Chapter 6

To the biographer, however, the passage praising Messalla's Greek pastorals is the most interesting for it reveals clearly how Vergil came to make the momentous decision of writing pastorals. Since Messalla's verses were in Greek they had, of course, been written two years before this while he was a student at Athens. Would that we knew this heroine upon whom he represents the divinities as bestowing gifts! Propertius, who acknowledged Mesalla as his patron later employed this same motive of celestial adoration in honor of Cynthia (II. 3, 25), but surely Messalla's _herois_ was, to judge from Vergil's comparison, a person of far higher station than Cynthia. Could she have been the lady he married upon his return from Athens? Such a treatment of a woman of social station would be in line with the customs of the "new poets," Catullus, Calvus, and Ticidas, rather than of the Augustans, Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Vergil himself used the motive in the second _Eclogue_ (l. 46), a reminiscence which, doubtless with many others that we are unable to trace, Messalla must have recognized as his own.

The pastoral which Vergil had translated from Messalla is quite fully described:

Molliter hic _viridi patulae sub tegmine quercus_ Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant, Dulcia jactantes alterno carmina versu Qualia Trinacriae doctus amat iuvenis.

That is, of course, the very beginning of his own _Eclogues_. When he published them he placed at the very beginning the well-known line that recalled Messalla's own line:

Tityre, tu _patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi_.

What can this mean but a graceful reminder to Messalla that it was he who had inspired the new effort?[3]

[Footnote 3: Roman writers frequently observed the graceful custom of acknowledging their source of inspiration by weaving in a recognizable phrase or line from the master into the very first sentence of a new work: cf. _Arma virumque cano_--[Greek: Andra moi ennepe] (Lundström, _Eranos_, 1915, p. 4). Shelley responding to the same impulse paraphrased Bion's opening lines in "I weep for Adonais--he is dead."]

We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his _Eclogues_ is a recognition of Messalla's influence. Conversely it is proof, if proof were needed, that the ninth _Catalepton_ is Vergil's. We may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth _Catalepton:_

pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas,

as a statement that in the autumn of 42, Vergil had already written some of his _Eclogues_, and that these early ones--presumably at least numbers II, III, and VII--contain suggestions from Messalla.

There was, of course, no triumph, and Vergil's eulogy was never sent, indeed it probably never was entirely completed.[4] Messalla quickly made his peace with the triumvirs, and, preferring not to return to Rome in disgrace, cast his lot with Antony who remained in the East. Vergil, who thoroughly disliked Antony, must then have felt that for the present, at least, a barrier had been raised between him and Messalla. Accordingly the _Ciris_ also was abandoned and presently pillaged for other uses.

[Footnote 4: It ought, therefore, not to be used seriously in discussions of Vergil's technique.]

The news of Philippi was soon followed by orders from Octavian--to be thoroughly accurate we ought of course to call him Caesar--that lands must now, according to past pledges, be procured in Italy for nearly two hundred thousand veterans. Every one knew that the cities that had favored the liberators, and even those that had tried to preserve their neutrality, would suffer. Vergil could, of course, guess that lands in the Po Valley would be in particular demand because of their fertility. The first note of fear is found in his eighth _Catalepton_:

Villula, quae Sironis eras, et pauper agelle, Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae, Me tibi et hos una mecum, quos semper amavi, Si quid de patria tristius audiero, Commendo imprimisque patrem: tu nunc eris illi Mantua quod fuerat quodque Cremona prius.

It is usually assumed from this passage that Siro had recently died, probably, therefore, some time in 42 B.C., and that, in accordance with a custom frequently followed by Greek philosophers at Rome, he had left his property to his favorite pupil. The garden school, therefore, seems to have come to an end, though possibly Philodemus may have continued it for the few remaining years of his life. Siro's villa apparently proved attractive to Vergil, for he made Naples his permanent home, despite the gift of a house on the Esquiline from Maecenas.

This, however, is not Vergil's last mention of Siro, if we may believe Servius, who thinks that "Silenum" in the sixth _Eclogue_ stands for "Sironem," its metrical equivalent. If, as seems wholly likely, Servius is right, the sixth _Eclogue_ is a fervid tribute to a teacher who deserves not to be forgotten in the story of Vergil's education. The poem has been so strangely misinterpreted in recent years that it is time to follow out Servius' suggestion and see whether it does not lead to some conclusions.[5]

[Footnote 5: Skutsch roused a storm of discussion over it by insisting that it was a catalogue of poems written by Gallus (_Aus Vergils Frühzeit_.) Cartault, _Étude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile_ (p. 285), almost accepts Servius' suggestion: "un résumé de ses lectures et de ses études."]

After an introduction to Varus the poem tells how two shepherds found Silenus off his guard, bound him, and demanded songs that he had long promised. The reader will recall, of course, how Plato also likened his teacher Socrates to Silenus. Silenus sang indeed till hills and valleys thrilled with the music: of creation of sun and moon, the world of living things, the golden age, and of the myths of Prometheus, Phaeton, Pasiphaë, and many others; he even sang of how Gallus had been captured by the Muses and been made a minister of Apollo.

A strange pastoral it has seemed to many! And yet not so strange when we bear in mind that the books of Philodemus reveal Vergil and Quintilius Varus as fellow students at Naples. Surely Servius has provided the key. The whole poem, with its references to old myths, is merely a rehearsal of schoolroom reminiscences, as might have been guessed from the fine Lucretian rhythms with which it begins:

Namque canebat, uti magnum per inane coacta Semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent Et liquidi simul ignis; ut his exordia primis Omnia et ipse tener mundi concreverit orbis; Tum durare solum et discludere Nerea ponto Coeperit, et rerum paulatim sumere formas; Iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem. Altius atque cadant summotis nubibus imbres; Incipiant silvae cum primum surgere, cumque Rara per ignaros errent animalia montis.

The myths that follow are meant to continue this list of subjects, only with somewhat less blunt obviousness. They suggested to Varus the usual Epicurean theories of perception, imagination, passion, and mental aberrations, subjects that Siro must have discussed in some such way as Lucretius treated them in his third and fourth books of the _De Rerum Natura_.

It is, of course, not to be supposed that Siro had lectured upon mythology as such. But the Epicurean teachers, despite their scorn for legends, employed them for pedagogical purposes in several ways. Lucretius, for instance, uses them sometimes for their picturesqueness, as in the _prooemium_ and again in the allegory of the seasons (V. 732). He also employs them in a Euhemeristic fashion, explaining them as popular allegories of actual human experiences, citing the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, as expressions of the ever-present dread of punishment for crimes. Indeed Vergil himself in the _Aetna_--if it be his--somewhat naïvely introduced the battle of the giants for its picturesque interest. It is only after he had enjoyed telling the story in full that he checked himself with the blunt remark:

(1. 74) Haec est mendosae vulgata licentia famae.

Lucretius is little less amusing in his rejection of the Cybele myth, after a lovely passage of forty lines (II, 600) devoted to it.

Vergil was, therefore, on familiar ground when he tried to remind his schoolmate of Siro's philosophical themes by designating each of them by means of an appropriate myth. Perhaps we, who unlike Varus have not heard the original lectures, may not be able in every case to discover the theme from the myth, but the poet has at least set us out on the right scent by making the first riddles very easy. The _lapides Pyrrhae_ (I. 41) refer of course to the creation of man; _Saturnia regna_ is, in Epicurean lore, the primitive life of the early savages; _furtum Promethei_ (I. 42) must refer to Epicurus' explanation of how fire came from clashing trees and from lightning. The story of Hylas (I. 43) probably reminded Varus of Siro's lecture on images and reflection, Pasiphaë (I. 46) of unruly passions, explained perhaps as in Lucretius' fourth book, Atalanta (I. 61) of greed, and Phaeton of ambition. As for Scylla, Vergil had himself in the _Ciris_ (I. 69) mentioned, only to reject, the allegorical interpretation here presented, according to which she portrays:

"the sin of lustfulness and love's incontinence."

Vergil had not then met Siro, but he may have read some of his lectures.

Finally, the strange lines on Cornelius Gallus might find a ready explanation if we knew whether or not Gallus had also been a member of the Neapolitan circle. Probus, if we may believe him, suggests the possibility in calling him a schoolmate of Vergil's, and a plausible interpretation of this eclogue turns that possibility into a probability. The passage (II. 64-73) may well be Vergil's way of recalling to Varus a well-beloved fellow-student who had left the circle to become a poet.

The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil's life in Siro's garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school closed, and Varus gone off to war. The younger man's school days are now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla's experiments had drawn him. The _Eclogues_ are already appearing in rapid succession.

IX

MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY

It has been remarked that Vergil's genius was of slow growth; he was twenty-eight before he wrote any verses that his mature judgment recognized as worthy of publication. A survey of his early life reveals some of the reasons for this tardy development. Born and schooled in a province he was naturally held back by lack of those contacts which stimulate boys of the city to rapid mental growth. The first few years at Rome were in some measure wasted upon a subject for which he had neither taste nor endowment. The banal rhetorical training might indeed have made a Lucan or a Juvenal out of him had he not finally revolted so decisively. However, this work at Rome proved not to be a total loss. His choice of a national theme for an epic and his insight into the true qualities of imperial Rome owe something to the study of political questions that his preparation for a public career had necessitated. He learned something in his Roman days that not even Epicurean scorn for politics could eradicate.

However, his next decision, to devote his life to philosophy, again retarded his poetic development. Certainly it held him in leash during the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The _Aetna_ shows perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic insistence that myths must now give way to facts. Its author was still too absorbed in the microscopic analysis of a petty piece of research to catch the spirit of Lucretius who had found in the visions of the scientific workshop a majesty and beauty that partook of the essence of poetry.

In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to Epicureanism than modern critics--too often obsessed by a misapplied _odium philosophicum_--have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its attitude towards art banal. But that is not a sound historical method of approach. The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how, when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.

The system, despite its inadequate first answers, employed a scientific method that gave the Romans faith in many of its results, just at a time when orthodox mythology had yielded before the first critical inspection. As a preliminary system of illumination it proved invaluable. Untrained in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naïve faith. Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by two centuries of skeptics. The Epicurean at least kept his feet on the ground, appealed to the practical man's faith in his own senses, and plausibly propped his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic. He rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of metaphysical reasoning. He came with a gospel of illumination to a race eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously created by processes that the average man beheld in his daily walks.

It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination, to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions, and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as unscientific.

[Footnote 1: It is not quite accurate to say that the Romans made a dogma of Epicurus' _ipse dixit_ which destroyed scientific open-mindedness. Vergil uses Posidonius and Zeno as freely as the Stoic Seneca does Epicurus.]

Furthermore, Epicureanism provided a view of nature which was apt in the minds of an imaginative poet to lead toward romanticism. Stoicism indeed pretended to be pantheistic, and Wordsworth has demonstrated the value to romanticism of that attitude. But to the clear of vision Stoicism immediately took from nature with one hand what it had given with the other. Invariably, its rule of "follow nature" had to be defined in terms that proved its distrust of what the world called nature. As a matter of fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec, peccat!" cries Persius in terror.

The earlier naïve animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the wealth of ancient myths. But the nymphs of that stream were dead, slain by philosophical questioning. The new poetic myth-making that still showed the influence of an old habit of mind was apt to be rather self-conscious and diffident, ending in something resembling the pathetic fallacy.

Epicureanism on the other hand by employing the theory of evolution was able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of romance became possible only upon the discovery of that unity. This is doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our day.

Nam simulac species patefactast verna diei ... Aëriae primum volucres te diva tuumque Significant initum perculsae corda tua vi, Inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta.

Vergil, convinced by the same philosophy, expresses himself similarly:

Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres amor omnibus idem.

And again:

Avia tum resonant avibus virgulta canoris Et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus Parturit almus ager Zepherique trementibus auris Laxant arva sinus.

It is, of course, the theme of "Sumer is icumen in." Lucretius feels so strongly the unity of naturally evolved creation that he never hesitates to compare men of various temperaments with animals of sundry natures--the fiery lion, the cool-tempered ox--and explain the differences in both by the same preponderance of some peculiar kind of "soul-atoms."

Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man's mental horizon and sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use. Like the crude evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau's day, it gave one a more soundly based sympathy for one's fellows--since evolution was not yet "red in tooth and claw." If nature was to be trusted, why not man's nature? Why curse the body, any man's body, as the root-ground of sin? Were not the instincts a part of man? Might not the scientific view prove that the passions so far from being diseases, conditioned the very life and survival of the race? Perhaps the evils of excess, called sin, were after all due to defects in social and political institutions that had applied incorrect regulative principles, or to the selfishly imposed religious fears which had driven the healthy instincts into tantrums. Rid man of these erroneous fears and of a political system begot for purposes of exploitation and see whether by returning to an age of primitive innocence he cannot prove that nature is trustworthy.[2]

[Footnote 2: Lucretius, III, 37-93; II, 23-39; V, 1105-1135.]

There is in this philosophy then a basis for a large humanitarianism, dangerous perhaps in its implications. And yet it could hardly have been more perilous than the Roman orthodox religion which insisted only upon formal correctness, seldom upon ethical decorum, or than Stoicism with its categorical imperative, which could restrain only those who were already convinced. The Stoic pretence of appealing to a natural law could be proved illogical at first examination, when driven to admit that "nature" must be explained by a question-begging definition before its rule could be applied.

Indeed the Romans of Vergil's day had not been accustomed to look for ethical sanctions in religion or creed. Morality had always been for them a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum, legal doctrine regarding the universality of _aequitas_, and, more than they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock. It probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard. Cicero, as statesman, does; but the question had doubtless come to him first out of the literature of the Academy which he was wont to read. Despite their creed, Lucretius and Vergil are indeed Rome's foremost apostles of Righteousness; and if anyone had pressed home the charge of possible moral weakness in their system they might well have pointed to the exemplary life of Epicurus and many of his followers. To the Romans this philosophy brought a creed of wide sympathies with none of the "lust for sensation" that accompanied its return in the days of Rousseau and "Werther." Had not the old Roman stock, sound in marrow and clear of eye, been shattered by wars and thinned out by emigration, only to be displaced by a more nervous and impulsive people that had come in by the slave trade, Roman civilization would hardly have suffered from the application of the doctrines of Epicurus.

Whether or not Vergil remained an Epicurean to the end, we must, to be fair, give credit to that philosophy for much that is most poetical in his later work,--a romantic charm in the treatment of nature, a deep comprehension of man's temper, a broader sympathy with humanity and a clearer understanding of the difference between social virtue and mere ritualistic correctness than was to be expected of a Roman at this time.

It is, however, very probable that Vergil remained on the whole faithful to this creed[3] to the very end. He was forty years of age and only eleven years from his death when he published the _Georgics_, which are permeated with the Epicurean view of nature; and the restatement of this creed in the first book of the _Aeneid_ ought to warn us that his faith in it did not die.

[Footnote 3: This is, of course, not the view of Sellar, Conington, Glover, and Norden,--to mention but a few of those who hold that Vergil became a Stoic. See chapter XV for a development of this view.]

X

RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI

The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at home. Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil's pastorals who can take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible hidden meanings that lie in them. But the biographer may not share that pleasure. The _Eclogues_ were soon burdened with comments by critics who sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity of an unannaled provincial life. In their eager search for data they forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author. The modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a little of the allegory that obscures the text.

It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not themselves consistent. Those early commentators who variously place the confiscation of Vergil's farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.), after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province that did not exist, may state some real facts: they certainly hazard many futile guesses. The safest way is to trust these records only when they harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret the _Eclogues_ primarily as imaginative pastoral poetry, and not, except when they demand it, as a personal record. We shall here treat the _Bucolics_ in what seems to be their order of composition, not the order of their position in the collection.