Vergil - Tenney Frank
[Footnote 1: Cf. Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 440.]
Vergil's position as foremost of these poets was doubtless established by
the publication of the _Eclogues_. They took Rome by storm, and were even
set to music and sung on the stage, according to an Alexandrian fashion
then prevailing in the capital. Octavian was, of course, attracted to
them by a personal interest. The poet was given a house in Maecenas'
gardens on the Esquiline with the hope of enticing him to Rome. Vergil
doubtless spent some time in the city before he turned to the more
serious task of the _Georgics_, but we are told that he preferred the
Neapolitan bay and established his home there. This group, it would seem,
was definitely drawn into Octavian's circle soon after the peace of
Brundisium, and formed the nucleus of a kind of literary academy that set
the standards for the Augustan age.
The introduction of Horace into this circle makes an interesting story.
He was five years younger than Vergil, and had had his advanced education
at Athens. There Brutus found him in 43, when attending philosophical
lectures in order to hide his political intrigues; and though Horace
was a freedman's son, Brutus gave him the high dignity of a military
tribuneship. Brutus as a Republican was, of course, a stickler for all
the aristocratic customs. That he conferred upon Horace a knight's office
probably indicates that the _libertinus pater_ had been a war captive
rather than a man of servile stock, and, therefore, only technically a
"freedman." In practical life the Romans observed this distinction, even
though it was not usually feasible to do so in political life. After
Philippi Horace found himself with the defeated remnant and returned to
Italy only to discover that his property had been confiscated. He was
eager for a career in literature, but having to earn his bread, he bought
a poor clerkship in the treasury office. Then during spare moments he
wrote--satires, of course. What else could such a wreckage of enthusiasm
and ambitions produce?
His only hope lay in attracting the attention of some kindly disposed
literary man, and for some reason he chose Vergil. The _Eclogues_ were
not yet out, but the _Culex_ was in circulation, and he made the pastoral
scene of this the basis of an epode--the second--written with no little
good-natured humor. Horace imagines a broker of the forum reading that
passage, and, quite carried away by the succession of delightful scenes,
deciding to quit business for the simple life. He accordingly draws in
all his moneys on the Calends--on the Ides he lends them out again![2]
What Vergil wrote Horace when he received a copy of the _Epode_, we
are not told, but in his next work, the _Georgics_, he returned the
compliment by similarly threading Horace's phrases into a description of
country life--a passage that is indeed one of the most successful in the
book.[3]
[Footnote 2: Horace's scenes (his memory is visual rather than auditory)
unmistakably reproduce those of the _Culex_; cf. _Culex_ 148-58 with
_Epode_ 26-28; _Culex_ 86-7 with _Epode_ 21-22; _Culex_ 49-50 with
_Epode_ 11-12; etc. A full comparison is made in _Classical Philology_,
1920, p. 24. Vergil could, of course, be expected to recognize the
allusions to his own poem.]
[Footnote 3: _See Georgics_, II, 458-542, and a discussion of it in
_Classical Philology_, 1920, p. 42.]
The composition of the sixteenth epode by Horace--soon after the second,
it would seem--gave Vergil an opportunity to recognize the new poet, and
answer his pessimistic appeal with the cheerful prophecy of the fourth
Eclogue, as we have seen. By this time we may suppose that an intimate
friendship had sprung up between the two poets, strengthened of course
by friendly intercourse, now that Vergil could spend some of his time
at Rome. Horace himself tells how Vergil and Varius introduced him to
Maecenas (_Sat_. 1. 6), an important event in his career that took place
some time before the Brundisian journey (_Sat_. 1. 5). Maecenas had
hesitated somewhat before accepting the intimacy of the young satirist:
Horace had fought quite recently in the enemy's army, had criticized
the government in his _Epodes_, and was of a class--at least
technically--which Octavian had been warned not to recognize socially,
unless he was prepared to offend the old nobility. But Horace's dignified
candor won him the confidence of Maecenas; and that there might be no
misunderstanding he included in his first book of _Satires_ a simple
account of what he was and hoped to be. Thus through the efforts of
Vergil and Varius he entered the circle whose guiding spirit he was
destined to become.
Thus the coterie was formed, which under such powerful patronage was
bound to become a sort of unofficial commission for the regulation of
literary standards. It was an important question, not only for the young
men themselves but for the future of Roman literature, which direction
this group would take and whose influence would predominate. It might be
Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his
ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse. This Etruscan,
whose few surviving pages reveal the fact that he never acquired
an understanding of the dignity of Rome's language, that he was
temperamentally un-Roman in his love for meretricious gaudiness and
prettiness, might have worked incalculable harm on this school had his
taste in the least affected it. But whether he withheld his dictum, or it
was disregarded by the others, no influence of his can be detected in the
literature of the epoch.
Apollodorus, Octavian's aged teacher, a man of very great personal
influence, and highly respected, probably counted for more. In his
lectures and his books, one of which, Valgius, a member of the circle,
translated into Latin, he preached the doctrines of a chaste and
dignified classicism. His creed fortunately fell in with the tendencies
of the time, and whether this teaching be called a cause, or whether the
popularity of it be an effect of pre-existing causes, we know that this
man came to represent many of the ideals of the school.
But to trace these ideals in their contact with Vergil's mental
development, we must look back for a moment to the tendencies of the
Catullan age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not
many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their
styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions
first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard. Then there are
Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful
directness he does approve. In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents
a homely plainness which he commends, while Vergil stands for gentleness
and urbanity (molle atque facetum).
[Footnote 4: _Sat_. I. 10, 40 ff.]
The passage is important not only because it reveals a contemporaneous
view of Vergil's position but because it shows Horace thus early as the
spokesman of the "classical" coterie, the tenets of which in the end
prevailed. In this passage Horace employs the categories of the standard
text-books of rhetoric of that day[5] which were accustomed to classify
styles into four types: (1) Grand and ornate, (2) grand but austere, (3)
plain and austere, (4) plain but graceful. The first two styles might
obviously be used in forensic prose or in ambitious poetic work like
epics and tragedies. Horace would clearly reject the former, represented
for instance by Hortensius and Pacuvius, in favor of the austere dignity
and force of the second, affected by men like Cornificius in prose and
Varius and Pollio in verse. The two types of the "plain" style were
employed in more modest poems of literature, both, in prose and in such
poetry as comedy, the epyllion, in pastoral verse, and the like. Severe
simplicity was favored by Calvus in his orations, Catullus in his
lyrics 5 while a more polished and well-nigh _precieuse_ plainness was
illustrated in the speeches of Calidius and in the Alexandrian epyllion
of Catullus' _Peleus and Thetis_ and in Vergil's _Ciris_ and _Bucolics_.
[Footnote 5: E.g. Demetrius, Philodemus, Cicero; of. _Class. Phil_. 1920,
p. 230.]
In choosing between these two, Horace, of course, sympathizes with the
ideals of the severe and chaste style, which he finds in the comedies of
Fundanius. Vergil's early work, unambitious and "plain" though it is,
falls, of course, into the last group; and though Horace recognizes his
type with a friendly remark, one feels that he recognizes it for reasons
of friendship, rather than because of any native sympathy for it. By his
juxtaposition he shows that the classical ideals of the second and third
of the four "styles" are to him most sympathetic. _Mollitudo_ does not
find favor in any of his own work, or in his criticism of other men's
work. Vergil, therefore, though he appears in this Augustan coterie as
an important member, is still felt to be something of a free lance who
adheres to Alexandrian art[6] not wholly in accord with the standards
which are now being formulated. If Horace had obeyed his literary
instincts alone he would probably have relegated Vergil at this period
to the silence he accorded Callus and Propertius if not to the open
hostility he expressed towards the Alexandrianism of Catullus. It is
significant of Vergil's breadth of sympathy that he remitted not a jot in
his devotion to Catullus and Gallus and that he won the deep reverence of
Propertius while remaining the friend and companion of the courtly group
working towards a stricter classicism. If we may attempt to classify
the early Augustans, we find them aligning themselves thus. The strict
classicists are Horace the satirist, Varius a writer of epics, Pollio
of tragedy; while Varus, Valgius, Plotius, and Fundanius, though less
productive, employ their influence in the support of this tendency as
does Tibullus somewhat later. Vergil is a close personal friend of these
men but refuses to accept the axioms of any one school; Gallus, his
friend, is a free romanticist, and is followed in this tendency a few
years later by Propertius.
[Footnote 6: Horace had doubtless seen not only the _Culex_ but several
of the other minor works that Vergil never deigned to put into general
circulation.]
The influences that made for classicism were many. Apollodorus, the
teacher of Octavian, must have been a strong factor, but since his work
has been lost, the weight of it cannot now be estimated. Horace imbibed
his love for severe ideals in Athens, of course. There his teachers were
Stoic rhetoricians who trained him in an uncompromising respect for
stylistic rules.[7] He read the Hellenistic poets, to be sure, and
reveals in his poems a ready memory of them, but it was the great epoch
of Greek poetry that formed his style. Such are the foreign influences.
But the native Roman factors must not be forgotten. In point of fact it
was the classicistic Catullus and Calvus, of the simple, limpid lyrics,
written in pure unalloyed every-day Latin, that taught the new generation
to reject the later Hellenistic style of Catullus and Calvus as
illustrated in the verse romances. Varus, Pollio, and Varius were old
enough to know Catullus and Calvus personally, to remember the days when
poems like _Dianae sumus in fide_ were just issued, and they were poets
who could value the perfect art of such work even after the authors of
them had been enticed by ambition into dangerous by-paths. In a word, it
was Catullus and Calvus, the lyric poets, who made it possible for the
next generation to reject Catullus and Calvus the neoteric romancers.
[Footnote 7: For the stylistic tenets of the Stoic teachers see
Fiske, _Lucilius and Horace_, pp. 64-143. Apollodorus seems to be the
rhetorician whom Horace calls Heliodorus in _Sat_. I, 5, see _Class.
Phil_. 1920, 393.]
For the modern, therefore, it is difficult to restrain a just resentment
when he finds Horace referring to these two great predecessors with a
sneer. Yet we can, if we will, detect an adequate explanation of Horace's
attitude. Very few poets of any time have been able to capture and hold
the generation immediately succeeding. The stronger the impression made
by a genius, the farther away is the pendulum of approbation apt to
swing. The _neoteroi_ had to face, in addition to this revulsion, the
misfortunes of the time. The civil wars which came close upon them had
little use for the sentimentality of their romances or the involutions
of their manner of composition. And again, Catullus and Calvus had been
over-brutal in their attacks upon Julius Caesar, a character lifted to
the high heavens by the war and the martyrdom that followed. And, as
fortune would have it, almost all of the new literary men were, as we
have seen, peculiarly devoted to Caesar. We know enough of wars to have
discovered that intense partizanship does silence literary judgment
except in the case of a very few men of unusual balance. Vergil was one
of the very few; he kept his candle lit at the shrine of Catullus still,
but this was hardly to be expected of the rest.
In prose also the Augustans upheld the refined and chaste work of
classical Atticism, an ideal which they derived from the Romans of the
preceding generation rather than from teachers like Apollodorus. Pollio
and Messalla are now the foremost orators. Pollio had stood close to
Calvus as well as to Caesar, and had witnessed the revulsion of feeling
against Cicero's style which continued to move in its old leisurely
course even after the civil war had quickened men's pulses. Messalla may
have been influenced by the example of his general, Brutus, a man who
never wasted words (so long as he kept his temper). Messalla and Pollio
were the dictators of prose style during this period.
We find Vergil, therefore, in a peculiar position. He was still
recognized as a pupil of Catullus and the Alexandrians at a time when the
pendulum was swinging so violently away from the republican poets that
they did not even get credit for the lessons that they had so well taught
the new generation. Vergil himself was in each new work drifting more and
more toward classicism, but he continued to the last to honor
Catullus and Calvus, Cinna and Cornificius, and his friend Gallus, in
complimentary imitation or by friendly mention. The new Academy was proud
to claim him as a member, though it doubtless knew that Vergil was too
great to be bound by rules. To after ages, while Horace has come to stand
as an extremist who carried the law beyond the spirit, Vergil, honoring
the past and welcoming the future, has assumed the position of Rome's
most representative poet.
XIV
THE "GEORGICS"
The years that followed the publication of the _Eclogues_ seem to have
been a season of reading, traveling, observing, and brooding. Maecenas
desired to keep the poet at Rome, and as an inducement provided him with
a villa in his own gardens on the Esquiline. The fame of the _digitus
praetereuntium_ awaited his coming and going, his _Bucolics_ had been set
to music and sung in the concert halls to vehement applause.[1] He seems
even to have made an effort to be socially congenial. There is intimate
knowledge of courtly customs in the staging of his epic; and in Horace's
fourth book a refurbished early poem in Philodemus' manner pictures a
Vergil--apparently the poet--as the pet of the fashionable world. But
these things had no attraction for him. Rome indeed appealed to his
imagination, _Roma pulcherrima rerum_, but it was the invisible Rome
rather than the _fumum et opes strepitumque_, it was the city of pristine
ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. When
he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in
their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the
straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the
spirit of Jove had guarded a folk of simpler piety.[2] And down the
centuries he beheld the heroes, the law-givers, and the rulers, who had
made the Forum the court of a world-wide empire. The Rome of his own day
was too feverish, it soon drove him back to his garden villa near Naples.
[Footnote 1: Tacitus, _Dialogus_, 13: Malo securum et quietum Vergilii
secessum, in quo tamen neque apud divum Augustum gratia caruit neque apud
populum Romanum notitia. Testes Augusti epistulae, testis ipse populus,
qui auditis in theatro Vergilii versibus surrexit universus et forte
praesentem spectantemque Vergilium veneratus est quasi Augustum.]
[Footnote 2: _Aeneid_ VIII.]
It was well that he possessed such a retreat during those years of petty
political squabbles. The capital still hummed with rumors of civil war.
Antony seemed determined to sever the eastern provinces from the empire
and make of them a gift to Cleopatra and her children--a mad course that
could only end in another world war. Sextus Pompey still held Sicily and
the central seas, ready to betray the state at the first mis-step on
Octavian's part. At Rome itself were many citizens in high position who
were at variance with the government, quite prepared to declare for
Antony or Pompey if either should appear a match for the young heir of
Caesar. Clearly the great epic of Rome could not have matured in that
atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and selfishness. The convulsions of
the dying republic, beheld day by day near at hand, could only have
inspired a disgust sufficient to poison a poet's sensitive hope. It was
indeed fortunate that Vergil could escape all this, that he could retain
through the period of transition the memories of Rome's former greatness
and the faith in her destiny that he had imbibed in his youth. The time
came when Octavian, after Actium, reunited the Empire with a firm hand
and justified the buoyant optimism which Vergil, almost alone of his
generation, had been able to preserve.
During these few years Vergil seems to have written but little. We have,
however, a strange poem of thirty-eight lines, the _Copa_, which, to
judge from its exclusion from the _Catalepton_, should perhaps be
assigned to this period. A study in tempered realism, not unlike the
eighth _Eclogue_, it gives us the song of a Syrian tavern-maid inviting
wayfarers into her inn from the hot and dusty road. The spirit is
admirably reproduced in Kirby Smith's rollicking translation:[3]
[Footnote 3: See Kirby Flower Smith, _Marital, the Epigrammatist and,
Other Essays_, Johns Hopkins Press, 1920, p. 170. The attribution of the
poem to Vergil by the ancients as well as by the manuscripts, and the
style of its fanciful realism so patent in much of Vergil's work place
the poem in the authentic list. Rand, _Young Virgil's Poetry_, Harvard
Studies, 1919, p. 174, has well summed up the arguments regarding the
authorship of the poem.]
'Twas at a smoke-stained tavern, and she, the hostess there--
A wine-flushed Syrian damsel, a turban on her hair--
Beat out a husky tempo from reeds in either hand,
And danced--the dainty wanton--an Ionian saraband.
"'Tis hot," she sang, "and dusty; nay, travelers, whither bound?
Bide here and tip a beaker--till all the world goes round;
Bide here and have for asking wine-pitchers, music, flowers,
Green pergolas, fair gardens, cool coverts, leafy bowers.
In our Arcadian grotto we have someone to play
On Pan-pipes, shepherd fashion, sweet music all the day.
We broached a cask but lately; our busy little stream
Will gurgle softly near you the while you drink and dream.
Chaplets of yellow violets a-plenty you shall find,
And glorious crimson roses in garlands intertwined;
And baskets heaped with lilies the water nymph shall bring--
White lilies that this morning were mirrored in her spring.
Here's cheese new pressed in rushes for everyone who comes,
And, lo, Pomona sends us her choicest golden plums.
Red mulberries await you, late purple grapes withal,
Dark melons cased in rushes against the garden wall,
Brown chestnuts, ruddy apples. Divinities bide here,
Fair Ceres, Cupid, Bacchus, those gods of all good cheer,
Priapus too--quite harmless, though terrible to see--
Our little hardwood warden with scythe of trusty tree.
"Ho, friar with the donkey, turn in and be our guest!
Your donkey--Vesta's darling--is weary; let him rest.
In every tree the locusts their shrilling still renew,
And cool beneath the brambles the lizard lies perdu.
So test our summer-tankards, deep draughts for thirsty men;
Then fill our crystal goblets, and souse yourself again.
Come, handsome boy, you're weary! 'Twere best for you to twine
Your heavy head with roses and rest beneath our vine,
Where dainty arms expect you and fragrant lips invite;
Oh, hang the strait-laced model that plays the anchorite!
Sweet garlands for cold ashes why should you care to save?
Or would you rather keep them to lay upon your grave?
Nay, drink and shake the dice-box. Tomorrow's care begone!
Death plucks your sleeve and whispers: 'Live now, I come anon.'"
Memories of the Neapolitan bay! The _Copa_ should be read in the arbor of
an _osteria_ at Sorrento or Capri to the rhythm of the tarantella where
the modern offspring of Vergil's tavern-maid are still plying the arts of
song and dance upon the passerby.[4]
[Footnote 4: Unfortunately the evidence does not suffice to assign the
_Moretum_ to Vergil, though it was certainly composed by a genuine if
somewhat halting poet, and in Vergil's day. It has many imaginative
phrases, and the meticulous exactness of its miniature work might seem to
be Vergilian were it not for the unrelieved plainness of the theme. Even
so, it might be considered an experiment in a new style, if the rather
dubious manuscript evidence were supported by a single ancient citation.
See Rand, _loc. Cit._ p. 178.]
There are also three brief _Priapea_ which should probably be assigned to
this period. The third may indeed have been an inscription on a pedestal
of the scare-crow god set out to keep off thieving rooks and urchins in
the poet's own garden:
This place, my lads, I prosper, I guard the hovel, too,
Thatched, as you see, by willows and reeds and grass that grew
In all the marsh about it; hence me, mere stump of oak,
Shaped by the farmer's hatchet, they now as god invoke.
They bring me gifts devoutly, the master and his boy,
Supposing me the giver of the blessings they enjoy.
The kind old man each morning comes here to weed the ground,
He clears the shrine of thistles and burrs that grow around.
The lad brings dainty offerings with small but ready hand:
At dawn of spring he crowns me with a lavish daisy-strand,
From summer's earliest harvest, while still the stalk is green,
He wreathes my brow with chaplets; he fills me baskets clean
With golden pansies, poppies, with apples ripe and gourds,
The first rich blushing clusters of grapes for me he hoards.
And once to my great honor--but let no god be told!--
He brought me to my altar a lambkin from the fold.
So though, my lads, a Scare-Crow and no true god I be,
My master and his vineyard are very dear to me.
Keep off your filching hands, lads, and elsewhere ply your theft:
Our neighbor is a miser, his Scare-Crow gets no gifts,
His apples are not guarded--the path is on your left.
The quaint simplicity of the sentiment and the playful surprise at the
end quickly disarm any skepticism that would deny these lines to Horace's
poet of "tender humor."
During this period the poet seems also to have traveled. Maecenas enjoyed
the society of literary men, and we may well suppose that he took Vergil
with him in his administrative tours on more than the one occasion
which Horace happens to have recorded. The poet certainly knows Italy
remarkably well. The meager and inaccurate maps and geographical works of
that day could not have provided him with the insight into details which
the Georgics and the last six books of the _Aeneid_ reveal. We know, of
course, from Horace's third ode that Vergil went to Greece. This famous
poem, a "steamer-letter" as it were, is undated, but it may well be a
continuation of the Brundisian diary. The strange turn which the poem
takes--its dread of the sea's dangers--seems to point to a time when
Horace's memories of his own shipwreck were still very vivid.
There was also time for extensive reading. That Vergil ranged widely and
deeply in philosophy and history, antiquities and all the world's best
prose and poetry, the vast learning of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_
abundantly proves. The epic story which he had early plotted out must
have lain very near the threshold of his consciousness through this
period, for his mind kept seizing upon and storing up apposite incidents
and germs of fruitful lore. References to Aeneas crop out here and there
in the _Georgics_, and the mysterious address to Mantua in the third book
promises, under allusive metaphors, an epic of Trojan heroes. Nor could
the poet forget the philosophic work he had so long pondered over. Doubts
increased, however, of his capacity to justify himself after the sure
success of Lucretius. A remarkable confession in the second book of the
_Georgics_ reveals his conviction that in this poem he had, through
lack of confidence, chosen the inferior theme of nature's physical
and sensuous appeal when he would far rather have experienced the
intellectual joy of penetrating into nature's inner mysteries.[5]