Schevill — Studies in Cervantes. 485 



festlj written when tlie Aeneid liad become more widely known, 

 possibly after a Spanish version had been published, and so belong 

 to the last third of the sixteenth century. While these ballads are 

 more or less true to the subject-matter of the Aeneid, they show 

 also by their manner that the story appealed to writers much after 

 the fashion of contemporary romances of adventure; they are a 

 further evidence of the general popularity of the Latin epic. 



The dramatic situations in the story of Aeneas and Dido were 

 recognized early by writers for the stage, but owing to the difficulty 

 of constructing a well-made play out of any one, or several of them, 

 none is of the highest order. Mere imitations, however, of the 

 pathos of Dido's situation as well as simple references to her sad 

 fate begin early in the history of the Spanish drama, and grow very 

 numerous toward the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the 

 seventeenth centuries. Dido, according to the two views of her char- 

 acter, treated at the end of this article,^ was either a chaste matron, 

 true to her dead husband, and as such was held up as an example, or 

 she was a yielding female, betrayed and forsaken, and so a warn- 

 ing to misguided women who might love, not wisely, but too well. 

 All these allusions have the qualities of romance, but their rather 

 stereotyped character implies that the story of Dido was known to 

 all, whether they had an academical education or not. There are 

 also other episodes of the Aeneid which receive frequent mention, 

 notably when an author desires to compare them with similar inci- 

 dents of his own work. Troy in flames, kindled by the fire of love, 

 the chastity of Camilla, the friendship of Euryalus and Nisus, the 

 loyalty of Achates, the filial piety of Aeneas, these are among the 

 more common reminiscences.- But all are overshadowed by the 

 episode of the fourth book of the Aeneid, a fact to be explained, per- 

 haps, by the influence of that romance on prose fiction.^ 



In the theater, it begins as early as Juan del Encina's Egloga 

 de Pldcida y Victoriano. After being forsaken by Victoriano, 



' Cf. Appendix I, p. 517. 



* The fact that Dante treats some of the Virgilian episodes as real 

 events and introduces some of the chL.racters of the Aeneid into the Divine 

 Comedy may be considered a significant beginning of their frequent mention 

 in subsequent literature; cf. Inferno, I, 73-4; I, 107-8; IV, 122, 124; V, 64; 

 XXVI, 90-3. 



^ The theme of sentimental death or suicide in the Aeneid was svipported 

 by the tone of some of the Eclogues; cf. II, 7; V, 20; VIII, 17 ff. ; 59, etc. 



L, 



