Chapter XV: The Aeneid (4)

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 _précieuse_ 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.

[Footnote 1: Tacitus, _Dialogus_, 13: Malo securum et quietum Vergilii secessum, in quo tamen neque apud divum Augustum gratia caruit neque apud populum Romanum notitia. Testes Augusti epistulae, testis ipse populus, qui auditis in theatro Vergilii versibus surrexit universus et forte praesentem spectantemque Vergilium veneratus est quasi Augustum.]

[Footnote 2: _Aeneid_ VIII.]

It was well that he possessed such a retreat during those years of petty political squabbles. The capital still hummed with rumors of civil war. Antony seemed determined to sever the eastern provinces from the empire and make of them a gift to Cleopatra and her children--a mad course that could only end in another world war. Sextus Pompey still held Sicily and the central seas, ready to betray the state at the first mis-step on Octavian's part. At Rome itself were many citizens in high position who were at variance with the government, quite prepared to declare for Antony or Pompey if either should appear a match for the young heir of Caesar. Clearly the great epic of Rome could not have matured in that atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and selfishness. The convulsions of the dying republic, beheld day by day near at hand, could only have inspired a disgust sufficient to poison a poet's sensitive hope. It was indeed fortunate that Vergil could escape all this, that he could retain through the period of transition the memories of Rome's former greatness and the faith in her destiny that he had imbibed in his youth. The time came when Octavian, after Actium, reunited the Empire with a firm hand and justified the buoyant optimism which Vergil, almost alone of his generation, had been able to preserve.

During these few years Vergil seems to have written but little. We have, however, a strange poem of thirty-eight lines, the _Copa_, which, to judge from its exclusion from the _Catalepton_, should perhaps be assigned to this period. A study in tempered realism, not unlike the eighth _Eclogue_, it gives us the song of a Syrian tavern-maid inviting wayfarers into her inn from the hot and dusty road. The spirit is admirably reproduced in Kirby Smith's rollicking translation:[3]

[Footnote 3: See Kirby Flower Smith, _Marital, the Epigrammatist and, Other Essays_, Johns Hopkins Press, 1920, p. 170. The attribution of the poem to Vergil by the ancients as well as by the manuscripts, and the style of its fanciful realism so patent in much of Vergil's work place the poem in the authentic list. Rand, _Young Virgil's Poetry_, Harvard Studies, 1919, p. 174, has well summed up the arguments regarding the authorship of the poem.]

'Twas at a smoke-stained tavern, and she, the hostess there-- A wine-flushed Syrian damsel, a turban on her hair-- Beat out a husky tempo from reeds in either hand, And danced--the dainty wanton--an Ionian saraband. "'Tis hot," she sang, "and dusty; nay, travelers, whither bound? Bide here and tip a beaker--till all the world goes round; Bide here and have for asking wine-pitchers, music, flowers, Green pergolas, fair gardens, cool coverts, leafy bowers. In our Arcadian grotto we have someone to play On Pan-pipes, shepherd fashion, sweet music all the day. We broached a cask but lately; our busy little stream Will gurgle softly near you the while you drink and dream. Chaplets of yellow violets a-plenty you shall find, And glorious crimson roses in garlands intertwined; And baskets heaped with lilies the water nymph shall bring-- White lilies that this morning were mirrored in her spring. Here's cheese new pressed in rushes for everyone who comes, And, lo, Pomona sends us her choicest golden plums. Red mulberries await you, late purple grapes withal, Dark melons cased in rushes against the garden wall, Brown chestnuts, ruddy apples. Divinities bide here, Fair Ceres, Cupid, Bacchus, those gods of all good cheer, Priapus too--quite harmless, though terrible to see-- Our little hardwood warden with scythe of trusty tree.

"Ho, friar with the donkey, turn in and be our guest! Your donkey--Vesta's darling--is weary; let him rest. In every tree the locusts their shrilling still renew, And cool beneath the brambles the lizard lies perdu. So test our summer-tankards, deep draughts for thirsty men; Then fill our crystal goblets, and souse yourself again. Come, handsome boy, you're weary! 'Twere best for you to twine Your heavy head with roses and rest beneath our vine, Where dainty arms expect you and fragrant lips invite; Oh, hang the strait-laced model that plays the anchorite! Sweet garlands for cold ashes why should you care to save? Or would you rather keep them to lay upon your grave? Nay, drink and shake the dice-box. Tomorrow's care begone! Death plucks your sleeve and whispers: 'Live now, I come anon.'"

Memories of the Neapolitan bay! The _Copa_ should be read in the arbor of an _osteria_ at Sorrento or Capri to the rhythm of the tarantella where the modern offspring of Vergil's tavern-maid are still plying the arts of song and dance upon the passerby.[4]

[Footnote 4: Unfortunately the evidence does not suffice to assign the _Moretum_ to Vergil, though it was certainly composed by a genuine if somewhat halting poet, and in Vergil's day. It has many imaginative phrases, and the meticulous exactness of its miniature work might seem to be Vergilian were it not for the unrelieved plainness of the theme. Even so, it might be considered an experiment in a new style, if the rather dubious manuscript evidence were supported by a single ancient citation. See Rand, _loc. Cit._ p. 178.]

There are also three brief _Priapea_ which should probably be assigned to this period. The third may indeed have been an inscription on a pedestal of the scare-crow god set out to keep off thieving rooks and urchins in the poet's own garden:

This place, my lads, I prosper, I guard the hovel, too, Thatched, as you see, by willows and reeds and grass that grew In all the marsh about it; hence me, mere stump of oak, Shaped by the farmer's hatchet, they now as god invoke. They bring me gifts devoutly, the master and his boy, Supposing me the giver of the blessings they enjoy. The kind old man each morning comes here to weed the ground, He clears the shrine of thistles and burrs that grow around. The lad brings dainty offerings with small but ready hand: At dawn of spring he crowns me with a lavish daisy-strand, From summer's earliest harvest, while still the stalk is green, He wreathes my brow with chaplets; he fills me baskets clean With golden pansies, poppies, with apples ripe and gourds, The first rich blushing clusters of grapes for me he hoards. And once to my great honor--but let no god be told!-- He brought me to my altar a lambkin from the fold. So though, my lads, a Scare-Crow and no true god I be, My master and his vineyard are very dear to me. Keep off your filching hands, lads, and elsewhere ply your theft:

Our neighbor is a miser, his Scare-Crow gets no gifts, His apples are not guarded--the path is on your left.

The quaint simplicity of the sentiment and the playful surprise at the end quickly disarm any skepticism that would deny these lines to Horace's poet of "tender humor."

During this period the poet seems also to have traveled. Maecenas enjoyed the society of literary men, and we may well suppose that he took Vergil with him in his administrative tours on more than the one occasion which Horace happens to have recorded. The poet certainly knows Italy remarkably well. The meager and inaccurate maps and geographical works of that day could not have provided him with the insight into details which the Georgics and the last six books of the _Aeneid_ reveal. We know, of course, from Horace's third ode that Vergil went to Greece. This famous poem, a "steamer-letter" as it were, is undated, but it may well be a continuation of the Brundisian diary. The strange turn which the poem takes--its dread of the sea's dangers--seems to point to a time when Horace's memories of his own shipwreck were still very vivid.

There was also time for extensive reading. That Vergil ranged widely and deeply in philosophy and history, antiquities and all the world's best prose and poetry, the vast learning of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_ abundantly proves. The epic story which he had early plotted out must have lain very near the threshold of his consciousness through this period, for his mind kept seizing upon and storing up apposite incidents and germs of fruitful lore. References to Aeneas crop out here and there in the _Georgics_, and the mysterious address to Mantua in the third book promises, under allusive metaphors, an epic of Trojan heroes. Nor could the poet forget the philosophic work he had so long pondered over. Doubts increased, however, of his capacity to justify himself after the sure success of Lucretius. A remarkable confession in the second book of the _Georgics_ reveals his conviction that in this poem he had, through lack of confidence, chosen the inferior theme of nature's physical and sensuous appeal when he would far rather have experienced the intellectual joy of penetrating into nature's inner mysteries.[5]

[Footnote 5:
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus-amore,
Accipiant, caelique vias et sidera monstrent--
Sin, has ne possim naturae accedere partes,
Frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis,
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes.
_Georgics_, II. 475. ff.

Was this striking _apologia of the Georgics_ forced upon Vergil by the fact that in the _Aetna_, 264-74, he had pronounced peasant-lore trivial in comparison with science?]

Though we need not take too literally a poet's prefatorial remarks, Vergil doubtless hoped that his _Georgics_ might turn men's thoughts towards a serious effort at rehabilitating agriculture, and the practical-minded Maecenas certainly encouraged the work with some such aim in view. The government might well be deeply concerned. The veterans who had recently settled many of Italy's best tracts could not have been skilled farmers. The very fact that the lands were given them for political services could only have suggested to the shrewd among them that the old Roman respect for property rights had been infringed, and that it was wise to sell as soon as possible and depart with some tangible gain before another revolution resulted in a new redistribution. Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the development of agriculture. And yet this was the very time when farming must be encouraged. Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising the amount of food that her population required. As a result, the younger Pompey's control of Sicily and the trade routes had now brought on a series of famines and consequent bread-riots. Year after year Octavian failed in his attempts to lure away or to defeat this obnoxious rebel. At best he could buy him off for a while, though he never knew at what season of scarcity the purchase price might become prohibitive. The choice of Vergil's subject coincided, therefore, with a need that all men appreciated.

The _Georgics_, however, are not written in the spirit of a colonial advertisement. In the youthful _Culex_ Vergil had dwelt somewhat too emphatically upon the song-birds and the cool shade, and had drawn upon himself the genial comment of Horace that Alfius did not find conditions in the country quite as enchanting as pictured. This time the poet paints no idealized landscape. Enticing though the picture is, Vergil insists on the need of unceasing, ungrudging toil. He lists the weeds and blights, the pests and the vermin against which the farmer must contend. Indeed it is in the contemplation of a life of toil that he finds his honest philosophy of life: the gospel of salvation through work. Hardships whet the ingenuity of man; God himself for man's own good brought an end to the age of golden indolence, shook the honey from the trees, and gave vipers their venom. Man has been left alone to contend with an obstinate nature, and in that struggle to discover his own worth. The _Georgics_ are far removed from pastoral allegory; Italy is no longer Arcadia, it is just Italy in all its glory and all its cruelty.

Vergil's delight in nature is essentially Roman, though somewhat more self-conscious than that of his fellows. There is little of the sentimental rapture that the eighteenth century discovered for us. Vergil is not likely to stand in postures before the awful solemnity of the sea or the majesty of wide vistas from mountain tops. Italian hill-tops afford views of numerous charming landscapes but no scenes of entrancing grandeur or awe-inspiring desolation, and the sea, before the days of the compass, was too suggestive of death and sorrow to invite consideration of its lawless beauty. These aspects of nature had to be discovered by later experiences in other lands. At first glance Vergil seems to care most for the obvious gifts of Italy's generous amenities, the physical pleasure in the free out-of-doors, the form and color of landscapes, the wholesome life. As one reads on, however, one becomes aware of an intimacy and fellowship with animate things that go deeper. Particularly in the second book the very blades of grass and tendrils of the vines seem to be sentient. The grafted trees "behold with wonder" strange leaves and fruits growing from their stems, transplanted shoots "put off their wild-wood instincts," the thirsting plant "lifts up its head" in gratitude when watered. Our own generation, which was sedulously enticed into nature study by books crammed with the "pathetic fallacy," has become suspicious of everything akin to "nature faking." It has learned that this device has been a trick employed by a crafty pedagogy for the sake of appealing to unimaginative children. Vergil was probably far from being conscious of any such purpose. As a Roman he simply gave expression to a mode of viewing nature that still seemed natural to most Greeks and Romans. The Roman farmer had not entirely outgrown his primitive animism. When he said his prayers to the spirits of the groves, the fields, and the streams, he probably did not visualize these beings in human form; manifestations of life betokened spirits that produced life and growth. Vergil's phrases are the poetic expression of the animism of the unsophisticated rustic which at an earlier age had shaped the great nature myths.

And if Vergil had been questioned about his own faith he could well have found a consistent answer. Though he had himself long ceased to pay homage to these _animae_, his philosophy, like that of Lucretius, also sought the life-principle in nature, though he sought that principle a step farther removed in the atom, the vitalized seeds of things, forever in motion, forever creating new combinations, and forever working the miracles of life by means of the energy with which they were themselves instinct. The memorable lines on spring in the second book are cast into the form of old poetry, but the basis of them is Epicurean energism, as in Lucretius' prooemium. Vergil's study of evolution had for him also united man and nature, making the romance of the _Georgics_ possible; it had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him more complex and subtle.

Finally, the careful reader will discover in Vergil's nature poetry a very modern attention to details such as we hardly expect to find before the nineteenth century. Here again Vergil is Lucretius' companion. This habit was apparently a composite product. The ingredients are the capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long occupation with deductive methods of philosophy,--scientific pursuits have thus enriched modern poetry also--and a sure aesthetic sense. This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil's commentators. Conington, for example, has frequently done the poet an injustice by assuming that Vergil was in error whenever his statements seem not to accord with what we happen to know. We have now learned to be more wary. It is usually a safer assumption that our observation is in error. A recent study of "trees, shrubs and plants of Vergil," illuminating in numberless details, has fallen into the same error here and there by failing to notice that Vergil wrote his _Bucolics_ and _Georgics_ not near Mantua but in southern Italy. The modern botanical critic of Vergil should, as Mackail has said, study the flora of Campania not of Lombardy. In every line of composition Vergil took infinite pains to give an accurate setting and atmosphere. Carcopino[6] has just astonished us with proof of the poet's minute study of topographical details in the region of Lavinium and Ostia, Mackail[7] has vindicated his care as an antiquarian, Warde Fowler[8] has repeatedly pointed out his scrupulous accuracy in portraying religious rites, and now Sergeaunt,[9] in a study of his botany, has emphasized his habit of making careful observations in that domain.

[Footnote 6: Carcopino, _Virgile et les origines d'Ostie_.]

[Footnote 7: Mackail, _Journal of Roman Studies_, 1915.]

[Footnote 8: Warde Fowler, _Religious Experience of the Roman People_. p. 408.]

[Footnote 9: Sergeaunt, _Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil_.]

This modern habit it is that makes the _Georgics_ read so much like Fabre's remarkable essays. The study of the bees in the fourth book is, of course, not free from errors that nothing less than generations of close scrutiny could remove. But the right kind of observing has begun. On the other hand the book is not merely a farmer's practical manual on how to raise bees for profit. The poet's interest is in the amazing insects themselves, their how and why and wherefore. It is the mystery of their instincts, habits, and all-compelling energy that leads him to study the bees, and finally to the half-concealed confession that his philosophy has failed to solve the problems of animate nature.

XV

THE AENEID

While Caesar Octavian, now grown to full political stature, was reuniting the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of the _Georgics_. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar, unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing now that Rome was saved and the empire restored. Vergil's youthful enthusiasm for Rome, which had sprung from a critical reading of her past career, seemed fully justified; he began at once his _Arma virumque_.

The _Aeneid_ reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have reiterated, an unsurpassed range of reading. But it is not necessary to repeat the evidence of Vergil's literary obligations in an essay concerned chiefly with the poet's more intimate experiences. In point of fact, the tracking of poetic reminiscences in a poet who lived when no concealment of borrowed thought was demanded does as much violence to Vergil as it does to Euripides or Petrarch. The poet has always been expected to give expression to his own convictions, but until recently it has been considered a graceful act on his part to honor the good work of his predecessors by the frank use, in recognizable form, of the lines that he most admires. The only requirement has been that the poet should assimilate, and not merely agglomerate his acceptances, that he should as Vergil put it, "wrest the club from Hercules" and wield it as its master.

In essence the poetry of the _Aeneid_ is never Homeric, despite the incorporation of many Homeric lines. It is rather a sapling of Vergil's Hellenistic garden, slowly acclimated to the Italian soil, fed richly by years of philosophic study, braced, pruned, and reared into a tree of noble strength and classic dignity. The form and majesty of the tree bespeak infinite care in cultivation, but the fruit has not lost the delicate tang and savour of its seed. The poet of the _Ciris_, the _Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the _Bucolics_ is never far to seek in the _Aeneid_.

It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.[1] The note of intimacy, unexpected in an epic, the occasional drawing of the veil to reveal the poet's own countenance, an un-Homeric sentimentality now and then, the great abundance of sense-teeming collocations, the depth of sympathy revealed in such tragic characters as Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, the insistent study of inner motives, the meticulous selection of incidents, the careful artistry of the meter, the fastidious choice of words, and the precision of the joiner's craft in the composition of traditional elements, all suggest the habits of work practiced by the friends of Cinna and Valerius Cato.

[Footnote 1: For a careful study of this subject see Duckett, _Hellenistic Influence on the Aeneid,_ Smith College Studies, 1920.]

The last point is well illustrated in Sinon's speech at the opening of the second book. The old folktale of how the "wooden horse," left on the shore by the Greeks, was recklessly dragged to the citadel by the Trojans satisfied the unquestioning Homer. Vergil does not take the improbable on faith. Sinon is compelled to be entirely convincing. In his speech he uses every art of persuasion: he awakens in turn curiosity, surprise, pity, admiration, sympathy, and faith. The passage is as curiously wrought as any episode of Catullus or the _Ciris_. It is not, as has been held, a result of rhetorical studies alone; it reveals rather a native good sense tempered with a neoteric interest in psychology and a neoteric exactness in formal composition. And yet the passage exhibits a great advance upon the geometric formality of the _Ciris_. The incident is not treated episodically as it might have been in Vergil's early work. The pattern is not whimsically intricate but is shaped by an understanding mind. While its art is as studied and conscious as that of the _Ciris_, it has the directness and integrity of Homeric narrative. Yet Vergil has not forgotten the startling effects that Catullus would attain by compressing a long tale into a suggestive phrase, if only a memory of the tale could be assumed. The story of Priam's death on the citadel is told in all its tragic horror till the climax is reached. Then suddenly with astonishing force the mind is flung through and beyond the memories of the awful mutilation by the amazingly condensed phrase:

jacet ingens litore truncus
avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

There Vergil has given only the last line of a suppressed tragedy which the reader is compelled to visualize for himself.

Neoteric, too, is the accurate observation and the patience with details displayed by the author of the _Aeneid_. In his youth Vergil had, to be sure, avoided the extremes of photographic realism illustrated by the very curious _Moretum_, but he had nevertheless, in works like the _Copa_, the _Dirae_, and the eighth _Eclogue_, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant. To realize the precision of his strokes even then one has but to recall the couplet of the _Copa_ which in an instant sets one upon the dusty road of an Italian July midday:

Nunc cantu crebro rumpunt arbusta cicadae
nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet.

Throughout the _Aeneid,_ the patches of landscape, the retreats for storm-tossed ships, the carved temple-doors, the groups of accoutred warriors marching past, and many a gruesome battle scene, are reminders of this early technique.