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Updated: June 15, 2025
Some of Vergil's most eloquent passages seem to be inspired by Stoic speculation. Even Horace, despite his banter about the sage, in his serious moods borrows the language of the Stoics. It was they who inspired the highest flights of declamatory eloquence in Persius and Juvenal.
Then there are Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful directness he does approve. The passage is important not only because it reveals a contemporaneous view of Vergil's position but because it shows Horace thus early as the spokesman of the "classical" coterie, the tenets of which in the end prevailed.
The tenth Eclogue gives Vergil's impressions upon reading one of the elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army post in Greece after the news of Cytheris' desertion. In his elegy the poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East away from his beloved.
One might well question whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of Spenser's than ever went to the composition of Vergil's Pollio. The 'November, like the 'April, consists for the most part of a lay composed in an elaborate stanza there a panegyric, here an elegy. This time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the Rosalind motive.
It is a syncretism of mystical beliefs, developed by Orphic and Apocalyptic poets and mystics from Pythagoras and Plato to a group of Hellenistic writers, popularized by the later less logical Stoic philosophers like Posidonius, and gaining in Vergil's day a wide acceptance among those who were growing impatient of the exacting metaphysical processes of thought.
The poet of the Ciris, the Copa, the Dirae, and the Bucolics is never far to seek in the Aeneid. It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.
Among fully a hundred different volumes that he printed were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and an English translation of Vergil's AEneid. Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The greatest prose work of the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight.
Whether Octavian, and his sage adviser Maecenas, acted from the same motive we do not know, though they too had seen in Vergil's epigrams on Antony's creatures, and in Horace's sixteenth epode that the poets of the new generation seemed likely to give effective expression to political sentiments.
If the latter theory be true, and it seems to fit well with the route which would probably be taken by Attila, the meeting took place in Vergil's country, and almost in sight of the very farm where Tityrus and Meliboeus chatted at evening under the beech-tree. Leo's success as an ambassador was complete.
In his references to Roman history, in the pageant of heroes of the sixth book, as well as in the historical scenes of the shield, no monarchial tendencies appear. Brutus the tyrannicide, Pompey and Cato, the irreconcilable foes of Caesar, Vergil's youthful hero, receive their meed of praise in the Aeneid, though there were many who held it treason in that day to mention rebels with respect.
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