by Virgil
‘quae nunc deinde mora est? aut quid iam, Turne, retractas?
“And wherewith wilt thou tarry me? hangs Turnus back again?
non cursu, saeuis certandum est comminus armis. 890
No foot-strife but the armèd hand must doom betwixt us twain.
uerte omnis tete in facies et contrahe quidquid
Yea, turn thyself to every shape, and, gathering everything
siue animis siue arte uales; opta ardua pennis
Wherewith thine heart, thy craft is strong, go soaring on the wing,
astra sequi clausumque caua te condere terra.’
And chase the stars; or deep adown in hollow earth lie stored.”
ille caput quassans: ‘non me tua feruida terrent
But Turnus shakes his head and saith: “’Tis not thy bitter word
dicta, ferox; di me terrent et Iuppiter hostis.’ 895
That frights me, fierce one; but the Gods, but Jove my foeman grown.”
nec plura effatus saxum circumspicit ingens,
No more he said, but, looking round, espied a weighty stone,
saxum antiquum ingens, campo quod forte iacebat,
An ancient mighty rock indeed, that lay upon the lea,
limes agro positus litem ut discerneret aruis.
Set for a landmark, judge and end of acre-strife to be,
uix illum lecti bis sex ceruice subirent,
Which scarce twice six of chosen men upon their backs might raise,
qualia nunc hominum producit corpora tellus; 900
Of bodies such as earth brings forth amid the latter days:
ille manu raptum trepida torquebat in hostem
But this in hurrying hand he caught, and rising to the cast,
altior insurgens et cursu concitus heros.
He hurled it forth against the foe, and followed on it fast;
sed neque currentem se nec cognoscit euntem
Yet while he raised the mighty stone, and flung it to its fall.
tollentemue manu saxumue immane mouentem;
Knew nought that he was running there, or that he moved at all:
genua labant, gelidus concreuit frigore sanguis. 905
Totter his knees, his chilly blood freezes with deadly frost,
tum lapis ipse uiri uacuum per inane uolutus
And e’en the hero-gathered stone, through desert distance tossed,
nec spatium euasit totum neque pertulit ictum.
O’ercame not all the space betwixt, nor home its blow might bring:
ac uelut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
E’en as in dreaming-tide of night, when sleep, the heavy thing,
nocte quies, nequiquam auidos extendere cursus
Weighs on the eyes, and all for nought we seem so helpless-fain
uelle uidemur et in mediis conatibus aegri 910
Of eager speed, and faint and fail amidmost of the strain;
succidimus; non lingua ualet, non corpore notae
The tongue avails not; all our limbs of their familiar skill
sufficiunt uires nec uox aut uerba sequuntur:
Are cheated; neither voice nor words may follow from our will:
sic Turno, quacumque uiam uirtute petiuit,
So Turnus, by whatever might he strives to win a way,
successum dea dira negat. tum pectore sensus
The Dread One bans his hope; strange thoughts about his heart-strings play;
uertuntur uarii; Rutulos aspectat et urbem 915
He stareth on his Rutuli, and on the Latin town
cunctaturque metu letumque instare tremescit,
Lingering for dread, trembling to meet the spear this instant thrown:
nec quo se eripiat, nec qua ui tendat in hostem,
No road he hath to flee, no might against the foe to bear;
nec currus usquam uidet aurigamue sororem.
Nowhither may he see his car, or sister charioteer.
Cunctanti telum Aeneas fatale coruscat,
Æneas, as he lingereth there, shaketh the fateful shaft,
sortitus fortunam oculis, et corpore toto 920
And, following up its fate with eyes, afar the steel doth waft
eminus intorquet. murali concita numquam
With all the might his body hath: no stone the wall-sling bears
tormento sic saxa fremunt nec fulmine tanti
E’er roars so loud: no thunderclap with such a crashing tears
dissultant crepitus. uolat atri turbinis instar
Amid the heaven: on flew the spear, huge as the whirlwind black,
exitium dirum hasta ferens orasque recludit
And speeding on the dreadful death: it brings to utter wrack
loricae et clipei extremos septemplicis orbis; 925
The hauberk’s skirt and outer rim of that seven-folded shield,
per medium stridens transit femur. incidit ictus
And goeth grating through the thigh: then falleth unto field
ingens ad terram duplicato poplite Turnus.
Huge Turnus, with his hampered knee twi-folded with the wound:
consurgunt gemitu Rutuli totusque remugit
Then with a groan the Rutuli rise up, and all around
mons circum et uocem late nemora alta remittunt.
Roar back the hill-sides, and afar the groves cast back the cry:
ille humilis supplex oculos dextramque precantem 930
But he, downcast and suppliant saith, with praying hand and eye:
protendens ‘equidem merui nec deprecor’ inquit;
“Due doom it is; I pray no ruth; use what hath chanced to fall.
‘utere sorte tua. miseri te si qua parentis
Yet, if a wretched father’s woe may touch thine heart at all,
tangere cura potest, oro (fuit et tibi talis
I pray thee — since Anchises once was even such to thee, —
Anchises genitor) Dauni miserere senectae
Pity my father Daunus’ eld, and send me, or, maybe,
et me, seu corpus spoliatum lumine mauis, 935
My body stripped of light and life, back to my kin and land.
redde meis. uicisti et uictum tendere palmas
Thou, thou hast conquered: Italy has seen my craven hand
Ausonii uidere; tua est Lauinia coniunx,
Stretched forth to pray a grace of thee; Lavinia is thy wife:
ulterius ne tende odiis.’ stetit acer in armis
Strain not thine hatred further now!” Fierce in the gear of strife
Aeneas uoluens oculos dextramque repressit;
Æneas stood with rolling eyes, and held back hand and sword,
et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere sermo 940
And more and more his wavering heart was softening ‘neath the word —
coeperat, infelix umero cum apparuit alto
When lo, upon the shoulder showed that hapless thong of war!
balteus et notis fulserunt cingula bullis
Lo, glittering with familiar boss the belt child Pallas bore,
Pallantis pueri, uictum quem uulnere Turnus
Whom Turnus with a wound overcame and laid on earth alow,
strauerat atque umeris inimicum insigne gerebat.
And on his body bore thenceforth those ensigns of his foe.
ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris 945
But he, when he awhile had glared upon that spoil of fight,
exuuiasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira
That monument of bitter grief, with utter wrath alight,
terribilis: ‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum
Cried terrible: “And shalt thou, clad in my beloved one’s prey,
eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas
Be snatched from me? — Tis Pallas yet, ’tis Pallas thus doth slay,
immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.’
And taketh of thy guilty blood atonement for his death!”
hoc dicens ferrum aduerso sub
pectore condit 950
Deep in that breast he driveth sword e’en as the word he saith:
feruidus; ast illi soluuntur frigore membra
But Turnus, — waxen cold and spent, the body of him lies,
uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.
And with a groan through dusk and dark the scornful spirit flies.
The Biographies
Brindisi harbour, Apulia region of Italy — having left Greece and crossed back to Italy by ship, while weakened with disease, Virgil died in Brundisium harbour on September 21, 19 BC.
LIFE OF VIRGIL by H. R. Fairclough
Publius Vergilius Maro was born October 15, 70 B.C., at Andes, a district near Mantua. He was "of rustic parentage, and brought up in the bush and forest," but his father gave him a careful education, first at Cremona, then at Milan, and lastly at Rome. In the capital he studied especially under Epidius the rhetorician, and Siro, a distinguished
Epicurean.
To his student-days must belong the short poems known as Catalepton (Kara Actttov, i.e. "small"), if indeed any of these are genuine. To the same period would belong the rest of the minor poems — the Culex, Ciris, Copa, Dirae, Priapea, Aetna, and Moretum—though it is very doubtful whether any of these are authentic.
Virgil's second period begins with 43 e.g., when, after Caesar's assassination, we find the poet again in Mantua. In that year the second triumvirate was formed, and in the year following Brutus and Cassius were defeated at Philippi. In the subsequent allotment of lands to the victorious veterans Cremona and Mantua suffered severely. The poet was dispossessed of his farm and, attempting resistance, barely escaped with his life. However, he found a friend in C. Asinius Pollio, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and in Pollio's successor (41 B.C.), L. Alfenus Varus. Through Pollio he was introduced to Octavius, and either recovered his farm or received in compensation an estate in Campania.
The poems in which Virgil records his experience at this time are the ten Eclogues, or Bucolics, which were published in their present order in 37 b.c. The two that are mainly concerned with the poet's expulsion from his farm are the first and ninth, but at least three, viz. the second, third, and fifth (with probably the seventh as well), preceded the first in point of time and, like it, were written in the poet's native district. The sixth and ninth were composed at Siro's villa; the remainder, viz. the fourth, eighth, and tenth, were written in Rome. The first doubtless won its place in the series because of the tribute it pays to Octavius, who before 37 b.c. had become sole ruler in Italy.
Seven years were devoted to the Georgics, the four books of which were published in 29 b.c, two years after the battle of Actium. The work was undertaken at the request of Maecenas, to whom it is dedicated. Though a didatic poem, being a treatise on agriculture, the Georgics are perhaps the most carefully finished production of Roman literature.
The rest of Virgil's life was devoted to the Aeneid, the greatest of Roman epics. Before it was ready for publication Virgil set out in 19 b.c. for Greece and Asia, where he intended to spend the next three years in revising his work. At Athens, however, meeting Augustus on his homeward journey from the East, he was induced to return with the
Emperor to Italy. A fever, contracted at Megara, grew worse during the voyage, and ended in his death at Brundisium, a few days after landing, in the fifty-first year of his age, September 22, 19 b.c. He was buried at Naples, and on his tomb was inscribed the epitaph :
MANTUA ME GENUIT, CALABRI RAPUERE, TENET NUNC
PARTHENOPE ; CECINI PASCUA, RURA, DUCES.
Conscious of many imperfections in the Aeneid, Virgil had begged Varius (who along with Tucca was Virgil's literary executor), in the event of his death, to burn the epic. It was published, however, by order of Augustus, who directed the executors to edit it, removing all superfluities, but making no additions. Examples of passages removed are furnished by the prooemium of four lines at the beginning of the Aeneid, and by the Helen episode in the second book (11. 567-588). In both cases Virgil's dissatisfaction with the passages may have been known to his literary friends.
LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL by W. Y. Sellar
I.
The most trustworthy sources for our personal knowledge of the great writers of antiquity are their own writings, and accidental notices in the works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation. But besides these sources of information some short biographies of eminent Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times. In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome’s continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended to their own works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome, in the prefatory letter to his own work ‘De Viris Illustribus,’ mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius ‘De Viris Illustribus,’ written in the second century, and containing the lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief authority to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his ‘Lives of the Caesars’ indicate a vein of credulity in regard to the details of unverifiable charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary sources on which Suetonius could have based his narrative. In the case of some poets, notably of Virgil, it is quite certain that there was such evidence. In the case of others, notably of Lucretius, there is no hint whatever of the existence of any such evidence. The poets who immediately succeeded him and who were diligent students of his poem concur in absolute silence as to the story of that poet’s unhappy fate, told in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and now received by the most competent critics as resting on the authority of Suetonius. But even when we substitute Suetonius for Jerome as the original voucher for the facts stated, the uncertainty as to any contemporary evidence available to the former, and the sensational character of the story itself, justify at least a suspense of judgment in accepting or rejecting this meagre fragment of personal history; while on the other hand there is no ground for distrusting the main features, whatever may be said of some details, of the ancient life of Virgil, equally acknowledged to rest ultimately on the authority of Suetonius.
In addition to these materials for the biography of Latin writers, in some few cases the imagination is assisted in realising their character and genius by the preservation from ancient times of their statues, busts, images impressed on gems, or other kinds of portraiture. But in the case of men of letters, it is not often that reliance can be placed on the authenticity of such memorials, except in such instances as that of Cicero, where a great name in literature was combined with prominence in public life.
The data fo
r a knowledge of the life, circumstances, and personal characteristics of Virgil are supplied partly by direct statements contained in his poems or inferences founded on them; partly by the indirect impression of himself stamped on these poems; partly by casual notices in the works of other poets, and especially of Horace; and partly by statements in the Life of the poet originally prefixed to the Commentary of Aelius Donatus,—a grammarian who flourished in the fourth century A.D.,—and founded on, if not an actual reproduction of, the Life originally contained in the work of Suetonius.
The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two of the minor poems published among the Catalepton, which may without hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of the poet’s estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to philosophical studies. The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that supplied by Horace, Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge derived from other sources.
The Georgics and those parts of the Aeneid which are specially ethical and didactic, as that part of Book VI. from line 264 to 751, throw most light on Virgil’s spiritual nature and on his convictions on the questions of most vital interest to man. But in these parts of his works Virgil has not revealed himself with such distinctness and consistency as Lucretius has done in his great philosophical poem. The personality of Lucretius was simpler and more forcible: the passion to utter his strong convictions prevailed in him over all considerations of art. The colouring of his own heart and spirit, of his enthusiasm or melancholy, appears in Virgil rather as a pervading and subtly interpenetrating influence, than as the direct indication of his true self. His artistic taste enforced on him reserve in expressing what was personal to himself; his nature was apparently more open to varied influences of books and men than that of Lucretius; he was endowed with the many-sided susceptibility of a poet, rather than with the simpler, more energetic, but narrower consistency of a philosophical partisan. Equally with Lucretius he throws his whole heart and being into the treatment of his subject; but in Lucretius the two streams of what is personal to himself and what is inherent in his subject are still distinguishable. In Virgil the imaginative sentiment of the poet and the strong tender heart of the man seem to be inseparably united. It would be impossible to distinguish them by analysis,—to abstract from the bloom of his poetry the delicate sweetness which may have pervaded his performance of the common duties and his share in the common intercourse of life.