Virgil

Virgil Poems

This now, the very latest of my toils,
Vouchsafe me, Arethusa! needs must I
Sing a brief song to Gallus- brief, but yet
...

Meliboeus.
You, Tityrus, 'neath a broad beech-canopy
Reclining, on the slender oat rehearse
...

Muses of Sicily, essay we now
A somewhat loftier task! Not all men love
Coppice or lowly tamarisk: sing we woods,
...

TO VARUS

First my Thalia stooped in sportive mood
To Syracusan strains, nor blushed within
...

Menalcas.
Why, Mopsus, being both together met,
You skilled to breathe upon the slender reeds,
...

The shepherd Corydon with love was fired
For fair Alexis, his own master's joy:
No room for hope had he, yet, none the less,
...

Daphnis beneath a rustling ilex-tree
Had sat him down; Thyrsis and Corydon
...

Of Damon and Alphesiboeus now,
Those shepherd-singers at whose rival strains
...

Lycidas.
Say whither, Moeris?- Make you for the town,
Or on what errand bent?
...

When spring begins and the ice-locked streams begin
To flow down from the snowy hills above
And the clods begin to crumble in the breeze,
The time has come for my groaning ox to drag
...

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore;
...

Virgil Biography

Legend has it that Virgil was born in the village of Andes, near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul. Scholars suggest Etruscan, Umbrian or even Celtic descent by examining the linguistic or ethnic markers of the region. Analysis of his name has led to beliefs that he descended from earlier Roman colonists. Modern speculation ultimately is not supported by narrative evidence either from his own writings or his later biographers. Etymological fancy has noted that his cognomen MARO shares its letters anagrammatically with the twin themes of his epic: AMOR (love) and ROMA (Rome). Legend also has it that Virgil received his first education when he was 5 years old and that he later went to Rome to study rhetoric, medicine, and astronomy, which he soon abandoned for philosophy; also that in this period, while in the school of Siro the Epicurean, he began to write poetry. A group of small works attributed to the youthful Virgil survive, but are largely considered spurious. One, the Catalepton, consists of fourteen short poems, some of which may be Virgil's, and another, a short narrative poem titled the Culex ("The Gnat"), was attributed to Virgil as early as the 1st century CE. These dubious poems are sometimes referred to as the Appendix Vergiliana. During the civil strife that killed the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar had been assassinated in 44 BCE, the army led by his assassins Brutus and Cassius met defeat by Caesar's faction, including his chief lieutenant Mark Antony and his newly adopted son Octavian Caesar in 42 BCE in Greece near Philippi. The victors paid off their soldiers with land expropriated from towns in northern Italy, supposedly including an estate near Mantua belonging to Virgil—again an inference from themes in his work and not supported by independent sources. Virgil dramatizes the contrasting feelings caused by the brutality of expropriation but also by the promise attaching to the youthful figure of Caesar's heir in the Bucolics in which he had worked out the mythic framework for lifelong ambition to conquer Greek epic for Rome. In themes the ten eclogues develop and vary epic song, relating it first to Roman power (ecl. 1), then to love, both homosexual (ecl. 2) and panerotic (ecl. 3), then again to Roman power and Caesar's heir imagined as authorizing Virgil to surpass Greek epic and refound tradition (ecll. 4 and 5), shifting back to love then as a dynamic source considered apart from Rome (ecl. 6). Hence in the remaining eclogues Virgil withdraws from his newly minted Roman mythology and gradually constructs a new myth of his own poetics--he casts the remote Greek region of Arcadia, home of the god Pan, as the place of poetic origin itself. In passing, he again rings changes on erotic themes, such as requited and unrequited homosexual and heterosexual passion, tragic love for elusive women or magical powers of song to retrieve an elusive boy. He concludes by establishing Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in Western literature and visual arts. Readers often did and sometimes do identify the poet himself with various characters and their vicissitudes, whether gratitude by an old rustic to a new god (ecl. 1), frustrated love by a rustic singer for a distant boy (his master's pet, ecl. 2), or a master singer's claim to have composed several eclogues (ecl. 5). Modern scholars largely reject such efforts to garner biographical details from fictive texts preferring instead to interpret the diverse characters and themes as representing the poet's own contrastive perceptions of contemporary life and thought. Biographical reconstruction supposes that Virgil soon became part of the circle of Maecenas, Octavian's capable agent d'affaires who sought to counter sympathy for Mark Antony among the leading families by rallying Roman literary figures to Octavian's side. It also appears that Virgil gained many connections with other leading literary figures of the time, including Horace and Varius Rufus (who later helped finish the Aeneid). After he had completed the Bucolics (so-called in homage to Theocritus, who had been the first to write short epic poems taking herdsmen's life as their apparent theme — bucolic in Greek meaning "on care for cattle"), Virgil spent the ensuing years (perhaps 37–29 BCE) on the longer epic called Georgics (from Greek, "On Working the Earth", because farming is their apparent theme, in the tradition of Greek Hesiod), which he dedicated to Maecenas (source of the expression tempus fugit ["time flies"]). Virgil and Maecenas took turns reading the Georgics to Octavian upon his return from defeating Antony and his consort Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. In 27 BCE the Roman Senate conferred on Octavian the more than human title Augustus, well suited to Virgil's ambition to write an epic to challenge Homer, a Roman epic developed from the Caesarist mythology introduced in the Bucolics and incorporating now the Julian Caesars' family legend that traced their line back to a mythical Trojan prince who escaped the fall of Troy.)

The Best Poem Of Virgil

Eclogue X

GALLUS

This now, the very latest of my toils,
Vouchsafe me, Arethusa! needs must I
Sing a brief song to Gallus- brief, but yet
Such as Lycoris' self may fitly read.
Who would not sing for Gallus? So, when thou
Beneath Sicanian billows glidest on,
May Doris blend no bitter wave with thine,
Begin! The love of Gallus be our theme,
And the shrewd pangs he suffered, while, hard by,
The flat-nosed she-goats browse the tender brush.
We sing not to deaf ears; no word of ours
But the woods echo it. What groves or lawns
Held you, ye Dryad-maidens, when for love-
Love all unworthy of a loss so dear-
Gallus lay dying? for neither did the slopes
Of Pindus or Parnassus stay you then,
No, nor Aonian Aganippe. Him
Even the laurels and the tamarisks wept;
For him, outstretched beneath a lonely rock,
Wept pine-clad Maenalus, and the flinty crags
Of cold Lycaeus. The sheep too stood around-
Of us they feel no shame, poet divine;
Nor of the flock be thou ashamed: even fair
Adonis by the rivers fed his sheep-
Came shepherd too, and swine-herd footing slow,
And, from the winter-acorns dripping-wet
Menalcas. All with one accord exclaim:
'From whence this love of thine?' Apollo came;
'Gallus, art mad?' he cried, 'thy bosom's care
Another love is following.'Therewithal
Silvanus came, with rural honours crowned;
The flowering fennels and tall lilies shook
Before him. Yea, and our own eyes beheld
Pan, god of Arcady, with blood-red juice
Of the elder-berry, and with vermilion, dyed.
'Wilt ever make an end?' quoth he, 'behold
Love recks not aught of it: his heart no more
With tears is sated than with streams the grass,
Bees with the cytisus, or goats with leaves.'
'Yet will ye sing, Arcadians, of my woes
Upon your mountains,' sadly he replied-
'Arcadians, that alone have skill to sing.
O then how softly would my ashes rest,
If of my love, one day, your flutes should tell!
And would that I, of your own fellowship,
Or dresser of the ripening grape had been,
Or guardian of the flock! for surely then,
Let Phyllis, or Amyntas, or who else,
Bewitch me- what if swart Amyntas be?
Dark is the violet, dark the hyacinth-
Among the willows, 'neath the limber vine,
Reclining would my love have lain with me,
Phyllis plucked garlands, or Amyntas sung.
Here are cool springs, soft mead and grove, Lycoris;
Here might our lives with time have worn away.
But me mad love of the stern war-god holds
Armed amid weapons and opposing foes.
Whilst thou- Ah! might I but believe it not!-
Alone without me, and from home afar,
Look'st upon Alpine snows and frozen Rhine.
Ah! may the frost not hurt thee, may the sharp
And jagged ice not wound thy tender feet!
I will depart, re-tune the songs I framed
In verse Chalcidian to the oaten reed
Of the Sicilian swain. Resolved am I
In the woods, rather, with wild beasts to couch,
And bear my doom, and character my love
Upon the tender tree-trunks: they will grow,
And you, my love, grow with them. And meanwhile
I with the Nymphs will haunt Mount Maenalus,
Or hunt the keen wild boar. No frost so cold
But I will hem with hounds thy forest-glades,
Parthenius. Even now, methinks, I range
O'er rocks, through echoing groves, and joy to launch
Cydonian arrows from a Parthian bow.-
As if my madness could find healing thus,
Or that god soften at a mortal's grief!
Now neither Hamadryads, no, nor songs
Delight me more: ye woods, away with you!
No pangs of ours can change him; not though we
In the mid-frost should drink of Hebrus' stream,
And in wet winters face Sithonian snows,
Or, when the bark of the tall elm-tree bole
Of drought is dying, should, under Cancer's Sign,
In Aethiopian deserts drive our flocks.
Love conquers all things; yield we too to love!'
These songs, Pierian Maids, shall it suffice
Your poet to have sung, the while he sat,
And of slim mallow wove a basket fine:
To Gallus ye will magnify their worth,
Gallus, for whom my love grows hour by hour,
As the green alder shoots in early Spring.
Come, let us rise: the shade is wont to be
Baneful to singers; baneful is the shade
Cast by the juniper, crops sicken too
In shade. Now homeward, having fed your fill-
Eve's star is rising-go, my she-goats, go

Virgil Comments

Fabrizio Frosini 16 December 2015

Publius Vergilius Maro (Andes,15 Oct.70 b.C. – Brindisi,21 Sept.19 b.C.) Epitaph: « Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces » (in Italian :) « Mi ha generato Mantova, il Salento mi rapì la vita, ora Napoli mi conserva; cantai pascoli, campagne, comandanti » (Epitaffio)

47 0 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 04 January 2016

30 B.C. onwards, Virgil spent the rest of his life composing The Aeneid, which was pressed upon him by Augustus Caesar. Augustus insisted Virgil to write about the glory and magnificence of Rome. The Aeneid became Rome’s national epic. Ironically, Virgil was never happy about writing the composition; he felt it was a task imposed upon him which he was bound to do as a religious and political duty. Unsatisfied with the manuscript, Virgil had wanted The Aeneid to be destroyed but Augustus did not let that happen and the poem was published posthumously. The Aeneid gained Virgil immense fame and a godlike persona after his death. A journey to Italy and Megara with the Emperor proved to be fatal for Virgil. He died in 19 B.C. due to a fever he had contracted in Greece. He was laid to rest near Naples. Virgil was the voice of the Roman people who wanted to tell the world about the glory, significance and greatness of the Roman Empire, and the men who created it.

31 1 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 04 January 2016

Virgil studied with Epicurean philosopher Siro and began his career as a poet after fleeing to Naples due to the civil disturbances in 49 B.C. when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River. He was at first known as an Alexandrian when he entered the literary circles. A group of poets who wrote poems inspired from the work of third-century Greek poets were known as Alexandrians. Although he had a house in Rome, Virgil spent most of his life in Campania and Sicily after his property was confiscated for veterans during the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. However, it was restored later on the command of Octavian. Virgil spent the next four years composing pastoral poems, Eclogues and Georgics which was mostly about farming.

30 1 Reply
sheila Young 23 March 2020

what poem did he write which speaks of the quality of wine fields of Philadelphia

1 0 Reply
s. Peterson 16 January 2019

In what work did Virgil write A pretty girl needs no other virtues?

3 0 Reply
willium phelan 17 January 2018

the line in a poem by Virgil are Aurora rising left the ocean, what was the name of the poem.thanks

1 0 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 21 January 2016

other poems are posted under ' Publius Vergilius Maro '

19 3 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 04 January 2016

Although not many details are known about the life of Virgil, the work he left behind has earned him the prestige of being the greatest Roman poet and also amongst the composers of world’s greatest poems. Virgil is best known for his epic, The Aeneid which is modeled after Homer’s epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. Financially sound and well-off, Virgil’s parents provided him with a good education. He studied in various places including Cremona, Milan and Rome, showing a specific interest in mathematics and medicine. He moved on to study law and rhetoric at the Academy of Epidius, Rome in 54 B.C. One of his classmates at the academy was Octavian, who would later become the Emperor Augustus and Virgil’s greatest supporter. After graduation, Virgil took up his first law case but did not take long to abandon the study of law and shift focus to studying philosophy.

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