Virgil

• 1. Introduction

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  Virgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the Roman poet a uniquely prominent position in history. Dante went further. In the Divine Comedy, he made Virgil his personal guide through Hell and the greater part of Purgatory, and put a tribute in his own mouth: tu se' solo colui da cu'io tolsi lo bello stile che m'ha fatto onore. The line means thou art alone the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has done honour to me. Centuries later, T. S. Eliot opened a lecture titled What Is a Classic? by treating one thing as self-evidently true. Whatever definition of a classic you reach, he said, it cannot be one that excludes Virgil. Publius Vergilius Maro was born on the 15th of October 70 BC and died on the 21st of September 19 BC. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. Yet the man behind them is hard to recover. Why is so much of his life story considered problematic? How did a poet become a magician in the popular imagination? And why did one of his unfinished poems nearly burn?

• 2. Lives From The Dead

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  Probus, Donatus, and Servius wrote commentaries on Virgil's work, and each prefixed his with a vita, a life of the poet. These prefaces are the chief source for almost everything we claim to know about Virgil. The life given by Donatus is thought to closely reproduce a lost work by Suetonius on the lives of famous authors. Donatus used that same Suetonius material for his life of the playwright Terence, where Suetonius is credited by name. Servius offers a far shorter life, which likewise reads as an abridgement of Suetonius, give or take a statement or two. Behind all of this may sit an even earlier text. Varius is said to have written a memoir of his friend Virgil, and Suetonius likely drew on it along with other contemporary sources. The grammarian Phocas, probably active in the 4th to 5th centuries AD, wrote a life in verse that differs from Donatus and Servius in some details. Henry Nettleship believed the life attributed to Probus may have drawn independently on the same sources as Suetonius, while others credit it to an anonymous writer of the 5th or 6th century AD who leaned on Donatus, Servius, and Phocas. The Servian life became the main source for medieval readers. The trouble is that these commentaries do not simply record facts. Some of their evidence can be shown to rest on allegory and on inferences drawn from Virgil's own poetry. A life reverse-engineered from poems is exactly the kind of life a careful reader learns to distrust.

• 3. The Argument Over Andes

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  Andes was the village where Virgil was born, near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul, the northern Italy added to Italy proper during his lifetime. Pinning that village to a real place on a map has provoked a long and stubborn argument. A tradition of obscure origin, accepted by Dante himself, identified Andes with modern Pietole, two or three miles southeast of Mantua. The ancient biography attributed to Probus tells a different story, recording that Andes lay thirty Roman miles, about 45 kilometres, from Mantua. Inscriptions complicate matters further. There are eight or nine references to Virgil's family line, the gens Vergilia, in inscriptions from Northern Italy. Three appear at Verona, and one at Calvisano, a votive offering to the Matronae by a woman named Vergilia, asking the goddesses to deliver another woman, Munatia, from danger. A tomb built by a member of the gens Magia, the family of Virgil's mother, stands at Casalpoglio, just 12 kilometres from Calvisano. In 1915, G. E. K. Braunholtz noted how close these inscriptions sit to one another, and that Calvisano is exactly thirty Roman miles from Mantua. Robert Seymour Conway took this further, theorizing that the inscriptions concern Virgil's relatives, and that the true Andes is Calvisano or Carpenedolo, not Pietole. E. K. Rand defended Pietole, pointing to Egnazio's 1507 edition of Probus, supposedly based on a very ancient codex from Bobbio Abbey, which gave the distance as three miles. Conway replied that Egnazio's manuscript could not be trusted to be as ancient as claimed, and that three might be Egnazio's own correction to fit the Pietole story. Other studies now look to the Casalpoglio area of Castel Goffredo for the lost village.

• 4. Potter, Magician, Or Gentleman

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  Magia Polla was the name of Virgil's mother, according to Phocas and Probus. His father is harder to fix. The Donatian life reports that some say he was a potter, but most say he was an employee of an apparitor named Magius, whose daughter he married. That maternal family name, Magius, set a strange legend in motion. In Servius's life, the genitive form Magi was not clearly distinguished from magi, the genitive of magus, the Latin word for magician. From that confusion grew a medieval belief that Virgil's father worked for a wandering magician, and that Virgil himself was one. The biographers insist the family was of modest means. Yet the details they preserve suggest otherwise. Virgil spent his boyhood in Cremona until his fifteenth year, in 55 BC, when he is said to have received the toga virilis on the very day the poet Lucretius died. From Cremona he moved to Milan, then shortly after to Rome. The accounts of his education, his study of rhetoric and law, and that formal coming-of-age ceremony point to a wealthy equestrian landowner for a father, not a struggling tradesman. The man himself was tall and stout, with a swarthy complexion and a rustic appearance. He suffered bad health throughout his life and in some ways lived as an invalid. His schoolmates found him shy and reserved, and nicknamed him Parthenias, meaning virgin, because of his aloofness.

• 5. Three Poems

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  Theocritus, the Hellenistic poet, supplied the model for Virgil's first major work. The Eclogues, ten poems whose Greek title means selections, reshaped his pastoral verse into something fresh. Tradition says Virgil began them in 42 BC and published the collection around 39 to 38 BC, though that dating is disputed. The poems range widely. Eclogues 1 and 9 deal with land confiscations in the Italian countryside. Eclogue 4, addressed to Asinius Pollio and known as the Messianic Eclogue, wraps the imagery of a golden age around the birth of a child whose identity has been debated ever since. In these poems Virgil is credited with establishing Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in literature and the visual arts. The Georgics came next, written perhaps between 37 and 29 BC at the insistence of Gaius Maecenas, Octavian's capable political adviser, to whom the poem is dedicated. Its ostensible subject is how to run a farm, following the didactic tradition of the Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days. Its four books cover crops, trees, livestock and horses, and bees. Book 4 closes with the discovery of beekeeping by Aristaeus and the story of Orpheus journeying to the underworld. Ancient scholars such as Servius guessed that this Aristaeus episode replaced, at the emperor's request, a long passage praising Virgil's friend Gallus, who fell into disgrace and killed himself in 26 BC. Virgil and Maecenas are said to have taken turns reading the Georgics aloud to Octavian on his return from defeating Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

• 6. Aeneas And Empire

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  Twelve books of dactylic hexameter verse follow a warrior and refugee of the Trojan War named Aeneas. The Aeneid, modelled on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, traces his flight from the sack of Troy to Italy, where he battles Turnus, and where his descendants Romulus and Remus found the city of Rome. Eliot called it the classic of all Europe. Ancient commentators noticed Virgil seems to split the poem in two. The first six books follow the Odyssey as a model, the last six the Iliad. Book 1 opens with a storm that Juno, Aeneas's enemy throughout, stirs against his fleet, driving him to the coast of Carthage. The queen, Dido, welcomes the ancestor of the Romans and, under the influence of the gods, falls deeply in love with him. Jupiter recalls the lingering hero to his duty in Book 4, and he slips away, leaving Dido to take her own life, cursing him and calling down revenge that foreshadows the wars between Carthage and Rome. The shield given to Aeneas in Book 8 depicts Roman history, and elsewhere the poem even shows Augustus's victory at Actium against Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC. The character of Aeneas is itself a focus of study. He wavers constantly between his emotions and his prophetic duty to found Rome. Critics note how his emotional control breaks down at the end, where the pious and righteous hero mercilessly slaughters Turnus, spurning his pleas for mercy. The poem closes on the image of Turnus's soul lamenting as it flees to the underworld. Some lines were left metrically unfinished at Virgil's death, and a few scholars argue he left them incomplete on purpose, for dramatic effect.

• 7. The Burning That Did Not Happen

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  Augustus commissioned the Aeneid, according to Propertius, and Virgil worked on it during the last eleven years of his life, from 29 to 19 BC. The poem was the cause of a near-disaster. Around 19 BC Virgil travelled to the senatorial province of Achaea in Greece to revise it. After meeting Augustus in Athens, he decided to return home, then caught a fever while visiting a town near Megara. Weakened by disease, he crossed to Italy by ship and died in Apulia on the 21st of September 19 BC. Virgil had wished the unfinished poem burned. Augustus overruled him. He ordered the literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard that wish and publish the work with as few editorial changes as possible. The poem's early reception suggests the stakes. Virgil is said to have recited Books 2, 4, and 6 to Augustus, and Book 6 apparently caused the emperor's sister Octavia to faint. After his death at Brundisium, or at Taranto according to late manuscripts of Servius, his remains were carried to Naples. There his tomb was engraved with an epitaph he had composed himself: Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces. Mantua gave me life, the Calabrians took it away, Naples holds me now; I sang of pastures, farms, and commanders.

• 8. Poet Into Sorcerer

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  Fferyllt was the Welsh form of Virgil's name, and in medieval Wales it became a generic term for a magic-worker. It survives in the modern Welsh word for pharmacist, fferyllydd. The path from Roman poet to byword for sorcery is one of the strangest afterlives in literature. Possibly as early as the 2nd century AD, Virgil's works were treated as having magical properties and used for divination. In the practice known as the Sortes Vergilianae, the Virgilian Lots, passages were chosen at random and read as answers to questions. Eclogue 4 deepened the mystique. From the 3rd century, Christian thinkers read its golden-age child as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus, and Virgil came to be ranked with the Hebrew prophets as one who had heralded Christianity. The Jewish Encyclopedia even argues that medieval golem legends may owe something to stories of Virgil's apocryphal power to bring inanimate objects to life. A separate tale, the legend of Virgil in his basket, arose in the Middle Ages as part of the Power of Women topos. In it Virgil falls for a beautiful woman, sometimes called Lucretia, who agrees to hoist him up to her window in a large basket, then leaves him stranded halfway up the wall into the next day, exposed to public ridicule. Lucas van Leyden made a woodcut and later an engraving of the scene. A famous medieval legend held that Paul the Apostle wept at Virgil's tomb that so great a poet had died without the Christian faith. For a couple of centuries that tomb, at the entrance of an ancient Roman tunnel in Piedigrotta three kilometres from the centre of Naples, drew pilgrims who came to venerate a poet they had half-turned into a saint.