- Virgil
(By Jasper Griffin)Preamble
Publius Vergilius Maro, in English normally called Virgil, was a celebrated figure in his own lifetime, and soon after his death a
number of writers tried to satisfy the popular curiosity about the life of the greatest of Roman poets. We are consequently much
better informed about him than about most poets in antiquity. Like most Roman writers, he was not born in Rome. He came into
the world in 70 B.C., near Mantua, in what was still called Cisalpine Gaul. Although thoroughly Romanized-we recall that
Catullus came from Verona, and Livy from Padua (Patavium)-the area did not receive the Roman citizenship till 49, and it became
officially part of Italy only in 42. Virgil's family seems to have been respectable though by no means prominent. The ultimate
origin of the names 'Vergilius' and 'Maro' was probably Etruscan, but only the credulous will try to explain the poet's art or his
character by invoking Etruscan ancestry. It is worth looking at the period through which Virgil lived. Born in the year in which
Pompey and Crassus forced their way into the consulship, he was seven when Catiline fell fighting at the head of a revolutionary
army opposing the Roman legions. The gathering disorder of the 50s led to civil war; the assassination of Caesar to another,
followed by proscriptions, by wars in Italy, and the eventual victory of Octavian, after a third civil war, in 31. As late as 19, the
year of Virgil's death, there were serious riots in Rome. Of the fifty-one years of the poet's life, sixteen were years of civil war; the
proscriptions which followed the battle of Philippi are said to have caused the deaths of at least 150 senators and 2,000 equites;
considerable areas of Italy were devastated by fighting, by famine, and by the forcible expropriation of land. It was a terrible
period, in which even the survival of Rome seemed to be in doubt, and that fact is of central importance for Virgil's poetry.
The Eclogues
His first published work was a collection of ten bucolic Eclogues, which proclaim themselves as in the tradition of Theocritus
(above, pp. 356ff), but which also echo and evoke many other poets, both Greek and Latin. The influence of Callimachus, for
instance, is clear at the opening of the Sixth Eclogue, that of Lucretius in the middle of the same poem, that of Catullus in the
Fourth. There were allusions to the work of other poets, contemporary or in the last generation, which we are not now in a position
to recognize. Virgil is thus, at his first appearance, a learned poet. That was always to be his manner, and in antiquity some critics
made names for themselves by sniping at the poet for his 'thefts', meaning plagiarism.
It is quite wrong to imagine that Virgil lacked originality, or that his poems are no more than imitations or distillations of the work
of his predecessors. If we read the first five lines of the First Eclogue we find a good example of the creative reworking of a
model. The countryman Meliboeus speaks to a friend who is singing of love, stretched out in the shade of a tree:
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua:
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.Beneath a shady beech you may rehearse
At ease, my Tityrus, your simple verse;
I'm forced to leave my country and to roam,
My Tityrus, from country and from home:
You here can fill, at leisure in the shade,
With Amaryllis' name the wooded glade.At once we see that we both are, and are not, in the world of Theocritus. The Greek poet is the source of the names, and of the
pastoral world of love and song; the languorously beautiful hexameters, with their melodious vowels and artfully simple
repetitions, also owe a lot to Theocritus' inspiration. But the world of reality, of politics and suffering, has invaded the pastoral
Arcadia in which nothing but love and song could happen. Why is Meliboeus not able to stretch out and sing? Because, it soon