legitimate extension of agriculture—­it was one form of turning the products of the villa-soil to the best use—­and agriculture as we remember (including horticulture and stock-raising) continued into Cicero’s day the only respectable income-bringing occupation in which a Roman senator could engage without apology.  That is the reason why even the names of Cicero, Asinius Pollio, and Marcus Aurelius are to be found on brick stamps when it would have been socially impossible for such men to own, shall we say, hardware or clothing factories.  Donatus was already so far away from that day that he had no feeling for its social tabus.  The property of Vergil’s father—­possibly a farm with a pottery on some part of it—­could hardly have been small when it supported the young student for many years in his leisured existence at Rome and Naples under the masters that attracted the aristocracy of the capital.  The story of Probus, otherwise not very reliable, may, therefore, be true—­that sixty soldiers received their allotments from the estates taken from Vergil’s father.

Of no little significance is the fact that Vergil first prepared himself for public life,[6] and progressed so far as to accept one case in court.  In order to enter public life in those days it was customary to train one’s self as widely as possible in literature, history, rhetoric, dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election purposes by taking a few cases.  It was not every citizen who dared enter such a career.  This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most jealously.  While any foreigner or freedman might become a doctor, banker, architect or merchant prince, he could not presume to stand up before a praetor to discuss the rights and wrongs of Roman citizens; and since the advocate’s work was furthermore considered the legitimate preliminary to magisterial offices it must the more carefully be protected.  It would have been quite useless for Vergil to prepare for this career had it been obviously closed.  We have no sure record in Cicero’s epoch of any young man rising successfully from the business or industrial classes to a career in public life except through the abnormal accidents provided by the civil wars.  Presumably, therefore, Vergil’s father belonged to a landholding family with some honors of municipal service to his credit.

[Footnote 6:  Donatus, 15; Ciris, l.2; Catal.  V.; Seneca, Controv.  III. praef. 8.]

Of the poet’s physical traits we have no very satisfactory description or likeness.  He was tall, dark and rawboned, retaining through life the appearance of a countryman, according to Donatus.  He also suffered, says the same writer, the symptoms that accompany tuberculosis.  The reliability of this rather inadequate description is supported by a second-century portrait of the poet done in a crude pavement mosaic which has been found in northern Africa.[7] To be sure the technique is so faulty that we cannot possibly consider this a faithful likeness.  But we may at least say that the person represented—­a man of perhaps forty-five—­was tall and loose-jointed, and that his countenance, with its broad brow, penetrating eye, firm nose and generous mouth and chin, is distinctly represented as drawn and emaciated.