VIRGIL (B. C. 70-19) BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON UBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, purest, sweetest, gentlest, best beloved among all poets since the dawn of civilization, was born at Andes, a village near Mantua. His birthplace, his name, perhaps too his wealth of romantic imagination, may indicate Keltic origin. At any rate, his father was a man of humble station, some say a potter, who married his master's daughter, Magia. (This name of Virgil's mother helped on the wild mediæval invention of Virgil the magician.) As Transpadanes, the family naturally shared the general gratitude toward the great Julius, always their especial champion, who in 49 B. C. conferred full Roman citizenship upon the provincials. Virgil apparently never had personal relations with Catullus, Calvus, and their brilliant group of young aristocrats and anti-Cæsarian poets. His education was not defective, certainly. He studied both at Milan and in Rome. A doubtful tradition makes him the fellowstudent of Antony and Augustus. In a youthful poem, perhaps authentic, he takes reluctant farewell of verse, when devoting himself to philosophy as the pupil of the Epicurean sage Siron:— "Begone, O Muses: ay, begone,- although Sweet Muses; for we will the truth confess, The undertone of doubt in these words proved doubly prophetic. Much in the tranquil Epicurean acceptance of life, and much indeed of Lucretius's grandest harmonies and large view of nature's eternal pageant, the Augustan poet-laureate always retained. Perhaps he even envies that most fearless and lofty of atheistic philosophers: "Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways,— All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan!» ('Georgics,' ii. 490–492, translation of F. W. H. Myers.) These lines are generally supposed to be a direct tribute to Lucretius. But Virgil's intensely religious and even mystical spirit clung most anxiously to those two beliefs which Lucretius puts scornfully behind him: the faith in all-wise, all-powerful Divine beings, and in the soul's existence after death. Virgil was certainly no untutored child of the soil, like Burns. Even more than his friend Horace, he everywhere reveals the loftiest refinement, and lifelong loving familiarity with the best in literature and art. He turns away, indeed, like Lucretius, and far more heartily than worldly-minded Horace, from the splendor and the noisy throng of clients in ministerial palaces, to seek refreshment on nature's heart. "Oh, happy beyond all happiness - did they Their weal but know - those husbandmen obscure, Fair with mosaic of tortoise-shell, the gold "But they are at peace in life, in guile untaught, And dowered with manifold riches. Theirs the ease And slumber of sweetness under sheltering trees, And theirs a hardy youth, unto humble ways Attempered, and patient in their toil; and still The old have honor of them, and the gods have praise. Left her last footprint among such as they." ("Georgics,' ii. 458-474, version of Harriet Waters Preston.) There is abundant evidence here (as in the pictures of Carthaginian splendor in 'Eneid,' Books i. and iv.) that Virgil knew the luxury of courts as thoroughly as he did the better beloved rural peace he craves. The last phrase just quoted, furthermore, reminds us of the melancholy tone, the vein of pathos, which all lovers of our poet remember so well. There was much in the conditions of the time to justify this; indeed, that sturdy patriot Livy, in his prelude, strikes a more disconsolate note than any single passage in the epic. In truth, the best stage of the national life had already passed with the age of the two Africani. The lordship of Italy fully attained, Rome passed on to more fatal successes. She overthrew Carthage and Corinth in a single year (146 B. C.); but Cato was more than half right, - the national character was rapidly undermined by foreign wealth, and by culture too easily and swiftly won from without, not bred steadily from within. Doubtless Ennius's historical poem, or versified chronicle, if ever it shall come again to light, will seem rugged and inartistic to us, as it certainly did to most of the later Romans. Yet it was more truly an epic of manly freedom and patriotic pride than was possible under the early empire. The empire itself indeed was generally, and rightly, welcomed. But it was "As he who, with distressful breath, Forth issued from the sea upon the shore, Augustus's rule came as the only hope of peace and order after a century full of civic strife, beginning with the death of the generous far-sighted patrician radical, Tiberius Gracchus, under the clubs of an aristocratic mob (133 B. C.). If ever conditions were such that the stanchest republican, who was a true and wise patriot as well, must welcome "the man on horseback," it was in the year after the great Julius's death (43 B. C.); when the Roman State,- that is, the civilized world,- already rudely shaken and drained of its life-blood by previous civil wars, now lay utterly helpless, and rent asunder between the dissolute rapacity of Mark Antony, and the impracticable imperious selfishness of wouldbe reactionists like Cassius and Brutus. Rome and civilization seemed about to sink together into that rift of civic strife, too wide for any Curtius to close. It was at this juncture that the cold-hearted, longheaded boy Octavian- heir to Julius's name and fortune, far more than heir to his self-control and mastery of other men-came upon the scene. Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar, he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dispatched. The next dozen years were to cost the commonwealth much bloodshed still, in war and peace; many of her noblest lives were yet to be cut short by the soldier's or the bravo's sword: for we can hardly set earlier than the decisive battle of Actium (31 B. C.), the end of the century of turmoil opened by the death of Tiberius Gracchus under Nasica's bludgeon. Yet even so, the mighty emperor Augustus could point to a reign of fully forty-five years, marked by prosperity and union within, and by foreign wars in the main successful, when he passed on the firm-held sceptre to his unloved and unloving kinsman, and took his own place beside Julius among the deities of Rome. Did the august Augustus ever forget, as we are prone to do, his own identity with the dissolute stripling Octavianus Cæsar, the murderer of his tutor Cicero? Through this long period, -this cardinal half-century of the world's life, the restoration of civic order, the rebuilding of the city and especially of the temples, the revival, so far as might be, of popular faith in the national gods, the glorification of Rome (and of his own house) in art and literature, were all purposes dear to Augustus's heart, all fused in the steady central purpose of his life. In all these efforts, Virgil the poet was as loyal and helpful as Agrippa and Mæcenas the soldier and diplomatist; and he met quite as generous appreciation as they, both from his imperial master and from the Roman people. Horace never forgot, nor ceased to be proud, that he had led his battalion in the last hopeless struggle against the incoming despotism. Nor did he ever wholly surrender his sturdy independence. Those who love him best may well regret that his life fell in a time when his genuine manliness and liberty-loving frankness must be so largely hidden under the courtier's mask and cloak. Virgil, on the contrary, more largely than any other great poet, we evidently owe to the sunshine- or perhaps more truly, to the hot-house warmth-of imperial favor. The marvelous charm of his verse, the exquisite commingling of clear-cut meaning and thousandfold haunting suggestion, is indeed the unique and inexplicable gift of his genius. Yet his languid Theocritean mock-pastorals might have perished with him,-at best he would probably have remained the idle singer of a rather ignoble provincial life,- had Mæcenas not summoned him before a far greater audience, and urged him on to more ambitious themes. Quite unlike Horace or any other Roman poet down to their day, Virgil in his first undoubted utterance strikes the note of utmost servility and adulation. "Yea, for a god shall he be evermore unto me, and his altar Often a tender lamb of our fold shall stain with his heart's blood!» cries the shepherd Tityrus in the first Eclogue. It is the voice of Virgil himself,- one of the first to deify the half-reluctant Emperor. The cause for gratitude was most inadequate. Virgil's little farm by Mantua, wrongfully wrested from its loyal owner and bestowed on one of Octavian's veterans, had been tardily and reluctantly restored. Moreover there is a tradition of a second expulsion, attended with danger to the poet's life; and the urgent intercession of three powerful friends,- Varus, Gallus, and Pollio,—as well as Virgil's own appeal at Rome to the dictator, were required to secure this act of scanty justice (41 B. C.). Indeed, some scholars doubt if Virgil ever returned to his old home. Perhaps Augustus never lost sight of the gifted and pliant youth whose value he promptly realized. We cannot hope to find in this timid courtly poet the exultant manliness and free stride of an Eschylus, an Ennius, or even of a Dante, unbending in homeless exile, fearless of speech even under imminent peril of death. More perhaps than any other artist, the heroic poet needs to breathe the air of freedom. Virgil the man, like his hero, is always conscious that his actual lot is, at best, but a second choice. Eneas tells Dido: "If fate permitted me to shape my life I then would cherish. Priam's halls would rise; >> This note of mild regret for vanished hopes is so recurrent and constant as to impress every listener at last. It is indeed the tone not merely of the poet but of his whole race and generation. But submission to fate, the merging of the individual life in the larger and more lasting current of destiny, is in all ages a peculiarly Roman ideal. Perhaps his very limitations have helped Virgil to crystallize into epic, more than any other artist has ever done, the whole national life of so many centuries. Honored and beloved though he was by all, Virgil's own earthly life hardly seems to have been a happy one. His health was delicate, his nature shy and sensitive, he had the bitterest misgivings as to his ability to master the high themes assigned him; and his life ends naturally with that unavailing appeal to his friends to destroy the uncompleted and unsatisfying national epic on which so many years of toil had been spent. But indeed the living Virgil is less real to us than the stately shade, so gladly descried by the Florentine pilgrim in the gloom of the Valley, the "courteous Mantuan spirit, Of whom the fame yet in the world endures, The ten brief pastorals known as the 'Bucolics' or 'Eclogues' were published at Rome in 37 B. C. They are often mere paraphrases from the more sincere Greek pastorals of the school of Theocritus. |