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 passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust 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, passive 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', 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 1 'Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat, sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.' Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle: 'Il lui était utile même d'avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.' § 3] HIS HABITS AND APPEARANCE 123 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 con versation, 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 embarrassment 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 1, 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 2. 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- Ὁ δ ̓ εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ', εὔκολος δ ̓ ἐκεῖ and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellow-dramatist to our own great poet, in the words 'my gentle Shakespeare.' 1 Cp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem of Catullus. 2 The German historians of Roman literature are more just in their judgment of Virgil's character than of his genius. Thus W. S. Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous remark-' Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an Vergil unbegreiflich war.' 3He was gentle here on earth, and is gentle there.' Aristoph. Frogs, 82. 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 sanctitas, 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 associate 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 passages 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'. 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 passage 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 passage as illustrating 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- indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace 1 Cf. Reifferscheid, p. 67. 2 Whatsoever it shall be, every fortune must be mastered by bearing it.' 'Learn, my son, from me to bear yourself like a man and to strive earnestly, from others learn to be fortunate.' |