The cave, where Monicus dwells in solitude, is Montrieux, where you are living your life in the midst of grottoes and woods. Or it may be taken for the very cave of Mary Magdalene, close by your monastery, the place where she passed her period of penitence, and where God lent the props of his grace to your vacillating heart and made you steadfast in the holy purpose which you had so often discussed with me.
For flocks and fields, which you are said to care for no longer, understand your fellow-men and their haunts, which you abandoned when you fled away into solitude. The statement that we had one and the same mother, and father too for that matter, is not allegory but naked truth. The word sepulchre[2] is to be taken as referring to our final abode. The meaning is that heaven awaits you, but Tartarus me, unless divine mercy comes to my rescue. Or the sentence can be taken literally, just as it reads, for you have now a sure abode, and consequently a fairly sure hope of sepulture, while I am still wandering about at random, and everything in my future is quite unsure.
The inaccessible peak, which Monicus upbraids Silvius for struggling toward, panting and exhausted though he is, is the height of fame, the rarer sort of fame, which but few succeed in attaining to. The deserts where Silvius is said to wander are scholarly pursuits. These to-day are desert places indeed, being in some cases forsaken outright, through love of money, in others despaired of and neglected, in consequence of intellectual sluggishness. The mossy rocks are the rich and great, the moss being their inherited wealth, which has slowly gathered about them. Murmuring fountains can be used of men of letters and of those who have the gift of eloquence, inasmuch as little streams of intellectual influence flow from the well-springs of genius that are within them, with a sound, so to speak, that charms and delights us. As for Silvius' swearing by Pales, that is a shepherd oath, for Pales is the shepherds' goddess. We may understand there Mary, who is not a goddess, to be sure, but yet is the mother of God. Parthenias is Virgil himself. It is not a name of my devising. We read in his biography that he well deserved to be styled Parthenias, or the virgin; so his whole life showed. That the reader may be sure to understand this reference the place is added; the region, as I express it, where Benacus, a lake of Cisalpine Gaul, produces a son that closely resembles himself. This son is the Mincius, a river that we associate with Mantua, which is Virgil's native town.
On the other hand, the shepherd of noble blood who has been brought here from another land signifies Homer. In that passage almost every word has a meaning. Even the inde, which is put for deinde, is used not without a certain mysteriousness, seeing that I came in contact with Virgil when I was a boy, but with Homer afterwards, when I was somewhat advanced in years....[3] The epithet noble is of course Homer's by right, for what is more truly noble than his language or mind? Again, I know not from what valley he has come was added because there are varying opinions as to the place of his birth, no one of which have I accepted in that place in the eclogue. Finally, that Virgil drank at the Homeric spring is a fact which is known to everyone who has to do with poetry. The mistress of whom they both are said to be worthy is Fame, for whose sakes they are poets. Except for their mistresses lovers would not sing. The bristling forest and the mountains that rise into the air, at which Silvius is amazed because they do not follow after these sweet singers, are the uncultivated multitude and the persons who occupy high stations. The descent from the mountain-tops to the bottom of the valleys, and the ascent from the valleys into the mountains again, which Silvius refers to in speaking of himself, are the transition from the heights of theory to the low and level ground of practice, and, conversely, the movement in the opposite direction, when our attitude changes. The fountain which praises the singer is the chorus of scholars. The dry and barren crags are the ignorant and illiterate, who, like the rocks where echo dwells, possess mere voice and power of agreement, without any power of discrimination. The nymphs, the goddesses of the fountains, are the divine minds of scholars. The threshold over which Monicus invites Silvius to pass is that of the Carthusian order, into which assuredly no one has ever been lured by deception, or against his will, as many persons have been into other religious bodies. The shepherd whose singing Monicus prefers to Homer and Virgil is no other than David. The mention of singing to the psaltery is peculiarly appropriate in his case, because of the psalms, which are his work. In the middle of the night, on account of the singing of the psalms in your churches at early dawn. The two rivers from a single source, as Monicus puts it first by mistake, are the Tigris and the Euphrates, well-known streams of Armenia. Then the single river from a double source is the Jordan, in Judæa. For this fact we have many authorities, among them Jerome, who was a diligent student of those regions and lived there for a long time. The names of the two sources are Jor and Dan. By their union both the stream and its name are formed. The Jordan empties, it is said, into the Sea of Sodom, where we are told that the fields are strewn with ashes from the burning of the cities. In this river Christ, we learn, was baptised by John. So the hairy youth is John the Baptist, who was but a youth, virgin, pure, innocent, clad in hairy raiment, unkempt, wearing the skin of a goat, with locks uncombed, with face blackened by the suns. Then by Apollo, whom I describe as son of Jupiter and god of intellect, I mean Christ, who is the son of God, and very God himself, and moreover, as I suggest, our god of intellect and wisdom. For, as all theologians know, among the attributes of the persons that constitute the Holy Trinity, one and indivisible, wisdom belongs to the Son; he is the wisdom of the Father.
Again, the hoarse voice and never-ceasing tears and oft-repeated name of Jerusalem are intended as a reference to David, because of his style, which at first seems rough and full of lamentation, and furthermore because there really is frequent mention of that city in the psalms, sometimes historical, sometimes allegorical. Now there follows a brief enumeration of the subjects which the poets whom Silvius is striving to exalt are wont to sing. To explain all this would take a long time. Besides it is sufficiently clear already to those who are proficient in such matters. And then Monicus replies, excusing this harshness of David, and running with like brevity over the list of subjects which he has treated.
The youth about whose deeds Silvius has begun to weave his song is Scipio Africanus, who laid Polyphemus low upon the African shore. The reference there is to Hannibal, the Carthaginian leader. Hannibal and Polyphemus were both one-eyed, after Hannibal's loss of an eye in Italy. The Libyan lions, in which we know that Africa abounds, are the other Carthaginian leaders, who were hurled from power by the same conqueror. The sacrifices that were consumed are the ships which he burned, the ships upon which all the hopes of the Carthaginians had hung. He destroyed five hundred of them before their very eyes, so Roman history tells us. The designation of starry youth is partly because of the heroic valour which he possessed above all other men, and which Virgil characterises as 'burning,' Lucan as 'fiery'; and partly because the Romans of his day were led by their admiration of him to credit him with divine origin. The Italians are said to praise him from the opposite shore because of the fact that the shore of Italy really was opposed to that of Africa, not alone in temper and feeling but in situation too. Rome itself is directly across from Carthage.
However, although this youth is praised so widely, nobody has sung of him; by which I meant to suggest that although all history is full of his deeds and his renown, and Ennius has written a great deal about him, in his rude and unpolished style, as Valerius calls it, there still is no carefully finished metrical treatment of his achievements as yet. So I decided long ago to sing of him myself, as best I could. My poem of Africa is about him. I began it in my youth, with a high heart. God grant that I may be permitted in my old age to bring it to the happy conclusion which I then dreamed of. The danger which always inheres in such postponement of a well-considered plan, and the mutability and uncertainty of this life of ours, Monicus bids us ponder upon, in his concluding remarks, which scarcely call for further explanation. And you will also understand the few sentences at the close, if you will reflect a little. Farewell.
Written at Padua, on the second day of December, toward evening.
[1] Fam., x., 4.