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Publius Virgilius Maro—such was his full name, though we have abbreviated the sounding Roman appellatives into the curt English form of “Virgil”—lived in the age when the great Roman Empire was culminating to its fall, but as yet showed little symptom of decay. The emperor under whom he was born was that Octavianus Cæsar, nephew of the great Julius, whose title of “Augustus” gave a name to his own times which has since passed into a common term for the golden age of literature in every nation. In the Augustan age of Rome rose and flourished, in rapid succession, a large proportion of those great writers to whose works we have given the name of classics. This brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes—to the increase of cultivation and refinement, to the leisure and quiet which followed after long years of war and civil commotion; but in part also it was owing to the character of the Roman emperor himself. Both Augustus and his intimate friend and counsellor Mæcenas were the professed patrons of letters and of the fine arts. Mæcenas was of the highest patrician blood of Rome. He claimed descent from the old Etruscan kings or Lucumos—those ancient territorial chiefs who ruled Italy while Rome was yet in her infancy, such as Lars Porsena of Clusium. Clever and accomplished, an able statesman in spite of all his indolence, Mæcenas had immense influence with Augustus. At his splendid palace on the Esquiline Hill—the Holland House of the day—met all the brilliant society of Rome, and his name very soon became a synonym for a liberal patron of art and literature. To be eminent in any branch of these accomplishments was to insure the notice of the minister; and to be a protégé of his was an introduction at once, under the happiest auspices, to the emperor himself. Such good fortune occurred to Virgil early in his life.

He was born in the little village of Andes (probably the modern Pietola), near Mantua, and received a liberal education, as is sufficiently evident from the many allusions in his poems. When grown to manhood, he seems to have lived for some years with his father upon his modest family estate. He suffered, like very many of his countrymen—his friend and fellow-poet Horace among the number—from the results of the great civil wars which so long desolated Italy, and which ended in the fall of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The district near Mantua was assigned and parcelled out among the legionaries who had fought for Antony and young Octavianus against Pompey. Cremona had espoused the cause of the latter, and Mantua, as Virgil himself tells us, suffered for the sins of its neighbour. His little estate was confiscated, amongst others, to reward the veterans who had claims on the gratitude of Octavianus. But through the intercession of some powerful friend who had influence with the young emperor—probably Asinius Pollio, hereafter mentioned, who was prefect of the province—they were soon restored to him. This obligation Virgil never forgot; and amongst the many of all ranks who poured their flattery into the ears of Augustus (as Octavianus must be henceforth called), perhaps that of the young Mantuan poet, though bestowed with something of a poet’s exaggeration, was amongst the most sincere. The first of his Pastorals was written to express his gratitude for the indulgence which had been granted him. If the Cæsar of the day was susceptible of flattery, at least he liked it good of its kind. “Stroke him awkwardly,” said Horace, “and he winces like a restive horse.” But the verse of the Mantuan poet had the ring of poetry as well as compliment.

These Pastorals (to be more particularly noticed hereafter) were his earliest work, composed, probably, between his twenty-seventh and thirty-fourth year, while he was still living a country life on his newly-recovered farm. They seem to have attracted the favourable attention of Mæcenas; and soon, among the brilliant crowd of courtiers, statesmen, artists, poets, and historians who thronged the audience-chamber of the popular minister, might be seen the tall, slouching, somewhat plebeian figure of the young country poet.[2] He soon became a familiar guest there; but although Augustus himself, half in jest, was said to have spoken of his minister’s literary dinners as a “table of parasites,” it is certain Virgil never deserved the character. This intimacy with Mæcenas must have led to frequent and prolonged visits to Rome; but his chief residence, after he left his Mantuan estate, seems to have been at Naples. It was at the suggestion of this patron that he set about the composition of his poem upon Roman agriculture and stock-breeding—the four books of Georgics. His greatest and best-known work—the Æneid—was begun in obedience to a hint thrown out by a still higher authority, though he seems to have long had the subject in his thoughts, and probably had begun to put it into shape. Augustus had condescended to ask the poet to undertake some grander theme than an imaginary pastoral life or the management of the country farm. The result was the Æneid, modelled upon the two great poems of Homer—in fact, a Roman Iliad and Odyssey combined in one. It was never completely finished, for Virgil, whose health was at no time robust, died before he had put in the finishing touches which his fastidious taste required. It is even said that in his last illness he would have burnt the copy, if his friends would have allowed the sacrifice. It is hardly probable, as a German scholar has ingeniously suggested, that it was because the cruelties of Augustus’s later years made him repent of having immortalised a tyrant. He died in his fifty-first year, at Brundusium, where he had landed in the suite of the emperor, whom he had met during a visit to Athens, and who brought him back with him to Italy. He was buried, as was the custom of the Romans, by the side of the public road leading out of Naples to Puteoli; and the tomb still shown to travellers, near Posilippo, as the last resting-place of the poet, may at least mark the real site. He died a comparatively rich man, possessed of a town-house at Rome, near the palace of Mæcenas, with a good library. Living, as he did, in the highest society of the capital, where he was very popular, he never forgot his old friends; and it is pleasant to read that he sent money to his aged parents regularly every year. So highly was he esteemed by his own cotemporaries, that on one occasion when he visited the theatre, the whole audience is said to have risen in a body and saluted him with the same honours which were paid to Augustus. He preserved to the last his simple manners and somewhat rustic appearance; and it is believed that his character, amongst all the prevalent vices of Rome, remained free from reproach—saving only that with which he was taunted by the libertines of the capital, the reproach of personal purity. It is as much to his honour that Caligula should have ordered all his busts to be banished from the public libraries, as that St Augustin should have quoted him alone of heathen authors, in his celebrated ‘Confessions.’