Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/273

Rh V I E G I L 251 counsellor, and genial companion, sharing the ordinary interests and pleasures of life, liable to the same weak nesses and endeared by the same social charm as those who are best liked in the intercourse of our own day. Virgil s fame as a poet rests ou the three acknowledged works of his early and mature manhood the pastoral poems or Eclogues, the Georgics, and the sEncid all written in that hexameter verse which he received from his immediate predecessors, still lacking something in variety and smoothness of cadence, and which he left to the world, in the words of a poet, who, if any one, is entitled to speak with authority on such a subject, &quot;The noblest metre ever moulded by the lips of man.&quot; Hut other poems were attributed to him in ancient times, and have been incorporated with his acknowledged works. These are (1) a collection of short poems, under the name &quot;Catalepton,&quot; most of them in the style of the short poems of Catullus, and composed in various forms of the iambic metre (chiefly the scazon), and in elegiacs; and (2) some longer poems, the Culcx, Ciris, Copa, Moretum, to which sometimes the ^Etna and Dine are added, all with one exception written in hexameters. As the younger Pliny mentions Virgil among the men of grave character by whose authority he justifies his own occasional indulgence in the composition of slight, playful, and somewhat indecorous verses, it is quite possible that two or three pieces of that kind found in the Catalepton may have been written by Virgil when fresh from the first reading of Catullus. The fifth, written in the couplet most used in the Erodes of Horace, and the most bitter in tone and coarsest in expression, it is im possible to attribute to him. But there are others among them of which there is no reason to question the authenticity, and which are interesting as an immediate expression of the poet s personal feelings at various periods of his life. Of the longer poems attri buted *to him in ancient times it is clear from internal evidence that the Ciris and Diree, though belonging to the Augustan age, are not his. The JEina has been shown to have been written in the age of Nero. The Moretum and the Copa are interesting as graphic and sharply defined pictures from common or homely life. But they have nothing in common with the idealizing art of Virgil, and the tone and sentiment of the Copa especially are C|iiite alien from the tone and sentiment of his acknowledged work. But there has been more controversy about the authenticity of the Culcx. The ambitious saying, not to apply to it a harsher epithet, attri buted by his biographer to Lucan, &quot; et quantum mihi restat ad Culicem,&quot; shows that in his time it was believed that Virgil had written a poem of that name. Martial (xiv. 185) writes of a Culex as the undoubted work of Virgil. He believes in it as unhesitatingly as he does in the &quot; Passer Catulli,&quot; and speaks as if it were only the patronage of Maecenas that enabled Virgil to rise to higher themes. Virgil s biographer speaks of the poem as having been written by him at the age of sixteen, though the saying of Lucan seems to imply that he supposed it to have been written when he was ten years older. The poem has no trace of the charm and variety of Virgil s style and rhythm, and is even less like the style and metre of the Eclogues than of his later poems. On the other hand, there is a technical correctness and regularity in the metre which was not possible until after the art of Virgil had made the knack of writing hexameters as attainable by all educated men as the art of Pope made the writing of the heroic couplet ; and the writing of such verse seems to have become a regular part of a liberal education. It is to be remembered that in the same soil and under the same air under which the genius of Virgil and Horace expanded to such stately proportions, there was a great undergrowth of minor poets who are the frequent butts of Horace s good-natured satire. Descriptions of nature to which they were trained by the reading of Lucretius and Virgil, and mythological commonplace, were apparently the chief materials of their verse exercises. The descriptions in the Culex show the care ful study both of Lucretius and of the Eclogues and Georgics, and, though too diffuse and diluted, are not without a real perception of, and feeling for, Italian nature. But it is very difficult to believe that the poem was ever edited by or acknowledged by Virgil in his life time. Nothing is more alien to his character than such immature ambition. It is difficult also to believe that it is a crude effort of his boyhood, accidentally preserved, and given to the world after his death by an authorized editor. It seems more probable that it is the composition of some young and enthusiastic admirer of Virgil, who, some time after his death, and, perhaps, after the death of his immediate contemporaries, succeeded in palming off his own imitative concoction as an early composition of the great master. The dedication to the &quot;revered Octavius,&quot; if the person addressed is the &quot; young Augustus,&quot; and not the poet and historian mentioned by Horace, and the lines &quot; Posterius graviore sono tibi niusa loquctur Xostra, dabunt cum maturos mihi tempora fructus &quot; seem like not very ingenious artifices to secure acceptance for the poem, and to represent Virgil as already in boyhood closely con nected with the future emperor, and conscious of his own genius and of the great future that awaited both himself and the young friend whom he addresses as &quot;sancte pucr.&quot; The pastoral poems or Eclogues a word denoting short selected Kclofjues. pieces were composed between the years 42 and 37 B.C., when Virgil was between the age of twenty-eight and thirty-three. By his invocation to the &quot;Sicelides Musse&quot; and &quot;Arethusa,&quot; by the names &quot; Daphnis&quot; and &quot; Menalcas,&quot; &quot; Thyrsis&quot; and &quot; Corydon,&quot; &c., which he gives to his shepherds, by his mention of &quot;Arcadians&quot; and of &quot;Eurotas,&quot; and by many other indications, he avows the purpose of eliciting from the strong Latin language the melody which the &quot;Sicilian shepherd&quot; drew out of the &quot;IDoric reed,&quot; of peopling the familiar plains and river-banks of his native land with the picturesque figures of the old Greek pastoral, and of express ing that tender feeling for the beauty of Italian scenes which Theocritus had expressed for the beauty of Sicily. The position of Virgil indicated in the Eclogues was not unlike that indicated in the idylls of Theocritus, that of a youth of genius with all the refinement of a rich culture, but with rustic tastes and habits, living his life among other young poets of his native province, cultivating his art by friendly rivalry with them, and nourishing his genius by communion with the spirit of nature as revealed in the scenes around him and in the melodies of older poets. It was as natural under these circumstances that he should aspire to be the Italian Theocritus as that Horace, with his more social and versatile temperament, and with the more adventurous experience of his youth, should aspire to be the Roman Alcseus. The earliest poems in the series were the second, third, and fifth; and these, along with the seventh, are the most purely Theocritean in character. The first and ninth, which probably were next in order, are much more Italian in sentiment, are much more an ex pression of the joet s own feelings, and have a much more direct reference both to his own circumstances and the circumstances of the time. The first is a true poetical reflex of the distress and confusion which arose out of the new distribution of lands, and blends the poet s own deep love of his home, and of the sights and sounds familiar to him from childhood, with his Italian suscepti bility to the beauty of nature. The ninth is immediately connected in subject with the first. It contains the lines which seem accur ately to describe the site of Virgil s farm, at the point where the range of hills which accompany the river for some distance from the foot of the Lago di Garda sinks into the plain about 14 or 15 miles above Mantua &quot; Qua se subducere colles Incipiunt molliquc juguni demittere clivo.&quot; The sixth is addressed to Varus, who succeeded Pollio as governor of the Cisalpine district. Its theme is the creation of the world (according to the Epicurean cosmogony), and the oldest tales of mythology. 1 The fourth and eighth are both closely associated with the name of Virgil s earliest protector, Pollio. The fourth celebrates the consulship of his patron in 40 B.C., and perhaps also the birth of his son, though it was disputed in antiquity, and still is disputed, who was meant by the child whose birth was to be coincident with the advent of the new era, and who, after filling the other great offices of state, was to &quot; rule with his father s virtues the world at peace.&quot; The main purpose of the poem, however, is to express, in connexion with pastoral associations, the longing of the world for a new era of peace and happiness, of which the treaty of Brundisium seemed to hold out some definite hopes. There is no trace in this poem of Theocritean influence. The rhythm recalls the stately monotonous movement of the longest poem of Catullus, not the vivacity of the idyllic rhythm. The ideas are derived partly from Greek representations of the Golden Age, and partly, it is sup posed, from the later Sibylline prophecies, circulated after the burning in the time of Sulla of the old Sibylline books, and pos sibly tinged with Jewish ideas. Some of the phraseology of the poem led to a belief in the early Christian church that Virgil had been an unconscious instrument of inspired prophecy. The date of the eighth is fixed by a reference to the campaign of Pollio against the Dalmatians in 39 B.C. It is founded on the ^ap/uiuKevrpia of Theocritus, but brings before us, with Italian associations, two love tales of homely Italian life. The tenth reproduces the Daphnis of Theocritus, and is a dirge over the unhappy love of Gallus and Lycoris. As in the other poems, the second and eighth, of which love is the burden, it is to the romantic and fantastic melancholy which the passion assumes in certain natures that Virgil gives a voice. Nothing can be more unreal than the association of su&amp;lt;-h a feeling with an ordinary liaison, like that of Gallus, the adventurous and ambitious soldier, and Cytheris, the notorious actress and discarded mistress of Antony. But there is no representation in ancient poetry of an ideal and chivalrous passion so tender and true as that of the Gallus of Virgil. There is no important work in Latin literature, with the excep tion of the comedy of Terence, so imitative as the Eclogues. But they are not, like the comedies of Terence, purely exotic as well as imitative. They are rather composite, partly Greek and partly 1 In the Geonjio also Virgil attempts to combine science with the poetic fancies which tilled its place in older times.