Vergil - A Biography | Page 5

second consulship--a notice to all the world
that the triumvirate had been continued upon terms that made Julius the
arbiter of Rome's destinies.
That same year the boy left Cremona to finish his literary studies in
Milan, a city which was now threatening to outstrip Cremona in
importance and size. The continuation of his studies in the province
instead of at Rome seems to have been fortunate: the spirit of the
schools of the north was healthier. At Rome the undue insistence upon
a practical education, despite Cicero's protests, was hurrying boys into
classrooms of rhetoricians who were supposed to turn them into
finished public men at an early age; it was assumed that a political
career was every gentleman's business and that every young man of any

pretensions must acquire the art of speaking effectively and of
"thinking on his feet." The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and
of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered
about the technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study
was itself made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would
spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over
several years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed
on the parents, and the system of education suffered.
In the northern province, on the other hand, there was less demand for
studies leading directly to the forum. Moreover, some of the best
teachers were active there.[1] They were men of catholic tastes, who in
their lectures on literature ranged widely over the centuries of Greek
masters from Homer to the latest popular poets of the Hellenistic period
and over the Latin poets from Livius to Lucilius. Indeed, the young
men trained at Cremona and Milan between the days of Sulla and
Caesar were those who in due time passed on the torch of literary art at
Rome, while the Roman youths were being enticed away into rhetoric.
Vergil's remarkable catholicity of taste and his aversion to the cramping
technique of the rhetorical course are probably to be explained in large
measure, therefore, by his contact with the teachers of the provinces.
Vergil did not scorn Apollonius because Homer was revered as the
supreme master, and though the easy charm of Catullus taught him
early to love the "new poetry," he appreciated none the less the rugged
force of Ennius. Had his early training been received at Rome, where
pedant was pitted against pedant, where every teacher was forced by
rivalry into a partizan attitude, and all were compelled by material
demands to provide a "practical education," even Vergil's poetic spirit
might have been dulled.
[Footnote 1: Suetonius, De Gram. 3.]
How long Vergil remained at Milan we are not told; Donatus' paulo
post is a relative term that might mean a few months or a few years.
However, at the age of sixteen Vergil was doubtless ready for the
rhetorical course, and it is possible that he went to the great city as
early as 54 B.C., the very year of Catullus' death and of the publication
of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The brief biography of Vergil
contained in the Berne MS.--a document of doubtful value--mentions
Epidius as Vergil's teacher in rhetoric, and adds that Octavius, the

future emperor, was a fellow pupil. This is by no means unreasonable
despite a difference of seven years in the ages of the two pupils. Vergil
coming from the provinces entered rhetoric rather late in years, whereas
Octavius must have required the aid of a master of declamation early,
since at the age of twelve he prepared to deliver the laudatio funebris at
the grave of his grandmother. Thus the two may have met in Epidius'
lecture room in the year 50 B.C. Vergil could doubtless have afforded
tuition under such a master since he presently engaged the no less
distinguished Siro. We have the independent testimony of Suetonius
that Epidius was Octavius' and Mark Antony's teacher.
If Antony's style be a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a
rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style,[2] then still orthodox at
Rome. This school--except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for going
to extremes--had not yet been effectively challenged by the rising
generation of the chaster Atticists. Hortensius was still alive, and highly
revered, and Cicero had recently written his elaborate De Oratore in
which, with the apparent calmness of a still unquestioned authority, he
laid down the program of the writer of ornate prose who conceived it as
his chief duty to heed the claims of art. While not an out and out
Asianist he advocates the claims of the "grand-style," so pleasing to
senatorial audiences, with its well-balanced periods, carefully
modulated, nobly phrased, precisely cadenced, and pronounced with
dignity. To be sure, Calvus had already raised