The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 7

Animae quales neque candidiores Terra tulit, neque queis me sit devinctior alter(175).

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 ign.o.bilis oti(176).

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(177),-

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(178). 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 pa.s.sion 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-a.s.sertion in his writings that his final hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by such confident a.s.surances 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 a.s.sociated 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sall.u.s.t 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, pa.s.sive 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(179), 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 embarra.s.sment 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(180), 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(181).

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-

? d' e?????? ?? ????d', e?????? d' ??e?(182)-

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 _sanct.i.tas_, 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 a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sages 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(183). 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage as ill.u.s.trating the maxims of consolation addressed by Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius. Many lines in the Aeneid, such as the

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est- Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis(184)-

indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace-loving disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fort.i.tude and resolute endurance.

The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of independence and self-a.s.sertion that his character was deficient. It is to the excess of his feeling of deference to power, and not to any insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally-as in the Invocation to the Georgics-transcending the limits of truth and sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously contributed little to human happiness. But the n.o.bleness of Virgil's nature is not the n.o.bleness of those qualities which make men great in resistance to wrong, but the n.o.bleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.

By no poet in any time has he been surpa.s.sed in devotion to his art. Into this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling, all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a generous appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his habits of composition confirm the impression of his a.s.siduous industry. In writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest compa.s.s. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the phrase 'parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino'-'that he produced verses by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.' The Aeneid was first arranged and written out in prose: when the structure of the story was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it, as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the true ???d??, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious artist. It is recorded on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he read his own poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm ('suavitate tum lenociniis miris'), that verses which would have sounded commonplace when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when 'chanted to their own music(185)' by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given of the effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This large, musical, and impa.s.sioned utterance-the 'os magna sonaturum'-is a sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a rhythmical expression for his thought.

It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that Virgil established and for a long time retained his ascendency as one of the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully re-established, the examination of his various works will show that it was not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but to all time and to every people.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ECLOGUES.

I.

The name by which the earliest of Virgil's recognised works is known tells us nothing of the subject of which it treats. The word 'Eclogae' simply means selections. As applied to the poems of Virgil, it designates a collection of short unconnected poems. The other name by which these poems were known in antiquity, 'bucolica,' indicates the form of Greek art in which they were cast and the pastoral nature of their subjects. Neither word is used by Virgil himself; but the expressions by which he characterises his art, such as 'Sicelides Musae,' 'versus Syracosius,'

'Musa agrestis' and 'silvestris,' show that he writes in a pastoral strain, and that he considered the pastoral poetry of Greece as his model.

He invokes not only the 'Sicilian Muses,' but the 'fountain of Arethusa.'

He speaks too of Pan, and Arcadia, and the 'Song of Maenalus.' His shepherd-poets are described as 'Arcadians.' The poets whom he introduces as his prototypes are the 'sage of Ascra,' and the mythical Linus, Orpheus, and Amphion. He alludes also to Theocritus under the name of the 'Syracusan shepherd.' The names of the shepherds who are introduced as contending in song or uttering their feelings in monologue-Corydon, Thyrsis, Menalcas, Meliboeus, t.i.tyrus, etc.-are Greek, and for the most part taken from the pastoral idyls of Theocritus. There is also frequent mention of the shepherd's pipe, and of the musical accompaniment to which some of the songs chanted by the shepherds are set.

The general character of the poems is further indicated by the frequent use of the word 'ludere,' a word applied by Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and others to the poems of youth, of a light and playful character, and, for the most part, expressive of various moods of the pa.s.sion of love. Thus at the end of the Georgics Virgil speaks of himself thus:-

Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque iuventa, t.i.tyre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine f.a.gi(186).

This reference shows further that the poem which stands first in order was placed there when the edition of the Eclogues was given to the world. But other references (at v. 8687 and vi. 12) seem to imply that the separate poems were known either by distinct t.i.tles, such as Varus, the t.i.tle of the sixth, or from their opening lines, as the 'Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexim,' and the 'Cuium pecus? an Meliboei?' It has been also suggested, from lines quoted in the ninth, which profess to be the opening lines of other pastoral poems, that the ten finally collected together were actual 'selections' from a larger number, commenced if not completed ('necdum perfecta canebat') by Virgil. But these pa.s.sages seem more like the lines attributed to the contending poets in the third and seventh Eclogues, i.e.

short unconnected specimens of pastoral song.

Nearly all the poems afford indications of the time of their composition and of the order in which they followed one another; and that order is different from the order in which they now appear. It is said, on the authority of Asconius, that three years, from 42 B.C. to 39 B.C., were given to the composition of the Eclogues. But an allusion in the tenth (line 47) to the expedition of Agrippa across the Alps in the early part of 37 B.C. proves that a later date must be a.s.signed to that poem. The probable explanation is that Virgil had intended to end the series with the eighth, which celebrated the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini in 39 B.C.,-

A te principium, tibi desinet,-

but that his friendship for Gallus induced him to add the tenth, two years later, either before the poems were finally collected for publication, or in preparing a new edition of them. They were written at various places and at various stages of the poet's fortunes. They appear to have obtained great success when first published, and some of them were recited with applause upon the stage. The earliest in point of time were the second and third, and these, along with the fifth, may be ascribed to the year 42 B.C. The seventh, which has no allusion to contemporary events and is a mere imitative reproduction of the Greek idyl, may also belong to this earlier period, although some editors rank it as one of the latest. The first, which is founded on the loss of the poet's farm, belongs to the next year, and the ninth and sixth probably may be a.s.signed to the same year, or to the early part of the following year. The date of the fourth is fixed by the Consulship of Pollio to the year 40 B.C.; that of the eighth to the year 39 B.C. by the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini. The opening words of the tenth show that it was the last of the series; and the reference to the expedition of Agrippa implies that it could not have been written earlier than the end of 38 B.C. or the beginning of 37 B.C.

The first, second, third, and fifth(187), were in all probability written by the poet in his native district, the sixth, ninth, and perhaps the seventh, at the villa which had formerly belonged to Siron ('villula quae Sironis _eras_'), the rest at Rome. The principle on which the poems are arranged seems to be that of alternating dialogue with monologue. The eighth, though not in dialogue, yet resembles the latter part of the fifth, in presenting two continuous songs, chanted by different shepherds.

The poem first in order may have occupied its place from its greater interest in connexion with the poet's fortunes, or from the honour which it a.s.signs to Octavia.n.u.s, whose pre-eminence over the other compet.i.tors for supreme power had sufficiently declared itself before the first collected edition of the poems was published.

In the earliest poems of the series the art of Virgil, like the lyrical art of Horace in his earlier Odes, is more imitative and conventional than in those written later. He seems satisfied with reproducing the form, rhythm, and diction of Theocritus, and mingling some vague expression of personal or national feeling with the sentiment of the Greek idyl. That the fifth was written after the second and third appears from the lines v.

8687, in which Menalcas, under which name Virgil introduces himself in the Eclogues, presents his pipe to Mopsus:-

Haec nos 'Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexin,'

Haec eadem docuit 'Cuium pecus? an Meliboei(188)?'

From these lines also it may be inferred as probable that the second poem, 'Formosum pastor Corydon,' was written before the third, 'Dic mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus? an Meliboei?'

A tradition, quoted by Servius and referred to (though inaccurately) by Martial(189), attributes the composition of the second Eclogue to the admiration excited in Virgil by the beauty of a young slave, Alexander, who was presented to him by Pollio and carefully educated by him. A similar story is told of his having received from Maecenas another slave, named Cebes, who also obtained from him a liberal education and acquired some distinction as a poet. It is not improbable that Virgil may have been warmly attached to these youths, and that there was nothing blameable in his attachment. Even Cicero, a man as far removed as possible from any sentimental weakness, writes to Atticus of the death of a favourite slave, a young Greek, and evidently, from the position he filled in Cicero's household, a boy of liberal accomplishments, in these words: 'And, I a.s.sure you, I am a good deal distressed. For my reader, Sositheus, a charming boy, is just dead; and it has affected me more than I should have thought the death of a slave ought to affect one(190).' It remains true however that in one or two of those Eclogues in which he most closely imitates Theocritus, Virgil uses the language of serious sentiment, and once of bantering raillery, in a way which justly offends modern feeling.

And this is all that can be said against him.