The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 5

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.

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 Ill.u.s.tribus(140),'

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 Ill.u.s.tribus,' 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sisted 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 for a knowledge of the life, circ.u.mstances, 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(141), 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(142). 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.lysis,-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.

Of the contemporary poets and critics whose works are extant, much the most important witness of the impression produced by Virgil on those with whom he lived is the poet Horace. And he is an admirable witness, from the clearness of his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the intimate terms of friendship on which he lived with the older poet. Unlike Virgil, who from reasons of health, or natural inclination, or devotion to his art had chosen

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae(143),

and cherished few, but close, intimacies, Horace lived in the world, enjoyed all that was ill.u.s.trious, brilliant or genial, in the society of his time, and while still constant to the attachments of his earlier years, continued through all his life to form new friendships with younger men who gave promise of distinction. His Odes and Epistles are addressed to a great variety of men, to those of highest social or political position, such as Agrippa, Pollio, Munatius Plancus, Sall.u.s.tius Crispus, Lollius, etc.; to old comrades of his youth or brother poets, such as Pompeius Grosphus, Septimius, Aristius Fuscus, Tibullus; to the men of a younger generation, such as Iulus Antonius, Julius Florus, and the younger Lollius: and to all of them he applies language of discriminating, but not of excessive appreciation. To the men of eminence in the State he uses expressions of courteous and delicate compliment, never of flattery or exaggeration. His old comrades and intimate a.s.sociates he greets with hearty friendliness or genial irony: to younger men, without a.s.suming the airs of a Mentor, he addresses words of sympathetic encouragement or paternal advice. But among all those whom he addresses there are only two-unless from one or two words implying strong attachment, we add one more to the number, Aelius Lamia-in connexion with whom he uses the language of warm and admiring affection. These are Maecenas and Virgil.

Whatever may have been the date or circ.u.mstances connected with the composition of the third Ode of Book I., the simple words 'animae dimidium meae' establish the futility of the notion, that the subject of this Ode is not the poet but only the same merchant or physician whom Horace in the twelfth Ode of Book IV. invites, in his most Epicurean style, to sacrifice for a time his pursuit of wealth to the more seasonable claims of the wine of Cales.

Two short Lives of Virgil written in prose have reached our time, one originally prefixed to the Commentary by Valerius Probus, a grammarian of the first century A.D., the other, much longer and more important, prefixed to that of Donatus. There is also a Life in hexameter verse, written by a grammarian named Phocas, about one half of which is devoted to an account of the marvellous portents that were alleged to have accompanied the birth of the poet. The Life of Donatus was in the later MSS. of Virgil so much corrupted by the intermixture of mediaeval fictions, that it is only in recent times that modern criticism has successfully removed the interpolations, and restored the original Life based on that of Suetonius(144). What then were the materials available to Suetonius? The earliest source of his information was a work referred to by Quintilian (x. 3. 8), written by the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, the poet Varius, ent.i.tled 'De ingenio moribusque Vergilii.' Aulus Gellius (xvii. 10) speaks of the 'memorials which the friends and intimates of Virgil have left of his genius and character.'

Among those who contributed to the knowledge of his habits, etc., the name of C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas, is quoted as an authority for a statement that 'in ordinary speech he was very slow and almost like an uneducated man'-a trait which calls to mind what is recorded of Addison.

Melissus could not fail to be an authority as to the relations of Virgil to Maecenas, and it is probably on his evidence that the statement rests of the direction given to the poet's genius in the choice of the subject of the Georgics.

A still more important work was that of the grammarian Asconius Pedia.n.u.s, born at the commencement of our era, who wrote 'Contra obtrectatores Vergilii.' These 'maligners,' beginning with those whose names have been condemned to everlasting fame, as Bavius and Maevius, had a.s.sailed the art of Virgil by flippant parodies, or had traduced his character by imputations, which, though they might have called for no remark if made against any other poet of the time, were believed by those who had the best means of knowing the truth to be incompatible with the finer nature of Virgil. In regard to one of these charges Asconius was able to procure the evidence of an emphatic denial from the only surviving person who could have known anything about the matter(145).

The certainty that the biographical notices of Virgil and the accounts transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline Museum, or of the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil.

II.

The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be known(146). Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old a.s.sociations to change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature into the unfamiliar _Vergil_. He was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Cra.s.sus. The Romans attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death to be regarded with the sanct.i.ty of a day of festival(147). The year of his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a somewhat later period of life than that of any of his ill.u.s.trious contemporaries.

This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social War, the b.l.o.o.d.y strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil's childhood and early youth were pa.s.sed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State pa.s.sed over the Roman world.

The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no scenes of horror, such as the ma.s.sacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:-

At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta Una dies dabat exitio(148).

His birth-place was in the 'pagus,' or 'township,' of Andes in the neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a 'vicus,' and there it is said to be distant from Mantua 'x.x.x milia pa.s.suum.' The word _pagus_, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be used as equivalent to _vicus_, but as a 'country-district,' which might include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the characteristic features of Virgil's early home. The immediate neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the first Eclogue,

Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae(149),

or

Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras(150),

can apply.

The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil's early years appear to have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he recalls with affectionate memory in pa.s.sages of the Eclogues and Georgics.

From the fact that the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side nearest Cremona. The use of the word 'depellere' (Ecl. i. 21) might perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation of 'driving our weaned lambs' forbids our attaching much force to this problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place are those of the ninth Eclogue, 710:-

Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles Incipiunt mollique iugum demittere clivo, Usque ad aquam et veteres, iam fracta cac.u.mina, f.a.gos, Omnia carminibus vestrum serva.s.se Menalcan(151).

There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for introducing the hills gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond 'the picturesque hill and castle of Vallegio,' about fifteen miles higher up the river than Mantua. Eustace, in his Cla.s.sical Tour, finds many of the features introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds, like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as

Tamen veniemus in urbem; Aut si nox pluviam ne colligat ante veremur(152),-

seem inapplicable to the shorter distance between Pietola and Mantua.

The 'sacri fontes' which are spoken of in Eclogue I., the existence of which is further confirmed by the

Non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina deerunt(153)

in the description from the Georgics (ii. 200), of the pastoral land which Mantua lost, are more naturally to be sought in the more picturesque environment of the upper reaches of the river than in the level plain in the midst of which Mantua stands(154). The accurate description of the lake out of which the Mincio flows-

Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino(155),-

the truth of which is attested by many modern travellers, Goethe among others-may well be the reproduction of some actual impression made in some of Virgil's early wanderings not far distant from the home of his youth.

The pa.s.sage in the Georgics just referred to, in which, speaking of the land most suitable for rearing herds and flocks, he introduces the lines

Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum, Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos(156),

proves the tender affection with which he recalled in later life the memory of his early home.

Some a.n.a.logy has been suggested between the quiet beauty of the scenery which first sank into his soul, and the tranquil meditative cast of his genius. And though it is easy to push such considerations too far, and to expect a closer correspondence than ever exists between the development of genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions, whose days from childhood to death were closely bound 'each to each by natural piety,' in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining type.

The district north of the Po, of which Virgil was a native, had enjoyed the 'ius Latii' since the end of the Social War, but did not obtain the full rights of Roman citizenship till the year 49 B.C., when Virgil was in his twenty-first year. The national poet of the early Empire, like the national poet of the Republic, had thus in all probability no claim by birth to be a member of the State of whose character and destiny his voice has been the truest exponent. It may be doubted whether Virgil belonged by birth to the purely Italian stock. He claims for Mantua a Tuscan origin(157); but the Etruscan race in the region north of the Po had for a long time previously given way before the settlements of the Gauls; and, although Roman conquest had established several important colonies north of the Po, the main stock between that river and the Alps must have been of Celtic blood, although a.s.similated in manner of life and culture to the purely Italian inhabitants of the Peninsula. Zeuss, in his Celtic Grammar, recognises the presence of a Celtic root, which appears in other Gallic names, and which he supposes to be the root also of _virgo_, and _virga_, and _Vergiliae_, in the name Vergilius(158). Some elements in Virgil's nature and genius which seem to antic.i.p.ate the developments of modern feeling, as, for instance, his vague melancholy, his imaginative sense of the mystery of the unseen world, his sympathy with the sentiment, as distinct from the pa.s.sion, of love, the modes in which his delight in nature manifests itself, the vein of romance which runs through his treatment of early times may perhaps be explained by some subtle intermixture of Celtic blood with the firmer temperament of the old Italian race. Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged.

It is to be noticed that, while in the Ciceronian Age the names of the men eminent in literature belong, with one or two exceptions, either to the pure Roman stock or to the races of central Italy which had been longest incorporated with Rome, in the last years of the Republic and in the Augustan Age Northern Italy contributed among other names those of Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Quintilius Varus, Aemilius Macer, Virgil, and the historian Livy to the roll of Latin literature. Since the concessions which followed the Social War the whole people inhabiting the Peninsula had become thoroughly united in spirit with the Imperial city, and Latin literature as well as the service of the State thus received a great impulse from the liberality with which Rome, at different stages in her history, extended the privileges of her citizenship. The culture of which Rome had been for two generations the centre became now much more widely diffused; and as the privilege of citizenship, or of that modified citizenship conferred by the 'ius Latii,' was more prized from its novelty, so the attractions of literary studies and the impulses of literary ambition were felt more strongly from coming fresh and unhackneyed to a vigorous race. It was a happier position for Virgil and for Horace, it fitted them not only to be truer poets of the natural beauty of Italy, but also to feel in imagination all the wonder a.s.sociated with the idea of the great city, to have spent their earliest and most impressible years among scenes of peace and beauty, remote from contact with the excitement, the vices, the routine of city life, than if, with the friend of Juvenal, they could have applied to themselves the words-'our childhood drank in the air of the Aventine.'

There is still one point to be noticed in connexion with the district in which Virgil was born and pa.s.sed his early youth. It was from Julius Caesar that Gallia Transpadana received the full Roman citizenship. But before he established this claim on their grat.i.tude, the 'Transpadani,' as we learn from Cicero's letters, were thoroughly devoted to his cause(159), and it was among them that his legions were mainly recruited. One of the spiteful acts by which the aristocratic party showed its animosity to Caesar was the scourging of one of the inhabitants of the colony of Novum Comum (Como) by order of the Consul Marcellus,-an act condemned by Cicero on the ground that the victim of this outrage was a 'Transpada.n.u.s(160).'

Caesar was in the habit of pa.s.sing the winters of his proconsulate in this part of his province, especially at Verona, where he was the guest of the father of Catullus. The name of Caesar must thus have become a household word among this people. They must have soon recognised his greatness as a soldier, and felt the fascination of his gracious presence. They must have been grateful for his championship of the provinces against the oppressive rule of the Senate, and for the protection afforded by his army from dangers similar to those from which their fathers had been saved, after many disasters, by his great kinsman, Marius. They did not share the sentiments of distrust excited among the aristocracy at Rome by Caesar's early career, and had no reason to regard the permanent ascendency of one man as a heavier burden than the caprices of their temporary governors.

From the favour which Virgil received from leaders of the Caesarean cause before his fame was established, and from his intimacy with Varius the panegyrist of Julius Caesar, it may be inferred that in adhering to the cause of the Empire he was true to the early impressions of his boyhood.