POSITION OF HIS FATHER 107 name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world. Latin literature in the Augustan Age drew its representatives not only from a wider district than the preceding age, but also from a different social class. The men eminent as poets, orators, and historians in the last years of the Republic were for the most part members of the great Roman or Italian families. They were either themselves actively engaged in political life, or living in intimacy with those who were so engaged. Whatever tincture of letters was found in any other class was confined to freedmen or learned Greeks, such as Archias and Theophanes, attached to the houses of the nobility. The fortunes of the two great poets of the Augustan Age prove that no barrier of class-prejudice and no necessary inferiority of early education prevented free-born men of very humble origin from attaining the highest distinction, and living as the trusted friends of the foremost men in the State. Virgil and Horace were the sons of men who by the thrift and industry of a humble occupation had been able to buy small farms in their native district. Virgil's father had not indeed, like the father of Horace, risen from a servile position. He is said to have begun life as a hired assistant to one Magius, who, according to one account, was a potter, according to another a viator (or officer whose duty it was to summon prisoners before magistrates). He married the daughter of his master, being recommended to him, as is said by his biographer, by his industry (ob industriam). The name of Virgil's mother was Magia Polla. His father is said to have increased his substance among other things by keeping bees (silvis coemendis et apibus curandis),—a fact which perhaps explains the importance given to this branch of rural industry in the Georgics. Virgil thus springs from that class whose condition he represents as the happiest allotted to man, and as affording the best field for the exercise of virtue and piety. He and Horace, after living in the most refined society of Rome, are entirely at one in their appreciation of the qualities of the old Italian husbandmen or small landowners, —a class long before their time reduced in numbers and influence, but still producing men of modest worth and strong common sense like the 'abnormis sapiens' of the Satires, and like those country neighbours whose lively talk and homely wisdom Horace contrasts with the fashionable folly of Rome; and true and virtuous women, such as may have suggested to the one poet the lines Quod si pudica mulier in partem iuvet Domum atque dulces liberos, Sabina qualis aut perusta solibus and to the other Interea longum cantu solata laborem These poets themselves probably owe that stronger grain of character, their large share of the old Italian seriousness of spirit (gravitas), which distinguishes them from the other poets of their time, to the traditions of virtue which the men of this class had not yet unlearned. It is remarked by M. SainteBeuve how strong the attachment of such men usually is to their homes and lands, inherited from their fathers or acquired and enriched by their own industry. He characterises happily 'cette médiocrité de fortune et de condition morale dans laquelle était né Virgile, médiocrité, ai-je dit, qui rend tout mieux senti et plus cher, parcequ'on y touche à chaque instant la limite, parcequ'on y a toujours présent le moment où l'on a acquis et celui où l'on peut tout perdre.' The truest human feeling expressed in the Eclogues is the love which the old settlers had for their lands, and the sorrow which they felt when forced to quit them. The Georgics bear witness to the strong Italian passion for the soil, and the pride in the varied results. 16 But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside, His cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills, Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills.' Martin. 2 Meanwhile, cheering her long task with song, his wife runs over the web with her sounding shuttle.' of his skill which made a life of unceasing labour one of contentment and happiness to the husbandman. As has happened in the case of other poets and men of poetic genius, tradition recorded some marvellous circumstances attending his birth, which were believed to have portended his future distinction. These stories may have originated early in his career from the promise of genius afforded by his childhood: or, like the mediaeval belief in his magical powers, they may be a kind of mythological reflection of the veneration and affection with which his memory was cherished. The character of these reported presages implies the impression produced by the gentleness and sweetness of his disposition', as well as by the rapid growth and development of his poetic faculty". A more trustworthy indication of his early promise is afforded by the care with which he was educated. Like Horace, he was fortunate in having parents who, themselves of humble origin, considered him worthy of receiving the best instruction which the world could give; and, like Horace, he repaid their tender solicitude with affectionate gratitude. By his father's care he was from boyhood dedicated to the high calling which he faithfully followed through all his life. At the age of twelve he was taken to Cremona, an old Latin colony; and, from the lines in one of his earliest authentic poems (the address to the villa of Siron) Tu nunc eris illi Mantua quod fuerat, quodque Cremona prius 3 implying a residence at Cremona, it seems probable that his father may have accompanied him thither, as Horace's father accompanied him to Rome for the same purpose. On his Ferunt infantem, cum sit editus, neque vagisse, et adeo miti vultu fuisse, ut haud dubiam spem prosperioris geniturae jam tunc indicaret. 2 Siquidem virga populea more regionis in puerperiis eodem statim loco depacta ita brevi evaluit tempore ut multo ante satas populos adaequasset, quae arbor Virgilii ex eo dicta atque etiam consecrata est summa gravidarum ac fetarum religione. The resemblance of the name to the word virga is probably at the root of this story. 3 You will now be to him what Mantua and Cremona were before.' sixteenth birth-day-the day on which, according to Donatus, Lucretius died-Virgil assumed the 'toga virilis,' and about the same time went to Milan, and continued there, engaged in study, till he removed to Rome in the year 53 B.C., when he was between sixteen and seventeen years of age. It was in this year of his life that he is said to have written the 'Culex.' There are many difficulties which prevent the belief that Virgil is the author of the poem which has come down to us under that name. But the consideration of these must be reserved for a later examination of the poem. At Rome he studied rhetoric under Epidius, who was also the teacher of the young Octavianus. As the future Emperor made his first public appearance at the age of twelve, by delivering the funeral oration over his grandmother Julia, it may have happened that he and Virgil were pupils of Epidius at the same time, and were not unknown to each other even before the meeting of ten years later which decisively affected Virgil's fortunes and determined his career. The time of his arrival at Rome was of critical importance in literature. The recent publication of the poem of Lucretius, the most important event in Latin literature since the appearance of the Annals of Ennius, must have stimulated the enthusiasm of the younger generation, among whom poetry and oratory were at that time conjointly cultivated. Mr. Munro has shown the influence exercised by this poem on the later style of Catullus, who collected and edited his own poems about the time when Virgil came to Rome, and died shortly afterwards. One or two of the minor poems among the Catalepton, attributed to Virgil with more probability than the Culex, are parodies or close imitations of the style of Catullus, and are written in a freer and more satiric spirit than anything published by him in later years. But it is a little remarkable that, while reproducing the language and cadences of both these poets in his first acknowledged work, Virgil never mentions the name either of Lucretius or Catullus. The poets mentioned by him with admiration in the Eclogues are his living contemporaries, Varius and Cinna, Pollio and Gallus. Is it on account of the Senatorian and anti-Caesarean sympathies of the older poets that the poets of the new era thus separate themselves abruptly from those of the previous epoch? If it was owing to the jealousy of the new régime that the two great Augustan poets, while paying a passing tribute to the impracticable virtue of Cato, never mention the greater name or allude to the fate of Cicero, there seems to have been nothing in the political action or expressed opinions of Lucretius to call for a similar retiIf, on the other hand, the boldness of his attack on the strongholds of all religious belief had the effect of cutting him off for a time from personal sympathy, as similar opposition to received opinions had in modern times in the case of Spinosa and Shelley, it did not interfere with the immediate influence exercised by his genius on the thought and art of Virgil. cence. The most interesting of the minor poems among the Catalepton is one written at the time when the young poet entered on the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. This poem expresses the joy felt by him in exchanging the empty pretension and dull pedantry of rhetorical and grammatical studies for the real enquiries of philosophy : Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura'. These lines are the earliest expression of that philosophical longing which haunted Virgil through all his life as a hope and aspiration, but never found its realisation in speculative 1 'Hence, away, empty phrases of the Rhetoricians, words swollen with water not from a Greek source, and you, ye Stilos, and Tarquiti, and Varros, tribe of grammarians oozing over with fat, away hence tinkling cymbal of our empty youth... I shape my course to the blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siron, and will redeem my life from every care.' |