VIRGIL. - P. Virgilius Maro (ancient form: Vergilius, cf. F. Ritschl, Opuscula philologica, II, p. 779 ff.) is the greatest poet of the Augustan age, b. at Andes (Mantua), today Pietole Virgilio (A. Dal Zotto, Vicus Andicus, Mantua 1930), on 15 Oct. 70 B.C., d. at Brindisi on 21 Sept. 19 A.D. The tradition continued through the centuries by legends and recollections of poets and humanists (Statius, Silv., IV, v. 54; Silius Italicus in Pliny, Ep., III, 7; Petrarch in the Itinerarium Syriacum; Boccaccio in the Genealogiae, etc.), even if subject to doubts, places his tomb at Naples on the via Puteolana intra lapidem secundum (Donatus, Vita Verg., 36). His life, according to the accounts common to the ancient biographers (E. Diehl, Die vitae vergilianae und ihre antiken Quellen, Bonn 1911), unfolded in keeping with the tranquil character of the poet. Excepting naturally those portents that ideally anticipated his birth; an indication of early popular astonishment arising as a reflection of his work (his father a laborer and skilled beekeeper, his mother "Magia" who gives birth to him without pain and after a strange dream, etc.).
V.'s literary formation is linked to the problem of the authenticity or otherwise of the compositions collected in the Appendix Vergiliana. This contains, among other things, under the name of catalepton, that is, "scattered verses," 14 poems of differing metrical composition. Some of these poems still display a Catullan manner, and in particular poem V: Ite hinc, inanes, ite, rhetorum ampullae seems to allude to the poet's move to Naples and his encounter with Siro and Philodemus, the chief representatives of the Epicurean school in Campania. In the catalepton and generally in the Appendix scholars have sought to trace the evolutionary line of V.'s poetry, as a follower of the veteran poets at first and of the Lucretian and Epicurean system during his stay at Naples (A. Rostagni, Virgilio minore, Turin 1933). Among the compositions of the Appendix, the attribution to V. of the Aetna, a short poem treating volcanic phenomena, of the Copa and of the Moretum is disputed. Worthy of attention, always provided they belong to the poet, are the remaining ones: the Ciris and the Culex. While the first poem is an epyllion of Alexandrian technique and workmanship, the Culex transcends the lightness of its subject and the analogous epicedia for other animals (a gnat inadvertently killed by a shepherd, appearing to him as a spirit, narrates its journey to the underworld). It is significant how this composition preludes that series of visions of the afterlife, a need so deeply felt and eagerly sought in our poet.
The Eclogues are the first revelation of Virgil's individuality. The reading of Theocritus' Idylls helps to make Virgil's first poetic initiation clearer and more immediate. In the Eclogues one finds motifs of varied inspiration, and two elements prevail: the realistic tone such as that of I and III (especially in the first part), and the mythical and symbolic which idealizes reality and echoes Eastern beliefs and aspirations. The nature described in the Bucolics, even if here and there it bears some preciousness derived from Arcadian taste (P. Grimal, Les jardins romains, Paris 1943, p. 404 ff.), is something real and deeply felt, as in Ecl. I, where V. hints at the misfortune that befell him when his land was confiscated in favor of the veterans in 41 B.C. (J. Liegle, Die Tyrtirusekloge, in Hermes, 78 [1943], p. 209 ff.). The melancholy of the sunsets confers on this countryside almost a religious solemnity. Whoever disturbs this quiet is a barbarus and an impius. The symbolic motif, on the other hand, finds its concretization in the much-discussed Ecl. IV with those mysterious allusions to the virgo and the puer. The Christian commentators of the 4th century A.D., struck by the messianic inspiration that dominates the entire eclogue (v. below), credited it with the value of a Christian prophecy, despite the energetic opposition of St. Jerome, who judged the interpretation in this sense puerilia (Ep., LIII, 7).
That Arcadian world, which in the Eclogues, though acquiring a reality in some points, is still undecided, finds its concretization in the Georgics. This poem in IV books and 2188 hexameters treats of the cultivation of herbs (I), of trees (II), of the rearing of livestock (III) and of beekeeping (IV). The poem considers the farmer, his life, his world with a seriousness and depth that bear the mark of Lucretian inspiration. The Georgics aim to be the precise picture of the labors that a family of farmers must perform without the help of slaves. Its pre-existing models can be found in the Works and Days of Hesiod, in the Georgica and the Melissurgica of Nicander of Colophon and in the Phaenomena of Aratus, but the didactic purpose of the poem is surpassed by the atmosphere and the evocative poetry that envelops it (B. Croce, Poesia antica e moderna,
3rd ed., Bari 1950, pp. 37-54). That the subject was suggested by Maecenas is shown by the frequent allusions (I, 2; II, 41; III, 41; IV, 2), but here the poet was able to ennoble and transform the haud mollia iussa of his powerful friend, setting before himself again, in book IV, those otherworldly problems (v. 315 ff.) which, departing from the Culex, reappear more fully in the Aeneid.
The saga of Aeneas and of his coming to Italy had been transmitted by the colonists of southern Italy to the native populations. Greek historians and poets, beginning with Stesichorus in his Iliupersis, lent authority to this tradition, to which were also added names of things and places ideally touched by Aeneas on his journey: Caieta Prochyte, the island Aenaria, the cult of Aphrodite alvelae, at Eryx (C. Robert, Die Griechische Heldensage, III, II, Berlin 1926, p. 1516 ff.). A confirmation of how deeply rooted the legend of Aeneas was in Etruria is offered us by an Etruscan statuette at Veii dating from the first half of the 5th century B.C. and depicting the hero in the act of supporting his father Anchises (A. Fuhrmann, in Archäologischer Anzeiger, 1941, pp. 422-28). V. undertook his labor, which lasted eleven years, aware of the difficulties and responsibilities that arose from it.
The Vitae document for us his poetic torment until, ill and near death, he asked in vain that his poem be consigned to the flames. The work was talked about and awaited with trepidation in the cultural world of the Augustan age. The well-known verse of Propertius bears witness to this: nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade (II, 34, 65 ff.), and the Aeneid upon its appearance, edited by Varius and Tucca, soon surpassed the malicious criticisms of its obtrectatores. The poet had given to Roman literature its highest epic composition and to the Latin people the noblest celebration of its origins. In its plot and in its episodes, the Aeneid happily blended poetry and legend, history and reality, setting itself apart through its own particular conception from the other similar poems that arose in the archaic age (Bellum Poenicum of Naevius, Annales of Ennius, etc.). The protagonist, Aeneas, lives the drama of the stateless, without possessing the shining tones that can characterize an ancient knight. He leaves behind a suffering and tragic experience, acts silently aware of the task the gods have entrusted to him, but almost in service to this duty. The other characters come to meet us suffused with a most human light. There is the lofty torment of love of Queen Dido (B. Croce, op. cit., pp. 55-64), the noble pride of Turnus, the grief of Mezentius for his son Lausus. War is regarded with sadness as a deplorable event that swallows up the best, mostly flourishing young men who go to meet it with enthusiasm, unaware of the terribleness it contains. Thus die Camilla, Pallas, Euryalus and Nisus. Another aspect of the poem is that aura of religiosity that envelops or springs from every place or situation. Aeneas himself never undertakes any enterprise without first consulting the auspices. The religious legends, the cults, the origins of the ancient Italic peoples come alive again in the evocative descriptions of localities and peoples of the most ancient Latium: Ardea, Lavinium, Laurentum, Albunea, etc. This is testimony to the acute historical and patriotic sense of V. (Servius, ad Aen., I, 44; B. Tilly, V.s Latium, Oxford 1947).
The underworld reappears in book VI; a motif, as has been said, well meditated upon. The souls, following the concept of Orphic-Pythagorean eschatology, according to their faults in life are subject in the afterlife to punishments that they expiate in Tartarus (vv. 548-627), while the souls of the just dwell serenely in Elysium. Others, and in this a Platonic motif is revealed, drink the waves of Lethe, and, after being purified, are subject to being reincarnated in life (vv. 703-51). From this vision the poet takes his cue to exalt those spirits who will give life to the highest and most noted figures of Roman history (Aeneis, Buch IV, erklärt von E. Norden, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1916).
Finally the Aeneid, referring back to the earlier stage of the founding of Rome, wishes to be its most complete exaltation, reflecting its imperial splendor in rapid allusions (I, VIII, 342 ff.).
Bibliography33 works
Lanfranco Fiore
THE TRADITION OF VIRGIL IN CHRISTIAN CENTURIES
The name of Virgil remained exalted through the centuries, with an uninterrupted fortune that has no equal in the tradition of the classics. The influence he exercised on the writers of Latinity was perpetuated also in the Christian Middle Ages, and the quotations drawn from his works, especially the Aeneid, reach an extremely high number.
It is true that one can speak of a poetic imprint only for the greatest, from Prudentius to Dante; but as proof of his fame stand the many echoes of his expressions, the centos elaborated on his verses (first among them that of Proba Faltonia, composed in the 4th century, after the conversion of the noblewoman to Christianity) and above all the fantastic myths that came to be elaborated about his personality and that took their origin in the cultured milieu, only to be deformed gradually through contact with popular fantasy. Only an author with a fame as vast as that of Virgil (a fame consolidated by the interest of biographers and by the exegetical and lexical teaching of the grammarians) could become the protagonist of a legend so multiform, absurd and picturesque as to allow one to find in it all the salient characteristics of the Middle Ages.
The first impulse came already from the classical world, from Roman proconsular Africa: in the 2nd century A.D. Apuleius, on the basis of certain passages of Eclogue VIII (v. 64 ff.), offers the first testimony (De magia, ch. 30) of the image of a magician Virgil, which found wide credence in the late empire, favored by the atmosphere of exaltation for occult practices that the syncretism between Roman paganism and the mystery religions of the East was creating, and was consolidated in the naive credulity of the Middle Ages, finding new vigor in the rise of a second myth, that of Virgil as prophet of Christ. At the beginning of the 4th century Lactantius, in the Divinae institutiones, attests for the first time the Christological interpretation of Eclogue IV, but in a millenarian sense, that is, referred to a second coming of Christ on earth. A few years later, however, Constantine himself, in the Easter Oration, delivered (if not written) by the Emperor after the Council of Nicaea, sanctioned with the authority of his high office the decidedly messianic meaning of the famous bucolic poem. It is interesting in this regard to note how the spread of this interpretation was contributed to, unwittingly, by St. Augustine himself, who, in admitting the possibility of divine inspiration in the Cumaean Sibyl, implicitly came to recognize it also in Virgil when he derived from that Sibyl the prophetic vision of the bucolic poem (cf. De civit. Dei, X, 27; Epist. 258, 5). The figure of Virgil the magician and of Virgil the prophet are from then on almost constantly confused, even if the fanciful episodes attributed to his intervention by a vigorous flowering of biographical anecdotes bring out now one aspect, now another. Still in the 4th and 5th centuries Africa remains the most fertile ground for the consolidation of these beliefs, with the legendary Passiones of the Alexandrian milieu and with the appearance of the first allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid in the De continentia Virgiliana of Fulgentius (probably a namesake and fellow-countryman of the famous Fulgentius of Ruspe [v.]), in which the poem is explained in a moralizing sense as a metaphor of human life. But already in the early Middle Ages and then down to the Renaissance the whole Western world offers new material to the legend of Virgil, favored, besides by the mentality proper to the age, by the subject matter of certain of his passages, destined to strike deeply the man of that age: first among them the palingenesis of Eclogue IV and the underworld of Aeneid VI. The glosses of the manuscripts give frequent examples of this and sometimes allow certain traditions to be localized (from Naples, to Gaul, to Ireland); the Mystery plays, especially French (Limoges, Laon), but also Italian (cf. the Lectio in Nativitatis nocte of Salerno), show the Roman poet in the procession of the Prophets and together with the Sibyl, probably drawing their original inspiration from a pseudo-Augustinian sermon (PL. 42, 1117 ff.); very many medieval treatises on alchemy are attributed outright to Virgil; chronicles, short poems, encyclopedias, romances bring new pieces to this phantasmagorical musician, culminating in the 12th century with the episodes narrated in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, with the moral allegory of the Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii of Bernard Silvestris, with the chivalric transposition of the Aeneid in the Roman d'Eneas.
With Dante the interpretation of the figure of Virgil shifts to another plane: while not disowning the medieval legend, the Alighieri raises the Virgilian allegory to poetic transfiguration (cf. Purgatorio, XXI, vv. 94-99) even when he alludes to the prophetic gifts of his « leader » (cf. ibid., XXVIII, vv. 139-44). But in the wholly particular imprint that Dante's genius impresses on the representation of Virgil it is also possible to recognize a motive destined to have a sequel in Petrarch's Africa and Canzone to Cola di Rienzo: that of the singer of Aeneas as a symbol of reawakened nationalism. The end of the Middle Ages dilutes the enthusiasm for Virgil the prophet: the Christological interpretation of Eclogue IV is rejected, besides by Petrarch and Boccaccio, by Benvenuto da Imola, who in the Chiuse virgiliane interprets the Bucolics as a historical allegory in which the life of their author is shadowed forth with moral significance. The Renaissance rediscovers in Virgil the poet, makes him the object of erudite lectiones (from A. Decembrio, to Pontano, to Scaliger, to Castelvetro), recreates his bucolic motifs in Boccaccio's Ameto or in Sannazzaro's Arcadia, studies his language and verse; but it does not free itself completely from the legend. The crystallization wrought by exegesis and medieval fantasy around the figure of Virgil will not be definitively broken except by the philological criticism of the last century: and perhaps with too much animosity, since while it is true that a representation of the poet of Rome as messianic prophet is absurd, it must not on the other hand be excluded that the fantastic images of that vision, which has its occasional motive in the birth of Pollio's son, sink their roots, through the Orphism of the mysteries of Sabazius, into Judaic prophetism.
Bibliography10 works
Alessandro Pratesi