124
PARTISAN REVIEW
our blood. Surely a time too
shall come when in those bor–
ders the husbandsman, as his
crooked plow labors the soil will
find spears eaten away with,scal–
ing rust, or strike on helms his
heavy mattock, and marvel at
mighty bones dug up from their
tombs. Gods of our fathers of
'
our country, and thou Romulus
and Vesta, mother who
keepes~
Tuscan Tiber and the Roman
Palatine, forbid not at least that
this our prince may succour a
ruined world! Long enough al–
ready has our life-blood recom–
pensed Laomedon's perjury at
Troy; long already the heavenly
palace, 0 Caesar, grudges thee
to us, and murmurs that thou
l
shouldst care for human tri–
umphs, where right and wrong
are confounded, where all these
wrongs cover the world where
wickedness is manifold
~nd
the
plow's meed of honour is gone;
the fields thicken with weeds for
the tillers are marched
a~ay,
and bent sickles are forged into
the stiff swordblade: here the
Euphrates, there Germany
heaves with war; neighboring
cities rush into arms one against
another over broken laws: the
merciless W a r - G o d rages
through all the world: even as
when chariots bursting from
their barriers swerve out of the
course, and, vainly tugging at
the curb, the driver is swept on
by his horses, and the car
hearkens not to the rein.
This passage, says Toynbee, is "a
prayer for delivery from a tortur–
ing sense of drift which is con-
veyed in the last three lines by one
of the most vivid strokes of Virgil's
art. The prayer takes the form of
a
co~fession
of sin; and,
th~ugh
the sm from which the poet im–
plores heaven for release is
nominally an 'original sin' inherited
fr~m ~aomedon
[king of Troy and
Pnam s father, a notorious · per–
jurer] . . . the tremendous
ergo
which is the first word of the first
line and the key word of the whole
passage tells the reader that the sin
which the Romans were expiating
in Virgil's day was really the sin
which they themselves had been
committing during the
two-cen~
tur~es-long
rake's progress upon
whtch they entered when they
plunged into the Hannibalic
War .. . "
But Virgil had hopes that good
would come of all this evil. Just as
modem philosophers of national–
ism or of class struggle pretend that
their nation or their class has a
benevolent "mission" to perform in/
connection with its proposed do–
mination of the world, so Virgil
argues that through universal war
Rome will establish universal peace.
I am thinking of the well-known
passage in the
Aeneid
in which
Jupiter prophesies the Pax Ro–
mana. "The dreadful steel-clenched
gates of War shall be shut fast; in–
human fury, his hands bound
behind him with an hundred rivets
of brass, shall sit within on mur–
derous weapons, shrieking with
ghastly blood-stained lips." Such
was Virgil's theory, but considering
his calamity-haunted imagination,
one wonders to what extent he be–
lieved in it.
F. W.
DuPEE
