LIBER QUINTUS

Summary

In the first half of the Aeneid it would almost seem as if Virgil had intentionally relieved those portions of Ms narrative which possess the most absorbing interest with others of a more level and less exciting kind. The detailed account of the agonies of the one night of Troy's capture was succeeded by a rapid sketch of the events of seven years of travel: and now we pass from the spectacle of Dido's frantic love and (as a modern reader will regard it) Aeneas' faithlessness to a description of the games celebrated by the Trojan hero in Sicily on the anniversary of his father's death. This serves to conduct us from the tragedy of the Fourth Book to the mysterious solemnities of the Sixth. Aeneas does not pass at once from the terrible conflict of love and duty to the initiation which is reserved for the chosen favourites of Heaven, but is shown to us as the pious and beneficent prince, reverentially dutiful to Ms father's memory, and kind and liberal to his followers and friends—encouraging the ambition of Ms own men and returning the courtesies of the Sicilians by a display in which it is his honour to be the dispenser of honour to others.

As usual, the subject and much of the treatment in detail are from Homer. The heroic courtesy of Achilles is never more conspicuous than in the games which he gives in memory of his dead friend, as described in the Twenty-third Iliad: and by treading in the steps of Homer, Virgil has succeeded in investing Ms own hero with similar associations of chivalrous magnificence.