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INTRODUCTION

1. Publius Vergilius Maro is one of that large company of Roman writers who came from the provinces. Cisalpine Gaul was not formally annexed to Italy until Virgil's native place. twenty-one years after the poet's birth, but Vir

gil's natural sympathies, environment and education all tended to make him an enthusiastic Roman. The people of his native district (the township of Andes, near Mantua) were grateful to Julius Caesar, and Virgil' shared with the rest in the joy of recently acquired rights of citizenship.

His early environment.

2. Virgil was born in the country, "of rustic parents and brought up in the bush and forest," and Melissus, a freedman of Augustus, tells us that he kept his shy rustic manners even at the court. The influence of his early surroundings was never lost; Virgil was a poet of the streams and the woods to the last. All his works reveal that love of the land and country scenes, in which the poet must have revelled in his youth, and which he indulged in mature years, when he gladly

1 The spelling Virgil is due to a Latin form Virgilius, which is less correct than Vergilius. However, the spelling Virgil has been so long in vogue in English, being the form known to all our great poets and prosewriters, that it seems pedantic to insist on Vergil (see Professor Kelsey's letter in the New York Nation, Sept. 5, 1907, p. 206).

2 Rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto (Macrobius, V. 2, 1).

8 Flumina amem silvasque. (Georgics, II. 486.)

forsook the capital for his villa in that most beautifu) region of all Italy, the neighborhood of Naples.

His father was of humble station, but a man of energy and integrity, who prospered in the world by keeping bees and investing in forest land. The second book of the Georgics is devoted to trees and their culture; the fourth to bees; while certain passages in the Aeneid indicate the poet's interest in his father's employments.

His love for his father.

3. Filial love was one of Virgil's chief characteristics, and has left its mark upon his great epic. His father gave him a careful education, and the son repaid him with affection. In a short poem addressed to the little villa of Siro, in which he once took refuge, when driven from his home by armed force, he thus writes: "To thee, I intrust myself, and with me those whom I have ever loved, and above all my father." With such an experience, how much sympathy would Virgil feel for his Aeneas, in that hour when Troy falls, and a refuge must be found for the aged Anchises!

His love of rural life.

4. To his father Virgil owed much more than his education. He also owed to him his love of simplicity and his purity of character. When, in the Georgics, we find him singing the simple virtues of the Italian farmer-his industry, watchfulness, and freedom from envy or sordid ambition we feel that his heart is in the old home, the true nurse of his genius. The purity of the home and the joy of children's love, the solid comforts and real independence, as well as the simple pleasures of rural life, are all set forth in Virgil's beautiful verse. It 1E.g. VI. 179 ff., 270-2.

2 Me tibi et hos una mecum, quos semper amavi,
Commendo, in primisque patrem. (Catalepton, VIII.)
8 Georgics, II. 523 ff.

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was after the poet had become the friend of princes, had seen the utmost glory of this world, and known both the joys and the disappointments of the highest fame that he heaved a sigh for the happiness of country life, which he would no longer be allowed to enjoy in peaceful seclusion: "Ah, too fortunate the husbandmen, if they knew their own blessedness! .. Repose without care is theirs, and a life that cannot disappoint, yet is rich in manifold treasures; yet the peace of broad domains fails them not, with caverns and living lakes, cool vales of Tempe, the lowing of oxen and soft slumbers beneath the trees; there are woodland glades and covers of game, a youth hardy in toil and accustomed to little; the worship of the gods and reverence for age; among them, as she passed from earth, Justice set her last footprints."1

5. The lines just cited suggest one of the chief traits in Virgil's character, -his simple piety and reverence, which, instilled into him in his early home, he never His pietas. doffed, even when assailed by the subtle cynicism and cold agnosticism of court circles.

The English word 'piety' usually signifies only one aspect of the Latin pietas, and pietas in its larger sense is the virtue which Virgil emphasizes as the chief characteristic of the hero of his Aeneid. Pity and piety are both included in pietas, but the Latin term embraces alsó tenderness and affectionate regard for one's relatives,2 one's country, and one's fellow-men in general. Virgil's own pietas is seen in his reverential attitude toward the gods and the time

1 Georgics, II. 458 ff.

"The word 'piety' can still be used thus in English; cf. W. D. Howells: "He pulled off his black satin stock the relic of ancient fashion which the piety of his daughter kept in repair — and laid it on the table." (A Modern Instance, Ch. XL.)

honored ritual of their celebrations. It is seen, also, in his intense patriotism; still further in his devotion to his father, who became blind; in the story of his grief over the loss of a brother Flaccus; and in the fact that he provided handsomely by will for his half-brother, Valerius Proculus.

In one of his odes,' Horace testifies to the pious and affectionate character of Virgil, and the striking, almost passionate, phrase which he elsewhere applies to him, animae dimidium meae, 'half of my soul,' illustrates Virgil's power of inspiring affection in others.2

It is worth while dwelling on these features of Virgil's character, because they are all richly exemplified in his work; and in everything that Virgil wrote we can see, not a merely objective narrative, but the poet's personality and attitude toward life.

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6. One of the ancient lives of Virgil tells us that the poet was of large frame, dark complexion, awkward in appearance, and weak in health. He suffered

His personal appearance and habits.

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from dyspepsia and perhaps on this account was abstemious in eating and drinking.

We have already noted his shyness. Far from courting publicity, he would avoid the throngs that followed and pointed him out by retiring into the nearest house. Horace describes his three friends, Virgil, Plotius, and Varius, as "the whit est souls ever borne by earth," a beautiful testimony, not only to Virgil's spotless character, but also to the purity of his social and intellectual circle.

1 Odes, I. 24.

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2 Odes, I. 3, 8.

3 Attributed to Donatus, of the fourth century, but really by Suetonius, a well-known biographer of the first century.

4 He was crudus. (Horace, Satires, I. 5, 49.)

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Animae qualis neque candidiores

Terra tulit, neque quis me sit devinctior alter. (Satires, I. 5, 41.)

His education and literary training.

7. Virgil's education was carefully attended to. He studied at Mantua and Cremona, then at the larger city of Milan (Mediolanum), and lastly at the age of seventeen he passed on to Rome. This was in the year 53 B.C., one year after the death of Catullus and two years after that of Lucretius. Virgil studied under the best masters: Greek under Parthenius, a poet of some note; rhetoric under Epidius, the master of Antonius and Octavius; and philosophy under Siro, a distinguished Epicurean. This last study had great attractions for the youth, and one poem in the Catalepton1 voices the delight with which, giving up the rhetoricians and grammarians, he turned to philosophy.

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8. The poem just referred to is composed in a peculiar metre much used by Catullus, to whom, in the sixth Aeneid, Virgil paid marked homage, for the line. with which Aeneas begins his address to Dido in the world below,

Influence of earlier poets,

especially Lucretius.

Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi, 3

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is taken directly from an elegiac poem by the earlier writer. Virgil, then, studied Catullus, and thus, perhaps, secured not a little of the precision, delicacy, and artistic finish for which Catullus is famous.

But if Virgil is indebted to Catullus, much greater is his debt to another famous poet, Lucretius. Catullus could teach form and style, but Lucretius could widen the horizon of his spirit. In a certain passage of the Georgics,5 Virgil pays a remarkable tribute to the author of the great poem

1 No. 5. The term Catalepton (кatà λettóv, i.e., ' small ') is applied to a group of 14 short poems attributed to Virgil. Some, at least, of these are genuine.

2 The scazon or limping iambic.

8 VI. 460.

4 Catullus, 66, 39.
5 Georgics II. 475 ff,

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