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Updated: June 15, 2025
Presumably, therefore, Vergil's father belonged to a landholding family with some honors of municipal service to his credit. V.; Seneca, Controv. Of the poet's physical traits we have no very satisfactory description or likeness. He was tall, dark and rawboned, retaining through life the appearance of a countryman, according to Donatus.
Vergilius is a good Italic nomen found in all parts of the peninsula, but Latin names came as a matter of course with the gift of citizenship or of the Latin status, and Mantua with the rest of Cisalpine Gaul had received the Latin status nineteen years before Vergil's birth.
The Aeneid reveals, as the critics of nineteen centuries have reiterated, an unsurpassed range of reading. But it is not necessary to repeat the evidence of Vergil's literary obligations in an essay concerned chiefly with the poet's more intimate experiences.
He also took some part in the civil wars, and came to be looked upon as a very firm supporter of sound literary standards. Horace's Ouis desiderio, shows that Varus was one of Vergil's most devoted friends. Vergil's position as foremost of these poets was doubtless established by the publication of the Eclogues.
It is not surprising then that in Vergil's youth it is a group of fellow-provincials returning sons of Rome's former emigrants that take the lead in the new literary movements. They are vigorous, clever young men, excellently educated, free from the city's binding traditionalism, well provided also, many of them, with worldly goods acquired in the new rich country.
There is, however, a strong likelihood that Vergil's forbears were among the Roman and Latin colonists who went north in search of new homes during the second century B.C. Vergil's father was certainly a Roman citizen, for none but a citizen could have sent his son to Rome to prepare for a political career.
The original plan was to have the poem contain twelve books, like Vergil's AEneid, but only six were published. If more were written, they have been lost. The poem is an allegory with the avowed moral purpose of fashioning "a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline."
He expressed his gratitude to the emperor in one of a series of poems called Pastorals or Bu-col'ics, words which mean shepherds' songs, or songs descriptive of life in the country. These poems, though among Vergil's earliest productions, were highly applauded in Rome.
From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome.
In fact it reveals Alfenus in the act of seizing an unreasonable amount of land. Vergil, of course, recognizes Alfenus' position as commissioner in his ninth Eclogue where he promises him great glory if he will show mercy to Mantua: Vare, tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobis ... And Vergil's appeal to him was reasonable, since he, too, was a man of literary ambitions.
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