“I sung flocks, tillage, heroes: Mantua gave
Me life; Brundisium, death; Naples, a grave.”
Virgil has been described as a tall, dark-complexioned man, careless of his dress, and with awkward country airs. His life was that of a student; and despite the fact that he was a martyr to dyspepsia and pulmonary disease, he did not allow his delicate health to interfere with his literary labors. Of gentle, unassuming manners, he would fly from the admiring crowds that followed him in the streets; and none would have inferred from his appearance or conversation that he was a great poet. He was more than a great poet—he was a pure, unselfish, honest man, uncontaminated by the prevailing vices. Not the least among his virtues was filial piety. His countrymen felt how great and noble he was, when they rose in the theatre and paid him equal honor with the emperor himself.
Had he lived, it was Virgil’s purpose, after completing the Æneid, to study philosophy, the love of which he had imbibed in early life from the verses of Lucretius. The investigation of truth was his highest aim; and there are reasons for believing that he had in mind the preparation of a grand philosophical poem that might have cast into the shade the stately treatise “On the Nature of Things.”
Such liberality had Virgil experienced from his friends that he left a fortune of $400,000, to be divided, as he never married, among his brother, Augustus, Mæcenas, and others of his associates.
The Eclogues.—Virgil was the first Roman writer to cultivate pastoral poetry, and his Eclogues (selections), or more properly Bucolics (shepherd poems), are mostly dialogues, in imitation of the idyls of Theocritus. Various subjects are charmingly discussed by imaginary shepherds, in whom one sometimes recognizes the poet and his friends.
The least understood of Virgil’s Eclogues is the one entitled “Pollio,” from the name of the consul to whom it is addressed. It was written B.C. 40, and predicts the coming of a wondrous Child, whose birth would usher in a golden age of peace and happiness. Some have seen in this child an unconscious allusion to the Babe of Bethlehem, whose advent the Sibylline oracles are believed to have foretold. Perhaps Virgil had heard of the Hebrew prophecies indirectly through the Alexandrian Greeks, and recast them in Latin verse; perhaps it was but a Roman infant—Pollio’s child—whose birth he sung in an exaggerated strain. However this may be, we may remember that the heathen as well as the Jewish world at this time expected a great reformer, who should restore the innocence and bliss of by-gone ages.
EXTRACT FROM THE POLLIO.
“Comes the Last Age, of which the Sibyl sung—
A new-born cycle of the rolling years;