many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his
ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they disclose the processes by
which the poet during an apprenticeship of ten years developed the mature
art of the _Georgics_ and the _Aeneid_. They have made it possible for us
to visualize him with a vividness that is granted us in the case of no
other Latin poet.

The reason for attempting a new biography of Vergil at the present time
is therefore obvious. This essay, conceived with the purpose of centering
attention upon the poet's actual life, has eschewed the larger task of
literary criticism and has also avoided the subject of Vergil's literary
sources--a theme to which scholars have generally devoted too much
acumen. The book is therefore of brief compass, but it has been kept
to its single theme in the conviction that the reader who will study
Vergil's works as in some measure an outgrowth of the poet's own
experiences will find a new meaning in not a few of their lines.

T.F.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I MANTUA DIVES AVIS

II SCHOOL AND WAR

III THE CULEX

IV THE CIRIS

V A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY

VI EPIGRAM AND EPIC

VII EPICUREAN POLITICS

VIII LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN

IX MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY

X RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI

XI THE EVICTIONS

XII POLLIO

XIII THE CIRCLE OF MAECENAS

XIV THE GEORGICS

XV THE AENEID

VERGIL

I

MANTUA DIVES AVIS

Among biographical commonplaces one frequently finds the generalization
that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for
a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in
lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human
nature. If there be some degree of truth in this reflection, Publius
Vergilius Maro, the farmer's boy from the Mantuan plain, was in so far
favored at birth. It is the fifteenth of October, 70 B.C., that the
Mantuans still hold in pious memory: in 1930 they will doubtless invite
Italy and the devout of all nations to celebrate the twentieth centenary
of the poet's birth.

Ancient biographers, little concerned with Mendelian speculation, have
not reported from what stock his family sprang. Scientific curiosity
and nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become
anthropologists. Vergil has accordingly been referred, by some critic
or other, to each of the several peoples that settled the Po Valley in
ancient