Vergil - Tenney Frank
VERGIL
_A Biography_
By
TENNEY FRANK
_Professor of Latin
in the
Johns Hopkins University_
1922
_TO_
THE MEMORY OF
W. WARDE FOWLER
PREFACE
Modern literary criticism has accustomed us to interpret our masterpieces
in the light of the author's daily experiences and the conditions of the
society in which he lived. The personalities of very few ancient poets,
however, can be realized, and this is perhaps the chief reason why their
works seem to the average man so cold and remote. Vergil's age, with its
terribly intense struggles, lies hidden behind the opaque mists of twenty
centuries: by his very theory of art the poet has conscientiously drawn a
veil between himself and his reader, and the scraps of information about
him given us by the fourth century grammarian, Donatus, are inconsistent,
at best unauthenticated, and generally irrelevant.
Indeed criticism has dealt hard with Donatus' life of Vergil. It has
shown that the meager _Vita_ is a conglomeration of a few chance facts
set into a mass of later conjecture derived from a literal-minded
interpretation of the _Eclogues_, to which there gathered during the
credulous and neurotic decades of the second and third centuries an
accretion of irresponsible gossip.
However, though we have had to reject many of the statements of Donatus,
criticism has procured for us more than a fair compensation from another
source. A series of detailed studies of the numerous minor poems
attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts--till
recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars--has compelled most
of us to accept the _Appendix Vergiliana_ at face value. These poems,
written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved
manner of the classical style, are full of personal reminiscences. They
reveal many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his
ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they disclose the processes by
which the poet during an apprenticeship of ten years developed the mature
art of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_. They have made it possible for us
to visualize him with a vividness that is granted us in the case of no
other Latin poet.
The reason for attempting a new biography of Vergil at the present time
is therefore obvious. This essay, conceived with the purpose of centering
attention upon the poet's actual life, has eschewed the larger task of
literary criticism and has also avoided the subject of Vergil's literary
sources--a theme to which scholars have generally devoted too much
acumen. The book is therefore of brief compass, but it has been kept
to its single theme in the conviction that the reader who will study
Vergil's works as in some measure an outgrowth of the poet's own
experiences will find a new meaning in not a few of their lines.
T.F.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I MANTUA DIVES AVIS
II SCHOOL AND WAR
III THE CULEX
IV THE CIRIS
V A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY
VI EPIGRAM AND EPIC
VII EPICUREAN POLITICS
VIII LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN
IX MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY
X RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI
XI THE EVICTIONS
XII POLLIO
XIII THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS
XIV THE GEORGICS
XV THE AENEID
VERGIL
I
MANTUA DIVES AVIS
Among biographical commonplaces one frequently finds the generalization
that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for
a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in
lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human
nature. If there be some degree of truth in this reflection, Publius
Vergilius Maro, the farmer's boy from the Mantuan plain, was in so far
favored at birth. It is the fifteenth of October, 70 B.C., that the
Mantuans still hold in pious memory: in 1930 they will doubtless invite
Italy and the devout of all nations to celebrate the twentieth centenary
of the poet's birth.
Ancient biographers, little concerned with Mendelian speculation, have
not reported from what stock his family sprang. Scientific curiosity
and nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become
anthropologists. Vergil has accordingly been referred, by some critic
or other, to each of the several peoples that settled the Po Valley in
ancient times: the Umbrians, the Etruscans, the Celts, the Latins. The
evidence cannot be mustered into a compelling conclusion, but it may be
worth while to reject the improbable suppositions.
The name tells little. _Vergilius_ is a good Italic _nomen_ found in all
parts of the peninsula,[1] but Latin names came as a matter of course
with the gift of citizenship or of the Latin status, and Mantua with
the rest of Cisalpine Gaul had received the Latin status nineteen years
before Vergil's birth. The cognomen _Maro_ is in origin a magistrate's
title used by Etruscans and Umbrians, but _cognomina_ were a recent
fashion in the first century B.C. and were selected by parents of the
middle classes largely by accident.
[Footnote 1: Braunholz, _The Nationality of Vergil_, _Classical Review_,
1915, 104 ff.]
Vergil himself, a good antiquarian, assures us that in the _heroic_
age Mantua was chiefly Etruscan with enclaves of two other peoples
(presumably Umbrians and Venetians). In this he is doubtless following a
fairly reliable tradition, accepted all the more willingly because of his
intimacy with Maecenas, who was of course Etruscan:[2]
Mantua dives avis, sed non genus omnibus unum,
Gens illis triplex, populi sub gente quaterni,
Ipsa caput populis; Tusco de sanguine vires.
[Footnote 2: Aeneid, X, 201-3.]
Pliny seems to have supposed this passage a description of Mantua in
Vergil's own day: Mantua Tuscorum trans Padum sola reliqua (III. 130).
That could hardly have been Vergil's meaning, however; for the Celts who
flooded the Po Valley four centuries before drove all before them except
in the Venetian marshes and the Ligurian hills. They could not have left
an Etruscan stronghold in the center of their path. Vergil was probably
not Etruscan.
The case for a Celtic origin is equally improbable. From the time when
the Senones burned Rome in 390 B.C. till Caesar conquered Gaul, the fear
of invasions from this dread race never slumbered. During the weary
years of the Punic war when Hannibal drew his fresh recruits from the Po
Valley, the determination grew ever stronger that the Alps should become
Rome's barrier line on the North. Accordingly the pacification of the
Transpadane region continued with little intermission until Polybius[3]
could say two generations before Vergil's birth that the Gauls had
practically been driven out of the Po Valley, and that they then held but
a few villages in the foothills of the Alps. If this be true, the open
country of Mantua must have had but few survivors. And the few that
remained were not often likely to have the privilege of intermarrying
with the Roman settlers who filled the vacuum. Romans were too proud of
their citizenship to intermarry with _peregrini_ and raise children who
must by Roman laws forego the dignities of citizenship.[4]
[Footnote 3: Polybius, II. 35, 4 (written about 140 B.C.).]
[Footnote 4: Ulpian, _Dig_. V. 8, ex peregrino et cive Romano, peregrinus
nascitur.]
A Celtic strain of romance has been from time to time claimed for
Vergil's poetry, though those who employ such terms seldom agree in their
definition of them. His romanticism may be more easily explained by
his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic
traits--whatever they may be--by the close racial affiliations between
Celts and Italians, vouched for by anthropologists. But the difficulty of
applying the test of the "Celtic temperament" lies in the fact that there
are apparently now no true representatives of the Celtic race from
whom to establish a criterion. The peoples that have longest preserved
dialects of the Celtic languages appear from anthropometric researches
to contain a dominant strain of a different race, perhaps that of the
pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Western Europe. It may be, therefore,
that what Arnoldians now refer to the "Celts" is after all not Celtic. At
best it is unsafe to search for racial traits in the work of genius; in
this instance it would but betray loose thinking.
The assumption of Celtic origin is, therefore, hazardous.[5] There is,
however, a strong likelihood that Vergil's forbears were among the Roman
and Latin colonists who went north in search of new homes during the
second century B.C. Vergil's father was certainly a Roman citizen, for
none but a citizen could have sent his son to Rome to prepare for a
political career. Mantua indeed, a "Latin" town after 89 B.C., did not
become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it, but Vergil's
father, according to the eighth _Catalepton_, had earlier in his life
lived in Cremona. That city was colonized by Roman citizens in 218 B.C.
and recolonized in 190, and though the colonists were reduced to the
"Latin status," the magistrates of the town and their descendants secured
citizenship from the beginning, and finally in 89 B.C. the whole colony
received full citizenship. But quite apart from this, all of Cisalpine
Gaul, as the region was called, was receiving immigrants from all parts
of Italy throughout the second century, when the fields farther south
were being exhausted by long tilling, and were falling into the hands
of capitalistic landlords and grazers. Since Roman citizenship was a
personal rather than a territorial right, such immigrants could
preserve their political status despite their change of habitation. The
probabilities are, therefore, that in any case Vergil, though born in the
province, was of the old Latin stock.
[Footnote 5: Vergil we know was tall and dark. The Gauls were as a rule
fair with light hair. The Etruscans on the other hand, while dark,
were generally short of stature. Such data are however not of great
importance.]
About the child appropriate stories gathered in time, but what the
biographers chose to repeat in the credulous days of Donatus, when Rome
was almost an Oriental city, need not detain us long. To Donatus, no
doubt, _Magia_ seemed a suitable name for the mother of a poet who knew
the mysteries of the lower world; that she dreamed prophetically of the
coming greatness of her son, we may grant as a matter of course. Sober
judgment, however, can hardly accept the miraculous poplar tree which
shot up at the place of nativity, or the birth-stories deriving
"Vergilus" from _virga_, contrary to early Latin nomenclature and
phonology. It is well to mention these things merely so that we may keep
in mind how little faith the late biographers really deserve.
Donatus is also inclined to accept the tradition that Vergil's father was
a potter and a man of very humble circumstances. That Vergil's father
made pottery may be true; a father's occupation was apt to be recorded in
Augustan biography--but it requires some knowledge of Roman society to
comprehend what these words meant at the end of the Republic. In Donatus'
day a "potter" was a day-laborer in loin-cloth and leather apron, earning
about twenty cents for a long day of fourteen hours. Needless to say,
Vergil's leisured competence during many years did not draw from such a
trickling source. Donatus had forgotten that in Vergil's day the economic
system of Rome was entirely different. At the end of the Republic, the
potters of Northern Italy conducted factories of enormous output, for
they had with their artistic red-figured ware captured the markets of the
whole Mediterranean basin. The actual workmen were not Roman citizens by
any means, but slaves. And we should add that while industrial producers,
like traders, were in general held in low esteem, because most of them
were foreigners and freedmen, the producers of earthenware had by
accident escaped from the general odium. The reason was simply that
earthenware production began as a legitimate extension of agriculture--it
was one form of turning the products of the villa-soil to the best
use--and agriculture as we remember (including horticulture and
stock-raising) continued into Cicero's day the only respectable
income-bringing occupation in which a Roman senator could engage without
apology. That is the reason why even the names of Cicero, Asinius Pollio,
and Marcus Aurelius are to be found on brick stamps when it would have
been socially impossible for such men to own, shall we say, hardware or
clothing factories. Donatus was already so far away from that day that
he had no feeling for its social tabus. The property of Vergil's
father--possibly a farm with a pottery on some part of it--could hardly
have been small when it supported the young student for many years in his
leisured existence at Rome and Naples under the masters that attracted
the aristocracy of the capital. The story of Probus, otherwise not very
reliable, may, therefore, be true--that sixty soldiers received their
allotments from the estates taken from Vergil's father.
Of no little significance is the fact that Vergil first prepared himself
for public life,[6] and progressed so far as to accept one case in court.
In order to enter public life in those days it was customary to train
one's self as widely as possible in literature, history, rhetoric,
dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election
purposes by taking a few cases. It was not every citizen who dared enter
such a career. This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most
jealously. While any foreigner or freedman might become a doctor, banker,
architect or merchant prince, he could not presume to stand up before a
praetor to discuss the rights and wrongs of Roman citizens; and since the
advocate's work was furthermore considered the legitimate preliminary to
magisterial offices it must the more carefully be protected. It would
have been quite useless for Vergil to prepare for this career had it been
obviously closed. We have no sure record in Cicero's epoch of any young
man rising successfully from the business or industrial classes to a
career in public life except through the abnormal accidents provided by
the civil wars. Presumably, therefore, Vergil's father belonged to a
landholding family with some honors of municipal service to his credit.
[Footnote 6: Donatus, 15; _Ciris_, l.2; _Catal_. V.; Seneca, _Controv_.
III. praef. 8.]
Of the poet's physical traits we have no very satisfactory description
or likeness. He was tall, dark and rawboned, retaining through life the
appearance of a countryman, according to Donatus. He also suffered,
says the same writer, the symptoms that accompany tuberculosis. The
reliability of this rather inadequate description is supported by a
second-century portrait of the poet done in a crude pavement mosaic which
has been found in northern Africa.[7] To be sure the technique is so
faulty that we cannot possibly consider this a faithful likeness. But
we may at least say that the person represented--a man of perhaps
forty-five--was tall and loose-jointed, and that his countenance, with
its broad brow, penetrating eye, firm nose and generous mouth and chin,
is distinctly represented as drawn and emaciated.
[Footnote 7: See _Monuments Piot_. 1897, pl. xx; _Atene e Roma_, 1913,
opp. p. 191.]
There is also an unidentified portrait in a half dozen mediocre
replicas representing a man of twenty-five or thirty years which some
archaeologists are inclined to consider a possible representation of
Vergil.[8] It is the so-called "Brutus." The argument for its attribution
deserves serious consideration. The bust, while it shows a far younger
man than the African mosaic, reveals the same contour of countenance, of
brow, nose, cheeks and chin. Furthermore it is difficult to think of any
other Roman in private life who attained to such fame that six marble
replicas of his portrait should have survived the omnivorous lime-kilns
of the dark ages. The Barrocco museum of Rome has a very lifelike
replica[9] of this type in half-relief. Though its firm, dry workmanship
seems to be of a few decades later than Vergil's youth it may well be a
fairly faithful copy of one of the first busts of Vergil made at the time
when the _Eclogues_ had spread his fame through Rome.
[Footnote 8: See British School _Cat. of the Mus. Capitolino_, p. 355;
Bernoulli, _Roem. Ikonographie_, I, 187, Helbig,'3 I, no. 872.]
[Footnote 9: Mrs. Strong, _Roman Sculpture_ plate, CIX; Hekler, _Greek
and Roman Portraits_, 188 a. The antiquity of this marble has been
questioned.]
A land of sound constitutions, mentally and physically, was the frontier
region in which Vergil grew to manhood; and had it not later been drained
of its sturdy citizenry by the civil wars and recolonized by the wreckage
of those wars it would have become Italy's mainstay through the Empire.
The earlier Romans and Latins who had first accepted colonial allotments
or had migrated severally there for over a century were of sterner stuff
than the indolent remnants that had drifted to the city's corn cribs.
These frontiersmen had come while the Italic stock was still sound, not
yet contaminated by the freedmen of Eastern extraction. Cities like
Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the puritanic ideals of Cato's
day than Rome itself. The clear expressive diction of Catullus' lyrics,
full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social ideals of Vergil's
_Georgics_, the buoyant idealism of the _Aeneid_ and of Livy's annals
speak the true language of these people. It is not surprising then that
in Vergil's youth it is a group of fellow-provincials--returning sons
of Rome's former emigrants--that take the lead in the new literary
movements. They are vigorous, clever young men, excellently educated,
free from the city's binding traditionalism, well provided also, many
of them, with worldly goods acquired in the new rich country. Such were
Catullus of Verona, Varius Rufus, Quintilius Varus, Furius, and Alfenus
of Cremona, Caecilius of Comum, Helvius Cinna apparently of Brescia, and
Valerius Cato who somehow managed to inspire in so many of them a love
for poetry.
II
SCHOOL AND WAR
To Cremona, Vergil was sent to school. Caesar, the governor of the
province, was now conquering Gaul, and as Cremona was the foremost
provincial colony from which Caesar could recruit legionaries, the school
boys must have seen many a maniple march off to the battle-fields of
Belgium. Those boys read their _Bellum Gallicum_ in the first edition,
serial publication. When we remember the devotion of Caesar's soldiers to
their leader, we can hardly be surprised at the poet's lasting reverence
for the great _imperator_. He must have seen the man himself, also, for
Cremona was the principal point in the court circuit that Caesar traveled
during the winters between his campaigns--whenever the Gauls gave him
respite.
The _toga virilis_ Vergil assumed at fifteen, the year that Pompey and
Crassus entered upon their second consulship--a notice to all the world
that the triumvirate had been continued upon terms that made Julius the
arbiter of Rome's destinies.
That same year the boy left Cremona to finish his literary studies in
Milan, a city which was now threatening to outstrip Cremona in importance
and size. The continuation of his studies in the province instead of at
Rome seems to have been fortunate: the spirit of the schools of the north
was healthier. At Rome the undue insistence upon a practical education,
despite Cicero's protests, was hurrying boys into classrooms of
rhetoricians who were supposed to turn them into finished public men
at an early age; it was assumed that a political career was every
gentleman's business and that every young man of any pretensions must
acquire the art of speaking effectively and of "thinking on his feet."
The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were
accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the
technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself
made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the
technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several
years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the
parents, and the system of education suffered.
In the northern province, on the other hand, there was less demand
for studies leading directly to the forum. Moreover, some of the best
teachers were active there.[1] They were men of catholic tastes, who in
their lectures on literature ranged widely over the centuries of Greek
masters from Homer to the latest popular poets of the Hellenistic period
and over the Latin poets from Livius to Lucilius. Indeed, the young men
trained at Cremona and Milan between the days of Sulla and Caesar were
those who in due time passed on the torch of literary art at Rome,
while the Roman youths were being enticed away into rhetoric. Vergil's
remarkable catholicity of taste and his aversion to the cramping
technique of the rhetorical course are probably to be explained in large
measure, therefore, by his contact with the teachers of the provinces.
Vergil did not scorn Apollonius because Homer was revered as the supreme
master, and though the easy charm of Catullus taught him early to love
the "new poetry," he appreciated none the less the rugged force of
Ennius. Had his early training been received at Rome, where pedant was
pitted against pedant, where every teacher was forced by rivalry into a
partizan attitude, and all were compelled by material demands to provide
a "practical education," even Vergil's poetic spirit might have been
dulled.
[Footnote 1: Suetonius, _De Gram_. 3.]
How long Vergil remained at Milan we are not told; Donatus' _paulo post_
is a relative term that might mean a few months or a few years. However,
at the age of sixteen Vergil was doubtless ready for the rhetorical
course, and it is possible that he went to the great city as early as
54 B.C., the very year of Catullus' death and of the publication of
Lucretius' _De Rerum Natura_. The brief biography of Vergil contained in
the Berne MS.--a document of doubtful value--mentions Epidius as Vergil's
teacher in rhetoric, and adds that Octavius, the future emperor, was a
fellow pupil. This is by no means unreasonable despite a difference
of seven years in the ages of the two pupils. Vergil coming from the
provinces entered rhetoric rather late in years, whereas Octavius must
have required the aid of a master of declamation early, since at the age
of twelve he prepared to deliver the _laudatio funebris_ at the grave of
his grandmother. Thus the two may have met in Epidius' lecture room in
the year 50 B.C. Vergil could doubtless have afforded tuition under such
a master since he presently engaged the no less distinguished Siro. We
have the independent testimony of Suetonius that Epidius was Octavius'
and Mark Antony's teacher.
If Antony's style be a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a
rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style,[2] then still orthodox at
Rome. This school--except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for
going to extremes--had not yet been effectively challenged by the rising
generation of the chaster Atticists. Hortensius was still alive, and
highly revered, and Cicero had recently written his elaborate _De
Oratore_ in which, with the apparent calmness of a still unquestioned
authority, he laid down the program of the writer of ornate prose who
conceived it as his chief duty to heed the claims of art. While not an
out and out Asianist he advocates the claims of the "grand-style,"
so pleasing to senatorial audiences, with its well-balanced periods,
carefully modulated, nobly phrased, precisely cadenced, and pronounced
with dignity. To be sure, Calvus had already raised the banner of
Atticism and had in several biting attacks shown what a simple, frugal
and direct style could accomplish; Calidius, one of the first Roman
pupils of the great Apollodorus, had already begun making campaign
speeches in his neatly polished orations which painfully eschewed all
show of ornament or passion; and Caesar himself, efficiency personified,
had demonstrated that the leader of a democratic rabble must be a master
of blunt phrases. But Calvus did not threaten to become a political
force, Calidius was too even-tempered, and Caesar was now in the north,
fighting with other weapons. Cicero's prestige still seemed unbroken. It
was not till Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, after Hortensius had died,
and Cicero had been pushed aside as a futile statesman, that Atticism
gained predominance in the schools. Later, in 46, Cicero in several
remarkable essays again took up the cudgels for an elaborate prose, but
then his cause was already lost. Caesar's victory had demonstrated that
Rome desired deeds, not words.
[Footnote 2: Octavius was drawn to the Atticistic principles by the great
master Apollodorus.]
When Virgil, therefore, turned to rhetoric, probably under Epidius,
he received the training which was still considered orthodox. His
farewell[3] to rhetoric--written probably in 48--shows unmistakably the
nature of the stuff on which he had been fed. It is the bombast and the
futile rules of the Asianic creed against which he flings his unsparing
scazons.