“who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes,”
had already spent some ten years on the Æneid, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the “famous cities” and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to
“Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render
Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge,
Whole and intact on the Attican borders
Faithfully guarding the half of my soul.”
Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples,