Virgil
70 B.C. – 19 B.C.

Publius Vergilius Maro, greatest of Latin poets, was born at Andes near Mantua on 15 October 70 B.C. Cisalpine Gaul was mainly Celtic in population, but was already permeated by the Latin language and civilisation. The name Vergilius is apparently Celtic, and in Virgil’s Celtic blood modern critics have found the origin of his romantic and melancholy temper and of his sense of the spiritual meaning of nature. His father owned a small property; the boy was sent to school in Cremona and Milan, and at sixteen went to Rome and studied rhetoric and philosophy. In 41 B.C. the victorious triumvirs were settling disbanded soldiers on confiscated lands throughout Italy. Virgil’s farm was part of the confiscated territory; but by advice of the governor of the district, Asinius Pollio, he went to Rome with special recommendations to Octavius; and though his own property was not restored to him, he obtained ample compensation from the government, and became one of the endowed court-poets who gathered round the prime minister Mæcenas. In 37 B.C his Eclogues, ten pastorals modelled on those of Theocritus, were received with unexampled enthusiasm. Soon afterwards Virgil withdrew from Rome to Campania. The munificence of Mæcenas had placed him in affluent circumstances. He had a villa at Naples and a country house near Nola. The Georgics or Art of Husbandry, in four books, dealing with tillage and pasturage, the vine and olive, horses, cattle and bees, appeared in 30 B.C., and confirmed Virgil’s position as the foremost poet of the age. The remaining eleven years of his life were devoted to a larger task, undertaken at the urgent request of the emperor, the composition of a great national epic on the story of Æneas the Trojan, legendry founder of the Roman nation and of the Julian family, from the fall of Troy to his arrival in Italy, his wars and alliances with the native Italian races, and his final establishment in his new kingdom. By 19 B.C. the Æneid was practically completed, and in that year Virgil left Italy to travel to Greece and Asia; but at Athens he fell ill, and returned only to die at Brundusium on 21 September. At his own wish he was buried in Naples, on the road to Pozzuoli, his tomb for many years after, being worshipped as a sacred place. His sincerity and sweetness of temper won the warm praise of Horace, and the fastidious purity of his life in an age of very lax morality gained him the name of ‘the lady’ by which Milton was known at Cambridge. A few juvenile pieces of more or less probable authenticity are extant under his name. These are the Culex and the Moretum, both in hexameter verse; The Copa, a short elegiac piece; and fourteen little poems in various meters, some serious and others trivial. The Ciris is now agreed to be by a contemporary imitator. The supremacy of Virgil in Latin poetry was immediate and almost unquestioned; in the Eclogues, the Latin tongue assumed a richness, harmony and sweetness, until then, unknown. The promise shown in the Eclogues was more than fulfilled in the Georgics. The workmanship of the Aeneid is more unequal; but in its great passages there is the same beauty with an even fuller strength and range. Virgil’s works were established classics even in his lifetime, and soon after his death had become, as they still remain, the school-books of western Europe.