workshop and follow the processes of his workmanship. The alteration of plan, with its consequent changes so far as these were actually carried out, was almost certainly made within four years of Virgil's death, and the final remodelling of Book III was never effected. It is both interesting and illuminating to think it away, and to see how Dido's request with which Book I closes - with the omission of the last two lines, which are an obvious connecting link added when the change was made is fulfilled in Book II, and with what swiftness of beauty Book IV then follows on at once. Yet there were good reasons for the change. It would have been a grave defect in art to open the poem with a mass of purely introductory matter, and one still graver not to set the stage at once for the main action. It would also, it may be judged, have been a mistake to place the high-tension work of the second and fourth books together without some intermediate relief. But nowhere else in the Aeneid do we miss so much the absence of the artist's final hand.

Virgil's concentration on the Aeneid knew no limit. In the extant fragment of his letter to Augustus, already cited, he goes on to speak

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of this in very striking words, said very simply: besides, as you know, I am bestowing other and far higher studies on it as well"— alia quoque studia multoque potiora. He was going deep into national traditions. He was mastering many volumes not only of Greek and of earlier Latin poetry, but of history, archaeology, science. He was making a profound study of Italian religion and Greek speculation. He was travelling much in Central and Southern Italy to study its natural features, to collect local legends, to familiarize himself with racial and tribal characteristics or usages. As he grew older, the pursuit of philosophy, the meaning of the world and the faith or doctrine of a future life, became his more and more absorbing study. Into the Aeneid meanwhile he kept pouring accumulated learning and profound thought. Already a national epic, it insensibly transformed itself into something still greater, an epic of civilization and humanity. He became not only the voice of Rome, Romanus Vergilius, but the poet and prophet of mankind.

VIII. THE STRUCTURE OF THE

T

AENEID

HE structure of the Aeneid as it finally shaped itself may at this point be briefly set out. To grasp it as a whole is necessary towards any adequate appreciation of its movement, of the manipulation by Virgil of its complex motives, and of the large unity which he sought to give, and succeeded marvellously in giving, to matter which as we have seen was not only of great range but of unusual intricacy.

Structure, in all the arts, bears an organic relation to scale. The length of an epic poem was already, within wide limits, indicated by usage and precedent. The Iliad and Odyssey had set a model. They had shown a limit which allowed full amplitude of treatment, and which it was desirable not to exceed; within which, the epic handling had free scope, and beyond which, the risk arose of losing effective unity and causing fatigue through excess of detail or dissipation of interest. Even with

such an unequalled masterpiece as the Iliad, the fifteen thousand lines to which it had grown by successive expansions and insertions involved real difficulty in securing cohesion. The lesser size of the Odyssey - twelve thousand lines, with the ending which was recognized by the best Greek critics as an epilogue or accretion, not much more than eleven thousand without it - was tacitly accepted as a working maximum. We may reasonably suppose that a compass of about ten thousand lines was in Virgil's mind when he began to lay out the plan of the Aeneid. As we possess it, it has 9,896; and there is no reason to think that further revision would have very materially altered that figure.

It is interesting to observe that, partly from the influence of Virgil's example, partly from practical experience, this is the scale which has on the whole been followed by later poets. In the instances to be cited, the figures are given in round numbers. Lucan's unfinished Pharsalia has 8,000 lines; Statius' Thebaid is very nearly of the same length as the Aeneid. After the decay of letters, a long gap follows. The Chanson de Roland, an epic lay rather than an epic in the full sense, is of 4,000 lines Boccaccio's Teseide, the first achieve

only.

ment in epic of the earlier Renaissance, is by design or coincidence of exactly the same length to a line as the Aeneid. The medieval romances set themselves no such limit, nor did the romantic epics of the later Renaissance: the Roman de la Rose has nearly 23,000 lines, the Orlando Innamorato over 35,000, the Orlando Furioso 40,000. Tasso's Gierusalemme Liberata, written when that tide of exorbitance had not quite exhausted itself, runs to 15,000. But the Paradise Lost with its 10,500 lines resumed the classical tradition; and to come down at once to modern times, Sigurd the Volsung, the greatest if not indeed the only English epic of the Victorian Age, is of about the same length. The literary epics of the Alexandrian School had taken shorter flights on a feebler wing. The Argonautica of Apollonius, which Virgil studied minutely and used largely, sinks exhausted and comes to a dead stop when still a good way short of 6,000 lines.

The Iliad and Odyssey had, centuries before Virgil's time, been divided for facility of reference, as also for purposes of recitation, into twenty-four books each. But that division was quite arbitrary. It was determined simply