course of events in the tale. Its contents were certainly national, yet it is scarcely credible that even an unprejudiced Roman could have derived any real pleasure from these stories. We feel but too painfully how ill the poet has succeeded in elevating those shadows, those characterless names of everyday barbarians, to the rank of living men, such as are the heroes of Homer. Perhaps the subject was unmanageable, at least by Virgil, whose inventive genius was too sterile, however great his talent for ornament. That he was sensible of this himself, and did not despise that kind of excellence to which he was competent, is proved by his imitations and plagiarisms as well as his dissatisfaction with a work which already enjoyed universal admiration. He who composes a work by industry and piecing is acquainted with the crevices and rents, which can only by a careful joining escape the unpractised eye, and from which the work of a master is exempt, being thrown off as it were in one great cast. Virgil himself had a foreboding that all the foreign embellishments, with which he had decorated his work, constituted the richness of the poem, but were not his own, and that posterity would at one time detect the plagiary. That notwithstanding this painful consciousness he laboured, in the path still open to him, to confer the highest beauty which it was capable of receiving from his hands, upon a poem which he did not write of his own choice, that he did not vainly and genius which nature had mistakenly aspire to a -- denied him, that he did not allow himself to be intoxicated by the idolatry with which he was every where worshipped,-that when Propertius sang of him Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii, -that, when death was about to release him from the fetters of political allegiance, he was anxious to destroy what in that solemn hour he was forced to contemplate with dissatisfaction as the subject of a false renown, all this challenges our respect, and our indulgence to all the imperfections of his work. A first essay is not always the criterion of excellence, but the first poetic effusion of Virgil's youth proved that he formed himself with incredible industry, and that none of his powers were lost through neglect. How amiable and noble-minded does he appear, when he pours forth the native feelings of his heart! not merely on subjects of agriculture and in all his pictures of a pure and quiet life, or in his epigram on Syron's villa; but equally so in his exhibition of those mighty spirits which shone with resplendent lustre in the history of Rome. It is recorded, that thirty years after the foundation of Lavinium, the inhabitants forsook this inhospitable district, to lay the foundation of Alba at the base of a lofty mountain, famed, for more than a thousand years, by the confederate sacrifice of the Latin nation, on the borders of a beautiful lake, and in a country which produced the noblest wine in Latium. In order not to leave in a desart the Trojan Penates who had refused to separate themselves from the infancy of the Latin power, a colony was sent back from Alba to the deserted walls of Lavinium 74 The list of the Alban kings is a comparatively modern and exceedingly clumsy piece of patchwork-a string of names either wholly un-Italian, and taken sometimes from earlier sometimes from later periods, or occasionally invented from geographical designations, the whole nearly destitute 74 For all these accounts, I give no quotations, for they are not dispersed; and a critique upon their differences would lead me much too far. 1 of narrative. The number of years in each reign is also mentioned; these fill up so accurately the interval assigned by Cato, according to the canon of Eratosthenes, between the destruction of Troy and the foundation of Rome, that this circumstance alone betrays it as a modern imposture. For, that such a coincidence could occur, a man of sense will hardly be brought to believe, I will not say probable, but even conceivable. The assertion is as palpably false that those thirty cities which, in order to distinguish them from the Latin colonies, were called the Ancient Latins, (Prisci Latini 75,) had been founded by Alba. Alba may have been the capital but not the governing city of the nation: some of those thirty cities themselves, according to tradition, are more ancient than Alba. Tiber was conquered by the Aborigines in the first irruption. Ardea also, Lavinium itself, and Laurentum, are enumerated amongst them in the catalogue in Dionysius 76, of which I shall speak more minutely hereafter. This only is worthy of notice-the primary division of the Latin people into thirty communes, as the earliest citizens of Rome were divided into thirty curiæ, and the Plebeians originally into thirty tribus. It is also singular, that after several ancient Latin cities had been destroyed by the Roman kings, this number (thirty) was again completed by inserting others, if indeed Dionysius's catalogue be worthy of any credit. 75 Festus in voce, Prisci Latini. 76 Dionysius, V. c. 61. CHAPTER XV. 1 ROME. VARIOUS TRADITIONS RESPECTING THE FOUNDATION OF THE CITY. THE foundation of Rome, like the arrival of the Trojans in Latium, belongs altogether to Mythology; and here also our object can only be to discriminate the various opinions which prevailed amongst the ancients, Romans and Greeks, before Livy raised to historical credit what had already been generally received, and to ascertain the native traditions ??. Antiochus 78 relates indeed, that Sicelus, a fugitive from Rome, betook himself to the Italian King Morges; but it is not allowable, even to one who mingles together the mythic and historic age, to conclude, as Dionysius does, that there had existed in remotest times a city called Rome, which "The accounts, differing from each other, are preserved in Dionysius (I. c. 72, 73.) Plutarch (in Romulus from the beginning,) and Festus (in voce Roma.) Solinus, like Festus, but more sparingly, has only extracted from Verrius Flaccus, who appears for the most part to have availed himself of Dionysius. |