Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal

Extract

In an age like the present which is sceptical of untutored inspiration and sets a high value on style, it is not surprising that the Aeneid should have regained some of the prestige it held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The hostility which the nineteenth century felt for its deliberate and self-conscious progress has abated, and Virgil is again regarded as the poet of unfaltering taste in emotions as in words. But the reviving admiration for the Aeneid has no word of praise for Aeneas. He is either neglected or dismissed with a few disparaging sentences. Even so generous a critic as Professor Garrod calls him ‘the wrong man in the wrong place’, and the hero of the Aeneid seems relegated to that undistinguished limbo which contains so many heroes of great epics. It seems that he is no better and no worse than Tennyson's King Arthur or Milton's Jehovah or the indistinguishable heroes of the different books of The Faerie Queene. He is as lifeless as they are, and for the same reason. His appeal is not to the imagination, but to the conscience, and the conscience has changed its ideals and left him and them behind. Perhaps to the Romans he was a symbol of much inspiring morality, but he means nothing to us. So far as he has any personality, he is a prig and a bore.