from Samos, at Athens, whence he accompanied him homewards, but his health, which had been long weak, broke down, and he died at Brundisium Sept. 22, B.C. 19. He was buried at Naples on the road which leads to Puteoli. The inscription said to have been inscribed on his tomb refers to the places of his birth, death, and burial, and to the subjects of his three great works: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rara, duces. Virgil was largely read in his own day, and his works, like those of Horace, at once became a standard text-book in schools,1 and were commented on by numerous critics and grammarians, of whom Aulus Gellius in the second century and Macrobius and Servius in the fourth are the most important. The early Christians in the belief, still unquestioned in the days of Pope,2 that the fourth Eclogue contained a prophecy of Christ, looked upon him almost with reverence, and it is not merely as the greatest of Italian singers, but also as something of a saint, that Dante claims him as his master and guide in the Inferno. In popular esteem he was long regarded as a wizard (possibly owing to his description of the Sibyl and the under world in the sixth Aeneid), and 1Juv. Sat. 7. 226. 2 See his Messiah, a sacred Eclogue in imitation of Virgil's Pollio.' it was customary to consult his works as oracles by opening them at random and accepting the first lines which were chanced upon as prophetic. The emperor Alexander Severus thus consulted the Sortes Vergil ianae, and opened at the words Aen. 6. 852 tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, while Charles I. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford came upon the famous lines Aen. 4. 615-620: at bello audacis populi vexatus et armis, sed cadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus harena. In considering Virgil's writings, it must be borne in mind that, with the exception of satire, Roman poetry is entirely modelled on Greek. Terence copies Menander, Lucretius Empedocles, Horace Alcaeus and Sappho, Propertius Callimachus, and so on. Virgil in his Eclogues professedly imitates Theocritus, in his Georgics Hesiod, and in the Aeneid Homer. The cultured circle of readers for whom he wrote would probably have turned aside with contempt from a poem which relied wholly on native vigour, and did not conform, at any rate outwardly, to one of the accepted standards of literary excellence. They relished some happy reproduction of a Greek phrase, which was 'caviare to the general,' much in the same way that English scholars some times dwell with peculiar satisfaction on passages of Milton which it needs a knowledge of Latin to appreciate. Horace in his treatise on Poetry (1. 268) lays down the law which was considered universally binding on all poets: vos exemplaria Graeca nocturna versate manu, versate diurna; and Seneca (Suas. 3) tells us that Virgil borrowed from the Greeks non surripiendi causa, sed palam imitandi, hoc animo ut vellet adgnosci. 1 The Bucolics 1 (Вovkoλikά 'songs about herdsmen') consist of ten short poems commonly called Eclogues 2 (i.e. 'Selections'), and belong to the class of poetry called pastoral.' They are largely copied from Theocritus, the first writer of pastoral poetry, who flourished during the first half of the third century B.C. and who, though born at Cos and for some time resident in Alexandria, lived for the most part in Sicily, a country famous for its pastoral life and also 3 1 The term is doubtless Virgil's; Ovid Tr. 2. 538 calls them Bucolici modi. 2 The name is probably due to the grammarians, as are the various titles given to the separate Eclogues, though Virgil may himself have given that of Varus to the sixth (cf. 6. 12). In 5. 86, 87 and G. 4. 565 the second, third, and first are referred to by quoting their first line. 3 Hence 'Sicilian'='pastoral verse'; cf. 4. 1 Sicelides Musae; S. 1 Syracosio versu; 10. 1 Arethusa; Pope's Pastorals 1. 3. 'Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring, for the natural vivacity of its inhabitants (Cic. Verr. 2. 4. 43 nunquam tam male est Siculis quin aliquid facete et commode dicant). His poems called 'Idylls' (Eidúλia 'small sketches') are descriptive for the most part of country life, and often take the form of dramatic dialogue. Their origin is to be traced to that love of music and song which is developed by the ease and happiness of a shepherd's existence in a southern clime (cf. Lucr. 5. 1379 seq.), and to the singing-matches and improvisations which were common at village feasts, especially among the Dorian race, and which in Sicily had already pro duced the comedies of Epicharmus and the mimes of Sophron. manner. The Idylls, however, though they serve as a model for the Eclogues, differ from them in a most marked They are true to nature; the scenery is real; the shepherds are 'beings of flesh and blood';1 their broad Doric has the freshness and native vigour of the Scotch of Burns. The Eclogues, on the other hand, are largely artificial; the scenery belongs to nowhere; it is Italian, Sicilian, or Arcadian; the shepherds are the shepherds of a masquerade, and at times put off their disguise to show themselves as Virgil (Tityrus in Ecl. 1; Menalcas 9. 10), or Gallus, or Caesar (Daphnis 5. 55). Convention has been imposed upon nature, and pastoral poetry, instead of reproducing rural life with all its charms, even though 1 Fritzche, Theocr. Introd. with some of its rudeness, has become a form of art in which the poet plays at being a countryman, and endeavours to attract the jaded attention of his townbred audience by the representation of an idealised rustic world.1 None the less, as ecclesiastical art often shows, what is extremely conventional may be extremely beautiful, and the beauty of the Eclogues is beyond question. Horace promptly recognised their 'tenderness, '2 and such lines as 8. 38-41 saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala— which have earned the equal admiration of Macaulay and Voltaire, need no praise. The fact, too, that the Cf. 1A modern play-writer has expressed his desire 'to waft the scent of the hay-field across the foot-lights.' He clearly recognises that pictures of rural life and rural simplicity are always most attractive to an audience the most widely removed by habit and training from both one and the other. Georges Sand (quoted by Sellar) 'Depuis les Bergers de Longus jusqu'à ceux de Trianon, la vie pastorale est un Éden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier.' François le Champi. 2 Hor. Sat. 1. 10. 44 molle atque facetum Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae, where Sellar rightly explains the adjectives as denoting (1) a yielding susceptibility to outward influences, and (2) the vivacity which gives them back in graceful forms.' |