United States or Democratic Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more pith and moment.
Do not the protracted battle scenes of the last book otherwise so un-Vergilian remind one of Caesar's never-ending campaigns against foes springing up in all quarters, and of the fact that Vergil had himself recently had a share in the struggle?
Since Roman citizenship was a personal rather than a territorial right, such immigrants could preserve their political status despite their change of habitation. The probabilities are, therefore, that in any case Vergil, though born in the province, was of the old Latin stock. The Gauls were as a rule fair with light hair.
Nor is this lack of intelligence to be wondered at, when we recall to mind the clean sweep of all classical learning and tradition which that period of time, truly known as the Dark Ages, made throughout Italy; if Petrarch found it necessary to explain to King Robert the Wise with the greatest tact and delicacy that Vergil was a poet and not a wizard, what must have been the appalling ignorance prevailing amongst the peasant and the fisherman?
When we find a tile scratched over with cursive lettering possibly part of a writing lesson which ends with a tag from the Aeneid, we recognize that not even Vergil was out of place here. The Silchester examples are so numerous and remarkable that they admit of no other interpretation.
For more than a century after Milton, the majority of references to nature were made in general terms and were borrowed from the stock illustrations of older poets, like Vergil. We find the conventional lark, nightingale, and turtledove. Nothing new or definite is said of them. Increasing comforts and safety in travel now took more people where they could see for themselves the beauty of nature.
From a very early period, almost from the age in which he lived, he was called the Prince of Latin Poets. His full name was Pub'li-us Ver-gil'i-us Ma'ro. His father was the owner of a small estate, which he farmed himself. Though of moderate means, he gave his son a good education. Young Vergil spent his boyhood at school at Cre-mo'na and Milan.
It is doubtless the miserable poor of Capua and Nuceria that Vergil particularly has in mind. The singers are two slave-shepherds departing from the lands of a master who has been dispossessed. The poem is pervaded by a strong note of pity for the lovers of peace, "pii cives," shall we say the "pacifists," who had been punished for refusing to enlist in a civil war.
It was apparently in the year 48 Vergil was then twenty-one that the poet attempted his first extended composition, the Culex, a poem that hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of Spenser. This is indeed one of the strangest poems of Latin literature, an overwhelming burden of mythological and literary references saddled on the feeblest of fables.
Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day.
Word Of The Day