So far, with the exception of Book two, which recorded the fall and sack of Troy, a theme omitted by Homer, Virgil has recorded the Odyssey or wanderings of his hero Æneas. Now in the succeeding six books is given the Iliad or wars of Æneas in Italy. As he lands, King Latinus is divinely led to promise Æneas his daughter Lavinia. But she has been betrothed to Turnus. Under Juno’s prompting then begins this tremendous duel between Æneas and Turnus. And here we note a curious likeness between Milton and Virgil. As our sympathies are aroused in the _Paradise Lost_ for Lucifer, so Turnus, “the reckless one,” looms up a figure of heroic size, doomed by the fates to die that Rome may live. SOURCES As Virgil’s sources for his story and indeed for no small portion of his language may be mentioned preeminently:— Homer’s _Odyssey_ and _Iliad_; Euripides, “with his droppings of warm tears”; the Greek epic poets, called the cyclic poets, as dealing with the cycle of story revolving around Troy; the Greek freedman and teacher, Livius Andronicus, who translated roughly the _Odyssey_; Nævius, who wrote on the First Punic War, tracing Carthaginian hostility back to the Æneas visit; and especially Ennius, “father of Latin literature,” who in a great epic traced the history of Rome from Æneas down. Of Virgil’s borrowings it were enough perhaps to say that, like our Shakespeare, he ennobled what he borrowed, wove it into the texture of his song—stamped it Virgilian. THE TRANSLATION Concerning the translation itself, we should perhaps set over against Emerson’s famous saying, “I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue,” that other remark of a great scholar, that “the thing for the student of language to learn is that _translation is impossible_.” Exquisitely done as is this version by Professor Conington, noble student of Virgil as he was, some faint notion of what is lost in the process might be gained by comparing a prose version of, say, Longfellow’s “Evangeline” with his hexameters themselves:— This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic— Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. At the very least, “the noblest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” Virgil’s “ocean-roll of rhythm,” is lost. That indeed is not revived for us in Conington’s own poetical version, not in Dryden’s, nor in Morris’s. Of Virgil also that is true which T. B. Aldrich, charming poet that he was, wrote me anent his own early translations, “But who could hope to decant the wine of Horace?” Yet it may be not without interest to compare some verse renderings of the initial lines:—