Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC)

The name-and-years line asks for dates, and the dates are known with unusual confidence for an ancient poet: Publius Vergilius Maro, whom the English-speaking world calls Virgil, was born on October 15, 70 BC, at Andes, a village near Mantua in the Po valley, and died on September 21, 19 BC, at Brundisium on the heel of Italy. The Latin form of his name is the older one; the spelling "Virgil," with its long afterlife, came later and was perhaps influenced by the Latin virgo, a medieval nickname that attached itself to a poet remembered for his gentleness.

He was born in Cisalpine Gaul, a region that did not yet have full Roman citizenship, and he belonged to a provincial landowning family of modest means. The biographical tradition, drawn mainly from the ancient Vita ascribed to Donatus, which rests on the lost work of Suetonius, says his father held land and perhaps worked as a potter or a farmer's agent. These details are late and partly legendary, but the rural north left its mark on the poetry, which returns again and again to fields, vines, bees, and the labor of those who work the soil. He was educated at Cremona and Milan and then at Rome, where he studied rhetoric and, according to the tradition, turned away from the law courts after a single failed appearance. He then went to Naples and studied Epicurean philosophy under Siro, a teacher whose circle of friends, men of letters and gentle retirement, shaped his early outlook. The Epicurean calm of his youth sits uneasily beside the grave religious seriousness of his later verse, and the tension is part of what makes him interesting.

His young life coincided with the collapse of the Roman Republic. The civil wars that followed the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC reached his own countryside. After the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, Octavian settled his veterans on confiscated land around Mantua and Cremona, and Virgil's family farm was caught up in the disruption. Whether he lost the property, recovered it, or was compensated is unclear, and the ancient accounts disagree. What the poems preserve is the memory of dispossession: the first Eclogue sets a displaced shepherd beside one who has been spared, and the ninth returns to the theme with more bitterness. The experience of seeing a rural world broken by the ambitions of great men never left him.

Through the friendship of the statesman Asinius Pollio and then the patron Maecenas, Virgil entered the circle around Octavian, who would become Augustus, the first emperor. This was the central relationship of his adult life. He was never a soldier or a magistrate. By every account he was shy, slow of speech, awkward in company, and uncomfortable when recognized in the street, so that he is said to have slipped into the nearest building to avoid being pointed out. He lived chiefly in Naples and on estates in Campania and Sicily, and he was reportedly delicate in health, troubled by his stomach and throat. Horace counted him among his dearest friends and called him half of his own soul.

The last decade of his life was given to the Aeneid, which Augustus pressed him for and which he wrote, according to the tradition, in prose first and then in verse, a few lines at a time. In 19 BC he set out for Greece, intending to spend three years revising the poem. He met Augustus at Athens and agreed to return with him, but he fell ill, perhaps after exposure to the sun at Megara, and died shortly after landing at Brundisium. The sources say he asked that the unfinished Aeneid be burned. Augustus overruled the request and had the poem edited and published by Virgil's friends Varius and Tucca, and it is to that decision that we owe the most influential poem in the Latin language.

His Writing and Its Influence

Virgil's surviving work falls into three poems, each larger in ambition than the last. The Eclogues, ten pastoral poems written in the years of the land confiscations, adapt the Greek bucolic tradition of Theocritus to Italian conditions of loss and political dependence. The Georgics, composed over roughly seven years and finished around 29 BC, is a didactic poem in four books on farming, vines, livestock, and bees, written in the tradition of Hesiod and in constant conversation with Lucretius. It is the work he most plainly cared about as craft, and it meditates seriously on labor, ruin, and the fragile order that human effort wrings from a hostile earth. The Aeneid, left unrevised at his death, follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas from the burning of his city to the founding of a new people in Italy, drawing on Homer for its structure and on the whole Roman past for its argument. It praises Rome's destiny and Augustus' peace while counting, with unusual honesty, what such achievements cost: the abandoned Dido, the slain Turnus, the young men who die before their lives begin. Scholars still argue over whether the poem is an imperial celebration, a quiet critique, or something that refuses to be either.

The manuscripts survived because Augustus refused the dying poet's request to burn the Aeneid. Virgil became a school author almost at once, and the poems were copied, commented on, and memorized across the empire. The commentary of Servius, written in the late fourth century, and the fifth-century Saturnalia of Macrobius kept him at the center of education as Rome itself changed.

Christian writers could not avoid him, and they answered him in different ways. Augustine confesses in the Confessions that he wept over Dido's death as a schoolboy while remaining dry-eyed about his own spiritual ruin, and in the City of God he takes the Roman myth of an empire without end, drawn largely from the first book of the Aeneid, as the thing to be answered. His argument is that the earthly city's glory is real but not final. Jerome, in a famous letter, recorded a dream in which he was condemned as a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, a sign of how deeply the classical poets had worked on a mind that knew Scripture by heart. The fourth Eclogue, which sings of a child whose birth will bring back a golden age, was read by Constantine's court and by many later Christians as a prophecy of Christ. Virgil intended nothing of the kind; the poem most likely honors the expected child of a Roman consul. Yet the reading shaped the medieval imagination and is the reason Dante makes him a guide.

In the Divine Comedy, Virgil leads Dante through Hell and Purgatory, representing human reason at its fullest and, as Dante has him say, a pilgrim who could see the road but not its end. Dante's debt to the sixth book of the Aeneid, with its descent into the underworld, is open and acknowledged, and Virgil's gentle exclusion from Paradise remains one of the most affecting moments in Christian literature. His reputation as a virtuous pagan, and sometimes as a magician or a proto-Christian, thrived through the Middle Ages and gave way to more careful historical reading only in the modern period.

Who should read Virgil: Readers of this library who want to understand the imaginative world that Augustine, Jerome, and Dante argued with, borrowed from, and loved. He is useful for those who suspect that the ancient world was not simply a dark backdrop to the gospel but a civilization with its own serious account of duty, grief, labor, and the price of founding anything lasting. He offers no guidance in prayer and no doctrine of grace, and readers hoping for devotional help will not find it. He is for those willing to read a great poem on its own terms and to feel, as Augustine did, how much it can move us.