The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley

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СКАЧАТЬ stars each in his orbit? Again who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with terror, when the parched earth rocks under horrible blow of the thunderbolt, and the roar sweeps over the vast sky? … When too the utmost fury of the wild wind scours the sea and sweeps over its waters the admiral with his stout legions and his elephants, does he not in prayer seek peace with the gods? … but all in vain, since, full oft, caught in the whirlwind, he is driven, for all his prayers, on, on to the shoals of death. Thus does some hidden power trample on mankind… Again, when the whole earth rocks under their feet, and towns fall at the shock or hang ready to collapse, what wonder if men despise themselves, and make over to the gods high prerogative and marvellous powers to govern all things?"[95]

      That Lucretius should be so open to impressions of this kind, in spite of his philosophy, is ra measure of his greatness as a poet. It adds weight and worth to all that he says – to his hatred of the polytheism and superstition round about him, and to his judgment upon their effect in darkening and benumbing the minds of men. He understands the feelings which he dislikes – he has felt them. The spectacle of the unguessed power that tramples on mankind has moved him; and he has suffered the distress of all delicate spirits in times of bloodshed and disorder. He knows the effect of such times upon those who still worship. "Much more keenly in evil days do they turn their minds to religion."[96]

      We have now to consider another poet, a disciple of Lucretius in his early years, who, under the influence of Nature and human experience, moved away from Epicureanism, and sought reconciliation with the gods, though he was too honest with himself to find peace in the systems and ideas that were yet available.

      Virgil

      Virgil was born in the year 70 B.C. – the son of a little self-made man in a village North of the Po. He grew up in the country, with a spirit that year by year grew more sensitive to every aspect of the world around him. No Roman poet had a more gentle and sympathetic love of Nature; none ever entered so deeply and so tenderly into the sorrows of men. He lived through forty years of Civil War, veiled and open. He saw its effects in broken homes and aching hearts, in coarsened minds and reckless lives. He was driven from his own farm, and had, like Æneas, to rescue an aged and blind father. Under such experience his early Epicureanism dissolved – it had always been too genial to be the true kind. The Epicurean should never go beyond friendship, and Virgil loved. His love of the land in which he was born showed it to him more worthy to be loved than men had yet realized. Virgil was the pioneer who discovered the beauty, the charm and the romance of Italy. He loved the Italians and saw poetry in their hardy lives and quiet virtues, though they were not Greeks. His love of his father and of his land opened to him the significance of all love, and the deepening and widening of his experience is to be read in the music, stronger and profounder, that time reveals in his poetry.

      Here was a poet who loved Rome more than ever did Augustus or Horace, and he had no such speedy cure as they for "the woes of sorrowful Hesperia." The loss of faith in the old gods meant more to him than to them, so his tone in speaking of them is quieter, a great deal, than that of Horace. He took the decline of morals more seriously and more inwardly, and he saw more deeply into the springs of action; he could never lightly use the talk of rapid and sweeping reformation, as his friend did in the odes which the Emperor inspired. He had every belief in Augustus, who was dearer to him personally than to Horace, and he hoped for much outcome from the new movement in the State. But with all his absorbing interest in his own times – and how deep that interest was, only long and minute study of his poems will reveal – he was without scheme or policy. He came before his countrymen, as prophets and poets do in all ages – a child in affairs, but a man in inward experience; he had little or nothing to offer but the impressions left upon his soul by human life. He had the advantage over most prophets in being a "lord of language"; he drew more music from Latin words than had ever been achieved before or was ever reached again.

      He told men of a new experience of Nature. It is hardly exaggeration to say that he stands nearer Wordsworth in this feeling than any other poet. He had the same "impulses of deeper birth"; he had seen new gleams and heard new voices; he had enjoyed what no Italian had before, and he spoke in a new way, unintelligible then, and unintelligible still, to those who have not seen and heard the same things. The gist of it all he tried to give in the language of Pantheism, which the Stoics had borrowed from Pythagoras: – "The Deity, they tell us, pervades all, earth and the expanse of sea, and the deep vault of heaven; from Him flocks, herds, men, wild beasts of every sort, each creature at its birth draws the bright thread of life; further, to Him all things return, are restored and reduced – death has no place among them; but they fly up alive into the ranks of the stars and take their seats aloft in the sky." So John Conington did the passage into English. But in such cases it may be said with no disrespect to the commentator who has done so much for his poet, the original words stand to the translation, as Virgil's thought did to the same thought in a Stoic's brain.

      Deum namque ire per omnis

      Terrasque tractusque maris cælumque profundum;

      Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,

      Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;

      Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri

      Omnia, nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare

      Sideris in numerum atque alto succedere cælo.

(Georgics, iv, 221.)

      The words might represent a fancy, or a dogma of the schools and many no doubt so read them, because they had no experience to help them. But to others it is clear that the passage is one of the deepest import, for it is the key to Virgil's mind and the thought is an expression of what we can call by no other name than religion. Around him men and women were seeking communion with gods; he had had communion with what he could not name – he had experienced religion in a very deep, abiding and true way. There is nothing for it – at least for Englishmen – but to quote the "lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" —

                              I have felt

      A presence that disturbs me with the joy

      Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

      Of something far more deeply interfused,

      Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

      And the round ocean, and the living air,

      And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

      A motion and a spirit, that impels

      All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

      And rolls through all things.

      Virgil's experience did not stop here; like Wordsworth, he found

      Nature's self

      By all varieties of human love

      Assisted.

      He had been a son and a brother; and such relations of men to men impressed him – they took him into the deepest and most beautiful regions of life; and one of the charms of Italy was that it was written all over with the records of human love and helpfulness. The clearing, the orchard, the hilltop town, the bed of flowers, all spoke to him "words that could not be uttered." His long acquaintance with such scripts brought it about that he found

      in man an object of delight,

      Of pure imagination and of love —

      and he came to the Roman people with a deep impression of human worth – something unknown altogether in Roman poetry before or after. Lucretius was impressed with man's insignificance in the universe; Horace, with man's folly. Virgil's poetry throbbed with the sense of man's grandeur and his sanctity.

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