Table Of ContentP. VERGILI MARONIS
AENEIDOS
LIBER QVARTVS
EDITED WITH A COMMENTARY
BY
R. G. AUSTIN, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
Oxford University Press, Ely House, London V/. i
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY IBADAN NAIROBI LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG
FIRST PUBLISHED 1955
REPRINTED i960, 1963 (WITH CORRECTIONS)
1966
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY VIVIAN RIDLER
1 R T KT T P HE UNIVERSITY
PREFACE
The plan of this edition originated in a course of lectures
which I gave to pass-degree students at University College,
Cardiff, in 1948. I felt then that there was room for a com
mentary which should try to show something of Virgil’s
method, thought, and art to a type of student for which the
existing editions were not designed. Modern conditions are
so different from the old that a fresh approach seems needed
in many matters that once were taken for granted; in
particular, the classical background of such students’ read
ing is now much more limited, and as a rule they know little
Greek, often none at all; they understand but little of the
music of the Latin hexameter, regarding ‘scansion’ as a
higher mystery, largely because they have never had the
opportunity of constructing verses, however unpoetic; and
they have often been taught by those who are similarly
handicapped. They need to be reminded that Latin litera
ture is not something hermetically sealed, but is related to
Other literatures that form part of many degree courses.
They need to be shown Virgil as a poet, with a poet’s mind,
not as a mere quarry for examiners. On the other hand, so
much loving care has been spent in recent years on the
study of Latin usage in general and of Virgilian style in
particular, that in many ways something new is needed also
by the young university student who is eager and able to
read Virgil with real scholarship and discrimination. In this
edition, I have tried to be useful to both classes, and I hope
that in attempting this I have not fallen between two stools.
The difficulty that confronts a commentator on Virgil is
as much that of what to omit as of what to include: as the
wise Quintilian remarks, ‘inter virtutes grammatici habe
bitur aliqua nescire ’. I have tried not to overload this book
with detail, and have preferred to indicate where discussion
VI PREFACE
of minutiae may be found rather than to list and evaluate
other people's views, except where it seemed to me really
necessary to do so. Everyone will notice omissions of this
and that point, or of reference to this or that book. Again,
on some matters a definite opinion is impossible: Virgil
looks so different as our moods change. Anatole France did
well to remark that nothing is less probable than that two
men in the same country have an absolutely similar impres
sion of a line of Virgil. If some rather elementary points of
metre or prosody appear to have been stressed too much,
or to be over-simplified, it is because I know something of
the difficulties that .the modem student finds in such things;
but I have dealt also with certain subtleties of Virgilian
metric for those more advanced readers who may care for
them.
I owe a very special debt of thanks to Mr. G. W. Williams,
Fellow of Balliol, for constant stimulating criticism and for
bringing to my notice much that would otherwise have
escaped me. Professor W. S. Watt, of the University of
Aberdeen, has given me valuable help on many points. The
patience of Miss Elizabeth Thomas, of University College,
Cardiff, has saved me from many careless references. But
without the receptive minds of my Cardiff students this
edition would never have been begun.
R. G. A.
CARDIFF
August 1954
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
TEXT i
COMMENTARY 25
APPENDIX (OVID, H EROIDES VII) 203
INDEXES 208
INTRODUCTION
Maist reuerend Virgil, of latine poetis prince,
Gem of ingyne, and flude of eloquence,
Thou peirles peirle, patron of poetry,
Rois, register, palme, laurere, and glory,
Chosin charbukill, cheif floure and Cedir tre,
Lanterne, lade sterne, myrour, and a per se
Maister of maisteris, swete sours and springand well,
Wide quhare ouer all ringis thyne heuinly bell.
Gavin Douglas, Preface to the Aeneid
The study of Virgil brings with it the richest of all the
rewards that Latin has for its initiates, and within that
study the Fourth Book of the Aeneid holds a special place.
It might have been omitted, with no apparent lacuna in the
epic theme. But if Virgil had not writteh it and set it where
he did, the Aeneid would have remained for ever within the
penumbra of myth; for it is in this book that he tells of the
most real of human experiences, without romanticizing it
or in any way hiding its painful wounds. His Dido and his
Aeneas are a woman and a man in love; and long after the
tragic tale has run its course, the pity of it echoes through
all Aeneas’ life and actions, so that it is never possible to
think of him as any other but the man whom Dido had
loved, and who, despite himself and despite his destiny, had
loved Dido. It is a book which in the last resort must be
interpreted by its readers in their secret hearts, without the
chilling guide of what Dryden calls somewhere ‘pedantic
pains'. As one reads it and reads it again, its power and its
reality grow always clearer and stronger. If Virgil had
written nothing else but this tale of ‘Dido of Carthage,
floure and lampe of Tyre’, it would have established his
right to stand beside the greatest of the Greek tragedians,
not only in his firm and unflinching expression of a bitter
X INTRODUCTION
moral conflict, not only in the pity and fear with which he
accomplishes his catharsis of our emotions, not only in the
noble simplicity of his conception, but also in the oeconomia
of his plot and the inexorability of its onward movement.
A reader who comes to it for the first time, knowing nothing
of what is to be unfolded in its pages, must be stirred as on
a first reading of Antigone or Othello; and in Virgil’s tale his
heart is riven and his conscience torn by a situation that for
all its heroic outlines is yet within the bounds of credible
human experience. Thomas Hardy, in The Woodlanders,
describes his Little Hintock as a place where, sequestered
though it was, ‘from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and
unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of
the concentrated passions and closely-knit interdependence
of the lives therein’. The tragedy of Dido’s passion might,
in essentials, occur at any time in the Little Hintocks of
today.
The book must be taken in its setting. In the First Book,
Dido has succoured the shipwrecked Trojans. She has al
ready heard of Aeneas by repute, and when at last she meets
him, her heart goes out to him, for she too has been driven
far from home:
me quoque per multos similis fortuna labores
iactatam hac demum voluit consistere terra,
non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco.
There and then Aeneas,' come to Paradys, out of the swolow
of helle’ as Chaucer puts it, tells Dido the tale of the sack
of Troy, so that it is through her eyes that we see his suffer
ing. At the opening of the Fourth Book his tale is done, and
she is lost:
Anoon her herte hath pitee of his wo
And, with that pitee, lov com in also.
And when her passion has run its course to its end upon the
pyre of her own building, and Aeneas sails away to fulfil
what the gods think fit, he has had his hour of happiness
INTRODUCTION xi
with her and let it go for ever. Dis aliter visum: the book
gives us the one glimpse that we are allowed to see of him
as he might have been; a chapter in his life has closed, but
his memories never leave him. In the Sixth Book, he meets
her grim ghost in the Lugentes Campi, the ‘Broken-Hearted
Fields’ as Flecker calls them, and there he pleads urgently
with her, but she will have none of him, and he
casu concussus iniquo
prosequitur lacrimans longe et miseratur euntem.
Long afterwards it was to Dido that his thoughts turned,
in the bitter moment when his friend Evander’s young son
Pallas lay dead in his cause, and on the boy’s body he set a
noble garment that she had once made for him, laeta
laborum (xi. 73): those two words should help us to under
stand what Aeneas had renounced in gaining his Italy.
The opening of the book shows Dido, sleepless and
agonized, seeking comfort and advice from Anna; at its end
we see her dying on the pyre, with Anna at her side doing
all that a sister’s tenderness could do to ease the sharpness
of death. Between this first scene and the last Anna takes
no direct part; no human agency could save Dido from the
swift current of her destiny; yet Anna’s presence is felt
throughout, and Dido's tragedy is shown as a family sorrow
The tenseness of the opening is never far relaxed in all that
follows. Dido hears from Anna the advice that she has
hoped to hear, despite herself; she takes it, but she gains
no peace, and it is with the knowledge of her heightened
passion that we presently listen to the two mocking god
desses, Juno and Venus, agreeing not to quarrel over the
victim of their sport. There follows the dazzling brilliance
of the meet, a single splendid moment of unalloyed happi
ness as Dido and Aeneas ride out in company; and then,
the storm, and the uncanny elemental witnesses to their
union in the cave. The scene changes now, and we hear the
gossip about them, carried by Rumour on her purposeful
xii INTRODUCTION
course until she reaches the one person who can do them
both most harm, Iarbas. In all this, and in Iarbas’ haughty,
angry prayer to Jupiter, as well as in Jupiter’s swift reaction
to it in sending Mercury with a peremptory message to
Aeneas (here Virgil depicts Jupiter’s masculine decision
as unerringly as he has shown the femininity of the two
goddesses), we are made aware of the ineluctable forces that
control the lives of men. We are reminded also that no
man can escape responsibility for his own actions. Dido has
tempted Aeneas, and Aeneas has fallen, and both must
suffer the consequence. So the stage is set for the harsh
conflict of will between them as they meet face to face. The
tension rises as Dido speaks to Aeneas, and it is not relaxed
while Aeneas replies, for beneath all his formal coldness he
is repressed and strained to breaking point; and then there
is a further heightening in the wild fury of Dido's second
speech, with its climax as she faints and is carried away. In
the rest of the book we witness the ebb and flow of her
resolution: her miserable attempt to gain time to be
‘schooled to sorrow’, then her realization that all hope has
gone, then the dim groping of the magic ritual, in which
Dido has left the real world for the shadows of supernatural
horror, then her weakening as she wearily argues with her
self, until she comes once more to see that death alone can
end her misery, irrationally blaming Anna for it all, finally
returning to her consciousness of wrong done to Sychaeus.
Virgil then quickly shows us Aeneas, jolted into horrified
haste by a second warning from Mercury. Dido, watching
his departure, rises first to a wild incoherent frenzy, then—
how rapidly her moods change—she collects herself to cal
culated, purposeful utterance as she sets the curse of Car
thage upon the race of Troy. So we are brought to the
death-agony on the pyre, preceded by her proud farewell to
life, and to the last scene where Anna and she are together
once more, until her soul slips gently away into the shelter
of the winds.
