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Virgil
(70–19 BC)

Other names: Publius Vergilius Maro

Biographical

The great Roman poet, Virgil was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 BC, on a farm on the banks of the Mincio, in the district of Andes, not far from Mantua. In the region north of the Po a race of more imaginative susceptibility than the people of Latium formed part of the Latin-speaking population. It was favourable to his development as a national poet that he was born and educated during the interval of comparative calm between the first and second civil wars, and that he belonged to a generation which, as the result of the social war, first enjoyed the sense of an Italian nationality. Yet it was only after Virgil had grown to manhood that the province to which he belonged obtained the full rights of Roman citizenship. It is remarkable that the two poets whose imagination seems to have been most powerfully possessed by the spell of Rome — Ennius and Virgil — were born outside the pale of Roman citizenship. The scenery familiar to his childhood, which he recalls with affection both in the Eclogues and the Georgics, was that of the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio and the rich pastures in its neighbourhood. Like his friend and contemporary Horace, he sprung from the class of yeomen, whose state he pronounces the happiest allotted to man and most conducive to virtue and piety. Virgil, as well as Horace, was fortunate in having a father who, though probably uneducated himself, discerned his genius and spared no pains in giving it the best culture then obtainable in the world. At the age of twelve he was taken for his education to Cremona, and from an expression in one of the minor poems attributed to him, about the authenticity of which there cannot be any reasonable doubt, it may be inferred that his father accompanied him. Afterwards he removed to Milan, where he continued engaged in study till he went to Rome two years later. The time of his removal to Rome must have nearly coincided with the publication of the poem of Lucretius and of the collected poems of Catullus. After studying rhetoric he began the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. One of the minor poems written about this time in the scazon metre tells of his delight at the immediate prospect of entering on the study of philosophy, and of the first stirring of that enthusiasm for philosophical investigation which haunted him through the whole of his life. At the end of the poem, the real master passion of his life, the charm of the Muses, reasserts itself. Our next knowledge of him is derived from allusions in the Eclogues, and belongs to a period nine or ten years later. Of what happened to him in the interval, during which the first civil war took place and Julius Caesar was assassinated, we have no indication from ancient testimony or from his own writings. In 42 BC, the year of the battle of Philippi, we find him 'cultivating his woodland Muse' under the protection of Asinius Pollio, governor of the district north of the Po. In the following year the famous confiscations of land for the benefit of the soldiers of the triumvirs took place. Of the impression produced on Virgil by these confiscations, and of their effect on his fortunes, we have a vivid record in the first and ninth eclogues. Mantua, in consequence of its vicinity to Cremona, which had been faithful to the cause of the republic, was involved in this calamity; and Virgil's father was driven from his farm. By the influence of his powerful friends, and by personal application to the young Octavian, Virgil obtained the restitution of his land. In the meantime he had taken his father and family with him to the small country house of his old teacher Siron. Soon afterwards we hear of him living in Rome, enjoying, in addition to the patronage of Pollio, the favour of Maecenas, intimate with Varius, who was at first regarded as the rising poet of the new era, and later on with Horace. His friendship with Gallus, for whom he indicates a warmer affection and more enthusiastic admiration than for any one else, was formed before his second residence in Rome, in the Cisalpine province, with which Gallus also was connected both by birth and office. The pastoral poems, or 'eclogues', commenced in his native district, were finished and published in Rome, probably in 37 BC. Soon afterwards he withdrew from habitual residence in Rome, and lived chiefly in Campania, either at Naples or in the neighbourhood of Nola. He was one of the companions of Horace in the famous journey to Brundisium (Brindisi); and it seems not unlikely that, some time before 23 BC, he made the voyage to Athens which forms the subject of the third ode of the first book of the Odes of Horace. The seven years from 37 to 30 BC. were devoted to the composition of the Georgics. In the following year he read the poem to Augustus on his return from Asia. The remaining years of his life were spent on the composition of the Aeneid. In 19 BC, after the Aeneid was finished but not finally corrected, he set out for Athens, intending to pass three years in Greece and Asia and to devote that time to perfecting the poem. At Athens he met Augustus, and was persuaded by him to return with him to Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun, he was seized with illness, and, as he continued his voyage without interruption, he grew rapidly worse, and died on the 21st of September, in his fifty-first year, a few days after landing at Brundisium. In his last illness he called for the cases containing his manuscripts, with the intention of burning the Aeneid. He had previously left directions in his will that his literary executors, Varius and Tucca, should publish nothing of his which had not already been given to the world by himself. This pathetic desire that the work to which he had given so much care, and of which such great expectations were formed, should not survive him has been used as an argument to prove his own dissatisfaction with the poem. A passage from a letter of his to Augustus is also quoted, in which he speaks as if he felt that the undertaking of the work had been a mistake. This dissatisfaction with his work may be ascribed to his passion for perfection of workmanship, which death prevented him from attaining. The command of Augustus overrode the poet's wish and rescued the poem. Virgil was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious veneration. Horace is our most direct witness of the affection which he inspired among his contemporaries. The qualities by which he gained their love were, according to his testimony, candour—sincerity of nature and goodness of heart—and pietas—the union of deep affection for kindred, friends and country with a spirit of reverence. The statement of his biographer, that he was known in Naples by the name 'Parthenias', is a testimony to the exceptional purity of his life in an age of licence. The seclusion of his life and his devotion to his art touched the imagination of his countrymen as the finer qualities of his nature touched the heart of his friends. It had been, from the time of Cicero, the ambition of the men of finest culture and most original genius in Rome to produce a national literature which might rival that of Greece; and the feeling that at last a poem was about to appear which would equal or surpass the greatest among all the works of Greek genius found a voice in the lines of Propertius: 'Yield, Roman writers; yield, Greek ones, I know not what greater than the Iliad is born'. The feeling of his countrymen and contemporaries seems justified by the personal impression which he produces on modern readers — an impression of sanctity, as of one who habitually lived in a higher and serener sphere than that of this world. The veneration in which his name was held during the long interval between the overthrow of Western civilisation and the revival of letters affords testimony of the depth of the impression which he made on the heart and imagination of the ancient world. The traditional belief in his pre-eminence has been on the whole sustained, though not with absolute unanimity, in modern times. By the scholars and men of letters of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries it was never seriously questioned. During the first half of the 19th century his right to be ranked among the great poets of the world was disputed by some German and English critics. The effect of this was a more just estimate of Virgil's relative position among the poets of the world. It may still be a matter of individual opinion whether Lucretius himself was not a more powerful and original poetical force, whether he does not speak more directly to the heart and imagination of our own time. But it can hardly be questioned, on a survey of Roman literature, as a continuous expression of the national mind, from the age of Naevius to the age of Claudian, that the position of Virgil is central and commanding, while that of Lucretius is in a great measure isolated. If we could imagine the place of Virgil in Roman literature vacant, it would be much the same as if we imagined the place of Dante vacant in modern Italian, and that of Goethe in German literature. The serious efforts of the early Roman literature – the efforts of the older epic and tragic poetry — found their fulfilment in him. The revelation of the power and life of Nature, first made to Lucretius, was able to charm the Roman mind, only after it had passed into the mind of Virgil. Virgil is the only complete representative of the deepest sentiment and highest mood of his countrymen and of his time. In his pastoral and didactic poems he gives a living voice to the whole charm of Italy, in the Aeneid to the whole glory of Rome. He was in the maturity of his powers at the most critical epoch of the national life, one of the most critical epochs in the history of the world. Keeping aloof from the trivial daily life of his contemporaries, he was moved more profoundly than any of them by the deeper currents of emotion in the sphere of government, religion, morals and human feeling which were then changing the world; and in uttering the enthusiasm of the hour, and all the new sensibilities that were stirring in his own heart and imagination, he had, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, 'divined at a decisive hour of the world what the future would love'. He was also by universal acknowledgment the greatest literary artist whom Rome produced. Virgil had a more catholic sympathy with the whole range of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod to Theocritus and the Alexandrians, than any one else at any period of Roman literature. The effort of the preceding generation to attain to beauty of form and finish of artistic execution found in him, at the most susceptible period of his life, a ready recipient of its influence. The rude dialect of Latium had been moulded into a powerful and harmonious organ of literary expression by a long series of orators; the Latin hexameter, first shaped by Ennius to meet the wants of his own spirit and of his high argument, had been smoothed and polished by Lucretius, and still more perfected by the finer ear and more careful industry of Catullus and his circle; but neither had yet attained their final development. It was left for Virgil to bring both diction and rhythm to as high a pitch of artistic perfection as has been attained in any literature. This great work was accomplished by the steady devotion of his genius to his appointed task. For the first half of his life he prepared himself to be the poet of his time and country with a high ambition and unresting industry. The second half of his career was a religious consecration of all his powers of heart, mind and spirit to his high office. Virgil’s great popularity In the middle ages is to be partly explained by the fact that he was to a certain extent recognized by the Church. He was supposed to have prophesied the coming of Christ in the fourth Eclogue, and by some divines the Aeneid was held to be an allegory of sacred things. This position was sufficiently emphasised by Dante when he chose him from among all the sages of antiquity to be his guide in the Divina Commedia. Ancient poets and philosophers were commonly transformed by medieval writers into necromancers; and Virgil and Aristotle became popularly famous, not for poetry and science, but for their supposed knowledge of the black art. Naples appears to have been the home of the popular legend of Virgil, which represented him as the special protector of the city, but was probably never quite independent of learned tradition.

Place of birth: Mantua
Place of death: Brindisi
Place of burial: Naples

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