Great works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil's Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Christian in fourth-century CE North Africa found the first-century BCE epic poem of pagan Rome the most impressive thing in his cultural life to date. Tellingly, his reaction shows no interest in the poem's theme of individual sacrifice in the name of imperial destiny; rather, into middle age, the great theologian and founder of institutional Catholic monasticism remembered weeping for Dido, who commits suicide after her lover, Aeneas, abandons her at the end of Book IV.
When we react as intensely to a work of literature as Augustine did, we may feel compelled to know what events in the author's life could have informed his imagination. There has to be, we are convinced, something about the author himself that is vital to that thing called literary achievement, some reason he brought into being a work so communicative and congenial. The lack of detail concerning, or the death of Hippolytus, dragged by spooked horses in the play named for him, though Euripides's unpopularity in his native Athens no doubt helped the story along. As for Vergil, we know a great deal less about him than about the second most important poet of his era, Horace; Vergil was a private man by preference, but he also seems to have been accorded—no doubt with the help of powerful imperial patronage—a most un-Roman respect for his privacy. Since then, Vergil's distance and blurriness as a human being have enticed people to read his life and his thinking so as best to suit their own lives and their own thinking.
