withdrawing the expression of self-distrust. Where so much has been successfully questioned, it is impossible not to be afraid that there remains behind much more, not only open to dispute, but actually erroneous. I can only say, as before, that I shall be very grateful to any reader who will help me towards accuracy by pointing out my mistakes. Meantime, I may perhaps put in a plea for indulgence on account of the wide field over which the notes extend. A body of several thousands of propositions on a great variety of subjects can hardly fail to yield a large percentage of error. 1865. JOHN CONINGTON. LIFE OF VIRGIL. § I. AUTHORITIES. § 2. CHILDHOOD. § 3. EARLY POEMS. $ 4. EARLY MANHOOD, THE ECLOGUES. § 5. THE GEORGICS. § 6. THE AENEID. § 7. DEATH. GENERAL Details. § 1. THE fullest and most authentic life of Virgil now existing is that prefixed to the commentaries of Aelius and Tiberius Donatus. This memoir, which was formerly attributed to Ti. Donatus, is now by the almost universal consent of scholars assigned to Suetonius.' There is also a Life prefixed to the commentary which bears the name of Probus, which may also be ultimately based upon Suetonius, but whose author, whoever he was and whatever authorities he followed, cannot be acquitted of either ignorance or carelessness. And a short memoir is also prefixed to the commentary of Servius, which, although it is for the most part merely a confused abridgment of the work of Suetonius, contains some additional matter, notably the statement that the lines about Helen in the second Aeneid (vv. 566 foll.) were Virgil's own, and were struck out of his manuscript by Varius and Tucca. 2 The memoir by Suetonius, in the form in which we now possess it, does not perhaps contain all that Suetonius wrote about Virgil, but so far as it extends its value is all-important. For Suetonius, a diligent and conscientious collector of facts, had access to documents contemporaneous with the poet himself," including his correspondence with 1 Arguments in support of this theory will be found in my edition of the memoir (Ancient Lives of Vergil, Clarendon Press, 1879). I should have added to those already adduced the fact that Jerome, in his additions to the Eusebian chronicle, which in this part are universally acknowledged to come from Suetonius, uses language about Virgil identical with that of the Life attributed to Donatus.-A. Abr. 1948, 1960, 1965, 2003 = Vita Vergilii 2, 7, 35, 36. [See also J. W. Beck in Fleckeisen's Jahrb. cxxxiii 502.] 2 He puts the confiscation of Virgil's estate immediately after the bellum Mutinense (43 B.C.), instead of after the battle of Philippi. [See also the criticisms of Thilo in Fleckeisen's Jahrb. cxlix 290.] 3 Quintilian, x iii 8, Vergilium quoque paucissimos die composuisse versus auctor est Varius.' Gellius, XVII 10, amici familiaresque Vergilii in iis quae de ingenio moribusque eius memoriae tradiderunt.' Tacitus, Dial. 13, 'testes Augusti (ad Vergilium) litterae.' Macrobius, Sat. 1 xxiv II, preserves a fragment of the correspondence between Augustus and Virgil. Augustus, and memoirs of him by the poet Varius and other friends. Fragments only of these original authorities have come down to us, but, so far as it goes, the information which they convey corresponds accurately enough with that given by Suetonius. Such are the sources from which I have drawn the following short account of the life of Virgil. § 2. Publius Vergilius Maro was born on the fifteenth of October, in the year 70 B.C., in which Cn. Pompeius Magnus and M. Licinius Crassus were for the first time consuls, at Andes, a pagus in the territory of Mantua.' The name Andes is Celtic, and so apparently is Vergilius. The poet's father was a man of humble origin. According to some accounts he was a worker in pottery, but most authorities represented him as the hired servant of one Magius, a courier, whose daughter Magia he at length married. His mother's name is doubtless in great part responsible for the mediæval notion which made Virgil ('Magiae filius') a magician. If we may trust the authorities mentioned by Suetonius, Virgil's father managed to enrich himself by buying up tracts of woodland and by keeping bees. There is nothing improbable in this statement, as the time when he was thus engaged may well have been the era of the Sullan proscriptions, when land would be cheap. It is probable that Virgil's love for the country was fostered by his early surroundings. Although of humble origin himself, Virgil's father, like Horace's, seems to have been anxious to give his son the best education attainable. Virgil spent his boyhood at Cremona, and took his toga virilis there on his fifteenth birthday (Oct. 15, B.C. 55), on the very day when the poet Lucretius died. By an odd coincidence, Pompeius and Crassus were a second time consuls in this year. From Cremona Virgil went to Milan, and shortly afterwards to Rome. Here he studied rhetoric under the best masters, among others (if we may believe the short biography 5 1 Suetonius, 2, 'in pago qui Andes dicitur et abest a Mantua non procul.' Jerome a. Abr. 1948, Vergilius Maro in pago qui Andes dicitur, haut procul a Mantua.' The memoir attributed to Probus calls Andes a vicus, and places it some thirty miles from Mantua. But Andes must have been much nearer to Mantua: see Ancient Lives of Vergil, etc., p. 33. 2 [For Andes see Holder's Altkeltischer Sprachschatz. Vergilius and Magius were common names in Cisalpine Gaul; see the index to Corpus Inscr. Lat. v.] Suetonius, I, quem quidam opificem figulum, plures Magi cuiusdam viatoris initio mercennarium, mox ob industriam generum tradiderunt, egregieque substantiae silvis coemendis et apibus curandis auxisse reculam.' (I conjecture substantiam . . reculae.) 4 Suetonius, VI 7; Jerome a. Abr. 1965. 5 Probus. given in two Berne manuscripts) Epidius, who also numbered Antonius and Octavianus among his pupils. The earliest specimen quoted of his poetry is a couplet said to have been written in his boyhood as an epitaph on a brigand Ballista, the master of a school of gladiators: 'Monte sub hoc lapidum tegitur Ballista sepultus ; 2 Suetonius says that among his other studies Virgil paid attention to medicine and astrology. A notice in the Verona scholia informs us also that he studied philosophy under Siron, a celebrated Epicurean.3 There are some pretty lines in the collection of the minor poems (karà AETTÓ) attributed to Virgil, in which the boy expresses the delight with which he is abandoning rhetoric and grammar, and even poetry, for philosophy : 'Ite hinc, inanes, ite, rhetorum ampullae, et vos, Stiloque Tarquitique Varroque, Revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.' No scholars, as far as I am aware, see any objection to accepting these lines as genuine. If they are so, they are an interesting testimony to the aspiration for philosophical culture which Virgil expresses again in the second Georgic, and which never left him. Like Horace, Virgil long felt the influence of the Epicurean system, to a part of which at least he expresses his adherence in a passage in the first Georgic (v. 415 foll.). And we may well believe that it was partly due to the teaching of Siron that Virgil conceived that deep admiration for Lucretius which no careful critic has failed to detect. § 3. Suetonius says that at the age of sixteen Virgil wrote the Culex,3 meaning thereby, I suppose, the worthless hexameter poem which has 1 Suetonius, 17; Servius. 3 Ecl. VI 10. 2 Ibid. 15. 4 Causa, Haupt. Suetonius, 17, 'deinde (scripsit) catalepton et priapia et epigrammata et diras, item Cirim et Culicem cum esset annorum xvi. Scripsit etiam, de qua ambigitur, Aetnam.' Servius: 'scripsit etiam septem sive octo libros hos: Cirin, Aetnam, come down to us under that name, and which concludes as Suetonius says Virgil's poem concluded. Suetonius is not alone responsible for this statement, for a literary tradition as old as Lucan assigned this piece to Virgil's youth or boyhood. The poem is poor enough in itself, and (as Mr. Munro has pointed out to me) stands sufficiently condemned on metrical grounds. For the author of the Culex is careful in the matter of elisions, never, if possible, allowing two long vowels to coalesce. This strictness is inconceivable in Virgil's youth. A poet who even in his ripest work allowed himself the greatest freedom in eliding vowels is not likely to have been preternaturally scrupulous in his seventeenth year." 3 2 No one now thinks of attributing the Ciris or the Aetna to Virgil. The workmanship of the Copa and the Moretum is not unworthy of the Augustan age; but this does not, of course, prove that they are from the hand of Virgil. Of the short poems known under the various names of Catalecton, Catalepta, and Catalecta, but more rightly, as Bergk and Unger have shown, named Catalepton (rà κаTа λɛπтóν, or minor poems), the second, 'Corinthiorum amator iste verborum,' is expressly attributed to Virgil by Quintilian (VIII iii 27), though even this testimony cannot be accepted as conclusive. Of the fifth, 'Ite hinc inanes, ite, rhetorum ampullae,' I have already spoken; there seems no reason to doubt the genuineness of the tenth, 'Sabinus ille quem videtis hospites,' a parody of Catullus' Culicem, Priapeia, catalepton, epigrammata, Copam, diras.' I doubt whether these two statements can be taken as independent. There is considerable critical difficulty about the passage. In Suetonius the Canonician MS., which, though late, represents a good tradition, reads moretum for catalepton: and Servius' words septem sive octo require explanation. My own opinion is that Suetonius wrote deinde Culicem cum esset annorum xvi, and that the rest is an interpolation. Servius' septem sive octo I should explain by supposing that epigrammata and catalepton refer to the same set of minor poems: that one word was written over the other as an explanation, and thus crept into the text, and that the scribe, in doubt whether to count epigrammata and catalepton as two sets of poems or one, saved his conscience by adding sive octo after septem. Baehrens, however, in his edition of these poems (Leipzig, 1880), accepts the text of Suetonius and Servius, whom he treats as independent authorities, as genuine, and contends that the title catalepton includes all the minor poems attributed to Virgil, and that the true title of the short pieces is epigrammata or praelusiones. I agree with him that epigrammata would be a very good term to designate the short pieces, but I doubt whether тà karà Xɛñtóv could include the larger ones, and suspect that epigrammata and catalepton were synonymous. Suetonius, Vita Lucani. 2 Baehrens also lays stress upon this point in the work just quoted (p. 26). 3 [Prof. R. Ellis (Classical Rev. x 183) ascribes the Culex to some imitator of Virgil, familiar with the Georgics and possibly with the Aeneid, who wrote not very long after Actium.] |