age, the era of the Pax Augusta, the Roman Gates of War had only once been closed; but he could afford to defy tradition here, partly because he is not writing of historical Rome but of the city of Latinus, and mainly because he had already, near the beginning of his poem, made Jupiter foretell the day when the Gates would be perpetually closed, and the unholy spirit of strife (furor impius) would be imprisoned within them, bound with a hundred chains (i. 291 ff.). The result of this treatment is magnificent poetry, and it comes from the heart. The world of Virgil's day was thoroughly weary of war; and in entering on the story of the fierce struggle for Italy and civilization which was to occupy the rest of the Aeneid, he emphasizes again and again the madness and the wickedness of war. King Latinus shrank from the horrid task of opening the Gates (foeda ministeria): he fled and hid himself in the dark recesses of his palace. Juno, the cruel enemy of the Trojans, had herself to undertake the work (620-2). Line 620-" Regina deum (Juno)": In Virgil's story the war is wholly due to Juno, with the loathesome Allecto as her agent. This is not simply because the Homeric Hera was the bitter enemy of the Trojans; that alone would not have made it possible for a Roman poet to employ her persistently against the chosen people, and against the decrees of Fate and Jupiter. How determined was her enmity we know from many passages, among which there is none better than v. 781 ff.: Venus complains "Iunonis gravis ira neque exsaturabile pectus cogunt me, Neptune, preces descendere in omnis; The fact is that the position of Juno at Rome was a curious one, and at no time a very important one, and |