Virgil (70-19 B.C.), also spelled Vergil, was the greatest poet of ancient Rome and one of the outstanding poets in world literature. His masterpiece was the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome.
His life.
Virgil was born on Oct. 15, 70 B.C., in Andes, a tiny village near Mantua in northern Italy. His full name was Publius Vergilius Maro. Virgil attended school in Cremona and Milan and then studied rhetoric in Rome and philosophy in Naples. He prepared for a career as a lawyer, but he was too shy and preferred the private life of a poet. His first poems won him the patronage of Maecenas, a wealthy lover of the arts and political adviser to the future Emperor Augustus. Maecenas gave Virgil a house near Naples and encouraged him to write poems about Italy and its history.
Virgil died on Sept. 21, 19 B.C., before he could finish the Aeneid. He left instructions to destroy it because he did not think it was good enough. However, Augustus refused to permit the poem’s destruction and appointed two of Virgil’s friends to prepare the epic for publication.
His works.
The first poems definitely attributed to Virgil are the Eclogues, or Bucolics, composed between 42 and 35 B.C. These 10 poems are pastorals—that is, they portray scenes from the lives of shepherds. In writing the Eclogues, Virgil imitated the Greek pastoral poems of Theocritus, but Virgil adapted their settings and themes to the Italian countryside. The fourth eclogue prophesies the birth of a wonderful child who will bring in a new age. After Rome became Christian under the emperor Constantine the Great in the early A.D. 300’s, many people thought the prophecy referred to the birth of Jesus.
Virgil spent about seven years writing the Georgics, a poem in four books, which was published in 29 B.C. On one level, the Georgics is a poem of advice to farmers. The first book deals with crops, the second with vines and olive trees, the third with breeding cattle and horses, and the fourth with keeping bees. But the Georgics goes beyond practical instruction to show the origin of civilization in the endless work of farming and to celebrate the beauty of Italy and its country life. The books on animals suggest the weaknesses and strengths of human beings and their sufferings in love, war, and sickness. Similarly, the world of the beehive is a model for the life of a human city under its ruler.
For the story of the Aeneid, Virgil used many sources. The most important were the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two great Greek epics attributed to Homer. Virgil based the first six books of the Aeneid on the Odyssey and the last six on the Iliad. The Aeneid describes the adventures of Aeneas, the legendary Trojan hero who survived the fall of Troy to the Greeks. Aeneas sailed westward to Italy. There he formed a new nation where his descendants founded the city of Rome. The poem, however, is not just the story of Aeneas. It also shows Rome as the fulfillment of a divine plan and mentions the greatest achievements of Roman history up to Virgil’s time.
Virgil treats Aeneas as the ancestor of Augustus. He showed that just as the gods appointed Aeneas to create the people of Rome, so they appointed his descendant Augustus to save Rome and re-create the city after the Roman civil wars of the 40’s and 30’s B.C. In this way, Virgil glorified both Augustus and his country, but also reminded Romans that power must be used to benefit others and to bring peace to the world.
His influence.
Roman schools began to use Virgil’s works as textbooks soon after his death. Copies of the Aeneid were kept in Roman temples, and people practiced prophecy by opening the poem at random and interpreting the first words they saw. Later, Christian writers used verses from Virgil’s poems to express Christian beliefs. During the Middle Ages (from about the A.D. 400’s through the 1400’s), people thought of Virgil as a prophet who had foreseen the coming of Jesus. Some even believed he had been a magician.
The Italian poet Dante Alighieri based his great epic The Divine Comedy (1321) on the sixth book of the Aeneid. In Dante’s poem, it is Virgil who guides the poet on his journey through Hell and Purgatory.
During the Renaissance (from the early 1300’s to about 1600), Virgil’s Eclogues influenced the pastoral poetry of such writers as Petrarch in Italy, Joachim du Bellay in France, and Sir Philip Sidney in England. In the 1500’s and 1600’s, English writers regarded Virgil as the ideal poet. The poet John Milton imitated Virgil in his own works, especially Paradise Lost (1667). The poet John Dryden translated the Aeneid into English verse in the late 1600’s. Virgil also influenced many poets of the 1800’s, including William Wordsworth and Lord Tennyson. In the 1900’s, the poet T. S. Eliot admired and imitated Virgil’s poetry. There are fine modern translations of the Aeneid by American and British poets.
