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Updated: May 19, 2025
Is it possible that you could live the courtier of Octavius; that you could accept of employments and honours from him, from the tyrant of your country; you, the brave, the noble-minded, the virtuous Messalla; you, whom I remember, my son-in-law Brutus has frequently extolled as the most promising youth in Rome, tutored by philosophy, trained up in arms, scorning all those soft, effeminate pleasures that reconcile men to an easy and indolent servitude, fit for all the roughest tasks of honour and virtue, fit to live or to die a free man?
The comparison is the more startling because our Messalla later explicitly rejected all connection with the first Valerius and seems never to have used the cognomen Publicola. The explanation of Vergil's passage is obvious.
Valerius Messalla was appointed the first præfect of Rome, that his reputation might countenance so invidious a measure; but, at the end of a few days, that accomplished citizen resigned his office, declaring, with a spirit worthy of the friend of Brutus, that he found himself incapable of exercising a power incompatible with public freedom.
The preface written in Siro's garden is addressed to Messalla, who was a student at Athens in 45-4 B.C., and served in the republican army of Brutus and Cassius in 43-2. In it Vergil begs pardon for sending a poem of so trivial a nature at a time when his one ambition is to describe worthily the philosophic system that he has adopted.
One, a panegyric on Messalla, by an unknown author, is without any poetical merit, and only interesting as an average specimen of the amateur verse of the time when, in the phrase of Horace Populus calet uno Scribendi studio; pueri patresque severi Fronde comas vincti cenant et carmina dictant.
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? We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his Eclogues is a recognition of Messalla's influence.
The four candidates for the consulship are all arraigned: their cases are difficult of defence, but I shall do my best to secure the safety of our friend Messalla and that is inseparable from the acquittal of the others. Publius Sulla has accused Gabinius of bribery his stepson Memmius, his cousin Cæcilius, and his son Sulla backing the indictment.
Pressure is being applied to prevent the trials taking place. It looks like an interregnum again. The consuls desire to hold the comitia: the accused don't wish it, and especially Memmius, because he hopes that Cæsar's approach may secure him the consulship. But he is at a very low ebb. Domitius, with Messalla as his colleague, I think is a certainty. Scaurus has lost his chance.
The literary circles of Maecenas and Messalla had each their elegiac poet of the first eminence; and the early death of both Propertius and Tibullus was followed, amid the decline of the other forms of the earlier Augustan poetry, by the consummate brilliance of Ovid.
Cato. Yet I must think it was beneath the character of Messalla to join in supporting a government which, though coloured and mitigated, was still a tyranny.
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