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When at length she returned, coming in with her ruthless Spahis, whose terrible passions she feared no more than Vergil's Volscian huntress feared the beasts of the forest and plain, the raven still hovered above her exhausted mare, the torn flag was still in her left hand; and the bright laughter, the flash of ecstatic triumph, was still in her face as she sang the last lines of her own war-chant.
It is not, as has been held, a result of rhetorical studies alone; it reveals rather a native good sense tempered with a neoteric interest in psychology and a neoteric exactness in formal composition. And yet the passage exhibits a great advance upon the geometric formality of the Ciris. The incident is not treated episodically as it might have been in Vergil's early work.
A young girl sat before a magnificent fireplace of cut stone gazing into the fire of drift-wood that burned diffidently upon a hearth whose spaciousness would have been more fittingly adorned by Vergil's "no small part of a tree."
A successful advocate must know what not to see and feel, and he must have ready convictions at his tongue's end. In the Aeneid there are several fluent orators, but they are never Vergil's congenial characters.
It is not unlikely that Quintilius Varus, Vergil's elder friend and fellow-Transpadane, who had grown up an intimate friend of Catullus and Calvus, had in these matters a stronger influence than Philodemus. There are, however, certain turns of sentiment in Vergil which betray a non-Roman flavor to one who comes to Vergil directly from a reading of Lucretius, Catullus, or Cicero's letters.
It seems clear also that the epic was an Aeneid, with Julius Caesar in the background, and that parts of the early epic were finally merged into the great work of his maturity. The question is of such importance to the study of Vergil's developing art that we may be justified in going fully into the evidence . As it happens we are fortunate in having several references to this early effort.
It has frequently been said that Vergil's philosophical system is confused and that his judgments on providence are inconsistent, that in fact he seems not to have thought his problems through. This is of course true so far as it is true of all the students of philosophy of his day.
Cicero represents them as homines doctissimos as early as 60 B.C., and though in his tirade against Piso ten years before Vergil's adhesion to the school he must needs cast some slurs at Piso's teacher, he is careful to compliment both his learning and his poetry.
The ingredients are the capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long occupation with deductive methods of philosophy, scientific pursuits have thus enriched modern poetry also and a sure aesthetic sense. This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil's commentators.
Mantua dives avis, sed non genus omnibus unum, Gens illis triplex, populi sub gente quaterni, Ipsa caput populis; Tusco de sanguine vires. That could hardly have been Vergil's meaning, however; for the Celts who flooded the Po Valley four centuries before drove all before them except in the Venetian marshes and the Ligurian hills.
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