(70-19 b.c.) poet
Virgil’s birthplace was the village of Andes near the northern Italian city of Mantua in the ancient Roman province known as Cisalpine Gaul, on the Roman side of the Alps. His father, who seems to have been a cattle farmer, beekeeper, and manufacturer of earthenware, once worked as a servant for a man whose daughter he married and must have become fairly prosperous, since he could afford to educate his son for an elite career.
Virgil attended schools in several cities. When he was approximately 11 years old, he was sent to Cremona, about 75 miles from Milan, to study grammar and literature. At the time, Julius caesar was governor of Cisalpine Gaul and advocated full citizenship and self-government for the Cisalpines. Virgil developed an enduring admiration for Caesar and for Augustus, his successor, that would last a lifetime. In 55 B.C., Virgil continued his schooling in Milan, then moved to Rome when he was around 18 to put the finishing touches on his education. He was lectured on Latin and Greek prose style, including forms of expression, literary devices and conventions, and rules of composition. Bored with the rigidity of these topics, he studied rhetoric with a popular instructor as preparation for a career in law or politics, but this discipline, too, he found restrictive and technical. In any case, he proved he had no knack for public speaking. He was, however, interested in writing verse, and he cultivated friendships with a group of writers known as the “New Poets,” who were experimenting in Latin with classical Greek poetic techniques. While in Rome, he enjoyed the patronage of men of wealth and influence, as he would for virtually his entire career.
lucretius’s On the Nature of Things was an enormous inspiration to Virgil, who copied the poet’s use of hexameter and emulated his faith in the wisdom of the Greek philosopher epicurus and his followers. The Epicureans blended an interest in nature, including human nature, with scientific analysis and made the pursuit of pleasure a legitimate way of life. “The effect of Lucretius on Virgil was tremendous,” writes scholar Olivia Coolidge in Lives of Famous Romans. Virgil’s “artistry, more subtle than that of Lucretius, is only possible because of the earlier poet’s work.” Indeed, Virgil spent most of his adult life in an Epicurean colony in Naples. (Despite his inclinations, Virgil was an unsophisticated man, diffident, physically awkward, perhaps embarrassed by his provincial accent, and of a delicate constitution. He never married.)
In 42 b.c., Augustus (then Octavian), seeking to settle 200,000 discharged troops, ruthlessly confiscated entire districts in Cisalpine Gaul, including, probably, Virgil’s boyhood home. The family’s estate was restored, possibly due to the intervention of a powerful friend, but Virgil was deeply moved by the suffering around the countryside and the misery of those who had been evicted from their homes. Beyond these borders was a collective weariness and disillusionment among a population that had just experienced the wrenching transition from a Roman republic to an empire.
Virgil purportedly wrote in his own epitaph, “I sang of pastures, of cultivated fields, and of rulers.” These three subjects correspond chronologically to his works: Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid. The Eclogues are pastoral poems patterned as dialogue sung by shepherds. They represent Virgil’s response to the misery he witnessed in contrast to the pastoral splendor and time of tranquillity that preceded it. His themes are the death and renewal inherent in nature, and the work suggests past travails and a redemptive future. They are unique in the way Virgil combines the pastoral genre with contemporary issues. The Eclogues were published in 37 b.c., upon which Virgil became a famous man, an enormously successful and highly regarded poet, and the beneficiary of the patronage of Maecenas, a chief adviser to Augustus. Maecenas was also patron to Virgil’s good friend and fellow poet horace, whom Virgil had introduced to Maecenas.
With Maecenas’s encouragement, Virgil went to work on his next composition, the Georgics. Again, he presents the cycles of nature central to a farmer’s life and shows how those who wrest a living from the land must toil assiduously to bring forth fertility and rebirth. The Georgics is didactic in nature, but in this work, as in the Eclogues, Virgil transforms the genre in his praise of Roman rural values and in the pathos he shows for the lack of peace in recent years. He views peace as the only condition under which agriculture and animal husbandry can thrive, yet he describes how the land has been desiccated by a century of warfare. Virgil took seven years to write the Georgics, completing it in 29 b.c. The finished work comprises four books on farming and cultivating corn, cultivating olives and vines, raising livestock, and beekeeping, respectively.
Virgil spent the rest of his life crafting his epic masterpiece, the Aeneid. Before completing it, he became ill while traveling with Augustus and never recovered. While he was dying, he pleaded with his executors to destroy the unfinished manuscript, since he feared it did not live up to his exacting standards. Augustus, who had heard excerpts of the work in progress and recognized its value, countermanded the order and had it published after the poet’s death.
Critical Analysis
The Aeneid recounts in iambic pentameter the epic adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior and the son of a goddess. Aeneas sorrowfully leaves his ruined homeland after it is sacked by the Greeks and founds the city that is Rome’s predecessor. Virgil summarizes the story in the opening lines, rendered here in a prose translation:
I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome.
Juno is queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter (corresponding to the Greek Hera and Zeus). She is Aeneas’s persistent adversary throughout the 12 books of the Aeneid. Juno maintains a furious grudge against the Trojans, in part because of the mythic “Judgment of Paris.” Paris, son of the king of Troy, was commanded to decide which of three goddesses was most beautiful: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite. He chose the third, incurring the wrath of the other two.
In the Aeneid, Juno uses her powers to inflict a succession of disasters upon the hero as he wanders with his band of Trojan War survivors through Sicily and Africa en route to fulfilling his destiny. One of the most well-known incidents takes place when the refugees are shipwrecked on Carthage (now Tunisia), where Aeneas arouses the ardor of Queen Dido. Ultimately he honors his fate and sense of duty and leaves her. Tragically, she throws herself on a funeral pyre.
Aeneas finally reaches Italy, where, after bitter conflict, he establishes his city and founds the new race that will unite Italy with a common language, culture, and sense of nationality and ultimately give rise to the Roman Empire.
As in his earlier works, Virgil’s themes in the Aeneid are those of peace and order, the devastation of war, and a destructive past giving way to a promising future. The work is also an eloquent hymn celebrating Rome’s glory and its imperial destiny. In subject matter, it is like a blend of homer’s Odyssey and Iliad; it is an epic adventure combined with violence and warfare presented in an original, almost novel style of poetry designed to create an epic for Rome as Homer did for Greece.
The Eclogues and Georgics became classroom texts during Virgil’s lifetime, and quotations from the Aeneid dating from a few years after its publication have been discovered in bathhouses and streets in Rome and Pompeii. His impact on literature is ongoing, but it was especially influential on the development of medieval and Renaissance epics, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, D’Aubigne’s Les Trag-iques, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s House of Fame, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Echoes of his work also can be seen in the works of Edmund Spencer, John Milton, dante, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges, T. S. Eliot, and more.
English Versions of Works by Virgil
The Aeneid. Edited by Philip Hardie et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The Aeneid. Translated by David West. London: Penguin, 1990.
Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Virgil: Selections from the Aeneid. Translated by Graham Tingay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Works about Virgil
Baswell, Christopher. Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring The Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. Edited by Alastair Minnis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Grandsden, K. W. and S. J. Harrison. Virgil: The Aeneid. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Rossi, Andreola. Contexts of War: Manipulation of Genre in Virgilian Battle Narrative. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Spargo, John Webster. Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
