been a season of reading, traveling, observing, and brooding. Maecenas
desired to keep the poet at Rome, and as an inducement provided him with
a villa in his own gardens on the Esquiline. The fame of the _digitus
praetereuntium_ awaited his coming and going, his _Bucolics_ had been set
to music and sung in the concert halls to vehement applause.[1] He seems
even to have made an effort to be socially congenial. There is intimate
knowledge of courtly customs in the staging of his epic; and in Horace's
fourth book a refurbished early poem in Philodemus' manner pictures a
Vergil--apparently the poet--as the pet of the fashionable world. But
these things had no attraction for him. Rome indeed appealed to his
imagination, _Roma pulcherrima rerum_, but it was the invisible Rome
rather than the _fumum et opes strepitumque_, it was the city of pristine
ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. When
he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in
their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the
straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the
spirit of Jove had guarded a folk of simpler piety.[2] And down the
centuries he beheld the heroes, the law-givers, and the rulers, who had
made the Forum the court of a world-wide empire. The Rome of his own day
was too feverish, it soon drove him back to his garden villa near Naples.
[Footnote 1: Tacitus, _Dialogus_, 13: Malo securum et quietum Vergilii
secessum, in quo tamen neque apud divum Augustum gratia caruit neque apud
populum Romanum notitia. Testes Augusti epistulae, testis ipse populus,
qui auditis in theatro Vergilii versibus surrexit universus et forte
praesentem spectantemque Vergilium veneratus est quasi Augustum.]
[Footnote 2: _Aeneid_ VIII.]
It was well that he possessed such a retreat during those years of petty
political squabbles. The capital still hummed with rumors of civil war.
Antony seemed determined to sever the eastern provinces from the empire
and make of them a gift to Cleopatra and her children--a mad course that
could only end in another world war. Sextus Pompey still held Sicily and
the central seas, ready to betray the state at the first mis-step on
Octavian's part. At Rome itself were many citizens in high position who
were at variance with the government, quite prepared to declare for
Antony or Pompey if either should appear a match for the young heir of
Caesar. Clearly the great epic of Rome could not have matured in that
atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and selfishness. The convulsions of
the dying republic, beheld day by day near at hand, could only have
inspired a disgust sufficient to poison a poet's sensitive hope. It was
indeed fortunate that Vergil could escape all this, that he could retain
through the period of transition the memories of Rome's former greatness
and the faith in her destiny that he had imbibed in his youth. The time
came when Octavian, after Actium, reunited the Empire with a firm hand
and justified the buoyant optimism which Vergil, almost alone of his
generation, had been able to preserve.
During these few years Vergil seems to have written but little. We have,
however, a strange poem of thirty-eight lines, the _Copa_, which, to
judge from its exclusion from the _Catalepton_, should perhaps be
assigned to this period. A study in tempered realism, not unlike the
eighth _Eclogue_, it gives us the song of a Syrian tavern-maid inviting
wayfarers into her inn from the hot and dusty road. The spirit is
admirably reproduced in Kirby Smith's rollicking translation:[3]
[Footnote 3: See Kirby Flower Smith, _Marital, the Epigrammatist and,
Other Essays_, Johns Hopkins Press, 1920, p. 170. The attribution of the
poem to Vergil by the ancients as well as by the manuscripts, and the
style of its fanciful realism so patent in much of Vergil's work place
the poem in the authentic list. Rand, _Young Virgil's Poetry_, Harvard
Studies, 1919, p. 174, has well summed up the arguments regarding the
authorship of the poem.]
'Twas at a smoke-stained tavern, and she, the hostess there--
A wine-flushed Syrian damsel, a turban on her hair--
Beat out a husky tempo from reeds in either hand,
And danced--the dainty wanton--an Ionian saraband.
"'Tis hot," she sang, "and dusty; nay, travelers, whither bound?
Bide here and tip a beaker--till all the world goes round;
Bide here and have for asking wine-pitchers, music, flowers,
Green pergolas, fair gardens, cool coverts, leafy bowers.
In our Arcadian grotto we have someone to play
On Pan-pipes, shepherd fashion, sweet music all the day.
We broached a cask but lately; our busy little stream
Will gurgle softly near you the while you drink and dream.
Chaplets of yellow violets a-plenty you shall find,
And glorious crimson roses in garlands intertwined;
And baskets heaped with lilies the water nymph shall bring--
White lilies that this morning were mirrored in her spring.
Here's cheese new pressed in rushes for everyone who comes,
And, lo, Pomona sends us her choicest golden plums.
Red mulberries await you, late purple grapes withal,
Dark melons cased in rushes against the garden wall,
Brown chestnuts, ruddy apples. Divinities bide here,
Fair Ceres, Cupid, Bacchus, those gods of all good cheer,
Priapus too--quite harmless, though terrible to see--
Our little hardwood warden with scythe of trusty tree.
"Ho, friar with the donkey, turn in and be our guest!
Your donkey--Vesta's darling--is weary; let him rest.
In every tree the locusts their shrilling still renew,
And cool beneath the brambles the lizard lies perdu.
So test our summer-tankards, deep draughts for thirsty men;
Then fill our crystal goblets, and souse yourself again.
Come, handsome boy, you're weary! 'Twere best for you to twine
Your heavy head with roses and rest beneath our vine,
Where dainty arms expect you and fragrant lips invite;
Oh, hang the strait-laced model that plays the anchorite!
Sweet garlands for cold ashes why should you care to save?
Or would you rather keep them to lay upon your grave?
Nay, drink and shake the dice-box. Tomorrow's care begone!
Death plucks your sleeve and whispers: 'Live now, I come anon.'"
Memories of the Neapolitan bay! The _Copa_ should be read in the arbor of
an _osteria_ at Sorrento or Capri to the rhythm of the tarantella where
the modern offspring of Vergil's tavern-maid are still plying the arts of
song and dance upon the passerby.[4]
[Footnote 4: Unfortunately the evidence does not suffice to assign the
_Moretum_ to Vergil, though it was certainly composed by a genuine if
somewhat halting poet, and in Vergil's day. It has many imaginative
phrases, and the meticulous exactness of its miniature work might seem to
be Vergilian were it not for the unrelieved plainness of the theme. Even
so, it might be considered an experiment in a new style, if the rather
dubious manuscript evidence were supported by a single ancient citation.
See Rand, _loc. Cit._ p. 178.]
There are also three brief _Priapea_ which should probably be assigned to
this period. The third may indeed have been an inscription on a pedestal
of the scare-crow god set out to keep off thieving rooks and urchins in
the poet's own garden:
This place, my lads, I prosper, I guard the hovel, too,
Thatched, as you see, by willows and reeds and grass that grew
In all the marsh about it; hence me, mere stump of oak,
Shaped by the farmer's hatchet, they now as god invoke.
They bring me gifts devoutly, the master and his boy,
Supposing me the giver of the blessings they enjoy.
The kind old man each morning comes here to weed the ground,
He clears the shrine of thistles and burrs that grow around.
The lad brings dainty offerings with small but ready hand:
At dawn of spring he crowns me with a lavish daisy-strand,
From summer's earliest harvest, while still the stalk is green,
He wreathes my brow with chaplets; he fills me baskets clean
With golden pansies, poppies, with apples ripe and gourds,
The first rich blushing clusters of grapes for me he hoards.
And once to my great honor--but let no god be told!--
He brought me to my altar a lambkin from the fold.
So though, my lads, a Scare-Crow and no true god I be,
My master and his vineyard are very dear to me.
Keep off your filching hands, lads, and elsewhere ply your theft:
Our neighbor is a miser, his Scare-Crow gets no gifts,
His apples are not guarded--the path is on your left.
The quaint simplicity of the sentiment and the playful surprise at the
end quickly disarm any skepticism that would deny these lines to Horace's
poet of "tender humor."
During this period the poet seems also to have traveled. Maecenas enjoyed
the society of literary men, and we may well suppose that he took Vergil
with him in his administrative tours on more than the one occasion
which Horace happens to have recorded. The poet certainly knows Italy
remarkably well. The meager and inaccurate maps and geographical works of
that day could not have provided him with the insight into details which
the Georgics and the last six books of the _Aeneid_ reveal. We know, of
course, from Horace's third ode that Vergil went to Greece. This famous
poem, a "steamer-letter" as it were, is undated, but it may well be a
continuation of the Brundisian diary. The strange turn which the poem
takes--its dread of the sea's dangers--seems to point to a time when
Horace's memories of his own shipwreck were still very vivid.
There was also time for extensive reading. That Vergil ranged widely and
deeply in philosophy and history, antiquities and all the world's best
prose and poetry, the vast learning of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_
abundantly proves. The epic story which he had early plotted out must
have lain very near the threshold of his consciousness through this
period, for his mind kept seizing upon and storing up apposite incidents
and germs of fruitful lore. References to Aeneas crop out here and there
in the _Georgics_, and the mysterious address to Mantua in the third book
promises, under allusive metaphors, an epic of Trojan heroes. Nor could
the poet forget the philosophic work he had so long pondered over. Doubts
increased, however, of his capacity to justify himself after the sure
success of Lucretius. A remarkable confession in the second book of the
_Georgics_ reveals his conviction that in this poem he had, through
lack of confidence, chosen the inferior theme of nature's physical
and sensuous appeal when he would far rather have experienced the
intellectual joy of penetrating into nature's inner mysteries.[5]
[Footnote 5:
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus-amore,
Accipiant, caelique vias et sidera monstrent--
Sin, has ne possim naturae accedere partes,
Frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis,
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes.
_Georgics_, II. 475. ff.
Was this striking _apologia of the Georgics_ forced upon Vergil by
the fact that in the _Aetna_, 264-74, he had pronounced peasant-lore
trivial in comparison with science?]
Though we need not take too literally a poet's prefatorial remarks,
Vergil doubtless hoped that his _Georgics_ might turn men's thoughts
towards a serious effort at rehabilitating agriculture, and the
practical-minded Maecenas certainly encouraged the work with some such
aim in view. The government might well be deeply concerned. The veterans
who had recently settled many of Italy's best tracts could not have
been skilled farmers. The very fact that the lands were given them for
political services could only have suggested to the shrewd among them
that the old Roman respect for property rights had been infringed,
and that it was wise to sell as soon as possible and depart with some
tangible gain before another revolution resulted in a new redistribution.
Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the
development of agriculture. And yet this was the very time when farming
must be encouraged. Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to
grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the
provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising
the amount of food that her population required. As a result, the younger
Pompey's control of Sicily and the trade routes had now brought on a
series of famines and consequent bread-riots. Year after year Octavian
failed in his attempts to lure away or to defeat this obnoxious rebel.
At best he could buy him off for a while, though he never knew at what
season of scarcity the purchase price might become prohibitive. The
choice of Vergil's subject coincided, therefore, with a need that all men
appreciated.
The _Georgics_, however, are not written in the spirit of a colonial
advertisement. In the youthful _Culex_ Vergil had dwelt somewhat too
emphatically upon the song-birds and the cool shade, and had drawn upon
himself the genial comment of Horace that Alfius did not find conditions
in the country quite as enchanting as pictured. This time the poet paints
no idealized landscape. Enticing though the picture is, Vergil insists on
the need of unceasing, ungrudging toil. He lists the weeds and blights,
the pests and the vermin against which the farmer must contend. Indeed
it is in the contemplation of a life of toil that he finds his honest
philosophy of life: the gospel of salvation through work. Hardships whet
the ingenuity of man; God himself for man's own good brought an end to
the age of golden indolence, shook the honey from the trees, and gave
vipers their venom. Man has been left alone to contend with an obstinate
nature, and in that struggle to discover his own worth. The _Georgics_
are far removed from pastoral allegory; Italy is no longer Arcadia, it is
just Italy in all its glory and all its cruelty.
Vergil's delight in nature is essentially Roman, though somewhat
more self-conscious than that of his fellows. There is little of the
sentimental rapture that the eighteenth century discovered for us. Vergil
is not likely to stand in postures before the awful solemnity of the
sea or the majesty of wide vistas from mountain tops. Italian hill-tops
afford views of numerous charming landscapes but no scenes of entrancing
grandeur or awe-inspiring desolation, and the sea, before the days of the
compass, was too suggestive of death and sorrow to invite consideration
of its lawless beauty. These aspects of nature had to be discovered by
later experiences in other lands. At first glance Vergil seems to care
most for the obvious gifts of Italy's generous amenities, the physical
pleasure in the free out-of-doors, the form and color of landscapes,
the wholesome life. As one reads on, however, one becomes aware of an
intimacy and fellowship with animate things that go deeper. Particularly
in the second book the very blades of grass and tendrils of the vines
seem to be sentient. The grafted trees "behold with wonder" strange
leaves and fruits growing from their stems, transplanted shoots "put off
their wild-wood instincts," the thirsting plant "lifts up its head" in
gratitude when watered. Our own generation, which was sedulously enticed
into nature study by books crammed with the "pathetic fallacy," has
become suspicious of everything akin to "nature faking." It has learned
that this device has been a trick employed by a crafty pedagogy for the
sake of appealing to unimaginative children. Vergil was probably far from
being conscious of any such purpose. As a Roman he simply gave expression
to a mode of viewing nature that still seemed natural to most Greeks and
Romans. The Roman farmer had not entirely outgrown his primitive animism.
When he said his prayers to the spirits of the groves, the fields, and
the streams, he probably did not visualize these beings in human form;
manifestations of life betokened spirits that produced life and growth.
Vergil's phrases are the poetic expression of the animism of the
unsophisticated rustic which at an earlier age had shaped the great
nature myths.
And if Vergil had been questioned about his own faith he could well have
found a consistent answer. Though he had himself long ceased to pay
homage to these _animae_, his philosophy, like that of Lucretius, also
sought the life-principle in nature, though he sought that principle a
step farther removed in the atom, the vitalized seeds of things, forever
in motion, forever creating new combinations, and forever working the
miracles of life by means of the energy with which they were themselves
instinct. The memorable lines on spring in the second book are cast into
the form of old poetry, but the basis of them is Epicurean energism, as
in Lucretius' prooemium. Vergil's study of evolution had for him also
united man and nature, making the romance of the _Georgics_ possible; it
had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the
language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him
more complex and subtle.
Finally, the careful reader will discover in Vergil's nature poetry a
very modern attention to details such as we hardly expect to find before
the nineteenth century. Here again Vergil is Lucretius' companion.
This habit was apparently a composite product. The ingredients are the
capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and
Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long
occupation with deductive methods of philosophy,--scientific pursuits
have thus enriched modern poetry also--and a sure aesthetic sense.
This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil's
commentators. Conington, for example, has frequently done the poet an
injustice by assuming that Vergil was in error whenever his statements
seem not to accord with what we happen to know. We have now learned to be
more wary. It is usually a safer assumption that our observation is
in error. A recent study of "trees, shrubs and plants of Vergil,"
illuminating in numberless details, has fallen into the same error here
and there by failing to notice that Vergil wrote his _Bucolics_ and
_Georgics_ not near Mantua but in southern Italy. The modern botanical
critic of Vergil should, as Mackail has said, study the flora of Campania
not of Lombardy. In every line of composition Vergil took infinite
pains to give an accurate setting and atmosphere. Carcopino[6] has just
astonished us with proof of the poet's minute study of topographical
details in the region of Lavinium and Ostia, Mackail[7] has vindicated
his care as an antiquarian, Warde Fowler[8] has repeatedly pointed
out his scrupulous accuracy in portraying religious rites, and now
Sergeaunt,[9] in a study of his botany, has emphasized his habit of
making careful observations in that domain.
[Footnote 6: Carcopino, _Virgile et les origines d'Ostie_.]
[Footnote 7: Mackail, _Journal of Roman Studies_, 1915.]
[Footnote 8: Warde Fowler, _Religious Experience of the Roman
People_. p. 408.]
[Footnote 9: Sergeaunt, _Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil_.]
This modern habit it is that makes the _Georgics_ read so much like
Fabre's remarkable essays. The study of the bees in the fourth book is,
of course, not free from errors that nothing less than generations of
close scrutiny could remove. But the right kind of observing has begun.
On the other hand the book is not merely a farmer's practical manual
on how to raise bees for profit. The poet's interest is in the amazing
insects themselves, their how and why and wherefore. It is the mystery
of their instincts, habits, and all-compelling energy that leads him to
study the bees, and finally to the half-concealed confession that his
philosophy has failed to solve the problems of animate nature.
XV
THE AENEID
While Caesar Octavian, now grown to full political stature, was reuniting
the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of
the _Georgics_. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the
poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar,
unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing
now that Rome was saved and the empire restored. Vergil's youthful
enthusiasm for Rome, which had sprung from a critical reading of her past
career, seemed fully justified; he began at once his _Arma virumque_.
The _Aeneid_ reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have
reiterated, an unsurpassed range of reading. But it is not necessary
to repeat the evidence of Vergil's literary obligations in an essay
concerned chiefly with the poet's more intimate experiences. In point of
fact, the tracking of poetic reminiscences in a poet who lived when no
concealment of borrowed thought was demanded does as much violence to
Vergil as it does to Euripides or Petrarch. The poet has always been
expected to give expression to his own convictions, but until recently it
has been considered a graceful act on his part to honor the good work of
his predecessors by the frank use, in recognizable form, of the lines
that he most admires. The only requirement has been that the poet should
assimilate, and not merely agglomerate his acceptances, that he should as
Vergil put it, "wrest the club from Hercules" and wield it as its master.
In essence the poetry of the _Aeneid_ is never Homeric, despite the
incorporation of many Homeric lines. It is rather a sapling of Vergil's
Hellenistic garden, slowly acclimated to the Italian soil, fed richly by
years of philosophic study, braced, pruned, and reared into a tree of
noble strength and classic dignity. The form and majesty of the tree
bespeak infinite care in cultivation, but the fruit has not lost the
delicate tang and savour of its seed. The poet of the _Ciris_, the
_Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the _Bucolics_ is never far to seek in the
_Aeneid_.
It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the
seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.[1] The note of intimacy,
unexpected in an epic, the occasional drawing of the veil to reveal the
poet's own countenance, an un-Homeric sentimentality now and then, the
great abundance of sense-teeming collocations, the depth of sympathy
revealed in such tragic characters as Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, the
insistent study of inner motives, the meticulous selection of incidents,
the careful artistry of the meter, the fastidious choice of words, and
the precision of the joiner's craft in the composition of traditional
elements, all suggest the habits of work practiced by the friends of
Cinna and Valerius Cato.
[Footnote 1: For a careful study of this subject see Duckett,
_Hellenistic Influence on the Aeneid,_ Smith College Studies, 1920.]