THE SAGES OF OLD LIVE AGAIN IN US.
GLANVILL
First issue of this Edition 1907.
Reprinted 1910.
Virgil—Publius Vergilius Maro—was born at Andes near Mantua, in theyear 70 B.C. His life was uneventful, though he lived in stirringtimes, and he passed by far the greater part of it in reading hisbooks and writing his poems, undisturbed by the fierce civil strifewhich continued to rage throughout the Roman Empire, until Octavian,who afterwards became the Emperor Augustus, defeated Antony at thebattle of Actium. Though his father was a man of humble origin, Virgilreceived an excellent education, first at Cremona and Milan, andafterwards at Rome. He was intimate with all the distinguished menof his time, and a personal friend of the Emperor. After thepublication of his second work, the Georgics, he was recognizedas being the greatest poet of his age, and the most striking figurein the brilliant circle of literary men, which was centred at theCourt. He died at Brindisi in the spring of 19 B.C. whilst returningfrom a journey to Greece, leaving his greatest work, the Aeneid,written but unrevised. It was published by his executors, andimmediately took its place as the great national Epic of the Romanpeople. Virgil seems to have been a man of simple, pure, and loveablecharacter, and the references to him in the works of Horace clearlyshow the affection with which he was regarded by his friends.
Like every cultivated Roman of that age, Virgil was a close studentof the literature and philosophy of the Greeks, and his poems beareloquent testimony to the profound impression made upon him by hisreading of the Greek poets. His first important work, the Eclogues,was directly inspired by the pastoral poems of Theocritus, from whomhe borrowed not only much of his imagery but even whole lines; inthe Georgics he took as his model the Works and Days of Hesiod,and though in the former case it must be confessed that he suffersfrom the weakness inherent in all imitative poetry, in the latterhe far surpasses the slow and simple verses of the Boeotian. But herewe must guard ourselves against a misapprehension. We moderns lookaskance at the writer who borrows without acknowledgment thethoughts and phrases of his forerunners, but the Roman critics ofthe Augustan Age looked at the matter from a different point of view.They regarded the Greeks as having set the standard of the highestpossible achievement in literature, and believed that it should bethe aim of every writer to be faithful, not only to the spirit, buteven to the letter of their great exemplars. Hence it was only naturalthat when Virgil essayed the task of writing the national Epic ofhis country, he should be studious to embody in his work all thatwas best in Greek Epic poetry.
It is difficult in criticizing Virgil to avoid comparing him to someextent with Homer. But though Virgil copied Homer freely, anycomparison between them is apt to be misleading. A primitive epic,like the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied, produced by an imaginativepeople at an early stage in its development, telling its storiessimply for the sake of story telling, cannot be judged by the samecanons of criticism as a literary epic like the Aeneid or ParadiseLost, which is the work of a great poet in an age of advanced culture,and sets forth a gr