VERGIL
_A Biography_
By
TENNEY FRANK
_Professor of Latin
in the
Johns Hopkins University_
1922
_TO_
THE MEMORY OF
W. WARDE FOWLER
PREFACE
Modern literary criticism has accustomed us to interpret our masterpieces
in the light of the author's daily experiences and the conditions of the
society in which he lived. The personalities of very few ancient poets,
however, can be realized, and this is perhaps the chief reason why their
works seem to the average man so cold and remote. Vergil's age, with its
terribly intense struggles, lies hidden behind the opaque mists of twenty
centuries: by his very theory of art the poet has conscientiously drawn a
veil between himself and his reader, and the scraps of information about
him given us by the fourth century grammarian, Donatus, are inconsistent,
at best unauthenticated, and generally irrelevant.
Indeed criticism has dealt hard with Donatus' life of Vergil. It has
shown that the meager _Vita_ is a conglomeration of a few chance facts
set into a mass of later conjecture derived from a literal-minded
interpretation of the _Eclogues_, to which there gathered during the
credulous and neurotic decades of the second and third centuries an
accretion of irresponsible gossip.
However, though we have had to reject many of the statements of Donatus,
criticism has procured for us more than a fair compensation from another
source. A series of detailed studies of the numerous minor poems
attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts--till
recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars--has compelled most
of us to accept the _Appendix Vergiliana_ at face value. These poems,
written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved
manner of the classical style, are full of personal reminiscences. They
reveal many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his
ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they disclose the processes by
which the poet during an apprenticeship of ten years developed the mature
art of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_. They have made it possible for us
to visualize him with a vividness that is granted us in the case of no
other Latin poet.
The reason for attempting a new biography of Vergil at the present time
is therefore obvious. This essay, conceived with the purpose of centering
attention upon the poet's actual life, has eschewed the larger task of
literary criticism and has also avoided the subject of Vergil's literary
sources--a theme to which scholars have generally devoted too much
acumen. The book is therefore of brief compass, but it has been kept
to its single theme in the conviction that the reader who will study
Vergil's works as in some measure an outgrowth of the poet's own
experiences will find a new meaning in not a few of their lines.
T.F.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I MANTUA DIVES AVIS
II SCHOOL AND WAR
III THE CULEX
IV THE CIRIS
V A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY
VI EPIGRAM AND EPIC
VII EPICUREAN POLITICS
VIII LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN
IX MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY
X RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI
XI THE EVICTIONS
XII POLLIO
XIII THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS
XIV THE GEORGICS
XV THE AENEID
VERGIL
I
MANTUA DIVES AVIS
Among biographical commonplaces one frequently finds the generalization
that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for
a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in
lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human
nature. If there be some degree of truth in this reflection, Publius
Vergilius Maro, the farmer's boy from the Mantuan plain, was in so far
favored at birth. It is the fifteenth of October, 70 B.C., that the
Mantuans still hold in pious memory: in 1930 they will doubtless invite
Italy and the devout of all nations to celebrate the twentieth centenary
of the poet's birth.
Ancient biographers, little concerned with Mendelian speculation, have
not reported from what stock his family sprang. Scientific curiosity
and nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become
anthropologists. Vergil has accordingly been referred, by some critic
or other, to each of the several peoples that settled the Po Valley in
ancient times: the Umbrians, the Etruscans, the Celts, the Latins. The
evidence cannot be mustered into a compelling conclusion, but it may be
worth while to reject the improbable suppositions.
The name tells little. _Vergilius_ is a good Italic _nomen_ found in all
parts of the peninsula,[1] but Latin names came as a matter of course
with the gift of citizenship or of the Latin status, and Mantua with
the rest of Cisalpine Gaul had received the Latin status nineteen years
before Vergil's birth. The cognomen _Maro_ is in origin a magistrate's
title used by Etruscans and Umbrians, but _cognomina_ were a recent
fashion in the first century B.C. and were selected by parents of the
middle classes largely by accident.
[Footnote 1: Braunholz, _The Nationality of Vergil_, _Classical Review_,
1915, 104 ff.]
Vergil himself, a good antiquarian, assures us that in the _heroic_
age Mantua was chiefly Etruscan with enclaves of two other peoples
(presumably Umbrians and Venetians). In this he is doubtless following a
fairly reliable tradition, accepted all the more willingly because of his
intimacy with Maecenas, who was of course Etruscan:[2]
Mantua dives avis, sed non genus omnibus unum,
Gens illis triplex, populi sub gente quaterni,
Ipsa caput populis; Tusco de sanguine vires.
[Footnote 2: Aeneid, X, 201-3.]
Pliny seems to have supposed this passage a description of Mantua in
Vergil's own day: Mantua Tuscorum trans Padum sola reliqua (III. 130).
That could hardly have been Vergil's meaning, however; for the Celts who
flooded the Po Valley four centuries before drove all before them except
in the Venetian marshes and the Ligurian hills. They could not have left
an Etruscan stronghold in the center of their path. Vergil was probably
not Etruscan.
The case for a Celtic origin is equally improbable. From the time when
the Senones burned Rome in 390 B.C. till Caesar conquered Gaul, the fear
of invasions from this dread race never slumbered. During the weary
years of the Punic war when Hannibal drew his fresh recruits from the Po
Valley, the determination grew ever stronger that the Alps should become
Rome's barrier line on the North. Accordingly the pacification of the
Transpadane region continued with little intermission until Polybius[3]
could say two generations before Vergil's birth that the Gauls had
practically been driven out of the Po Valley, and that they then held but
a few villages in the foothills of the Alps. If this be true, the open
country of Mantua must have had but few survivors. And the few that
remained were not often likely to have the privilege of intermarrying
with the Roman settlers who filled the vacuum. Romans were too proud of
their citizenship to intermarry with _peregrini_ and raise children who
must by Roman laws forego the dignities of citizenship.[4]
[Footnote 3: Polybius, II. 35, 4 (written about 140 B.C.).]
[Footnote 4: Ulpian, _Dig_. V. 8, ex peregrino et cive Romano, peregrinus
nascitur.]
A Celtic strain of romance has been from time to time claimed for
Vergil's poetry, though those who employ such terms seldom agree in their
definition of them. His romanticism may be more easily explained by
his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic
traits--whatever they may be--by the close racial affiliations between
Celts and Italians, vouched for by anthropologists. But the difficulty of
applying the test of the "Celtic temperament" lies in the fact that there
are apparently now no true representatives of the Celtic race from
whom to establish a criterion. The peoples that have longest preserved
dialects of the Celtic languages appear from anthropometric researches
to contain a dominant strain of a different race, perhaps that of the
pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Western Europe. It may be, therefore,
that what Arnoldians now refer to the "Celts" is after all not Celtic. At
best it is unsafe to search for racial traits in the work of genius; in
this instance it would but betray loose thinking.
The assumption of Celtic origin is, therefore, hazardous.[5] There is,
however, a strong likelihood that Vergil's forbears were among the Roman
and Latin colonists who went north in search of new homes during the
second century B.C. Vergil's father was certainly a Roman citizen, for
none but a citizen could have sent his son to Rome to prepare for a
political career. Mantua indeed, a "Latin" town after 89 B.C., did not
become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it, but Vergil's
father, according to the eighth _Catalepton_, had earlier in his life
lived in Cremona. That city was colonized by Roman citizens in 218 B.C.
and recolonized in 190, and though the colonists were reduced to the
"Latin status," the magistrates of the town and their descendants secured
citizenship from the beginning, and finally in 89 B.C. the whole colony
received full citizenship. But quite apart from this, all of Cisalpine
Gaul, as the region was called, was receiving immigrants from all parts
of Italy throughout the second century, when the fields farther south
were being exhausted by long tilling, and were falling into the hands
of capitalistic landlords and grazers. Since Roman citizenship was a
personal rather than a territorial right, such immigrants could
preserve their political status despite their change of habitation. The
probabilities are, therefore, that in any case Vergil, though born in the
province, was of the old Latin stock.
[Footnote 5: Vergil we know was tall and dark. The Gauls were as a rule
fair with light hair. The Etruscans on the other hand, while dark,
were generally short of stature. Such data are however not of great
importance.]
About the child appropriate stories gathered in time, but what the
biographers chose to repeat in the credulous days of Donatus, when Rome
was almost an Oriental city, need not detain us long. To Donatus, no
doubt, _Magia_ seemed a suitable name for the mother of a poet who knew
the mysteries of the lower world; that she dreamed prophetically of the
coming greatness of her son, we may grant as a matter of course. Sober
judgment, however, can hardly accept the miraculous poplar tree which
shot up at the place of nativity, or the birth-stories deriving
"Vergilus" from _virga_, contrary to early Latin nomenclature and
phonology. It is well to mention these things merely so that we may keep
in mind how little faith the late biographers really deserve.
Donatus is also inclined to accept the tradition that Vergil's father was
a potter and a man of very humble circumstances. That Vergil's father
made pottery may be true; a father's occupation was apt to be recorded in
Augustan biography--but it requires some knowledge of Roman society to
comprehend what these words meant at the end of the Republic. In Donatus'
day a "potter" was a day-laborer in loin-cloth and leather apron, earning
about twenty cents for a long day of fourteen hours. Needless to say,
Vergil's leisured competence during many years did not draw from such a
trickling source. Donatus had forgotten that in Vergil's day the economic
system of Rome was entirely different. At the end of the Republic, the
potters of Northern Italy conducted factories of enormous output, for
they had with their artistic red-figured ware captured the markets of the
whole Mediterranean basin. The actual workmen were not Roman citizens by
any means, but slaves. And we should add that while industrial producers,
like traders, were in general held in low esteem, because most of them
were foreigners and freedmen, the producers of earthenware had by
accident escaped from the general odium. The reason was simply that
earthenware production began as a legitimate extension of agriculture--it
was one form of turning the products of the villa-soil to the best
use--and agriculture as we remember (including horticulture and
stock-raising) continued into Cicero's day the only respectable
income-bringing occupation in which a Roman senator could engage without
apology. That is the reason why even the names of Cicero, Asinius Pollio,
and Marcus Aurelius are to be found on brick stamps when it would have
been socially impossible for such men to own, shall we say, hardware or
clothing factories. Donatus was already so far away from that day that
he had no feeling for its social tabus. The property of Vergil's
father--possibly a farm with a pottery on some part of it--could hardly
have been small when it supported the young student for many years in his
leisured existence at Rome and Naples under the masters that attracted
the aristocracy of the capital. The story of Probus, otherwise not very
reliable, may, therefore, be true--that sixty soldiers received their
allotments from the estates taken from Vergil's father.
Of no little significance is the fact that Vergil first prepared himself
for public life,[6] and progressed so far as to accept one case in court.
In order to enter public life in those days it was customary to train
one's self as widely as possible in literature, history, rhetoric,
dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election
purposes by taking a few cases. It was not every citizen who dared enter
such a career. This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most
jealously. While any foreigner or freedman might become a doctor, banker,
architect or merchant prince, he could not presume to stand up before a
praetor to discuss the rights and wrongs of Roman citizens; and since the
advocate's work was furthermore considered the legitimate preliminary to
magisterial offices it must the more carefully be protected. It would
have been quite useless for Vergil to prepare for this career had it been
obviously closed. We have no sure record in Cicero's epoch of any young
man rising successfully from the business or industrial classes to a
career in public life except through the abnormal accidents provided by
the civil wars. Presumably, therefore, Vergil's father belonged to a
landholding family with some honors of municipal service to his credit.
[Footnote 6: Donatus, 15; _Ciris_, l.2; _Catal_. V.; Seneca, _Controv_.
III. praef. 8.]
Of the poet's physical traits we have no very satisfactory description
or likeness. He was tall, dark and rawboned, retaining through life the
appearance of a countryman, according to Donatus. He also suffered,
says the same writer, the symptoms that accompany tuberculosis. The
reliability of this rather inadequate description is supported by a
second-century portrait of the poet done in a crude pavement mosaic which
has been found in northern Africa.[7] To be sure the technique is so
faulty that we cannot possibly consider this a faithful likeness. But
we may at least say that the person represented--a man of perhaps
forty-five--was tall and loose-jointed, and that his countenance, with
its broad brow, penetrating eye, firm nose and generous mouth and chin,
is distinctly represented as drawn and emaciated.
[Footnote 7: See _Monuments Piot_. 1897, pl. xx; _Atene e Roma_, 1913,
opp. p. 191.]
There is also an unidentified portrait in a half dozen mediocre
replicas representing a man of twenty-five or thirty years which some
archaeologists are inclined to consider a possible representation of
Vergil.[8] It is the so-called "Brutus." The argument for its attribution
deserves serious consideration. The bust, while it shows a far younger
man than the African mosaic, reveals the same contour of countenance, of
brow, nose, cheeks and chin. Furthermore it is difficult to think of any
other Roman in private life who attained to such fame that six marble
replicas of his portrait should have survived the omnivorous lime-kilns
of the dark ages. The Barrocco museum of Rome has a very lifelike
replica[9] of this type in half-relief. Though its firm, dry workmanship
seems to be of a few decades later than Vergil's youth it may well be a
fairly faithful copy of one of the first busts of Vergil made at the time
when the _Eclogues_ had spread his fame through Rome.
[Footnote 8: See British School _Cat. of the Mus. Capitolino_, p. 355;
Bernoulli, _Röm. Ikonographie_, I, 187, Helbig,'3 I, no. 872.]
[Footnote 9: Mrs. Strong, _Roman Sculpture_ plate, CIX; Hekler, _Greek
and Roman Portraits_, 188 a. The antiquity of this marble has been
questioned.]
A land of sound constitutions, mentally and physically, was the frontier
region in which Vergil grew to manhood; and had it not later been drained
of its sturdy citizenry by the civil wars and recolonized by the wreckage
of those wars it would have become Italy's mainstay through the Empire.
The earlier Romans and Latins who had first accepted colonial allotments
or had migrated severally there for over a century were of sterner stuff
than the indolent remnants that had drifted to the city's corn cribs.
These frontiersmen had come while the Italic stock was still sound, not
yet contaminated by the freedmen of Eastern extraction. Cities like
Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the puritanic ideals of Cato's
day than Rome itself. The clear expressive diction of Catullus' lyrics,
full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social ideals of Vergil's
_Georgics_, the buoyant idealism of the _Aeneid_ and of Livy's annals
speak the true language of these people. It is not surprising then that
in Vergil's youth it is a group of fellow-provincials--returning sons
of Rome's former emigrants--that take the lead in the new literary
movements. They are vigorous, clever young men, excellently educated,
free from the city's binding traditionalism, well provided also, many
of them, with worldly goods acquired in the new rich country. Such were
Catullus of Verona, Varius Rufus, Quintilius Varus, Furius, and Alfenus
of Cremona, Caecilius of Comum, Helvius Cinna apparently of Brescia, and
Valerius Cato who somehow managed to inspire in so many of them a love
for poetry.
II
SCHOOL AND WAR
To Cremona, Vergil was sent to school. Caesar, the governor of the
province, was now conquering Gaul, and as Cremona was the foremost
provincial colony from which Caesar could recruit legionaries, the school
boys must have seen many a maniple march off to the battle-fields of
Belgium. Those boys read their _Bellum Gallicum_ in the first edition,
serial publication. When we remember the devotion of Caesar's soldiers to
their leader, we can hardly be surprised at the poet's lasting reverence
for the great _imperator_. He must have seen the man himself, also, for
Cremona was the principal point in the court circuit that Caesar traveled
during the winters between his campaigns--whenever the Gauls gave him
respite.
The _toga virilis_ Vergil assumed at fifteen, the year that Pompey and
Crassus entered upon their second consulship--a notice to all the world
that the triumvirate had been continued upon terms that made Julius the
arbiter of Rome's destinies.
That same year the boy left Cremona to finish his literary studies in
Milan, a city which was now threatening to outstrip Cremona in importance
and size. The continuation of his studies in the province instead of at
Rome seems to have been fortunate: the spirit of the schools of the north
was healthier. At Rome the undue insistence upon a practical education,
despite Cicero's protests, was hurrying boys into classrooms of
rhetoricians who were supposed to turn them into finished public men
at an early age; it was assumed that a political career was every
gentleman's business and that every young man of any pretensions must
acquire the art of speaking effectively and of "thinking on his feet."
The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were
accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the
technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself
made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the
technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several
years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the
parents, and the system of education suffered.
In the northern province, on the other hand, there was less demand
for studies leading directly to the forum. Moreover, some of the best
teachers were active there.[1] They were men of catholic tastes, who in
their lectures on literature ranged widely over the centuries of Greek
masters from Homer to the latest popular poets of the Hellenistic period
and over the Latin poets from Livius to Lucilius. Indeed, the young men
trained at Cremona and Milan between the days of Sulla and Caesar were
those who in due time passed on the torch of literary art at Rome,
while the Roman youths were being enticed away into rhetoric. Vergil's
remarkable catholicity of taste and his aversion to the cramping
technique of the rhetorical course are probably to be explained in large
measure, therefore, by his contact with the teachers of the provinces.
Vergil did not scorn Apollonius because Homer was revered as the supreme
master, and though the easy charm of Catullus taught him early to love
the "new poetry," he appreciated none the less the rugged force of
Ennius. Had his early training been received at Rome, where pedant was
pitted against pedant, where every teacher was forced by rivalry into a
partizan attitude, and all were compelled by material demands to provide
a "practical education," even Vergil's poetic spirit might have been
dulled.
[Footnote 1: Suetonius, _De Gram_. 3.]
How long Vergil remained at Milan we are not told; Donatus' _paulo post_
is a relative term that might mean a few months or a few years. However,
at the age of sixteen Vergil was doubtless ready for the rhetorical
course, and it is possible that he went to the great city as early as
54 B.C., the very year of Catullus' death and of the publication of
Lucretius' _De Rerum Natura_. The brief biography of Vergil contained in
the Berne MS.--a document of doubtful value--mentions Epidius as Vergil's
teacher in rhetoric, and adds that Octavius, the future emperor, was a
fellow pupil. This is by no means unreasonable despite a difference
of seven years in the ages of the two pupils. Vergil coming from the
provinces entered rhetoric rather late in years, whereas Octavius must
have required the aid of a master of declamation early, since at the age
of twelve he prepared to deliver the _laudatio funebris_ at the grave of
his grandmother. Thus the two may have met in Epidius' lecture room in
the year 50 B.C. Vergil could doubtless have afforded tuition under such
a master since he presently engaged the no less distinguished Siro. We
have the independent testimony of Suetonius that Epidius was Octavius'
and Mark Antony's teacher.
If Antony's style be a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a
rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style,[2] then still orthodox at
Rome. This school--except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for
going to extremes--had not yet been effectively challenged by the rising
generation of the chaster Atticists. Hortensius was still alive, and
highly revered, and Cicero had recently written his elaborate _De
Oratore_ in which, with the apparent calmness of a still unquestioned
authority, he laid down the program of the writer of ornate prose who
conceived it as his chief duty to heed the claims of art. While not an
out and out Asianist he advocates the claims of the "grand-style,"
so pleasing to senatorial audiences, with its well-balanced periods,
carefully modulated, nobly phrased, precisely cadenced, and pronounced
with dignity. To be sure, Calvus had already raised the banner of
Atticism and had in several biting attacks shown what a simple, frugal
and direct style could accomplish; Calidius, one of the first Roman
pupils of the great Apollodorus, had already begun making campaign
speeches in his neatly polished orations which painfully eschewed all
show of ornament or passion; and Caesar himself, efficiency personified,
had demonstrated that the leader of a democratic rabble must be a master
of blunt phrases. But Calvus did not threaten to become a political
force, Calidius was too even-tempered, and Caesar was now in the north,
fighting with other weapons. Cicero's prestige still seemed unbroken. It
was not till Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, after Hortensius had died,
and Cicero had been pushed aside as a futile statesman, that Atticism
gained predominance in the schools. Later, in 46, Cicero in several
remarkable essays again took up the cudgels for an elaborate prose, but
then his cause was already lost. Caesar's victory had demonstrated that
Rome desired deeds, not words.
[Footnote 2: Octavius was drawn to the Atticistic principles by the great
master Apollodorus.]
When Virgil, therefore, turned to rhetoric, probably under Epidius,
he received the training which was still considered orthodox. His
farewell[3] to rhetoric--written probably in 48--shows unmistakably the
nature of the stuff on which he had been fed. It is the bombast and the
futile rules of the Asianic creed against which he flings his unsparing
scazons.
[Footnote 3: _Catalepton_ V (Edition, Vollmer). Birt, _Jugendverse und
Heimatpoesie Vergils_, 1910, has provided a useful commentary on the
_Catalepton_.]
Begone ye useless paint-pots of the school;
Your phrases reek, but not with Attic scent,
Tarquitius' and Selius' and Varro's drool:
A witless crew, with learning temulent.
And ye begone, ye tinkling cymbals vain,
That call the youths to drivelings insane.
Epidius, to be sure, is not mentioned, but we happen to know that
Varro--if this be the erudite friend of Cicero--was devoted to the
Asianic principles. And Epidius, the teacher of the flowery Mark Antony,
may well be concealed in Vergil's list of names even if mention of him
was omitted for reasons of propriety.
This poem reveals the fact that Vergil did not, like the young men of
Cicero's youth, enjoy the privilege of studying law, court procedure, and
oratory by entering the law office, as it were, of some distinguished
senator and thus acquiring his craft through observation, guided
practice, and personal instruction. That method, so charmingly described
by Cicero as in vogue in his youth, had almost passed away. The school
had taken its place with its mock courts, contests in oratory, set themes
in fictitious controversies. The analytical rules of rhetoric were
growing ever more intricate and time-wasting, and how pedantic they were
even before Vergil's childhood may be seen by a glance into the anonymous
_Auctor ad Herennium_. The student had to know the differences between
the various kinds of cases, demonstrativum, deliberativum and judiciale;
he must know the proportionate value to the orator of inventio,
dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio, and how to manage each;
he must know how to apply inventio in each of the six divisions of the
speech: exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, confutatio, conclusio.
On the subject of adornment of style a relatively small task lay in
memorizing illustrations of some sixty figures of speech--and so on ad
infinitum. _Inane cymbalon juventutis_ is indeed a fitting commentary on
such memory tasks. The end of the poem cited betrays the fact that the
poet had not been able to keep his attention upon his task. He had been
writing verses; who would not?
Quite apart, however, from the unattractive content of the course, the
gradual change in political life must have disclosed to the observant
that the free exercise of talents in a public career could not continue
long. The triumvirate was rapidly suppressing the free republic. Even in
52, when Pompey became sole consul, the trial of Milo was conducted under
military guard, and no advocate dared speak freely. During the next two
years every one saw that Caesar and Pompey must come to blows and that
the resulting war could only lead to autocracy.
The crisis came in January of 49 B.C. when Vergil was twenty years old.
Pompey with the consuls and most of the senators fled southward in
dismay, and in sixty days, hotly pursued by Caesar, was forced to
evacuate Italy. Caesar, eager to make short work of the war, to attack
Spain and Africa while holding the Alpine passes and pressing in pursuit
of Pompey, began to levy new recruits throughout Italy.[4] Vergil also
seems to have been drawn in this draft, since this is apparently the
circumstance mentioned in his thirteenth _Catalepton_. "Draft," however,
may not be the right word, for we do not know whether Caesar at this time
claimed the right to enforce the rules of conscription. In any case, it
is clear from all of Vergil's references to Caesar that the great general
always retained a strong hold upon his imagination. Like most youths who
had beheld Caesar's work in the province close at hand, he was probably
ready to respond to a general appeal for troops, and Labienus' words to
Pompey on the battlefield of Pharsalia make it clear that Caesar's
army was largely composed of Cisalpines. The accounting they gave of
themselves at that battle is evidence enough of the spirit which pervaded
Vergil's fellow provincials. Nor is it unlikely that Vergil himself
took part, for one of the most poignant passages in all his work is the
picture of the dead who lay strewn over the battlefield of Pharsalia.
[Footnote 4: Cic. _Ad Att_. IX. 19, in March.]
It is also probable that Vergil had had some share in the cruises on the
Adriatic conducted by Antony the summer and winter before Pharsalia.
Not only does this poem speak of service on the seas, but his poems
throughout reveal a remarkable acquaintance with Adriatic geography. If
he took part in the work of that stormy winter's campaigns, when more
than one fleet was wrecked, we can comprehend the intimate touches in the
description of Aeneas' encounters with the storms.
The thirteenth _Catalepton_, which mentions the poet's military service,
is not pleasant reading. Written perhaps in 48 or 47 B.C., directed
against some hated martinet of an officer, it bears various disagreeable
traces of camp life, which was then not well-guarded by charitable
organizations of every kind as now. We need quote only the first few
lines:[5]
You call me caitiff, say I cannot sail
The seas again, and that I seem to quail
Before the storms and summer's heat, nor dare
The speeding victor's arms again to bear.
We know how frail Vergil's health was in later years. His constitution
may well have been wrecked during the winter of 49 which Caesar himself,
inured though he was to the storms of the North, found unusually severe.
Vergil, it would seem from these lines, was given sick-leave and
permitted to go back to his studies, though apparently taunted for not
later returning to the army.
[Footnote 5:
Jacere me, quod alta non possim, putas
Ut ante, vectari freta,
Nec ferre durum frigus aut aestum pati
Neque arma victoris sequi.
The verses were written before 46 B.C. when the _collegia compitalicia_
were disbanded; Birt, _Rhein. Mus_. 1910, 348.]
There is another brief epigram which--if we are right in thinking Pompey
the subject of the lines--seems to date from Vergil's soldier days, the
third _Catalepton_:
Aspice quem valido subnixum Gloria regno
Altius et caeli sedibus extulerat.
Terrarum hic bello magnum concusserat orbem,
Hic reges Asiae fregerat, hic populos,
Hic grave servitium tibi iam, tibi, Roma, ferebat
(Cetera namque viri cuspide conciderant),
Cum subito in medio rerum certamine praeceps
Corruit, e patria pulsus in exilium.
Tale deae numen, tali mortalia nutu
Fallax momento temporis hora dedit.[6]
[Footnote 6: Behold one whom, upborne by mighty authority, Glory had
exalted even above the abodes of heaven. Earth's great orb had he shaken
in war, the kings and peoples of Asia had he broken, grievous slavery was
he bringing even to thee, O Rome,--for all else had fallen before that
man's sword,--when suddenly, in the midst of his struggle for mastery,
headlong he fell, driven from fatherland into exile. Such is the will of
Nemesis; at a mere nod, in a moment of time, the faithless hour tricks
mortal endeavor.]
Whether or not Pompey aspired to become autocrat at Rome, many of his
supporters not only believed but desired that he should. Cicero, who did
not desire it, did, despite his devotion to his friend, fear that Pompey
would, if victorious, establish practically or virtually a monarchy.[7]
Vergil, therefore, if he wrote this when Pompey fled to Greece in 49, or
after the rout at Pharsalia, was only giving expression to a conviction
generally held among Caesar's officers. Quite Vergilian is the repression
of the shout of victory. The poem recalls the words of Anchises on
beholding the spirits of Julius and Pompey:
Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo
Proice tela manu, sanguis meus.
[Footnote 7: Cic. _Ad Att_. VIII, 11, 4; X, 4, 8.]
This is the poet's final conviction regarding the civil war in which he
served; his first had not differed widely from this.
Vergil's one experience as advocate in the court room should perhaps be
placed after his retirement from the army. Egit, says Donatus, et causam
apud judices, unam omnino nec amplius quam semel. The reason for his lack
of success Donatus gives in the words of Melissus, a critic who ought to
know: in sermone tardissimum ac paene indocto similem. The poet himself
seems to allude to his disappointing failure in the _Ciris_: expertum
fallacis praemia volgi. How could he but fail? He never learned to cram
his convictions into mere phrases, and his judgments into all-inclusive
syllogisms. When he has done his best with human behavior, and the
sentence is pronounced, he spoils the whole with a rebellious dis aliter
visum. A successful advocate must know what not to see and feel, and he
must have ready convictions at his tongue's end. In the _Aeneid_ there
are several fluent orators, but they are never Vergil's congenial
characters.
III
THE "CULEX"
It was apparently in the year 48--Vergil was then twenty-one--that the
poet attempted his first extended composition, the _Culex_, a poem that
hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of
Spenser. This is indeed one of the strangest poems of Latin literature,
an overwhelming burden of mythological and literary references saddled on
the feeblest of fables.
A shepherd goes out one morning with his flocks to the woodland glades
whose charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative rhapsody.
The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is about to
strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save
him. But--such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore--the shepherd, still
in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life. At night the
gnat's ghost returns to rebuke the shepherd for his innocent ingratitude,
and rather inappropriately remains to rehearse at great length the tale
of what shades of old heroes he has seen in the lower regions. The poem
contains 414 lines.
The _Culex_ has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism,
and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of
stylistic criteria. Though it was accepted as Vergilian by Renaissance
readers simply because the manuscripts of the poem and ancient writers,
from Lucan and Statius to Martial and Suetonius, all attribute the work
to him, recent critics have usually been skeptical or downright recusant.
Some insist that it is a forgery or supposititious work; others that it
is a liberally padded re-working of Vergil's original. Only a few have
accepted it as a very youthful failure of Vergil's, or as an attempt of
the poet to parody the then popular romances. Recent objections have not
centered about metrical technique, diction, or details of style: these
are now admitted to be Vergilian enough, or rather what might well have
been Vergilian at the outset of his career. The chief criticism is
directed against a want of proportion and an apparent lack of artistic
sense betrayed in choosing so strange a character for the ponderous
title-role. These are faults that Vergil later does not betray.
Nevertheless, Vergil seems to have written the poem. Its ascription to
Vergil by so many authors of the early empire, as well as the concensus
of the manuscripts, must be taken very seriously. But the internal
evidence is even stronger. Octavius, to whom the poem is dedicated, is
addressed _Octavi venerande_ and _sancte puer_, a clear reference to the
remarkable honor that Caesar secured for him by election to the office of
pontiff[1] when he was approaching his fifteenth birthday and before
he assumed the _toga virilis_. Vergil was then twenty-one years of
age--nearing his twenty-second birthday--and we may perhaps assume in
Donatus' attribution of the _Culex_ to Vergil's sixteenth year a mistake
in some early manuscript which changed the original XXI to XVI, a
correction which the citations of Statius and Lucan favor.[2] Finally,
when, as we shall see presently, Horace in his second _Epode_, accords
Vergil the honor of imitating a passage of the _Culex_, Vergil returns
the compliment in his _Georgics_. We have therefore not only Vergil's
recognition of Horace's courtesy, but, in his acceptance of it, his
acknowledgment of the _Culex_ as his own.[3]
[Footnote 1: Vellius, II. 59, 3, pontificatus sacerdotio _puerum_
honoravit, that is, before he assumed _the toga virilis_ on October 18th.
Nicolaus Damascenus (4) confirms this. Octavius received the office made
vacant by the death of Domitius at Pharsalia (Aug. 9). His birthday was
Sept. 23, 63. This high office is the first indication that Caesar had
chosen his grandnephew to be his possible successor. The boy was hardly
known at Rome before this time. See _Classical Philology_, 1920, p. 26.]
[Footnote 2: Anderson, in _Classical Quarterly_, 1916, p. 225; and
_Class. Phil_. 1920, p. 26. The dedicatory lines of the _Culex_ imply
that the body of the poem was already complete. Whether the interval was
one of weeks or months or years the poet does not say.]
[Footnote 3: _Classical Philology_, 1920, pp. 23, 33.]
The _Culex_, therefore, is the work of a beginner addressed to a young
lad just highly honored, but after all to a schoolboy whom Vergil had,
presumably two years before, met in the lecture rooms of Epidius. Does
this provide a key with which to unlock the hidden intentions of our
strange treasure-trove of miscellaneous allusions? Let the reader
remember the nature of the literary lectures of that day when
dictionaries, reference books, and encyclopedias were not yet to be found
in every library, and school texts were not yet provided with concise
Allen and Greenough notes. The teacher alone could afford the voluminous
"cribs" of Didymus. Roman schoolboys had not, like the Greeks, drunk in
all myths by the easy process of nursery babble. By them the legends of
Homer and Euripides must be acquired through painful schoolroom exegesis.
Even the names of natural objects, like trees, birds, and beasts came
into literature with their Greek names, which had to be explained to the
Roman boys. Hence the teacher of literature at Rome must waste much
time upon elucidating the text, telling the myths in full, and giving
convenient compendia of metamorphoses, of Homeric heroes, of "trees and
flowers of the poets," and the like. Epidius himself, a pedagogue of the
progressive style, had doubtless proved an adept at this sort of
thing. Claiming to be a descendant of an ancient hero who had one day
transformed himself into a river-god, he must have had a knack for these
tales. At any rate we are told that he wrote a book on metamorphosed
trees.[4] When Octavius read the _Culex_, did he recognize in the quaint
passage describing the shepherd's grove of metamorphosed trees (124-145)
phrases from the lecture notes of their voluble teacher? Are there
reminiscences lurking also in the long list of flowers so incongruously
massed about the gnat's grave and in the two hundred lines that detail
the ghostly census of Hades? If this is a parody at all, it is to remind
Octavius of Epidian erudition. In any case it is a kind of prompter of
the poetic allusions that occupied the boys' hours at school. The simple
plot of the shepherd and the gnat was selected from the type of fable
lore thought suitable for school-room reading. It served by its very
incongruity as a suitable thread for a catalogue of facts and fiction.
Vergil himself furnishes the clue for this interpretation of the _Culex_,
but it has been overlooked because of the wretched condition of the text
that we have. The first lines[5] of the poem seem to mean:
"My verses on the _Culex_ shall be filled with erudition so that all
the lore of the past may be strung together playfully in the form of a
story." That Martial considered it a boy's book appropriate for vacation
hours between school tasks is apparent from the inscription:[6]
Accipe facundi _Culicem_, studiose, Maronis,
Ne nucibus positis, _Arma virumque_ legas.
[Footnote 4: Pliny, _Nat. Hist_. XVII. 243; Suetonius, _De Rhetoribus_,
4.]
[Footnote 5: Lines 3-5:
lusimus (haec propter culicis sint carmina docta,
omnis ut historiae per ludum consonet ordo
notitiae) doctumque voces, licet invidus adsit.]
[Footnote 6: Martial, XIV. 185.]
The _Culex_ is then, after all, a poem of unique interest; it takes us
into the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two lads whose
names come first in the honor roll of the golden age.
The poem is of course not a masterpiece, nor was it intended to be
anything but a _tour de force_; but a comprehension of its purpose will
at least save it from being judged by standards not applicable to it. It
is not naïvely and unintentionally incongruous. To the modern reader it
is dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired
no doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the
obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology
betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to
take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote
currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the
verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses[7] and the phrasing compare
rather favorably with the Catullan hexameters which obviously served as
its models, that in the best lines the poet shows himself sensitive to
delicate effects, and that the pastoral scene--which Horace compliments
a few years later--is, despite its imitative notes, written with
enthusiasm, and reminds us pleasantly of the _Eclogues_.
[Footnote 7: For stylistic and metrical studies of the _Culex_, see _The
Caesura in Vergil_, Butcher, _Classical Quarterly_, 1914, p. 123; Hardie,
_Journal of Philology_, XXXI, p. 266, and _Class Quart_. 1916, 32 ff.;
Miss Jackson, _Ibid_. 1911, 163; Warde Fowler, _Class. Rev_. 1919, 96.]
IV
THE "CIRIS"
It was at about this same time, 48 B.C., that Vergil began to write the
_Ciris_, a romantic epyllion which deserves far more attention than it
has received, not only as an invaluable document for the history of the
poet's early development, but as a poem possessing in some passages at
least real artistic merit. The _Ciris_ was not yet completed at the time
when Vergil reached the momentous decision to go to Naples and study
philosophy. He apparently laid it aside and did not return to it until he
had been in Naples several years. It was not till later that he wrote the
dedication. As we shall see, the author again laid the poem away, and it
was not published till after his death. The preface written in Siro's
garden is addressed to Messalla, who was a student at Athens in 45-4
B.C., and served in the republican army of Brutus and Cassius in 43-2. In
it Vergil begs pardon for sending a poem of so trivial a nature at a time
when his one ambition is to describe worthily the philosophic system that
he has adopted. "Nevertheless," he says, "accept meanwhile this poem: it
is all that I can offer; upon it I have spent the efforts of early youth.
Long since the vow was made, and now is fulfilled." (_Ciris_, 42-7.)[1]
[Footnote 1: On the question of authenticity, see, Class. Phil. 1920, 103
ff.]
The story, beginning at line 101, was familiar. Minos, King of Crete, had
laid siege to Megara, whose king, Nisus, had been promised invincibility
by the oracles so long as his crimson lock remained untouched. Scylla,
the daughter of Nisus, however, was driven by Juno to fall in love with
Minos, her father's enemy; and, to win his love, she yields to the
temptation of betraying her father to Minos. The picture of the girl when
she had decided to cut the charmed lock of hair, groping her way in the
dark, tiptoe, faltering, rushing, terrified at the fluttering of her own
heart, is an interesting attempt at intensive art: 209-219:
cum furtim tacito descendens Scylla cubili
auribus erectis nocturna silentia temptat
et pressis tenuem singultibus aera captat.
tum suspensa levans digitis vestigia primis
egreditur ferroque manus armata bidenti
evolat: at demptae subita in formidine vires
caeruleas sua furta prius testantur ad umbras.
nam qua se ad patrium tendebat semita limen,
vestibulo in thalami paulum remoratur et alti
suspicit ad gelidi nictantia sidera mundi
non accepta piis promittens munera divis.
Her aged nurse, Carme, comes upon the bewildered and shivering girl,
folds her in her robe, and coaxes the awful confession from her; 250-260:
haec loquitur mollique ut se velavit amictu
frigidulam iniecta circumdat veste puellam,
quae prius in tenui steterat succincta crocota.
dulcia deinde genis rorantibus oscula figens
persequitur miserae causas exquirere tabis.
nec tamen ante ullas patitur sibi reddere voces,
marmoreum tremebunda pedem quam rettulit intra.
ilia autem "quid me" inquit, "nutricula, torques?
quid tantum properas nostros novisse furores?
non ego consueto mortalibus uror amore."
Scylla does not readily confess. The poet's characterization of her
as she protracts the story to avoid the final confession reveals an
ambitious though somewhat unpracticed art. Carme tries in vain to
dissuade the girl, and must, to calm her, promise to aid her if all other
means fail. The aged woman's tenderness for her foster child is very
effectively phrased in a style not without reminiscences of Catullus
(340-48):
his ubi sollicitos animi relevaverat aestus
vocibus et blanda pectus spe luserat aegrum,
paulatim tremebunda genis obducere vestem
virginis et placidam tenebris captare quietem
inverso bibulum restinguens lumen olivo
incipit ad crebros (que) insani pectoris ictus
ferre manum assiduis mulcens praecordia palmis.
noctem illam sic maesta super morientis alumnae
frigidulos cubito subnixa pependit ocellos.
On the morrow the girl pleads with her father to make peace, with
humorous naïveté argues with the counsellors of state, tries to bribe the
seers, and finally resorts to magic. When nothing avails, she secures
Carme's aid. The lock is cut, the city falls, the girl is captured by
Minos--in true Alexandrian technique the catastrophe comes with terrible
speed--and she is led, not to marriage, but to chains on the captor's
galley. Her grief is expressed in a long soliloquy somewhat too
reminiscent of Ariadne's lament in Catullus. Finally, Amphitrite in pity
transforms the captive girl into a bird, the Ciris, and Zeus as a reward
for his devout life releases Nisus, also transforming him into a bird of
prey, and henceforth there has been eternal warfare between the Ciris and
the Nisus:
quacunque illa levem fugiens secat aethera pennis,
ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras
insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras,
illa levem fugiens raptim secat aethera pennis.[1]