Virgil’s Life
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), born in the rural district near Mantua, a farmer’s son, was given by his loving father a careful education. Of his father Virgil says, “those whom I have ever loved and above all my father.” The regard of his hero Æneas for his father Anchises not merely illustrates the early Roman filial affection—it suggests Virgil’s relation to his own parent. In north Italy Virgil studied at Mantua, Cremona, and Milan, and at seventeen took up his wider studies at Rome itself in the year 53 B.C. Catullus had died the year before, Lucretius was dead two years. At Rome Virgil had the best masters in Greek, rhetoric, and in philosophy, a study in which he especially delighted. In forming his own poetic style Virgil was profoundly influenced by Lucretius, whose great poem On Nature treated of the wondrous physical universe, and by the subtly sweet young Catullus,
“Tenderest of Roman poets.”
—Tennyson.
In such studies Virgil spent ten years. But in 41 B.C. he appears again in north Italy and this time in storm and stress. In the year of Philippi the triumvirs, settling their victorious legions, confiscated lands about Cremona, and Virgil, attempting to resist dispossession, came near to losing his life. Through fellow-students of the Roman days he secured an introduction to Octavius and was compensated—either recovering his own farm, or receiving in lieu of it an estate in Campania.
Virgil relates his experience in two of his ten Eclogues which were published in their present form in 38 B.C. These charming poems were especially loved by Milton and Wordsworth. Macaulay indeed considered them the best of Virgil’s works. At Rome they met immediate success with the people and with Octavius and his wise minister Mæcenas, Horace’s patron. In them Virgil tenderly sings love of friends, home, and country.
Then Virgil spent seven years on the four books of the Georgics, publishing them in 29 B.C., two years after Actium. The Georgics Merivale calls “the glorification of labor.” In them Virgil hymns the farmer’s life in beautiful Italy.
“Hail to thee, land of Saturn, mighty mother of noble fruits and noble men! For thee I essay the theme of the glory and the skill of olden days.”
Virgil was now acknowledged the greatest poet of Italy. In the year 26 B.C., one year after the title Augustus had been conferred on Octavius, we find the emperor writing Virgil the most urgent letters begging the poet to send him, then in Spain, some portion of the projected Æneid. It was, however, considerably later when Virgil read to Augustus the second, fourth, and sixth books, for the young Marcellus, the emperor’s nephew, died in 23 B.C., and we are told that Octavia, his mother, fainted on hearing the poet read the immortal lines about her son in the sixth book:—
“Child of a nation’s sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant’s shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow.”
Virgil,
“who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes,”
had already spent some ten years on the Æneid, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the “famous cities” and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to
“Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render
Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge,
Whole and intact on the Attican borders
Faithfully guarding the half of my soul.”
Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples,
“That delicious Bay
Parthenope’s Domain—Virgilian haunt;
Illustrated with never dying verse
And by the Poet’s laurel-shaded tomb,
Age after age to pilgrims from all lands
Endeared.”
—Wordsworth.