VIRGIL (PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO) (7o-19 B.C.) the great Roman poet, was born on Oct. 15,7o B.C., on a farm not far from the town of Mantua. In the region north of the Po a race of more imaginative susceptibility than the people of Latium formed part of the Latin-speaking population. It was favourable to his devel opment as a national poet that he was born and educated during the interval of comparative calm between the first and second Civil Wars, and that he belonged to a generation which, as the result of the Social War, first enjoyed the sense of an Italian nationality. It is remarkable that the two poets whose imagination seems to have been most powerfully possessed by the spell of Rome—Ennius and Virgil—were born outside the pale of Roman citizenship.
Like his friend and contemporary Horace, he sprang from the class of yeomen, whose state he pronounces the happiest allotted to man and most conducive to virtue and piety. At the age of twelve he was taken for his education to Cremona, and from an expression in one of his minor poems it may be inferred that his father accompanied him. Afterwards he removed to Milan, where he continued to study till he went to Rome two years later.
After studying rhetoric he began the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. One of the minor poems written about this time in the scazon metre tells of his delight at the immediate prospect of entering on the study of philosophy; at the end of the poem, the real master-passion of his life, the charm of the Muses, reasserts itself (Catalepton v.).
Our next knowledge of him is derived from some allusions in the Eclogues, and belongs to a period nine or ten years later. Of what happened to him in the interval, during which the Civil War took place and Julius Caesar was assassinated, we have no indication from ancient testimony or from his own writings. In B.C., the year of the battle of Philippi, we find him "cultivating his woodland Muse" under the protection of Asinius Pollio, gov ernor of the district north of the Po. In the following year the famous confiscations of land for the benefit of the soldiers of the triumvirs took place. Of the impression produced on Virgil by these confiscations, and of their effect on his fortunes, we have a vivid record in the first and ninth eclogues. Mantua, in conse quence of its vicinity to Cremona, which had been faithful to the cause of the republic, was involved in this calamity; and Virgil's father was driven from his farm. By the influence of his powerful friends, and by personal application to the young Octavian, Virgil obtained the restitution of his land. In the meantime he had taken
his father and family with him to the small country house of his old teacher Siron (Catalepton x.).
Soon afterwards we hear of him living in Rome, enjoying the favour of Maecenas, intimate with Varius, who was at first re garded as the rising poet of the new era, and later on with Horace. His friendship with Gallus, for whom he indicates a warmer affec tion and more enthusiastic admiration than for any one else, was formed before his second residence in Rome, in the Cisalpine province. The pastoral poems, or "eclogues," commenced in his native district, were finished and published in Rome, probably in 37 B.C. Soon afterwards he withdrew from Rome, and lived chiefly in Campania, either at Naples or in the neighbourhood of Nola. He was one of the companions of Horace in the famous journey to Brundisium; and it seems not unlikely that, some time before 23 B.c., he made the voyage to Athens which forms the subject of the third ode of the first book of the Odes of Horace.
The seven years from 37 to 30 B.C. were devoted to the com position of the Georgics. In the following year he read the poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia. The remaining years of his life were spent on the composition of the Aeneid. In 19 B.C., after the Aeneid was finished but not finally corrected, he set out for Athens, intending to pass three years in Greece and Asia and to devote that time to perfecting the poem. At Athens he met Augustus, and was persuaded by him to return with him to Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun, he was seized with illness, and, as he continued his voyage without interruption, he grew rapidly worse, and died on Sept. 21, 19 B.C., a few days after landing at Brundisium. In his last illness he called for the cases containing his manuscripts, with the intention of burning the Aeneid. He had previously left directions in his will that his lit erary executors, Varius and Tucca, should publish nothing of his which had not already been given to the world by himself. A passage from a letter of his to Augustus is also quoted, in which he speaks as if he felt that the undertaking of the work had been a mistake. This dissatisfaction with his work may be ascribed to his passion for perfection of workmanship, which death prevented him from attaining. The command of Augustus overrode the poet's wish and rescued the poem.