Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate constitution, and probably left the fever-bearing regions of the Mincio for the higher plain of Milan for sanitary reasons, as much as the other,—of studying, as men of his parts did study, Greek and philosophy. There is a story, indeed, that he studied and practised farriery, as his father had done before him; and Jethro Tull, in his crude onslaught upon what he calls the Virgilian husbandry, (chap. ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice. But this story of his having been a horse-doctor rests, so far as I can discover, only on this flimsy tradition,—that the young poet, on his way to the South of Italy, after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome with the master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd hints to that official in regard to the points and failings of certain favorite horses of the Roman Triumvir (for Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple) as to gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich marks of his favor.
It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South, and that thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Baiæ and of the Neapolitan shores gave a color to his poems and to his life.
Yet his agricultural method was derived almost wholly from his observation in the North of Italy. He never forgot the marshy borders of the Mincio nor the shores of beautiful Benacus (Lago di Garda); who knows but he may some time have driven his flocks afield on the very battle-ground of Solferino?
But the ruralities of Virgil take a special interest from the period in which they were written. He followed upon the heel of long and desolating intestine wars,—a singing-bird in the wake of vultures. No wonder the voice seemed strangely sweet.
The eloquence of the Senate had long ago lost its traditionary power; the sword was every way keener. Who should listen to the best of speakers, when Pompey was in the forum, covered with the spoils of the East? Who should care for Cicero's periods, when the magnificent conqueror of Gaul is skirting the Umbrian Marshes, making straight for the Rubicon and Rome?
Then came Pharsalia, with its bloody trail, from which Cæsar rises only to be slaughtered in the Senate-Chamber. Next comes the long duel between the Triumvirate and the palsied representatives of the Republican party. Philippi closes that interlude; and there is a new duel between Octavianus and Antony (Lepidus counting for nothing). The gallant lover of Cleopatra is pitted against a gallant general who is a nephew to the first Cæsar. The fight comes off at Actium, and the lover is the loser; the pretty Egyptian Jezebel, with her golden-prowed galleys, goes sweeping down, under a full press of wind, to swell the squadron of the conqueror. The winds will always carry the Jezebels to the conquering side.
Such, then, was the condition of Italy,—its families divided, its grain-fields trampled down by the Volscian cavalry, its houses red with fresh blood-stains, its homes beyond the Po parcelled out to lawless returning soldiers, its public security poised on the point of the sword of Augustus,—when Virgil's Bucolics appear: a pastoral thanksgiving for the patrimony that had been spared him, through court-favor.
There is a show of gross adulation that makes one blush for his manhood; but withal he is a most lithesome poet, whose words are like honeyed blossoms, and whose graceful measure is like a hedge of bloom that sways with spring breezes, and spends perfume as it sways.
The Georgics were said to have been written at the suggestion of Mæcenas, a cultivated friend of Augustus, who, like many another friend of the party in power, had made a great fortune out of the wars that desolated Italy. He made good use of it, however, in patronizing Virgil, and in bestowing a snug farm in the Sabine country upon Horace; where I had the pleasure of drinking goats' milk—"dulci digne mero"—in the spring of 184-.
There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an attentive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of Varro; otherwise he certainly would have been unworthy of the task he had undertaken,—that of laying down the rules of good husbandry in a way that should insure the reading of them, and kindle a love for the pursuit.