Dryden's "Aeneid" as English Augustan Epic

The high esteem enjoyed by Dryden's translation of the Aeneid since its appearance in 1697 has been threatened by two recent and connected developments. Critical revaluations of Virgil have given us a poem very different from the Aeneid which has enchanted and instructed readers for centuries, and we suspect that Dryden's "Eng­lish Augustan " version misrepresents " our " modern Virgil. Dryden may not have delivered the best of all possible Virgils, since his trans­lation is certainly in and of his own time; yet Dryden's Aeneid is richly complex, and in significant ways closer to Virgil's epic vision than our twentieth-century perspective.

Until the twentieth-century, the Aeneid was generally regarded as Virgil's paean to venerable tradition, heroic achievement, and Roman destiny. For many modern readers, however, the heart of Virgilian appeal is the extraordinary counterpoint between public panegyric and private lament or critical skepticism. One contemporary clas­sicist, D. R. Dudley, cites Dryden's "blinkered approbation," which means that Dryden failed to perceive the poem's ironic implications. Another contemporary critic, R. D. Williams, faults Dryden because " he does not see the subtlety of the psychological counterplay between Aeneas's virtues and his frailties, for he is too concerned to show they are not frailties, in order to justify the poet. He does not see the tension in the poem between these virtues and their disastrous con­sequences...."¹ The tension in the poem. There is an instructive analogy here between the metamorphoses of critical interpretations of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Although Dryden, Pope, and Addison all recognized the sublimity of Satan, and the relative dreariness of heavenly discourse, it was Blake and the Romantics who initiated "that radical mode of romantic polysemism in which the latent personal significance of a narrative poem is found not merely to underlie, but to contradict and cancel the surface intention."²  Dryden and most eighteenth-century readers believed Paradise Lost succeeded in justifying the ways of God to men; similarly, they accepted the "surface intention" of the Aeneid, to extol "the long glories of majestic Rome." It was left to modern critics to discover the poem's "latent personal significance," the way Virgil qualifies and possibly repudiates the hero and empire he purports to celebrate. Dryden's Virgil, in other words, has been reincarnated as a bleak and rugged ironist.

There is indeed abundant evidence for an ironic interpretation of the Aeneid, once we agree to question the transcendent priority of the Roman Empire.³ To a twentieth-century Virgilian, the response of Aeneas to the shade of Creusa expresses not only the agony of his loss but the whole insubtantiality of his destiny.

I strove to speak; but horror tied my tongue;
And thrice about her neck my arms I flung,
And thrice deceived, on vain embraces hung:
Light as an empty dream at break of day,
Or as a blast of wind, she rushed away.⁴

Aeneas is forced to learn that the values he counts on most urgently are as transient " as an empty dream at break of day." In order to fulfill the larger, impersonal destiny, one modern critic writes, he becomes as much a ghost as Hector, Creusa, or Anchises. Until the descent to Hades, at dead center of the poem, Aeneas voices pained, muted compunctions about his mission; in Book VI he passes into the center of indifference, and henceforth enacts his fate with more stoic dignity. A modern way of describing the deve­lopment is to say that the glorious re-birth of Rome demands a symbolic death of the spirit. The hero is fully, divinely ordained and committed to his mission, and considerably less humanly appealing; too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

Moreover, the glorious future Aeneas envisions is awful in both senses. What awaits Aeneas when he is finally permitted to reach Latium? The Sibyl screeches out the answer: " Wars, horrid wars, I view!—A field of blood,/And Tiber rolling with a purple flood" (VI, 133-4). He is condemned to recurrent horrors; ostensibly, the longer view Anchises affords his son is more comforting: "to set before your sight your glorious race;/That this presaging joy may fire your mind..." (971-2). Anchises does assure the fulfillment of Roman destiny, but the quality of the achievement is more dubious than he ever recognizes. He reveals to Aeneas an unbroken series of catas­trophes—visions of individual suffering, civil war, internecine strife, and ruin. Even Anchises is blandly astonished: "What wars, what wounds, what slaughter shall ensue!" (1139)

Until this "apotheosis," we can scarcely believe Aeneas capable of the valorous feats he needs to attain victory in Italy. Of course we have been told often enough it is decreed, but the narrative has never emphasized the hero's capacity for traditional, effective ferocity. In becoming god-like, a modern humanist might argue, Aeneas has at last forsaken his humanity, and is accordingly fit to be the hero of the second (or "Iliadic") half of the Aeneid. The action suddenly sounds more Homeric, as war breaks out, and Aeneas moves through this new world like a shade in Hades. With only intermittent pauses for doubt, Aeneas becomes a fierce, vaunting, and merciless figure out of the Iliad, but he reverses Achilles' development from anger to compassion. The final scene of the Aeneid is a spectacular denoue­ment. Aeneas stands triumphant over his fallen foe Turnus, who makes a generous avowal of Aeneas' mastery, and begs for mercy. He appeals to the victor's best instincts, pity for Turnus's father, which moves Aeneas: "He rolled his eyes, and every moment felt/His manly soul with more compassion melt" (XII, 1362-3). Then he sees the golden belt Turnus won for spoil from Pallas, Aeneas's comrade-in-arms. This rekindles his wrath, and he plunges his sword into Turnus. The laconic ending of the entire poem is: " The streaming blood distained his arms around;/And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound." That is all: no fanfare, just another brutal death and loss. Turnus hardly wins an epitaph, while Aeneas, in a moment of authorized savagery, certifies his heroic stature.

This modern reading presents an intriguing anomaly. In spite of his predilection for elegy and irony, Dryden generally responded to Virgilian pathos without questioning the high purpose of the hero's suffering or the felicity of his development. With all his skeptical challenges to traditional values—heroic, political, spiritual—he failed to recognize the "ironic aspects" of the Aeneid. Why is it that Dryden, so ardently predisposed to a bi-focal vision, never perceived Virgil's dialectic of celebration and doubt, the clash between private instinct and divine imperative? Why did Dryden not remark in the Aeneid those dark forces, lurking just out of sight, which can make a hero a man-eater?

The reasons why Dryden's Virgil does not more closely resemble our twentieth-century ironist depend upon the whole range of assump­tions Dryden brought to the Aeneid: ethical, political, literary, and religious. Unfortunately these premises have for too long been reduced to that familar text-book rubric "Augustanism " or " neo-classicism." There is a certain genteel elegance to the fable: in 1697 the former poet laureate delivered to the town his long-awaited Virgil, a lavish folio edition featuring the most celebrated poem of antiquity. While the Aeneid was a perennial source of illustrative allusions and dignified sentiments, to adorn or enhance many a manuscript, the poem attained a sanctified quality in the "English Augustan " era, far beyond the ubiquitous mottoes and tag lines. Dryden's revivification of Virgil, so the story goes, stood honorably for the native epic of the neo­classic period in English letters. Of course Dryden and his audience did share some common values, but they were far less unified than this literary history acknowledges. A closer examination of these "Augustan" premises can teach us more about Dryden's aesthe­tics and more about Virgil's Aeneid as well.

Dryden, like many of his contemporaries, maintained the cardinal classical precept that literature instructs us. Since epic is the primary genre, it must perforce convey a great Moral. Dryden's definition of the epic is thus typical: "A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form the mind to heroic virtue by example; tis conveyed in verse that it may delight while it instructs."⁵ Every eighteenth-century commentator is bound by definition to find a moral in the Aeneid which will inspire the love of heroic virtue. And so, while there were persistent squabbles about such aspects of the poem as its unity or the probability of various episodes, there was virtual unanimity on the central purpose and effect of Virgil's moral. Even the form of critical discussion remained remarkably uniform through­out the century, dutifully applying the categories devised by Le Bossu and the French commentators; we find countless analyses faithfully partitioned into Fable, Action, Unity, Episodes, Machines, Characters, Probability and Verisimilitude, all subordinate to Moral.⁶

As a neo-classical humanist" Dryden naturally looked to Virgil to buttress and confirm his ethical principles, and he consequently idealizes Aeneas. Certainly Aeneas achieves feats no contemporary figure would dream of daring, and embodies "manners" Dryden heartily approved: "piety to the gods, and a dutiful affection to his father, love to his relations, care of his people, courage and conduct in the wars, gratitude to those who had obliged him, and justice in general to mankind." Dryden's broad conception of Pius approxi­mates Virgil's; as Ilionus characterizes the hero to Dido, "a juster lord,/Or nobler warrior, never drew a sword: /Observant of the right, religious of his word..." (I, 767-769). Larger than life, with an aura of spiritual grace, Dryden's Aeneas is a fit model, and a just standard by which to measure such contemporary failures as Shadwell or Shaftesbury.

Yet Aeneas is a model hero for Dryden precisely because the poet was so ambivalent about the heroic ideal. Dryden's translation is incorrectly characterized as "a prime representation of the positive attitude of the times ... an optimistic poem ...."⁷  The emphasis in the Aeneid is upon the limits, rather than the potential, of great endeavor, and Dryden was particularly attuned to this sense of boundary. Aeneas has diminished heroic capacities, constantly facing futility, and teaching us, like Adam, the virtue of patience and constancy. For all the differences between Aeneas and Adam, they both learn that "to obey is best," achieving sovereignty over themselves through abne­gation. Dryden recognized and approved Virgil's transformation of the heroic code from self-aggrandizing ferocity to self-abnegating piety, as he indicates in criticizing Homer's warriors: "He forms and equips those ungodly man-killers whom we poets, when we flatter them, call heroes: a race of men who can never enjoy quiet in themselves until they have taken it from all the world. This is Homer's commendation; and, such as it is, the lovers of peace, or at least of more moderate heroism, will never envy him."⁸ Dryden accepted the restrictions on Aeneas's freedom and will, applauding the "more moderate heroism" of equanimity; Aeneas fulfills Dryden's notion of what a hero could and should be.

Our dominant impression throughout the first six books is that Aeneas is stripped of every individual attribute, losing nearly every­one and everything he loves, to fulfill his destiny as founder of the empire. We rarely see him in any conventionally heroic poses, a fact so striking that Dryden is obliged to defend the hero's valour at some length in the preface. Certainly our first view of Aeneas, "struck with unusual fright" by the storm, is inauspicious: "Thrice and four times happy those (he cried),/That under Ilian walls, before their parents died! " Aeneas echoes the words of Odysseus, but it is the distinction rather than the parallel between Homer and Virgil which is most significant: the Greek hero's temporary loss of heart is very nearly the Trojan's perpetual lament. A bit later, serving venison to his weary men, Aeneas adds another, crucial "unHomeric" dimension to heroism.

Thus while he dealt it round, the pious chief
With cheerful words allayed the common grief:—
" Endure, and conquer! Jove will soon dispose
To future good, our past and present woes.
With me, the rocks of Scylla you have tried;
The inhuman Cyclops, and his den, defied.
What greater ills hereafter can you bear?
Resume your courage, and dismiss your care:
An hour will come, with pleasure to relate
Your sorrows past, as benefits of fate.
Through various hazards and events, we move
To Latium, and the realms foredoomed by Jove.
Called to the seat (the promise of the skies)
Where Trojan kingdoms once again may rise,
Endure the hardships of your present state;
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate." (I, 275-290)

Aeneas is above all a sufferer and comforter; his cardinal virtues are nearly saint-like acquiescence and endurance.⁹ Like Dryden's Don Sebastian, his most glorious cry could be, "Souls know no con­querers."

While every other warrior in literature is proud to relate his experiences, Aeneas begins his account to Dido: "Great Queen, what you command me to relate,/Renews the sad remembrance of our fate" (II, 3-4). The narrative is patently not the pleasant recollection in tranquility Aeneas promised his men, nor is it Homeric myth-making. Painfully, Aeneas describes how the gory shroud of Hector urged him to forget heroic defense of Troy and escape; how he repudiated the divine injunction, trying vainly to fulfill the demands of the old Homeric code, and failed abysmally. It is clear, even in Aeneas's own words, that the very attempt was mistaken. He describes his frenzy, the ignominious tactic of donning Greek colors, abundant butchery, and even the possibility of revenge upon Helen. Again he is re­primanded like a wayward adolescent, this time by his mother Venus, who scolds his "madness" and "unmanly rage." Aeneas must abandon his impulse to play Hector, no matter how compelling the instinct to fight unto death for homeland; his lot is simply to acquiesce and endure. Finally he does relent, gathering his family and an exhausted band of followers, only to lose his wife Creusa in the tumult. Distraught, Aeneas returns to the city, where the pale specter of Creusa conveys the will of the gods: long wandering, hard labors, and painful years must preceed the restoration of the Trojan line in Latium. Destiny is very literally thrust upon him; he willingly bears his aged father out of Troy, yet throughout the story Anchises represents all the burdens the hero cannot evade. Eventually he loses his father too, and is haunted by his ghost every night.

Aeneas must renounce valiance at Troy and romantic chivalry at Carthage; he was not meant to be either Hector or Antony. Dryden, in his preface, is pressed to amusing lengths to defend his hero before outraged ladies: "they may learn experience at [Dido's] cost, and for her sake, avoid a cave, as the worst shelter they can choose from a shower of rain, expecially when they have a lover in their company" (186). And later, of the legal stature of their union: "That the ceremonies were short, we may believe; for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow" (196). The fact that Aeneas's ungallant leave-taking worried Dryden and offends readers indicates how beautifully the book works; like Aeneas himself, we are supposed to regret his decision, if decision is the right word. Certainly he makes clear how much it pains him to depart, and that he has no choice. When Dido rebukes him as false and "hewn from hardened entrails of a rock," she is partially right. Dido, quivering with emotion, represents all that Aeneas must forsake to consummate his mission.

Dryden places Aeneas beyond criticism, ardently defending his hero from accusations which might tarnish his personal stature or call into question his divine mission. He thus offends some readers and commentators of the past century or so, who consider Dryden's inter­pretation, like the whole translation, too stern, rhetorical, artificial, and prosaic—all those elements, in other words, the nineteenth century stressed and rejected in the poetry of the eighteenth. It was the Victorians, after all, who hallowed Virgilian pathos: what Arnold identified as "a sweet, a touching sadness." And Tennyson com­memorates Virgil thus: "Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind." To a certain kind of sensibility, alien to Dryden, Aeneas would be more admirable if he had luxuriated in despair and imitated Dido's solution. Instead Dryden's sense of heroic decorum elevates and insulates Aeneas, at least in part.

For example, in the exhortatory speech to his men, cited above, Dryden translates "forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" as "An hour will come, with pleasure to relate/Your sorrows past as benefits of fate" (I, 203)—still a touching moment, but it bleaches out the even more pathetic Latin forsan, perhaps. Similarly, Dryden's couplet "Great Queen, what you command me to relate,/Renews the sad remembrance of our fate," mollifies the harsh emphasis which begins Virgil's line: Inf andum, unspeakable. A final example is the relative tepidity of Dryden's "And Trojan griefs the Tyrians ' pity claim" (I, 649) to convey perhaps the poem's most celebrated sentiment: "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" (I, 462).

Despite the rhetorical formality of the translation, suppositions concerning heroic propriety did not prevent Dryden from perceiving and rendering the fundamental, unceasing pathos of the Aeneid. He shared with Virgil a sense of the burden of the past, the private cost of public achievement, and the diminished possibilities of heroic action; Dryden's own poetry stresses elegiac tones. The nuances vary, of course, from risible to weary to mordant to scathing, but the theme of loss persists; the picture of Aeneas bearing Anchises upon his shoulders, with no Creusa behind him, is a fitting graven image for any collection of Dryden's poetry. What is particularly characteristic of Dryden is his receptivity to Virgil's revision of Homeric heroism, and the unqualified way he justified the hero's "abrupt departure" from Carthage. Since Dido stands between Aeneas and his glorious destiny, her demands, no matter how com­pelling, are ultimately unjustified: "Could a pious man dispense with the commands of Jupiter to satisfy his passion" (188)?

Dryden affirms, rather priggishly here, the need for stoic self-sacrifice and the transcendent value of the Roman Empire. Like Virgil, he writes sub specie communitatis, cherishing homeland, culture, and tradition. That other renowned royalist, classicist, and conservative, T. S. Eliot, praised Dryden in terms either might have applied to Virgil: "to him, as much as to any individual, we owe our civilization." Here we must be wary of over-simplifying Dryden's Aeneid in order to fit it easily into a myth of a monolithic, coherent world-view called English Augustanism. For one thing, it is necessary to distinguish Dryden from the uses to which his translation was sometimes put. Johnson's comment in the Life of Dryden that "the nation considered its honor as interested in the event" of the poem's publication indicates that it appealed to self-styled English Augustans who were pleased to discover an analogy between Rome and their own manifest destiny. They honored Aeneas because he won

The Latian realm, and built the destined town
His banished gods restored to rites divine;
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome. (I, 6-10)

Only nine years earlier the glorious revolution of 1688 enthroned William, and within five more, Parliament would settle sure succession in the Hanoverian line of Protestants. With new-found stability at home, following two generations of internecine strife, Britannia could turn to the serious business of establishing an empire. The words of Anchises to Aeneas in Hades seemed apposite:

But Rome! tis thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey:
Disposing peace and war thy own majestic way.
To tame the proud, the fettered slave to free,
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee. (VI, 1173-77)

The dream of Pax Britannia inspired poets throughout the century, particularly between Dryden's paean to Charles II, "Astraea Redux," and Pope's ode to the treaty of Utretcht, "Windsor Forest."

The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind,
Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde,
And seas but join the Regions they divide;
Earth's distant Ends our Glory shall behold,
And the new World launch forth to seek the Old.
Oh stretch thy Reign, fair Peace! from Shore to Shore,
Till Conquest cease, and Slav'ry be no more .... ("Windsor Forest," 11. 396-408)

Pope's image of a second Augustan age, bringing order and prosperity to the English empire, is a revision of Jove's sacred vision of Rome:

To them no bounds of empire I assign,
Nor terms of years to their immortal line.
Then Caesar from the Julian stock shall rise,
Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies
Alone shall bound; whom, fraught with eastern spoils,
Our heaven, the just reward of human toils,
Securely shall repay with rights divine;
And incense shall ascend before his sacred shrine.
Then dire debate, and impious war, shall cease,
And the stern age be softened into peace.... (I, 378-9; 390-397)

Eighteenth-century British patriots doubtless read Dryden's Aeneid in quest of an inspiring, self-aggrandizing model for imperial aspiration and civilized grandeur. To their eyes, the splendor of empire demanded heroic sacrifices. They viewed the awful destiny of Aeneas as a glorious burden, because that glory sanctioned the euphoric "sure succession " and " long glories " assured by the 1701 Act of Settlement, and helped justify the travail of creating and sustaining an empire. Indeed, it was as much an ordeal as a blessing—from the protracted miseries of the French War, through periodic uprisings in Scotland, the South Sea Bubble of ' 21, unsuccessful war with Spain in mid-century, the Seven Years War, the revolt of the American colonies, the French Revolution, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings. All these torments threatened national esteem and unity, so a myth was necessary to cohere English purpose.

In fact Dryden's perspective was considerably more complex and elusive than this nationalist application of his work, and one would be hard-pressed to derive any unqualified endorsement of empire from Dryden's preface or translation. Whether he considered Roman destiny worth all of the hero's travail, pain, and loss is problematic. Surely we hear a very conditional affirmation of imperial destiny in Dryden's cumulative qualifications. A much more modest notion, "that all men might be happy if they would be quiet" here in this best of all possible worlds, dominates the preface: "Virgil having maturely weighed the condition of the times in which he lived; that an entire liberty was not to be retrieved; that the present settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same family, or those adopted into it; ... that this conquerer, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it; that the arts of peace flourished under him; that all men might be happy, if they would be quiet... these things, I say, being considered by the poet, he concluded it to be the interest of his country to be so governed; to infuse an awful respect into the people towards such a prince; by the respect to confirm their obedience to make them happy. This was the moral of his divine poem; honest in the poet; honourable to the Emperor, whom he derives from a divine extraction; and reflecting part of that honour on the Roman people, whom he derives also from the Trojans ..." (171-2).

Dryden appears to identify himself with Virgil's ambivalence. Like his master, Dryden maturely weighed the condition of the times, realized that an entire liberty was not to be retrieved, that this con­querer, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it, and that Englishmen might be happy, if they would be quiet. One might recall the narrative bias of Absalom and Achitophel regarding mon­archy and liberty. There Dryden played bo-peep with divine right, beginning with Charles scattering his maker's image throughout the land, and concluding with the famous fiat, right out of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue: "And God-like nations knew their lawful lord."

Because it was produced amid the febrile political climate of the late seventeenth century, Dryden's translation has been unfairly labled a "Royalist epic." Spence records Pope's opinion that Dryden's Aeneid was "as much a party piece as Absalom and Achitophel," and other responses throughout the eighteenth century were related to political sympathies and prejudices. The fate was perhaps inevitable for a poet so involved in wordly affairs as Dryden. He was at work on Virgil's epic story of a foreigner's invasion and victory when his patron James was humiliated and overthrown by William. We're told that his publisher Jacob Tonson wanted to embellish the woodcut of Aeneas in the first edition by adding a slight hook to the hero's nose, that he might more nearly resemble William III. Dryden refused to acquiesce.¹⁰

Nevertheless, Dryden's alleged "trimming " has haunted his re­putation all along. His Aeneid precipitated criticism in some eighteenth-century circles because attitudes toward Virgil and the "peace of the Augustans " were so politically oriented, as we have seen. Many Englishmen defied the Roman Augustan ideal, and judged Augustus himself a usurper and tyrant; Virgil's role as the Emperor's court poet marred his status considerably. He was scorned as a lackey, or defended in spite of his political affinities. Some readers, such as Warton and Gibbon, anticipated modern views of the Aeneid by discovering latent " subversive elements " or " concealed reproofs " to the Emperor.¹¹ One scholar has recently argued that the Aeneid of 1697 was composed " not in praise of Augustus but of the liberties he had suppressed," but I believe this goes too far.¹² We may discard the fuzzy picture of "English Augustans " unanimously applauding Dryden's Aeneid as the ornament of their happy world of patronage, prosperity, and peace without adopting the equally misleading protrait of Dryden as a misunderstood liberal humanist.

Dryden, like all great poets, resists our categories. To a degree he did enact the traditional role of prophet and teacher, relying at times upon an "Augustan" standard to measure the disparity between "classical" ideals and contemporary realities. Dryden's assessment of his social ethos, his own artistic accomplishment, and the possibilities for heroism depended upon a reliable scale of values; in order to establish a means of judgment he would provisionally adapt, or pre­tend to adapt, an Augustan or neo-classical posture. A skeptic and satirist, as opposed to a cynic, Dryden nourished an ideal against which he could view corruptions, perversions, and inequities. To this extent, Virgil's Aeneid proved that a good and great empire, a pious and valiant man, and a magnificent epic poem, were all possible; so he did not often turn his withering irony upon Augustan Rome or its epic.

On the other hand, Dryden was anything but dogmatic or naive in his conception of Virgil. He loved Virgil without mistaking the Aeneid for divine revelation. William Frost relates an anecdote which tellingly illustrates Dryden's flexible uses of classical resources.¹³ The year before the publication of the Aeneid, Dryden's son published a play, dedicated to his uncle, in the preface of which Dryden cited the Virgilian line, "Et pater Aeneas et avunculus excitet Hector." Yet the same line was used for very different purposes in Macflecknoe, fifteen years earlier, in the couplet "Let father Flecknoe fire thy mind with praise,/And Uncle Ogliby thy envy raise" (173-4). So we err seriously if we divide Dryden's assumptions into water-tight com­partments marked classical/elevated and contemporary/degraded. His poetry is frequently two-edged, and classical epics were not beyond the range of his satiric thrusts. In the Fables, published in 1700, he rendered Book I of the Iliad near-burlesque, and certain scenes from the Aeneid anticipate the bathetic plunges of Pope's Dunciad. This description of Venus and Vulcan, for example, has bawdy and humorous elements quite foreign to Virgil.

She said; and straight, her arms of snowy hue
About her unresolving husband threw.
Her soft embraces soon infuse desire;
His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire;
And all the godhead feels the wonted fire.
Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies,
Or forky lightnings flash along the skies.
The goddess, proud of her successful wiles,
And conscious of her form, in secret smiles.
Then thus the power, obnoxious to her charms,
Panting, and half dissolving in her arms...
Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms,
He snatched the willing goddess to his arms;
Till, in her lap infused, he lay possessed
Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. (VIII, 512-522, 535-538)

This scene helps us understand the limits of Dryden's epic vision, and the reason he could not produce an epic of his own. He was unable to render supernatural powers seriously; consequently, his gods are too mortal and his heroes all-too-human. An enlightened skeptic committed to rational inquiry, he had difficulty affirming that divine spirit Virgil depicts; as he wrote only three years earlier, in his epistle To Sir Godfrey Kneller, " satire will have room where e're I write." So he renders a broadly amusing, nearly slap-stick seduction. Venus never does appear very mystical; her epiphany before Aeneas in Book II has degenerated into a beauty competition, and wooing Vulcan she resembles a starlet on the producer's couch. "The wonted fire" is too familiar. I suspect there is a pun in "forky lightnings," since Vulcan is a famous cuckold; certainly he lacks stature here, "Panting, and half dissolving in her arms," and later: "Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms,/He snatched the willing goddess to his arms...". The comedy is latent in Virgil: com­paring Vulcan to a "housewife" in the extended simile which follows the lines cited above, plays on the reversal of roles, in which the husband acquiesces in his own cuckoldry and the wife flaunts her philandering.¹⁴ But the translation drains every comic possibility, and forgets to convey any wonder at all.

Living in a fallen, fragmented world where heroic action appeared less likely than ever, Dryden never does make the divine "machinery" of the Aeneid very convincing. When the gods are restoring order, like Neptune calming the storm in Book I, they are rhetorically compelling, but rarely inspiring. Dryden frankly acknowledged his frustrated struggle to convey Virgil's divine energy: "Machines sometimes are specious things to amuse the reader, and give a color of probability to things otherwise incredible" (209). At least this is the way Dryden habitually employs machinery—as for instance at the climax of Macflecknoe, where a stage prop parodies epic con­secration, and a fart in the face decimates "Father Fleckno's" pretensions.

He said, but his last words were scarcely heard,
For Bruce and Longvil had a Trap prepared,
And down they sent the yet declaiming Bard.
Sinking he left his Druggett robe behind,
Borne upwards by a subterranean wind.
The Mantle fell to the young Prophet's part
With double portion of his Father's Art.

Unfortunately too many of Dryden's genuine epical moments in the Aeneid retain a bit of this mundane or stagey quality. Even the descent of Hermes, so gorgeous and thrilling in Virgil, has as much pose as mystery in Dryden's rendition.

Hermes obeys; with golden pinions binds
His flying feet, and mounts the western winds:
And, whether o'er the seas or earth he flies,
With rapid force they bear him down the skies.
But first he grasps within his awful hand
The mark of sovereign power, his magic wand;
With this he draws the ghosts from hollow graves;
With this he drives them down the Stygian waves;
With this he seals in sleep the wakeful sight,
And eyes, though closed in death, restores to light.
Thus armed, the god begins his airy race,
And drives the racking clouds along the liquid space;
Now sees the top of Atlas, as he flies,
Whose brawny back supports the starry skies:
Atlas, whose head with piney forests crowned,
Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound.
Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin
The founts of rolling streams their race begin:
A beard of ice on his large breast depends:
Here, poised upon his wings, the god descends.
Then, rested thus, he from the towering height
Plunged downward with precipitated flight:
Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood. (IV, 350-372)

The magic wand of Hermes is described in rhetorical terms: "With this ... with this ... with this...". And the stock poetic diction (" the liquid space," " the starry skies," " the towering height ") does not help us envision the universe in any new ways. Hermes himself

too close to posing: " Here, poised upon his wings, the god de­scends...Plunged downward with precipitated flight." One might argue that the progression from Paradise Lost to the Dunciad is marked by Dryden's Aeneid as well as by Mac flecknoe. Dryden' Aeneid suffers from the terminal skepticism toward the forces or energies which made gods truly "awful " and heroes really "godlike."

An analysis of the virtues and limitations of Dryden's Aeneid illustrates several hoary truths perhaps worth reiterating. Above all, that Virgil is many-minded enough to accommodate large needs across the centuries. The meanings Dryden derived from the Aeneid depend ultimately on the ethical, political, religious and literary premises he brought to it—very much like the various reactions to the translation. It would seem there is no such thing as pure inductive procedure, not in science, nor in literary analysis, nor in translation; the results of even the most rigorously empirical observation rely upon our categories of understanding. In Karl's Popper's words, "obser­vations ... are always interpretations of the facts observed ... they are interpretations in the light of theories." ¹⁵ Popper's statement is itself an epitomal "modernist" premise, and suggests another pro­visional conclusion which emerges from my argument: there is nothing particularly sacred about our twentieth-century perspective on Virgil. Although many modern critics may prefer to maintain that their ironic view of the Aeneid is objective and verifiable, right there in the text awaiting any careful reader, it seems less likely there is any such there there. Pausing to explore Dryden's "obsolete" version of the Aeneid can tell us something about Dryden, Virgil, the English Augustan myth, and our own biases. Clearly we moderns also bring to the poem shaping preconceptions, and make "interpretations in the light of theories." We are probably insufficiently receptive to the need to subordinate ourselves to any duty, especially patriotic or civic. The Aeneid went into a brief eclipse during the Romantic era for just that reason; we remain more Romantic than we admit, especially compared to Dryden. Dryden was undoubtedly closer than we are, for instance, to Virgil's sense of City. The whole Aeneid is predicated on the glamor and sublimity of building a great metropolis. One reason Aeneas is initially attracted to Dido is her position as leader of Carthage. When she abandons that role for a love affair, all construction ceases, and we are supposed to regret her irrespon­sibility. After The Prelude, Bleak House, The Secret Agent, and Dubliners, it is far more difficult to give our whole-hearted assent to the city. The deterioration in the idea of empire is too obvious to elaborate; concomitantly, our conception of Hero has been utterly transformed. No longer is the hero the very embodiment of cultural values and aspirations, but has for some time been more typically estranged from, or in fundamental opposition to, the society which nourished him: Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus exemplify the modern alternatives.

We still agree with Dryden that Aeneas represents "heroic virtue," but we question its nature and fate. Yet Virgil makes multiple, com­plex demands upon his readers, including the need to recover and cherish several alien values. If Dryden had limited vision when he interpreted the Aeneid, so do we. His version can still help us see crucial elements we tend to overlook in the character of Aeneas and the larger design of Virgil. Modern critics, for example, tend to underestimate the last half of the Aeneid because the elegiac and ironic aspects are so much less prevalent. It is Dryden who reminds us that "the shining quality of an epic heero, his magnanimity, his constancy, his patience, his piety ... raises first our admiration; we are naturally prone to imitate what we admire ... for there the whole hero is to be imitated" (159). We might enhance our sense of Virgilian richness, its assumptions, nuanced complications, and even­tual resolution, by recovering more of Dryden's perspective.

¹ Both quotations are from Virgil, ed. D. R. Dudley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), Dudley's introduction p. x, and R. D. Williams, "Changing Attitudes to Virgil," pp. 125-6.

² M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 251.

³A number of twentieth-century critics have helped me develop the ironic reading. I particularly want to acknowledge Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963); C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (New York: Macmillan, 1945); Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); Thomas Greene, The Descent From Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963); and three essays which appear in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Steele Commager (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966): Adam Perry's " The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid," Bernard Knox's " The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the Aeneid," and R. A. Brooks's "Discolor Aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough."

⁴ John Dryden, The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Macmillan, 1965), Book II, 1076-1080. Further references identified by book and line numbers.

⁵ John Dryden, " Dedication of the Aeneis," in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), II, 154. References to this preface are by page numbers in the text.

⁶ Nearly every eighteenth-century writer finds a similar moral in Virgil. Dennis concluded that " the showing that Aeneas succeeds, shows that every such good and great man succeeds in such enterprizes and is established ...." Trapp, translating the Aeneid, elaborates this point in his preface: " Piety to God, and justice and goodness to men, together with valor, both active and passive, (not such as consists in strength, intrepidity, and fierceness only, which is the courage of a tyger, not of a man) will engage Heaven on our sides, and make both Prince and people victorious, flourishing, and happy ... This is the moral of the Aeneis, properly so called." Pope agreed that the design of the story is to illustrate " pious resignation and its rewards." All three quotations are cited by H. T. Swedenberg in The Theory of the Epic in England 1650­1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1944), pp. 198, 205, 201.

⁷  M. M. Kelsall, " What God, What Mortal? The Aeneid and English Mock-Heroic," Anion, 8 (Autumn 1969), 359-379.

⁸ John Dryden, "Dedication to the Third Miscellany," in Essays of John Dryden, II, 13.

⁹ See Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint, Chapter II, “Our Virgil.”

¹⁰ See George Watson, " Dryden and the Jacobites," TLS, March 16, 1973, pp. 301-302.

¹¹ Both are cited by T. W. Harrison in "English Virgil: the Aeneid in the XVIII Century," Philologica Pragensia, X (1967), 6.

¹² Watson, p. 301.

¹³ William Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 63-64.

¹⁴ I owe this point to Kelsall's article, p. 373.

¹⁵ Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1968), p. 107n.