The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil

by W. Y. Sellar

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi

Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus[177],—

the region prized by Horace as second only to his beloved Tibur. In the year 29 B.C. he read the whole poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia, at the town of Atella. The reading occupied four days. Maecenas was of the party, and relieved the poet in the task of reading.

The remaining years of his life were spent in the composition of the Aeneid. One of the poems of the Catalepta (vi.) gives expression to a vow binding the poet to sacrifice a bull to Venus if he succeeded in accomplishing the task which he had imposed on himself. So early as the year 26 B.C., Augustus while engaged in the Cantabrian war, had desired to see some part of the poem. It was in answer to that request that Virgil wrote the letter of which the fragment, quoted in the previous chapter, has been preserved by Macrobius[178]. At a later time, after the death of the young Marcellus (23 B.C.), he read three Books to Augustus and the other members of his family.

After spending eleven years on the composition of his great epic, he set aside three more for its final correction. In the year 19 B.C. he set out with the view of travelling in Greece and Asia. Meeting Augustus at Athens, he was persuaded to abandon his purpose and return with him to Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun he was seized with illness. Continuing his voyage without interruption, he became worse, and on the 21st of September, a few days after landing at Brundisium, he died in the fifty-first year of his age. In his [pg 121]last illness he showed the ruling passion of his life—the craving perfection—by calling for the cases which held his MSS., with the intention of burning the Aeneid. It is in keeping with the absence of self-assertion in his writings that his final hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by such confident assurances of immortality as other Roman poets have expressed. In the same spirit of dissatisfaction with all imperfect accomplishment, he left directions in his will that his executors, Varius and Tucca, should publish nothing but what had been already edited by him. This direction, which would have deprived the world of the Aeneid, was disregarded by them in compliance with the commands of Augustus.

He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious veneration and visited as a temple; and tradition has associated his name, as that of a magician, with the construction of the great tunnel of Posilippo, in its immediate neighbourhood.

III.

The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an independent value as affording insight into social life and character, irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and intermingles with the even course of Virgil’s poetic career. And this may have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic faculty, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the [pg 122]rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The ‘inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae’ thus betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been named. Virgil’s life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his career, from childhood to maturity, was an education, passive and active, for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art: in later life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by which his poetical gifts were fostered—that of living and varying his residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to his happiness, viz. that he suffered during all his life from delicate or variable health[179], was not unfavourable to the concentration of his whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the [pg 123]pleasures in which his contemporaries indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the poets and artists of a southern land is powerfully attracted. The abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the fact recorded of him that he ‘took very little food and wine,’ must have quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished. Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit, or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and greater power in delineating varied types of character: but in combination with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of Virgil would have been lost.

He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion, and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The ‘monstrari digito praetereuntium’ was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that gratification which Horace derived from it.