Vergil - A Biography | Page 4

young man rising successfully from the business
or industrial classes to a career in public life except through the
abnormal accidents provided by the civil wars. Presumably, therefore,
Vergil's father belonged to a landholding family with some honors of
municipal service to his credit.
[Footnote 6: Donatus, 15; Ciris, l.2; Catal. V.; Seneca, Controv. III.
praef. 8.]
Of the poet's physical traits we have no very satisfactory description or
likeness. He was tall, dark and rawboned, retaining through life the
appearance of a countryman, according to Donatus. He also suffered,
says the same writer, the symptoms that accompany tuberculosis. The
reliability of this rather inadequate description is supported by a
second-century portrait of the poet done in a crude pavement mosaic
which has been found in northern Africa.[7] To be sure the technique is
so faulty that we cannot possibly consider this a faithful likeness. But
we may at least say that the person represented--a man of perhaps
forty-five--was tall and loose-jointed, and that his countenance, with its

broad brow, penetrating eye, firm nose and generous mouth and chin, is
distinctly represented as drawn and emaciated.
[Footnote 7: See Monuments Piot. 1897, pl. xx; Atene e Roma, 1913,
opp. p. 191.]
There is also an unidentified portrait in a half dozen mediocre replicas
representing a man of twenty-five or thirty years which some
archaeologists are inclined to consider a possible representation of
Vergil.[8] It is the so-called "Brutus." The argument for its attribution
deserves serious consideration. The bust, while it shows a far younger
man than the African mosaic, reveals the same contour of countenance,
of brow, nose, cheeks and chin. Furthermore it is difficult to think of
any other Roman in private life who attained to such fame that six
marble replicas of his portrait should have survived the omnivorous
lime-kilns of the dark ages. The Barrocco museum of Rome has a very
lifelike replica[9] of this type in half-relief. Though its firm, dry
workmanship seems to be of a few decades later than Vergil's youth it
may well be a fairly faithful copy of one of the first busts of Vergil
made at the time when the Eclogues had spread his fame through
Rome.
[Footnote 8: See British School _Cat. of the Mus. Capitolino_, p. 355;
Bernoulli, _Röm. Ikonographie_, I, 187, Helbig,'3 I, no. 872.]
[Footnote 9: Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture plate, CIX; Hekler, Greek
and Roman Portraits, 188 a. The antiquity of this marble has been
questioned.]
A land of sound constitutions, mentally and physically, was the frontier
region in which Vergil grew to manhood; and had it not later been
drained of its sturdy citizenry by the civil wars and recolonized by the
wreckage of those wars it would have become Italy's mainstay through
the Empire. The earlier Romans and Latins who had first accepted
colonial allotments or had migrated severally there for over a century
were of sterner stuff than the indolent remnants that had drifted to the
city's corn cribs. These frontiersmen had come while the Italic stock
was still sound, not yet contaminated by the freedmen of Eastern
extraction. Cities like Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the
puritanic ideals of Cato's day than Rome itself. The clear expressive
diction of Catullus' lyrics, full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social
ideals of Vergil's Georgics, the buoyant idealism of the Aeneid and of

Livy's annals speak the true language of these people. It is not
surprising then that in Vergil's youth it is a group of
fellow-provincials--returning sons of Rome's former emigrants--that
take the lead in the new literary movements. They are vigorous, clever
young men, excellently educated, free from the city's binding
traditionalism, well provided also, many of them, with worldly goods
acquired in the new rich country. Such were Catullus of Verona, Varius
Rufus, Quintilius Varus, Furius, and Alfenus of Cremona, Caecilius of
Comum, Helvius Cinna apparently of Brescia, and Valerius Cato who
somehow managed to inspire in so many of them a love for poetry.

II
SCHOOL AND WAR
To Cremona, Vergil was sent to school. Caesar, the governor of the
province, was now conquering Gaul, and as Cremona was the foremost
provincial colony from which Caesar could recruit legionaries, the
school boys must have seen many a maniple march off to the
battle-fields of Belgium. Those boys read their Bellum Gallicum in the
first edition, serial publication. When we remember the devotion of
Caesar's soldiers to their leader, we can hardly be surprised at the poet's
lasting reverence for the great imperator. He must have seen the man
himself, also, for Cremona was the principal point in the court circuit
that Caesar traveled during the winters between his
campaigns--whenever the Gauls gave him respite.
The toga virilis Vergil assumed at fifteen, the year that Pompey and
Crassus entered upon their