Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae,
Me tibi et hos una mecum, quos semper amavi,
Si quid de patria tristius audiero,
Commendo imprimisque patrem: tu nunc eris illi
Mantua quod fuerat quodque Cremona prius.
It is usually assumed from this passage that Siro had recently died,
probably, therefore, some time in 42 B.C., and that, in accordance with a
custom frequently followed by Greek philosophers at Rome, he had left his
property to his favorite pupil. The garden school, therefore, seems to
have come to an end, though possibly Philodemus may have continued it
for the few remaining years of his life. Siro's villa apparently proved
attractive to Vergil, for he made Naples his permanent home, despite the
gift of a house on the Esquiline from Maecenas.
This, however, is not Vergil's last mention of Siro, if we may believe
Servius, who thinks that "Silenum" in the sixth _Eclogue_ stands for
"Sironem," its metrical equivalent. If, as seems wholly likely, Servius
is right, the sixth _Eclogue_ is a fervid tribute to a teacher who
deserves not to be forgotten in the story of Vergil's education. The poem
has been so strangely misinterpreted in recent years that it is time to
follow out Servius' suggestion and see whether it does not lead to some
conclusions.[5]
[Footnote 5: Skutsch roused a storm of discussion over it by insisting
that it was a catalogue of poems written by Gallus (_Aus Vergils
Frühzeit_.) Cartault, _Étude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile_ (p. 285),
almost accepts Servius' suggestion: "un résumé de ses lectures et de ses
études."]
After an introduction to Varus the poem tells how two shepherds found
Silenus off his guard, bound him, and demanded songs that he had long
promised. The reader will recall, of course, how Plato also likened his
teacher Socrates to Silenus. Silenus sang indeed till hills and valleys
thrilled with the music: of creation of sun and moon, the world of
living things, the golden age, and of the myths of Prometheus, Phaeton,
Pasiphaë, and many others; he even sang of how Gallus had been captured
by the Muses and been made a minister of Apollo.
A strange pastoral it has seemed to many! And yet not so strange when we
bear in mind that the books of Philodemus reveal Vergil and Quintilius
Varus as fellow students at Naples. Surely Servius has provided the key.
The whole poem, with its references to old myths, is merely a rehearsal
of schoolroom reminiscences, as might have been guessed from the fine
Lucretian rhythms with which it begins:
Namque canebat, uti magnum per inane coacta
Semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent
Et liquidi simul ignis; ut his exordia primis
Omnia et ipse tener mundi concreverit orbis;
Tum durare solum et discludere Nerea ponto
Coeperit, et rerum paulatim sumere formas;
Iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem.
Altius atque cadant summotis nubibus imbres;
Incipiant silvae cum primum surgere, cumque
Rara per ignaros errent animalia montis.
The myths that follow are meant to continue this list of subjects, only
with somewhat less blunt obviousness. They suggested to Varus the usual
Epicurean theories of perception, imagination, passion, and mental
aberrations, subjects that Siro must have discussed in some such way as
Lucretius treated them in his third and fourth books of the _De Rerum
Natura_.
It is, of course, not to be supposed that Siro had lectured upon
mythology as such. But the Epicurean teachers, despite their scorn
for legends, employed them for pedagogical purposes in several ways.
Lucretius, for instance, uses them sometimes for their picturesqueness,
as in the _prooemium_ and again in the allegory of the seasons (V. 732).
He also employs them in a Euhemeristic fashion, explaining them as
popular allegories of actual human experiences, citing the myths of
Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, as expressions of the ever-present
dread of punishment for crimes. Indeed Vergil himself in the _Aetna_--if
it be his--somewhat naïvely introduced the battle of the giants for its
picturesque interest. It is only after he had enjoyed telling the story
in full that he checked himself with the blunt remark:
(1. 74) Haec est mendosae vulgata licentia famae.
Lucretius is little less amusing in his rejection of the Cybele myth,
after a lovely passage of forty lines (II, 600) devoted to it.
Vergil was, therefore, on familiar ground when he tried to remind his
schoolmate of Siro's philosophical themes by designating each of them by
means of an appropriate myth. Perhaps we, who unlike Varus have not heard
the original lectures, may not be able in every case to discover the
theme from the myth, but the poet has at least set us out on the right
scent by making the first riddles very easy. The _lapides Pyrrhae_ (I.
41) refer of course to the creation of man; _Saturnia regna_ is, in
Epicurean lore, the primitive life of the early savages; _furtum
Promethei_ (I. 42) must refer to Epicurus' explanation of how fire came
from clashing trees and from lightning. The story of Hylas (I. 43)
probably reminded Varus of Siro's lecture on images and reflection,
Pasiphaë (I. 46) of unruly passions, explained perhaps as in Lucretius'
fourth book, Atalanta (I. 61) of greed, and Phaeton of ambition. As for
Scylla, Vergil had himself in the _Ciris_ (I. 69) mentioned, only to
reject, the allegorical interpretation here presented, according to which
she portrays:
"the sin of lustfulness
and love's incontinence."
Vergil had not then met Siro, but he may have read some of his lectures.
Finally, the strange lines on Cornelius Gallus might find a ready
explanation if we knew whether or not Gallus had also been a member
of the Neapolitan circle. Probus, if we may believe him, suggests the
possibility in calling him a schoolmate of Vergil's, and a plausible
interpretation of this eclogue turns that possibility into a probability.
The passage (II. 64-73) may well be Vergil's way of recalling to Varus a
well-beloved fellow-student who had left the circle to become a poet.
The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil's
life in Siro's garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school
closed, and Varus gone off to war. The younger man's school days are
now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla's
experiments had drawn him. The _Eclogues_ are already appearing in rapid
succession.
IX
MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY
It has been remarked that Vergil's genius was of slow growth; he was
twenty-eight before he wrote any verses that his mature judgment
recognized as worthy of publication. A survey of his early life reveals
some of the reasons for this tardy development. Born and schooled in
a province he was naturally held back by lack of those contacts which
stimulate boys of the city to rapid mental growth. The first few years at
Rome were in some measure wasted upon a subject for which he had neither
taste nor endowment. The banal rhetorical training might indeed have
made a Lucan or a Juvenal out of him had he not finally revolted so
decisively. However, this work at Rome proved not to be a total loss.
His choice of a national theme for an epic and his insight into the
true qualities of imperial Rome owe something to the study of political
questions that his preparation for a public career had necessitated. He
learned something in his Roman days that not even Epicurean scorn for
politics could eradicate.
However, his next decision, to devote his life to philosophy, again
retarded his poetic development. Certainly it held him in leash during
the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric
poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught
early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all
earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The _Aetna_ shows
perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic
insistence that myths must now give way to facts. Its author was still
too absorbed in the microscopic analysis of a petty piece of research
to catch the spirit of Lucretius who had found in the visions of the
scientific workshop a majesty and beauty that partook of the essence of
poetry.
In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to
Epicureanism than modern critics--too often obsessed by a misapplied
_odium philosophicum_--have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy
to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and
to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its
attitude towards art banal. But that is not a sound historical method of
approach. The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the
need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the
mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how,
when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism
with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean
positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.
The system, despite its inadequate first answers, employed a scientific
method that gave the Romans faith in many of its results, just at a time
when orthodox mythology had yielded before the first critical inspection.
As a preliminary system of illumination it proved invaluable. Untrained
in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact
science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing
curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naïve faith.
Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible
guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world
politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience
with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in
aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by
two centuries of skeptics. The Epicurean at least kept his feet on the
ground, appealed to the practical man's faith in his own senses, and
plausibly propped his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes
approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic. He
rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman
daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of
metaphysical reasoning. He came with a gospel of illumination to a race
eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously
created by processes that the average man beheld in his daily walks.
It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination,
to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions,
and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible
answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new
philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of
the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way
of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as
unscientific.
[Footnote 1: It is not quite accurate to say that the Romans made a dogma
of Epicurus' _ipse dixit_ which destroyed scientific open-mindedness.
Vergil uses Posidonius and Zeno as freely as the Stoic Seneca does
Epicurus.]
Furthermore, Epicureanism provided a view of nature which was apt in the
minds of an imaginative poet to lead toward romanticism. Stoicism indeed
pretended to be pantheistic, and Wordsworth has demonstrated the value
to romanticism of that attitude. But to the clear of vision Stoicism
immediately took from nature with one hand what it had given with the
other. Invariably, its rule of "follow nature" had to be defined in terms
that proved its distrust of what the world called nature. As a matter of
fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a
creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec,
peccat!" cries Persius in terror.
The earlier naïve animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of
aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the
wealth of ancient myths. But the nymphs of that stream were dead, slain
by philosophical questioning. The new poetic myth-making that still
showed the influence of an old habit of mind was apt to be rather
self-conscious and diffident, ending in something resembling the pathetic
fallacy.
Epicureanism on the other hand by employing the theory of evolution was
able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered
that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature
unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of
romance became possible only upon the discovery of that unity. This is
doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium
bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the
troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our
day.
Nam simulac species patefactast verna diei ...
Aëriae primum volucres te diva tuumque
Significant initum perculsae corda tua vi,
Inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta.
Vergil, convinced by the same philosophy, expresses himself similarly:
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres
amor omnibus idem.
And again:
Avia tum resonant avibus virgulta canoris
Et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus
Parturit almus ager Zepherique trementibus auris
Laxant arva sinus.
It is, of course, the theme of "Sumer is icumen in." Lucretius feels so
strongly the unity of naturally evolved creation that he never
hesitates to compare men of various temperaments with animals of
sundry natures--the fiery lion, the cool-tempered ox--and explain the
differences in both by the same preponderance of some peculiar kind of
"soul-atoms."
Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man's mental horizon and
sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use. Like the crude
evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau's day, it gave one a more soundly
based sympathy for one's fellows--since evolution was not yet "red in
tooth and claw." If nature was to be trusted, why not man's nature? Why
curse the body, any man's body, as the root-ground of sin? Were not the
instincts a part of man? Might not the scientific view prove that the
passions so far from being diseases, conditioned the very life and
survival of the race? Perhaps the evils of excess, called sin, were after
all due to defects in social and political institutions that had applied
incorrect regulative principles, or to the selfishly imposed religious
fears which had driven the healthy instincts into tantrums. Rid man of
these erroneous fears and of a political system begot for purposes
of exploitation and see whether by returning to an age of primitive
innocence he cannot prove that nature is trustworthy.[2]
[Footnote 2: Lucretius, III, 37-93; II, 23-39; V, 1105-1135.]
There is in this philosophy then a basis for a large humanitarianism,
dangerous perhaps in its implications. And yet it could hardly have been
more perilous than the Roman orthodox religion which insisted only upon
formal correctness, seldom upon ethical decorum, or than Stoicism with
its categorical imperative, which could restrain only those who were
already convinced. The Stoic pretence of appealing to a natural law could
be proved illogical at first examination, when driven to admit that
"nature" must be explained by a question-begging definition before its
rule could be applied.
Indeed the Romans of Vergil's day had not been accustomed to look for
ethical sanctions in religion or creed. Morality had always been for them
a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum,
legal doctrine regarding the universality of _aequitas_, and, more than
they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock. It
probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new
philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard. Cicero, as
statesman, does; but the question had doubtless come to him first out of
the literature of the Academy which he was wont to read. Despite their
creed, Lucretius and Vergil are indeed Rome's foremost apostles of
Righteousness; and if anyone had pressed home the charge of possible
moral weakness in their system they might well have pointed to the
exemplary life of Epicurus and many of his followers. To the Romans this
philosophy brought a creed of wide sympathies with none of the "lust
for sensation" that accompanied its return in the days of Rousseau and
"Werther." Had not the old Roman stock, sound in marrow and clear of
eye, been shattered by wars and thinned out by emigration, only to be
displaced by a more nervous and impulsive people that had come in by
the slave trade, Roman civilization would hardly have suffered from the
application of the doctrines of Epicurus.
Whether or not Vergil remained an Epicurean to the end, we must, to be
fair, give credit to that philosophy for much that is most poetical in
his later work,--a romantic charm in the treatment of nature, a deep
comprehension of man's temper, a broader sympathy with humanity and a
clearer understanding of the difference between social virtue and mere
ritualistic correctness than was to be expected of a Roman at this time.
It is, however, very probable that Vergil remained on the whole faithful
to this creed[3] to the very end. He was forty years of age and only
eleven years from his death when he published the _Georgics_, which are
permeated with the Epicurean view of nature; and the restatement of this
creed in the first book of the _Aeneid_ ought to warn us that his faith
in it did not die.
[Footnote 3: This is, of course, not the view of Sellar, Conington,
Glover, and Norden,--to mention but a few of those who hold that Vergil
became a Stoic. See chapter XV for a development of this view.]
X
RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI
The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at
home. Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil's pastorals who can
take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting
what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible
hidden meanings that lie in them. But the biographer may not share that
pleasure. The _Eclogues_ were soon burdened with comments by critics who
sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity
of an unannaled provincial life. In their eager search for data they
forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the
poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author. The
modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a
little of the allegory that obscures the text.
It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no
scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the
falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a
beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not
themselves consistent. Those early commentators who variously place the
confiscation of Vergil's farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.),
after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony
as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province
that did not exist, may state some real facts: they certainly hazard many
futile guesses. The safest way is to trust these records only when they
harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret
the _Eclogues_ primarily as imaginative pastoral poetry, and not, except
when they demand it, as a personal record. We shall here treat the
_Bucolics_ in what seems to be their order of composition, not the order
of their position in the collection.
The eulogy of Messalla, written in 42 B.C., reveals Vergil already at
work upon pastoral themes, to which, as he tells us, Messalla's Greek
eclogues had called his attention. We may then at once reject the
statement of the scholiasts that Vergil wrote the _Eclogues_ for the
purpose of thanking Pollio, Alfenus, and Gallus for having saved his
estates from confiscation. At least a full half of these poems had been
written before there was any material cause for gratitude, and, as we
shall see presently, these three men had in any case little to do with
the matter. It will serve as a good antidote against the conjectures of
the allegorizing school if we remember that these commentators of the
Empire were for the most part Greek freedmen, themselves largely occupied
in fawning upon their patrons. They apparently assumed that poets as a
matter of course wrote what they did in order to please some patron--a
questionable enough assumption regarding any Roman poetry composed before
the Silver Age.
The second _Eclogue_ is a very early study which, in the theme of the
gift-bringing, seems to be reminiscent of Messalla's work.[1] The third
and seventh are also generally accepted as early experiments in the more
realistic forms of amoebean pastoral. Since the fifth, which should be
placed early in 41 B.C., actually cites the second and third, we have a
_terminus ante quem_ for these two eclogues. To the early list the tenth
should be added if it was addressed to Gallus while he was still doing
military service in Greece, and with these we may place the sixth,
discussed above.
[Footnote 1: See Chapter VIII.]
The lack of realistic local color in these pastorals has frequently been
criticized, on the supposition that Vergil wrote them while at home in
Mantua, and ought, therefore, to have given true pictures of Mantuan
scenery and characters. His home country was and is a monotonous plain.
The jutting crags with their athletic goats, the grottoes inviting
melodious shepherds to neglect their flocks, the mountain glades and
waterfalls of the _Eclogues_ can of course not be Mantuan. The Po Valley
was thickly settled, and its deep black soil intensively cultivated. A
few sheep were, of course, kept to provide wool, but these were herded by
farmers' boys in the orchards. The lone she-goat, indispensable to every
Italian household, was doubtless tethered by a leg on the roadside. There
were herds of swine where the old oak forests had not yet been cut, but
the swine-herd is usually not reckoned among songsters. Nor was any
poetry to be expected from the cowboys who managed the cattle ranches
at the foot hills of the Alps and the buffalo herds along the undrained
lowlands. Is Vergil's scenery then nothing but literary reminiscence?