{"id":1405,"date":"2024-10-06T18:25:19","date_gmt":"2024-10-06T22:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=1405"},"modified":"2024-10-06T18:25:19","modified_gmt":"2024-10-06T22:25:19","slug":"virgil-and-imperial-pressure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2024\/10\/06\/virgil-and-imperial-pressure\/","title":{"rendered":"Virgil and Imperial Pressure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since my primary text (<\/span>The Aeneid<\/span><\/i>) is from literally centuries ago, I struggled a bit for this blog post to construct an author biography. Very little survives aside from Virgil\u2019s published works \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>Eclogues <\/span><\/i>and<\/span> Georgics, <\/span><\/i>pastoral poems about the beauty of Italy and the proper life of a farmer. However, he pivots from pastoral poetry to <\/span>The Aeneid<\/span><\/i>, 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, <\/span>The Aeneid<\/span><\/i> has its foundations in the period when Augustus took power and became the <\/span>princeps<\/span><\/i> of Rome (aka the emperor). One of Virgil\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For this blog post, I want to focus on the <\/span>pressure<\/span><\/i> placed on Virgil to present the perfect epic. If it\u2019s 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 \u2018the best\u2019? Maybe that\u2019s why, according to tradition, he only wrote three lines of the poem a day \u2014 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 \u2014 with the words, the message, the impact \u2014 how do we approach what survives?<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to assume Virgil was under a lot of pressure \u2014 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<\/span> \u201cMake way, ye Roman writers, make way, ye Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth\u201d (Elegies, II.34.64-65). <\/span>Everyone<\/span><\/i> waited to see what Virgil would come up with; it\u2019s 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\u2019t seem very satisfied with what he had, continually revising his work and apparently calling for its destruction on his deathbed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think this history, whether it be real or mythological itself, provides an interesting lens through which to read <\/span>The Aeneid<\/span><\/i> \u2014 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 \u2014 what I will explore in my thesis \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poets\/virgil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica\/Virgil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Propertius. <\/span>Elegies. <\/span><\/i>Edited and translated by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s published works \u2014 his biography has to be constructed through allusions by his contemporaries, ancient lost biographies, and popular legend. Publius Vergilius Maro, or as … Continue reading Virgil and Imperial Pressure<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4989,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4989"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}