Vergil - Tenney Frank
However, his next decision, to devote his life to philosophy, again
retarded his poetic development. Certainly it held him in leash during
the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric
poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught
early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all
earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The _Aetna_ shows
perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic
insistence that myths must now give way to facts. Its author was still
too absorbed in the microscopic analysis of a petty piece of research
to catch the spirit of Lucretius who had found in the visions of the
scientific workshop a majesty and beauty that partook of the essence of
poetry.
In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to
Epicureanism than modern critics--too often obsessed by a misapplied
_odium philosophicum_--have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy
to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and
to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its
attitude towards art banal. But that is not a sound historical method of
approach. The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the
need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the
mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how,
when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism
with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean
positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.
The system, despite its inadequate first answers, employed a scientific
method that gave the Romans faith in many of its results, just at a time
when orthodox mythology had yielded before the first critical inspection.
As a preliminary system of illumination it proved invaluable. Untrained
in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact
science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing
curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naive faith.
Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible
guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world
politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience
with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in
aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by
two centuries of skeptics. The Epicurean at least kept his feet on the
ground, appealed to the practical man's faith in his own senses, and
plausibly propped his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes
approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic. He
rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman
daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of
metaphysical reasoning. He came with a gospel of illumination to a race
eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously
created by processes that the average man beheld in his daily walks.
It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination,
to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions,
and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible
answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new
philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of
the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way
of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as
unscientific.
[Footnote 1: It is not quite accurate to say that the Romans made a dogma
of Epicurus' _ipse dixit_ which destroyed scientific open-mindedness.
Vergil uses Posidonius and Zeno as freely as the Stoic Seneca does
Epicurus.]
Furthermore, Epicureanism provided a view of nature which was apt in the
minds of an imaginative poet to lead toward romanticism. Stoicism indeed
pretended to be pantheistic, and Wordsworth has demonstrated the value
to romanticism of that attitude. But to the clear of vision Stoicism
immediately took from nature with one hand what it had given with the
other. Invariably, its rule of "follow nature" had to be defined in terms
that proved its distrust of what the world called nature. As a matter of
fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a
creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec,
peccat!" cries Persius in terror.
The earlier naive animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of
aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the
wealth of ancient myths. But the nymphs of that stream were dead, slain
by philosophical questioning. The new poetic myth-making that still
showed the influence of an old habit of mind was apt to be rather
self-conscious and diffident, ending in something resembling the pathetic
fallacy.
Epicureanism on the other hand by employing the theory of evolution was
able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered
that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature
unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of
romance became possible only upon the discovery of that unity. This is
doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium
bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the
troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our
day.
Nam simulac species patefactast verna diei ...
Aeriae primum volucres te diva tuumque
Significant initum perculsae corda tua vi,
Inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta.
Vergil, convinced by the same philosophy, expresses himself similarly:
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres
amor omnibus idem.
And again:
Avia tum resonant avibus virgulta canoris
Et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus
Parturit almus ager Zepherique trementibus auris
Laxant arva sinus.
It is, of course, the theme of "Sumer is icumen in." Lucretius feels so
strongly the unity of naturally evolved creation that he never
hesitates to compare men of various temperaments with animals of
sundry natures--the fiery lion, the cool-tempered ox--and explain the
differences in both by the same preponderance of some peculiar kind of
"soul-atoms."
Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man's mental horizon and
sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use. Like the crude
evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau's day, it gave one a more soundly
based sympathy for one's fellows--since evolution was not yet "red in
tooth and claw." If nature was to be trusted, why not man's nature? Why
curse the body, any man's body, as the root-ground of sin? Were not the
instincts a part of man? Might not the scientific view prove that the
passions so far from being diseases, conditioned the very life and
survival of the race? Perhaps the evils of excess, called sin, were after
all due to defects in social and political institutions that had applied
incorrect regulative principles, or to the selfishly imposed religious
fears which had driven the healthy instincts into tantrums. Rid man of
these erroneous fears and of a political system begot for purposes
of exploitation and see whether by returning to an age of primitive
innocence he cannot prove that nature is trustworthy.[2]
[Footnote 2: Lucretius, III, 37-93; II, 23-39; V, 1105-1135.]
There is in this philosophy then a basis for a large humanitarianism,
dangerous perhaps in its implications. And yet it could hardly have been
more perilous than the Roman orthodox religion which insisted only upon
formal correctness, seldom upon ethical decorum, or than Stoicism with
its categorical imperative, which could restrain only those who were
already convinced. The Stoic pretence of appealing to a natural law could
be proved illogical at first examination, when driven to admit that
"nature" must be explained by a question-begging definition before its
rule could be applied.
Indeed the Romans of Vergil's day had not been accustomed to look for
ethical sanctions in religion or creed. Morality had always been for them
a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum,
legal doctrine regarding the universality of _aequitas_, and, more than
they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock. It
probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new
philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard. Cicero, as
statesman, does; but the question had doubtless come to him first out of
the literature of the Academy which he was wont to read. Despite their
creed, Lucretius and Vergil are indeed Rome's foremost apostles of
Righteousness; and if anyone had pressed home the charge of possible
moral weakness in their system they might well have pointed to the
exemplary life of Epicurus and many of his followers. To the Romans this
philosophy brought a creed of wide sympathies with none of the "lust
for sensation" that accompanied its return in the days of Rousseau and
"Werther." Had not the old Roman stock, sound in marrow and clear of
eye, been shattered by wars and thinned out by emigration, only to be
displaced by a more nervous and impulsive people that had come in by
the slave trade, Roman civilization would hardly have suffered from the
application of the doctrines of Epicurus.
Whether or not Vergil remained an Epicurean to the end, we must, to be
fair, give credit to that philosophy for much that is most poetical in
his later work,--a romantic charm in the treatment of nature, a deep
comprehension of man's temper, a broader sympathy with humanity and a
clearer understanding of the difference between social virtue and mere
ritualistic correctness than was to be expected of a Roman at this time.
It is, however, very probable that Vergil remained on the whole faithful
to this creed[3] to the very end. He was forty years of age and only
eleven years from his death when he published the _Georgics_, which are
permeated with the Epicurean view of nature; and the restatement of this
creed in the first book of the _Aeneid_ ought to warn us that his faith
in it did not die.
[Footnote 3: This is, of course, not the view of Sellar, Conington,
Glover, and Norden,--to mention but a few of those who hold that Vergil
became a Stoic. See chapter XV for a development of this view.]
X
RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI
The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at
home. Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil's pastorals who can
take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting
what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible
hidden meanings that lie in them. But the biographer may not share that
pleasure. The _Eclogues_ were soon burdened with comments by critics who
sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity
of an unannaled provincial life. In their eager search for data they
forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the
poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author. The
modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a
little of the allegory that obscures the text.
It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no
scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the
falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a
beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not
themselves consistent. Those early commentators who variously place the
confiscation of Vergil's farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.),
after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony
as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province
that did not exist, may state some real facts: they certainly hazard many
futile guesses. The safest way is to trust these records only when they
harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret
the _Eclogues_ primarily as imaginative pastoral poetry, and not, except
when they demand it, as a personal record. We shall here treat the
_Bucolics_ in what seems to be their order of composition, not the order
of their position in the collection.
The eulogy of Messalla, written in 42 B.C., reveals Vergil already at
work upon pastoral themes, to which, as he tells us, Messalla's Greek
eclogues had called his attention. We may then at once reject the
statement of the scholiasts that Vergil wrote the _Eclogues_ for the
purpose of thanking Pollio, Alfenus, and Gallus for having saved his
estates from confiscation. At least a full half of these poems had been
written before there was any material cause for gratitude, and, as we
shall see presently, these three men had in any case little to do with
the matter. It will serve as a good antidote against the conjectures of
the allegorizing school if we remember that these commentators of the
Empire were for the most part Greek freedmen, themselves largely occupied
in fawning upon their patrons. They apparently assumed that poets as a
matter of course wrote what they did in order to please some patron--a
questionable enough assumption regarding any Roman poetry composed before
the Silver Age.
The second _Eclogue_ is a very early study which, in the theme of the
gift-bringing, seems to be reminiscent of Messalla's work.[1] The third
and seventh are also generally accepted as early experiments in the more
realistic forms of amoebean pastoral. Since the fifth, which should be
placed early in 41 B.C., actually cites the second and third, we have a
_terminus ante quem_ for these two eclogues. To the early list the tenth
should be added if it was addressed to Gallus while he was still doing
military service in Greece, and with these we may place the sixth,
discussed above.
[Footnote 1: See Chapter VIII.]
The lack of realistic local color in these pastorals has frequently been
criticized, on the supposition that Vergil wrote them while at home in
Mantua, and ought, therefore, to have given true pictures of Mantuan
scenery and characters. His home country was and is a monotonous plain.
The jutting crags with their athletic goats, the grottoes inviting
melodious shepherds to neglect their flocks, the mountain glades and
waterfalls of the _Eclogues_ can of course not be Mantuan. The Po Valley
was thickly settled, and its deep black soil intensively cultivated. A
few sheep were, of course, kept to provide wool, but these were herded by
farmers' boys in the orchards. The lone she-goat, indispensable to every
Italian household, was doubtless tethered by a leg on the roadside. There
were herds of swine where the old oak forests had not yet been cut, but
the swine-herd is usually not reckoned among songsters. Nor was any
poetry to be expected from the cowboys who managed the cattle ranches
at the foot hills of the Alps and the buffalo herds along the undrained
lowlands. Is Vergil's scenery then nothing but literary reminiscence?
In point of fact the pastoral scenery in Vergil is Neapolitan. The eighth
_Catalepton_ is proof that Vergil was at Naples when he heard of the
dangers to his father's property in the North. It is doubtful whether
Vergil ever again saw Mantua after leaving it for Cremona in his early
boyhood. The property, of course, belonged not to him but to his father,
who, as the brief poem indicates, had remained there with his family. The
pastoral scenery seldom, except in the ninth _Eclogue_, pretends to be
Mantuan. Even where, as in the first, the poem is intended to convey
a personal expression of gratitude for Vergil's exemption from harsh
evictions, the poet is very careful not to obtrude a picture of himself
or his own circumstances. Tityrus is an old man, and a slave in a typical
shepherd's country, such as could be seen every day in the mountains near
Naples. And there were as many evictions near Naples as in the North.
Indeed it is the Neapolitan country--as picturesque as any in Italy--that
constantly comes to the reader's mind. We are told by Seneca that
thousands of sheep fed upon the rough mountains behind Stabiae, and
the clothier's hall and numerous fulleries of Pompeii remind us that
wool-growing was an important industry of that region. Vergil's excursion
to Sorrento was doubtless not the only visit across the bay. Behind
Naples along the ridge of Posilipo,[2] below which Vergil was later
buried, in the mountains about Camaldoli, and behind Puteoli all the
way to Avernus--a country which the poet had roamed with observant
eyes--there could have been nothing but shepherd country. Here, then,
are the crags and waterfalls and grottoes that Vergil describes in the
_Eclogues_.
[Footnote 2: The picturesque road from Naples to Puteoli clung to the
edge of the rocky promontory of Posilipo, finally piercing the outermost
rock by means of a tunnel now misnamed the "grotto di Sejano." Most of
the road is now under twenty feet of water: See Guenther, _Pausilypon_. To
see the splendid ridge as Vergil saw it from the road one must now row
the length of it from Naples to Nesida, sketching in an abundance of
ilexes and goats in place of the villas that now cover it.]
And here, too, were doubtless as many melodious shepherds as ever
Theocritus found in Sicily, for they were of the same race of people as
the Sicilians. Why should the slopes of Lactarius be less musical than
those of Aetna? Indeed the reasonable reader will find that, except for
an occasional transference of actual persons into Arcadian setting--by an
allegorical turn invented before Vergil--there is no serious confusion
in the scenery or inconsistent treatment in the plots of Vergil's
_Eclogues_. But by failing to make this simple assumption--naturally due
any and every poet--readers of Vergil have needlessly marred the effect
of some of his finest passages.
The fifth _Eclogue_, written probably in 41 B.C., is a very melodious
Daphnis-song that has always been a favorite with poets. It has been and
may be read with entire pleasure as an elegy to Daphnis, the patron god
of singing shepherds. Those, however, who in Roman times knew Vergil's
love of symbolism, suspected that a more personal interest led him to
compose this elegy. The death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar is still
thought by some to be the real subject of the poem, while a few have
accepted another ancient conjecture that Vergil here wrote of his
brother. The person mourned must, however, have been of more importance
than Vergil's brother. On the other hand, certain details in the
poem--the sorrow of the mother, for instance--preclude the conjecture
that it was Caesar, unless the poet is here confusing his details more
than we need assume in any other eclogue.
It is indeed difficult to escape the very old persuasion that a sorrow
so sympathetically expressed must be more than a mere Theocritan
reminiscence. If we could find some poet--for Daphnis must be that--near
to Vergil himself, who met an unhappy death in those days, a poet, too,
who died in such circumstances during the civil strife that general
expression of grief had to be hidden behind a symbolic veil, would not
the poem thereby gain a theme worthy of its grace? I think we have such
a poet in Cornificius, the dear friend of Catullus, to whom in fact
Catullus addressed what seem to be his last verses.[3] Like so many of
the new poets, Cornificius had espoused Caesar's cause, but at the end
was induced by Cicero to support Brutus against the triumvirs. After
Philippi Cornificius kept up the hopeless struggle in Africa for several
months until finally he was defeated and put to death. If he be Vergil's
Daphnis we have an explanation of why his identity escaped the notice of
curious scholars. Tactful silence became quite necessary at a time when
almost every household at Rome was rent by divided sympathies, and yet
brotherhood in art could hardly be entirely stifled. From the point of
view of the masters of Rome, Cornificius had met a just doom as a rebel.
If his poet friends mourned for him it must have been in some such guise
as this.
[Footnote 3: Catullus, 38.]
In this instance the circumstantial evidence is rather strong, for we are
told by a commentator that Valgius, an early friend of Vergil's,
wrote elegies to the memory of a "Codrus," identified by some as
Cornificius:[4]
Codrusque ille canit quali tu voce canebas,
Atque solet numeros dicere Cinna tuos.
[Footnote 4: _Scholia Veronensia_, Ecl. VII, 22. The evidence is
presented in _Classical Review_, 1920, p. 49.]
That "shepherd" at least is an actual person, a friend of Cinna, and
a member of the neoteric group; that indeed it is Cornificius is
exceedingly probable. The poet-patriot seems then, not to have been
forgotten by his friends.
All too little is known about this friend of Catullus and Cinna, but what
is known excites a keen interest. Though he was younger than Cicero by
nearly a generation, the great orator[5] did him no little deference as
a representative of the Atticistic group. In verse writing he was of
Catullus' school, composing at least one epyllion, besides lyric verse.
According to Macrobius, Vergil paid him the compliment of imitating him,
and he in turn is cited by the scholiasts as authority for an opinion of
Vergil's. If the Daphnis-song is an elegy written at his death--and it
would be difficult to find a more fitting subject--the poem, undoubtedly
one of the most charming of Vergil's _Eclogues_, was composed in 41 B.C.
It were a pity if Vergil's prayer for the poet should after all not come
true:
Semper honos, nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.
[Footnote 5: See Cicero's letter to him: _Ad Fam_. XII, 17, 2.]
The tenth _Eclogue_, to Gallus, steeped in all the literary associations
of pastoral elegies, from the time of Theocritus' Daphnis to our own
"Lycidas" and "Adonais," has perhaps surrounded itself with an atmosphere
that should not be disturbed by biographical details. However, we must
intrude. Vergil's associations with Gallus, as has been intimated, were
those, apparently, of Neapolitan school days and of poetry. The sixth
_Eclogue_ delicately implies that the departure of Gallus from the circle
had made a very deep impression upon his teacher and fellow students.
What would we not barter of all the sesquipedalian epics of the Empire
for a few pages written by Cornelius Gallus, a thousand for each! This
brilliant, hot-headed, over-grown boy, whom every one loved, was very
nearly Vergil's age. A Celt, as one might conjecture from his career,
he had met Octavius in the schoolroom, and won the boy's enduring
admiration. Then, like Vergil, he seems to have turned from rhetoric to
philosophy, from philosophy to poetry, and to poetry of the Catullan
romances, as a matter of course. It was Cytheris, the fickle actress--if
the scholiasts are right--who opened his eyes to the fact that there were
themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales;
and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months
of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman
self-pity, this first poet of the _poitrinaire_ school. His subsequent
career was meteoric. Octavian, fascinated by a brilliancy that hid a
lack of Roman steadiness, placed him in charge of the stupendous task
of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The
romantic poet lost his head. Wine-inspired orations that delighted his
guests, portrait busts of himself in every town, grotesque catalogues of
campaigns against unheard-of negro tribes inscribed even on the venerable
pyramids did not accord with the traditions of Rome. Octavian cut his
career short, and in deep chagrin Gallus committed suicide.
The tenth _Eclogue_[6] gives Vergil's impressions upon reading one of the
elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army
post in Greece after the news of Cytheris' desertion. In his elegy the
poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East
away from his beloved.
"Would that he might have been a simple shepherd like the Greeks about
his tent, for their loves remained true!" And this is of course the very
theme which Vergil dramatizes in pastoral form.
[Footnote 6: This is the interpretation of Leo, _Hermes_, 1902, p. 15.]
We, like Vergil, realize that Gallus invented a new genre in literature.
He had daringly brought the grief of wounded love out of the realm of
fiction--where classic tradition had insisted upon keeping it--into the
immediate and personal song. The hint for this procedure had, of course,
come from Catullus, but it was Gallus whom succeeding elegists all
accredited with the discovery. Vergil at once felt the compelling force
of this adventuresome experiment. He gave it immediate recognition in his
_Eclogues_, and Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid became his followers.