LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.
I.
The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great
writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the
works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But
besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent
Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times.
In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or
summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the
Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended
to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period
produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In
the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the
earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives
of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome,
in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus(140),’
mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as
authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the
precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De
Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the
lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians,
and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others
complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief
authority to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier
Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the
materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question
remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian,
is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two
centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on
the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to
his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of
credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and
scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have
been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other
hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to
the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general
innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular
poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from
contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In
the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there
was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is
no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who
immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem
concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate,
told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by
the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But
even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for
the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence
available to the former, and the sensational character of the story
itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting
this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is
no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some
details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest
ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.
In addition to these materials for the biography of Latin writers, in some
few cases the imagination is assisted in realising their character and
genius by the preservation from ancient times of their statues, busts,
images impressed on gems, or other kinds of portraiture. But in the case
of men of letters, it is not often that reliance can be placed on the
authenticity of such memorials, except in such instances as that of
Cicero, where a great name in literature was combined with prominence in
public life.
The data for a knowledge of the life, circumstances, and personal
characteristics of Virgil are supplied partly by direct statements
contained in his poems or inferences founded on them; partly by the
indirect impression of himself stamped on these poems; partly by casual
notices in the works of other poets, and especially of Horace; and partly
by statements in the Life of the poet originally prefixed to the
Commentary of Aelius Donatus,—a grammarian who flourished in the fourth
century A.D.,—and founded on, if not an actual reproduction of, the Life
originally contained in the work of Suetonius.
The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two
of the minor poems published among the Catalepton(141), which may without
hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus
has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of
the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to
philosophical studies(142). The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our
information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for
the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely
didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that
supplied by Horace, Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their
lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to
himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge
derived from other sources.
The Georgics and those parts of the Aeneid which are specially ethical and
didactic, as that part of Book VI. from line 264 to 751, throw most light
on Virgil’s spiritual nature and on his convictions on the questions of
most vital interest to man. But in these parts of his works Virgil has not
revealed himself with such distinctness and consistency as Lucretius has
done in his great philosophical poem. The personality of Lucretius was
simpler and more forcible: the passion to utter his strong convictions
prevailed in him over all considerations of art. The colouring of his own
heart and spirit, of his enthusiasm or melancholy, appears in Virgil
rather as a pervading and subtly interpenetrating influence, than as the
direct indication of his true self. His artistic taste enforced on him
reserve in expressing what was personal to himself; his nature was
apparently more open to varied influences of books and men than that of
Lucretius; he was endowed with the many-sided susceptibility of a poet,
rather than with the simpler, more energetic, but narrower consistency of
a philosophical partisan. Equally with Lucretius he throws his whole heart
and being into the treatment of his subject; but in Lucretius the two
streams of what is personal to himself and what is inherent in his subject
are still distinguishable. In Virgil the imaginative sentiment of the poet
and the strong tender heart of the man seem to be inseparably united. It
would be impossible to distinguish them by analysis,—to abstract from the
bloom of his poetry the delicate sweetness which may have pervaded his
performance of the common duties and his share in the common intercourse
of life.
Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the
most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with
whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the
clearness of his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the
intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike
Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to
his art had chosen
Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae(143),
and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world,
enjoyed all that was illustrious, brilliant or genial, in the society of
his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier
years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger
men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed
to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political
position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus,
Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as
Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a
younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger
Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not
of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses
expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or
exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate associates he greets with
hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without assuming the
airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or
paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only
two—unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one
more to the number, Aelius Lamia—in connexion with whom he uses the
language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil.
Whatever may have been the date or circumstances connected with the
composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words ‘animae dimidium
meae’ establish the futility of the notion, that the subject of this Ode
is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the
twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice
for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine
of Cales.
Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one
originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of
the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important,
prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse,
written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted
to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have
accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later
MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval
fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has
successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life
based on that of Suetonius(144). What then were the materials available to
Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to
by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long
friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, entitled ‘De ingenio moribusque
Vergilii.’ Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the ‘memorials which the
friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.’
Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name
of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a
statement that ‘in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an
uneducated man’—a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison.
Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil
to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests
of the direction given to the poet’s genius in the choice of the subject
of the Georgics.
A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedianus,
born at the commencement of our era, who wrote ‘Contra obtrectatores
Vergilii.’ These ‘maligners,’ beginning with those whose names have been
condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had assailed the art
of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by
imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made
against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the
best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature
of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure
the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who
could have known anything about the matter(145).
The certainty that the biographical notices of Virgil and the accounts
transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary
sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main
statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice
of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while
it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius
have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the
authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline
Museum, or of the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different
from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil.
II.
The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek
rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of
the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be
known(146). Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to
change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature
into the unfamiliar _Vergil_. He was born on the 15th of October in the
year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans
attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of
their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death
to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festival(147). The year of
his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most
eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than
Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and
Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high
distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or
literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a
somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious
contemporaries.
This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and
disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the
commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or
security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the
Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of
these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of
the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his
imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life,
as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves
indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or
made desolate by them. Virgil’s childhood and early youth were passed in
the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of
the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world.
The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused
some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood;
but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no
scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of
which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries
of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:—
At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta
Una dies dabat exitio(148).
His birth-place was in the ‘pagus,’ or ‘township,’ of Andes in the
neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a
tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of
Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is
only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a ‘vicus,’ and there
it is said to be distant from Mantua ‘xxx milia passuum.’ The word
_pagus_, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be
used as equivalent to _vicus_, but as a ‘country-district,’ which might
include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any
particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry
with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional
scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction
from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the
characteristic features of Virgil’s early home. The immediate
neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the
first Eclogue,
Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae(149),
or
Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras(150),
can apply.
The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil’s early years appear to
have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he
recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics.
From the fact that the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan
land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems
obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side
nearest Cremona. The use of the word ‘depellere’ (Ecl. i. 21) might
perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was
situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation
of ‘driving our weaned lambs’ forbids our attaching much force to this
problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other
the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place
are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10:—
Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles
Incipiunt mollique iugum demittere clivo,
Usque ad aquam et veteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos,
Omnia carminibus vestrum servasse Menalcan(151).
There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for
introducing the hills gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the
actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the
neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which
for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di
Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond ‘the picturesque
hill and castle of Vallegio,’ about fifteen miles higher up the river than
Mantua. Eustace, in his Classical Tour, finds many of the features
introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though
the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A
walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds,
like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as
Tamen veniemus in urbem;
Aut si nox pluviam ne colligat ante veremur(152),—
seem inapplicable to the shorter distance between Pietola and Mantua.
The ‘sacri fontes’ which are spoken of in Eclogue I., the existence of
which is further confirmed by the
Non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina deerunt(153)
in the description from the Georgics (ii. 200), of the pastoral land which
Mantua lost, are more naturally to be sought in the more picturesque
environment of the upper reaches of the river than in the level plain in
the midst of which Mantua stands(154). The accurate description of the
lake out of which the Mincio flows—
Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino(155),—
the truth of which is attested by many modern travellers, Goethe among
others—may well be the reproduction of some actual impression made in some
of Virgil’s early wanderings not far distant from the home of his youth.
The passage in the Georgics just referred to, in which, speaking of the
land most suitable for rearing herds and flocks, he introduces the lines
Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum,
Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos(156),
proves the tender affection with which he recalled in later life the
memory of his early home.
Some analogy has been suggested between the quiet beauty of the scenery
which first sank into his soul, and the tranquil meditative cast of his
genius. And though it is easy to push such considerations too far, and to
expect a closer correspondence than ever exists between the development of
genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a
poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions,
whose days from childhood to death were closely bound ‘each to each by
natural piety,’ in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately
blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than
in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining
type.
The district north of the Po, of which Virgil was a native, had enjoyed
the ‘ius Latii’ since the end of the Social War, but did not obtain the
full rights of Roman citizenship till the year 49 B.C., when Virgil was in
his twenty-first year. The national poet of the early Empire, like the
national poet of the Republic, had thus in all probability no claim by
birth to be a member of the State of whose character and destiny his voice
has been the truest exponent. It may be doubted whether Virgil belonged by
birth to the purely Italian stock. He claims for Mantua a Tuscan
origin(157); but the Etruscan race in the region north of the Po had for a
long time previously given way before the settlements of the Gauls; and,
although Roman conquest had established several important colonies north
of the Po, the main stock between that river and the Alps must have been
of Celtic blood, although assimilated in manner of life and culture to the
purely Italian inhabitants of the Peninsula. Zeuss, in his Celtic Grammar,
recognises the presence of a Celtic root, which appears in other Gallic
names, and which he supposes to be the root also of _virgo_, and _virga_,
and _Vergiliae_, in the name Vergilius(158). Some elements in Virgil’s
nature and genius which seem to anticipate the developments of modern
feeling, as, for instance, his vague melancholy, his imaginative sense of
the mystery of the unseen world, his sympathy with the sentiment, as
distinct from the passion, of love, the modes in which his delight in
nature manifests itself, the vein of romance which runs through his
treatment of early times may perhaps be explained by some subtle
intermixture of Celtic blood with the firmer temperament of the old
Italian race. Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated
nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic
nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin
studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged.
It is to be noticed that, while in the Ciceronian Age the names of the men
eminent in literature belong, with one or two exceptions, either to the
pure Roman stock or to the races of central Italy which had been longest
incorporated with Rome, in the last years of the Republic and in the
Augustan Age Northern Italy contributed among other names those of
Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Quintilius Varus, Aemilius Macer, Virgil, and
the historian Livy to the roll of Latin literature. Since the concessions
which followed the Social War the whole people inhabiting the Peninsula
had become thoroughly united in spirit with the Imperial city, and Latin
literature as well as the service of the State thus received a great
impulse from the liberality with which Rome, at different stages in her
history, extended the privileges of her citizenship. The culture of which
Rome had been for two generations the centre became now much more widely
diffused; and as the privilege of citizenship, or of that modified
citizenship conferred by the ‘ius Latii,’ was more prized from its
novelty, so the attractions of literary studies and the impulses of
literary ambition were felt more strongly from coming fresh and
unhackneyed to a vigorous race. It was a happier position for Virgil and
for Horace, it fitted them not only to be truer poets of the natural
beauty of Italy, but also to feel in imagination all the wonder associated
with the idea of the great city, to have spent their earliest and most
impressible years among scenes of peace and beauty, remote from contact
with the excitement, the vices, the routine of city life, than if, with
the friend of Juvenal, they could have applied to themselves the
words—‘our childhood drank in the air of the Aventine.’
There is still one point to be noticed in connexion with the district in
which Virgil was born and passed his early youth. It was from Julius
Caesar that Gallia Transpadana received the full Roman citizenship. But
before he established this claim on their gratitude, the ‘Transpadani,’ as
we learn from Cicero’s letters, were thoroughly devoted to his cause(159),
and it was among them that his legions were mainly recruited. One of the
spiteful acts by which the aristocratic party showed its animosity to
Caesar was the scourging of one of the inhabitants of the colony of Novum
Comum (Como) by order of the Consul Marcellus,—an act condemned by Cicero
on the ground that the victim of this outrage was a ‘Transpadanus(160).’
Caesar was in the habit of passing the winters of his proconsulate in this
part of his province, especially at Verona, where he was the guest of the
father of Catullus. The name of Caesar must thus have become a household
word among this people. They must have soon recognised his greatness as a
soldier, and felt the fascination of his gracious presence. They must have
been grateful for his championship of the provinces against the oppressive
rule of the Senate, and for the protection afforded by his army from
dangers similar to those from which their fathers had been saved, after
many disasters, by his great kinsman, Marius. They did not share the
sentiments of distrust excited among the aristocracy at Rome by Caesar’s
early career, and had no reason to regard the permanent ascendency of one
man as a heavier burden than the caprices of their temporary governors.
From the favour which Virgil received from leaders of the Caesarean cause
before his fame was established, and from his intimacy with Varius the
panegyrist of Julius Caesar, it may be inferred that in adhering to the
cause of the Empire he was true to the early impressions of his boyhood.
He was one of the first to feel and make others feel the spell which the
name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world.
Latin literature in the Augustan Age drew its representatives not only
from a wider district than the preceding age, but also from a different
social class. The men eminent as poets, orators, and historians in the
last years of the Republic were for the most part members of the great
Roman or Italian families. They were either themselves actively engaged in
political life, or living in intimacy with those who were so engaged.
Whatever tincture of letters was found in any other class was confined to
freedmen or learned Greeks, such as Archias and Theophanes, attached to
the houses of the nobility. The fortunes of the two great poets of the
Augustan Age prove that no barrier of class-prejudice and no necessary
inferiority of early education prevented free-born men of very humble
origin from attaining the highest distinction, and living as the trusted
friends of the foremost men in the State. Virgil and Horace were the sons
of men who by the thrift and industry of a humble occupation had been able
to buy small farms in their native district. Virgil’s father had not
indeed, like the father of Horace, risen from a servile position. He is
said to have begun life as a hired assistant to one Magius, who, according
to one account, was a potter, according to another a ‘viator’ (or officer
whose duty it was to summon prisoners before magistrates). He married the
daughter of his master, being recommended to him, as is said by his
biographer, by his industry (ob industriam). The name of Virgil’s mother
was Magia Polla. His father is said to have increased his substance among
other things by keeping bees (silvis coemendis et apibus curandis),—a fact
which perhaps explains the importance given to this branch of rural
industry in the Georgics. Virgil thus springs from that class whose
condition he represents as the happiest allotted to man, and as affording
the best field for the exercise of virtue and piety. He and Horace, after
living in the most refined society of Rome, are entirely at one in their
appreciation of the qualities of the old Italian husbandmen or small
landowners,—a class long before their time reduced in numbers and
influence, but still producing men of modest worth and strong common sense
like the ‘abnormis sapiens’ of the Satires, and like those country
neighbours whose lively talk and homely wisdom Horace contrasts with the
fashionable folly of Rome; and true and virtuous women, such as may have
suggested to the one poet the lines—
Quod si pudica mulier in partem iuvet
Domum atque dulces liberos,
Sabina qualis aut perusta solibus
Pernicis uxor Appuli(161),
and to the other—
Interea longum cantu solata laborem
Arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas(162).
These poets themselves probably owe that stronger grain of character,
their large share of the old Italian seriousness of spirit (gravitas),
which distinguishes them from the other poets of their time, to the
traditions of virtue which the men of this class had not yet unlearned. It
is remarked by M. Sainte-Beuve how strong the attachment of such men
usually is to their homes and lands, inherited from their fathers or
acquired and enriched by their own industry. He characterises happily
‘cette médiocrité de fortune et de condition morale dans laquelle était né
Virgile, médiocrité, ai-je dit, qui rend tout mieux senti et plus cher,
parcequ’on y touche à chaque instant la limite, parcequ’on y a toujours
présent le moment où l’on a acquis et celui où l’on peut tout perdre.’ The
truest human feeling expressed in the Eclogues is the love which the old
settlers had for their lands, and the sorrow which they felt when forced
to quit them. The Georgics bear witness to the strong Italian passion for
the soil, and the pride in the varied results of his skill which made a
life of unceasing labour one of contentment and happiness to the
husbandman.
As has happened in the case of other poets and men of poetic genius,
tradition recorded some marvellous circumstances attending his birth,
which were believed to have portended his future distinction. These
stories may have originated early in his career from the promise of genius
afforded by his childhood: or, like the mediaeval belief in his magical
powers, they may be a kind of mythological reflection of the veneration
and affection with which his memory was cherished. The character of these
reported presages implies the impression produced by the gentleness and
sweetness of his disposition(163), as well as by the rapid growth and
development of his poetic faculty(164).
A more trustworthy indication of his early promise is afforded by the care
with which he was educated. Like Horace, he was fortunate in having
parents who, themselves of humble origin, considered him worthy of
receiving the best instruction which the world could give; and, like
Horace, he repaid their tender solicitude with affectionate gratitude. By
his father’s care he was from boyhood dedicated to the high calling which
he faithfully followed through all his life. At the age of twelve he was
taken to Cremona, an old Latin colony; and, from the lines in one of his
earliest authentic poems (the address to the villa of Siron)—
Tu nunc eris illi
Mantua quod fuerat, quodque Cremona prius(165)—
implying a residence at Cremona, it seems probable that his father may
have accompanied him thither, as Horace’s father accompanied him to Rome
for the same purpose. On his sixteenth birth-day—the day on which,
according to Donatus, Lucretius died—Virgil assumed the ‘toga virilis,’
and about the same time went to Milan, and continued there, engaged in
study, till he removed to Rome in the year 53 B.C., when he was between
sixteen and seventeen years of age. It was in this year of his life that
he is said to have written the ‘Culex.’ There are many difficulties which
prevent the belief that Virgil is the author of the poem which has come
down to us under that name. But the consideration of these must be
reserved for a later examination of the poem.
At Rome he studied rhetoric under Epidius, who was also the teacher of the
young Octavianus. As the future Emperor made his first public appearance
at the age of twelve, by delivering the funeral oration over his
grandmother Julia, it may have happened that he and Virgil were pupils of
Epidius at the same time, and were not unknown to each other even before
the meeting of ten years later which decisively affected Virgil’s fortunes
and determined his career. The time of his arrival at Rome was of critical
importance in literature. The recent publication of the poem of Lucretius,
the most important event in Latin literature since the appearance of the
Annals of Ennius, must have stimulated the enthusiasm of the younger
generation, among whom poetry and oratory were at that time conjointly
cultivated. Mr. Munro has shown the influence exercised by this poem on
the later style of Catullus, who collected and edited his own poems about
the time when Virgil came to Rome, and died shortly afterwards. One or two
of the minor poems among the Catalepton, attributed to Virgil with more
probability than the Culex, are parodies or close imitations of the style
of Catullus, and are written in a freer and more satiric spirit than
anything published by him in later years. But it is a little remarkable
that, while reproducing the language and cadences of both these poets in
his first acknowledged work, Virgil never mentions the name either of
Lucretius or Catullus. The poets mentioned by him with admiration in the
Eclogues are his living contemporaries, Varius and Cinna, Pollio and
Gallus. Is it on account of the Senatorian and anti-Caesarean sympathies
of the older poets that the poets of the new era thus separate themselves
abruptly from those of the previous epoch? If it was owing to the jealousy
of the new _régime_ that the two great Augustan poets, while paying a
passing tribute to the impracticable virtue of Cato, never mention the
greater name or allude to the fate of Cicero, there seems to have been
nothing in the political action or expressed opinions of Lucretius to call
for a similar reticence. If, on the other hand, the boldness of his attack
on the strongholds of all religious belief had the effect of cutting him
off for a time from personal sympathy, as similar opposition to received
opinions had in modern times in the case of Spinosa and Shelley, it did
not interfere with the immediate influence exercised by his genius on the
thought and art of Virgil.
The most interesting of the minor poems among the Catalepton is one
written at the time when the young poet entered on the study of philosophy
under Siron the Epicurean. This poem expresses the joy felt by him in
exchanging the empty pretension and dull pedantry of rhetorical and
grammatical studies for the real enquiries of philosophy:—
Ite hinc, inanes rhetorum ampullae,
Inflata rore non Achaico verba,
Et vos, Stiloque, Tarquitique, Varroque,
Scholasticorum natio madens pingui,
Ite hinc, inanis cymbalon iuventutis.
* * * * *
Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus,
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis,
Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura(166).
These lines are the earliest expression of that philosophical longing
which haunted Virgil through all his life as a hope and aspiration, but
never found its realisation in speculative result. The motive which he
professes for entering on the study,
Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura,
is the same as that which acted on Lucretius—the wish to secure an ideal
serenity of life. The same trust in the calming influence of the Epicurean
philosophy appears in the
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, etc.
of the second Georgic. But in different ways, by the deep feeling of
melancholy in the one, by the revolt and spiritual reaction in the other,
Lucretius and Virgil both show that these tenets could not secure to ‘the
passionate heart of the poet’ that calmness and serenity of spirit which
they gave to men of the stamp of Atticus, Velleius, or Torquatus. The
final lines of the poem express the lingering regret with which he bids a
temporary farewell to the Muses. These few lines, more than any other poem
attributed to Virgil, seem to bring him in his personal feelings nearer to
us. There is a touch of the graciousness of his nature, recalling the
cordial feeling of Catullus to all his young comrades, in the passing
notice of those who had shared his studies:—
Iam valete, formosi.
At a time when the poetry of the younger generation was universally free
and licentious in tone, the purity of Virgil’s nature reveals itself in
the prayer to the Muses to revisit his writings ‘pudenter et raro,’
chastely and seldom. The whole poem is the sincere expression of the
scholar and poet, even in youth idealising the austere charm of
philosophy, while feeling in his heart the more powerful attraction of
poetry. In the
Nam, fatebimur verum,
Dulces fuistis(167),
is the literal expression of that deep joy which afterwards moved him in
uttering the lines—
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, etc.
and
Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis
Raptat amor(168);
and which sustained him stedfastly in the noble harmony of all his later
life.
Of the next ten years of his career nothing is known with certainty; but
the outbreak of the Civil War is likely to have interrupted his residence
at Rome, and he is next heard of living in his native district and engaged
in the composition of the Eclogues. He took no part in the war, nor ever
served as a soldier; and he seems to have appeared only once in the other
field of practical distinction open to a young Roman who had received so
elaborate an education—that of forensic pleading. He is said to have
wanted the readiness of speech and self-possession necessary for success
in such a career; and he was thus fortunate in escaping all temptation to
sacrifice his genius to the ambition of practical life, or to divide his
allegiance, as Licinius Calvus did, between the claims of poetry and of
oratory. His first literary impulse was to write an historical epic on the
early Roman or Alban history, and to this impulse, he himself alludes in
the lines of the sixth Eclogue,—
Cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
Vellit et admonuit(169).
He gave up the idea, feeling the unsuitable nature of the material for
poetic treatment,—‘offensus materia,’ as the Life of Donatus expresses it;
and he resolutely resisted the projects often urged upon him of giving a
poetical account of contemporary events, in celebration of the glory of
Pollio, Varus, or Caesar. But it is noticeable as a proof of the
persistence with which his mind continued to dwell on ideas once
projected, till they finally assumed appropriate shape, that in the Aeneid
he really combines these two purposes of vivifying the ancient traditions
of Rome and Alba, and of glorifying the great results of his own era. It
is by this capacity of forecasting some great work, and dwelling on the
idea till it clears itself of all alien matter and assimilates to itself
the impressions and interests of a life-time, that the vastest and most
enduring monuments of genius are produced.
In the year of the battle of Philippi, Virgil was living in his native
district, engaged in the composition of his pastoral poems. Of his mode of
life, taste, and feelings about this time we perceive only that he
continued to be a student of the Alexandrine literature, that he had, by
natural gift and assiduous culture, brought the technical part of his
art—the diction and rhythm of poetry—to the highest perfection hitherto
attained, that he enjoyed the favour and patronage of the Governor of the
province, Asinius Pollio, and that he was united by strong ties of
affection and warm admiration to Cornelius Gallus, who, while still in
early youth, had obtained high distinction in poetry and a prominent
position in public life. There are in the Eclogues notices of other poets
of the district, whose friendship he enjoyed or whose jealousy he excited.
The Mopsus of the fifth is said to be the didactic poet, Aemilius Macer.
The mention of Bavius and Maevius, the ‘iurgia Codri,’ and the allusion in
a later poem to Anser the panegyrist of Antony, are the nearest approaches
to anything like resentment or personal satire that Virgil has shown. It
may be that in the lines where Amaryllis and Galatea and other personages
of the poems are introduced he refers to some personal experiences; but as
compared with all the poets of this era, Virgil either observed a great
reticence, or enjoyed an exceptional immunity from the passions of youth.
The whole tone of the earlier poems, and numerous expressions in all of
them, such as ‘tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra,’ are suggestive of a somewhat
indolent enjoyment of the charm of books, of poetry, and of the softer
beauties of Nature.
The following year was the turning-point in his career, and gave a more
definite aim to his genius and sympathies. In that year his own fortunes
became involved in the affairs which were determining the fate of the
world. The Triumvirs, in assigning grants of land to their soldiers, had
confiscated the territory of Cremona, which had shown sympathy with the
Senatorian cause, and when this proved insufficient, an addition was made
from the adjoining Mantuan territory, in which the farm of Virgil’s father
was situated. The Commissioners appointed to distribute the land were
Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, all friendly to Virgil, and by their advice he
went to Rome, and obtained the restitution of his land by personal
application to Octavianus. On his return to his native district he found
that Varus had succeeded Pollio as Governor of the province. He appears to
have been unfriendly to the Mantuans, and was either unable or unwilling
to protect Virgil, who was forced at the imminent peril of his life to
escape, by swimming the river, from the violence of the soldier who had
entered on the possession of the land. Two of the Eclogues, the first and
the ninth, are written in connexion with these events. Though he still
adheres to an indirect and allusive treatment of his subject, these poems
possess the interest of being based on real experience. They give
expression to the sense of disorder, insecurity, and distress, which we
learn from other sources accompanied these forced divisions and
alienations of land. The first expresses also the gratitude of the poet to
‘the god-like youth’ to whom he owed the exceptional indulgence of being,
though only for a short time, reinstated in the possession of his land. It
is characteristic either of some weakness in Virgil’s nature, or of a
great depression among the peaceful inhabitants of Italy, that he had no
thought of resisting violence by violence, that he does not even express
resentment against the intruder, but only a feeling of wonder that any man
could be capable of such wickedness. To most readers the vehemence with
which the author of the ‘Dirae,’ under similar circumstances, curses the
land and its new owners, appears, if less sweet and musical, more natural
than this mild submission to superior force expressed by Virgil. But in
these personal experiences that strong sympathy with the national
fortunes, which henceforward animates his poetry, originates. Virgil may
thus in a sense be numbered among the poets who ‘are cradled into poetry
by wrong.’
After this second forcible expulsion from his old home, he took refuge,
along with his family, in a small country-house which had belonged to his
old teacher Siron. The poem numbered X. in the Catalepta,
Villula quae Sironis eras, et pauper agelle,
Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae(170),
was written at this time. It expresses anxiety and distress about the
state of his native district, to which, as in Eclogue i., he applies the
word _patria_, and affectionate solicitude for those along with him,
‘those with me whom I have ever loved,’ and especially for his father. His
own experience at this time may have suggested to him the feelings which
he afterwards reproduced in describing the flight of Aeneas from the ruins
of Troy.
He seems never after this time to have returned to his native district.
The liberality of Octavianus(171) compensated him for his loss, nor was
the even tenor of his life henceforward broken by any new dangers or
hardships. Through the gift of friends and patrons he acquired a fortune,
which at his death amounted to 10,000,000 sesterces (about £90,000); he
possessed a house on the Esquiline near the gardens of Maecenas, a villa
at Naples, and a country-house near Nola in Campania; and he seems to have
lived from time to time in Sicily and the South of Italy.
The Eclogues, commenced in his native district in the year 42 B.C., were
completed and published at Rome probably in the year 37 B.C. They were at
once received with great favour, and recited amid much applause upon the
stage. They established the author’s fame as the poet of Nature and of
rural life, as Varius was accepted as the poet of epic, Pollio of tragic
poetry:—
Molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae(172).
For a short time afterwards Virgil lived chiefly at Rome, as one of the
circle of which Maecenas was the centre, consisting of those poets and men
eminent in the State whom Horace (Sat i. 10) mentions as the critics and
friends whose approval he valued. Our knowledge of Virgil at this time is
derived from the first Book of the Satires of Horace. It was by Virgil and
Varius that Horace himself was introduced to Maecenas. They were all three
of the party who made the famous journey to Brundisium in 37 B.C. While
Horace starts alone from Rome, Virgil and Varius join him at Sinuessa.
Virgil may already have begun to withdraw from habitual residence in Rome
to his retirement in Campania, where he principally lived from this time
till his death. One line in this Satire confirms the account of the
weakness of his health which is given by his biographer,—the line, namely,
in which Horace describes himself and Virgil as going to sleep, while
Maecenas went to enjoy the exercise of the ‘pila’:—
Lusum it Maecenas, dormitum ego Vergiliusque,
Namque pila lippis inimicum et ludere crudis(173).
There is no notice of Virgil in the second Book of the Satires, written
between the years 35 and 30 B.C., at which time he had withdrawn
altogether from Rome, and was living at Naples, engaged in the composition
of the Georgics. Two of the Odes of Book I., however, the third and the
twenty-fourth, throw some light on his circumstances and character, and on
the relations of friendship subsisting between him and Horace. There is
some difficulty in determining the occasion that gave rise to the first of
these Odes. It is addressed to the ship which was to bear Virgil to
Attica. As we only know of one voyage of Virgil to Attica, that
immediately preceding his death, and as the first three Books of the Odes
were originally published some years before that date, we must suppose
either that this Ode refers to an earlier voyage contemplated or actually
accomplished by Virgil; or that the Virgil here spoken of is a different
person; or that the publication of the edition of the Odes which we
possess was of a later date than that generally accepted. The reason for
rejecting the second of these alternatives has been already given. Two
reasons may be given for rejecting the third,—first, the improbability
that one of the latest, if not the latest, in point of time among all the
Odes in the three Books should be placed third in order in the first Book,
among Odes that all refer to a much earlier period; and secondly, that
this Ode, in respect of the somewhat conventional nature of the thought
and the character of the mythological allusions, is clearly written in
Horace’s earlier manner. There is no improbability in accepting the first
alternative, that as Virgil travelled to and resided in Sicily, so he may
have made, or at least contemplated, an earlier voyage to Greece. One
object for such a voyage may have been the desire of seeing the localities
which he represents Aeneas as passing or visiting in the course of his
adventures between the time of leaving Troy and settling in Latium. The
Aeneid indicates in many places the tastes of a cultivated traveller; and
parts of the sea-voyage of Aeneas look as if they were founded on personal
reminiscences.
It may be noticed in several of the Odes of Horace how he adapts the vein
of thought running through them to the character or position of the person
to whom they refer. The revival of the old Hesiodic and theological idea
of the sin and impiety of that spirit of enterprise which led men first to
brave the dangers of the sea, and to baffle the purpose of the Deity in
separating nations from one another by the ocean,—an idea to which Virgil
himself gives expression in the fourth Eclogue,—
Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis,
Quae temptare Thetim ratibus, etc.(174),—
is not unsuited to the unadventurous disposition of the older poet.
The twenty-fourth Ode is addressed to him on the occasion of the death of
their common friend Quintilius Varus, probably the Varus of the tenth poem
of Catullus, and thus one of the last survivors of the friendly circle of
poets and wits of a former generation. While a high tribute to the pure
character of their lost friend, it is at the same time a tribute to the
pious and affectionate character of Virgil.
It is a delicate touch of appreciation that Horace dwells more on the
thought of the depth of Virgil’s sorrow for their common friend than on
his own. Both of these Odes give evidence of the strong affection which
Virgil inspired; the second affords further evidence of the qualities in
virtue of which he inspired that feeling. Similar proof of affection and
appreciation is afforded by the words in which Horace in the fifth Satire
of Book I. characterises Virgil (‘Vergilius optimus,’ as he elsewhere
calls him), and his two friends Plotius and Varius,—
Animae quales neque candidiores
Terra tulit, neque queis me sit devinctior alter(175).
The word ‘candidiores’ suggests the same qualities of a beautiful
nature,—the unworldly simplicity and sincerity, which are ascribed to
Quintilius in the words ‘pudor, incorrupta fides, nudaque veritas.’
The seven years from 37 B.C. to 30 B.C. were devoted by Virgil to the
composition of the Georgics, a poem scarcely exceeding 2000 lines in
length. His chief residence at this time was Naples:—
Me dulcis alebat
Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti(176).
He possessed also at this time a country-house or estate in the
neighbourhood of Nola; and the fourth Book affords evidence of some time
spent at or in the neighbourhood of Tarentum which is confirmed by the
lines in Propertius,—
Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus(177),—
the region prized by Horace as second only to his beloved Tibur. In the
year 29 B.C. he read the whole poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia,
at the town of Atella. The reading occupied four days. Maecenas was of the
party, and relieved the poet in the task of reading.
The remaining years of his life were spent in the composition of the
Aeneid. One of the poems of the Catalepta (vi.) gives expression to a vow
binding the poet to sacrifice a bull to Venus if he succeeded in
accomplishing the task which he had imposed on himself. So early as the
year 26 B.C., Augustus while engaged in the Cantabrian war, had desired to
see some part of the poem. It was in answer to that request that Virgil
wrote the letter of which the fragment, quoted in the previous chapter,
has been preserved by Macrobius(178). At a later time, after the death of
the young Marcellus (23 B.C.), he read three Books to Augustus and the
other members of his family.
After spending eleven years on the composition of his great epic, he set
aside three more for its final correction. In the year 19 B.C. he set out
with the view of travelling in Greece and Asia. Meeting Augustus at
Athens, he was persuaded to abandon his purpose and return with him to
Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun he was seized with
illness. Continuing his voyage without interruption, he became worse, and
on the 21st of September, a few days after landing at Brundisium, he died
in the fifty-first year of his age. In his last illness he showed the
ruling passion of his life—the craving perfection—by calling for the cases
which held his MSS., with the intention of burning the Aeneid. It is in
keeping with the absence of self-assertion in his writings that his final
hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by
such confident assurances of immortality as other Roman poets have
expressed. In the same spirit of dissatisfaction with all imperfect
accomplishment, he left directions in his will that his executors, Varius
and Tucca, should publish nothing but what had been already edited by him.
This direction, which would have deprived the world of the Aeneid, was
disregarded by them in compliance with the commands of Augustus.
He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious
veneration and visited as a temple; and tradition has associated his name,
as that of a magician, with the construction of the great tunnel of
Posilippo, in its immediate neighbourhood.
III.
The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his
circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it
affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature
to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an
independent value as affording insight into social life and character,
irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no
separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and
intermingles with the even course of Virgil’s poetic career. And this may
have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic
adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike
that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic
faculty, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave
proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the
rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same
way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus
different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had
either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon,
or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and
Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The ‘inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae’ thus
betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been
named. Virgil’s life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption
in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his
career, from childhood to maturity, was an education, passive and active,
for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist
and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of
twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to
which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of
his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he
lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and
poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of
joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the
second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet
sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art: in later
life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy
exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by
which his poetical gifts were fostered—that of living and varying his
residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to
his happiness, viz. that he suffered during all his life from delicate or
variable health(179), was not unfavourable to the concentration of his
whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever
sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the pleasures in which his
contemporaries indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the
poets and artists of a southern land is powerfully attracted. The
abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the
fact recorded of him that he ‘took very little food and wine,’ must have
quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished.
Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit,
or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active
forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and
greater power in delineating varied types of character: but in combination
with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of
Virgil would have been lost.
He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion,
and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted
readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his
rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits
to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from
the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The ‘monstrari digito
praetereuntium’ was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that
gratification which Horace derived from it.
Both his parents lived till after the loss of his farm, when the poet was
in his twenty-ninth year. Two brothers died before him, one while still a
boy, the other after reaching manhood. To his half-brother Valerius
Proculus he left one half of his estate. Augustus, Maecenas, and his two
friends Varius and Tucca also received legacies. He was never married, nor
is there any record in connexion with him of any of those temporary
liaisons which the other poets of the Augustan Age formed and celebrated
in their verse. Some modern critics arguing from a single expression in
the Life by Donatus, and giving to a tradition connected with the subject
of the second Eclogue a meaning which, even if the tradition was
trustworthy, need not apply to it, have written of Virgil as if throughout
his whole life he yielded to a laxity of morals from which perhaps some of
his eminent contemporaries were not free, but which was condemned by the
manlier instincts of Romans, as of all modern nations. The expression of
Donatus is probably a mere survival of the calumnies against which
Asconius vindicated Virgil’s character. The statement of the same
biographer, that on account of his purity of speech and life he was known
in Naples by the name ‘Parthenias,’ is at least as trustworthy evidence as
that on which the imputations on his character have been revived. The
levity and mendacity with which such calumnies were invented(180), and the
attractions which they have for the baser nature of men in all times,
sufficiently explain both the original existence and the later revival of
these imputations. We are called upon not merely to disregard them as
unproved, or irrelevant to our estimate of the poet’s art, but to reject
them as incompatible with the singular purity and transparent sincerity of
nature revealed in all the maturer works of his genius(181).
The cordial and discriminating language both of the Satires and the Odes
of Horace confirms the impression of delicacy and simplicity of character
suggested by the general tone of Virgil’s writings. The appreciation of
Horace for Virgil reminds us of the touching tribute which the great comic
poet of Athens pays to her greatest tragic poet, where he speaks of him as
showing the same disposition among the Shades as he had shown in the world
above—
Ὁ δ’ εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ’, εὔκολος δ’ ἐκεῖ(182)—
and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellow-dramatist to our
own great poet, in the words ‘my gentle Shakespeare.’ The affection and
admiration of the greatest of his contemporaries, surviving in the
tradition handed on to future times, testify to Virgil’s exemption from
the personal frailties and asperities to which the impressible and mobile
temperament of genius is peculiarly liable.
His works do not present any single distinct impression of the poet
himself, in his own character and convictions, separable from his artistic
representation. Yet from the study of these works we are able to form a
general conception of the disposition, affections, and moral sympathies
which distinguish him from the other great writers of his country. We
might perhaps without undue fancifulness express the dominant ethical or
social characteristic—the ideal virtue or grace—of some of the great Roman
writers by some word peculiarly expressive of Roman character or culture,
and of frequent use in these writers themselves. Thus, in regard to
Cicero, the man of quick susceptibility to praise and blame, to sympathy
and coldness, who, except where his personal or political antagonism was
roused, had the liveliest sense of the claims of kind offices and kind
feeling which men have on one another, the word _humanitas_ seems to sum
up those qualities of heart and intellect which, in spite of the
transparent weaknesses of his character, gained for him so much affection,
and which, through the sympathy they enabled him to feel and arouse in
others, were the secret of his unparalleled success as an advocate. To
Lucretius we might apply the word _sanctitas_, in the sense in which he
applies the word _sanctus_ to the old philosophers, as expressive of that
glow of reverential emotion which animates him in his search after truth
and in his contemplation of Nature. His own words ‘_lepor_’ and
‘_lepidus_’ express the graceful vivacity, artistic and social rather than
ethical, which we associate with the thought of Catullus. The quality,
mainly intellectual and social, but still not devoid of ethical content,
of which Horace is the most perfect type, is ‘_urbanitas_.’ The full
meaning of the great Roman word ‘_gravitas_’—the vital force of ethical
feeling as well as the strength of character connoted by it, and by its
sister-qualities ‘dignity and authority’—is only completely realised in
the pages of Tacitus. And so it is only in Virgil, and especially in that
poem in which he deals with types of human character and motives
originating in human affection, that we understand all the feelings of
love to family and country, and of fidelity to the dead, and that sense of
dependence on a higher Power, sanctioning and sanctifying these feelings
and the duties demanded by them, which the Romans comprehended in their
use of the word ‘_pietas_.’
With this recognition of man’s dependence on a wise and beneficent Power
above him, is perhaps connected another moral characteristic strongly
indicated in many passages of the Aeneid, and mentioned among the personal
attributes of Virgil in some of the editions of Donatus’s Life, though it
does not appear in that accepted by the latest critics as resting on the
best MS. authority(183). This quality is the stoical power of endurance
which he attributes to his hero, but which in him is combined with nothing
either of the austerity or pedantry of Stoicism. The passage in the
biography, which, if an interpolation in the original Life, is one that is
at least ‘well invented,’ is to the following effect:—‘He was in the habit
of saying that there was no virtue of more use to a man than patience, and
that there was no fortune so harsh, that a brave man cannot triumph over
it by wisely enduring it.’ Mr. Wickham, in his edition of Horace, refers
to this passage as illustrating the maxims of consolation addressed by
Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius. Many lines in
the Aeneid, such as the
Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est—
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis(184)—
indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace-loving
disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute
endurance.
The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is
that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of
independence and self-assertion that his character was deficient. It is to
the excess of his feeling of deference to power, and not to any
insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally—as in
the Invocation to the Georgics—transcending the limits of truth and
sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever
to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of
admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the
symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which
Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no
sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient
republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of
political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his
personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning
after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of
the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more
combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely
possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of
ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously
contributed little to human happiness. But the nobleness of Virgil’s
nature is not the nobleness of those qualities which make men great in
resistance to wrong, but the nobleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.
By no poet in any time has he been surpassed in devotion to his art. Into
this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling,
all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in
poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main
springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the
unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a
generous appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust
in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his
habits of composition confirm the impression of his assiduous industry. In
writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the
morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed
the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest
compass. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little
that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the
phrase ‘parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino’—‘that he produced verses
by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.’ The Aeneid was
first arranged and written out in prose: when the structure of the story
was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it,
as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of
reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the
true ἀοιδός, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious
artist. It is recorded on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he
read his own poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm (‘suavitate
tum lenociniis miris’), that verses which would have sounded commonplace
when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when ‘chanted to their
own music(185)’ by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given of the
effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some
among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This
large, musical, and impassioned utterance—the ‘os magna sonaturum’—is a
sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a
rhythmical expression for his thought.
It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius
with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that
Virgil established and for a long time retained his ascendency as one of
the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his
supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully
re-established, the examination of his various works will show that it was
not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the
dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of
the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but
to all time and to every people.