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Then it is that the teacher or mother should quote to her the line of the Aeneid about Venus: "The true goddess is shown by her gait," and save her from an irreparable folly. If mothers will remember that children are not dolls, and that mothers are not children to take pleasure in bedecking them, they will need no advice about dressing their little ones.
There Vergil has given only the last line of a suppressed tragedy which the reader is compelled to visualize for himself. Neoteric, too, is the accurate observation and the patience with details displayed by the author of the Aeneid.
Statius had a high opinion of his own merits, especially when he compared himself with the poet fraternity of his day; but his careful study of Homer and Virgil had shown him that there was a domain into which he could not enter, and so even while vaunting his claims to immortality, he is careful not to aspire to be ranked with the poet of the Aeneid:
I read once again all my favourite authors; and I became acquainted with new ones. All my former taste for study was revived. You will see of what use this was to me in the sequel. The light I had already derived from love, enabled me to comprehend many passages in Horace and Virgil which had before appeared obscure. I wrote an amatory commentary upon the fourth book of the AEneid.
The circle of fabulous narrative was thus completed, and a link formed, though in a very gentle and qualified manner, both with Dante's theocracy and the obvious regularity of the Aeneid, the oldest romance of Italy.
It certainly has more affinity with that of Lucretius than with that of Lucan. A learned Roman reading the Aeneid would feel his mind stirred by a thousand patriotic associations.
Whatever view we may hold as to their appearance in the Aeneid, there can he no doubt that in the Odes these deities have a purely fictitious character. With the single exception of Jupiter, the eternal Father, without second or equal even among the Olympian choir, whom he is careful not to name, none of his allusions imply, but on the contrary implicitly disown, any belief in their existence.
Surely something out of the ordinary was to be expected of the man who could "repeat the AEneid of Virgil from the beginning to the end without hesitation, and indicate the first and last line of every page of the edition which he used." Something was expected, and he fulfilled these expectations.
Odo could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.
The first parts of Virgil's aeneid and Homer's Iliad were recited to one of these illiterate jumpers, and he repeated the words as they came to him in a sharp voice, at the same time jumping or throwing whatever he had in his hand, or raising his shoulder, or making some other violent motion.
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