bonese Gaul. Gallus was a youth of almost exactly Virgil's own age, of great personal fascination and precocious poetical genius. Virgil and he were the two foremost members in a remarkable literary circle during the Civil Wars. They studied and wrote in conjunction. The whole group to which the two belonged originated a new poetical movement. It had a triple aim: first, a higher and more sustained technical quality than had hitherto been reached in Latin poetry; next, the assimilation and transmutation into poetical forms of the Alexandrian learning which had become the heritage of the new intellectual class at Rome; and lastly, the embodiment in these forms of the new romanticism.

Virgil's own studies, continued for many years, indeed throughout his life, were wide and assiduously pursued. He began at Rome with the normal course of rhetoric and its cognate studies in language and literature, which was the foundation of the all-important art of oratory. But he soon passed on from these to the pursuit of Greek philosophy. In the lecture-room of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance with the poetry of Lucretius, to

which his own owes so much. In that of the rhetorician Epidius he is said (though the dates make this improbable) to have had young Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, as one of his junior fellow-students. But for some ten years at this period we know little of his life except that it was a time of slowly maturing genius and ardent study, in a circle of kindred spirits. During these years, his father had died and his mother married again. He is not known to have kept up afterwards any personal connection with the country of his birth and boyhood. He had sufficient patrimony to live the life of a scholar, to study and to travel, to devote himself wholly to letters and to philosophical and historical studies. His great shyness, a certain rusticity of manner which he retained through life, and physical health which was always delicate, combined to keep him from any attempt to launch out, as many of his circle did, on public life in a civil, administrative, or military career.

When he was nearly thirty, the course of public events almost wrecked, and then permanently secured, his material fortune. After the battle of Philippi, the first task of the victorious triumvirs was to provide for the

demobilization and settlement of their immense armies. For that purpose, the lands of Italian towns or communes which had taken the other side in the Civil War were confiscated. Virgil's inheritance was included in the confiscation of the territory of Cremona and part of that of Mantua. But he had powerful and active friends. Among them, besides Gallus and Varus, who had already risen to influential positions, was Pollio, the actual administrator of that district. By their intervention, Virgil was not only compensated for the loss of his patrimony by a small landed estate in Campania, but was introduced to the intimacy of what was now becoming an Imperial Court. Prosperity and even considerable wealth were assured to him for the remainder of his life.

Soon after, in 37 B.C., he published the collection of Eclogues or Selected Poems, Poesie Scelte, also known by the name of the Bucolics or Pastorals. The immediate welcome given in all quarters to this small and unassuming volume will be mentioned and discussed later. It made its shy author at once famous; he found himself, to his great embarrassment, vociferously cheered if he entered the theatre. There is a story of the Sixth Eclogue being re

cited there, with great applause, by the favourite actress Cytheris, who was the mistress of Gallus and the Lycoris of the Tenth Eclogue. Already Virgil was marked out by expectation as the laureate of the new régime. Pollio had introduced him to Maecenas, the Home Secretary and Minister of Reconstruction (to use modern phraseology) of the national government. The lively account given by Horace, in the fifth of his first volume of Satires, of the journey he made (in the year 37 or 38 B.C.) from Rome to Brindisi with Maecenas, when Virgil joined the party on the way, is the only intimate glimpse of Virgil which we possess for this period, and the only sketch of him, tantalizingly slight indeed, which has reached us at first hand from the pen of an intimate friend.

It was at Maecenas' instance, and not only with his encouragement but under some pressure from him, that Virgil now undertook the composition of the Georgics. He was not however in any way hurried over the work. About seven years were spent on it, chiefly at his new home in Campania. He had a house at Rome, in the recently laid out fashionable quarter on the Esquiline, but seldom used it, and never for long together. His winters were spent mainly

on the coast near Naples, his summers on his own estate in the lovely hill-country of the interior; it is from "sweet Parthenope," overlooking the Bay of Naples, that he dates his Georgics in the graceful concluding lines. But he also travelled and resided for considerable periods in the South, near Tarentum, and also in Sicily; and intimate personal knowledge of many districts in Central Italy is indicated both in the Georgics and more particularly in the Aeneid.

The Georgics were completed by the autumn of 29 B.C., when they were read aloud by Virgil to Octavianus at Atella after his return to Italy from settling the affairs of the Eastern provinces. They were published soon after, and placed their author beyond dispute at the head of both contemporaries and predecessors, as the foremost of Latin poets.

Virgil was now turned forty. He had from early years contemplated the writing of an Italian epic. He had never lost sight of that design; nor had he ever for long together ceased to ponder over it, to lay plans for it, and to work at it. It now began to take shape in the general scheme of the Aeneid. This became the task of the rest of his life. It was urged on