Virgil

Virgil was born on 15 October 70 BCE in the village of Andes near Mantua, in the region the Romans called Cisalpine Gaul ^[1]. The modern town of Borgo Virgilio, south of Mantua, takes its name from the traditional identification of the site. His full Roman name was Publius Vergilius Maro. Ancient biographical tradition, much of it preserved through the fourth-century commentator Aelius Donatus, describes his father as a man of modest means, perhaps a farmer or the keeper of bees and woodland, who managed to fund an ambitious education for his son ^[2].

The northern plain where Virgil grew up was farming country, crossed by the river Mincius and dotted with smallholdings. Readers have long noticed how closely his poetry observes rural work: grafting, ploughing, the habits of cattle and bees. That familiarity almost certainly began in childhood ^[1].

As a boy he studied at Cremona and then Milan before moving to Rome, where he trained in rhetoric, the standard preparation for a public career in law or politics ^[2]. The training did not take. One ancient account claims he pleaded a single case and never returned to the courts. Instead he turned to philosophy, spending time at Naples in the circle of the Epicurean teacher Siro, whose garden school attracted several young poets of the period ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Virgil in his own lifetime would have received a political answer as well as a literary one, because his career unfolded inside the violence of the late Republic. He was a teenager when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and a young man when Caesar was murdered in 44 BCE. After the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, the victorious triumvirs confiscated land across northern Italy to settle veteran soldiers, and the territory of Mantua and Cremona was among the areas seized ^[1]. Ancient biographers report that Virgil's family property was threatened or lost in these confiscations, an experience that echoes through the dispossessed herdsmen of his first collection ^[2].

That collection, the Eclogues (also called Bucolics), appeared in the years around 39 to 38 BCE: ten short pastoral poems modelled on the Greek poet Theocritus but transposed into an Italian landscape shadowed by civil war ^[1]. They made his reputation. The fourth Eclogue, which announces the birth of a child who will usher in a new golden age, was later read by Christian interpreters as a prophecy of Christ, a misreading that helped preserve Virgil's prestige through the Middle Ages ^[4].

Success brought patronage. Virgil entered the circle of Maecenas, the wealthy adviser to Octavian who assembled the finest writers of the age, and it was Virgil who introduced the poet Horace to Maecenas around 38 BCE ^[3]. From this point his material worries ended. Ancient sources speak of a house in Rome and property near Naples, though he preferred the Bay of Naples to the capital and lived there for most of his remaining years ^[2].

Any honest account of Virgil achievements begins with the observation that he wrote slowly and published little, yet each of his three works became a permanent classic. The second, the Georgics, occupied him for roughly seven years and was finished around 29 BCE ^[1]. On its surface it is a four-book didactic poem about farming: crops and weather signs, vines and olives, livestock, and finally bees. In practice it is a meditation on labour, loss, and the recovery of Italy after decades of civil war, closing with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poet John Dryden called it the best poem by the best poet, and modern critics have often judged it Virgil's most perfectly finished work ^[5].

The Aeneid consumed his final decade. Commissioned expectations were high: Augustus, victorious at Actium in 31 BCE, wanted a national epic, and Virgil supplied something larger and stranger than propaganda. In twelve books of hexameter verse he told how the Trojan prince Aeneas escaped the fall of Troy, wandered the Mediterranean, abandoned Dido the queen of Carthage, descended to the underworld, and fought a war in Italy to found the race from which Rome would spring ^[1]. The first six books answer Homer's Odyssey, the last six his Iliad, yet the poem's tone is distinctly Roman and often sombre, alert to the human cost of empire ^[6].

The epic circulated in extracts even before completion. Ancient tradition holds that Virgil read books two, four, and six aloud to Augustus and his family, and that Octavia fainted at the passage honouring her dead son Marcellus ^[2]. Unfinished lines remain scattered through the text, visible seams of a poem its author never declared complete.

Reliable detail about Virgil the private man is thin, and much of what circulates comes from ancient lives written centuries after his death, which mix fact with anecdote. Donatus describes him as tall, dark, rustic in appearance, and so shy that in Naples people nicknamed him Parthenias, roughly the maiden, for his retiring habits; he was said to duck into doorways when recognised on the street in Rome ^[2].

He never married and had no children. His health was poor for much of his life, with ancient sources mentioning ailments of the stomach and throat and frequent headaches ^[2]. He was devoted to his work at the expense of nearly everything else, reportedly composing lines in the morning and spending the rest of the day reducing and polishing them, a method he compared to a bear licking her cubs into shape ^[2].

By the standards of Roman literary men he was wealthy, holding an estate reckoned by Donatus at ten million sesterces, largely the product of imperial and aristocratic favour ^[2]. Yet the poetry keeps returning to small farms, ordinary labour, and the vulnerability of settled life, and that tension between the patronised court poet and the elegist of the dispossessed runs through modern criticism of his work ^[6].

In 19 BCE, with the Aeneid drafted but not revised to his satisfaction, Virgil left Italy for Greece. His plan, according to the ancient biographers, was to spend three years polishing the epic in the East and then devote himself to philosophy ^[2]. At Athens he met Augustus, who was returning from the eastern provinces, and agreed to travel home with the emperor's party.

During a visit to the town of Megara under a hot sun he fell ill. The sickness worsened on the sea crossing, and he died at the port of Brundisium, modern Brindisi, on 21 September 19 BCE, a few weeks short of his fifty-first birthday ^[1]. His remains were carried to Naples and buried on the road toward Puteoli. A tomb near the entrance of the old tunnel at Piedigrotta in Naples has been venerated as his since antiquity, though the identification cannot be proven ^[4].

The most famous story of his death concerns the fate of the poem. Virgil is said to have asked that the unfinished Aeneid be burned. Augustus refused, instructing the poet's literary executors, Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to publish it with minimal editing ^[2]. Whatever the truth of the deathbed request, the epic appeared shortly after his death essentially as he left it, half-lines and all.

Few writers have held authority for so long. Within a generation the Aeneid was a school text across the Roman world, and it never lost that status while Latin remained the language of education ^[1]. Schoolboys scratched its opening line on walls from Pompeii to Britain. Later Romans consulted the poem for omens by opening it at random, a practice known as the sortes Vergilianae that persisted into the modern era ^[4].

The Middle Ages transformed the poet into something close to a prophet and even a magician in popular legend, largely because of the fourth Eclogue's supposed foretelling of Christ ^[4]. Dante made him the guide through Inferno and most of Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy, addressing him as master and author. The whole tradition of European epic, from Ariosto and Tasso through Camões and Milton's Paradise Lost, is built on Virgilian foundations ^[6].

Basic Virgil facts still anchor any study of Latin: students typically meet the language's poetry through the Aeneid, and his hexameters remain the standard against which Latin verse is measured. Translations keep appearing, from Dryden's landmark English version of 1697 to recent renderings by Robert Fagles, Sarah Ruden, and Shadi Bartsch, evidence that the poems still find general readers ^[5]. Any Virgil biography ends where his own epic does, in unresolved tension: a poet of empire who never stopped counting what empire costs, which may be exactly why he lasts ^[6].