Tu nunc eris illi
Mantua quod fuerat, quodque Cremona prius[165]—
implying a residence at Cremona, it seems probable that his father may have accompanied him thither, as Horace’s father accompanied him to Rome for the same purpose. On his [pg 110]sixteenth birth-day—the day on which, according to Donatus, Lucretius died—Virgil assumed the ‘toga virilis,’ and about the same time went to Milan, and continued there, engaged in study, till he removed to Rome in the year 53 B.C., when he was between sixteen and seventeen years of age. It was in this year of his life that he is said to have written the ‘Culex.’ There are many difficulties which prevent the belief that Virgil is the author of the poem which has come down to us under that name. But the consideration of these must be reserved for a later examination of the poem.
At Rome he studied rhetoric under Epidius, who was also the teacher of the young Octavianus. As the future Emperor made his first public appearance at the age of twelve, by delivering the funeral oration over his grandmother Julia, it may have happened that he and Virgil were pupils of Epidius at the same time, and were not unknown to each other even before the meeting of ten years later which decisively affected Virgil’s fortunes and determined his career. The time of his arrival at Rome was of critical importance in literature. The recent publication of the poem of Lucretius, the most important event in Latin literature since the appearance of the Annals of Ennius, must have stimulated the enthusiasm of the younger generation, among whom poetry and oratory were at that time conjointly cultivated. Mr. Munro has shown the influence exercised by this poem on the later style of Catullus, who collected and edited his own poems about the time when Virgil came to Rome, and died shortly afterwards. One or two of the minor poems among the Catalepton, attributed to Virgil with more probability than the Culex, are parodies or close imitations of the style of Catullus, and are written in a freer and more satiric spirit than anything published by him in later years. But it is a little remarkable that, while reproducing the language and cadences of both these poets in his first acknowledged work, Virgil never mentions the name either of Lucretius or Catullus. The poets mentioned by him with admiration in the Eclogues are his living contemporaries, [pg 111]Varius and Cinna, Pollio and Gallus. Is it on account of the Senatorian and anti-Caesarean sympathies of the older poets that the poets of the new era thus separate themselves abruptly from those of the previous epoch? If it was owing to the jealousy of the new régime that the two great Augustan poets, while paying a passing tribute to the impracticable virtue of Cato, never mention the greater name or allude to the fate of Cicero, there seems to have been nothing in the political action or expressed opinions of Lucretius to call for a similar reticence. If, on the other hand, the boldness of his attack on the strongholds of all religious belief had the effect of cutting him off for a time from personal sympathy, as similar opposition to received opinions had in modern times in the case of Spinosa and Shelley, it did not interfere with the immediate influence exercised by his genius on the thought and art of Virgil.
The most interesting of the minor poems among the Catalepton is one written at the time when the young poet entered on the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. This poem expresses the joy felt by him in exchanging the empty pretension and dull pedantry of rhetorical and grammatical studies for the real enquiries of philosophy:—
Ite hinc, inanes rhetorum ampullae,
Inflata rore non Achaico verba,
Et vos, Stiloque, Tarquitique, Varroque,
Scholasticorum natio madens pingui,
Ite hinc, inanis cymbalon iuventutis.