Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), the first of Latin poets and one of the three or four chief poets of the world, was born at Andes near Mantua on the 15th of October 70 B.C. The plain of Lombardy then lay outside of the limits of Italy, and formed a province known as Cisalpine Gaul. The population was mainly Celtic, but was already permeated by the Latin language and civilisation; and Julius Cæsar, when he admitted it to full Roman citizenship in Virgil's twenty-first year, was adjusting rather than extending the natural limits of Italy. The name Vergilius is apparently Celtic, and in Virgil's Celtic blood modern critics have found the origin of his romantic and melancholy temper, and of the deep sense of natural beauty and the spiritual meaning of nature, in which he stands alone among Greek and Latin poets.
Virgil's father owned a small property in his native place, where, besides the ordinary work of a farm, he occupied himself in forestry and bee-keeping. He was well enough off to give his son the education which was generally confined to a wealthier class. The boy was sent to school at Cremona and Milan, and at the age of sixteen went to Rome and studied rhetoric and philosophy under the best teachers of the time. His studies were probably interrupted by the civil war; at all events, we know nothing of the next years of his life till 41 B.C. The victorious triumvirs were then providing for the immense armies which had been disbanded after the battle of Philippi by settling them on confiscated lands throughout Italy. Virgil's farm was part of the confiscated territory of Cremona; but his reputation as a rising poet had already brought him under the notice of the governor of the district, Asinius Pollio, himself a distinguished man of letters. By Pollio's advice he went to Rome, with special recommendations to Octavianus; and though his own property was ultimately not restored to him, he obtained ample compensation from the government, and became for a few years one of the circle of endowed court-poets who gathered round the prime-minister Mæcenas. In 37 B.C. the Ecloques, a collection of ten pastorals modelled on those of Theocritus, were published, and received with unexampled enthusiasm. Soon afterwards Virgil withdrew from Rome to Campania. The munificence of Mæcenas had placed him in easy and even affluent circumstances. He had a villa at Naples, and a country-house near Nola, within easy reach of it; and he seems to have lived almost entirely in this neighbourhood during the seven years in which he was engaged on the composition of the Georgics, or Art of Husbandry. This poem, which is in four books, and deals with tillage and pasturage, the cultivation of trees, especially the vine and olive, and the breeding of horses, cattle, and bees, appeared in 30 B.C., and confirmed Virgil's position as the foremost poet of the age. The remaining eleven years of his life were devoted to a larger and in some respects more uncongenial task, undertaken at the urgent and repeated request of the emperor, the composition of a great national epic. During these years he lived a secluded life, chiefly in Campania and Sicily; he seems also to have travelled in Greece, and to have paid occasional visits to Rome, where he had a house in the fashionable quarter on the Esquiline. The subject he chose was the story of Æneas the Trojan, the legendary founder of the Roman nation and of the Julian family, from the fall of Troy to his arrival in Italy, his wars and alliances with the native Italian races, and his final establishment in his new kingdom. By 19 B.C. the Æneid was practically completed, but Virgil had set apart three years more for its final revision. In the summer of that year he left Italy with the intention of travelling in Greece and Asia; but at Athens he fell ill, and returned only to die at Brundusium a few days after landing, on the 21st of September. He had almost completed his fifty-first year. In his last illness he expressed a wish to burn the Æneid, and he left directions to that effect in his will. By the command of Augustus these directions were disobeyed, and it was published as we now possess it. At his own wish he was buried at Naples, on the road to Pozzuoli, his tomb for many hundreds of years after being worshipped as a sacred place.
In person Virgil was tall and dark, shy and silent in manner, and suffering from delicate health throughout his life. No authentic portrait of him exists. He never married, and from his will it would appear that a half-brother was the only near relation whom he left. His sincerity and sweetness of temper won the warm praise of Horace, who is not lavish of praise, and the fastidious purity of his life in an age of very lax morality gained him the same name of the lady by which Milton was known at Cambridge.
Besides the three works already mentioned, a few juvenile pieces of more or less probable authenticity are extant under his name. These are the Culex and the Moretum, both in hexameter verse, the former an 'epyllion,' or short poem of narrative and description in the epic manner, the latter an idyll freely translated from the Greek of Parthenius; the Copa, a short elegiac piece; and fourteen little poems in various metres, some serious, others trivial, which come under his name at the head of a collection of minor Latin poetry incorporated in the Latin Anthology. These pieces are not printed in most editions of Virgil, nor are any of them certainly authentic, though some of them passed as his among scholars within a century after his death. The Ciris, a piece of the same kind as the Culex, is now agreed to be by a contemporary imitator.
The supremacy of Virgil in Latin poetry was immediate and almost unquestioned. The enthusiasm excited by the Ecloques rose partly from the recognition in them of a new sense of romantic beauty, partly from the feeling that a Roman artist had at last appeared who could be set beside the great artists of Greece. In the hands of Lucretius and Catullus the intractable Latin tongue had proved able to express impassioned argument and vivid emotion; in the Ecloques it assumed a richness, harmony, and sweetness till then quite unknown. The promise shown in the Ecloques was more than fulfilled in the Georgics. In no work of ancient or modern art is there a more sustained splendour, an ampler music of language, a more magical fusion of thought and feeling. The workmanship of the Æneid is more unequal; but in its great passages there is the same beauty, with an even fuller strength and range. Virgil left the Latin language to his successors as an instrument of which he had sounded the full compass and developed the entire capacity; subsequent Latin poetry has to be estimated by the degree in which it falls short of his. There were some in ancient as in modern times who continued to prefer the direct force and austere simplicity of Lucretius to Virgil's rich and intricate harmonies; but for the world Virgil was the imperial poet, the great voice of Rome.
In estimating Virgil's place among the great poets of the world different natures will lay stress on different qualities as constituting the essence of the highest poetry. Virgil is not comparable to Homer in dramatic force and in the fresh charm of his story; he has not the concentrated passion of Pindar and Dante; and the lyrical cry of direct emotion, such as thrills us in Sappho or Catullus, belongs to a different order of art from the majestic sadness, the serene and harmonious cadences, of poetry enriched with all the associations of art and learning, and wrought by patient labour into the most exquisite finish. But what Virgil has in a degree that no other poet has ever equalled is pity; the sense of 'tears in things,' to which in the most famous of his single verses (Aen. i. 462) he has given imperishable expression, and which fills with strange insight and profound emotion those lonely words and pathetic half-lines where he has sounded the depths of beauty and sorrow, of patience and magnanimity, of honour in life and hope beyond death.
The reputation of Virgil from his own time till now is probably unparalleled in its continuity. His works were established classics even in his lifetime, and soon after his death had become, as they still remain, the school-books of western Europe. By the 3d century his poems ranked as sacred books, and were regularly used for purposes of divination. The purity and piety in which he is eminent beyond other Latin poets, together with the mystical interpretation of the fourth Eclogue, which found in him an unconscious channel of divine inspiration and a 'prophet of Christ among the Gentiles,' made his fame almost as high in the Christian as in the pagan world; of all the testimonies borne to his matchless power in stirring the deepest human emotions the subtlest and most cloquent are those of two princes of the Catholic Church nearly fifteen centuries apart from one another—Augustine and Newman. In the dark ages his fabled powers as a magician almost eclipsed his real fame as a poet; but with the revival of learning he resumed his old place; for Dante and Petrarch, and for the whole of the earlier and later Renaissance, he was the first of the world's poets. In the earlier part of the 19th century his reputation for the first time suffered serious eclipse. The spiritual upheaval of the age which followed the French Revolution turned for inspiration to fresher sources; and in the general anarchy of taste which followed Virgil fell out of fashion among readers too capricious or too impatient to feel his charm. Criticism has now returned to a juster view, and the most recent estimates of Virgil, both in France and England, are also the most appreciative, not only of his immense learning and of the wonderful truth and refinement of his descriptions, but of his eminence in all the essential qualities of poetry. Of his consummate mastery of metre and diction there has never been any question; even those who have thought least of his dramatic power or imaginative insight have acknowledged the finished beauty of his language, and the stately and haunting music of his verse, to which the noblest of tributes has been given by Lord Tennyson, himself the most Virgilian of modern poets.
There are extant MSS. of Virgil of as early a date as the 4th century. Virgil was first printed at Rome by Sweynheym and Pannartz in or before the year 1469, the edition consisting of 275 copies. Of the many hundreds of subsequent editions the most important are those of Heync (1767–75; enlarged in subsequent editions and afterwards re-edited by Wagner) and Ribbeck (1859–68). Both of these include the minor poems. The standard English edition is that of Conington and Nettleship (4th ed. 1881–83), and there are good smaller editions by Kennedy, Papillon, and Sidgwick. The commentary by Keightley is almost indispensable in reading the Georgics. Among verse translations that of Dryden still holds a high place; others which deserve special mention are those of Lord Justice Bowen (incomplete), Mr William Morris (Aeneid), Calverley (Eclogues), and Rhodes (Georgics). There are prose translations by Conington and by the present writer. The best estimates of Virgil as a poet are those of the late Professor Sellar in The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, of Sainte-Beuve in his Étude sur Virgile, and of Mr F. Myers in his Classical Essays; and beyond all, Lord Tennyson's lines 'To Virgil' in Teircias and other Poems.
VIRGIL THE MAGICIAN.—Not the least remarkable circumstance in the history of Virgil is the reputation of the magician which the mediæval imagination persistently associated with his name. His undisputed supremacy and the peculiar fascination of his poetry made easy the notion of a wisdom and mystic meaning wrapped up in his verses, and as early as the 3d and 4th centuries we find Christian authors like Minucius Felix, Lactantius, and Augustine separating him from all other pagan writers. Messianic prophecy was read into his fourth Eclogue, and Virgil and the Sibyl were actually introduced into the liturgy of the church, along with the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, as witnesses to a coming Messiah. Had not St Paul visited Virgil's tomb at Naples, and did not Statins owe his conversion to the fourth Eclogue? Centos were manufactured out of the Aeneid giving the whole of sacred history in epitome. And already under the Roman empire it was customary enough to discover one's fortune by selecting lines at random from his epic—the famous Sortes Virgilianæ (q.v.). Ultimately in the Divina Commedia of Dante the 13th-century Virgil became a representative of enlightened reason, a gifted genius standing midway between paganism and Christianity. This deep half-religious veneration for Virgil, together with the scholastic conception of his superior wisdom, especially in mathematics and medicine, helps us to understand Dante's conception of the vates sacer; in the contemporary Dolopathos, a special version of the Seven Wise Masters (q.v.), we see the mythopoeic process at work, the name of Virgil taking the place of the sage Sindibad.
It was out of Neapolitan folklore that the legendary reputation first grew, gaining many strange accretions from all sides on its course. But the earliest literary accounts were not Italian. The first writer to mention it is John of Salisbury in his Polycraticon de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum (1156), who describes Virgil as making for Marcellus a fly that would destroy all other flies. But the first artistic treatment of the theme is seen in the letters of Conrad of Querfurt, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, the representative of the Emperor Henry VI. at Naples. He tells us he had seen the palladium of Naples (a model of the city enclosed in a narrow-necked bottle) and many other talismans and charms wrought by Virgil's skill—the most useful, the statue of an archer pointing an arrow at Vesuvius, which prevented its eruptions. These stories occur again with additions in Alexander Neckam's De Naturis Rerum, in the Otia Imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, the French poem Image du Monde (1245), where the famous brazen head appears, as well as the first thread of love. In the rhymed Weltbuch of Johann Euenkel of Vienna (1250) we read how Virgil, finding the devil imprisoned in a glass bottle, released him after he had learned all his magic arts. His first task was the creation of a perfect woman. But not content with her he made love to a married woman of Rome who befooled him by a pretended assignation, and left him exposed to public ridicule hanging half up to her window in a basket. This last was an exceedingly popular mediæval story, and was even carved on the misereres of churches. In the Roman de Cleomadès of Adenès li Rois (c. 1290) we find the first mention of Virgil's figure holding the mirror at Rome which showed if treason was hatching anywhere—the famous Salvacio Roma—as well as the copper statue of an archer whose arrow pointed at the public fire kept it alive; his magic garden we first meet in Padre Giordano's contemporary Life of San Guglielmo of Vercelli. The old stories again occur in the French romance of the Renard Countrefait (c. 1319); his compacts with the devil, with much detail, in the 14th-century German poems Reinfrit von Braunschweig and the Wartburg-krieg. The earliest attempt in Italy to weave all the varying legends into a collected form is the prose Cronica di Partenope of Bartolommeo Caracciolo (1382). In the Process of the Seven Sages (1330), the English form of the History thereof, the ninth tale is devoted to the 'nigramancie' of Virgil at Rome, and the same reappears in the Gesta Romanorum (No. 27). The latest stages of the legend may be seen in Le Myreur des Histors, written at Liège by Jean d'Outremeuse in the 14th century; the English Lyfe of Virgilius (1510; reprinted in W. J. Thoms's Early English Prose Romances); its French version, the Faicts Merveilleux; and in the Spanish Romance of Virgilius (1550). In the Faicts Virgil makes a statue the sight of which ensures the virtue of women. His own wife and other licentious Roman ladies try to break it, but in vain. He carries off the beautiful daughter of the Soldan of Babylon, baffles her father by sorcery, builds Naples, and establishes there a school of necromancy.
Professor Comparetti thinks these legends of popular and Neapolitan origin, but recognises in them two elements, the first exclusively Neapolitan connected with the notion of a special intimate affection of Virgil for the city; the second consisting of the distinct and not merely Neapolitan belief in certain public talismans attributed to Virgil, analogous accretions of legend being associated with most monuments of antiquity. Mr J. S. Tunison, in his Master Virgil (Cincinnati, 1888), labours to prove that the legend is originally of northern not southern origin, and of literary rather than popular genesis, the first writers who related tales of Virgilian magic being Norman Latinists of England and France.
See Zappert, Virgil's Leben und Fortleben im Mittelalter (Vienna, 1851); Roth in Pfeiffer's Germania (vol. iv. 1859); Milberg, Mirabilia Vergyliana (Meiss. 1867); Professor Dom. Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo (2 vols. 1872; Eng. trans. 1895: see Quarterly Review, July 1875); and Professor A. Graf, Roma nella Memoria e nelle Immaginazioni del Medio Evo (2 vols. 1882-83).