The most lovable of Romans was born in 70 B.C. on a farm near Mantua, where the river Mincio wanders slowly toward the Po. The capital would henceforth give birth to very few great Romans; they would come from Italy in the century that was divided by the birth of Christ, and thereafter from the provinces. Perhaps Virgil’s veins contained some Celtic blood, for Mantua had long been peopled by Gauls; technically he was a Gaul by birth, for it was only twenty-one years later that Cisalpine Gaul received the Roman franchise from Caesar. The man who most eloquently sang the majesty and destiny of Rome would never show the hard masculinity of the Roman stock, but would touch Celtic strings of mysticism, tenderness, and grace rare in the Roman breed.
His father saved enough as a court clerk to buy a farm and raise bees. In that murmurous quietude the poet spent his boyhood; the full foliage of the well-watered north lingered in his later memory, and he was never really happy away from those fields and streams. At twelve he was sent to school at Cremona, at fourteen to Milan, at sixteen to Rome. There he studied rhetoric and allied subjects under the same man who was to teach Octavian. Probably after this he attended the lectures of Siro the Epicurean at Naples. Virgil tried hard to accept the philosophy of pleasure, but his rural background had ill-equipped him. He seems to have returned north after his education, for in 41 B.C. we find him swimming for life to escape a soldier who seized by force his father’s farm; Octavian and Antony had confiscated it because the region had favored their enemies. Asinius Pollio, the learned governor of Cisalpine Gaul, tried to have the farm returned, but failed. He atoned by giving his patronage to the young man, and encouraging him to continue the Eclogues he was composing.
By the year 37 Virgil was drinking in the wine of fame in Rome. The Eclogues (“Selections”) had just been published and had been well received; some verses had been recited on the stage by an actress and had been enthusiastically applauded.6 The poems were pastoral sketches in the manner, sometimes the phrases, of Theocritus, beautiful in style and rhythm, the most melodious hexameters that Rome had yet heard, full of pensive tenderness and romantic love. The youth of the capital had been long enough detached from the soil to idealize country life; everyone was pleased to imagine himself a shepherd moving with his flocks up and down the Apennine slopes, and breaking his heart with love unreturned.
Realer than these Theocritan ghosts were the rural scenes. Here, too, Virgil idealized, but he did not have to imitate. He had heard the woodman’s lusty song and the hovering restlessness of bees;8 and he had known the emptyhearted despair of the farmer who, like thousands then, had lost his land.9 Above all, he felt intensely the hopes of the age for an end to faction and war. The Sibylline Books had predicted that after the Age of Iron the Golden Age of Saturn would return. When, in 40 B.C., a son was born to Virgil’s patron, Asinius Pollio, the poet announced in his Fourth Eclogue that this birth would usher in utopia:
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
iam nova progenies, caelo demittitur alto.
Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo—
“Now comes the final age [announced] in the Cumean [Sibyl’s] chant; the great succession of epochs is born anew. Now the Virgin I returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new race descends from heaven on high. O chaste Lucina [goddess of births]! smile upon the boy just born, in whose time the race of iron shall first cease, and a race of gold shall arise throughout the world. Thine own Apollo is now king.”
Ten years later these prophecies were fulfilled. The iron tools of war were laid aside; a new generation took charge, armed and infatuated with gold. Through the brief remainder of Virgil’s life Rome would know no further turmoil; prosperity and happiness increased, and Augustus was hailed as a savior, though not an Apollo. The quasi-royal court welcomed the optimism of the poet’s verse; Maecenas invited him, liked him, and saw in him a popular instrument of Octavian’s reforms. This judgment showed insight; for to all appearances Virgil, now thirty-three, was an awkward rustic, shy to the point of stammering, shunning any public place where he might be recognized and pointed out, ill at ease in the voluble and aggressive fashionable society of Rome. Besides, even more than Octavian, he was an invalid, suffering from headaches, throat ailments, stomach disorders, and frequent spitting of blood. Virgil never married, and seems to have felt no more than his Aeneas the full abandon of love. Apparently he consoled himself for a time with the affection of a boy slave; for the rest he was known, at Naples, as “the virgin.”10
Maecenas treated the youth generously, had Octavian restore his farm, and suggested to him some poems glorifying agricultural life. At that moment (37 B.C..) Italy was paying a penalty for letting so much of her soil go to pasturage, orchards, and vines; Sextus Pompey was blocking the import of food from Sicily and Africa, and a shortage of grain threatened another revolution. City life was enervating the young manhood of Italy; from every standpoint the health of the nation seemed to require the restoration of farming. Virgil readily agreed; he knew rural life; and though too frail now to bear its hardships, he was just the man to paint its attractive features with affectionate memory. He hid himself in Naples, and after seven years of file work emerged with his most perfect poems, the Georgics—literally “the labor of the land.” Maecenas was delighted, and brought Virgil south with him to meet Octavian, then (29 B.C..) returning from his victory over Cleopatra. At the little town of Atella the weary general rested and listened for four enchanted days to the 2000 lines. They fell in with his policies more completely than even Maecenas had foreseen. For he proposed now to disband the larger part of the immense armies that had won the world for him, to settle his veterans on the land, and at once to quiet them, feed the cities, and preserve the state, through rural toil. From that moment Virgil was free to think only of poetry.
In the Georgics a great artist deals with the noblest of the arts—the cultivation of the earth. Virgil borrows from Hesiod, Aratus. Cate Varro; but he transforms their rough prose or limping lines into finely chiseled verse. He covers dutifully the diverse branches of husbandry—the variety and treatment of soils, the seasons for sowing and reaping, the culture of the olive and the vine, the raising of cattle, horses, and sheep, and the care of bees. Every aspect of farming interests and beguiles him; he has to caution himself to get on;
Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circum vectamur amore—11
“But meanwhile time flies, flies irreparably, while we, charmed with love [of our theme], linger around each single detail.” He has a word about the diseases of animals and how to treat them. He describes the common farm animals with understanding and sympathy; he is never through admiring the simplicity of their instincts, the power of their passions, the perfection of their forms. He idealizes rural life, but he does not ignore the hardships and vicissitudes, the crippling toil, the endless struggle against insects, the torturing pendulum of drought and storm. Nevertheless, *labor omnia vincit;*12 there is in such toil a purpose and result that give it dignity; no Roman need feel ashamed to guide a plow. Moral character, says Virgil, grows on the farm; all the old virtues that made Rome great were planted and nourished there; and hardly any process of seed sowing, protection, cultivation, weeding, and harvesting but has its counterpart in the development of the soul. And out of the fields, where the miracle of growth and the whims of the sky bespeak a thousand mystic forces, the soul, more readily than in the city, perceives the presence of creative life, and is deepened with religious intuition, humility, and reverence. Here Virgil breaks into his most famous lines, beginning with a noble echo of Lucretius, but passing into a pure Virgilian strain:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari;
fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores—13
“Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things, and has put under foot all fear and inexorable fate, and the noise of a greedy Hell. But happy too he who knows the rural deities, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister Nymphs.” The peasant is right in seeking to propitiate the gods with sacrifice and enlist their good will; these exercises of piety brighten the round of toil with festivals and clothe earth and life with meaning, drama, and poetry.
Dryden considered the Georgics “the best poem of the best poet.”14 It shares with the De Rerum Natura the rare distinction of being at once didactic and beautiful. Rome did not take it seriously as a handbook of agriculture; we do not hear that anyone, having read it, exchanged the Forum for a farm; indeed, as Seneca chought, Virgil may have written these rural ecstasies precisely to please an urban taste. In any case, Augustus felt that Virgil had performed Maecenas’ assignment marvelously well. He called the poet to his palace and suggested a harder task, a vastly larger theme.