the accounts transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline Museum, or the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil. II. Life of Virgil, and conditions affecting the development of his Genius. The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be known1. Yet it seems an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature into the unfamiliar Vergil. He was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 B. C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and those of their friends, and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festival2. The year of his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high distinction, and took their place as leaders 1 Gossrau, in his edition of the Aeneid (1876), argues and quotes authorities in favour of retaining the older form Virgilius. 2 Cf. Pliny, Ep. iii. 7. Martial, xii. 67 :— Octobres Maro consecravit Idus. of their age in action or literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious contemporaries. This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social . War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus; and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil's childhood and early youth were passed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world. The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement : At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta Una dies dabat exitio1. His birth-place was in the 'pagus,' or 'township,' of Andes in the neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. 1 Lucret. v. 999. But it is only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a 'vicus,' and there it is said to be distant from Mantua 'xxx milia passuum.' The word pagus which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be used as equivalent to vicus, but as a 'country-district,' which might include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry with it any conviction of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional scenery of pastoral poetry is blended apparently so inseparably with the reproduction from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the characteristic features of Virgil's early home. The immediate neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the first Eclogue, or can apply. Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae, Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras, The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil's early years appear to have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics. From the fact that the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i. e. on the side nearest Cremona. The use of the word 'depellere' (Ecl. i. 21) might perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation of 'driving our weaned lambs' forbids our attaching much force to this problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10 :— Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles Usque ad aquam et veteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos, There seems no motive, certainly none suggested by the Sicilian idyl, for introducing the hills, gradually sinking into the plain, unless to mark the actual position of the place referred to. The only hills in the neighbourhood of the Mincio to which these lines can apply are those which for a time accompany the flow of the river from the foot of the Lago di Guarda, and gradually sink into the plain a little beyond 'the picturesque hill and castle of Vallegio,' about fifteen miles higher up the river than Mantua. Eustace, in his Classical Tour, finds many of the features introduced into the first and ninth Eclogues in this neighbourhood, though the wish to find them may have contributed to the success of his search. A walk of fifteen miles seems not too long for young and active shepherds, like Moeris and Lycidas, while such expressions as Tamen veniemus in urbem; Aut si nox pluviam ne colligat ante veremur, seem inapplicable to the shorter distance between Pietola and Mantua. The 'sacri fontes' which are spoken of in Eclogue I., the existence of which is further confirmed by the Non liquidi gregibus fontes, non gramina deerunt in the description from the Georgics (ii. 200), of the pastoral land which Mantua lost, are more naturally to be sought in the more picturesque environment of the upper reaches of the river than in the level plain in the midst of which Mantua stands1. The accurate description of the lake out of which the Mincio flows Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino, the truth of which is attested by many modern travellers, 1 Cf. Eustace, vol. i. chap. v. Compare also the following characteristic passage quoted from Dickens by Mr. Hare in his Cities of Northern and Central Italy: 'Was the way to Mantua as beautiful when Romeo was banished thither, I wonder? Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees? Those purple mountains lay on the horizon, then, for certain.' Dickens certainly was not looking for Virgilian reminiscences in writing this description. Goethe among others-may well be the reproduction of some actual impression made in some of Virgil's early wanderings not far distant from the home of his youth. The passage in the Georgics just referred to, in which, speaking of the land most suitable for rearing herds and flocks, he introduces the lines Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum, proves the tender affection with which he recalled in later life the memory of his early home. Some analogy has been suggested between the rich and quiet beauty of the scenery which first sank into his soul, and the tranquil meditative cast of his genius and the calm and rich harmony of his art. And though it is easy to push such considerations too far, and to expect a closer correspondence than ever exists between the development of genius and the earliest impression of outward nature on the soul, in a poet like Virgil, unusually receptive and retentive of such impressions, whose days from childhood to death were closely bound 'each to each by natural piety,' in whom all elements of feeling were finely and delicately blended with one another, such influences may have been more powerful than in the case of men of a less impressionable and more self-determining type. The district north of the Po, of which Virgil was a native, had enjoyed the 'ius Latii' since the end of the Social War, but did not obtain the full rights of Roman citizenship till the year 49 B. C., when Virgil was in his twenty-first year. The national poet of the early Empire, like the national poet of the Republic, had thus in all probability no claim by birth to be a member of the State of whose character and destiny he has been the truest and greatest expone It may be doubted whether Virgil belonged by birth to the purely Italian stock. He claims for Mantua a Tuscan origin1, but the Etruscan race in the region north of the Po had for a long time previously given way before the settlements of the Gauls, and although 1 Aeneid, x. 204. |