Vergil A Biography   By: Tenney Frank (1876-1939)

A Biography

By

TENNEY FRANK

Professor of Latin in the Johns Hopkins University

1922

TO

THE MEMORY OF

W. WARDE FOWLER

PREFACE

Modern literary criticism has accustomed us to interpret our masterpieces in the light of the author's daily experiences and the conditions of the society in which he lived. The personalities of very few ancient poets, however, can be realized, and this is perhaps the chief reason why their works seem to the average man so cold and remote. Vergil's age, with its terribly intense struggles, lies hidden behind the opaque mists of twenty centuries: by his very theory of art the poet has conscientiously drawn a veil between himself and his reader, and the scraps of information about him given us by the fourth century grammarian, Donatus, are inconsistent, at best unauthenticated, and generally irrelevant.

Indeed criticism has dealt hard with Donatus' life of Vergil. It has shown that the meager Vita is a conglomeration of a few chance facts set into a mass of later conjecture derived from a literal minded interpretation of the Eclogues , to which there gathered during the credulous and neurotic decades of the second and third centuries an accretion of irresponsible gossip.

However, though we have had to reject many of the statements of Donatus, criticism has procured for us more than a fair compensation from another source. A series of detailed studies of the numerous minor poems attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts till recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars has compelled most of us to accept the Appendix Vergiliana at face value. These poems, written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved manner of the classical style, are full of personal reminiscences. They reveal many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they disclose the processes by which the poet during an apprenticeship of ten years developed the mature art of the Georgics and the Aeneid . They have made it possible for us to visualize him with a vividness that is granted us in the case of no other Latin poet.

The reason for attempting a new biography of Vergil at the present time is therefore obvious. This essay, conceived with the purpose of centering attention upon the poet's actual life, has eschewed the larger task of literary criticism and has also avoided the subject of Vergil's literary sources a theme to which scholars have generally devoted too much acumen. The book is therefore of brief compass, but it has been kept to its single theme in the conviction that the reader who will study Vergil's works as in some measure an outgrowth of the poet's own experiences will find a new meaning in not a few of their lines.

T.F.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I MANTUA DIVES AVIS

II SCHOOL AND WAR

III THE CULEX

IV THE CIRIS

V A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY

VI EPIGRAM AND EPIC

VII EPICUREAN POLITICS

VIII LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN

IX MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY

X RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI

XI THE EVICTIONS

XII POLLIO

XIII THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS

XIV THE GEORGICS

XV THE AENEID

VERGIL

I

MANTUA DIVES AVIS

Among biographical commonplaces one frequently finds the generalization that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country boy reared in lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human nature. If there be some degree of truth in this reflection, Publius Vergilius Maro, the farmer's boy from the Mantuan plain, was in so far favored at birth. It is the fifteenth of October, 70 B.C., that the Mantuans still hold in pious memory: in 1930 they will doubtless invite Italy and the devout of all nations to celebrate the twentieth centenary of the poet's birth.