Life
Publio Virgilio Marone was
born in
Anyway, Virgil had the
chance of studying in Cremona and Milan, then in 90 BC in Rome, where he
completed his retoric studies, essential to start his politic career. However,
his shyness not combined with oratorical art and the chaos of the Capital: he
prefers the lesure of Andes and Naples, where he can actually dedicate himself
to literature and philosophy, attending the school of the epicurean Sirone.
Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti
At that time me, Virgil, nourished the sweet
Georgiche IV, 563-564
However thi is a period of
difficult crisis, that will bring to the transition from Repubblic to
princedom: the roman newness (made of civil wars and requisition of lands in
ordere to reward the old-warriors) brusts into the rural lesure of the poet,
tearing him from his ideal of life quiet and remote.
In 42 BC indeed, in Filippi,
Ottaviano and Marco Antonio eliminate Brutus and Cassius, killers of Caesar:
now there is the big problem of the lands' requisitions to in ordere to reward
the old-warriors of the victorious army. The first lands to be dispossessed are
those of the cities that , during the war, had taken the side of cesaricides:
among them was also found
Virgil remembers bitterly
these moments:
Mantova, dear me, too near from the unlucky
Bucoliche IX, 28
Probably Virgil lose too, or he was about to
lose, his properties. He managed to keep them only through the agency of some
influential people, among which there were Ottaviano, who he had met in Rome,
attending the exclusive club of intellectual people that gathered around
Mecenate. To these people – Cornelio Gallo, Asinio Pollione, Alfeno Varo – he
will be thankful in in some passages of Bucoliche.
However, the remember of these events and the
sense of insecurity for the future, will last a subject his whole work.
Virgil died when he was 51, on September 20th
of 19 BC in Brindisi, comeback from a journey in Greece, where he had been in
order to collect information about the places he had described in his Eneide. His
remains will be transferred to Naples and buried on the way to Pozzuoli.
