Scylla (from a Roman coin),.

The Grynean Apollo (from a coin of Myrina in Aeolis),

Goats Drinking (from the Vatican Manuscript), .

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INTRODUCTION.

P. VERGILIUS1 MARO was born Oct. 15, B.C. 70, at Andes, a small village near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul, five years before Horace and seven before C. Octavius, who later, under the names of Octavian and Augustus, was destined to become his great patron. His father was a yeoman, and cultivated a small farm of his own. The boy was educated at Cremona and Mediolanum (Milan), and is said to have subsequently studied at Neapolis (Naples) under Parthenius of Bithynia, from whom he learnt Greek, and at Rome under Siron, an Epicurean philosopher, and Epidius, a rhetorician. His works afford ample evidence of his wide reading, and he certainly merits the epithet of doctus to which all the poets of his age aspired; a noble passage in the Georgics (2. 475-492) expresses his deep admiration for scientific and philosophic study, while throughout the Aeneid, and especially in the speeches of the

1 The spelling Vergilius is wrong, but as an English word it seems pedantic to alter 'Virgil' established as it is by a long literary tradition.

2 Ellis, Cat. 35. 16 n.

fourth Book, there are marked traces of that rhetorical training which has left such a profound impress on the literature of the succeeding century.

On completing his education he seems to have returned home, and some of the minor poems ascribed to him-Ciris, Copis, Culex, Dirae, Moretum-may be in reality youthful attempts of his composed during this period. Our first certain knowledge, however, of his poetic career begins in B.C. 42, when, after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, the Roman world passed into the hands of the triumvirs Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus. They had promised their victorious veterans the lands of eighteen cities in Italy, among which was Cremona, and subsequently it became necessary to include the neighbouring district of Mantua.1 Virgil's father was threatened with the loss of his farm, but the youthful poet had secured the favour of C. Asinius Pollio, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and of L. Alfenus Varus, his successor (B.C. 41), whose assistance he invokes in the sixth Eclogue. Pollio, himself a scholar and poet, accepted the dedication of his earliest Eclogues, and secured for him

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1 Ecl. 9. 28 Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae.

2 The date of this is usually given as 41 B.C., but a year or two later (say B.C. 39) seems more probable: see Class. Rev. vi. p. 450.

3 Hor. Od. 2. 1.

1 Ecl. 8. 11 a te principium.