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Twin monsters there are, called the Dirae by their name, whom with infernal Megaera the dead of night bore at one single birth, and wreathed them in like serpent coils, and clothed them in windy wings.
But as Giovio does it naturally, and lays no special stress upon it, we are not offended if, in his melodious language, the cardinals appear as 'Senatores, their dean as 'Princeps Senatus, excommunication as 'Dirae, and the carnival as 'Lupercalia. The example of this author alone is enough to warn us against drawing a hasty inference from these peculiarities of style as to the writer's whole mode of thinking.
On a platform of rock, beneath a cliff, and looking to the Mediterranean, were the ruins of the ancient shrine: the votive offerings; the lamps long without oil or flame; the Curses, or Dirae, inscribed on thin sheets of lead, and directed against thieves or rivals. The head of the statue, itself already known, was also discovered.
In the second and third place, they thus distinguished the deities into those which are beneficial and those that are injurious to mankind. Those which are beneficial they call Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Ceres; those who are mischievous the Dirae, Furies, and Mars. These, which threaten dangers and violence, men endeavor to appease and conciliate by sacred rites.
In his youth Vergil had, to be sure, avoided the extremes of photographic realism illustrated by the very curious Moretum, but he had nevertheless, in works like the Copa, the Dirae, and the eighth Eclogue, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant.
If I could be mistaken there, I was not mistaken at least as to the servant on the seat behind. Looking back at a butcher's boy who had just escaped being run over, and was revenging himself by all the imprecations the Dirae of London slang could suggest, the face of Mr. Peacock was exposed in full to my gaze.
Where is the blooming cheek, ruddy with the browning air? where the bright and swimming eye? Alas where? `Tum breviter dirae mortis aperta via est, as sweet Tibullus hath it;" and the Dominie sobbed anew.
The poet of the Ciris, the Copa, the Dirae, and the Bucolics is never far to seek in the Aeneid. It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.
"Honey on the rim" was Lucretius' wise precept, and it was doubtless a prudent impulse that substituted the Eclogue for the "Curses." The former probably accomplished little enough, the latter would not even have been read. The Dirae takes the form of a "cursing roundel," a form once employed by Callimachus, who may have inherited it from the East.
Scholars know at what rate such accidents should be estimated, and value at its proper price one clear interpretation like G. O. M.= Gladstonio Optimo Maximo. It is, of course, no argument against this view that the authors of the Dirae regard Gladstone as a maleficent being. How could they do otherwise? They were the scribes of the opposed religion.
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