Vergil - A Biography | Page 2

The
evidence cannot be mustered into a compelling conclusion, but it may
be worth while to reject the improbable suppositions.
The name tells little. Vergilius is a good Italic nomen found in all parts
of the peninsula,[1] but Latin names came as a matter of course with
the gift of citizenship or of the Latin status, and Mantua with the rest of
Cisalpine Gaul had received the Latin status nineteen years before
Vergil's birth. The cognomen Maro is in origin a magistrate's title used
by Etruscans and Umbrians, but cognomina were a recent fashion in the
first century B.C. and were selected by parents of the middle classes
largely by accident.
[Footnote 1: Braunholz, The Nationality of Vergil, Classical Review,
1915, 104 ff.]
Vergil himself, a good antiquarian, assures us that in the heroic age
Mantua was chiefly Etruscan with enclaves of two other peoples

(presumably Umbrians and Venetians). In this he is doubtless following
a fairly reliable tradition, accepted all the more willingly because of his
intimacy with Maecenas, who was of course Etruscan:[2]
Mantua dives avis, sed non genus omnibus unum, Gens illis triplex,
populi sub gente quaterni, Ipsa caput populis; Tusco de sanguine vires.
[Footnote 2: Aeneid, X, 201-3.]
Pliny seems to have supposed this passage a description of Mantua in
Vergil's own day: Mantua Tuscorum trans Padum sola reliqua (III. 130).
That could hardly have been Vergil's meaning, however; for the Celts
who flooded the Po Valley four centuries before drove all before them
except in the Venetian marshes and the Ligurian hills. They could not
have left an Etruscan stronghold in the center of their path. Vergil was
probably not Etruscan.
The case for a Celtic origin is equally improbable. From the time when
the Senones burned Rome in 390 B.C. till Caesar conquered Gaul, the
fear of invasions from this dread race never slumbered. During the
weary years of the Punic war when Hannibal drew his fresh recruits
from the Po Valley, the determination grew ever stronger that the Alps
should become Rome's barrier line on the North. Accordingly the
pacification of the Transpadane region continued with little
intermission until Polybius[3] could say two generations before Vergil's
birth that the Gauls had practically been driven out of the Po Valley,
and that they then held but a few villages in the foothills of the Alps. If
this be true, the open country of Mantua must have had but few
survivors. And the few that remained were not often likely to have the
privilege of intermarrying with the Roman settlers who filled the
vacuum. Romans were too proud of their citizenship to intermarry with
peregrini and raise children who must by Roman laws forego the
dignities of citizenship.[4]
[Footnote 3: Polybius, II. 35, 4 (written about 140 B.C.).]
[Footnote 4: Ulpian, Dig. V. 8, ex peregrino et cive Romano,
peregrinus nascitur.]
A Celtic strain of romance has been from time to time claimed for
Vergil's poetry, though those who employ such terms seldom agree in
their definition of them. His romanticism may be more easily explained
by his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic
traits--whatever they may be--by the close racial affiliations between

Celts and Italians, vouched for by anthropologists. But the difficulty of
applying the test of the "Celtic temperament" lies in the fact that there
are apparently now no true representatives of the Celtic race from
whom to establish a criterion. The peoples that have longest preserved
dialects of the Celtic languages appear from anthropometric researches
to contain a dominant strain of a different race, perhaps that of the
pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Western Europe. It may be, therefore,
that what Arnoldians now refer to the "Celts" is after all not Celtic. At
best it is unsafe to search for racial traits in the work of genius; in this
instance it would but betray loose thinking.
The assumption of Celtic origin is, therefore, hazardous.[5] There is,
however, a strong likelihood that Vergil's forbears were among the
Roman and Latin colonists who went north in search of new homes
during the second century B.C. Vergil's father was certainly a Roman
citizen, for none but a citizen could have sent his son to Rome to
prepare for a political career. Mantua indeed, a "Latin" town after 89
B.C., did not become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it,
but Vergil's father, according to the eighth Catalepton, had earlier in
his life lived in Cremona. That city was colonized by Roman citizens in
218 B.C. and recolonized in 190, and though the colonists were
reduced to the "Latin status," the magistrates of the town and their
descendants secured citizenship from the beginning, and finally in 89
B.C. the whole colony received full citizenship. But quite apart from
this, all of Cisalpine Gaul,