Virgil’s birthplace was the village of Andes near the
northern Italian city of Mantua in the ancient
Roman province known as Cisalpine Gaul, on the
Roman side of the Alps. His father, who seems to
have been a cattle farmer, beekeeper, and manufacturer
of earthenware, once worked as a servant for
a man whose daughter he married and must have
become fairly prosperous, since he could afford to
educate his son for an elite career.
Virgil attended schools in several cities.When
he was approximately 11 years old, he was sent to
Cremona, about 75 miles from Milan, to study
grammar and literature. At the time, Julius CAESAR
was governor of Cisalpine Gaul and advocated full
citizenship and self-government for the Cisalpines.
Virgil developed an enduring admiration for Caesar
and for AUGUSTUS, his successor, that would last
a lifetime. In 55 B.C., Virgil continued his schooling
in Milan, then moved to Rome when he was
around 18 to put the finishing touches on his education.
He was lectured on Latin and Greek prose
style, including forms of expression, literary devices
and conventions, and rules of composition.
Bored with the rigidity of these topics, he studied
rhetoric with a popular instructor as preparation
for a career in law or politics, but this discipline,
too, he found restrictive and technical. In any case,
he proved he had no knack for public speaking.He
was, however, interested in writing verse, and he
cultivated friendships with a group of writers
known as the “New Poets,” who were experimenting
in Latin with classical Greek poetic techniques.
While in Rome, he enjoyed the patronage of men
of wealth and influence, as he would for virtually
his entire career.
LUCRETIUS’s On the Nature of Things was an
enormous inspiration to Virgil, who copied the
poet’s use of hexameter and emulated his faith in
the wisdom of the Greek philosopher EPICURUS and
his followers. The Epicureans blended an interest
in nature, including human nature, with scientific
analysis and made the pursuit of pleasure a legitimate
way of life. “The effect of Lucretius on Virgil
was tremendous,”writes scholar Olivia Coolidge in
Lives of Famous Romans. Virgil’s “artistry, more
subtle than that of Lucretius, is only possible because
of the earlier poet’s work.” Indeed, Virgil
spent most of his adult life in an Epicurean colony
in Naples. (Despite his inclinations, Virgil was an
unsophisticated man, diffident, physically awkward,
perhaps embarrassed by his provincial accent,
and of a delicate constitution. He never
married.)
In 42 B.C., Augustus (then Octavian), seeking to
settle 200,000 discharged troops, ruthlessly confiscated
entire districts in Cisalpine Gaul, including,
probably, Virgil’s boyhood home. The family’s estate
was restored, possibly due to the intervention
of a powerful friend, but Virgil was deeply moved
by the suffering around the countryside and the
misery of those who had been evicted from their
homes. Beyond these borders was a collective
weariness and disillusionment among a population
that had just experienced the wrenching transition
from a Roman republic to an empire.
Virgil purportedly wrote in his own epitaph, “I
sang of pastures, of cultivated fields, and of rulers.”
These three subjects correspond chronologically to
his works: Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid. The
Eclogues are pastoral poems patterned as dialogue
sung by shepherds. They represent Virgil’s response
to the misery he witnessed in contrast to
the pastoral splendor and time of tranquillity that
preceded it. His themes are the death and renewal
inherent in nature, and the work suggests past travails and a redemptive future. They are unique in
the way Virgil combines the pastoral genre with
contemporary issues. The Eclogues were published
in 37 B.C., upon which Virgil became a famous
man, an enormously successful and highly regarded
poet, and the beneficiary of the patronage
ofMaecenas, a chief adviser to Augustus.Maecenas
was also patron to Virgil’s good friend and fellow
poet HORACE, whom Virgil had introduced to Maecenas.
With Maecenas’s encouragement,Virgil went to
work on his next composition, the Georgics. Again,
he presents the cycles of nature central to a
farmer’s life and shows how those who wrest a living
from the land must toil assiduously to bring
forth fertility and rebirth. The Georgics is didactic
in nature, but in this work, as in the Eclogues, Virgil
transforms the genre in his praise of Roman
rural values and in the pathos he shows for the lack
of peace in recent years.He views peace as the only
condition under which agriculture and animal
husbandry can thrive, yet he describes how the
land has been desiccated by a century of warfare.
Virgil took seven years to write the Georgics, completing
it in 29 B.C. The finished work comprises
four books on farming and cultivating corn, cultivating
olives and vines, raising livestock, and beekeeping,
respectively.
Virgil spent the rest of his life crafting his EPIC
masterpiece, the Aeneid. Before completing it, he
became ill while traveling with Augustus and never
recovered.While he was dying, he pleaded with his
executors to destroy the unfinished manuscript,
since he feared it did not live up to his exacting
standards. Augustus, who had heard excerpts of
the work in progress and recognized its value,
countermanded the order and had it published
after the poet’s death.
Critical Analysis
The Aeneid recounts in iambic pentameter the epic
adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior and the son
of a goddess. Aeneas sorrowfully leaves his ruined
homeland after it is sacked by the Greeks and
founds the city that is Rome’s predecessor. Virgil
summarizes the story in the opening lines, rendered
here in a prose translation:
I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an
exile, who long since left the land of Troy and
came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a
great pounding he took by land and sea at the
hands of the heavenly gods because of the
fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great
too were his sufferings in war before he could
found his city and carry his gods into Latium.
This was the beginning of the Latin race, the
Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome.
Juno is queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter
(corresponding to the Greek Hera and Zeus). She
is Aeneas’s persistent adversary throughout the 12
books of the Aeneid. Juno maintains a furious
grudge against the Trojans, in part because of the
mythic “Judgment of Paris.” Paris, son of the king
of Troy, was commanded to decide which of three
goddesses was most beautiful: Hera, Athena, or
Aphrodite.He chose the third, incurring the wrath
of the other two.
In the Aeneid, Juno uses her powers to inflict a
succession of disasters upon the hero as he wanders
with his band of Trojan War survivors
through Sicily and Africa en route to fulfilling his
destiny. One of the most well-known incidents
takes place when the refugees are shipwrecked on
Carthage (now Tunisia), where Aeneas arouses the
ardor of Queen Dido.Ultimately he honors his fate
and sense of duty and leaves her. Tragically, she
throws herself on a funeral pyre.
Aeneas finally reaches Italy, where, after bitter
conflict, he establishes his city and founds the new
race that will unite Italy with a common language,
culture, and sense of nationality and ultimately
give rise to the Roman Empire.
As in his earlier works, Virgil’s themes in the
Aeneid are those of peace and order, the devastation
of war, and a destructive past giving way to a
promising future. The work is also an eloquent
hymn celebrating Rome’s glory and its imperial
destiny. In subject matter, it is like a blend of
HOMER’s Odyssey and Iliad; it is an epic adventure
combined with violence and warfare presented in
an original, almost novel style of poetry designed
to create an epic for Rome as Homer did for
Greece.
The Eclogues and Georgics became classroom
texts during Virgil’s lifetime, and quotations from
the Aeneid dating from a few years after its publication
have been discovered in bathhouses and streets
in Rome and Pompeii. His impact on literature is
ongoing, but it was especially influential on the development
of medieval and Renaissance epics, such
as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, D’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s House of
Fame, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Echoes of his
work also can be seen in the works of Edmund
Spencer, John Milton, DANTE,William Wordsworth,
Lord Tennyson, John Dryden, Alexander Pope,Victor
Hugo,William Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges,T.
S. Eliot, and more.
English Versions of Works by Virgil
The Aeneid. Edited by Philip Hardie et al. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
The Aeneid. Translated by David West. London: Penguin,
1990.
Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, Vol. 1. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Virgil: Selections from the Aeneid. Translated by Graham
Tingay. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Works about Virgil
Baswell, Christopher. Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring
The Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to
Chaucer. Edited by Alastair Minnis. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Grandsden, K. W. and S. J. Harrison. Virgil: The
Aeneid. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998.
Rossi, Andreola. Contexts of War: Manipulation of
Genre in Virgilian Battle Narrative. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Spargo, John Webster. Virgil the Necromancer: Studies
in Virgilian Legends.Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger
Publishing, 2004.