Shall
we dare, continues Segrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a
fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other
poets who have made many of their fictions against the order of
nature? For what else are the splendid miracles of the
"Metamorphoses?" Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and
have also deep learning and instructive mythologies couched under
them. But to give, as Virgil does in this episode, the original
cause of the long wars betwixt Rome and Carthage; to draw truth out
of fiction after so probable a manner, with so much beauty, and so
much for the honour of his country, was proper only to the divine
wit of Maro; and Tasso, in one of his discourses, admires him for
this particularly. It is not lawful indeed to contradict a point of
history which is known to all the world--as, for example, to make
Hannibal and Scipio contemporaries with Alexander--but in the dark
recesses of antiquity a great poet may and ought to feign such
things as he finds not there, if they can be brought to embellish
that subject which he treats.
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