This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil’s childhood and early youth were passed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world. The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no [pg 101]scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:—
At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta
Una dies dabat exitio[148].
His birth-place was in the ‘pagus,’ or ‘township,’ of Andes in the neighbourhood of Mantua. The exact situation of Andes is unknown, though a tradition, as old as the time of Dante, identifies it with the village of Pietola, about three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. But it is only in the Life by Probus that Andes is described as a ‘vicus,’ and there it is said to be distant from Mantua ‘xxx milia passuum.’ The word pagus, which is generally used in reference to Andes, never seems to be used as equivalent to vicus, but as a ‘country-district,’ which might include several villages. The tradition which identifies Andes with any particular village in the neighbourhood of Mantua does not therefore carry with it any guarantee of its truth. In the Eclogues the conventional scenery of pastoral poetry is blended so inseparably with the reproduction from actual scenes, that it is impossible to determine with certainty the characteristic features of Virgil’s early home. The immediate neighbourhood of Mantua presents no features to which the lines of the first Eclogue,
Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae[149],
or
Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras[150],
can apply.
The most characteristic objects familiar to Virgil’s early years appear to have been the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio, which he recalls with affectionate memory in passages of the Eclogues and Georgics. From the fact that [pg 102]the farm on which he lived formed part of the Mantuan land added to the confiscated territory of Cremona, the inference seems obvious that it was on the right bank of the Mincio, i.e. on the side nearest Cremona. The use of the word ‘depellere’ (Ecl. i. 21) might perhaps justify the inference that it was either on higher ground, or was situated higher up the river than Mantua, though the other interpretation of ‘driving our weaned lambs’ forbids our attaching much force to this problematical inference. But the lines which produce more than any other the impression of describing the actual features of some familiar place are those of the ninth Eclogue, 7–10:—
Certe equidem audieram qua se subducere colles