Vergil - A Biography

Vergil - A Biography

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Title: Vergil A Biography
Author: Tenney Frank
Release Date: February 6, 2004 [EBook #10960]
Language: English
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VERGIL
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.
Ancient biographers, little concerned with Mendelian speculation, have
not reported from what stock his family sprang. Scientific curiosity and
nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become
anthropologists. Vergil has accordingly been referred, by some critic or
other, to each of the several peoples that settled the Po Valley in
ancient times: the Umbrians, the Etruscans, the Celts, the Latins.