Ancient biography is an almost impossible undertaking. Its only recourse from meager, less-than-reliable sources is the author’s feel for their subject’s milieu, deeds, or texts. And it must resist anachronistic pressures while in the same breath proclaiming its relevance. On these bases, it is hard to imagine Sarah Ruden’s wise, insightful, and engaging Vergil: The Poet’s Life being bettered.
Ruden, the gifted translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, is alive to the challenge she has set herself: “The man was like Shakespeare in being hard to know in proportion to his greatness.” This is due partly to Vergil’s retiring habits—he was possessed of “conspicuous negatives for his time and class (no wife, no children, no settled home, extreme reserve)”—and partly to the long, equivocal shadow of imperial patronage.
Vergil was born in Northern Italy, then referred to as Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul on This Side of the Alps), in 70 B.C. The region would not officially merge with the republic until 42 B.C., making the young Vergil “a technical outsider” to Rome, which, Ruden suggests, “probably mattered little” for his future prospects. It might, in fact, have seemed an attractive, out-of-the-way place during the tit-for-tat civil wars of the first century B.C.
We do not know much about Vergil’s family or upbringing. Speculating about the former, Ruden divides “Roman fathers into two basic kinds, those like Cato the Elder and Horace’s father who would not let their children’s minders and teachers alone and would clearly have liked to do everything themselves, and the fathers who presided and issued demands at more remote heights. Vergil’s father was probably the second, more common kind.” Whatever the case, Vergil’s father saw to his evidently first-rate education.
Reticence, or perhaps an already strong interest in poetry, swayed Vergil from the legal advocacy his training had prepared him for. (Ruden further cites the unappetizing example of Cicero’s loss of head and hands for the would-be orator.) At all events, it has been assumed that the Eclogues, pastoral poems influenced by Theocritus, were Vergil’s debut. Ruden, however, is less quick to dismiss the Appendix Vergiliana, juvenilia of uneven quality and, for many, debatable authenticity.
She quotes the Loeb edition’s “monstrously unfair” take on their genuineness: “It is the greatness of Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that determines the author Vergil and not the other way round. This consideration enables us to see that the principal question to be asked of the Appendix is not so much ‘Did Virgil compose these poems?’ as ‘Do these poems or any of them reflect or presage the greatness of Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid?’” To Ruden, the balance of probability tends to weigh against their most fervent detractors.
The fourth chapter, on Vergil’s relationship with Maecenas (“a wealthy cultural showman”), Octavian, and power writ large, is the book’s fulcrum. “Because of Vergil’s low-key mode of operating,” Ruden writes, “he would have been invaluable in a regime that above all stressed the avoidance of open competition and conflict. This attitude represented Augustus’ prize lesson from the life of Julius Caesar.” Where Caesar shaped his own glory in pithy accounts of the Gallic and Civil Wars, Octavian enlisted Vergil to produce the ultimate national epic. “Vergil the author was Augustus’ greatest achievement,” Ruden observes, “the most beautiful and the most lasting.”
By now Ruden has lapped her predecessor, Peter Levi’s Virgil: His Life and Times (1997), the keen textual readings of which could not salvage its misbegotten approach. Vergil is superb on the wary dance with Octavian, or Augustus, as he became in 27 B.C.—at his deathbed in 19 B.C., Vergil would request, in vain, that the uncompleted Aeneid be burned—though I am partial to Hermann Broch’s masterpiece, The Death of Virgil (1945).
“The man was like Shakespeare in being hard to know in proportion to his greatness.”
Broch cannot be equaled for his beautiful language and Latinate syntax (“And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, ready to start on the inner journey back to loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity, the simplicity of dying”); for his reflections (“He knew of the innermost danger of all artists, he knew the utter loneliness of the man destined to be an artist, he knew the inherent loneliness which drove such a one into the still deeper loneliness of art and into the beauty that cannot be articulated, and he knew that for the most part such men were shattered by this immolation, that it made them blind”); for his telling detail (“Lucius Varius, on the other hand, who took care never to sit down at all, because he had to be mindful of the elegant, well-pressed folds of his toga, remained standing”); for his great philosophical set piece; or for his vision of death (“Thereupon he shuddered and it was a mighty shuddering, almost beneficent in its finality, for the ring of time had closed and the end was the beginning. The images sank down but, preserving them unseen, the rumbling continued”). When you finish you want to begin again.
Even so, Broch’s highest flights and adumbrations of Christianity are rightly set aside in Vergil. Ruden explores Vergil’s homosexuality (per Suetonius, he was “of desire more inclined than usual toward boys”) without turning him into an L.G.B.T.Q.+ showpiece, and dots her narrative with fine parallels, from Jane Austen and George Eliot to Abraham Lincoln (like Octavian, “a little engine that knew no rest”) and James Thurber. (Yes, that Thurber.)
Through it all, she does not forget the non-specialist. So, on the Roman “man of means”: he “played the host in his own dining room, spoiled his daughter and married her off to a crony, worried self-importantly about his son’s education and future, met with clients, wrote business letters, joshed a favorite slave, and took a lordly interest in productive activities on his estate.”
In The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (1975), Frank Kermode noted that “Virgil entered Roman history and the Latin language at precisely the right moment for both. His manners were mature, his style, in its complexity and simplicity, is such that only Dante and Racine among the moderns approach him.” Kermode surveyed Vergil’s reception, among others, and resolved that “the image of the imperial classic, beyond time, beyond vernacular corruption and change, had perhaps, after all, a measure of authenticity; all we need do is bring it down to earth.” This Ruden achieves for the poet’s life.
Max Carter is vice-chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York