Whether or not Vergil remained an Epicurean to the end, we must, to be fair, give credit to that philosophy for much that is most poetical in his later work,—­a romantic charm in the treatment of nature, a deep comprehension of man’s temper, a broader sympathy with humanity and a clearer understanding of the difference between social virtue and mere ritualistic correctness than was to be expected of a Roman at this time.

It is, however, very probable that Vergil remained on the whole faithful to this creed[3] to the very end.  He was forty years of age and only eleven years from his death when he published the Georgics, which are permeated with the Epicurean view of nature; and the restatement of this creed in the first book of the Aeneid ought to warn us that his faith in it did not die.

[Footnote 3:  This is, of course, not the view of Sellar, Conington, Glover, and Norden,—­to mention but a few of those who hold that Vergil became a Stoic.  See chapter XV for a development of this view.]

X

RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI

The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at home.  Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil’s pastorals who can take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible hidden meanings that lie in them.  But the biographer may not share that pleasure.  The Eclogues were soon burdened with comments by critics who sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity of an unannaled provincial life.  In their eager search for data they forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author.  The modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a little of the allegory that obscures the text.

It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not themselves consistent.  Those early commentators who variously place the confiscation of Vergil’s farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.), after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province that did not exist, may state some real facts:  they certainly hazard many futile guesses.  The safest way is to trust these records only when they harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret the Eclogues primarily as imaginative pastoral poetry, and not, except when they demand it, as a personal record.  We shall here treat the Bucolics in what seems to be their order of composition, not the order of their position in the collection.