[Footnote 9: Nettleship, Ancient Lives of Virgil, 104; Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman People, p. 415.]

[Footnote 10: See Warde Fowler, The Death of Turnus, pp. 87-92, on the character of Ascanius.]

It would be futile to attempt to pick out definite lines and claim that these were parts of the youthful poem. Indeed the artistry of most of the verses discussed is, as any reader will notice, more on the plane of the later work than of the Ciris, written about 47-3 B.C. It is safe to say that Vergil did not in his youth write the sonorous lines of Aen. I, 285-290, just as they now stand. But as we may learn from the Ciris, which Vergil attempted to suppress, no poet has more successfully retouched lines written in youth and fitted them into mature work without leaving a trace of the process.

Critics have always expressed their admiration for the comprehensive scope of the Aeneid, its depth of learning, its finished artistry, and its wide range of observation. The substantial character of the poem is not a mystery to us when we consider how long its theme lay in the poet's mind.



VII

EPICUREAN POLITICS

Caesar fell on the Ides of March, 44. The peaceful philosophic community at Herculaneum "seeking wisdom in daily intercourse" must have felt the shock as of an earthquake, despite Epicurean scorn for political ambition. Caesar had been friendly to the school; his father-in-law, Piso, had been Philodemus' life-long friend and patron, and, if we may believe Cicero, even at times a boon companion. Several of Caesar's nearest friends were Epicureans of the Neapolitan bay. Their future depended wholly upon Caesar. Dolabella was Antony's colleague in that year's consulship, while Hirtius and Pansa had been chosen consuls for the following year by Caesar. To add to the shock, the liberators had been led by a recent convert to the school, Cassius.

The community as a whole was Caesarian, a fact explained not wholly by Piso's relations to Philodemus and the friendly attitude of so many followers of Caesar, but also by the consideration that the leading spirits were Transpadanes: Vergil, Varius and Quintilius, at least. But at Rome the political struggle soon turned itself into a contest to decide not whether Caesar's regime should be honored and continued in the family—Octavius seemed at first too young to be a decisive factor—but whether Antony would be able to make himself Caesar's successor. When in July Brutus and Cassius were out-manoeuvered by Antony, and Cicero fled helplessly from Rome, it was Piso who stepped into the breach, not to support Brutus and Cassius, but to check the usurpation of Antony. This gave Cicero a program. In September he entered the lists against Antony; in December he accepted the support of Octavian who had with astonishing daring for a youth of eighteen collected a strong army of Caesar's veterans and placed himself at the service of Cicero and the Senate in their warfare against Antony. Spring found the new consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, both Caesarians, with the aid of Octavian, Caesar's heir, besieging Antony at the bidding of the Senate in the defence of Decimus Brutus, one of Caesar's murderers! Such was Cicero's skill in generalship. Of course Caesarians were not wholly pleased with this turn of events. Cicero's success would mean not only the elimination of Antony—to which they did not object—but also the recall of Brutus and Cassius, and the consequent elimination of themselves from political influence. Piso accordingly began to waver. While assuring the Senate of his continued support in their efforts to render Antony harmless, he refused to follow Cicero's leadership in attempting the complete restoration of Brutus' party. Cicero's Philippics dwell with no little concern upon this phase of the question.

We would expect the Garden group, friendly to the memory of Caesar, to adopt the same point of view as Piso and for the same reasons. They could hardly have sympathized with the murderers of Caesar. On the other hand, they had no reason for supporting the usurpations of Antony, and seem to have enjoyed Cicero's Philippics in so far as these attacked Antony. Extreme measures were, however, not agreeable to Epicureans, who in general had nothing but condemnation for civil war. However, Octavian's strong stand could only have pleased them: Caesar's grand-nephew and heir would naturally be to them a sympathetic figure.

A fragment of Philodemus, recently deciphered,[1] reveals the teacher adopting in his lectures the very point of view which we have already found in Piso. The fragment is brief and mutilated, but so much is clear: Philodemus criticizes the party of Cicero for carrying the attack upon Antony to such extremes that through fear of the liberators a reaction in favor of Antony might set in. We find this position reflected even in Vergil. He never speaks harshly of the liberators, to be sure; in fact his indirect reference to Brutus in the Aeneid is remarkably sympathetic for an Augustan poet, but we have two epigrams of his attacking partizans of Antony in terms that remind us of passages in Cicero's Philippics. It would almost appear that Vergil now drew his themes for lampoons from Cicero's unforgettable phrases,[2] as Catullus had done some fifteen years before. How thoroughly Vergil disliked Antony may be seen in the familiar line in the Aeneid which Servius recognized as an allusion to that usurper (Aen. VI. 622):

Fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

[Footnote 1: Hermes, 1918, p. 382.]

[Footnote 2: Three other epigrams, VI, XII, XIII, have been assumed by some critics to be direct attacks upon Antony, but the key to them has been lost and certainty is no longer attainable.]

If Servius is correct, we have here again a reminder of those stormy years. This, too, is a dagger drawn from Cicero's armory. Again and again the orator in the Philippics charges Antony with having used Caesar's seal ring for lucrative forgeries in state documents. It is interesting to find that Vergil's school friend, Varius, in his poem on Caesar's death, called De Morte[3] first put Cicero's charges into effective verse:

Vendidit hic Latium populis agrosque Quiritum Eripuit: fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

[Footnote 3: Some recent critics have suggested that the poem may have been a general discussion of the fear of death, but Varius is constantly referred to as an epic poet (Horace, Sat. I. 10, 43; Carm. I. 6 and Porphyrio ad loc). His poem was written before Vergil's eighth Eclogue which we place in 41 B.C. (Macrobius, Sat. VI. 2. 20) and probably before the ninth (see I.36).]

The reference here, too, must have been to Antony. The circle was clearly in harmony in their political views.

The two creatures of Antony attacked by Cicero and Vergil alike are Ventidius and Annius Cimber. The epigram on the former takes the form of a parody of Catullus' "Phasellus ille," a poem which Vergil had good reason to remember, since Catullus' yacht had been towed up the Mincio past Vergil's home when he was a lad of about thirteen. Indeed we hope he was out fishing that day and shared his catch with the home-returning travelers. Parodies are usually not works of artistic importance, and this for all its epigrammatic neatness is no exception to the rule. But it is not without interest to catch the poet at play for a moment, and learn his opinion on a political character of some importance.

Ventidius had had a checkered career. After captivity, possibly slavery and manumission, Caesar had found him keeping a line of post horses and pack mules for hire on the great Aemilian way, and had drafted him into his transport service during the Gallic War. He suddenly became an important man, and of course Caesar let him, as he let other chiefs of departments, profit by war contracts. It was the only way he could hold men of great ability on very small official salaries. Vergil had doubtless heard of the meteoric rise of this mulio even when he was at school, for the post-road for Caesar's great trains of supplies led through Cremona. After the war Caesar rewarded Ventidius further by letting him stand for magistracies and become a senator—which of course shocked the nobility. Muleteers in the Senate! The man changed his cognomen to be sure, called himself Sabinus on the election posters, but Vergil remembered what name he bore at Cremona. Caesar finally designated him for the judge's bench, as praetor, and this high office he entered in 43. He at once attached himself to Antony, who used him as an agent to buy the service of Caesarian veterans for his army. It was this that stirred Cicero's ire, and Cicero did not hesitate to expose the man's career. Vergil's lampoon is interesting then not only in its connections with Catullus and the poet's own boyhood memories, but for its reminiscences of Cicero's speeches and the revelation of his own sympathies in the partizan struggle. The poem of Catullus and Vergil's parody must be read side by side to reveal the purport of Vergil's epigram.

Phaselus ille, quem videtis, hospites, Ait fuisse navium celerrimus, Neque ullius natantis impetum trabis Nequisse praeterire, sive palmulis Opus foret volare sive linteo. Et hoc negat minacis Adriatici Negare litus insulasve Cycladas Rhodumque nobilem horridamque Thraciam Propontida trucemve Ponticum sinum, Ubi iste post phaselus antea fuit Comata silva: nam Cytorio in iugo Loquente saepe sibilum edidit coma. Amastri Pontica et Cytore buxifer, Tibi haec fuisse et esse cognitissima Ait phaselus: ultima ex origine Tuo stetisse dicit in cacumine, Tuo imbuisse palmulas in aequore, Et inde tot per inpotentia freta Erum tulisse, laeva sive dextera Vocaret aura, sive utrumque Iuppiter Simul secundus incidisset in pedem; Neque ulla vota litoralibus deis Sibi esse facta, cum veniret a mari Novissimo hunc ad usque limpidum lacum. Sed haec prius fuere; nunc recondita Senet quiete seque dedicat tibi, Gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris.

Vergil's parody,[4] which substitutes the mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original phraseology with amusing fidelity:

Sabinus ille, quem videtis, hospites Ait fuisse mulio celerrimus, Neque ullius volantis impetum cisi Nequisse praeterire, sive Mantuam Opus foret volare sive Brixiam. Et hoc negat Tryphonis aemuli domum Negare nobilem insulamve Caeruli, Ubi iste post Sabinus, ante Quinctio Bidente dicit attodisse forcipe Comata colla, ne Cytorio iugo Premente dura volnus ederet iuba. Cremona frigida et lutosa Gallia, Tibi haec fuisse et esse cognitissima Ait Sabinus: ultima ex origine Tua stetisse (dicit) in voragine, Tua in palude deposisse sarcinas Et inde tot per orbitosa milia Iugum tulisse, laeva sive dextera Strigare mula sive utrumque coeperat

* * * * *

Neque ulla vota semitalibus deis Sibi esse facta praeter hoc novissimum, Paterna lora proximumque pectinem. Sed haec prius fuere: mine eburnea Sedetque sede seque dedicat tibi, Gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris.

[Footnote 4: See Classical Philology, 1920, p. 114.]

The other epigram referred to (Catalefton II) also attacks a creature of Antony's, Annius Cimber, a despised rhetorician who had been helped to high political office by Antony. Again Cicero's Philippics (XI. 14) serve as our best guide for the background.

Corinthiorum amator iste verborum, Iste iste rhetor, namque quatenus totus Thucydides, Britannus, Attice febris! Tau Gallicum min et sphin ut male illisit, Ita omnia ista verba miscuit fratri.

It might be paraphrased: "a maniac for archaic words, a rhetor indeed, he is as much and as little a Thucydides as he is a British prince, the bane of Attic style! It was a dose of archaic words and Celtic brogue, I fancy, that he concocted for his brother."

There seem to be three points of attack. Cimber, to judge from Cicero's invective, was suspected of having risen from servile parentage, and of trying, as freedmen then frequently did, to pass as a descendant of some unfortunate barbarian prince. Since his brogue was Celtic (tau Gallicum) he could readily make a plausible story of being British. Vergil seems to imply that the brogue as well as the name Cimber had been assumed to hide his Asiatic parentage. The second point seems to be that Cimber, though a teacher of rhetoric, was so ignorant of Greek, that while proclaiming himself an Atticist, he used non-Attic forms and vaunted Thucydides instead of Lysias as the model of the simple style. Finally, it was rumored, and Cicero affects to believe the tale, that Cimber was not without guilt in the death of his brother. Vergil is, of course, not greatly concerned in deriding Atticism itself: to this school Vergil must have felt less aversion than to Antony's flowery style; it is the perversion of the doctrine that amuses the poet.

Taken in conjunction with other hints, these two poems show us where the poet's sympathies lay during those years of terror. There may well have been a number of similar epigrams directed at Antony himself, but if so they would of course have been destroyed during the reign of the triumvirate. Antony's vindictiveness knew no bounds, as Rome learned when Cicero was murdered.



VIII

LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN

Vergil's dedication of the Ciris to Valerius Messalla was, as the poem itself reveals, written several years after the main body of the poem. The most probable date is 43 B.C., when the young nobleman, then only about twenty-one, went with Cicero's blessing[1] to join Brutus and Cassius in their fight for the Republic. Messalla had then, besides making himself an adept at philosophy—at Naples perhaps, since Vergil knew him—and stealing away student hours at Athens for Greek verse writing, gained no little renown by taking a lawsuit against the most learned lawyer of the day, Servius Sulpicius. Cicero's letter of commendation, which we still have, is unusually laudatory.

[Footnote 1: Cicero, Ad Brutum, I, 15.]

The dedication of the Ciris reveals Vergil still eager to win his place as a rival of Lucretius. We may paraphrase it thus:

"Having tried in vain for the favor of the populace, I am now in the 'Garden' seeking a theme worthy of philosophy, though I have spent many years to other purpose. Now I have dared to ascend the mountain of wisdom where but few have ventured. Yet I must complete these verses that I have begun so that the Muses may cease to entice me further. Oh, if only wisdom, the mistress of the four sages of old, would lead me to her tower whence I might from afar view the errors of men; I should not then honor one so great with a theme so trifling, but I should weave a marvelous fabric like Athena's pictured robe ... a great poem on Nature, and into its texture I should weave your name. But for that my powers are still too frail. I can only offer these verses on which I have spent many hours of my early school-days, a vow long promised and now fulfilled."

It is apparent that the student still throbs with a desire to become a poet of philosophy, and that he is willing to appease the muses of lighter song only because they insist on returning. But there is another poem addressed to Messalla that is equally full of personal interest.

Messalla, as we know from Plutarch's Brutus, drawn partly from the young man's diary, joined Cassius in Asia, and did noteworthy service in helping his general win the Eastern provinces from the Euxine to Syria for the Republican cause. Later at Philippi he led the cavalry charge which broke through the triumvirate line and captured Octavius' camp. That was the famous first battle of Philippi, prematurely reported in Italy as a decisive victory for the Republican cause. Three weeks later the forces clashed again and the triumvirs won a complete victory. Messalla, who had been chosen commander by the defeated remnant, recognized the hopelessness of his position and surrendered to the victors.

Vergil's ninth Catalepton seems to have been written as a paean in honor of Messalla on receipt of the first incomplete report. The poem does not by any means imply that Vergil favored Brutus and Cassius or felt any ill-will towards Octavian. Vergil's regard for Messalla was clearly a personal matter, and of such a nature that political differences played no part in it. The poet's complete silence in the poem about Brutus and Cassius indicates that it is not to any extent the cause which interests him. Nor can a eulogy of a young republican at this time be considered as implying any ill-will toward Octavian, to whom Vergil was always devoted. At this early day Antony was still looked upon as the dominating person in the triumvirate, and for him Vergil had no love whatever. He may, therefore, though a Caesarian and friendly to Octavian, sing the praises of a personal friend who is fighting Antony's triumvirate.

The ninth Catalepton, like most eulogistic verse thrown off at high speed, has few good lines (indeed it was probably never finished), but it is exceedingly interesting as a document in Vergil's life.

Since it has generally been placed about fifteen years too late and therefore misunderstood, we must dwell at length on some of its significant details. The poem can be briefly summarized:

"A conqueror you come, the great glory of a mighty triumph, a victor on land and sea over barbarian tribes; and yet a poet too. Some of your verses have found a place in my pages, pastoral songs in which two shepherds lying under the spreading oak sing in honor of your heroine to whom the divinities bring gifts. The heroine of your song shall be more famous than the themes of Greek song, yes even than the Roman Lucrece for whose honor your sires drove the tyrants out of Rome."

"Great are the honors that Rome has bestowed upon the liberty-loving (Publicolas) Messallas for that and other deeds. So I need not sing of your recent exploits: how you left your home, your son, and the forum, to endure winter's chill and summer's heat in warfare on land and sea. And now you are off to Africa and Spain and beyond the seas."

"Such deeds are too great for my song. I shall be satisfied if I can but praise your verses."

The most significant passage is the implied comparison of Valerius Messalla with the founder of the Valerian family who had aided the first Brutus in establishing the republic as he now was aiding the last Brutus in restoring it. The comparison is the more startling because our Messalla later explicitly rejected all connection with the first Valerius and seems never to have used the cognomen Publicola. The explanation of Vergil's passage is obvious.[2] The poet hearing of Messalla's remarkable exploit at Philippi saw at once that his association with Brutus would remind every Roman of the events of 509 B.C., and that the populace would as a matter of course acclaim the young hero by the ancient cognomen "Publicola." Later, after his defeat and submission, Messalla had of course to suppress every indication that might connect him with "tyrannicide" stock or faction. The poem, therefore, must have been written before Messalla's surrender in 42 B.C.

[Footnote 2: The argument is given in full in Classical Philology, 1920, p. 36.]

The poet's silences and hesitation in touching upon this subject of civil war are significant of his mood. The principals of the triumph receive not a word: his friend is the "glory" of a triumph led by men whose names are apparently not pleasant memories. Nor is there any exultation over a presumed defeat of "tyrants" and a restoration of a "republic." The exploit of Messalla that Vergil especially stresses is the defeat of "barbarians," naturally the subjection of the Thracian and Pontic tribes and of the Oriental provinces earlier in the year. And the assumption is made (1. 51 ff.) that Messalla has, as a recognition of his generalship, been chosen to complete the war in Africa, Spain, and Britain. Most significant of all is Vergil's blunt confession that his mind is not wholly at ease concerning the theme (II. 9-12): "I am indeed strangely at a loss for words, for I will confess that what has impelled me to write ought rather to have deterred me." Could he have been more explicit in explaining that Messalla's exploits, for which he has friendly praise, were performed in a cause of which his heart did not approve? And does not this explain why he gives so much space to Messalla's verses, and why he so quickly passes over the victory of Philippi with an assertion of his incapacity for doing it justice?

To the biographer, however, the passage praising Messalla's Greek pastorals is the most interesting for it reveals clearly how Vergil came to make the momentous decision of writing pastorals. Since Messalla's verses were in Greek they had, of course, been written two years before this while he was a student at Athens. Would that we knew this heroine upon whom he represents the divinities as bestowing gifts! Propertius, who acknowledged Mesalla as his patron later employed this same motive of celestial adoration in honor of Cynthia (II. 3, 25), but surely Messalla's herois was, to judge from Vergil's comparison, a person of far higher station than Cynthia. Could she have been the lady he married upon his return from Athens? Such a treatment of a woman of social station would be in line with the customs of the "new poets," Catullus, Calvus, and Ticidas, rather than of the Augustans, Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Vergil himself used the motive in the second Eclogue (l. 46), a reminiscence which, doubtless with many others that we are unable to trace, Messalla must have recognized as his own.

The pastoral which Vergil had translated from Messalla is quite fully described:

Molliter hic viridi patulae sub tegmine quercus Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant, Dulcia jactantes alterno carmina versu Qualia Trinacriae doctus amat iuvenis.

That is, of course, the very beginning of his own Eclogues. When he published them he placed at the very beginning the well-known line that recalled Messalla's own line:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi.

What can this mean but a graceful reminder to Messalla that it was he who had inspired the new effort?[3]

[Footnote 3: Roman writers frequently observed the graceful custom of acknowledging their source of inspiration by weaving in a recognizable phrase or line from the master into the very first sentence of a new work: cf. Arma virumque cano—[Greek: Andra moi ennepe] (Lundstroem, Eranos, 1915, p. 4). Shelley responding to the same impulse paraphrased Bion's opening lines in "I weep for Adonais—he is dead."]

We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his Eclogues is a recognition of Messalla's influence. Conversely it is proof, if proof were needed, that the ninth Catalepton is Vergil's. We may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth Catalepton:

pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas,

as a statement that in the autumn of 42, Vergil had already written some of his Eclogues, and that these early ones—presumably at least numbers II, III, and VII—contain suggestions from Messalla.

There was, of course, no triumph, and Vergil's eulogy was never sent, indeed it probably never was entirely completed.[4] Messalla quickly made his peace with the triumvirs, and, preferring not to return to Rome in disgrace, cast his lot with Antony who remained in the East. Vergil, who thoroughly disliked Antony, must then have felt that for the present, at least, a barrier had been raised between him and Messalla. Accordingly the Ciris also was abandoned and presently pillaged for other uses.

[Footnote 4: It ought, therefore, not to be used seriously in discussions of Vergil's technique.]

The news of Philippi was soon followed by orders from Octavian—to be thoroughly accurate we ought of course to call him Caesar—that lands must now, according to past pledges, be procured in Italy for nearly two hundred thousand veterans. Every one knew that the cities that had favored the liberators, and even those that had tried to preserve their neutrality, would suffer. Vergil could, of course, guess that lands in the Po Valley would be in particular demand because of their fertility. The first note of fear is found in his eighth Catalepton:

Villula, quae Sironis eras, et pauper agelle, Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae, Me tibi et hos una mecum, quos semper amavi, Si quid de patria tristius audiero, Commendo imprimisque patrem: tu nunc eris illi Mantua quod fuerat quodque Cremona prius.

It is usually assumed from this passage that Siro had recently died, probably, therefore, some time in 42 B.C., and that, in accordance with a custom frequently followed by Greek philosophers at Rome, he had left his property to his favorite pupil. The garden school, therefore, seems to have come to an end, though possibly Philodemus may have continued it for the few remaining years of his life. Siro's villa apparently proved attractive to Vergil, for he made Naples his permanent home, despite the gift of a house on the Esquiline from Maecenas.

This, however, is not Vergil's last mention of Siro, if we may believe Servius, who thinks that "Silenum" in the sixth Eclogue stands for "Sironem," its metrical equivalent. If, as seems wholly likely, Servius is right, the sixth Eclogue is a fervid tribute to a teacher who deserves not to be forgotten in the story of Vergil's education. The poem has been so strangely misinterpreted in recent years that it is time to follow out Servius' suggestion and see whether it does not lead to some conclusions.[5]

[Footnote 5: Skutsch roused a storm of discussion over it by insisting that it was a catalogue of poems written by Gallus (Aus Vergils Fruehzeit.) Cartault, Etude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile (p. 285), almost accepts Servius' suggestion: "un resume de ses lectures et de ses etudes."]

After an introduction to Varus the poem tells how two shepherds found Silenus off his guard, bound him, and demanded songs that he had long promised. The reader will recall, of course, how Plato also likened his teacher Socrates to Silenus. Silenus sang indeed till hills and valleys thrilled with the music: of creation of sun and moon, the world of living things, the golden age, and of the myths of Prometheus, Phaeton, Pasiphae, and many others; he even sang of how Gallus had been captured by the Muses and been made a minister of Apollo.

A strange pastoral it has seemed to many! And yet not so strange when we bear in mind that the books of Philodemus reveal Vergil and Quintilius Varus as fellow students at Naples. Surely Servius has provided the key. The whole poem, with its references to old myths, is merely a rehearsal of schoolroom reminiscences, as might have been guessed from the fine Lucretian rhythms with which it begins:

Namque canebat, uti magnum per inane coacta Semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent Et liquidi simul ignis; ut his exordia primis Omnia et ipse tener mundi concreverit orbis; Tum durare solum et discludere Nerea ponto Coeperit, et rerum paulatim sumere formas; Iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem. Altius atque cadant summotis nubibus imbres; Incipiant silvae cum primum surgere, cumque Rara per ignaros errent animalia montis.

The myths that follow are meant to continue this list of subjects, only with somewhat less blunt obviousness. They suggested to Varus the usual Epicurean theories of perception, imagination, passion, and mental aberrations, subjects that Siro must have discussed in some such way as Lucretius treated them in his third and fourth books of the De Rerum Natura.

It is, of course, not to be supposed that Siro had lectured upon mythology as such. But the Epicurean teachers, despite their scorn for legends, employed them for pedagogical purposes in several ways. Lucretius, for instance, uses them sometimes for their picturesqueness, as in the prooemium and again in the allegory of the seasons (V. 732). He also employs them in a Euhemeristic fashion, explaining them as popular allegories of actual human experiences, citing the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, as expressions of the ever-present dread of punishment for crimes. Indeed Vergil himself in the Aetna—if it be his—somewhat naively introduced the battle of the giants for its picturesque interest. It is only after he had enjoyed telling the story in full that he checked himself with the blunt remark:

(1. 74) Haec est mendosae vulgata licentia famae.

Lucretius is little less amusing in his rejection of the Cybele myth, after a lovely passage of forty lines (II, 600) devoted to it.

Vergil was, therefore, on familiar ground when he tried to remind his schoolmate of Siro's philosophical themes by designating each of them by means of an appropriate myth. Perhaps we, who unlike Varus have not heard the original lectures, may not be able in every case to discover the theme from the myth, but the poet has at least set us out on the right scent by making the first riddles very easy. The lapides Pyrrhae (I. 41) refer of course to the creation of man; Saturnia regna is, in Epicurean lore, the primitive life of the early savages; furtum Promethei (I. 42) must refer to Epicurus' explanation of how fire came from clashing trees and from lightning. The story of Hylas (I. 43) probably reminded Varus of Siro's lecture on images and reflection, Pasiphae (I. 46) of unruly passions, explained perhaps as in Lucretius' fourth book, Atalanta (I. 61) of greed, and Phaeton of ambition. As for Scylla, Vergil had himself in the Ciris (I. 69) mentioned, only to reject, the allegorical interpretation here presented, according to which she portrays:

"the sin of lustfulness and love's incontinence."

Vergil had not then met Siro, but he may have read some of his lectures.

Finally, the strange lines on Cornelius Gallus might find a ready explanation if we knew whether or not Gallus had also been a member of the Neapolitan circle. Probus, if we may believe him, suggests the possibility in calling him a schoolmate of Vergil's, and a plausible interpretation of this eclogue turns that possibility into a probability. The passage (II. 64-73) may well be Vergil's way of recalling to Varus a well-beloved fellow-student who had left the circle to become a poet.

The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil's life in Siro's garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school closed, and Varus gone off to war. The younger man's school days are now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla's experiments had drawn him. The Eclogues are already appearing in rapid succession.



IX

MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY

It has been remarked that Vergil's genius was of slow growth; he was twenty-eight before he wrote any verses that his mature judgment recognized as worthy of publication. A survey of his early life reveals some of the reasons for this tardy development. Born and schooled in a province he was naturally held back by lack of those contacts which stimulate boys of the city to rapid mental growth. The first few years at Rome were in some measure wasted upon a subject for which he had neither taste nor endowment. The banal rhetorical training might indeed have made a Lucan or a Juvenal out of him had he not finally revolted so decisively. However, this work at Rome proved not to be a total loss. His choice of a national theme for an epic and his insight into the true qualities of imperial Rome owe something to the study of political questions that his preparation for a public career had necessitated. He learned something in his Roman days that not even Epicurean scorn for politics could eradicate.

However, his next decision, to devote his life to philosophy, again retarded his poetic development. Certainly it held him in leash during the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The Aetna shows perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic insistence that myths must now give way to facts. Its author was still too absorbed in the microscopic analysis of a petty piece of research to catch the spirit of Lucretius who had found in the visions of the scientific workshop a majesty and beauty that partook of the essence of poetry.

In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to Epicureanism than modern critics—too often obsessed by a misapplied odium philosophicum—have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its attitude towards art banal. But that is not a sound historical method of approach. The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how, when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.

The system, despite its inadequate first answers, employed a scientific method that gave the Romans faith in many of its results, just at a time when orthodox mythology had yielded before the first critical inspection. As a preliminary system of illumination it proved invaluable. Untrained in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naive faith. Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by two centuries of skeptics. The Epicurean at least kept his feet on the ground, appealed to the practical man's faith in his own senses, and plausibly propped his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic. He rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of metaphysical reasoning. He came with a gospel of illumination to a race eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously created by processes that the average man beheld in his daily walks.

It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination, to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions, and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as unscientific.

[Footnote 1: It is not quite accurate to say that the Romans made a dogma of Epicurus' ipse dixit which destroyed scientific open-mindedness. Vergil uses Posidonius and Zeno as freely as the Stoic Seneca does Epicurus.]

Furthermore, Epicureanism provided a view of nature which was apt in the minds of an imaginative poet to lead toward romanticism. Stoicism indeed pretended to be pantheistic, and Wordsworth has demonstrated the value to romanticism of that attitude. But to the clear of vision Stoicism immediately took from nature with one hand what it had given with the other. Invariably, its rule of "follow nature" had to be defined in terms that proved its distrust of what the world called nature. As a matter of fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec, peccat!" cries Persius in terror.

The earlier naive animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the wealth of ancient myths. But the nymphs of that stream were dead, slain by philosophical questioning. The new poetic myth-making that still showed the influence of an old habit of mind was apt to be rather self-conscious and diffident, ending in something resembling the pathetic fallacy.

Epicureanism on the other hand by employing the theory of evolution was able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of romance became possible only upon the discovery of that unity. This is doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our day.

Nam simulac species patefactast verna diei ... Aeriae primum volucres te diva tuumque Significant initum perculsae corda tua vi, Inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta.

Vergil, convinced by the same philosophy, expresses himself similarly:

Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres amor omnibus idem.

And again:

Avia tum resonant avibus virgulta canoris Et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus Parturit almus ager Zepherique trementibus auris Laxant arva sinus.

It is, of course, the theme of "Sumer is icumen in." Lucretius feels so strongly the unity of naturally evolved creation that he never hesitates to compare men of various temperaments with animals of sundry natures—the fiery lion, the cool-tempered ox—and explain the differences in both by the same preponderance of some peculiar kind of "soul-atoms."

Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man's mental horizon and sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use. Like the crude evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau's day, it gave one a more soundly based sympathy for one's fellows—since evolution was not yet "red in tooth and claw." If nature was to be trusted, why not man's nature? Why curse the body, any man's body, as the root-ground of sin? Were not the instincts a part of man? Might not the scientific view prove that the passions so far from being diseases, conditioned the very life and survival of the race? Perhaps the evils of excess, called sin, were after all due to defects in social and political institutions that had applied incorrect regulative principles, or to the selfishly imposed religious fears which had driven the healthy instincts into tantrums. Rid man of these erroneous fears and of a political system begot for purposes of exploitation and see whether by returning to an age of primitive innocence he cannot prove that nature is trustworthy.[2]

[Footnote 2: Lucretius, III, 37-93; II, 23-39; V, 1105-1135.]

There is in this philosophy then a basis for a large humanitarianism, dangerous perhaps in its implications. And yet it could hardly have been more perilous than the Roman orthodox religion which insisted only upon formal correctness, seldom upon ethical decorum, or than Stoicism with its categorical imperative, which could restrain only those who were already convinced. The Stoic pretence of appealing to a natural law could be proved illogical at first examination, when driven to admit that "nature" must be explained by a question-begging definition before its rule could be applied.

Indeed the Romans of Vergil's day had not been accustomed to look for ethical sanctions in religion or creed. Morality had always been for them a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum, legal doctrine regarding the universality of aequitas, and, more than they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock. It probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard. Cicero, as statesman, does; but the question had doubtless come to him first out of the literature of the Academy which he was wont to read. Despite their creed, Lucretius and Vergil are indeed Rome's foremost apostles of Righteousness; and if anyone had pressed home the charge of possible moral weakness in their system they might well have pointed to the exemplary life of Epicurus and many of his followers. To the Romans this philosophy brought a creed of wide sympathies with none of the "lust for sensation" that accompanied its return in the days of Rousseau and "Werther." Had not the old Roman stock, sound in marrow and clear of eye, been shattered by wars and thinned out by emigration, only to be displaced by a more nervous and impulsive people that had come in by the slave trade, Roman civilization would hardly have suffered from the application of the doctrines of Epicurus.

Whether or not Vergil remained an Epicurean to the end, we must, to be fair, give credit to that philosophy for much that is most poetical in his later work,—a romantic charm in the treatment of nature, a deep comprehension of man's temper, a broader sympathy with humanity and a clearer understanding of the difference between social virtue and mere ritualistic correctness than was to be expected of a Roman at this time.

It is, however, very probable that Vergil remained on the whole faithful to this creed[3] to the very end. He was forty years of age and only eleven years from his death when he published the Georgics, which are permeated with the Epicurean view of nature; and the restatement of this creed in the first book of the Aeneid ought to warn us that his faith in it did not die.

[Footnote 3: This is, of course, not the view of Sellar, Conington, Glover, and Norden,—to mention but a few of those who hold that Vergil became a Stoic. See chapter XV for a development of this view.]



X

RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI

The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at home. Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil's pastorals who can take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible hidden meanings that lie in them. But the biographer may not share that pleasure. The Eclogues were soon burdened with comments by critics who sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity of an unannaled provincial life. In their eager search for data they forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author. The modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a little of the allegory that obscures the text.

It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not themselves consistent. Those early commentators who variously place the confiscation of Vergil's farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.), after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province that did not exist, may state some real facts: they certainly hazard many futile guesses. The safest way is to trust these records only when they harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret the Eclogues primarily as imaginative pastoral poetry, and not, except when they demand it, as a personal record. We shall here treat the Bucolics in what seems to be their order of composition, not the order of their position in the collection.

The eulogy of Messalla, written in 42 B.C., reveals Vergil already at work upon pastoral themes, to which, as he tells us, Messalla's Greek eclogues had called his attention. We may then at once reject the statement of the scholiasts that Vergil wrote the Eclogues for the purpose of thanking Pollio, Alfenus, and Gallus for having saved his estates from confiscation. At least a full half of these poems had been written before there was any material cause for gratitude, and, as we shall see presently, these three men had in any case little to do with the matter. It will serve as a good antidote against the conjectures of the allegorizing school if we remember that these commentators of the Empire were for the most part Greek freedmen, themselves largely occupied in fawning upon their patrons. They apparently assumed that poets as a matter of course wrote what they did in order to please some patron—a questionable enough assumption regarding any Roman poetry composed before the Silver Age.

The second Eclogue is a very early study which, in the theme of the gift-bringing, seems to be reminiscent of Messalla's work.[1] The third and seventh are also generally accepted as early experiments in the more realistic forms of amoebean pastoral. Since the fifth, which should be placed early in 41 B.C., actually cites the second and third, we have a terminus ante quem for these two eclogues. To the early list the tenth should be added if it was addressed to Gallus while he was still doing military service in Greece, and with these we may place the sixth, discussed above.

[Footnote 1: See Chapter VIII.]

The lack of realistic local color in these pastorals has frequently been criticized, on the supposition that Vergil wrote them while at home in Mantua, and ought, therefore, to have given true pictures of Mantuan scenery and characters. His home country was and is a monotonous plain. The jutting crags with their athletic goats, the grottoes inviting melodious shepherds to neglect their flocks, the mountain glades and waterfalls of the Eclogues can of course not be Mantuan. The Po Valley was thickly settled, and its deep black soil intensively cultivated. A few sheep were, of course, kept to provide wool, but these were herded by farmers' boys in the orchards. The lone she-goat, indispensable to every Italian household, was doubtless tethered by a leg on the roadside. There were herds of swine where the old oak forests had not yet been cut, but the swine-herd is usually not reckoned among songsters. Nor was any poetry to be expected from the cowboys who managed the cattle ranches at the foot hills of the Alps and the buffalo herds along the undrained lowlands. Is Vergil's scenery then nothing but literary reminiscence?

In point of fact the pastoral scenery in Vergil is Neapolitan. The eighth Catalepton is proof that Vergil was at Naples when he heard of the dangers to his father's property in the North. It is doubtful whether Vergil ever again saw Mantua after leaving it for Cremona in his early boyhood. The property, of course, belonged not to him but to his father, who, as the brief poem indicates, had remained there with his family. The pastoral scenery seldom, except in the ninth Eclogue, pretends to be Mantuan. Even where, as in the first, the poem is intended to convey a personal expression of gratitude for Vergil's exemption from harsh evictions, the poet is very careful not to obtrude a picture of himself or his own circumstances. Tityrus is an old man, and a slave in a typical shepherd's country, such as could be seen every day in the mountains near Naples. And there were as many evictions near Naples as in the North. Indeed it is the Neapolitan country—as picturesque as any in Italy—that constantly comes to the reader's mind. We are told by Seneca that thousands of sheep fed upon the rough mountains behind Stabiae, and the clothier's hall and numerous fulleries of Pompeii remind us that wool-growing was an important industry of that region. Vergil's excursion to Sorrento was doubtless not the only visit across the bay. Behind Naples along the ridge of Posilipo,[2] below which Vergil was later buried, in the mountains about Camaldoli, and behind Puteoli all the way to Avernus—a country which the poet had roamed with observant eyes—there could have been nothing but shepherd country. Here, then, are the crags and waterfalls and grottoes that Vergil describes in the Eclogues.

[Footnote 2: The picturesque road from Naples to Puteoli clung to the edge of the rocky promontory of Posilipo, finally piercing the outermost rock by means of a tunnel now misnamed the "grotto di Sejano." Most of the road is now under twenty feet of water: See Guenther, Pausilypon. To see the splendid ridge as Vergil saw it from the road one must now row the length of it from Naples to Nesida, sketching in an abundance of ilexes and goats in place of the villas that now cover it.]

And here, too, were doubtless as many melodious shepherds as ever Theocritus found in Sicily, for they were of the same race of people as the Sicilians. Why should the slopes of Lactarius be less musical than those of Aetna? Indeed the reasonable reader will find that, except for an occasional transference of actual persons into Arcadian setting—by an allegorical turn invented before Vergil—there is no serious confusion in the scenery or inconsistent treatment in the plots of Vergil's Eclogues. But by failing to make this simple assumption—naturally due any and every poet—readers of Vergil have needlessly marred the effect of some of his finest passages.

The fifth Eclogue, written probably in 41 B.C., is a very melodious Daphnis-song that has always been a favorite with poets. It has been and may be read with entire pleasure as an elegy to Daphnis, the patron god of singing shepherds. Those, however, who in Roman times knew Vergil's love of symbolism, suspected that a more personal interest led him to compose this elegy. The death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar is still thought by some to be the real subject of the poem, while a few have accepted another ancient conjecture that Vergil here wrote of his brother. The person mourned must, however, have been of more importance than Vergil's brother. On the other hand, certain details in the poem—the sorrow of the mother, for instance—preclude the conjecture that it was Caesar, unless the poet is here confusing his details more than we need assume in any other eclogue.

It is indeed difficult to escape the very old persuasion that a sorrow so sympathetically expressed must be more than a mere Theocritan reminiscence. If we could find some poet—for Daphnis must be that—near to Vergil himself, who met an unhappy death in those days, a poet, too, who died in such circumstances during the civil strife that general expression of grief had to be hidden behind a symbolic veil, would not the poem thereby gain a theme worthy of its grace? I think we have such a poet in Cornificius, the dear friend of Catullus, to whom in fact Catullus addressed what seem to be his last verses.[3] Like so many of the new poets, Cornificius had espoused Caesar's cause, but at the end was induced by Cicero to support Brutus against the triumvirs. After Philippi Cornificius kept up the hopeless struggle in Africa for several months until finally he was defeated and put to death. If he be Vergil's Daphnis we have an explanation of why his identity escaped the notice of curious scholars. Tactful silence became quite necessary at a time when almost every household at Rome was rent by divided sympathies, and yet brotherhood in art could hardly be entirely stifled. From the point of view of the masters of Rome, Cornificius had met a just doom as a rebel. If his poet friends mourned for him it must have been in some such guise as this.

[Footnote 3: Catullus, 38.]

In this instance the circumstantial evidence is rather strong, for we are told by a commentator that Valgius, an early friend of Vergil's, wrote elegies to the memory of a "Codrus," identified by some as Cornificius:[4]

Codrusque ille canit quali tu voce canebas, Atque solet numeros dicere Cinna tuos.

[Footnote 4: Scholia Veronensia, Ecl. VII, 22. The evidence is presented in Classical Review, 1920, p. 49.]

That "shepherd" at least is an actual person, a friend of Cinna, and a member of the neoteric group; that indeed it is Cornificius is exceedingly probable. The poet-patriot seems then, not to have been forgotten by his friends.

All too little is known about this friend of Catullus and Cinna, but what is known excites a keen interest. Though he was younger than Cicero by nearly a generation, the great orator[5] did him no little deference as a representative of the Atticistic group. In verse writing he was of Catullus' school, composing at least one epyllion, besides lyric verse. According to Macrobius, Vergil paid him the compliment of imitating him, and he in turn is cited by the scholiasts as authority for an opinion of Vergil's. If the Daphnis-song is an elegy written at his death—and it would be difficult to find a more fitting subject—the poem, undoubtedly one of the most charming of Vergil's Eclogues, was composed in 41 B.C. It were a pity if Vergil's prayer for the poet should after all not come true:

Semper honos, nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.

[Footnote 5: See Cicero's letter to him: Ad Fam. XII, 17, 2.]

The tenth Eclogue, to Gallus, steeped in all the literary associations of pastoral elegies, from the time of Theocritus' Daphnis to our own "Lycidas" and "Adonais," has perhaps surrounded itself with an atmosphere that should not be disturbed by biographical details. However, we must intrude. Vergil's associations with Gallus, as has been intimated, were those, apparently, of Neapolitan school days and of poetry. The sixth Eclogue delicately implies that the departure of Gallus from the circle had made a very deep impression upon his teacher and fellow students.

What would we not barter of all the sesquipedalian epics of the Empire for a few pages written by Cornelius Gallus, a thousand for each! This brilliant, hot-headed, over-grown boy, whom every one loved, was very nearly Vergil's age. A Celt, as one might conjecture from his career, he had met Octavius in the schoolroom, and won the boy's enduring admiration. Then, like Vergil, he seems to have turned from rhetoric to philosophy, from philosophy to poetry, and to poetry of the Catullan romances, as a matter of course. It was Cytheris, the fickle actress—if the scholiasts are right—who opened his eyes to the fact that there were themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales; and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman self-pity, this first poet of the poitrinaire school. His subsequent career was meteoric. Octavian, fascinated by a brilliancy that hid a lack of Roman steadiness, placed him in charge of the stupendous task of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The romantic poet lost his head. Wine-inspired orations that delighted his guests, portrait busts of himself in every town, grotesque catalogues of campaigns against unheard-of negro tribes inscribed even on the venerable pyramids did not accord with the traditions of Rome. Octavian cut his career short, and in deep chagrin Gallus committed suicide.

The tenth Eclogue[6] gives Vergil's impressions upon reading one of the elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army post in Greece after the news of Cytheris' desertion. In his elegy the poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East away from his beloved.

"Would that he might have been a simple shepherd like the Greeks about his tent, for their loves remained true!" And this is of course the very theme which Vergil dramatizes in pastoral form.

[Footnote 6: This is the interpretation of Leo, Hermes, 1902, p. 15.]

We, like Vergil, realize that Gallus invented a new genre in literature. He had daringly brought the grief of wounded love out of the realm of fiction—where classic tradition had insisted upon keeping it—into the immediate and personal song. The hint for this procedure had, of course, come from Catullus, but it was Gallus whom succeeding elegists all accredited with the discovery. Vergil at once felt the compelling force of this adventuresome experiment. He gave it immediate recognition in his Eclogues, and Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid became his followers.

The poems of Gallus, if the Arcadian setting is real, were probably written soon after Philippi. Vergil's Eclogue of recognition may have been composed not much later, for we have a right to assume that Vergil would have had one of the first copies of Gallus' poems. If this be true, the first and last few lines were fitted on later, when the whole book was published, to adapt the poem for its honorable position at the close of the volume.



XI

THE EVICTIONS

The first and ninth Eclogues, and only these, concern the confiscations of land at Cremona and Mantua which threatened to deprive Vergil's father of his estates and consequently the poet of his income. There seems to be no way of deciding which is the earlier. Ancient commentators, following the order of precedence, interpreted the ninth as an indication of a second eviction, but there seems to be no sound reason for agreeing with them, since they are entirely too literal in their inferences. Conington sanely decides that only one eviction took place, and he places the ninth before the first in order of time. He may be right. The two poems at any rate belong to the early months of 41.

The obsequious scholiasts of the Empire have nowhere so thoroughly exposed their own mode of thought as in their interpretations of these two Eclogues. Knowing and caring little for the actual course of events, having no comprehension of the institutions of an earlier day, concerned only with extracting what is to them a dramatic story from the Eclogues, they put all the historical characters into impossible situations. The one thing of which they feel comfortably sure is that every Eclogue that mentions Pollio, Gallus and Alfenus Varus must have been a "bread and butter" poem written in gratitude for value received. Of the close literary associations of the time they seem to be unaware. To suit such purposes Pollio[1] is at times made governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and at times placed on the commission to colonize Cremona, Alfenus is made Pollio's "successor" in a province that does not exist, and Gallus is also made a colonial commissioner. If, however, we examine these statements in the light of facts provided by independent sources we shall find that the whole structure based upon the subjective inferences of the scholiasts falls to the ground.

[Footnote 1: See Diehl, Vitae Vergilianae, pp. 51 ff.]

We must first follow Pollio's career through this period. When the triumvirate was formed in 43, Pollio was made Antony's legatus in Cisalpine Gaul and promised the consulship for the year 40.[2] After Philippi, however, in the autumn of 42, Cisalpine Gaul was declared a part of Italy and, therefore, fell out of Pollio's control.[3] Nevertheless, he was not deprived of a command for the year remaining before his consulship (41 B.C.), but was permitted to withdraw to the upper end of the Adriatic with his army of seven legions.[4] His duty was doubtless to guard the low Venetian coast against the remnants of the republican forces still on the high seas, and, if he had time, to subdue the Illyrian tribes friendly to the republican cause.[5] During this year, in which Octavian had to besiege Lucius Antony at Perusia, Pollio, a legatus of Mark Antony, was naturally not on good terms with Octavian, and could hardly have used any influence in behalf of Vergil or any one else. After the Perusine war he joined Antony at Brundisium in the spring of 40, and acted as his spokesman at the conference which led to the momentous treaty of peace. We may, therefore, safely conclude that Pollio was neither governor nor colonial commissioner in Cisalpine Gaul when Cremona and Mantua were disturbed, nor could he have been on such terms with Octavian as to use his influence in behalf of Vergil. The eighth and fourth Eclogues which do honor to him, seem to have nothing whatever to do with material favors. They doubtless owe their origin to Pollio's position as a poet, and Pollio's interest in young men of letters.

[Footnote 2: Appian, IV. 2 and V. 22.]

[Footnote 3: Appian, V. 3 and V. 22.]

[Footnote 4: Velleius Paterculus, II. 76.2; Macrobius, Sat. I. XI. 22]

[Footnote 5: A task which he performed in 39.]

With regard to Alfenus and Gallus, the scholiasts remained somewhat nearer the truth, for they had at hand a speech of Callus criticizing the former for his behavior at Mantua. By quoting the precise words of this speech Servius[6] has provided us with a solid criterion for accepting what is consistent in the statements of Vergil's earlier biographers and eliminating some conjectures. The passage reads: "When ordered to leave unoccupied a district of three miles outside the city, you included within the district eight hundred paces of water which lies about the walls." The passage, of course, shows that Alfenus was a commissioner on the colonial board, as Servius says. It does not excuse Servius' error of making Alfenus Pollio's successor as provincial governor[7] after Cisalpine Gaul had become autonomous, nor does it imply that Alfenus had in any manner been generous to Vergil or to any one else. In fact it reveals Alfenus in the act of seizing an unreasonable amount of land. Vergil,[8] of course, recognizes Alfenus' position as commissioner in his ninth Eclogue where he promises him great glory if he will show mercy to Mantua:

Vare, tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobis ...

And Vergil's appeal to him was reasonable, since he, too, was a man of literary ambitions.[9] But there is no proof that Alfenus gave ear to his plea; at any rate the poet never mentions him again. Servius' supposition that Alfenus had been of service to the poet[10] seems to rest wholly on the mistaken idea that the sixth Eclogue was obsequiously addressed to him. As we have seen, however, Quintilius Varus has a better claim to that poem.

[Footnote 6: Servius Dan. on Ecl. IX. 10; ex oratione Cornelii in Alfenum. Cf. Kroll, in Rhein. Museum 1909, 52.]

[Footnote 7: Servius Dan. on Ecl. VI. 6.]

[Footnote 8: Vergil, Eclogue IX, 26-29.]

[Footnote 9: See Suffenus and Alfenus, Classical Quarterly, 1920, p. 160.]

[Footnote 10: On Eclogue. VI. 6.]

The quotation from the speech of Gallus also lends support to a statement in Servius that Gallus had been assigned to the duty of exacting moneys from cities which escaped confiscation.[11] For this we are duly grateful. It indicates how Alfenus and Gallus came into conflict since the latter's financial sphere would naturally be invaded if the former seized exempted territory for the extension of his new colony of Cremona. In such conditions we can realize that Gallus was, as a matter of course, interested in saving Mantua from confiscation, and that in this effort he may well have appealed to Octavian in Vergil's behalf. In fact his interpretation of the three-mile exemption might actually have saved Vergil's properties, which seem to have lain about that distance from the city.[12]

[Footnote 11: Servius Dan. on Ecl. VI. 64.]

[Footnote 12: Vita Probiana, milia passuum XXX is usually changed to III on the basis of Donatus: a Mantua non procul.]

Again, however, there is little reason for the supposition that Vergil's Eclogues in honor of Gallus have any reference whatever to this affair. The sixth followed the death of Siro, and the tenth seems to precede the days of colonial disturbances, if it has reference to Gallus as a soldier in Greece. If the sixth Eclogue refers to Siro, as Servius holds, then Vergil and Gallus had long been literary associates before the first and ninth were written.

The student of Vergil who has once compared the statements of the scholiasts with the historical facts at these few points, where they run parallel, will have little patience with the petty gossip which was elicited from the Eclogues. The story of Vergil's tiff with a soldier, for example, is apparently an inference from Menalcas' experience in Eclogue IX. 15; but "Menalcas" appears in four other Eclogues where he cannot be Vergil. The poet indeed was at Naples, as the eighth Catalepton proves. The estate in danger is not his, but that of his father, who presumably was the only man legally competent of action in case of eviction. Vergil's poem, to be sure, is a plea for Mantua, but it is clearly a plea for the whole town and not for his father alone. The landmark of the low hills and the beeches up to which the property was saved (IX.8) seems to be the limits of Mantua's boundaries, not of Vergil's estates on the low river-plains. We need not then concern ourselves in a Vergilian biography with the tale that Arrius or Clodius or Claudius or Milienus Toro chased the poet into a coal-bin or ducked him into the river.[13] The shepherds of the poem are typical characters made to pass through the typical experiences of times of distress.

[Footnote 13: See Diehl, Vitae Vergilianae, p. 58.]

The first Eclogue, Tityre tu, is even more general than the ninth in its application. Though, of course, it is meant to convey the poet's thanks to Octavian for a favorable decree, it speaks for all the poor peasants who have been saved. The aged slave, Tityrus, does not represent Vergil's circumstances, but rather those of the servile shepherd-tenants,[14] so numerous in Italy at this time. Such men, though renters, could not legally own property, since they were slaves. But in practice they were allowed and even encouraged to accumulate possessions in the hope that they might some day buy their freedom, and with freedom would naturally come citizenship and the full ownership of their accumulations. Many of the poor peasants scattered through Italy were coloni of this type and they doubtless suffered severely in the evictions. Tityrus is here pictured as going to the city to ask for his liberty, which would in turn ensure the right of ownership. Such is the allegory, simple and logical. It is only the old habit of confusing Tityrus with Vergil which has obscured the meaning of the poem. However, the real purpose of the poem lies in the second part where the poet expresses his sympathy for the luckless ones that are being driven from their homes; and that this represents a cry of the whole of Italy and not alone of his home town is evident from the fact that he sets the characters in typical shepherd country,[15] not in Mantuan scenery as in the ninth. The plaint of Meliboeus for those who must leave their homes to barbarians and migrate to Africa and Britain to begin life again is so poignant that one wonders in what mood Octavian read it. "En quo discordia cives produxit miseros!" was not very flattering to him.

[Footnote 14: See Leo, Hermes, 1903, p. 1 ff., questioned by Stampini, Le Bucoliche,'3 1905, p. 93.]

[Footnote 15: Capua and Nuceria were two of the cities near Naples where Vergil could see the work of eviction near at hand.]

The very deep sympathy of Vergil for the poor exiles rings also through the Dirae, a very surprising poem which he wrote at this same time, but on second thought suppressed. It has the bitterness of the first Eclogue without its grace and tactful beginning. The triumvirs were in no mood to read a book of lamentations. "Honey on the rim" was Lucretius' wise precept, and it was doubtless a prudent impulse that substituted the Eclogue for the "Curses." The former probably accomplished little enough, the latter would not even have been read.

The Dirae takes the form of a "cursing roundel," a form once employed by Callimachus, who may have inherited it from the East. It calls down heaven's wrath upon the confiscated lands in language as bitter as ever Mt. Ebal heard: fire and flood over the crops, blight upon the fruit, and pestilence upon the heartless barbarians who drive peaceful peasants into exile.

The setting is once more that of the country about Naples, of the Campanian hills and the sea coast, not that of Mantua.[16] It is doubtless the miserable poor of Capua and Nuceria that Vergil particularly has in mind. The singers are two slave-shepherds departing from the lands of a master who has been dispossessed. The poem is pervaded by a strong note of pity for the lovers of peace,—"pii cives," shall we say the "pacifists,"—who had been punished for refusing to enlist in a civil war. A sympathy for them must have been deep in the gentle philosopher of the garden:

O male deuoti, praetorum crimina, agelli![17] Tuque inimica pii semper discordia ciuis. Exsul ego indemnatus egens mea rura reliqui, Miles ut accipiat funesti praemia belli. Hinc ego de tumulo mea rura nouissima uisam, Hinc ibo in siluas: obstabunt iam mihi colles, Obstabunt montes, campos audire licebit.[18]

[Footnote 16: It is just possible that "Lycurgus" (l. 8) who is spoken of as the author of the mischief is meant for Alfenus Varus, who boasted of his knowledge of law. Horace lampoons him as Alfenus vafer.]

[Footnote 17: Ye fields accursed for our statesmen's sins, O Discord ever foe to men of peace, In want, an exile, uncondemned, I yield My lands, to pay the wages of a hell-born war. Ere I go hence, one last look towards my fields, Then to the woods I turn to close you out From view, but ye shall hear my curses still.]

[Footnote 18: The Lydia which comes in the MS. attached to the Dirae is not Vergil's. Nor can it be the famous poem of that name written by Valerius Cato, despite the opinion of Lindsay, Class. Review, 1918, p. 62. It is too slight and ineffectual to be identified with that work. The poem abounds with conceits that a neurotic and sentimental pupil of Propertius—not too well practiced in verse writing—would be likely to cull from his master.]

For Vergil there was henceforth no joy in war or the fruits of war. His devotion to Julius Caesar had been unquestioned, and Octavian, when he proved himself a worthy successor and established peace, inherited that devotion. But for the patriots who had fought the losing battle he had only a heart full of pity.

Ne pueri ne tanta animis adsuescite bella, Neu patriae validos in viscera vertite viris; Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo, Projice tela manu, sanguis meus!



XII

POLLIO

We come finally to the two Eclogues addressed to Asinius Pollio. This remarkable man was only six years older than Vergil, but he was just old enough to become a member of Caesar's staff, an experience that matured men quickly. To Vergil he seemed to be a link with the last great generation of the Republic. That Catullus had mentioned him gracefully in a poem, and Cinna had written him a propempticon, that Caesar had spoken to him on the fateful night at the Rubicon, and that he had been one of Cicero's correspondents, placed him on a very high pedestal in the eyes of the studious poet still groping his way. It may well be that Gallus was the tie that connected Pollio and Vergil, for we find in a letter of Pollio's to Cicero that the former while campaigning in Spain was in the habit of exchanging literary chitchat with Gallus. That was in the spring of 43, at the very time doubtless when Pollio—as young men then did—spent his leisure moments between battles in writing tragedies. Vergil in his eighth Eclogue, perhaps with over-generous praise, compares these plays with those of Sophocles.

This Eclogue presents one of the most striking studies in primitive custom that Latin poetry has produced, a bit of realism suffused with a romantic pastoral atmosphere. The first shepherd's song is of unrequited love cherished from boyhood for a maiden who has now chosen a worthless rival. The second is a song sung while a deserted shepherdess performs with scrupulous precision the magic rites which are to bring her faithless lover back to her. There are reminiscences of Theocritus of course, any edition of the Eclogues will give them in full, but Vergil, so long as he lived at Naples, did not have to go to Sicilian books for these details. He who knows the social customs of Campania, the magical charms scribbled on the walls of Pompeii, the deadly curses scratched on enduring metal by forlorn lovers,—curses hidden beneath the threshold or hearthstone of the rival to blight her cheeks and wrinkle her silly face,—knows very well that such folks are the very singers that Vergil might meet in his walks about the hills of the golden bay.

The eighth Eclogue claims to have been written at the invitation of Pollio, who had apparently learned thus early that Vergil was a poet worth encouraging. That the poem has nothing to do with the confiscations, in so far at least as we are able to understand the historical situation, has been suggested above. It is usually dated in the year of Pollio's Albanian campaign in 39, that is a year after his consulship. Should it not rather be placed two years earlier when Pollio had given up the Cisalpine province and withdrawn to the upper Adriatic coast preparatory to proceeding on Antony's orders against the Illyrian rebels? In the spring of 41 Pollio camped near the Timavus, mentioned in line 6; two years later the natural route for him to take from Rome would be via Brundisium and Dyrrhachium.[1] The point is of little interest except in so far as the date of the poem aids us in tracing Pollio's influence upon the poet, and in arranging the Eclogues in their chronological sequence.

[Footnote 1: Antony's province did not extend beyond Scodra; the roads down the Illyrian mountain from Trieste were not easy for an army to travel; if the Eclogues were composed in three years (Donatus) the year 39 is too late. Finally, Vellius, II, 76.2, makes it plain that in 41 Pollio remained in Venetia contrary to orders. He had apparently been ordered to proceed into Illyria at that time.]

Finally, we have the famous "Messianic" Eclogue, the fourth, which was addressed to Pollio during his consulship. By its fortuitous resemblance to the prophetic literature of the Bible, it came at one time to be the best known poem in Latin, and elevated its author to the position of an arch-magician in the medieval world. Indeed, this poem was largely influential in saving the rest of Vergil's works from the oblivion to which the dark ages consigned at least nine-tenths of Latin literature.

The poem was written soon after the peace of Brundisium—in the consummation of which Pollio had had a large share—when all of Italy was exulting in its escape from another impending civil war. Its immediate purpose was to give adequate expression to this joy and hope at once in an abiding record that the Romans and the rulers of Rome might read and not forget. Its form seems to have been conditioned largely by a strange allegorical poem written just before the peace by a still unknown poet. The poet was Horace, who in the sixteenth epode had candidly expressed the fears of Roman republicans for Rome's capacity to survive. Horace had boldly asked the question whether after all it was not the duty of those who still loved liberty to abandon the land of endless warfare, and found a new home in the far west—a land which still preserved the simple virtues of the "Golden Age." Vergil's enthusiasm for the new peace expresses itself as an answer to Horace:[2] the "Golden Age" need not be sought for elsewhere; in the new era of peace now inaugurated by Octavian the Virgin Justice shall return to Italy and the Golden Age shall come to this generation on Italian soil. Vergil, however, introduces a new "messianic" element into the symbolism of his poem, for he measures the progress of the new era by the stages in the growth of a child who is destined finally to bring the prophecy to fulfillment. This happy idea may well have been suggested by table talks with Philodemus or Siro, who must at times have recalled stories of savior-princes that they had heard in their youth in the East. The oppressed Orient was full of prophetic utterances promising the return of independence and prosperity under the leadership of some long-hoped-for worthy prince of the tediously unworthy reigning dynasties. Indeed, since Philodemus grew to boyhood at Gadara under Jewish rule he could hardly have escaped the knowledge of the very definite Messianic hopes of the Hebrew people. It may well be, therefore, that a stray image whose ultimate source was none other than Isaiah came in this indirect fashion into Vergil's poem, and that the monks of the dark ages guessed better than they knew.

[Footnote 2: Sellar, Horace and the Elegiac Poets, p. 123. Ramsay, quoted by W. Warde Fowler, Vergil's Messianic Eclogue, p, 54.]

To attempt to identify Vergil's child with a definite person would be a futile effort to analyze poetic allegory. Contemporary readers doubtless supposed that since the Republic was dead, the successor to power after the death of Octavius and Antony would naturally be a son of one of these.

The settlements of the year were sealed by two marriages, that of Octavian to Scribonia and that of Octavian's sister to Antony. It was enough that some prince worthy of leadership could naturally be expected from these dynastic marriages, and that in either case it would be a child of Octavian's house.[3] Thus far his readers might let their imagination range; what actually happened afterwards through a series of evil fortunes has, of course, nothing to do with the question. Pollio is obviously addressed as the consul whose year marked the peace which all the world hoped and prayed would be lasting.

[Footnote 3: See Class. Phil. XI, 334.]

We have now reviewed the circumstances which called forth the Eclogues. They seem, as Donatus says, to have been written within a period of three years. The second, third, seventh and sixth apparently fall within the year 42, the tenth, fifth, eighth, ninth and first in the year 41, while the Pollio certainly belongs to the year 40, when Vergil became thirty years of age. The writing of these poems had called the poet more and more away from philosophy and brought him into closer touch with the sufferings and experiences of his own people. He had found a theme after his own heart, and with the theme had come a style and expression that fitted his genius. He abandoned Hellenistic conceits with their prettiness of sentiment, attained an easy modulation of line readily responding to a variety of emotions, learned the dignity of his own language as he acquired a deeper sympathy for the sufferings of his own people. There is a new note, as there is a new rhythm in:

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.



XIII

THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS

Julius Caesar had learned from bitter experience that poets were dangerous enemies. Cicero's innuendoes were disagreeable enough but they might be forgotten. When, however, Catullus and Calvus put them into biting epigrams there was no forgetting. This was doubtless Caesar's chief reason for his constant endeavor to win the goodwill of the young poets, and he ultimately did win that of Calvus and Catullus. Whether Octavian, and his sage adviser Maecenas, acted from the same motive we do not know, though they too had seen in Vergil's epigrams on Antony's creatures, and in Horace's sixteenth epode that the poets of the new generation seemed likely to give effective expression to political sentiments. At any rate, the new court at Rome began very soon to make generous overtures to the literary men of the day.

Pollio, Octavian's senior by many years, and of noble family, could hardly be approached. Though gradually drawing away from Antony, he had so closely associated himself with this brilliant companion of his Gallic-war days, that he preferred not to take a subordinate place at the Roman court. Messalla, who had entered the service of Antony, was also out of reach. There remained the brilliant circle of young men at Naples, men whose names occurred in the dedications of Philodemus' lectures: Vergil, Varius, Plotius and Quintilius Varus, three of whom at least were from the north and would naturally be inclined to look upon Octavian with sympathy.

Varius had already written his epic De Morte which seems to have mourned Caesar's death, and, though in hidden language, he had alluded bitterly to Antony's usurpations in the year that followed the murder. Before Vergil's epic appeared it was Varius who was always considered the epic poet of the group. Of Plotius Tucca we know little except that he is called a poet, was a constant member of the circle, and with Varius the literary executor who published Vergil's works after his death. Quintilius Varus had, like Varius, come from Cremona, known Catullus intimately, and, if we accept the view of Servius for the sixth Eclogue, had been Vergil's most devoted companion in Siro's school. He also took some part in the civil wars, and came to be looked upon as a very firm supporter of sound literary standards.[1] Horace's Ouis desiderio, shows that Varus was one of Vergil's most devoted friends.

[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.