The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine

By Sabine MacCormack

Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers us new insights into the exercise of power and into the social, political, and cultural significance of religious change during the Christianization of the Roman world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.
Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official lit

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520920279

Sabine MacCormack

Sabine G. MacCormack is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Book preview

The Joan Palevsky

Imprint in Classical Literature

In honor of beloved Virgil—

O degli altri poeti onore e lume…

—Dante, Inferno

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE

Peter Brown, General Editor

I Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity, by Sabine G. MacCormack

II Synesius of Cyrene: Philosopher-Bishop, by Jay Alan Bregman

III Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity, by Kenneth G. Holum

IV John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century, by Robert L. Wilken

V Biography in Late Antiquity: The Quest for the Holy Man, by Patricia Cox

VI Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, by Philip Rousseau

VII Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, by A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein

VIII Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, by Raymond Van Dam

IX Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, by Robert Lamberton

X Procopius and the Sixth Century, by Averil Cameron

XI Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity, by

Robert A. Kaster

XII Civic Coins and Civic Politics in the Roman East, A.D. 180-275, by Kenneth Hari

XIII Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, introduced and translated by Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey

XIV Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, by Carole Straw

XV Apex Omnium: Religion in the Res gestae of Ammianus, by R. L. Rike

XVI Dioscorus of Aphrodito: His Work and His World, by Leslie S. B. MacCoull

XVII On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity, by Michele Renee Salzman

XVIII Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and The Lives of the Eastern Saints, by Susan Ashbrook Harvey

XIX Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius, by Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, with a contribution by Lee Sherry

XX Basil of Caesarea, by Philip Rousseau

XXI In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegirici Latini, introduction, translation, and historical commentary by C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers

XXII Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital, by

Neil B. McLynn

XXIII Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity, by

Richard Lim

XXIV The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy, by Virginia Burrus

XXV Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City, by

Derek Krueger

XXVI The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine, by Sabine

MacCormack

THE SHADOWS OF POETRY

The poet amid his works, which are present on the page of this Italian manuscript of the late fifth century as both objects and texts. Vergil is seated on a throne, holding a rolled-up manuscript scroll, with a lectern at the left and a lock- able container for scrolls at the right. The portrait appears at the end of Eclogue I, the last two lines of which describe the solemn coming of evening: already in the distance smoke rises from the rooftops/and longer shadows fall from the mountain heights. Below the portrait, the opening of Eclogue II reads, more lightheartedly,

The herdsman Corydon was afire for handsome Alexis, his master’s pet, but Corydon’s passion was hopeless. All he could do was to wander among the tall shady beech trees crying out with artless words to woods and mountains: Oh cruel Alexis, have you no care for my songs?

Source: Vergilius Romanus, fol. 3V.

THE SHADOWS

OF POETRY

Vergil in the Mind of Augustine

SABINE MACCORMACK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution to this book

provided by the Joan Palevsky Endowment in Classical Literature.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1998 by

The Regents of the University of California

The illustrations are reproduced by the kind permission of Father Leonard Boyle,

O.P., Prefect of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacCormack, Sabine.

The shadows of poetry: Vergil in the mind of Augustine / Sabine MacCormack.

p. cm. — (The transformation of the classical heritage: 26) Earlier versions of three chapters were presented as a Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism, Princeton University, winter of 1994.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0-520-21187-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. 2. Virgil. 3. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo Style. 4. Virgil—Influence. 5. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo Books and reading. I. Title. II. Series.

BR65.A9M24 1998

270.2'092—dc21 97-45014

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Hadwig Hörner

hic tarnen mecum poteras requiescere noctem fronde super viridi: sunt nobis mitia poma, castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis;

et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant, maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I THEIR RENOWNED POET

CHAPTER II THE SCENT OF A ROSE

CHAPTER III THE TEARS RUN DOWN IN VAIN

CHAPTER IV GODS OF OUR HOMELAND

CHAPTER V THE HIGH WALLS OF ROME

EPILOGUE

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX OF ANCIENT AND LATE ANTIQUE TEXTS

GENERAL INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Portrait of Vergil with text of Eclogues 1.82-83 and II. 1-4.

Vergilius Romanus, fol. 3V.

1. Herdsmen and animals, illustrating Georgies III. Vergilius Romanus, fol. 44V. 8

2. Queen Dido greets Aeneas and his companions, with text of Aeneid 1.586-590. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. i6r. 16

3. Queen Dido and Aeneas withdraw to a cave during a rainstorm, illustrating Aeneid IV.160-168. Vergilius Romanus, fol. io6r. 18

4. Aeneas and Achates watch the building of Carthage, illustrating Aeneid 1.427-431. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 13r. 39

5. King Latinus receives the Trojans in front of his palace, with text of Aeneid VII.195-202. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 6ov. 42

6. The herdsmen Menalcas, Damoetas, and Palaemon, with text of

Eclogue III. 1-9. Vergilius Romanus, fol.ór. 47

7. Queen Dido offers sacrifice, with text of Aeneid IV.56-62. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 33V. 76

8. Sinon before King Priam, with the wooden horse, illustrating Aeneid II.57-75. Vergilius Romanus, fol. loir. 91

9. Queen Dido watches the Trojan ships sail away, with text of Aeneid IV. 5 76-583. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 39V. 98

10. Aeneas and Queen Dido arguing, with text of Aeneid IV.305-311. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 36V. 117

11. The Penates appear to Aeneas in a dream, with text of Aeneid

111. 147-152. Vergilius Vaticanus, fol. 28r. 145

12. Iris appears to Turnus, illustrating Aeneid IX. 1-22. Vergilius Romanus, fol. 74V. 169

PREFACE

When I first read Augustine’s City of God as an undergraduate, I thought he was citing Vergil only for purposes of refutation and that the Aeneid emerged from this treatment as a mere shadow of itself. Years later, and after a good deal of effort, I am much less sure. Augustine, a man of very significant intellectual stature both in his own time and in subsequent centuries, was undoubtedly Vergil’s most intelligent and searching ancient reader, and in reading the greatest Roman poet in Augustine’s company, I have learned to hesitate and look again before jumping to some speedy conclusion or other. This book began to take shape in my head just over ten years ago, when Amos Funkenstein urged me to accept an invitation I had received to present a talk about Augustine at the Stanford Humanities Center. In this, as in so many other things, his counsel was wise and imbued with rare foresight. His friendship was very dear to me. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Earlier versions of three of the chapters here published were presented in the winter of 1994 as a Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University. Many of the revisions I have subsequently made arose from discussions after these lectures and from the more informal conversations that followed. I warmly thank Victor Brombert for inviting me and for his most generous hospitality and kindness. Chapter III has benefited by questions from faculty and students at the University of Notre Dame, and I thank John Van Engen for his invitation to speak there. The Monday Night Group at the University of Michigan has subjected the second and fourth chapters to its customary detailed scrutiny and discussion, thanks to which I rewrote the former and started afresh on the latter. James O'Donnell read an earlier version of this book and wrote me a long letter with his comments; I did my best to respond to them, and I thank him warmly for taking so much time over my work. I also thank Charles Witke for reading three of my chapters and for saving me from diverse errors. Mark Vessey and an anonymous reader reviewed the book for the University of California Press and helped me to catch another crop of errors and infelicities. Michael Moore has read I cannot now recall how many versions of this book in its various incarnations, and his questions and comments have led me to rethink and rewrite a great many things. Vergil and Augustine have formed the subject of two graduate seminars I taught in the Classics Department at the University of Michigan, and I thank the department for giving me the opportunity to present my research to students. The earlier of those classes was attended by Clifford Ando when he was still a graduate student. The class was much enhanced thanks to his input, and I have benefited greatly since then from his friendship and erudition. He has read more than one version of most of this book, and traces of his suggestions, additions, and corrections are to be found on many of its pages. I could not have hoped for a more generous and learned friend to consult during these recent years.

I spent some time working on this book while at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan during the academic year 1994-95. To James Winn, who was then directing the Institute, and to the fellows of that year, especially to Gregory Dobrov, I extend my thanks for company and inspiration. I also thank the Faculty of the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for making me welcome as kindly and as generously as they have done. I have been very happy working on this book with their benevolent and learned company so close at hand. I would also like to mention Mark Sandler and Thomas Burnett at the Graduate Library of the University of Michigan, who have helped me so often over the years and who have made the Graduate Library feel, just about, like a second home. Dore Brown, Sylvia Stein Wright, and Kate Toll have edited this book for the University of California Press, and I am very much indebted to them for all the care and attention they have lavished on my typescript.

The book would be different had I finished it more quickly. Arguments would probably have been framed in more decisive terms, and issues that are delineated with a certain openness toward different resolutions might have been finalized in one way or the other. In arriving at the text that now comes before the reader, however, I have not simply evaded my responsibility of saying something clear-cut and definitive. Instead, the question as to how and why Augustine read and remembered Vergil has continued to hold my attention for so long precisely because it does not allow simple answers. In writing during these same years about the cultural and religious changes that engulfed the empire of the Incas after the Spanish invasion in 1532, I have become ever more aware that such changes defy straightforward categorization. This does not mean that they are unintelligible; it simply means that to understand them requires patience and a willingness to stand back from ready solutions. The same is true about the Christianization of the late antique Mediterranean world, which, unlike the Spanish conquest and Christianization of the Andes, has attracted scholarly attention for centuries. Augustine’s relationship to the Latin classics and the philosophies current in his time, which forms one aspect of this vast field, has likewise been studied in considerable detail. It is thanks to this earlier work of cataloguing, editing, and interpreting that I have been able to approach the more imponderable question as to how and why Vergil’s poetry stayed with Augustine throughout his long life.

Vergil and Augustine are very different authorial personalities. Vergil wrote slowly, with much revising, and the volume of all his poems will fit into a small purse. Augustine, by contrast, usually wrote rather quickly, and his works take up several feet on the shelves of a library. But the two share one characteristic: they both wrote for their contemporaries at large, not merely for the erudite few, and they wrote about topics that captured the imagination. I have tried, in this book, to follow in their footsteps by not concealing the ideas and feelings that Augustine and his contemporaries expressed about Vergil, insofar as I have been able to understand them, within the armor of academic prose. Some of the ancient manuscripts of Vergil were illustrated, and two of them, one dating to Augustine’s lifetime, have survived. The illustrations reproduced in this book come from these two manuscripts and add another layer of reflection about the poet’s themes that is not tied exclusively to erudite considerations because the pictures were painted so as to lead the beholder into Vergil’s text and so as to give pleasure. But my topic is a learned one; it is anchored both in the original sources and in the work of the scholars who have preceded me. I have therefore taken stock of the sources and of earlier research in the footnotes, the purpose being to document my statements, to supplement them where this seemed useful, and to indicate possible directions of future work.

Vergil has been understood differently in different historical periods and by different people. Some readers, most notably Dante in the early fourteenth century, followed by numerous scholars of our own time, have discovered in Vergil a validation and even a eulogy of the Roman Empire; others have discovered the very opposite. It is not the case that evidence and arguments justifying such divergent interpretations cannot be found in Vergil’s text. Some arguments and methods of documentation may be judged to be preferable to others, but the fact remains that Vergil invites readers with different interests and preoccupations to share the poetic world that he created while discouraging them from arriving at simple answers to hard questions. All of his works comprise a dialogue with earlier poets, sometimes explicitly so and sometimes only in hints and allusions. For this reason alone, Vergil’s lines are of many layers that the patient and careful reader will gradually discover. In addition, Vergil’s brevity and intensity, his ability to crystallize a thought or a narrative of events in a sequence of perfectly chosen words, endows what he said with a weight and momentum that change as the thoughts of the reader change. This was why, throughout his long life, Augustine returned to Vergil as one of a handful of authors who defined for him what was worth understanding and why.

Much of Augustine’s writing was occasioned by the events of his time, and he also wrote to review his own experiences. His search for a career, his involvement with Manichees, Platonists, and representatives of the Catholic Church are all documented in his own writings. So are his engagement with the alternative visions of society and salvation that were propounded, from very different vantage points, by Donatists and Pelagians and his engagement with the political events of his time, in particular the destruction of the city of Rome in the year 410. In almost all these different contexts, lines of Vergil came to his mind, and he wrote them down in the process of formulating a thought or an argument.

In some instances, Augustine quoted from Vergil as part of a thought or a line of reasoning, referring to the famous poet in order to help convince his readers. At other times, however, he cited lines or half-lines of Vergil quite informally as part of his own mental furniture. Put differently, Vergil formed part of the very shape of Augustine’s reality because he described reality in ways that Augustine found decisive. The reasons why this Vergilian reality was decisive differed for Augustine the young student of philosophy and convert to Christianity, the mature Augustine, bishop of Hippo and correspondent of imperial officials, and the old Augustine contemplating the awesome prospect of eternal salvation or damnation. During the months of reflection following his conversion, Augustine wrote dialogues in the manner of Cicero, in which quotations from Vergil enrich and adorn his arguments. But once Augustine had been consecrated as priest and then as bishop, Vergil receded somewhat from his awareness, and his treatise On Christian Doctrine, begun in 396, then set aside and completed over thirty years later, contains few Vergilian reminiscences because here Augustine sought to describe an autonomous Christian culture that did not have to depend on the pagan culture of an earlier period. The Confessions, however, written at the turn of the fourth to the fifth century, are deeply imbued with Vergilian themes and feelings. Finally, in the opening books of City of God, the writing of which occupied Augustine between 413 and 427, Vergil moved to center stage as the spokesman of the pagan Roman culture that Augustine sought to refute.

Vergil had helped to shape the Latin language that Augustine and his contemporaries used. Augustine was thus not alone in giving expression to a good many of his thoughts in Vergilian terms. Beyond shaping the language, however, Vergil had written about topics that emerged at the forefront of Augustine’s attention: the birth of a messianic child, the destruction of a great city, the relationship between soul and body and the nature of emotion and death, the focus of worship and piety, and the nature of the divine. Did Augustine think about these issues because Vergil had thought about them first? Or did he think about them because they formed part of the very fabric of his culture, a fabric that transcended the particular allegiance a person might find in pagan or, increasingly, in Christian religion? Or did Augustine think about them because Vergil’s poetry had long since become part and parcel of this fabric?

One can answer yes to all these questions, but such a yes will not tell one a great deal. That is why, in this book, I have tried to listen in on the conversation between Vergil and Augustine and between Vergil and other readers who were contemporaries or near contemporaries of Augustine. I have sought to let these readers, in particular Augustine, guide my own understanding of Vergil and in this way, so I hope, have arrived at an understanding of the world that Vergil created for his late antique readers, the world that these readers, for reasons I endeavor to explain, found meaningful. In doing this, I hope to have arrived at an explanation, perhaps a new explanation, of what was at issue when Augustine became a Christian and what this choice led him to in the course of his life. Augustine thought that his coming into converse with the Christian god was a gain because he thought that he found with this god the true home of his soul. Looking at Augustine’s conversion as a historian and from a very long chronological distance, however, one can also see in it a story of losses, in particular the loss of Vergil’s engagement with nature and with the immediacy and poignancy, and often the simple joys, sadnesses, and sorrows of human experience. I have sought to describe these gains and losses by reading Vergil not only in Augustine’s company, but also in the company of the late antique Romans who admired and loved their great poet for having expressed for them their most dearly cherished values.

However much Vergil had set forth, as the old Augustine perceived it, the ideas and priorities of the pagan Rome from which he sought to distance himself, the Aeneid and Vergil’s other poems continued being read and loved by many people. An almost continuous sequence of manuscripts links the Vergil of Augustine’s Roman Empire to the poet who was studied and quoted in subsequent centuries. This long tradition, with its diverse changes and continuities, lies beyond the conversation between Vergil and Augustine that I describe, a conversation that became a distinct part of the Vergilian tradition. When Dante chose Vergil as his guide through hell and purgatory, he thought, of course, about the Roman poet in his own right, but he also thought about the poet whose voice had sounded in the pages of Augustine.

Why might anyone wish to know these things about people who lived and died so long ago? Let me answer that question with a line of Vergil’s that has been much admired, by Augustine among others:

blessed is he who has known the causes of things, felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

CHAPTER I

THEIR RENOWNED POET

I

Nearly four hundred years and a long geographical and cultural distance separate the Roman poet Vergil, who was born in northern Italy, from Augustine, who began his professional life as a grammarian and rhetor of the Latin language in Roman North Africa. Later, like many other talented men of his time, Augustine converted to Christianity and then became a monk, priest, and bishop.1 Vergil lived in a very different world. In 70 B.C., the year of his birth, the Romans had only recently gained control over his homeland, but in the African province of Numidia, where Augustine was born in 354 A.D., the Roman presence went back nearly half a millennium. Vergil lived during the period when the procedures of Roman imperial governance that were to endure for centuries were being established, and Augustine, in his later years, witnessed the beginnings of their disintegration. But Vergil’s lines and many of his ideas and feelings accompanied Augustine throughout his long life as though no time at all had elapsed since Vergil lived and worked. Vergil’s poetry moved the young Augustine to tears, and as an old man, Augustine the bishop continued to remember the words of the renowned poet, the most noble poet, with whom he now profoundly disagreed, but who remained unforgettable nonetheless. This long relationship between the Roman poet and the Christian bishop is testimony, of course, to the ample and retentive memories of people who lived in what was still, despite much literacy, an oral culture in which texts were spoken and thus sounded, deeply and tenaciously, in the mind and the soul.2 The relationship is also an example of this culture’s profound continuities that endured long beyond the demise of the Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean.3 But what is really at issue is a matter both more subtle and more profound. This is the nature of Vergil’s poetry, which spoke to its countless readers so as to evoke, whether by way of imiation, of adaptation, or of contradiction, what those readers had all along wanted to say in their own right.4

Not much is known about Vergil’s life beyond its outlines. In the midfourth century, around the time when Augustine was entering school in his small hometown of Thagaste, Aelius Donatus, grammarian of the city of Rome,5 wrote a brief biographical study of Vergil in which he resumed earlier information, most of which came from the now lost Life of Vergil by the erudite Suetonius.6 Some further short biographies, including those by the grammarians Servius and Probus, add a few modifications but little new material. An additional detail comes from the Roman senator Macrobius, who in c. 431 A.D. composed a learned dialogue that centers on Vergil’s poetry.7 Donatus and Servius wrote about Vergil’s life by way of providing an introduction to their commentaries on his works, and these commentaries in turn were designed to assist teachers of literature, grammatici, who provided instruction in Roman schools. As Servius expressed it: In explaining authors, the following topics must be covered: the life of the poet, the title of the work, the nature of the poem, the intention of the writer, the number of books, their order, and their exegesis.8

In this context, therefore, biography was an investigation of an author’s character and experience insofar as these helped elucidate his work as studied by the young. This kind of biography accordingly was a narrowly focused genre not primarily designed to satisfy discursive human

curiosity. Instead, it helped to explain and establish the canonicity and authority of certain writings.9

We thus learn, much as Augustine and his contemporaries are likely to have done, that Publius Vergilius Maro was born in the village of Andes near Mantua, in the year when Pompey and Crassus were consuls. His father worked the land, and his mother’s name was Magia Polla.10 Vergil studied first in Cremona and then in Milan, Rome, and Naples.11 During the Roman civil wars, the family’s small plot, laboriously acquired, was confiscated for Octavian’s soldiers, but was later restored.12 Vergil’s late antique commentators endeavored, persistently but not altogether successfully, to disentangle the precise nature of these events by identifying Vergil with characters who figure in his first and ninth eclogues.13 The Eclogues were Vergil’s first published work, to be followed, in 30 B.C., by the Georgies, which conclude with a statement in which the poet did speak in his own voice:

This much have I sung about caring for fields and animals, and for trees, while great Caesar has wielded his thunder in war upon the remote Euphrates, and now as victor gives laws to willing nations, preparing his path to Olympus.

In that same time, I Vergil was nourished by gentle Parthenope, prospering with my verses in undistinguished ease, having made songs about shepherds, and, while still a daring young man,

Tityrus, of you I sang in the shade of a far-spreading beech tree.

Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum fulminât Euphraten bello victorque volentis per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo. ilio Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine f agi.14

The Aeneid, Vergil’s epic that comprised, as Servius expressed it, all of Roman history from the coming of Aeneas to the poet’s own time,15 occupied the last eleven years of his life. According to Donatus and Servius,16 the work did not originally begin with the famous arma virumque cano, but with a further statement that reiterated and continued what Vergil had said about himself at the end of the Georgies:

I am he who once composed my song on a slender reed pipe, then left the forests to master the neighboring fields so that they yielded to the eager husbandman, a work the farmers welcomed, but now the horror of war, arms and the man I sing.

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis arma virumque cano.17

In his epitaph, Vergil said more briefly and simply:

Mantua bore me, in Calabria I died and now I rest in Parthenope; I sang of pastures, fields, and great men.

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces.18

As understood by his ancient and late antique readers, therefore, Vergil had written about all aspects of human experience, beginning, in the Eclogues, with the pastoral life that represented the earliest forms of human culture and society, and going on, in the Georgies, to agriculture and thence, in the Aeneid, to warfare and the foundation of cities.19

Vergil wrote with much care and reflection. When working on the Georgies, according to Donatus, he was accustomed to dictate verses every morning and then, revising during the rest of the day, he would reduce them to a considerably smaller number. He gave birth to the poem, so he said, like a bear gives birth to her cubs, licking them into shape once they were born. As for the Aeneid, it was also composed slowly over a period of years. Donatus recorded that Vergil had begun with a prose outline in twelve books and that, in order not to interrupt the flow of composition, he had left some verses incomplete or in a preliminary form, to be reviewed later. Jokingly he said that he had placed these by way of scaffolding to sustain the work, until solid columns could be brought in.20 This care in composition was matched by Vergil’s reluctance to bring before the public any part of his work that he did not consider fully finished.21 In part, perhaps, composition was slow because Vergil was a man of much learning. In the biography, Donatus mentioned specifically Vergil’s studies in mathematics and medicine;22 Probus and Servius mentioned philosophy.23 Further dimensions in the poet’s erudition were highlighted by those who studied and commented on his works. Donatus, Servius, and Macrobius were thus interested in Vergil’s antiquarian scholarship and choice of vocabulary and also in his deployment and reformulation of themes from Homer and Homeric commentaries, from Hellenistic poets, and from Italian and Roman traditions.24 In particular, Vergil’s interpretation of episodes in the legendary history of Italy and Rome entailed complex choices among conflicting and incompatible views of the past.

An example is Vergil’s rendering of the story of the legendary founders of Rome, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus. The war between Octavian and Sextus Pompey for control of the western Mediterranean led Vergil’s friend Horace to compare these conflicts of his own time to the crime of Romulus, who had killed the innocent Remus at the very moment of Rome’s inauguration. It was a prophetic, tone-giving deed, for, as Horace saw matters during this period, a blind fratricidal fury seemed to have been at work in Roman history ever since that foundational moment:

It is thus: a harsh fate drives the Romans, the crime of fratricide, when the blood of innocent Remus flowed on the earth, a curse on all his descendants.

sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt scelusque fraternae necis, ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi sacer nepotibus crúor.25

But such was not the view that Vergil took when, during these same years, he was working on the Georgies and later on the Aeneid. Vergil did not like straightforwardly paradigmatic stories; insofar as myths and legends contained lessons for the present, he therefore extrapolated these lessons indirectly, in the manner of poets, as his late antique commentators so often noted.26 In addition, Vergil was interested in the branch of the legends of Romulus and Remus that pointed to harmony between the two brothers and thus to the potential for harmony within Roman society. The Italian farmer, Vergil wrote in the Georgies, is unmoved by the affairs of the great

Figure i. The simplicity and grace of life in the country as described by Vergil in the Georgies: a herdsman listens to his companion playing the flute while dogs, goats, and horses disport themselves in a flowery meadow. A reed shelter with a drinking flask suspended at its entrance will offer protection from heat and rain. Source: Vergilius Romanus, fol. 44V.

world, by warfare, politics, and the acquisition of property; instead, the farmer follows his daily tasks, the order of which is given by the seasons:

This life the ancient Sabines lived of old, and Remus with his brother; thus strong Etruria grew, and thus did Rome become the fairest of all things surrounding her seven hills within a single wall. Even before the rule of Jupiter, and likewise before a haughty race feasted on slaughtered cattle, Saturn lived such a life on earth during the golden age. At that time, men had not yet heard the trumpet blown, not listened to the sword blade clanking on the anvil.

hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma, septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces, ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis, aureus hanc vitam in terris Satumus agebat; necdum etiam audierant inflari classica, necdum impositos duris crepitare incudibus ensis.27

Vergil thus placed the foundation of Rome within a pastoral golden age that was not disturbed by brotherly envy and competition for power. In the Aeneid, similarly, when Jupiter foretells the future of Rome, Romulus appears as the eponymous founder of the city, without any mention of fraternal discord. In due course, so the god prophesies, Julius Caesar will be born, and finally, in the age of Augustus, Romulus, under his divine name Quirinus, will make laws alongside his brother:

The iron age will then grow mild and wars will cease;

white-haired Good Faith with Vesta, and Quirinus with Remus his brother

will make the laws; the grim steel welded gates of war shall shut.

aspera turn positis mitescent saecula bellis;

cana Fides et Vesta, Remo cum fratre Quirinus iura dabunt; dirae ferro et compagibus artis claudentur Belli portae.28

Conflict between Romulus and Remus was thus never explicitly mentioned by Vergil. Not that he did not perceive a dark side to Roman history—but he expressed it in other ways.29 However, Vergil’s late antique commentators were used to the familiar tale about the twins and commented accordingly. In his paraphrase of the Aeneid, Tiberius Claudius Donatus thus glossed the words Quirinus with Remus his brother will make the laws with the simple statement: that is, the laws of Romulus will endure.30 The grammarian Servius, perceiving a dissonance between what Vergil had said and the customary story, tried to adjust Vergil’s sense in light of that story. Commenting on Quirinus with Remus, he suggested that Vergil was referring to the time after Remus had been killed, when Romulus performed the public rituals in his own and his brother’s name in order to expiate the murder. Elsewhere, Servius observed that as an act of expiation, an empty curule chair with a scepter, crown, and royal insignia was placed next to Romulus whenever he performed an official act, so that Romulus and Remus should be seen to be ruling together. In a different sense, Servius thought, Vergil was describing the return of Rome’s earliest days in his own time. Here, Quirinus stood for Augustus while, speaking in the manner of poets, Remus was Agrippa, who took the daughter of Augustus as his wife and fought his wars with him. Finally, the brothers Quirinus and Remus quite simply represented the Roman people.31 Although Vergil’s commentators did not always interpret Vergil in strict accord with what he had actually written, they did seek to appreciate their poet’s scholarship and erudition by matching it with their own.32

According to Donatus, who ascribed the information to a certain Melissus,33 Vergil was initially to have become a lawyer, but he pleaded only one case and then abandoned this career because he spoke too slowly.34 Also, Vergil looked like a man of the countryside,35 and he was shy, so that the noisy and competitive life of the law courts did not suit him.36 Altogether, he preferred to live not in Rome but in one of his country retreats; and when he did come to the city, he liked to escape from the admirers who wanted to meet him by vanishing into some nearby edifice.37 Perhaps this was why Vergil’s younger contemporary, Ovid, who was far from shy, remembered merely seeing the admired poet at a distance with out being able to exchange any words with him.38 To Horace, however, Vergil was close and dear, so that, when Vergil left Italy on a voyage to Greece, Horace implored the ship that was to carry his beloved friend:

Ship to whom is entrusted

Vergil, and him you owe me: from Attic lands bring him back safe and sound, I pray, and save for me the half of my own soul.

navis, quae tibi creditum

debes Vergilium, finibus Atticis

reddas incolumem, precor,

et serves animae dimidium meae.39

Despite his retiring ways, Vergil was famous. In lines