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Vergilius (70 BCE - 19 BCE) - in English Virgil or Vergil; Latin in full Publius Vergilius Maro |
The greatest Roman poet, called by Tennyson "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man." Virgil is known for his epic, the Aeneid (written about 29 BCE, unfinished), which had taken as its literary model Homer's epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. The tale depicts Aeneas's search for a new homeland and his war to found a city. This archetypical character was given much later form in those Western heroes familiar from the books of Owen Wister and Louis L'Amour. But the dedicated man, Virgil was born on October 15, 70 BCE,
in
Northern Italy in a small village near Mantua – probably but not
certainly the modern Pietole. Virgil was no Roman but a Gaul – the
village was situated in what was then called Gallia Cisalpina – Gaul
this side of the Alps. Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, grew up to be
hailed as the greatest Roman poet. And although his work has influenced
Western literature for two millennia, little is known about the man
himself. His father was a prosperous landowner, described variously as
a "potter" and a "courier". Moreover, to increase his wealth, Virgil's father raised bees. "What more
lovely occupations could be found for the father of a poet or upon what
more lovely objects than woodlands and bee-skeps could the eyes of a
poet open?" (The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford, 1st Dalkey Archive ed., second printing, 1998, p. 211) He could afford a thorough education for
the future poet. This Virgil received. He attended school at Cremona
and Mediolanum (Milan), then went to Rome, where he studied
mathematics, medicine and rhetoric, and finally completed his studies
in Naples. He entered literary circles as an "Alexandrian," the name
given to a group of poets who sought inspiration in the sophisticated
work of third-century Greek poets, also known as Alexandrians. Virgil became a Roman citizen. Lucretius influenced his way of thinking, but his early poems were written in the tradition of Theocritus. According to Aelius Donatus to whom the Life of Virgil, is traditionally ascribed, the poet "was tall and full habit, with a dark complexion and a rustic appearance. His health was variable; for he very often suf'fered from stomach and throat troubles, as well as with headache; and he also had frequent haemorrhages. He ate and drank but little. He was especially given to passions for boys". (The Art of Biography in Antiquity by Tomas Hägg, 2012, pp. 215-216) The biographer continues by naming two of his favorite boys, Cebes and Alexander, whom Virgil calls Alexis in Bucolics, also known as The Eclogues. Richard Jenkyns has noted that Cebes actually was a refugee from the dialogues of Plato, and "the inventor of the story about Alexander had no more evidence to go on than we have; he has made his fiction out of ineptly biographical reading of the eclogue. (Virgil's Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places by Richard Jenkyns, 1998, p. 8) After the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE,
Virgil’s property in Cisalpine Gaul, or else his father's, was
confiscated for veterans. "I leave my father's fields and my sweet
ploughlands, / an exile from my native soil," wrote Virgil later. (Eclogues,
translated by Barbara Hughes Fowler, 1997, p. 1) According to some sources the property was afterwards restored at the
command of Octavian (later styled Augustus). In the following years
Virgil spent most of his time in Campania and Sicily, but he also had a
house in Rome. During the reign of emperor Augustus, Virgil became a
member of his court circle and was advanced by a minister, Maecenas,
patron of the arts and close friend to the poet Horace.
When Maecenas went in 37 BCE to a peace summit held at the Greek city of Tarentum, Virgil and Horace accompanied him on the journey. Virgil refered to Tarentum as a pastoral place. The journey was documented by Horace: in Satires: "We went on to Capua, / Where the mules laid aside their packsaddles early in the day. / Maecenas went off to play ball, but Vergil and I / Went to sleep. Playing ball is hard on a man with sore eyes / And a man with weak digestion." (The Satires and Epistles of Horace, translated by Smith Palmer Bovie, 2002, p. 60) Maecenas was twice left in virtual control of Rome when the emperor was away. He gave Virgil a house near Naples. Between 42 and 37 BCE Virgil composed
pastoral poems known as Bucolic or Eclogues ("rustic
poems" and "selections"). The formal model is the collection of Idyls
by the Alexandrian cout poet Theocritus. Virgil then spent years on the
Georgics
(literally, "pertaining to agriculture"), a didactic work on
agriculture, and the of the olive and vine, the rearing of livestock,
and beekeeping. This work, which was probably completed in 29 BCE, took as its model Works and Days by
the Greek writer Hesiod, who had composed it around 700 BCE.
"Happy he who hath availed to know the causes of things,"
Virgil wrote, most likely referring to Lucretius' On the Nature of Things,
"and hath laid all fears and immitigable Fate and the roar of hungry Acheron." (Virgil's Works : The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics, translated by J.W. Mackail, 1934 p. 321) For centuries, the so-called Appendix Vergiliana was ascribed as juvenilia of Virgil by many Latinists. The poems were collected under this title by J.C. Scaliger in 1572. Nowadays it is believed that they are efforts of imitators. Most of the poems were composed in the Julio-Claudian period, between the death of Augustus and the suicide of Nero. Virgil's Eclogues was a huge success, and in its famous 'Messianic Eclogue' (Eclogue IV) he prophesied the new Golden Age. "The final age of Cumae's prophecies has come, / Now the great long line of the ages is begun. / The Virgin now returns, and Saturn's golden regnum. / Now come new generations down on high from heaven. / O chaste Lucina, you need only bless this boy / Just born and the the Iron Age will end. A gens / Of gold will fill the globe. Now, your Apollo reigns." (Ibid., translated by Len Krisak, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, p. 31) (This was interpreted in the Middle Ages as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Dante cites the lines in The Divine Comedy). According to some interpretations, the shepherd lad who dies in the poem is probably Julius Caesar. Of the two contrasting characters, Tityrus and Meliboeus, the former was long considered Virgil in disguise. A phrase altered from Eclogues – "Novus ordo seclorum" – appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first used on the silver dollar certificates, series of 1935. Virgil also supplied the Latin for other phrases of the Great Seal. In 31 BCE Octavian won the Battle of Actium against his former ally Mark Anthony, who had a liaison with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and by 29 the way to power was open to him. In 27 BCE he was given the title of Augustus ("venerable"). He pressed his poet to write of the glory of Rome under his rule. "I found Rome brick and I left it marble," he said according to Suetonius. Thus the rest of his life, from 30 to 19 BCE, Virgil devoted to the Aeneid, and the glory of the Empire. Although ambitious, Virgil was never really happy about the task. Moreover, he was a perfectionist, who knew the importance of his work, and did not want to hurry with his lines. Virgil set out to compose an epic to be read by generations to come. A contemporary poet, Propertius, acknowledged this – perhaps ironically – with the lines: "Make way, you Roman writers, make way, you Greeks! / Something greater than the Iliad is being born." (The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, edited by Peter E. Knox and J. C. McKeown, 2013, p. 185) The early Christian biblican scholar St. Jerome had doubts about reading Greek and Roman classics: "How can Horace go with the psalter, Virgil with the gospels, Cicero with the apostle?" (The Darkening Age by Katherine Nixley, 2017, p. 141) Until the Romantic era, the Aeneid was "the classic of Europe". Following the development of the notion of artistic originality, it was then superseded by Homer's great Greek epics and Virgil was regarded as a gifted imitator of Homer. After the publication of Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik (1903) a new interest arose in Virgil's work, his originality, and his use of hellenistic and classical models. Arms and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, In the famous lines of Book VI, the spirit of Anchises shows to his son the future of Rome: "Romans, these are your arts: to bear dominion over the nations, to impose peace, to spare the conquered and subdue the proud." In 23 Virgil read the second and the fourth books to Augustus and his wife Octavia personally – the emperor had complained a few years earlier that he had not seen any of the text. When Augustus was returning from Samos after the winter of 20, he met the poet in Athens. Virgil accompanied the emperor to Megara and then to Italy. "Fortune assists the bold," Virgil once said. However, the journey turned out to be fatal and Virgil died of a fever contracted on his visit to Greece. He had instructed his executor Varius to destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid, but Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published. Servius Danielis mentions the editorial work of Virgil's literary executors Plotius Tucca and Varius Rufus on the manuscript. Virgil was buried near Naples but there are doubts that the so-called Tomb of Virgil in the area is authentic. However, it soon became a place of pilgrimage. The Aeneid is a historical epic, depicting one of the great heroes of the Trojan war, recounts Aeneas' wanderings and adventures from the fall of Troy to the establishment of his destined rule in Latium. It was well understood in Virgil's own time that the epic was in its first half an Odyssey and in its second an Iliad. The work was written about 29-19 BCE and composed in hexameters, about 60 lines of which were left unfinished at Virgil's death. Nowadays the Aeneid has been read as both celebrating the history of Rome and at the same time taking back its glorification. "Virgil controls the ironies of the Aeneid in response to a particular historical situation: the emergence of a new princely regime and promised peace out of the series of civil wars that had torn apart the Roman republic." (Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid by David Quint, 2018, p. xii) Organized in 12 books, the Aeneid opens when Aeneas is forced to land his fleet on the Libyan coast. He is welcomed by Dido, queen of Carthage, to whom he tells his adventures. Dido is his heroic female counterpart, and an exile, too. She falls in love with Aeneas, but her guest is forced to sail again and Dido prepares to kill herself; her death creates an enmity between Carthage and Rome. The Trojans sail to Sicily, then Aeneas journeys to the underworld where he meets Dido and his father Anchises. ". . . and three times he tried to put his arms around his father's neck. Three times the phantom melted in his hands, as weightless as the wind, as light as the flight of sleep." (from The Aeneid, Book Six, a new prose translation by David West, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 154) Virgil reveals the destiny of Rome in book VI. The Trojans reach Tiber and are received by King Latinus. War breaks out, but the Trojans win with the help of Etruscans the local tribe known as Rutuli. Aeneas marries Latinus' daughter Lavinia and founds Lavinium. Dante adopted themes from the Aeneid in his epic poem The Divine Comedy. Virgil is also Dante's guide through Inferno and Purgatory. Petrach questioned Virgil's choice of Dido as the heroine in Seniles: "And why indeed did the most learned and excellent poet of all invent this—for it is well known that he invented it—when it had been permitted by his own rule to choose any other out of a number of heroines or to form a new one; why did he choose one . . . whom he knew died out of zeal for chastity and the preservation of widowhood and make her yield to a wanton love?" (quoted in Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality and the Medieval Aeneid by Marilynn Desmond, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 23) The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: "Virgil. Of all the poets of the earth, there is none other who has been listened to with such love. Even beyond Augustus, Rome, and the empire that, across other nations and languages, is still the Empire. Virgil is our friend. When Dante made Virgil his guide and the most continual character in the Commedia, he gave an enduring aesthetic form to that which all men feel with gratitude." (Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges, 1999, p. 520) T.S. Eliot argued in his 1944 Presidential Address to the Virgil Society that "[Aeneas] is a symbol of Rome; and as Aeneas it to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilization, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp." (What is a Classic? by T.S. Eliot, 1975, pp. 128-29) Hermann Broch took another view on the epic in his novel The Death of Virgil (1945), one of the great monuments of exile literature. The story focuses on the feverish last days of the dying poet, who rejects the poem's glorification by the Augustan regime. He is ready throw the Aeneid into the flames because poetry is useless in a doomed society. For further reading: Virgil's Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid by Kirk Freudenburg (2023); Vergil: The Poet's Life by Sarah Ruden (2023); A Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues by/ Andrea Cucchiarelli (2023); The Cambridge Companion To Virgil, edited by Fiachra Mac Góráin and Charles Martindale (second edition, 2019); Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid by David Quint (2018); Reading Vergil's Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide, ed. Christine Perkell (1999); Reading Virgil and His Texts: Studies in Intertextuality by Richard F. Thomas (1999); Virgil, ed. Philip R. Hardie (1999); Patterns of Redemption in Virgil's Georgics by Llewlyn Morgan (1999); Virgil's Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places by Richard Jenkyns (1998); Virgil; His Life And Times by Peter Levi (1998); Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid by Michael C. J. Putnam (1998); The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey by L. P. Wilkinson, Niall Rudd (1997); The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (1997); The Chil and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil by Mark Petrini (1997); Vergil's Aeneid: Contemporary Literary Views Book, ed. Harold Bloom (1996); Virgil As Orpheus: A Study of the Georgics by M. Owen Lee (1996); True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay by James J. O'Hara (1996); Virgil's Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence by Michael C. J. Putnam (1995); A Companion to the Study of Virgil, ed. Nicholas Horsfall (1995); Virgil by Jasper Griffin (1995); Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry by Brooks Otis (1995); A Commentary on Virgil Eclogues by Wendell Clausen (1995); Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton by David Quint (1993); The Language of Virgil: An Introduction to the Poetry of the Aeneid by Daniel H. Garrison (1993); Virgil's Epic Technique by Richard Heinze, et al. (1993); The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition by Philip Hardie (1993); Virgil and the Moderns by Theodore Ziolkowski (1993); Vergil's Aeneid: A Poem of Grief and Love by Steven Farron (1993); Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Vergil's Aeneid by James J. O'Hara (1990); Virgil, ed. Ian McAuslan, Peter Walcot (1990); The Poet's Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil's Georgics by Christine G. Perkell (1989); Public and Private in Vergil's Aeneid by Susan Ford Wiltshire (1989); Pastoral and Ideology; Virgil to Valery by Annabel Patterson (1987); The Art of Vergil by Viktor Poschl (1986); Vergil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence, ed. John D. Bernard (1986); Effects of Divine Manifestation on the Readers Perspective in Vergils Aneld by Elizabeth Block (1981); The Social Poetry of the Georgics by Edward W. Spofford (1981); Fathers and Sons in Virgil's Aeneid: Tum Genitor Natum by M. Owen Lee (1980); Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid by W. A. Camp (1979, paperback); Patterns of Time in Vergil by Sara MacK (1978); Roman Poets of Augustan Age: Virgil by W. Y. Sellar (1970), Virgil's Aeneid: A Critical Description by Kenneth Quinn (1968); Roman Vergil by W.F. Jackson Knight (1944) - Suomennokset: Aeneaan tarun käänsi ensimmäisenä kokonaan suomeksi Konstantin Siitonen nimellä P. Vergilio Maronin Aeneidi (1888). Päivö Oksala ehti saada valmiiksi neljä ensimmäistä ja kuudennen kirjan, Aeneis I-IV. Aeneas ja Dido (1972). Työn saattoi loppuun vuonna 1999 Teivas Oksala, jatkaen suomenkielisen heksametrin lähes 200-vuotista perinnettä. Vuonna 2000 ilmestyi toinen eepoksen heksametrikäännös, suomentajana Alpo Rönty. Kummassakin näissä on laaja selitysosasto, Röntyn teokseen kuuluu lisäksi kattava hakemisto. Selected works:
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