long task of resistance, achieving some conscious community of aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself: the poet whose lovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of _that_, is assuredly carrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epic intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of civilization. But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than what Virgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the fact which everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as a poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself compelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--to do by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure in this does not matter much in comparison with his technical success otherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate to the epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic than Homer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stock epithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they are characteristics of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient technique. But epic poetry cannot be written as Homer composed it; whereas it must be written something as Virgil wrote it; yes, if epic poetry is to be _written_, Virgil must show how that is to be done. The superb Virgilian economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of the whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of this fashion: Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna: Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.[11] Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so far as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme; and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction, supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and memorable lines: Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]