At a time when the poetry of the younger generation was universally free and licentious in tone, the purity of Virgil’s nature reveals itself in the prayer to the Muses to revisit his writings ‘pudenter et raro,’ chastely and seldom. The whole poem is the sincere expression of the scholar and poet, even in youth idealising the austere charm of philosophy, while feeling in his heart the more powerful attraction of poetry. In the
Nam, fatebimur verum,
Dulces fuistis[167],
is the literal expression of that deep joy which afterwards moved him in uttering the lines—
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, etc.
and
Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis
Raptat amor[168];
and which sustained him stedfastly in the noble harmony of all his later life.
Of the next ten years of his career nothing is known with certainty; but the outbreak of the Civil War is likely to have interrupted his residence at Rome, and he is next heard of living in his native district and engaged in the composition of the Eclogues. He took no part in the war, nor ever served as a soldier; and he seems to have appeared only once in the other field of practical distinction open to a young Roman who had received so elaborate an education—that of forensic pleading. He is said to have wanted the readiness of speech and self-possession necessary for success in such a career; and he was thus fortunate in escaping all temptation to sacrifice his genius to the ambition of practical life, or to divide his allegiance, as Licinius Calvus did, between the claims of poetry and of oratory. His first literary impulse was to write an historical epic on the early Roman or Alban history, and to this impulse, he himself alludes in the lines of the sixth Eclogue,—