INTRODUCTION. $ 1. VERGIL'S LIFE. PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO was born on the 15th of October, B.C. 70 [the first consulship of Pompey and Crassus] at Andes, which tradition asserts to have been on the site of the modern Pietola, three miles lower down the Mincio than Mantua. Andes, however, is generally described as a pagus 'a district [not vicus a village,'] and there seems to be no certain means of fixing on any particular village as the birth-place of our poet. He was educated at Cremona from his twelfth year till about his sixteenth, when he assumed the toga virilis and shortly afterwards went to Milan, where he studied until his removal to Rome in B.C. 53. At Rome he studied Rhetoric under Epidius, having possibly as a fellowpupil, young Octavius, the future Emperor Augustus. When he came to Rome the poem of Lucretius had been recently published; and the poems of Catullus were collected and published soon after his arrival. Few Romans of education in his time failed to attend with more or less of conviction reans. to the doctrines of either the Stoics or the EpicuOur poet appears to have been attracted by the latter rather than the former, and to have studied philosophy under the Epicurean Siro. The influence of this philosophy is manifest in many parts of his writings [see especially extract xiii. of this collection]; but he seems early to have recognised that his bent lay in the direction of poetry rather than philosophy; and to the Muse accordingly his best energies throughout his life were directed. From the time of his coming to Rome B.C. 53 to the Battle of Philippi B.C. 42 the political world was in a state of trouble and fermentation which culminated in the Civil War of B.C. 50-46, the brief supremacy of Julius Caesar, his murder, and the appearance of Octavian as his successor and avenger. In all these events Vergil took no part; nor did he come forward in the way open to every Roman who wished to distinguish himself, that, namely, of forensic speaking. Once only is he said to have appeared in court. We do not know how these years were passed, but probably some portion of them was spent away from Rome, perhaps on his paternal property. The poems of his which we possess were not written until after the close of this period. The Eclogues are said to have occupied him from B.C. 42 to B.C. 36. The Georgics between the year B.C. 40,-in which he was first introduced to Maecenas, and B.C. 30. The Aeneid occupied the last eleven years of his life, from B.C. 30 to B.c. 19. The circumstance referred to in the first extract of this book produced a decisive change in his life. Among the lands confiscated by the Triumvirs wherewith to reward their soldiery after the battle of |