Virgil

Virgil, the supreme Latin poet, produced in the Aeneid an epic that has been one of the most revered and influential works of art in Western cultural history. Only HOMER [3], whose heroic poetry Virgil absorbed and transformed, has exerted a comparable, continual influence in Western thought and art. Virgil also set the prototype for the artist for whom poetry is both a way of life and a means for the deepest personal, cultural, and religious inquiry.

Like CATULLUS [82], Publius Vergilius Maro was a native of Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy, and from a rural district not far from Mantua. His father was a landowner and farmer, prominent enough to provide Virgil with a solid education in Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome, where he arrived at the age of 17. Initially Virgil pursued a career in law, but he gave it up for the life of a professional poet and scholar. Shy and studious, Virgil took no part in public life, despite contact with prominent figures of his day, including Caesar Augustus, but the political background of his times is central to an understanding of his poetry. 

During his lifetime, as a result of the scramble for autocratic power between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and the civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination, the Roman Republic broke apart. Augustus was to emerge from the chaos with a political and cultural mission to restore order and the Roman values that had gained Rome its great empire. Virgil’s role as an apologist for the Augustan regime should be seen in the context of his fear of the violence and lawlessness that preceded Augustus’s reign. In his art, Virgil accepted his part in establishing a bulwark against the forces antithetical to Roman values and their principal contribution to civilization, law, and government. His poetry has, therefore, a strong didactic and nationalistic quality, though his sheer poetic brilliance and moral complexity transcend and expand these aims.Virgil’s poetic achievement is expressed in three monumental works. 

His earliest is the Eclogues, written 42–37 B.C., in which he set out to become the Roman Theocritus (the great Greek pastoral poet of the third century B.C.) by reviving the pastoral form. His celebration of idyllic rustic life, though in one sense escapist, is rooted in reality, with references to historical figures and cur-rent topics, and is clearly meant to contrast the present with the natural and the simple life. In the Georgics (36 to 29), considered by many his finest work, Virgil provides a Roman version of Hesiod’s Works and Days, a description of the agricultural life, in a didactic poem that is both a practical handbook on husbandry and a patriotic paean expressing his love of the land and the enduring wisdom of rural values. Virgil read the poem to Augustus on his return to Italy in 29 B.C., and it must have resonated with the new emperor, whose political and cultural goals coincided with the poem’s message. 

The Georgics is widely regarded as technically the most perfect of all Latin poems. Both poems show Virgil working toward the expansion of the epic, national and moral purposes of the Aeneid, which he composed during his last 10 years. The poem, one of the greatest verse narratives in world literature, follows the adventures of the Trojan Aeneas after the fall of Troy through his affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, and his descent into the underworld, to his arrival in Italy, where he defeats in combat the warrior Turnus and establishes the beginning of the Roman state. Virgil died before completing revisions and instructed that the poem should be destroyed. It is believed that Augustus himself overruled Virgil’s final wish and saved the Aeneid for posterity.It was natural for Virgil to turn to Homer when looking for a model for the great poem he aspired to write. 

The Homeric epics represented, for the Romans as well as for the Greeks, the highest poetic achievement and the appropriate form for a serious, monumental work. Unlike Homer, Virgil was a literary artist, not an oral performer, and he transformed the epic by both his unique genius and the opportunity that written composition represented. Although his meter (dactylic hexameter), structure (the first half of the Aeneid corresponds to the Odyssey and the second to the Iliad), elements like similes, catalogues, and phrases, and entire episodes, such as the visit to the underworld, are borrowed from Homer, Virgil achieves a great deal more in the Aeneid than a convincing imitation. 

The Aeneid fundamentally alters the Homeric worldview and shifts the purpose of the epic into a new direction that would have important implications for later writers like DANTE [2] and MILTON [8], who would take up the epic form again.In looking back to the heroic world of Homer, Virgil began to trace the possibilities of a grand, nationalistic poem for his own day. To celebrate Roman greatness, he located the origin of that greatness in the legendary journey of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy to found Lavinium, in Latium, which would eventually become Rome. 

The Homeric past therefore becomes a means for Virgil to explore his own present, offering an explanation of how the present was shaped by the past and suggesting the heroic elements that define the Roman character.Aeneas, the prototype of the Roman leader, is a different kind of hero than either Achilles or Odysseus, and one of the poem’s radical concepts is a fundamental redefinition of the essential qualities of heroism and its cost in self-sacrifice. Aeneas accepts his divine mission to found the Roman state, and his adventures are lessons in suffering as well as tests in the values necessary to become a true leader. Achilles exerts his skills as a warrior for his own glory and honor; Odysseus struggles to reestablish himself in Ithaca. 

The adventures of Aeneas, however, point to a much larger purpose, one that goes beyond personal fulfillment. His virtues of duty and responsibility run counter to the often self-centered preoccupations of Homer’s heroes.Aeneas has been called a puppet, a “shadow of a man,” and most memorably by Charles James Fox, as “always either insipid or odious,” but such interpretations miss Virgil’s intention in the Aeneid, which was his willingness to sacrifice Aeneas’s individuality and to place him in the context of Rome’s destiny. One of the signs of the poem’s greatness is Virgil’s recognition of the cost of leadership and the degree to which a proper hero must sacrifice self-fulfillment for the greater good. In Aeneas’s tragic affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, Virgil raises the stakes impossibly high. 

It would have been far easier for Virgil to turn Dido, once the queen of Rome’s bitterest enemy, into a far more resistible adversary for Aeneas. Dido is one of the most memorable and sympathetic character portraits in all classical literature, evidence of Virgil’s honesty and the complex moral tone of the Aeneid.

In the Aeneid, Virgil achieves an epic that is both nationalistic in purpose and deeply subjective in its probing of the inner meaning of heroism and man’s fate. For later generations, the poem served, like the Bible, as an important source for wisdom and guidance. The fact that readers would select passages at random for inspiration is a testimony to the multilayered tone and nuances of Virgil’s poetry, which reaches well beyond his patriotic nationalism to deeper reflections of human experience. The Aeneid is suffused with Virgil’s presence and persistent melancholy, which Matthew Arnold recognized as “the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart.” That the dramatic and objective epic form of Homer could be remade into a personal as well as a political poem of great sweep and depth is due to Virgil’s great genius. Later writers who took up the epic would have to contend with a second master of its form.