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 VIRGIL,
the greatest of the Roman poets, was born at Andes, a village
near Mantua, in the first consulate of Pompeius and Crassus,
70 B.C. He was about thirty years younger than Julius Caesar
and Lucretius; a little older than Augustus, Maecenas, and Horace.
It is thought that his name was written VERGILIUS, the
first syllable suggesting a Gallic descent, and that he was not
by birth a Roman citizen. His father, a well-to-do farmer of
the Cisalpine province, gave his son the best education, at Cremona,
Milan, and then at Rome. With delicate health and of nervous
temperament, the young student shrank from arms and from oratory;
and, almost from boyhood, devoted himself to a life of meditative
retirement; haunted with dreams of a great poem on the early
history of Rome, and meanwhile occupied with minor poems on rural
subjects. After the battle of Philippi, the poet, then aged 29,
was dispossessed of his paternal farm and nearly killed by a
soldier of the victorious party. Augustus, his patron and friend,
compensated him; and gave him estates and gifts which ultimately
amounted to a large fortune. For a short time he lived at Rome,
but soon withdrew to Naples; where, and at a villa in the Companian
country, he passed the rest of his life. During a tour in Greece
with Augustus, he took a fever and died at sea off Brundisium,
having not quite completed his 51st year. He was buried at Posilipo,
near Naples, and since that time it has been a place of religious
pilgrimage and superstitious reverence.
No life recorded offers a more complete dedication to one
great purpose, or a more serene and unbroken concentration of
powers on the poetic office. The poet was tall, dark, and somewhat
rustic in air; modest, shy, retiring in disposition, and somewhat
proud; a confirmed invalid, and never married. His life and his
verse were pure and refined, full of a deep religious melancholy;
he lived apart from all the storms and distractions around him,
both public and private. Candor, fides, pietas--i.e. simplicity,
honour, conscientiousness--are the phrases by which his warm
friends describe the poet.
He was one of the most learned and most serious of all poets;
like Dante, Milton, and Racine,
profoundly saturated with the best culture of his age; living
in personal relations with the great statesmen of his epoch,
but meditating on the world of action from a distant and poetical
retirement. Happily, his life was free from the cares and disappointments
which weighed on the three poets whom he most resembles. Of all
poets, Virgil was perhaps the most intensely conscientious and
laborious. He said "that he produced verses as a bear does
her cubs," by licking them into shape. In 24 years of incessant
labour, he wrote less than 13,000 verses. He spent 7 years on
the 2,288 lines of the Georgics, and 11 years on the Æneid,
which consists of only 9892 lines, and which was unfinished at
his death. He gave a characteristic proof of his passion for
perfection, when he directed his friends to destroy the manuscript
to which his final touches were still wanting. Fortunately, at
the order of Augustus, they disobeyed the poet, and saved to
the world the great Roman masterpiece.
Roman poetry is less spontaneous, less imaginative, and more
artificial than that of Greece; but, from the social point of
view, its higher level has a finer moral power; it has a nobler
personality beneath its voices, and is more fully inspired with
a national mission. In all this, Virgil stands pre-eminent, as
the great national poet who idealized his country in a critical
moment of its development. Hence, even in his own lifetime, he
was at once recognized as the national poet of Rome; and since
then has always remained the supreme poet of the Latin race.
In the Middle Ages Virgil exerted the same spell, and even in
church hymns was addressed as poetarum maxime. The reverential
devotion of Dante to Virgil led him to personify the poet of
Italy as earthly wisdom: "my master and my author,"
as he is invoked in the Divine Comedy. And all through
the Medieval and Renaissance epochs, and down to the rise of
the revolutionary and romantic outburst of the nineteenth century,
Virgil reigned supreme. We can now see how vastly inferior he
is, in native purity and in sublime imagination, to Homer
and Æschylus;
but we can also see better than ever how completely he embodied
the dignity and social greatness of Rome, as it passed from a
turbulent republic into a world-wide dictatorship.
Virgil was born under the Republic, before the Italians across
the Po had received the Roman citizenship. He was 22 when the
battle of Pharsalia made Julius dictator of the civilized world;
and he was 39 when the battle of Actium made his friend Augustus
supreme ruler. The poet, deeply sympathizing with the new hopes
for an era of peace and order, saw in the imperial dictatorship
an epoch of prosperity and stability; and in the unification
of the Roman provinces the prospect of a greater Rome to be.
His whole career was inspired by a mission to idealize this future
of peaceful development, with Rome as the protector and leader
of the world. His Pastorals and his Georgics are
the poems of peace and rural industry. But the Æneid
is the central work of his life. In youth he had meditated on
a poem in the Homeric method, such as Alexandrine versifiers
had so often produced, which was to celebrate the early history
of Italy and Rome. A larger experience taught him to lay aside
the literary idea of an epic, confined to heroic adventures
in mythical times. On the other hand, his poetic imagination
recoiled from the attempt to idealize actual history and recent
times, as Ennius had done.
The Æneid is the combination of both conceptions.
The form of his epic is found in the Homeric world of the ideal
heroes: but its inner spirit is a continuous appeal to the sense
of national dignity and to the patriotic hopes of his countrymen.
Thus the poem is surrounded with all the halo of the Homeric
legend; and, though being in form a continuation of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, in substance it is "the epic of the
national fortunes"; alive with patriotic memories and hopes
in every part; rousing the Roman race to a sense of greater glories
to come and a new mission to fulfil. The center of this new epoch
was the dictatorship vested in the house of Julius, which the
poem is designed to glorify, and almost to deify.
But Virgil was no court flatterer. He was a patriot, and an
enthusiast, who profoundly believed in a social and political
revolution, under which the transition from the ancient world
to the modern was ultimately effected. Not in the ways anticipated
by the poet; who, like most of the greater Romans of the early
Empire, from Julius to Marcus Aurelius, believed in a moral,
social, and religious regeneration of the world without the revolution
embodied in Christianity and Mosaism. It was an error; but it
was a noble mistake. And the idea of this moral, material, social,
and religious revivification of the ancient society under a beneficent
emperor, was never put in a finer and more religious spirit than
it was in the Æneid, under its peaceful, beneficent,
pious hero, Æneas. Indeed, the whole epic is a poetic analogue
of Augustine's City of God, a pagan idealism of the city
of the deified emperor. And it is this idea of a religious regeneration
of mankind to be worked out under the leadership of Rome, as
prefigured in his early poem, the Pollio, or 4th Eclogue,
which gave Virgil his vast influence all through the Catholic
period.
This vision of a peaceful reorganization of the world, and
the intense social and religious earnestness of Virgil, separate
the Æneid from all the literary epics, ancient or
modern, and place it alongside of the Divine Comedy and
the Paradise Lost. His ideal of the destiny and mission
of Rome is inferior to the ideal of Dante and Milton,--the destiny
and mission of Humanity. But it is less vague and less superhuman:
more real, more definite, and more true to fact. The Augustine
age is often compared to that of Louis XIV; but it was far larger
and with a grander future before it. Virgil combines Corneille
and Racine, and surpasses both. He displays the heroic types,
the moral elevation, the massive dignity of Corneille, together
with the religious spirit, the learning, the pathos, the consummate
mastery over language of Racine. But his theme is far less artificial,
remote, and literary than that of any of the French or Italian
tragic and epic poets, save Dante alone. He was not presenting
a historical picture, or dealing with ann imaginary world: he
believed in the reality of the mythology which he used as his
machinery; and his main object was to present to his own countrymen
the past, the future, and the dignity of their common country.
In this conception of human progress, unity, and life, he makes
a step towards the ideal poet of Humanity.
It is not necessary here to enlarge on the consummate mastery
over language possessed by Virgil, the majestic roll of his matchless
hexameter, the symmetry and perfection of his poetic form, on
his immense learning and philosophic spirit, on the deeply practical
and moral force of his appeals to duty and heroism, on his spiritual
presentment of human life and death, on his refined picture of
the great and just ruler of men, on his consummate gift of tenderness,
and the intense pathos with which he has painted heroic women,
or on the style which makes him the best known of the ancients
by virtue of his massive and monumental embodiment of noble thought.
Inferior as he is in spontaneous imagination to the greatest
poets of Greece--to Dante and Ariosto, to Shakespeare
and Milton--he will always remain, by virtue of his unique historical
position, one of the greatest poets of the world.
Purchase books
by Virgil
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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