There has always been a mystical school of classical interpretation, who see in the Æneid, as in the Iliad and Odyssey, a tissue of allegory from first to last. Not content with identifying the Trojan chief with Augustus, they found a double meaning in every character and every legend in the poem. Bishop Warburton, in his well-known 'Divine Legation,' expended a great amount of learning and research to prove that in the Descent to the Shades in the sixth book we have a sketch, scarcely veiled, of the great Eleusinian mysteries. Others saw in Dido the love-passion and the fate of Cleopatra, Antony in Turnus, the flight of Marius to the marshes in the person of Sinon, the miserable end of Pompey in Priam—
"The head shorn off, the trunk without a name."
It is impossible to enjoy either Homer or Virgil, if their text is to be "improved" at every step after this sort. Augustus and Octavia looked to the poet for a tale of the olden time, and he told it well. No doubt he threw in graceful compliments to Rome and its ruler; but to have to guess at some hidden meaning all along would have been far too severe a tax on the imperial audience, and would certainly not heighten the enjoyment of modern readers.
One would be glad to know what was the view that was really taken by that profligate court on the one hand, and by the poet himself on the other, of the theological machinery of the poem; those powerful and passionate Genii who pull the wires of the human puppets to gratify their own preferences and hatreds,
