Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. New York: St. Martin's Press, Wright, David H. London: British Library, Toggle navigation.
Early years and education Virgil was born on October 15, 70 B. Pastoral poems The Eclogues this, the more usual title, means "Select Poems"; they are also known as Virgil. The Aeneid The Aeneid is one of the most complex and subtle works ever written. Last years Virgil worked on the Aeneid for the last eleven years of his life.
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E-mail: Show my email publicly. Human Verification:. Public Comment: characters. Perhaps out of fear of another slave war -- Spartacus's rising BC was still well remembered -- Caesar insisted that at least one out of every three herdsmen in Italy must be free. In early spring 44 BC, six months after adopting his great-nephew Octavian Augustus as heir, he was assassinated, and more appalling violence followed.
In the two years BC, a hundred-and-fifty senators and two-thousand equites died in the wars and purges. Virgil took no part in all those wars, and no part that we know in politics or in Roman society. He had no ambition as a lawyer or as a senator. The Epicurean views about physics or cosmology or science that Lucretius so carefully lays out in detail were possibly of secondary importance to Virgil and to Siro.
Their gods were a pleasing vision but they were deists, they did not believe the gods were worried by this distant world. These philosophers lived undisturbed and free from fear, at Pozzuoli Puteoli as they did in Athens, and both women and slaves might belong to their circle as equal members. Puteoli was a little way south from Naples, towards Pompeii and Herculaneum where the house of Philodemos stood and some of his writings have been excavated from what may be his or Piso's house.
Philodemos came to Rome in the wars with Mithridates the Great BC , probably as a refugee and he had been lucky enough to be taken up by the Piso family, one of whom, the consul of 58 BC, gave him his fine house at Herculaneum. Philodemos appears to have been an Epicurean as Siro was, and is said to have influenced the Romans more widely than has ever seemed obvious to me.
After the assassination of Caesar he apparently took up a strong view against Mark Antony, and Virgil and Horace have been cited among those he influenced: but Horace was abroad and the evidence in Virgil's case is mostly in the Appendix , which is negligible. A papyrus has been found at Piso's house, which has Virgil's name as one of the speakers in Philodemos's dialogue On Flattery M. Gigante, SIFC, But, even without this lucky find, the mere fact of the two Greek sages of withdrawal living close to one another would suggest a way in which Virgil as he grew older may have become known to a wider world.
Still, we do not know for certain when he first got to know those he addresses in his first book, his Eclogues. They are a sign of something new in poetry, and it is only by hindsight that we appreciate their lively originality.
Valerius Cato was a faded force in Roman poetry, his country house in Tuscany had been sold to pay debts, and by 40 BC when he was an old man he was dying in picturesque rustic poverty, caught in a few verses by his disciple Furius Bibaculus as precisely as a photographer from the Sunday papers. The old man had disciples but no patron. It is hard to know how these things happen: it was not only a change of fashion, yet it was also that. Its result was that a movement or something too cloudy to be called a movement had dried up before the death of Cicero, who identified them as these newfangled writers, the moderns, the Neoterici.
We are lucky that they aroused enough interest in later and sillier critics or theorists to furnish us with some idea of the literary culture in which Virgil grew up, just as Philip Larkin grew up when the ground was thick with late Georgians, and Yeats in the nineties had to fight his way out of the shadow of dying Tennyson, and Tennyson in his day out of the oppressive atmosphere of ladies' annuals under George IV.
But Virgil must have learnt the elements of the language at home, where there were many Greeks, and we should conjecture that the influence of recent and obscure Greek poets like Euphorion ?
However that may be, Parthenius was sent to Italy in 73 BC and was there set free as a poet. Macrobius, a dignified and footling but not wholly inglorious man of letters in the fifth century AD, reports that Parthenius taught Virgil Greek in Naples.
Parthenius was a poet with a higher contemporary reputation than he deserved. As a very young student I used to read it hoping it would throw light on Virgil, but I do not remember that it ever did.
Writers like him forty years ago were called Scriptores Erotici , and at Oxford you needed a note from your senior tutor to read them in the Bodleian.
As the late Hellenistic writers, and to a lesser extent Virgil and Ovid, had a passion for the most unlikely erotic variations, our studies of Hellenistic Greek hardly got off the ground. Parthenius at least serves to fill out the picture we have of Greek influence south of Rome.
By this time the Greeks from the war with Mithridates were ageing. Philodemos had been a pupil of the Epicurean Zeno at Athens, but soon after 40 he was dead, and most of his relics are vers de societe , frivolous or erotic or pathetic or playful epigrams. They are adroitly written but they smell of dust. Cicero attacked him without naming him, as an evil Greek influence on Piso against whom his onslaught was hell for leather Pison.
Still, Philodemos was a romantic of a kind, and original by the rules of his game. It is important not to make too much of him just because we happen to know his name, and it is very doubtful whether he was an influence on Horace, though Horace was strongly influenced on literary matters by Quintilius Varus who was Virgil's friend and fellow-pupil in Naples.
These Greeks were a network: there is a poem inviting Philodemos to dinner Gow and Page, 22 which he is supposed to have written himself, and one of the other guests is Artemidorus, very likely the same son of Theopompos of Cnidos who warned Caesar about the Ides of March in 44 BC on his way to his assassination. Would Virgil have taken the same side? In Caesar's four years of power, it had been possible for all Italians to hope, and the new settlement of Cisalpine Gaul must have confirmed Virgil in hopes.
At this self-invited dinner everyone is Greek, there are no Roman pupils. In an invitation poem to Piso for an Epicurean anniversary, Philodemos mentions only luxuries not to expect, but we know at least that it was in these circles that Virgil spent his youth, and no doubt ruined his digestion. Naples and Puteoli and Herculaneum were old Greek market towns, and had been so since Rome was a village.
The Romans took it over in , but even though they finally colonised it, Naples remained loyal to the Romans, and so Greek was allowed to be spoken there and taught in the schools there until long after Virgil's time.
Herculaneum was only five miles away: that was a small wealthy place, Hellenised by the shadow of Naples, though in the wars over the franchise just before Virgil was born the Romans had taken it over and Romanised it.
Puteoli was founded by Samians in the sixth century BC, and taken over by Rome in the fourth. It was in Virgil's day the greatest Roman port for the Eastern trade, and second only to Delos as a market. Sulla had a house there, so had Cicero, and so later had Hadrian. All these towns are within the small circle of Virgil's world as an Epicurean, but perhaps the best surviving example of what kind of world it was is Paestum, the Greek Poseidonia, where the temples are still standing and the roses in Virgil's day used to blossom twice in the year.
Since then the great pillars of the temples have stood a thousand years in the sea, but the sea has now receded, and when they were rediscovered in the eighteenth century they were sheds for water buffaloes.
By Virgil's day Paestum must already have been plagued by mosquitos, in spite of its roses. The houses of his rich contemporaries with serious good taste were inland at places like Boscoreale.
The case of Cumae is the most extraordinary of all, since it was founded by about BC by Chalcis and became the mother of many colonies, including Naples, Pozzuoli, and Messina Messana in Sicily. Alas only fifty-three years later the Oscans took it, but then the Romans occupied it in their turn, and by BC the people of Cumae were speaking Latin. What excited Virgil at Cumae was the dramatic darkness of the Sibyl's cave.
This prophetess had become entangled into Roman legend, and she was in a curious way central to Virgil's plan for the Aeneid, just as Cumae itself must have influenced his thoughts on Roman Italy, Greek Italy, complex and united Italy. Cumae is not very far from Naples, but of course we do not know how far south he ventured. Northerners used to say Italy ends at Rome and ends badly -- though my own feeling is that it begins at Rome and begins well.
To Virgil Cumae was wonderfully impressive in its antiquity and doubtless he climbed to its impregnable acropolis. As a decent Epicurean and a modern poet he did not believe in things like the Sibyl, though he was greatly interested, as an Epicurean should be, in the nature of sense perception.
Virgil had certainly read Lucretius. He gives evidence of believing, as Lucretius does, that perception is infallible but inference from it misleads us. Lucretius's On the Nature of Things was published posthumously and had required editing. So the poem would first have been available when Virgil was about eighteen, edited by Cicero it seems. Virgil was the right age for it then, and old-fashioned, or even wonderfully curmudgeonly as the poem was, it influenced him deeply.
The study of Lucretius is alarmingly pitted with elephant-traps, we do not know whether he was an aristocrat or an ex-slave, whether he was poisoned by a love-philtre -- it is a wonder that did not happen more often -- which may be a false inference from his inveighing against passions. Lucretius's patron Memmius was in politics, and patron to Catullus and to Cinna, and we are told to Parthenius.
He took them all to Bithynia where he was governor when Virgil was in his teens. Parthenius is a slippery figure for literary historians. He made a disgusting attack on Homer, but as he is said to have outlived Augustus there may well have been two of him: anyway, his circumstances leave it open to us to hope another Parthenius was to blame, not Virgil's tutor. Memmius was a man of influence married to Sulla's daughter who stood as consul with Caesar's support in 54 BC, but a scandal undid him and he died in exile in Athens before 46 BC.
He bought the old house of Epicurus, and to Cicero's alarm thought of redeveloping it. Neither Memmius's patronage nor any other in that generation is to be taken very seriously, except maybe Piso's. Old Archias of Antioch used to compose Greek verse impromptu and wrote entire epics in praise of Roman leaders, and when his Roman citizenship was contested he attracted the patronage of Cicero, who successfully defended him in a speech as delicious and light as a wine made of the elderflower, but they did not stay friends.
Archias was born in the second century, though he was still alive when Caesar fell. No doubt Archias preferred the great family of the Metelli, and may be they looked after him. Things were not as bad for mediocre Greek poets as they were to become by Juvenal's time, but men like Archias had a sort of street wisdom that even Cicero lacked.
We are now to deal with a different atmosphere and another matter. What emerges from all this tattered information and clouded judgement is that alarming phenomenon, a great book of poetry that two thousand years have not in any way lessened. Virgil's Eclogues were Spenser's and Milton's starting-point in poetry, and Shakespeare in his comedies constantly returned to them.
The problems of their date and the order of their composition are comparatively small, but much about Virgil's life both now and later hangs on a rigorously exact account of his patrons in these poems. The Eclogues were presented to the world we are told in 37 or 36 BC and they swiftly became an enormous popular success.
Tacitus records Dialog. Nothing like it is remembered of any earlier Roman poet. Throughout these poems the musical phrases and tones of the verse do deliberately echo themselves, and the first word, Tityre which he uses as a name, is also a Greek word for a shepherd's pipe: a tityrist is a piper, but tityros can mean a bird and it comes from the word for the cheeping or the warbling of young birds.
As a name Tityros can mean a Satyr but only in the late writer Aelian , a he-goat, or a bell-wether, or just the reed. It appears to be a Sicilian Doric word, though Theocritus who invented this kind of poetry never uses it.
The noise of a self-echoing flute or self-echoing bird has been re-invented many times in the half rhymes and internal rhymes of poetry, in Persian and in Welsh, and in English in William Barnes and his modern followers, but in Virgil's Latin sparingly and with a fastidious perfection in the Eclogues. The fact that Latin metre was by long and short syllables and not by accent like English poems down to Kipling slightly muffles the bird-twitter or fluting effect, but does not abolish it.
Virgil's phrasing in the Eclogues has a peculiar, dandified beauty which is vernacular. If it imitates Greek then it imitates a dialect pronunciation of Theocritus which we cannot now imagine. Such things alter, and we do not know what exact stage Italian Greek had reached in Virgil's lifetime.
Since this subject has interested me for so many years, perhaps the reader will forgive me a short diversion on its later history. The lines turn out to be by Charles d'Orleans, but I do not know whether he wrote then as a prisoner in England, for twenty years after Agincourt, or in France. Virgil tells us that his patron's commands led him to write his Eclogues, which are a rather single-minded adaptation of the Idylls of Theocritus. Virgil's statement is in the dedication of the eighth Eclogue, where the patron is given the grandest praise but is not named.
As a young man I despaired of these lines, since it was commonly taught then that the patron was G. Asinius Pollio, which made very little sense. But I now gratefully accept Wendell Clausen's clear account in his commentary , which is based on a suggestion by Bowersock that Virgil's patron was Augustus, no less.
In November 43 BC after some tough skirmishing Augustus had himself made consul, and with Antony and Lepidus formed the triumvirate for state. In the year 42 BC when Antony defeated Cassius and Brutus at Philippi and they committed suicide, Agrippa Augustus's fellow-student Maecenas his grey eminence and Salvidienus Rufus who did not last were Augustus's friends and allies. That same year, in October, the treaty of Brindisi Brundisium entailed the marriage of Antony with Octavia, Augustus's sister, which Virgil apparently celebrated in his fourth Eclogue.
The Eclogue is about Pollio's consulship which was at that time and about the birth of a son and the new golden age. Also, the manipulation of themes and motifs, images and symbols allowed a poet to create significance and meaning, to make his own statement. Virgil was not a Roman Homer. His artistic purpose was different. The Aeneid can be divided into two parts of six books each or into three parts of four books each.
Books , organized around Aeneas's narration of the destruction of Troy and his wanderings, have Carthage as their dramatic setting; are an interlude between the drama of and , the story of the fighting in Italy. Moreover, the even-numbered books are highly dramatic, while the odd-numbered books reflect a lessening of tension and have less dramatic value. Modern interpreters of the Aeneid are not inclined to view the epic simply as a patriotic poem glorifying Rome through the accomplishments of its stalwart hero, pious Aeneas, who embodies the character of Augustus and the quintessential spirit of Rome.
Love and glorification of Rome and its mighty empire as well as admiration of Augustus are certainly present book 6, Anchises' revelation of the future greatness of Rome; book 8, the description of Aeneas's shield on which are engraved scenes from Roman history. But there also runs through the Aeneid a constant undercurrent of awareness of the human cost of Aeneas's undertaking, that is, of the cost of building Rome's empire. This awareness reflects the moral ambiguities surrounding the new regime.
Augustus established a much-needed peace and restored order after years of disruption, but his hands were just as bloody as those of anyone else.
Virgil, the most melancholy of Roman poets, saw the life of his time in all its complexity, saw the "tears of things, the human situation which touches the heart, " to paraphrase his most famous line "sunt lacrimae return et mentem mortalia tangunt".
In the course of the epic, Aeneas, while steadily growing more responsible and more devoted to his great mission, loses, nevertheless, every human tie except that to his son, to whom he is not particularly close.
As he advances in pietas, the quality of devotion to duty valued so highly by the Romans, he loses his humanness.
He becomes an entirely public man; there is no space in his heart for private feelings or human love. The last statement has one exception. A modern critic has drawn attention to an important theme of the poem, the subduing of the demonic, represented as furor or ira, "madness" or "wrath, " whether on the cosmic level, as in Juno; the natural level, as in the storm in book 1; or the human level, as in Dido, Amata, or Aeneas himself in book 2.
Pietas, especially in Aeneas, seems slowly to subdue the forces of madness and wrath. Yet, in the final lines of the poem, Aeneas, "inflamed by madness and wrath" "furilis accensus et ira" , in revenge for the death of Pallas, kills Turnus although he had heard the admonition of his father in the underworld to "spare those at your mercy. One may note, too, that the final book ends with a death, as do so many of the others.
As a recent critic says, "It is this perception of Roman history as a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit that makes Virgil his country's truest historian. Virgil worked on the Aeneid for the last 11 years of his life. The composition of it, from a prose outline, was never easy for him. Augustus once wrote to ask to see part of the uncompleted work.
Virgil replied that he had nothing to send and added, "I have undertaken a task so difficult that I think I must have been mentally ill to have begun it.
In 19 B. Virgil resolved to spend 3 more years on his epic after taking a trip to Greece, perhaps to check on some details necessary for his revision. At Megara he contracted a fever and became so ill that he returned to Brundisium, where he died on September He left instructions that the Aeneid should be burned, but Augustus countermanded them and ordered Various and Tucca, two friends of the poet, to edit it for publication. It appeared in 17 B. Letters, Virgil According to the tradition, Virgil asked to burn the Aeneid because it was incomplete.
The hall of Dido by Sonse — Wikimedia Commons. Over time, Cardinal Scipione Borghese collected extraordinary paintings but also various works of art and at the end of the seventeenth century, he had more than paintings preserved in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. According to the Aeneid, after a violent storm, Enea arrived in Carthage, hosted by the founder and first queen Dido. At the time of his departure, Dido killed herself with a sword, prophesying enmity between the heirs of Aeneas and Carthage.
Also here in the Galleria Borghese, you can admire the beautiful statue of Bernini which depicts Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanio.
The scene represents the escape of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanio from Troy. Aeneas carries on his shoulders his old father Anchises who carries the vase containing the ashes of the ancestors. But Ascanio, instead olds the eternal fire kept in the temple of Vesta. The statue is a must-see! You will notice how Bernini represented the age difference between the three men.
Nowadays you can admire many worthwhile performances in this beautiful amphitheatre surrounded by a green park. Although I live in Italy, travel is part of my life.
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