Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/271

Rh VIRGIL 249 the words of Sainte-Beuve, &quot; divined at a decisive hour of the world what the future would love.&quot; He was also by universal acknowledgment the greatest literary artist whom Rome produced. It was an essential condition of Roman more than of any other great literature that it was based on culture and education. Not only the knowledge but the inspiration of Greek poetry &quot; spiritus Graite cameme &quot; was the condition of Roman success in poetry. Virgil had not only more learning and culture, but had a more catholic sympathy with the whole range of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod to Theocritus and the Alexandrians, than any one else at any period of Roman literature. Greek studies were in his time pursued with greater ardour, completeness, and thoroughness than at any previous period. The effort of the preceding generation to attain to beauty of form and finish of artistic execution found in him, at the most susceptible period of his life, a ready recipient of its influence. The rude dialect of Latiurn had been moulded into a powerful and harmonious organ of literary expression by the emotional ardour and vigorous understanding of a long series of orators ; the rough and unhewn structure of the Latin hexameter, first shaped by Ennius to meet the wants of his own spirit and of his high argument, had been smoothed and polished by the congenial labour of Lucretius, and still more perfected by the finer ear and more careful industry of Catullus and his circle; but neither had yet attained their final develop ment. It was left for Virgil to bring both diction and rhythm to as high a pitch of artistic perfection as has been attained in any literature. The great work which he accomplished was the result of the steady devotion of his genius, undistracted by pleasure or business, to his appointed task. For the first half of his life he prepared himself to be the great poet of his time and country with a high ambition and unresting industry, equalled only by the ambition and industry with which Cicero prepared himself to be the greatest orator and the most accomplished exponent of philosophy among his con temporaries and countrymen. The second half of his career was a religious consecration of all his powers of heart, mind, and spirit to his high office. He was born on the 19th of October in the year 70 B.C., in a farm on the banks of the Mincio, in the district of Andes, not far from the town of Mantua. He thus belonged to a genera tion about thirty years younger than that to which Lucretius belonged, and about fifteen years younger than that of Catullus : but both these poets were dead before the younger poet was old enough or sufficiently known to have come into personal contact with them. But the literary impulse which gave birth to their poetry was felt in all its force in his early youth, and especially in the district north of the Po, in which a race of more imaginative suscepti bility than the people of Latium, who had been the first to receive the discipline and feel the enthusiasm of Greek studies, formed part of the Latin-speaking population. 1 It was favourable to his development as a national poet that he was born and educated during the interval of com parative calm between the first and second civil wars, and that he belonged to a generation which, as the result of the social war, first enjoyed the sense of an Italian nationality. Yet it was only after Virgil had grown to manhood that the province to which he belonged obtained the full rights of Roman citizenship. It is remarkable that the two poets whose imagination seems to have been most powerfully possessed by the spell of Rome, Ennius and Virgil, were born outside the pale of Roman citizenship, though be- 1 Of. Cic., Pro Archia, in. 5 &quot; Erat Italia tune plena Grjecarum artium ac disciplinarum, studiaque haec et in Latio vehementius turn colebantur quain mine iisdem in oppidis, et hie RomiB propter tran- quillitatem reipublicte 11011 neglegebantur.&quot; longing to races who had acknowledged the sovereignty without deeply or permanently resenting the hostility of Rome. The scenery familiar to his childhood, which he recalls with affection both in the Eclogues and the Georgics, was that of the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio and the rich pastures in its neighbourhood. Like his friend and contemporary Horace, and unlike the poets of the preceding generation, who were members either of the aristocracy or of the class closely associated with it, he sprang from the class of yeomen, whose state he pronounces the happiest allotted to man and most conducive to virtue and piety. Virgil, as well as Horace, was fortunate in having a father who, though probably uneducated himself, discerned his genius and spared no pains in nourishing it with the highest and richest culture then obtainable in the world. At the age of twelve he was taken for his educa tion to Cremona, an old Latin colony, and from an expres sion in one of the minor poems attributed to him, about the authenticity of which there cannot be any reasonable doubt, it may be inferred that his father accompanied him thither as Horace s father accompanied him to Rome for the same purpose. He assumed the toga virilis on his sixteenth birthday, the day, according to Donatus, on which Lucretius died ; and shortly afterwards he removed to Milan, where he continued engaged in study till he went to Rome two years later. The time of his removal to Rome must have nearly coincided with the publication of the poem of Lucretius and of the collected poems of Catullus, the first really artistic poems produced in the Latin language. A powerful stimulus must have been given to a youth of genius from a northern province by his arrival in the metropolis of the world at such a crisis in the national literature. The impression produced on his imagination on his first coming to Rome may be recalled to memory in the lines he puts into the mouth of Tityrus in the first eclogue, &quot; Urbeni quam dicunt Romam Melibcee putavi,&quot; &c. After studying under a rhetorician, who was, probably about the same time, the teacher of the future emperor, he proceeded to the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean, who, in common with other teachers of that sect, appears to have had the gift of inspiring enthusiasm for his subject and affection for himself. One of the minor poems written about this time in the scazon metre, which had recently been brought to the highest possible perfection by Catullus, tells of his delight at the immediate prospect of entering on the study of philosophy, and of the first stirring of that enthusiasm for philosophical investigation which haunted him through the whole of his life, but never obtained complete realization. At the end of the poem, the real master-passion of his life, the charm of the Muses &quot; dulces ante omnia Musai&quot; reasserts itself. Our next knowledge of him is derived from allusions to his circumstances and state of feeling contained in the Eclogues, and belongs to a period nine or ten years later. Of what happened to him in the interval, during which the first civil war took place and Julius Ctesar was assassin ated, we have no indication from ancient testimony or from his own writings. We might conjecture that this was a time of studious leisure passed in his father s house in the country, as the life of Milton was passed after leaving Cambridge. In 42 B.C., the year of the battle of Philippi, when he was in his 28th year, we find him lead ing such a life, &quot; cultivating his woodland Muse,&quot; and enjoying the protection of Asinius Pollio, the governor of the district north of the Po. In the following year the famous confiscations of land for the benefit of the soldiers of the triumvirs took place. Of the impression produced XXIV. 32