Virgil or Publius Vergilius Maro, was the greatest Roman poet. The Romans regarded his "Aeneid," published 2 years after his death, as their national epic. Virgil's contemporary poets were the lyricist and satirist Horace and the writers of elegy Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Together they are known as poets of the Golden Age of Latin literature, or more simply, as Augustans.
Background
Virgil was born on October 15, 70 B.C., at Andes near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul (now Province of Mantua, Italy) of humble parentage. His father, either a potter or a laborer, worked for a certain Magius, who, attracted no doubt by the intelligence and industry of his employee, allowed him to marry his daughter, Magia.
By the time Virgil finished his education, his father was blind and possibly ailing. His mother had lost two other sons, one in infancy, the other at the age of 17. When Virgil's father died, she remarried and bore another son, Valerius Proculus, to whom Virgil left half his fortune. The minor poems ascribed to Virgil, known generally as the Appendix Vergiliana, belong, perhaps, to this youthful period of his life.
Education
Virgil's father was able to give his son the education reserved for children of higher status. Virgil began his study in Cremona, continued it at Milan, and then went on to Rome to study rhetoric, medicine, and mathematics before giving himself to philosophy under the tutelage of Siro the Epicurean.
His education prepared him for the profession of law (the alternative was a military career), but he spoke only once in court. He was shy, retiring, and of halting speech - no match physically, temperamentally, or by inclination for the aggressively articulate Roman lawyers who had inherited Cicero's mantle. Virgil returned from Rome to his family's farm near Mantua to spend his days in study and writing and to be near his parents.
Career
The farm of Virgil's father was among the land confiscated as payment for the victorious soldiers of the Battle of Philippi (42 B.C.). But Augustus restored the farm to the family. Virgil then rendered thanks to young Caesar in his first Eclogue. He dedicated his earliest Eclogues to Asinius Pollio and mentioned Alfenus Varus in the ninth, where the evils of land confiscation are referred to, to thank them for their help as well. The final phrase of the epitaph on Virgil's supposed tomb at Naples runs "cecini pascua, rura, duces (I sang of pastures, of sown fields, and of leaders)." This summarizes the progression from Eclogues to Georgics to Aeneid (which appeared in that order) and, as has been said, "proposes a miniature of the evolution of civilization from shepherds to farmers to warriors." This sequence also shows a progression in genre from pastoral to didactic poetry to epic.
The Eclogues (they are also known as Bucolics, or "Pastorals") were written between 42 B.C. and 37 B.C. These 10 poems, songs of shepherds, all about 100 lines long, were written in hexameters and modeled on the pastoral poems, or Idylls, of Theocritus of Syracuse, a Greek poet of the early 3d century B.C. who created the genre. The poems are highly artificial and imitative.
Eclogue 4, the so-called Messianic Eclogue, is the best known. Written in 40 B.C., during the consulship of Pollio, Virgil's benefactor a year or two previously, it hails the birth of a baby boy who will usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity in which even nature herself will participate.
The Georgics ("Points of Farming"), a didactic poem in hexameters in four books, was written from 37 B.C. to 30 B.C. Book 1 treats the farming of land; book 2 is about growing trees, especially the vine and the olive; book 3 concerns cattle raising; and 4, beekeeping. When Virgil completed the Georgics, he read them aloud to Augustus in 4 days, spelled occasionally by Maecenas, his friend and adviser. His praise of the Emperor in the Georgics is almost worshipful.
The Aeneid is one of the most complex and subtle works ever written. An epic poem of about 10,000 lines composed in graceful and flowing hexameters and divided into 12 books, it tells of the efforts of the Trojan hero, Aeneas, to find a new homeland for himself and his small band of followers.
Shortly after Actium, the final battle of the Roman civil war 31 B.C., Augustus, the victor, was looking for a poet who could give to his accomplishments their proper literary enhancement in an epic poem. Maecenas offered the commission to Propertius and to Horace, both of whom declined as graciously as possible. Virgil had been less reluctant than the other two, through his imagination. His epic of Augustan Rome would be cast in mythological form, making use of the legend of the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan hero mentioned by Homer, who, tradition held, escaped from Troy and came to Italy. Virgil's models were the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. The first six books, narrating the wanderings of Aeneas, draw material from the Odyssey; the last six, narrating the warfare in Italy which was waged by Aeneas and his followers to establish themselves there, have the Iliad as their model.
The Aeneid can be divided into two parts of six books each or into three parts of four books each. Books 1-4, organized around Aeneas's narration of the destruction of Troy and his wanderings, have Carthage as their dramatic setting; 5-8 are an interlude between the drama of 1-4 and 9-12, the story of the fighting in Italy. Moreover, the even-numbered books are highly dramatic, while the odd-numbered books reflect a lessening of tension and have less dramatic value.
Virgil worked on the Aeneid for the last 11 years of his life. The composition of it, from a prose outline, was never easy for him. Augustus once wrote to ask to see part of the uncompleted work. Virgil replied that he had nothing to send and added, "I have undertaken a task so difficult that I think I must have been mentally ill to have begun it."
In 19 B.C. Virgil resolved to spend 3 more years on his epic after taking a trip to Greece, perhaps to check on some details necessary for his revision. At Megara he contracted a fever and became so ill that he returned to Brundisium, where he died on September 21. He left instructions that the Aeneid should be burned, but Augustus countermanded them and ordered Various and Tucca, two friends of the poet, to edit it for publication. It appeared in 17 B.C.
The similarity of language in the Eclogue 4, the so-called Messianic Eclogue, to that of the Book of Isaiah gave rise to the idea, in the early Christian period, that the fourth Eclogue was indeed a prophecy of the birth of Christ. The similarity may be due to the fact that Jewish ideas spread over Italy in the second half of the first century B.C., and Virgil may have used his acquaintance with them to express the Roman equivalent of a Messianic expectation.
Politics
Virgil chose not to become deeply involved in affairs of state due to his mild demeanor. Though the poet preferred a country life, he maintained connections with notable members of Roman society and thus wield influence on affairs of state himself.
Views
Virgil, the most melancholy of Roman poets, saw the life of his time in all its complexity, saw the "tears of things, the human situation which touches the heart.”
The Georgics is a kind of realistic pastoral, spoke to feelings deep in the hearts of Romans. Small farmers, who, thrifty and hardworking, embodied the ideals of the Roman Republic, had been driven off their land by capitalistic landowners or else were unwilling to live on it as tenants. They migrated to Rome, where they swelled the ranks of the "mob" and added to the general turbulence and unrest. For Romans sickened by years of death and violence, it must have been consoling to become absorbed in a work which offered detailed instructions for pursuing a way of life considered ideal which was now all but lost.
The work was not intended as escapist literature, however, for Augustus wanted to restore or re-create small farms-a way of depopulating Rome-and tried to revive interest in agriculture. Maecenas, his friend and adviser, had urged Virgil to compose the Georgics (the poem is dedicated to him).Virgil was not undertaking hack work, however, when he complied with Maecenas's request. He sincerely believed in Augustus as the bringer of peace and order to Italy. Augustus's agricultural program coincided happily with Virgil's own feelings about rural life and his love for Italy. It was a fortuitous conjunction of the conviction of a poet and a national need for its expression.
The Aeneid is not also viewed as a patriotic poem glorifying Rome through the accomplishments of its stalwart hero, pious Aeneas, who embodies the character of Augustus and the quintessential spirit of Rome. Love and glorification of Rome and its mighty empire as well as admiration of Augustus are certainly present (book 6, Anchises' revelation of the future greatness of Rome; book 8, the description of Aeneas's shield on which are engraved scenes from Roman history). But there also runs through the Aeneid a constant undercurrent of awareness of the human cost of Aeneas's undertaking, that is, of the cost of building Rome's empire. This awareness reflects the moral ambiguities surrounding the new regime. Augustus established a much-needed peace and restored order after years of disruption, but his hands were just as bloody as those of anyone else.
In the course of the epic, Aeneas, while steadily growing more responsible and more devoted to his great mission, loses, nevertheless, every human tie except that to his son, to whom he is not particularly close. As he advances in pietas, the quality of devotion to duty valued so highly by the Romans, he loses his humanness. He becomes an entirely public man; there is no space in his heart for private feelings or human love. The last statement has one exception.
A modern critic has drawn attention to an important theme of the poem, the subduing of the demonic, represented as furor or ira, "madness" or "wrath," whether on the cosmic level, as in Juno; the natural level, as in the storm in book 1; or the human level, as in Dido, Amata, or Aeneas himself in book 2. Pietas, especially in Aeneas, seems slowly to subdue the forces of madness and wrath. Yet, in the final lines of the poem, Aeneas, "inflamed by madness and wrath" ("furilis accensus et ira"), in revenge for the death of Pallas, kills Turnus although he had heard the admonition of his father in the underworld to "spare those at your mercy." Lust for vengeance, then, is the only human feeling that remains in the hero, and this passage can be interpreted as a sad commentary on the demands made on Aeneas by his mission. One may note, too, that the final book ends with a death, as do so many of the others.
Quotations:
“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
“Fortune sides with him who dares.”
“Audaces fortuna iuvat (latin)- Fortune favors the bold.”
“The descent into Hell is easy”
“Death twitches my ear;
'Live,' he says...
'I'm coming.”
“Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori.
Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.”
“If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
“Let me rage before I die.”
“No day shall erase you from the memory of time”
“forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day”
“The greatest wealth is health”
“They can because they think they can.”
“The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.”
The only hope for the doomed, is no hope at all...”
“Through pain I've learned to comfort suffering men”
“...She nourishes the poison in her veins and is consumed by a secret fire.”
“Trust one who has gone through it.”
“Each of us bears his own Hell.”
“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man's mad desire become his god?”
“Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.”
“Facilis descensus Averni.”
“It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air---there's the rub...”
“Love conquers all; therefore, let us submit to love.”
“I will be gone from here and sing my songs/ In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,/ And carve in letters on the little trees/ The story of my love, and as the trees/ Will grow letters too will grow, to cry/ In a louder voice the story of my love.”
“Vera incessu patuit dea.
(The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step.)”
“Fortunate is he whose mind has the power to probe the causes of things and trample underfoot all terrors and inexorable fate.”
“Do not yield to misfortunes, but advance more boldly to meet them, as your fortune permits you. ”
“Death's brother, sleep.”
Personality
Poor health and his shy nature and love of study made Virgil a recluse. He preferred to be away from Rome, and when he was compelled to go there and was recognized and hailed on the streets, he would flee for refuge into the nearest house.
Physical Characteristics:
In appearance Virgil was tall and dark, his face reflecting the rural peasant stock from which he came. His health was always uncertain. Horace tells us that on a journey to Brundisium in 37 B.C., he and Virgil were unable to join their fellow travelers in their games for he had sore eyes and Virgil was suffering from indigestion.
Quotes from others about the person
"It is this perception of Roman history as a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit that makes Virgil his country's truest historian."
Quintilian: "It is therefore an admirable practice which now prevails, to begin by reading Homer and Vergil, although the intelligence needs to be further developed for the full appreciation of their merits: but there is plenty of time for that since the boy will read them more than once."
Suetonius: "He [Virgil] was tall and of full habit, with a dark complexion and a rustic appearance. His health was variable; for he very often suffered from stomach and throat troubles, as well as with headache; and he also had frequent haemorrhages. He ate and drank but little. He was especially given to passions for boys... It is common report that he also had an intrigue with Plotia Hieria. ... Certain it is that for the rest of his life he was so modest in speech and thought, that at Naples he was commonly called "Parthenias" ("The Maiden"), and that whenever he appeared in public in Rome, where he very rarely went, he would take refuge in the nearest house, to avoid those who followed and pointed him out."
Augustine of Hippo: "Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age – they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him."
Julius Caesar Scaliger: "Nothing in short was omitted by that godlike man. Only fools would want to add anything; only insolent men to change anything. Sentences, numbers, figures, simplicity, candor, ornaments, nature, art, learning—all is incomparable, or, in a word—Virgilian. ... Let the cravens who contend that the free genius and taste of divine Virgil were prisoners of Homer's inventions hold their peace. It was not thus. The arguments of Homer which nature proposed to him were corrected by Virgil as a schoolboy's theme by his professor."
Connections
The statuesque Virgil never wed and was in fact known to be attracted to men.
Brother:
Valerius Proculus
References
Virgil; His Life And Times
An intriguing biography provides readers with an in-depth look at the life of ancient Rome's most famous poet, while presenting the influencial effects Virgil's work has had on civilization throughout time.