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Updated: June 15, 2025
Donatus is also inclined to accept the tradition that Vergil's father was a potter and a man of very humble circumstances. That Vergil's father made pottery may be true; a father's occupation was apt to be recorded in Augustan biography but it requires some knowledge of Roman society to comprehend what these words meant at the end of the Republic.
It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination, to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions, and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible answers that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy.
The analytical rules of rhetoric were growing ever more intricate and time-wasting, and how pedantic they were even before Vergil's childhood may be seen by a glance into the anonymous Auctor ad Herennium.
She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of Æneas as the storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that against the rooted oak.
He gave it immediate recognition in his Eclogues, and Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid became his followers. The poems of Gallus, if the Arcadian setting is real, were probably written soon after Philippi. Vergil's Eclogue of recognition may have been composed not much later, for we have a right to assume that Vergil would have had one of the first copies of Gallus' poems.
Vergil's phrases are the poetic expression of the animism of the unsophisticated rustic which at an earlier age had shaped the great nature myths. And if Vergil had been questioned about his own faith he could well have found a consistent answer.
According to Macrobius, Vergil paid him the compliment of imitating him, and he in turn is cited by the scholiasts as authority for an opinion of Vergil's.
Bernard Andreas, the blind poet of Toulouse, after trying his fortune in vain at Oxford, had insinuated himself into Henry VII's confidence, and was now attached to the court as tutor to Prince Arthur an office from which Linacre attempted unsuccessfully to oust him and busy with his history of the king's reign: a project which enjoyed royal favour, and was the forerunner of Polydore Vergil's creditable essay towards a critical history of England.
A stranger passing might have thought them about to come to blows. But they were simply noisy with earnestness. Their argument was as unlike one of the debates in Vergil's Eclogues as possible. It was an antistrophe of twang and drawl: "Gee, you durned fool, watcha want gointa business for?" "Durned fool your own self! Watcha wanta be a writer for?"
But to trace these ideals in their contact with Vergil's mental development, we must look back for a moment to the tendencies of the Catullan age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their styles and departments, places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard.
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