Virgil {vur'-jil}

The great Roman poet Vergil (also spelled Virgil) was born Publius Vergilius Maro on Oct. 15, 70 BC, in Andes, a village near Mantua in northern Italy. Vergil spent his childhood on his father's farm and was educated at Cremona, Milan, and then Rome, where he studied rhetoric. There he met poets and statesmen who were to play an important part in his life. When civil war broke out in 49 BC, he retired to Naples where he studied philosophy with the Epicurean Siro.

Beginning in 45 BC, encouraged by the statesman Pollio, Vergil spent eight or ten years composing the Eclogues, which were greatly admired in literary circles. They were adapted to the stage as mimes, and thus made him a popular, if elusive, figure. After the publication of the Eclogues, Vergil joined the literary circle of Gaius Maecenas, which would later include the poets Horace and Propertius. Over a period of seven years he wrote the Georgics, a didactic poem on farming, described by the poet John Dryden as "the best Poem of the best Poet." The last years of Vergil's life were devoted to writing his epic poem, the Aeneid. He died in Brundisium on Sept. 21, 19 BC, after catching a fever on a trip to Greece and Asia, during which he had intended to complete the Aeneid. Before setting out on the voyage, Vergil had asked that the Aeneid be destroyed if anything should happen to him before the poem was complete, but the emperor Augustus overturned the request and had it published. (Also attributed to Vergil in his youth is a collection of poems known as the Appendix Vergiliana. The authenticity of most of these poems is now disputed or rejected.)

The Eclogues, written from 45 to 37 (or 35) BC, were praised for the quiet beauty and charm with which they captured the pastoral landscape. Vergil arranged these ten poems to fit the design of the book as a whole, a new development in poetry. Poems of Theocritus provide a model for some of Vergil's Eclogues, which depict an idyllic Arcadia, with Roman political concerns and real people in pastoral guise intruding on the peaceful setting. The fourth Eclogue prophesies a new golden age that will begin with the birth of an unnamed child. The sixth is a unique blend of cosmology and myths.

The Georgics, written from 36 to 29 BC, is a didactic poem in four books purporting to teach farming. The poem's overall plan is summed up in the opening lines: what to plant and when, the cultivation of trees, especially the vine, and of livestock, and the art of beekeeping. The influence of Hesiod, Aratus, Callimachus, Varro, and Lucretius, as well as other poets in lesser degree, is evident in the poem. Vergil weaves together his diverse materials into a stunning creation that has been compared by many to a musical composition. Masterfully balancing the somber and the joyous, he evokes a love of the land that has seldom, if ever, been matched. Italy emerges as the "Saturnian land," fertile and varied in its produce, the beautiful land over which Saturnus ruled during the golden age. The horror of disease, embodied in the ravages of a plague, is relieved by the picture of the light and joyous bees, whose cultivation is said to have resulted from the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. (Vergil's poem is the classic formulation of the details of this myth.) The poem ends with Aristaeus appeasing the offended deities and in the process discovering the art of beekeeping.

The Aeneid ("the story of Aeneas"), written from 26 to 19 BC, became the national epic and established Vergil, with Homer, as one of the great epic poets. Roman poets before Vergil, including Naevius and Ennius, had already written of Aeneas's adventures. Vergil succeeded in unifying around the figure of Aeneas the theme of Homer's Odyssey (the search for a new home) in the first six books and that of the Iliad (the war and final reconciliation of the Trojans and the Latins) in the last six books, with multiple correspondences between the two halves.

Vergil's greatness was recognized in his own lifetime, soon after which the Aeneid was made a standard school text. In subsequent ages Vergil was viewed as the supreme poet, orator, philosopher, prophet, and theologian. Copies of the Aeneid were placed in temples for consultation. In 4th-century Rome the pagan opposition to the church used Vergil as its Bible, and Fulgentius turned the Aeneid into an allegory of the stages of human life. Dante made Vergil his guide in the Divine Comedy. More recent scholarship has emphasized the continuity of Vergil's work, his art of cumulative imagery, his use of language, and the music of his hexameters: "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" (Tennyson).

Patricia A. Johnston

Bibliography: Commager, S., ed., Virgil (1966); Johnson, W. R., Darkness Visible (1976); Johnston, P. A., Vergil's Agricultural Golden Age (1980); Leach, E. W., Vergil's Eclogues (1974); Miles, G. B., Virgil's Georgics (1980); Otis, B., Virgil (1963); Pavlock, B., Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition (1990); Perkell, C., The Poet's Truth (1989); Putnam, M. C. J., Virgil's Pastoral Art (1979) and Virgil's Poem of the Earth (1970).

(c) 1996 Grolier, Inc.