Since my primary text (The Aeneid) is from literally centuries ago, I struggled a bit for this blog post to construct an author biography. Very little survives aside from Virgil’s published works — his biography has to be constructed through allusions by his contemporaries, ancient lost biographies, and popular legend. Publius Vergilius Maro, or as we know him, Virgil, (~70 BCE – 19 BCE) was born to a farming family in northern Italy; though little is known about his family, they must have been relatively well-off because they provided him with an education that eventually led him to Rome. According to a lost biography by Servius, he was a relatively shy, closed-off man, who devoted himself to studying philosophy and writing poetry.
Virgil lived through a particularly unsteady period in Roman history: he saw both the first and second civil war, the murder of Julius Caesar, the death of the Republic, and the beginning of what we know as the Roman empire. During this period of mass upheaval, he wrote the Eclogues and Georgics, pastoral poems about the beauty of Italy and the proper life of a farmer. However, he pivots from pastoral poetry to The Aeneid, an epic poem that set out to reflect the foundation of Rome, its connection to the new emperor (Octavian/Augustus), and to unite a divided Rome. Begun around 29 BCE, The Aeneid has its foundations in the period when Augustus took power and became the princeps of Rome (aka the emperor). One of Virgil’s contemporaries, Sextus Propertius, says Augustus himself commissioned Virgil to write the epic, and common legend says he was the only poet Augustus saw as up to the task. It’s hard to completely believe this story however, since so much of our evidence is contradictory and our modern conceptions of his biography are largely based on hearsay and legends.
For this blog post, I want to focus on the pressure placed on Virgil to present the perfect epic. If it’s true that he was the poet chosen out of many famous and talented poets at the time (figures such as Ovid, Horace, and Catullus), would this work be expected to be proof that he was ‘the best’? Maybe that’s why, according to tradition, he only wrote three lines of the poem a day — reworking and perfecting each word and phrase. Virgil spent over ten years on the epic, and died before he was finished with it. Legend says he was largely unsatisfied with it, and it was awaiting many revisions; apparently, Virgil wanted the epic to be burned after his death, and only by the grace of Caesar Augustus was it saved and published. If Virgil struggled that much with this work — with the words, the message, the impact — how do we approach what survives?
I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume Virgil was under a lot of pressure — he had the emperor looking to him, his fellow poets, and, presumably, the entire Roman nation who had begun to see him as a national poet. His contemporary, Sextus Propertius, wrote “Make way, ye Roman writers, make way, ye Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth” (Elegies, II.34.64-65). Everyone waited to see what Virgil would come up with; it’s almost as if the entire weight of the nation was on his shoulders. When Virgil did share his work, either through letters to fellow poets or an alleged reading of a few books to the imperial family, he prompted excessive emotion and praise. Yet, Virgil didn’t seem very satisfied with what he had, continually revising his work and apparently calling for its destruction on his deathbed.
I think this history, whether it be real or mythological itself, provides an interesting lens through which to read The Aeneid — from its inception, this work had a imperially-sanctioned message: to construct the foundation of the empire and help shape its values going forward. Virgil knew the weight this work held, for him as an artist and for the country. The way in which he chose to present empire and imperial values — what I will explore in my thesis — was deeply intentional. He also had a specific audience he was writing for: the emperor and those looking to define what Rome would become after all that upheaval.
Works Cited:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/virgil
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Virgil
Propertius. Elegies. Edited and translated by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.