by Virgil
The Eclogues, commenced in his native district in the year 42 B.C., were completed and published at Rome probably in the year 37 B.C. They were at once received with great favour, and recited amid much applause upon the stage. They established the author’s fame as the poet of Nature and of rural life, as Varius was accepted as the poet of epic, Pollio of tragic poetry:—
Molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.
For a short time afterwards Virgil lived chiefly at Rome, as one of the circle of which Maecenas was the centre, consisting of those poets and men eminent in the State whom Horace (Sat i. 10) mentions as the critics and friends whose approval he valued. Our knowledge of Virgil at this time is derived from the first Book of the Satires of Horace. It was by Virgil and Varius that Horace himself was introduced to Maecenas. They were all three of the party who made the famous journey to Brundisium in 37 B.C. While Horace starts alone from Rome, Virgil and Varius join him at Sinuessa. Virgil may already have begun to withdraw from habitual residence in Rome to his retirement in Campania, where he principally lived from this time till his death. One line in this Satire confirms the account of the weakness of his health which is given by his biographer,—the line, namely, in which Horace describes himself and Virgil as going to sleep, while Maecenas went to enjoy the exercise of the ‘pila’:—
Lusum it Maecenas, dormitum ego Vergiliusque,
Namque pila lippis inimicum et ludere crudis.
There is no notice of Virgil in the second Book of the Satires, written between the years 35 and 30 B.C., at which time he had withdrawn altogether from Rome, and was living at Naples, engaged in the composition of the Georgics. Two of the Odes of Book I., however, the third and the twenty-fourth, throw some light on his circumstances and character, and on the relations of friendship subsisting between him and Horace. There is some difficulty in determining the occasion that gave rise to the first of these Odes. It is addressed to the ship which was to bear Virgil to Attica. As we only know of one voyage of Virgil to Attica, that immediately preceding his death, and as the first three Books of the Odes were originally published some years before that date, we must suppose either that this Ode refers to an earlier voyage contemplated or actually accomplished by Virgil; or that the Virgil here spoken of is a different person; or that the publication of the edition of the Odes which we possess was of a later date than that generally accepted. The reason for rejecting the second of these alternatives has been already given. Two reasons may be given for rejecting the third,—first, the improbability that one of the latest, if not the latest, in point of time among all the Odes in the three Books should be placed third in order in the first Book, among Odes that all refer to a much earlier period; and secondly, that this Ode, in respect of the somewhat conventional nature of the thought and the character of the mythological allusions, is clearly written in Horace’s earlier manner. There is no improbability in accepting the first alternative, that as Virgil travelled to and resided in Sicily, so he may have made, or at least contemplated, an earlier voyage to Greece. One object for such a voyage may have been the desire of seeing the localities which he represents Aeneas as passing or visiting in the course of his adventures between the time of leaving Troy and settling in Latium. The Aeneid indicates in many places the tastes of a cultivated traveller; and parts of the sea-voyage of Aeneas look as if they were founded on personal reminiscences.
It may be noticed in several of the Odes of Horace how he adapts the vein of thought running through them to the character or position of the person to whom they refer. The revival of the old Hesiodic and theological idea of the sin and impiety of that spirit of enterprise which led men first to brave the dangers of the sea, and to baffle the purpose of the Deity in separating nations from one another by the ocean,—an idea to which Virgil himself gives expression in the fourth Eclogue,—
Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis,
Quae temptare Thetim ratibus, etc.,—
is not unsuited to the unadventurous disposition of the older poet.
The twenty-fourth Ode is addressed to him on the occasion of the death of their common friend Quintilius Varus, probably the Varus of the tenth poem of Catullus, and thus one of the last survivors of the friendly circle of poets and wits of a former generation. While a high tribute to the pure character of their lost friend, it is at the same time a tribute to the pious and affectionate character of Virgil.
It is a delicate touch of appreciation that Horace dwells more on the thought of the depth of Virgil’s sorrow for their common friend than on his own. Both of these Odes give evidence of the strong affection which Virgil inspired; the second affords further evidence of the qualities in virtue of which he inspired that feeling. Similar proof of affection and appreciation is afforded by the words in which Horace in the fifth Satire of Book I. characterises Virgil (‘Vergilius optimus,’ as he elsewhere calls him), and his two friends Plotius and Varius,—
Animae quales neque candidiores
Terra tulit, neque queis me sit devinctior alter.
The word ‘candidiores’ suggests the same qualities of a beautiful nature,—the unworldly simplicity and sincerity, which are ascribed to Quintilius in the words ‘pudor, incorrupta fides, nudaque veritas.’
The seven years from 37 B.C. to 30 B.C. were devoted by Virgil to the composition of the Georgics, a poem scarcely exceeding 2000 lines in length. His chief residence at this time was Naples:—
Me dulcis alebat
Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti.
He possessed also at this time a country-house or estate in the neighbourhood of Nola; and the fourth Book affords evidence of some time spent at or in the neighbourhood of Tarentum which is confirmed by the lines in Propertius,—
Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus,—
the region prized by Horace as second only to his beloved Tibur. In the year 29 B.C. he read the whole poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia, at the town of Atella. The reading occupied four days. Maecenas was of the party, and relieved the poet in the task of reading.
The remaining years of his life were spent in the composition of the Aeneid. One of the poems of the Catalepta (vi.) gives expression to a vow binding the poet to sacrifice a bull to Venus if he succeeded in accomplishing the task which he had imposed on himself. So early as the year 26 B.C., Augustus while engaged in the Cantabrian war, had desired to see some part of the poem. It was in answer to that request that Virgil wrote the letter of which the fragment, quoted in the previous chapter, has been preserved by Macrobius. At a later time, after the death of the young Marcellus (23 B.C.), he read three Books to Augustus and the other members of his family.
After spending eleven years on the composition of his great epic, he set aside three more for its final correction. In the year 19 B.C. he set out with the view of travelling in Greece and Asia. Meeting Augustus at Athens, he was persuaded to abandon his purpose and return with him to Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun he was seized with illness. Continuing his voyage without interruption, he became worse, and on the 21st of September, a few days after landing at Brundisium, he died in the fifty-first year of his age. In his last illness he showed the ruling passion of his life—the craving perfection—by calling for the cases which held his MSS., with the intention of burning the Aeneid. It is in keeping with the absence of self-assertion in his writings that his final hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by such confident assurances of immortality as other Roman poets have expressed. In the same spirit of dissatisfaction with all imperfect accomplishment, he left directions in his will that his executors, Varius and Tucca, should publish nothing but what had been already edited by him. This direction, which would have deprived the world of the Aeneid, was disregarded by them in compliance with the commands of Augustus.
He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded
with religious veneration and visited as a temple; and tradition has associated his name, as that of a magician, with the construction of the great tunnel of Posilippo, in its immediate neighbourhood.
III.
The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an independent value as affording insight into social life and character, irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and intermingles with the even course of Virgil’s poetic career. And this may have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic faculty, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The ‘inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae’ thus betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been named. Virgil’s life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his career, from childhood to maturity, was an education, passive and active, for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art: in later life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by which his poetical gifts were fostered—that of living and varying his residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to his happiness, viz. that he suffered during all his life from delicate or variable health, was not unfavourable to the concentration of his whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the pleasures in which his contemporaries indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the poets and artists of a southern land is powerfully attracted. The abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the fact recorded of him that he ‘took very little food and wine,’ must have quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished. Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit, or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and greater power in delineating varied types of character: but in combination with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of Virgil would have been lost.
He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion, and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The ‘monstrari digito praetereuntium’ was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that gratification which Horace derived from it.
Both his parents lived till after the loss of his farm, when the poet was in his twenty-ninth year. Two brothers died before him, one while still a boy, the other after reaching manhood. To his half-brother Valerius Proculus he left one half of his estate. Augustus, Maecenas, and his two friends Varius and Tucca also received legacies. He was never married, nor is there any record in connexion with him of any of those temporary liaisons which the other poets of the Augustan Age formed and celebrated in their verse. Some modern critics arguing from a single expression in the Life by Donatus, and giving to a tradition connected with the subject of the second Eclogue a meaning which, even if the tradition was trustworthy, need not apply to it, have written of Virgil as if throughout his whole life he yielded to a laxity of morals from which perhaps some of his eminent contemporaries were not free, but which was condemned by the manlier instincts of Romans, as of all modern nations. The expression of Donatus is probably a mere survival of the calumnies against which Asconius vindicated Virgil’s character. The statement of the same biographer, that on account of his purity of speech and life he was known in Naples by the name ‘Parthenias,’ is at least as trustworthy evidence as that on which the imputations on his character have been revived. The levity and mendacity with which such calumnies were invented, and the attractions which they have for the baser nature of men in all times, sufficiently explain both the original existence and the later revival of these imputations. We are called upon not merely to disregard them as unproved, or irrelevant to our estimate of the poet’s art, but to reject them as incompatible with the singular purity and transparent sincerity of nature revealed in all the maturer works of his genius.
The cordial and discriminating language both of the Satires and the Odes of Horace confirms the impression of delicacy and simplicity of character suggested by the general tone of Virgil’s writings. The appreciation of Horace for Virgil reminds us of the touching tribute which the great comic poet of Athens pays to her greatest tragic poet, where he speaks of him as showing the same disposition among the Shades as he had shown in the world above—
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and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellow-dramatist to our own great poet, in the words ‘my gentle Shakespeare.’ The affection and admiration of the greatest of his contemporaries, surviving in the tradition handed on to future times, testify to Virgil’s exemption from the personal frailties and asperities to which the impressible and mobile temperament of genius is peculiarly liable.
His works do not present any single distinct impression of the poet himself, in his own character and convictions, separable from his artistic representation. Yet from the study of these works we are able to form a general conception of the disposition, affections, and moral sympathies which distinguish him from the other great writers of his country. We might perhaps without undue fancifulness express the dominant ethical or social characteristic—the ideal virtue or grace—of some of the great Roman writers by some word peculiarly expressive of Roman character or culture, and of frequent use in these writers themselves. Thus, in regard to Cicero, the man of quick susceptibility to praise and blame, to sympathy and coldness, who, except where his personal or political antagonism was roused, had the liveliest sense of the claims of kind offices and kind feeling which men have on one another, the word humanitas seems to sum up those qualities of heart and intellect which, in spite of the transparent weaknesses of his character, gained for him so much affection, and which, through the sympathy they enabled him to feel and arouse in others, were the secret of his unparalleled success as an advocate. To Lucretius we might apply the word sanctitas, in the sense in which he applies the word sanctus to the old philosophers, as expressive of that glow of reverential emotion which animates him in his search after truth and in his contemplation of Nature. His own words ‘lepor’ and ‘lepidus’ express the graceful vivacity, artistic and social rather than ethical,
which we associate with the thought of Catullus. The quality, mainly intellectual and social, but still not devoid of ethical content, of which Horace is the most perfect type, is ‘urbanitas.’ The full meaning of the great Roman word ‘gravitas’—the vital force of ethical feeling as well as the strength of character connoted by it, and by its sister-qualities ‘dignity and authority’—is only completely realised in the pages of Tacitus. And so it is only in Virgil, and especially in that poem in which he deals with types of human character and motives originating in human affection, that we understand all the feelings of love to family and country, and of fidelity to the dead, and that sense of dependence on a higher Power, sanctioning and sanctifying these feelings and the duties demanded by them, which the Romans comprehended in their use of the word ‘pietas.’
With this recognition of man’s dependence on a wise and beneficent Power above him, is perhaps connected another moral characteristic strongly indicated in many passages of the Aeneid, and mentioned among the personal attributes of Virgil in some of the editions of Donatus’s Life, though it does not appear in that accepted by the latest critics as resting on the best MS. authority. This quality is the stoical power of endurance which he attributes to his hero, but which in him is combined with nothing either of the austerity or pedantry of Stoicism. The passage in the biography, which, if an interpolation in the original Life, is one that is at least ‘well invented,’ is to the following effect:—‘He was in the habit of saying that there was no virtue of more use to a man than patience, and that there was no fortune so harsh, that a brave man cannot triumph over it by wisely enduring it.’ Mr. Wickham, in his edition of Horace, refers to this passage as illustrating the maxims of consolation addressed by Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius. Many lines in the Aeneid, such as the