Cicero.  When Brutus stood wavering, Cicero avoiding the issue, and Cassius as usual losing his temper, it was Servilia who offered the only feasible solution, and it was her program which they adopted.  Is it surprising that Greek historians like Plutarch could never quite comprehend the part in Roman politics played by women like Clodia, Porcia and Terentia?  In sheer despair he usually resorts to the hypotheses of some personal intrigue for an explanation of their powerful influence.

It is in truth very likely that had Roman literature been permitted to run its own natural course, without being overwhelmed, as was the Italian literature of the renaissance, it would have progressed much farther on the road to Romanticism.  Apollonius was far more a restraining influence in this respect than an inspiration.  As it is, Vergil’s first and fourth books are as unthinkable in Greek dress as is the sixth.  They constitute a very conspicuous landmark in the history of literature.

Vergil does not wholly escape the powerful conventions of his Greek predecessors:  in his fourth book, for instance, there are suggestions of the melodramatic “maiden’s lament” so dear to the music hall gallery of Alexandria.  But Vergil, apparently to his own surprise, permits his Roman understanding of life to prevail, and transcends his first intentions as soon as he has felt the grip of the character he is portraying.  Dido quickly emerges from the role of a temptress designed as a last snare to trap the hero, and becomes a woman who reveals human laws paramount even to divine ordinance.  Once realizing this the poet sacrifices even his hero and wrecks his original plot to be true to his insight into human nature.  The confession of Aeneas, as he departs, that in heeding heaven’s command he has blasphemed against love—­polluto amore—­how strange a thought for the pius Aeneas!  That sentiment was not Greek, it was a new flash of intuition of the very quality of purest Romance.

The Aeneid is also a remarkably religious poem to have come from one who had devoted so many enthusiastic years to a materialistic philosophy.  Indeed it is usual to assume that the poet had abandoned his philosophy and turned to Stoicism before his death.  But there is after all no legitimate ground for this supposition.  The Aeneid has, of course, none of the scientific fanaticism that mars the Aetna, and the poet has grown mellow and tolerant with years, but that he was still convinced of the general soundness of the Epicurean hypotheses seems certain.  Many puzzles of the Aeneid are at least best explained by that view.  The repetition of his creed in the first Aeneid ought to warn us that his enthusiasm for the study of Rerum natura did not die.  Indeed the Aeneid is full of Epicurean phrases and notions.  The atoms of fire are struck out of the flint (VI, 6), the atoms of light are emitted from the sun (VII, 527, and VIII, 23), early men were born duro robore and lived like those described in the fifth book of Lucretius (VIII, 320), and Conington finds almost two hundred reminiscences of Lucretius in the Aeneid, the proportion increasing rather than decreasing in the later books.[3]