custom that Latin poetry has produced, a bit of realism suffused with a
romantic pastoral atmosphere. The first shepherd's song is of unrequited
love cherished from boyhood for a maiden who has now chosen a worthless
rival. The second is a song sung while a deserted shepherdess performs
with scrupulous precision the magic rites which are to bring her
faithless lover back to her. There are reminiscences of Theocritus of
course, any edition of the _Eclogues_ will give them in full, but Vergil,
so long as he lived at Naples, did not have to go to Sicilian books for
these details. He who knows the social customs of Campania, the magical
charms scribbled on the walls of Pompeii, the deadly curses scratched on
enduring metal by forlorn lovers,--curses hidden beneath the threshold
or hearthstone of the rival to blight her cheeks and wrinkle her silly
face,--knows very well that such folks are the very singers that Vergil
might meet in his walks about the hills of the golden bay.
The eighth _Eclogue_ claims to have been written at the invitation of
Pollio, who had apparently learned thus early that Vergil was a
poet worth encouraging. That the poem has nothing to do with the
confiscations, in so far at least as we are able to understand the
historical situation, has been suggested above. It is usually dated in
the year of Pollio's Albanian campaign in 39, that is a year after his
consulship. Should it not rather be placed two years earlier when Pollio
had given up the Cisalpine province and withdrawn to the upper Adriatic
coast preparatory to proceeding on Antony's orders against the Illyrian
rebels? In the spring of 41 Pollio camped near the Timavus, mentioned in
line 6; two years later the natural route for him to take from Rome would
be via Brundisium and Dyrrhachium.[1] The point is of little interest
except in so far as the date of the poem aids us in tracing Pollio's
influence upon the poet, and in arranging the _Eclogues_ in their
chronological sequence.
[Footnote 1: Antony's province did not extend beyond Scodra; the roads
down the Illyrian mountain from Trieste were not easy for an army to
travel; if the _Eclogues_ were composed in three years (Donatus) the year
39 is too late. Finally, Vellius, II, 76.2, makes it plain that in 41
Pollio remained in Venetia contrary to orders. He had apparently been
ordered to proceed into Illyria at that time.]
Finally, we have the famous "Messianic" _Eclogue_, the fourth, which was
addressed to Pollio during his consulship. By its fortuitous resemblance
to the prophetic literature of the Bible, it came at one time to be the
best known poem in Latin, and elevated its author to the position of
an arch-magician in the medieval world. Indeed, this poem was largely
influential in saving the rest of Vergil's works from the oblivion to
which the dark ages consigned at least nine-tenths of Latin literature.
The poem was written soon after the peace of Brundisium--in the
consummation of which Pollio had had a large share--when all of Italy was
exulting in its escape from another impending civil war. Its immediate
purpose was to give adequate expression to this joy and hope at once in
an abiding record that the Romans and the rulers of Rome might read and
not forget. Its form seems to have been conditioned largely by a strange
allegorical poem written just before the peace by a still unknown poet.
The poet was Horace, who in the sixteenth epode had candidly expressed
the fears of Roman republicans for Rome's capacity to survive. Horace had
boldly asked the question whether after all it was not the duty of those
who still loved liberty to abandon the land of endless warfare, and found
a new home in the far west--a land which still preserved the simple
virtues of the "Golden Age." Vergil's enthusiasm for the new peace
expresses itself as an answer to Horace:[2] the "Golden Age" need not be
sought for elsewhere; in the new era of peace now inaugurated by Octavian
the Virgin Justice shall return to Italy and the Golden Age shall come
to this generation on Italian soil. Vergil, however, introduces a new
"messianic" element into the symbolism of his poem, for he measures the
progress of the new era by the stages in the growth of a child who is
destined finally to bring the prophecy to fulfillment. This happy idea
may well have been suggested by table talks with Philodemus or Siro, who
must at times have recalled stories of savior-princes that they had heard
in their youth in the East. The oppressed Orient was full of prophetic
utterances promising the return of independence and prosperity under the
leadership of some long-hoped-for worthy prince of the tediously unworthy
reigning dynasties. Indeed, since Philodemus grew to boyhood at Gadara
under Jewish rule he could hardly have escaped the knowledge of the very
definite Messianic hopes of the Hebrew people. It may well be, therefore,
that a stray image whose ultimate source was none other than Isaiah came
in this indirect fashion into Vergil's poem, and that the monks of the
dark ages guessed better than they knew.
[Footnote 2: Sellar, _Horace and the Elegiac Poets_, p. 123. Ramsay,
quoted by W. Warde Fowler, _Vergil's Messianic Eclogue_, p, 54.]
To attempt to identify Vergil's child with a definite person would be a
futile effort to analyze poetic allegory. Contemporary readers doubtless
supposed that since the Republic was dead, the successor to power after
the death of Octavius and Antony would naturally be a son of one of
these.
The settlements of the year were sealed by two marriages, that of
Octavian to Scribonia and that of Octavian's sister to Antony. It was
enough that some prince worthy of leadership could naturally be expected
from these dynastic marriages, and that in either case it would be a
child of Octavian's house.[3] Thus far his readers might let their
imagination range; what actually happened afterwards through a series of
evil fortunes has, of course, nothing to do with the question. Pollio is
obviously addressed as the consul whose year marked the peace which all
the world hoped and prayed would be lasting.
[Footnote 3: See _Class. Phil_. XI, 334.]
We have now reviewed the circumstances which called forth the _Eclogues_.
They seem, as Donatus says, to have been written within a period of three
years. The second, third, seventh and sixth apparently fall within the
year 42, the tenth, fifth, eighth, ninth and first in the year 41, while
the _Pollio_ certainly belongs to the year 40, when Vergil became thirty
years of age. The writing of these poems had called the poet more and
more away from philosophy and brought him into closer touch with the
sufferings and experiences of his own people. He had found a theme after
his own heart, and with the theme had come a style and expression
that fitted his genius. He abandoned Hellenistic conceits with their
prettiness of sentiment, attained an easy modulation of line readily
responding to a variety of emotions, learned the dignity of his own
language as he acquired a deeper sympathy for the sufferings of his own
people. There is a new note, as there is a new rhythm in:
_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_.
XIII
THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS
Julius Caesar had learned from bitter experience that poets were
dangerous enemies. Cicero's innuendoes were disagreeable enough but they
might be forgotten. When, however, Catullus and Calvus put them into
biting epigrams there was no forgetting. This was doubtless Caesar's
chief reason for his constant endeavor to win the goodwill of the young
poets, and he ultimately did win that of Calvus and Catullus. Whether
Octavian, and his sage adviser Maecenas, acted from the same motive we
do not know, though they too had seen in Vergil's epigrams on Antony's
creatures, and in Horace's sixteenth epode that the poets of the new
generation seemed likely to give effective expression to political
sentiments. At any rate, the new court at Rome began very soon to make
generous overtures to the literary men of the day.
Pollio, Octavian's senior by many years, and of noble family, could
hardly be approached. Though gradually drawing away from Antony, he
had so closely associated himself with this brilliant companion of his
Gallic-war days, that he preferred not to take a subordinate place at the
Roman court. Messalla, who had entered the service of Antony, was also
out of reach. There remained the brilliant circle of young men at Naples,
men whose names occurred in the dedications of Philodemus' lectures:
Vergil, Varius, Plotius and Quintilius Varus, three of whom at least were
from the north and would naturally be inclined to look upon Octavian with
sympathy.
Varius had already written his epic _De Morte_ which seems to have
mourned Caesar's death, and, though in hidden language, he had alluded
bitterly to Antony's usurpations in the year that followed the murder.
Before Vergil's epic appeared it was Varius who was always considered the
epic poet of the group. Of Plotius Tucca we know little except that he is
called a poet, was a constant member of the circle, and with Varius
the literary executor who published Vergil's works after his death.
Quintilius Varus had, like Varius, come from Cremona, known Catullus
intimately, and, if we accept the view of Servius for the sixth
_Eclogue_, had been Vergil's most devoted companion in Siro's school. He
also took some part in the civil wars, and came to be looked upon as
a very firm supporter of sound literary standards.[1] Horace's _Ouis
desiderio_, shows that Varus was one of Vergil's most devoted friends.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 440.]
Vergil's position as foremost of these poets was doubtless established by
the publication of the _Eclogues_. They took Rome by storm, and were even
set to music and sung on the stage, according to an Alexandrian fashion
then prevailing in the capital. Octavian was, of course, attracted to
them by a personal interest. The poet was given a house in Maecenas'
gardens on the Esquiline with the hope of enticing him to Rome. Vergil
doubtless spent some time in the city before he turned to the more
serious task of the _Georgics_, but we are told that he preferred the
Neapolitan bay and established his home there. This group, it would seem,
was definitely drawn into Octavian's circle soon after the peace of
Brundisium, and formed the nucleus of a kind of literary academy that set
the standards for the Augustan age.
The introduction of Horace into this circle makes an interesting story.
He was five years younger than Vergil, and had had his advanced education
at Athens. There Brutus found him in 43, when attending philosophical
lectures in order to hide his political intrigues; and though Horace
was a freedman's son, Brutus gave him the high dignity of a military
tribuneship. Brutus as a Republican was, of course, a stickler for all
the aristocratic customs. That he conferred upon Horace a knight's office
probably indicates that the _libertinus pater_ had been a war captive
rather than a man of servile stock, and, therefore, only technically a
"freedman." In practical life the Romans observed this distinction, even
though it was not usually feasible to do so in political life. After
Philippi Horace found himself with the defeated remnant and returned to
Italy only to discover that his property had been confiscated. He was
eager for a career in literature, but having to earn his bread, he bought
a poor clerkship in the treasury office. Then during spare moments he
wrote--satires, of course. What else could such a wreckage of enthusiasm
and ambitions produce?
His only hope lay in attracting the attention of some kindly disposed
literary man, and for some reason he chose Vergil. The _Eclogues_ were
not yet out, but the _Culex_ was in circulation, and he made the pastoral
scene of this the basis of an epode--the second--written with no little
good-natured humor. Horace imagines a broker of the forum reading that
passage, and, quite carried away by the succession of delightful scenes,
deciding to quit business for the simple life. He accordingly draws in
all his moneys on the Calends--on the Ides he lends them out again![2]
What Vergil wrote Horace when he received a copy of the _Epode_, we
are not told, but in his next work, the _Georgics_, he returned the
compliment by similarly threading Horace's phrases into a description of
country life--a passage that is indeed one of the most successful in the
book.[3]
[Footnote 2: Horace's scenes (his memory is visual rather than auditory)
unmistakably reproduce those of the _Culex_; cf. _Culex_ 148-58 with
_Epode_ 26-28; _Culex_ 86-7 with _Epode_ 21-22; _Culex_ 49-50 with
_Epode_ 11-12; etc. A full comparison is made in _Classical Philology_,
1920, p. 24. Vergil could, of course, be expected to recognize the
allusions to his own poem.]
[Footnote 3: _See Georgics_, II, 458-542, and a discussion of it in
_Classical Philology_, 1920, p. 42.]
The composition of the sixteenth epode by Horace--soon after the second,
it would seem--gave Vergil an opportunity to recognize the new poet, and
answer his pessimistic appeal with the cheerful prophecy of the fourth
Eclogue, as we have seen. By this time we may suppose that an intimate
friendship had sprung up between the two poets, strengthened of course
by friendly intercourse, now that Vergil could spend some of his time
at Rome. Horace himself tells how Vergil and Varius introduced him to
Maecenas (_Sat_. 1. 6), an important event in his career that took place
some time before the Brundisian journey (_Sat_. 1. 5). Maecenas had
hesitated somewhat before accepting the intimacy of the young satirist:
Horace had fought quite recently in the enemy's army, had criticized
the government in his _Epodes_, and was of a class--at least
technically--which Octavian had been warned not to recognize socially,
unless he was prepared to offend the old nobility. But Horace's dignified
candor won him the confidence of Maecenas; and that there might be no
misunderstanding he included in his first book of _Satires_ a simple
account of what he was and hoped to be. Thus through the efforts of
Vergil and Varius he entered the circle whose guiding spirit he was
destined to become.
Thus the coterie was formed, which under such powerful patronage was
bound to become a sort of unofficial commission for the regulation of
literary standards. It was an important question, not only for the young
men themselves but for the future of Roman literature, which direction
this group would take and whose influence would predominate. It might be
Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his
ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse. This Etruscan,
whose few surviving pages reveal the fact that he never acquired
an understanding of the dignity of Rome's language, that he was
temperamentally un-Roman in his love for meretricious gaudiness and
prettiness, might have worked incalculable harm on this school had his
taste in the least affected it. But whether he withheld his dictum, or it
was disregarded by the others, no influence of his can be detected in the
literature of the epoch.
Apollodorus, Octavian's aged teacher, a man of very great personal
influence, and highly respected, probably counted for more. In his
lectures and his books, one of which, Valgius, a member of the circle,
translated into Latin, he preached the doctrines of a chaste and
dignified classicism. His creed fortunately fell in with the tendencies
of the time, and whether this teaching be called a cause, or whether the
popularity of it be an effect of pre-existing causes, we know that this
man came to represent many of the ideals of the school.
But to trace these ideals in their contact with Vergil's mental
development, we must look back for a moment to the tendencies of the
Catullan age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not
many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their
styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions
first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard. Then there are
Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful
directness he does approve. In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents
a homely plainness which he commends, while Vergil stands for gentleness
and urbanity (molle atque facetum).
[Footnote 4: _Sat_. I. 10, 40 ff.]
The passage is important not only because it reveals a contemporaneous
view of Vergil's position but because it shows Horace thus early as the
spokesman of the "classical" coterie, the tenets of which in the end
prevailed. In this passage Horace employs the categories of the standard
text-books of rhetoric of that day[5] which were accustomed to classify
styles into four types: (1) Grand and ornate, (2) grand but austere, (3)
plain and austere, (4) plain but graceful. The first two styles might
obviously be used in forensic prose or in ambitious poetic work like
epics and tragedies. Horace would clearly reject the former, represented
for instance by Hortensius and Pacuvius, in favor of the austere dignity
and force of the second, affected by men like Cornificius in prose and
Varius and Pollio in verse. The two types of the "plain" style were
employed in more modest poems of literature, both, in prose and in such
poetry as comedy, the epyllion, in pastoral verse, and the like. Severe
simplicity was favored by Calvus in his orations, Catullus in his
lyrics 5 while a more polished and well-nigh _précieuse_ plainness was
illustrated in the speeches of Calidius and in the Alexandrian epyllion
of Catullus' _Peleus and Thetis_ and in Vergil's _Ciris_ and _Bucolics_.
[Footnote 5: E.g. Demetrius, Philodemus, Cicero; of. _Class. Phil_. 1920,
p. 230.]
In choosing between these two, Horace, of course, sympathizes with the
ideals of the severe and chaste style, which he finds in the comedies of
Fundanius. Vergil's early work, unambitious and "plain" though it is,
falls, of course, into the last group; and though Horace recognizes his
type with a friendly remark, one feels that he recognizes it for reasons
of friendship, rather than because of any native sympathy for it. By his
juxtaposition he shows that the classical ideals of the second and third
of the four "styles" are to him most sympathetic. _Mollitudo_ does not
find favor in any of his own work, or in his criticism of other men's
work. Vergil, therefore, though he appears in this Augustan coterie as
an important member, is still felt to be something of a free lance who
adheres to Alexandrian art[6] not wholly in accord with the standards
which are now being formulated. If Horace had obeyed his literary
instincts alone he would probably have relegated Vergil at this period
to the silence he accorded Callus and Propertius if not to the open
hostility he expressed towards the Alexandrianism of Catullus. It is
significant of Vergil's breadth of sympathy that he remitted not a jot in
his devotion to Catullus and Gallus and that he won the deep reverence of
Propertius while remaining the friend and companion of the courtly group
working towards a stricter classicism. If we may attempt to classify
the early Augustans, we find them aligning themselves thus. The strict
classicists are Horace the satirist, Varius a writer of epics, Pollio
of tragedy; while Varus, Valgius, Plotius, and Fundanius, though less
productive, employ their influence in the support of this tendency as
does Tibullus somewhat later. Vergil is a close personal friend of these
men but refuses to accept the axioms of any one school; Gallus, his
friend, is a free romanticist, and is followed in this tendency a few
years later by Propertius.
[Footnote 6: Horace had doubtless seen not only the _Culex_ but several
of the other minor works that Vergil never deigned to put into general
circulation.]
The influences that made for classicism were many. Apollodorus, the
teacher of Octavian, must have been a strong factor, but since his work
has been lost, the weight of it cannot now be estimated. Horace imbibed
his love for severe ideals in Athens, of course. There his teachers were
Stoic rhetoricians who trained him in an uncompromising respect for
stylistic rules.[7] He read the Hellenistic poets, to be sure, and
reveals in his poems a ready memory of them, but it was the great epoch
of Greek poetry that formed his style. Such are the foreign influences.
But the native Roman factors must not be forgotten. In point of fact it
was the classicistic Catullus and Calvus, of the simple, limpid lyrics,
written in pure unalloyed every-day Latin, that taught the new generation
to reject the later Hellenistic style of Catullus and Calvus as
illustrated in the verse romances. Varus, Pollio, and Varius were old
enough to know Catullus and Calvus personally, to remember the days when
poems like _Dianae sumus in fide_ were just issued, and they were poets
who could value the perfect art of such work even after the authors of
them had been enticed by ambition into dangerous by-paths. In a word, it
was Catullus and Calvus, the lyric poets, who made it possible for the
next generation to reject Catullus and Calvus the neoteric romancers.
[Footnote 7: For the stylistic tenets of the Stoic teachers see
Fiske, _Lucilius and Horace_, pp. 64-143. Apollodorus seems to be the
rhetorician whom Horace calls Heliodorus in _Sat_. I, 5, see _Class.
Phil_. 1920, 393.]
For the modern, therefore, it is difficult to restrain a just resentment
when he finds Horace referring to these two great predecessors with a
sneer. Yet we can, if we will, detect an adequate explanation of Horace's
attitude. Very few poets of any time have been able to capture and hold
the generation immediately succeeding. The stronger the impression made
by a genius, the farther away is the pendulum of approbation apt to
swing. The _neoteroi_ had to face, in addition to this revulsion, the
misfortunes of the time. The civil wars which came close upon them had
little use for the sentimentality of their romances or the involutions
of their manner of composition. And again, Catullus and Calvus had been
over-brutal in their attacks upon Julius Caesar, a character lifted to
the high heavens by the war and the martyrdom that followed. And, as
fortune would have it, almost all of the new literary men were, as we
have seen, peculiarly devoted to Caesar. We know enough of wars to have
discovered that intense partizanship does silence literary judgment
except in the case of a very few men of unusual balance. Vergil was one
of the very few; he kept his candle lit at the shrine of Catullus still,
but this was hardly to be expected of the rest.
In prose also the Augustans upheld the refined and chaste work of
classical Atticism, an ideal which they derived from the Romans of the
preceding generation rather than from teachers like Apollodorus. Pollio
and Messalla are now the foremost orators. Pollio had stood close to
Calvus as well as to Caesar, and had witnessed the revulsion of feeling
against Cicero's style which continued to move in its old leisurely
course even after the civil war had quickened men's pulses. Messalla may
have been influenced by the example of his general, Brutus, a man who
never wasted words (so long as he kept his temper). Messalla and Pollio
were the dictators of prose style during this period.
We find Vergil, therefore, in a peculiar position. He was still
recognized as a pupil of Catullus and the Alexandrians at a time when the
pendulum was swinging so violently away from the republican poets that
they did not even get credit for the lessons that they had so well taught
the new generation. Vergil himself was in each new work drifting more and
more toward classicism, but he continued to the last to honor
Catullus and Calvus, Cinna and Cornificius, and his friend Gallus, in
complimentary imitation or by friendly mention. The new Academy was proud
to claim him as a member, though it doubtless knew that Vergil was too
great to be bound by rules. To after ages, while Horace has come to stand
as an extremist who carried the law beyond the spirit, Vergil, honoring
the past and welcoming the future, has assumed the position of Rome's
most representative poet.
XIV
THE "GEORGICS"