Publius Vergilius Maro, whom we call Virgil, was born up north in Italy, somewhere in the vicinity of Mantua, in the year 70B.C.Julius Caesar, that year, was a man of thirty. The poet’s father was a landholder, sufficiently affluent to afford his son a pretty extensive course of education. Virgil grew up to be tall, dark, perhaps a little rawboned and loose-jointed, never very robust, quiet, no doubt, but with more fun in him, and malice, too, if the ascription of the minor poems is correct, than we sometimes think. As a youth, he studied first at Cremona, then at Milan, and in this he was fortunate, for the scholars of the north seemed to have laid more emphasis on the humanistic side of education, on arts, letters, and philosophy, than did the materialist-minded rhetoricians of Rome. To Rome, in his late teens, Virgil did go for pre-legal study, for him a not very congenial experience; it is on record, according to Donatus, that he pleaded exactly one case, and that unsuccessfully. He was twenty-one when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and the Civil War flared up between Caesar and Pompey, and it seems probable that he was pressed into service with Caesar’s forces, not too much against his political sympathies, however distasteful to his temperament. His service was not long: the state of his health may have brought him early leave or discharge; in his younger twenties he turned to the study of philosophy at Naples.
He found good teachers there, Siro, Philodemus, highlytrained men of the Epicurean school, versed not only in Greek thought but familiar, also, with the wisdom of the East. He found good fellow-students, too, a remarkable list of influential Romans, men who were to be his lifelong friends, as Naples was to be made his permanent home, in spite of traveling, later, and the honor of an official residence at Rome. Naples was a pleasant place to be during those years, above the battles that broke and raged not only up and down the peninsula, but to east and west, in Spain, in Gaul, in Thessaly, in Africa. The republican institutions which had sufficed an agrarian economy were breaking down under the pressures of the new rising mercantile and almost industrial society; there had even been something like a primitive proletarian revolution under Spartacus; no Epicurean scorn for political ambitions could keep men’s consciences from being deeply troubled. Virgil, conservative at heart, yet with a great admiration for Julius Caesar the man, seems not to have been too bitter about the imminence of a dictatorship; he would have preferred it not to be so called, and he hoped, with all his soul and spirit, that it would be wisely and mercifully administered, and he said so. He was twenty-six when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44B.C., and the shock of that event was enough to drive from his mind the ideas he had formed, in a groping and immature wishfulness, of writing a national epic.
Virgil was not much over thirty when his first substantial work was given publication. This consisted of the Eclogues, or Bucolics, ten longish poems, ostensibly pastoral, modelled, to a certain extent, on the Greek poet Theocritus. These poems were by no means purely escapistliterature; they were full of allusions to recent political events, sympathy for the victims of civil war, appeals to the victors for compassion, gratitude that the patrimonial estates had suffered less severely than some others under the policy of rewarding the veterans with places on the land. The young Octavian, victor, with Mark Antony, over the Caesaricides Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, was impressionable enough to be guided in decent ways, following his great-uncle’s tradition of clemency; and Octavian, on his part, was sufficiently tactful, as well as shrewd, to want to have the poets on his side. The great success of the Eclogues rendered it highly desirable that Virgil, along with other poets, be given something like official status; the wealthy counsellor Maecenas, patron of the arts and member of the inner circle, put a villa in his own gardens at the poet’s disposal. Here Virgil found new friends, notably the poet Horace, five years his junior—it lay much to the credit of Octavian’s decency that place could be made for a young satirist who had fought against him at Philippi (probably not very hard, if we can believe Horace’s own account) and whose published work had been caustic about the government. So Virgil had security, recognition, freedom to travel with the distinguished on official journeys, or to come and go as he pleased, with the privilege of staying, whenever he was so minded, in his quieter gardens near Naples.
It was nearly a decade before the publication of his next major work, the Georgics, a long poem, in four books, on the subject of husbandry. Those returned veterans, settled by tens of thousands on the land, knew, it seemed, little of farming, and, for that matter, probably cared less. It was Virgil’s responsibility, under Octavian’s sanction, to instruct them, to see to it that they should both know and care, have practical information as to what must be done with crops and cattle and bees, and at the same time develop faith and pride in what they were doing, return to the simple virtues of the fathers, the good old republican ways. For all its official status, however, the poem was just a little too honest to be what we should consider ideal propaganda. There is no sentimental rapture in the Georgics, no idolization, idealization, or idyllization of what life on a farm is like; the sober-minded citizen, in fact, might easily be dissuaded from agriculture entirely by the accurate description of the various kinds of hell farming would put him through.
By the time Virgil was putting the finishing touches to this book, the unsettled condition of the Roman state had begun to change for the better. A decade’s opposition to Octavian, led by the sons of Pompey and his old partner Antony, had come to an end with the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31B.C.The East and West could join again; there could now be one world, under the tempered principate of the man who had matured from the young Octavian into Caesar Augustus. And Virgil could turn to the project he had never forgotten, fulfill the longings that, as allusions in both Eclogues and Georgics had shown, still occupied at least his unconscious mind, the composition of an epic poem that should justify this great nation, remind her citizens of all she had cost, inspire them to be worthy of their tradition. To this work, the Aeneid, Virgil devoted the rest of his life. He did not ever consider it finished; he had still three years’ work ahead of him, he estimated, when he went to Greece, at the age of fifty, to study more carefully thescenes of the book in which he described the wanderings of Aeneas. There he fell ill, was brought back to Brundisium, on the heel of Italy, where he died in 19B.C.In his dissatisfaction with the unfinished state of his work, he left instructions that the manuscript of the Aeneid should be burned; Augustus, however, in the words of Tenny Frank, “interposed the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will.” No dictator, ever, has exercised a happier veto.
R. H.
In the fighting between the Greeks and Trojans around Troy, Virgil calls both sides by tribal names as well as national names, and sometimes uses patronymics: thus the Greeks are also called Achaeans, Argives, Danaans, Dolopes, Ithacans, Myrmidons, and so on; and the Trojans are called Dardanians, Ilians, Teucrians, Phrygians. I have used these terms much less than Virgil did, and tried, for the sake of avoiding confusion and clutter, to stick to the terms Greek and Trojan, wherever possible.
Likewise, in the wars between the Trojans and Latins in Italy, we find the enemies of Aeneas described as Italians, Latins, Rutulians, and Etruscans. But there were also some Etruscans on his side; these were led by Tarchon, the anti-Aeneas faction by Mezentius. His other principal allies were the Arcadians, whose king was Evander.
The principal Greek warriors were Agamemnon, Menelaus, Ulysses, Diomedes, and Ajax; the most conspicuous on the Trojan side Aeneas, Hector, and possibly Paris.
Of the gods and goddesses, Juno, in the Aeneid, is actively opposed to Aeneas, and Venus equally active on his behalf. Apollo gives the Trojans considerable help with counsel, especially in the course of their wanderings; Vulcan makes armor for Aeneas when he arrives in Italy, and Neptune helps put down a storm that all but wrecked the Trojan fleet. Jupiter maintains neutrality, in so far as the pressure applied by Venus and Juno will permit.
A list of the important characters in the narrative follows:—
Aenéas, son of Anchises and Venus, leader of the Trojans, hero of the poem.Amáta, wife of king Latinus, mother of Lavinia; favors Turnus, opposes Aeneas as suitor for her daughter.Anchíses, son of Capys, father of Aeneas.Andrómache, widow of Hector, subsequently wife of Helenus, settler, after the fall of Troy, at Buthrotum in Epirus.Anna, sister of Dido, queen of Carthage.Ascánius, or Iúlus, son of Aeneas and Creusa.Camílla, daughter of Metabus and Casmilla, a Latin warrior-maid, ally of Turnus in the fight against Aeneas in Italy.Creúsa, daughter of Priam, wife of Aeneas, mother of Ascanius, lost in the confusion following the last night of Troy.Deíphobe, a Sibyl, priestess of Apollo and guide to Aeneas during his visit to the Lower World.Dído, queen of Carthage.Diomede, or Diomédes, an important Greek warrior, founder, after the fall of Troy, of Arpi in Italy; declines to help the Latins in their warfare against Aeneas.Dránçes, an eloquent Latin orator, opposed to Turnus.Euryalus, son of Opheltes, a young Trojan athlete and warrior, boon companion of Nisus.Evánder, king of Pallanteum, father of Pallas, ally of Aeneas in the fighting in Italy.Helenus, son of Priam, husband of Andromache, ruler of Buthrotum in Epirus, priest and prophet of Apollo.Ilionéus, a Trojan, responsible spokesman for his people on missions to Dido and Latinus.Iúlus, also known as Ascanius, son of Aeneas and Creusa.Jutúrna, a nymph, sister of Turnus.Latínus, king of Latium, husband of Amata, father of Lavinia, favors Aeneas as his daughter’s suitor.Laúsus, a young Etruscan warrior, son of the exiled king Mezentius.Lavínia, daughter of king Latinus and Amata, sought in marriage by both Turnus and Aeneas.Mezéntius, an Etruscan king, exiled by his people for barbarity, despiser of the gods, ally of Turnus against the Trojans.Neoptólemus, or Pyrrhus, a son of Achilles, killer of King Priam, war-lord of Hector’s widow Andromache.Nísus, a young Trojan athlete and warrior, son of Hyrtacus, boon companion of the younger Euryalus.Palinúrus, pilot of the fleet of Aeneas.Pállas, son of king Evander, ally of Aeneas in the Latin wars, slain by Turnus.Sinon, a Greek, principal agent in the scheme to bring the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy.Tárchon, an Etruscan prince, ally of Aeneas against Turnus and Mezentius.Túrnus, son of Daunus and the nymph Venilia, prince of the Rutulians, principal enemy of Aeneas in Italy.Vénulus, an Italian leader, sent by the Latins on a fruitless mission for the help of Diomede.
Aenéas, son of Anchises and Venus, leader of the Trojans, hero of the poem.
Amáta, wife of king Latinus, mother of Lavinia; favors Turnus, opposes Aeneas as suitor for her daughter.
Anchíses, son of Capys, father of Aeneas.
Andrómache, widow of Hector, subsequently wife of Helenus, settler, after the fall of Troy, at Buthrotum in Epirus.
Anna, sister of Dido, queen of Carthage.
Ascánius, or Iúlus, son of Aeneas and Creusa.
Camílla, daughter of Metabus and Casmilla, a Latin warrior-maid, ally of Turnus in the fight against Aeneas in Italy.
Creúsa, daughter of Priam, wife of Aeneas, mother of Ascanius, lost in the confusion following the last night of Troy.
Deíphobe, a Sibyl, priestess of Apollo and guide to Aeneas during his visit to the Lower World.
Dído, queen of Carthage.
Diomede, or Diomédes, an important Greek warrior, founder, after the fall of Troy, of Arpi in Italy; declines to help the Latins in their warfare against Aeneas.
Dránçes, an eloquent Latin orator, opposed to Turnus.
Euryalus, son of Opheltes, a young Trojan athlete and warrior, boon companion of Nisus.
Evánder, king of Pallanteum, father of Pallas, ally of Aeneas in the fighting in Italy.
Helenus, son of Priam, husband of Andromache, ruler of Buthrotum in Epirus, priest and prophet of Apollo.
Ilionéus, a Trojan, responsible spokesman for his people on missions to Dido and Latinus.
Iúlus, also known as Ascanius, son of Aeneas and Creusa.
Jutúrna, a nymph, sister of Turnus.
Latínus, king of Latium, husband of Amata, father of Lavinia, favors Aeneas as his daughter’s suitor.
Laúsus, a young Etruscan warrior, son of the exiled king Mezentius.
Lavínia, daughter of king Latinus and Amata, sought in marriage by both Turnus and Aeneas.
Mezéntius, an Etruscan king, exiled by his people for barbarity, despiser of the gods, ally of Turnus against the Trojans.
Neoptólemus, or Pyrrhus, a son of Achilles, killer of King Priam, war-lord of Hector’s widow Andromache.
Nísus, a young Trojan athlete and warrior, son of Hyrtacus, boon companion of the younger Euryalus.
Palinúrus, pilot of the fleet of Aeneas.
Pállas, son of king Evander, ally of Aeneas in the Latin wars, slain by Turnus.
Sinon, a Greek, principal agent in the scheme to bring the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy.
Tárchon, an Etruscan prince, ally of Aeneas against Turnus and Mezentius.
Túrnus, son of Daunus and the nymph Venilia, prince of the Rutulians, principal enemy of Aeneas in Italy.
Vénulus, an Italian leader, sent by the Latins on a fruitless mission for the help of Diomede.