II

SCHOOL AND WAR

To Cremona, Vergil was sent to school.  Caesar, the governor of the province, was now conquering Gaul, and as Cremona was the foremost provincial colony from which Caesar could recruit legionaries, the school boys must have seen many a maniple march off to the battle-fields of Belgium.  Those boys read their Bellum Gallicum in the first edition, serial publication.  When we remember the devotion of Caesar’s soldiers to their leader, we can hardly be surprised at the poet’s lasting reverence for the great imperator.  He must have seen the man himself, also, for Cremona was the principal point in the court circuit that Caesar traveled during the winters between his campaigns—­whenever the Gauls gave him respite.

The toga virilis Vergil assumed at fifteen, the year that Pompey and Crassus entered upon their second consulship—­a notice to all the world that the triumvirate had been continued upon terms that made Julius the arbiter of Rome’s destinies.

That same year the boy left Cremona to finish his literary studies in Milan, a city which was now threatening to outstrip Cremona in importance and size.  The continuation of his studies in the province instead of at Rome seems to have been fortunate:  the spirit of the schools of the north was healthier.  At Rome the undue insistence upon a practical education, despite Cicero’s protests, was hurrying boys into classrooms of rhetoricians who were supposed to turn them into finished public men at an early age; it was assumed that a political career was every gentleman’s business and that every young man of any pretensions must acquire the art of speaking effectively and of “thinking on his feet.”  The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the technique of declamatory prose.  Not that the rhetorical study was itself made absolutely practical.  The teachers unfortunately would spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several years.  But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the parents, and the system of education suffered.

In the northern province, on the other hand, there was less demand for studies leading directly to the forum.  Moreover, some of the best teachers were active there.[1] They were men of catholic tastes, who in their lectures on literature ranged widely over the centuries of Greek masters from Homer to the latest popular poets of the Hellenistic period and over the Latin poets from Livius to Lucilius.  Indeed, the young men trained at Cremona and Milan between the days of Sulla and Caesar were those who in due time passed on the torch of literary art at Rome, while the Roman youths were being enticed away into rhetoric.  Vergil’s remarkable catholicity of taste and his aversion to the cramping technique