was a religious consecration of all his powers of heart, mind and spirit to his high office.
Virgil’s fame as a poet rests on the three acknowledged works of his early and mature manhood—the pastoral poems or Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid—all written in that hexameter verse which Tennyson has called
“The stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”
The pastoral poems or Eclogues—a word denoting short selected pieces—were composed between the years 42 and 37 B.C., when Virgil was between the age of twenty-eight and thirty three. By his invocation to the “Sicelides Musae” and “Arethusa,” and by many other indications, he avows the purpose of eliciting from the strong Latin language the melody which theEclogues. “Sicilian shepherd” drew out of the “Doric reed,” and of expressing that tender feeling for the beauty of Italian scenes which Theocritus had expressed for the beauty of Sicily.
The earliest poems in the series were the second, third and fifth, and these, along with the seventh, are the most purely Theocritean in character. The first and ninth, which probably were next in order, are much more Italian in sentiment, are much more an expression of the poet’s own feelings, and have a much more direct reference both to his own circumstances and the circumstances of the time. The first is a true poetical reflex of the distress and confusion which arose out of the new distribution of lands, and blends the poet’s own deep love of his home, and of the sights and sounds familiar to him from childhood, with his Italian susceptibility to the beauty of nature. The ninth is immediately connected in subject with the first. It contains the lines which seem accurately to describe the site of Virgil’s farm, at the point where the range of hills which accompany the river for some distance from the foot of the Lago di Garda sinks into the plain about 14 or 15 m. above Mantua. The sixth is addressed to Varus, who succeeded Pollio as governor of the Cisalpine district. Its theme is the creation of the world (according to the Epicurean cosmogony), and the oldest tales of mythology.[1] The fourth and eighth are both closely associated with the name of Virgil’s earliest protector, Pollio. The fourth celebrates the consulship of his patron in 40 B.C., and also the prospective birth of a child, though it was disputed in antiquity, and still is disputed, who was meant by this child whose birth was to be coincident with the advent of the new era, and who, after filling the other great offices of state, was to “rule with his father’s virtues the world at peace.” [2] The main purpose of the poem, however, is to express the longing of the world for a new era of peace and happiness, of which the treaty of Brundisium seemed to hold out some definite hopes. There is no trace in this poem of Theocritean influence. The ideas are derived partly from Greek representations of the Golden Age, and partly, it is supposed, from the later Sibylline prophecies, circulated after the burning in the time of Sulla of the old Sibylline books, and possibly tinged with Jewish ideas. Some of the phraseology of the poem led to a belief in the early Christian church that Virgil had been an unconscious instrument of inspired prophecy. The date of the eighth is fixed by a reference to the campaign of Pollio against-the Dalmatians in 39 B.C.. It is founded on the Φρμαλεντρια of Theocritus, but brings before us, with Italian associations, two love tales of homely Italian life. The tenth reproduces the Daphnis of Theocritus, and is a dirge over the unhappy love of Gallus and Lycoris. As in the other poems, the second and eighth, of which love is the burden, it is to the romantic and fantastic melancholy which the passion assumes in certain natures that Virgil gives a voice.
There is no important work in Latin literature, with the exception of the comedy of Terence, so imitative as the Eclogues. But they are not, like the comedies of Terence, purely exotic as well as imitative. They are rather composite, partly Greek and partly Italian, and, as a vehicle for the expression of feeling, hold an undefined place between the objectivity of the Greek idyll and the subjectivity of the Latin elegy. For the most part, they express the sentiment inspired by the beauty of the world, and the kindred sentiment inspired by the charm of human relationships. Virgil’s susceptibility to the beauty of nature appears in the truth with which his Work suggests the charm of Italy—the fresh life of an Italian spring, the delicate hues of the wild flowers and the quiet beauty of the pastures and orchards of his native district. The representative character of the poems is enhanced by the fidelity and grace with which he has expressed the Italian peasant’s love of his home and of all things associated with it. The supreme charm of the diction and rhythm is universally recognized. The power of varied harmony is as conspicuous in Virgil’s earliest poems as in the maturer and more elaborate workmanship of the Georgics and Aeneid. The Italian language, without sacrifice of the fulness, strength and majesty of its tones, acquired a more tender grace and more liquid flow from the gift—the “molle atque facetum”—which the muses of country life bestowed on Virgil.
But these Muses had a more serious and dignified function to fulfil than that of glorifying the picturesque pastime, the “otia dia,” of rural life. The Italian imagination formed an ideal of the happiness of a country life nobler than that of passive susceptibility to the sights and sounds of the outward world. It is stated that Maecenas, acting on the principle of employing the poetsGeorgics. of the time in favour of the conservative and restorative policy of the new government, directed the genius of Virgil to the subject of the Georgics. No object could be of more consequence in the eyes of a statesman whose master inherited the policy of the popular leaders than the revival of the great national industry, associated with happier memories of Rome, which had fallen into abeyance owing to the long unsettlement of the revolutionary era as well as to other causes. Virgil’s previous life and associations made it natural for him to identify himself with this object, while his genius fitted him to enlist the imagination of his countrymen in its favour. It would be a most inadequate view of his purpose to suppose that, like the Alexandrian poets or the didactic poets of modern times, he desired merely to make useful information more attractive by the aid of verse. His aim was rather to describe with realistic fidelity, and to surround with an atmosphere of poetry, the annual round of labour in which the Italian yeoman’s life was passed; to bring out the intimate relation with nature into which man was brought in the course of that life, and to suggest the delight to heart and imagination which he drew from it; to contrast the simplicity, security and sanctity of such a life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate the ideal of a life of rustic labour with the beauties of Italy and the glories of Rome. This larger conception of the dignity of his subject separates the didactic poem of Virgil from all other didactic, as distinct from philosophic, poems. He has produced in the Georgics a new type of didactic, as in the Aeneid he has produced a new type of epic poetry.
The subject is treated in four books, varying in length from 514 to 566 lines. The first treats of the tillage of the fields, of the constellations, the rise and setting of which form the farmer’s calendar, and of the signs of the weather, on which the success of his labours largely depends. The second treats of trees, and especially of the vine and olive, two great staples of the national wealth and industry of Italy; the third of the rearing of herds and flocks and the breeding of horses; the fourth of bees.
As he had found in Theocritus a model for the form in which his idler fancies were expressed, he turned to an older page in Greek literature for the outline of the form in which his graver interest in rural affairs was to find its outlet. The Works and Days of Hesiod could not supply an adequate mould for the systematic treatment of all the processes of rural industry, and still less for the treatment of the larger ideas to which this was subsidiary, yet that Virgil considered him as his prototype is shown by the line which concludes one of the cardinal episodes of the poem—
“Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.”
Virgil accepts also the guidance of the Alexandrian poets who treated the science of their day—astronomy, natural history and geography—in the metre and diction of epic poetry. But, in availing himself of the work of the Alexandrians, Virgil is like a great master making use of mechanical assistants. A more powerful influence on the form, ideas, sentiment and diction of the Georgics was exercised by the great philosophical poem of Lucretius, of which Virgil had probably been a diligent student since the time of its first appearance, and with which his mind was saturated when he was engaged in the composition of the Georgics. Virgil is at once attracted and repelled by the genius and attitude of the philosophic poet. He is possessed by his imaginative conception of nature, as a living, all-pervading power; he shares his Italian love of the beauty of the world, and his sympathy with animal as well as human life. He recognizes with enthusiasm his contemplative elevation above the petty interests and passions of life. But he is repelled by his apparent separation from the ordinary beliefs, hopes and fears of his fellow-men Virgil is in thorough sympathy with the best restorative tendencies—religious, social and national—of his time; Lucretius was driven into isolation by the anarchic and dissolving forces of his. So far as any speculative idea underlying the details of the Georgics can be detected, it is one of which the source can be traced to Lucretius—the idea of the struggle of human force with the forces of nature. In Virgil this idea is modified by Italian piety and by the Italian delight in the results of labour. In the general plan of the poem Virgil follows the guidance of Lucretius rather than that of any Greek model. The distinction between a poem addressed to national and one addressed to philosophical sympathies is marked by the prominence assigned in the one poem to Caesar as the supreme personality of the age, in the other to Epicurus as the supreme master in the realms of mind. The invocation to the “Di agrestes,” to the old gods of mythology and art, to the living Caesar as the latest power added to the pagan Pantheon, is both a parallel and a contrast to the invocation to the all-pervading principle of life, personified as “Alma Venus.” In the systematic treatment of his materials, and the interspersion of episodes dealing with the deeper poetical and human interest of the subject. Virgil adheres to the practice of the older poet. He uses his connecting
