Life and Times of Vergil

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Life and Times of Vergil
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Publius Vergilius Maro

• Sources Donatus, Servius, and Macrobius
• Born at Mantua Oct. 15th 70 B.C.
• Father was a farmer
• Educated at Cremona
• Continues studies at Milan, Naples and Rome
• Family Farm confiscated in 41 B.C.
• 2nd triumvirate confiscated land to give to
  veterans
• Died in Brundisium Sept. 21 19 B.C.
• Buried at Naples

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Literary Productions

• Vergil went to Rome, where he became a part of
  the literary circle patronized by Pollio,
  Maecenas and Augustus.
• Befriends Horace and introduces him to Maecenas
• Eclogues, or Bucolics (10), were completed in 37
  BC
• In these poems he idealizes rural life in the
  manner of his Greek predecessor Theocritus.
• Messianic 4th Eclogue to Pollio, who helped get
  his land back

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Georgics

• Georgics (4) published in 30 B.C.
• From the Eclogues, Vergil turned to rural poetry
  of a contrasting kind, realistic and didactic.
• In his Georgics, Vergil sought, as had the Greek
  Hesiod before him, to interpret the charm of real
  life and work on the farm.

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Aeneid I

• Aeneid
• Vergil devotes rest of life to Roman epic
• Works on poem for ten years, unfinished at his
  death
• Written in dactylic hexameters, though Vergil's
  death left the epic incomplete and some fifty
  lines unfinished.
• Dies at Brundisium Sept. 21 19 B.C.
• Requested that is be destroyed
• Augustus, who is with Vergil when he dies, sees
  to it that text is saved
• Varius and Tucca edit text.

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Aeneid II

• Influences
• Homer Odyssey, books 1-6 Iliad, books 7-12
  Homeric simile
• Livius Andronicus Odusia, translation of Odyssey
  in Saturnian verse
• Ennius Annales, first Latin epic in dactylic
  hexameter
• Catullus 66.39 and Aen. 6.606
• 12 books on foundation of Rome
• Celebration of mythical past and Augustan present
• Examination of leadership, conflict between
  desires and duties, relationship of individual to
  society
• Joins foundation myths of Aeneas and Romulus
• Aeneas as founder of Rome originates from Iliad
  20. prophecy of Poseidon
• Greeks identified Aeneas with Rome by fifth
  century

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Nachleben

• Immediate influence on other Roman Poets
• Basis of education along w/ Terence, Cicero,
  Sallust
• Lucan writes epic on Civil Wars, which rebels
  against political system of empire and epic style
  of Vergil
• Statius Thebaid
• Silius Italicus Punica

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Nachleben cont.

• Influence on medieval and renaissance poets
• Dante Commedia
• Especially the Inferno from book six of Aeneid
• John Milton Paradise Lost
• Countless other poets and writers
• Iuppiter omnipotens, audacibus adnue coeptis.
  Aen. 9.625
• Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. Ecl.
  4.5

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To Virgil Alfred Lord Tennyson

• Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the
  Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil's Death
• Roman Virgil, thou that singestIlion's lofty
  temples robed in fire,Ilion falling, Rome
  arising,wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre
• Landscape-lover, lord of languagemore than he
  that sang the Works and Days,All the chosen
  coin of fancyflashing out from many a golden
  phrase
• Thou that singest wheat and woodland,tilth and
  vineyard, hive and horse and herdAll the charm
  of all the Musesoften flowering in a lonely
  word
• Poet of the happy Tityruspiping underneath his
  beechen bowersPoet of the poet-satyrwhom the
  laughing shepherd bound with flowers

• Chanter of the Pollio, gloryingin the blissful
  years again to be,Summers of the snakeless
  meadow,unlaborious earth and oarless sea
• Thou that seest UniversalNature moved by
  Universal MindThou majestic in thy sadnessat
  the doubtful doom of human kind
• Light among the vanished agesstar that gildest
  yet this phantom shoreGolden branch amid the
  shadows,kings and realms that pass to rise no
  more
• Now thy Forum roars no longer,fallen every
  purple Caesar's dome - Tho' thine ocean-roll of
  rhythmsound for ever of Imperial Rome -
• Now the Rome of slaves hath perished,and the
  Rome of freemen holds her place,I, from out the
  Northern Islandsundered once from all the human
  race,
• I salute thee, Mantovano,I that loved thee
  since my day began,Wielder of the stateliest
  measureever moulded by the lips of man.