Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

The Aeneidthe purely Homeric touches are in the character and the story ofAeneas. 13Virgil’s Aeneas implies a new relation to heaven. While the wholequestion of Olympus and the gods will have to be reserved for separatetreatment at more length, it will be convenient to anticipate afew points of importance. Greek thinkers had moved, and broughtmankind with them, beyond the Olympus of Homer. Men no longermight expect toHave sight of Proteus rising from the sea,Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.There was a gain, however, in their loss, for it was a deepeningconsciousness of the real character of the Divine nature that carriedmen away from Olympus to look for divinity in a higher region. Thedivine was more remote, but it was more divine. It had less contactwith humanity, but it was freer from the weaknesses and the vicesof humanity. It was perhaps less interested in the individual, but itmight exercise a wider and a firmer power over the universe.The Homeric gods, in accordance with epic usage, had to watchover Aeneas, but they were gods in whom no one really believed.Hence Virgil handles them with a caution that excludes warmth.Though Aeneas is favoured with one theophany after another, and isfor the while re-assured by them, he is not on such easy terms withthe gods as was Achilles. He sees them less frequently, and his relationsare more formal. In fact, the complete rejection of the Homericpantheon by educated people in favour of eastern religion or Greekphilosophy was too strong for the poet. 14Yet Virgil is far from refusing the idea of some divine governmentof the world. Some of the philosophers had rejected the Homerictheology, just because it did not sufficiently relate the world with thegods. They traced the world’s origin back to divine intelligence, theyrecognized the diviner element in man’s nature, his power of rememberingand re-discovering the divine “ideas,” and they leant to a beliefin the moral government of the universe. With the gradual directionof philosophy to individual life, men came to believe in a personalconcern of heaven with the individual man. If Fate is hard andunrelenting, it has recognized the individual, and on the whole the