“_No death from thee May snare Orestes between earth and sea._“[33] As for Orestes himself, Athena declares that it is laid on him to carry the rescued image of Artemis to Halæ, on the bounds of Attica; and there it will be worshipped with curious rites designed to recall the old barbarity while condemning it. These poor Greek women must be restored to their homes; and, for that fleeing priestess, Destiny has given to her to end her days in peace and gentleness. “_And thou, Iphigenia, by the stair Of Brauron in the rocks, the Key shalt bear. Of Artemis. There shalt thou live and die, And there have burial._“[33] ----- Footnote 33: From Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ (George Allen & Co. Ltd.). _Virgil: Dido_ Nineteen years before the birth of Christ the great Roman poet Virgil died, leaving amongst his papers an epic poem which had been the work of many years. Both in life and art this poet of the Augustan Age had a very high ideal; and because he was conscious of defects in his work: because his last illness came before he was able to put the finishing touches upon it, he begged that it should be burned. But the emperor Augustus interposed. Some parts of the poem were already known and loved in the circle of Virgil’s friends, of whom the emperor was one. They knew its fine theme—the founding of the Roman State by its legendary ancestor Æneas; and having already some foretaste of its beauty and charm and strong patriotic appeal, it seemed that the destruction of the poem would mean an immense and irreparable loss. So the Emperor decided that it should be preserved, and directed Virgil’s executors to edit it. The poem is of course the _Æneid_, and Dido is its heroine. Like the Greek epics, it is an authentic voice of the ancient world; but of an Age, a Race and a Civilization vastly different from theirs. It is quite frankly fashioned in the Homeric form, and its hero is one of the Trojan chiefs who fled overseas to Italy, to re-establish his race there at the command of the gods. It actually brings Æneas at one point of his wanderings within three months’ time of an incident in the _Odyssey_: it shows us Andromache still mourning for Hector, and the gods still at enmity over the old feud between Greek and Trojan. But all these links with the earlier epics, and many others, subtler or more obvious, are merely formal. In spirit there is as wide a severance as we know to exist in actual time. The _Æneid_, with its humane, philosophic and cultured poet, belongs to a state of society many hundreds of years later than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. And although it is a mistake to regard the earlier poems as really ‘primitive,’ they represent an age which, because it was relatively simpler and less self-conscious, seems youthful and buoyant by comparison.