Hic quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat,
  Pulsatusve parens et fraus innexa clienti,
  Aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis
  Nec partem posuere suis, quae maxima turba est.

The virtues that win a place in Elysium indicate the same fusion of religion with humanitarian sympathies: 

  Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,
  Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
  Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,
  Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artis,
  Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo: 
  Omnibus his nivea cinguntur tempora vitta.

His Elysium is far removed from Homer’s limbo; truly did he deserve his place among those

  Phoebo digna locuti.

Before he had completed his work the poet set out for Greece to visit the places which he had described and which in his fastidious zeal he seems to have thought in need of the same careful examination that he had accorded his Italian scenery.  Three years he still thought requisite for the completion of his epic.  But at Megara he fell ill, and being carried back in Augustus’ company to Brundisium he died there, in 19 B.C. at the age of fifty-one.  Before his death he gave instructions that his epic should be burned and that his executors, his life-long friends Varius and Tucca, should suppress whatever of his manuscripts he had himself failed to publish.  In order to save the Aeneid, however, Augustus interposed the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will.  The minor works were probably left unpublished for some time.  Indeed, there is no convincing proof that such works as the Ciris, the Aetna, and the Catalepton were circulated in the Augustan age.

The ashes were carried to his home at Naples and buried beneath a tombstone bearing the simple epitaph written by some friend who knew the poet’s simplicity of heart: 

  Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
  Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.

His tomb[12] was on the roadside outside the city, as was usual—­Donatus says on the highway to Puteoli, nearly two miles from the gates.  Recent examination of the region has shown that by some cataclysm of the middle ages not mentioned in any record, the road and the tomb have subsided, and now the quiet waters of the golden bay flow many fathoms over them.

[Footnote 12:  Guenther, Pausilypon, p. 201]

INDEX

Acestes
Aeneas
Aeneid, the
Aetna, the
Alexandrian poetry
Alfenus Varus
Allegory
Ancestry of Vergil
Animism
Annius Cimber
Antiquarian lore in the Aeneid
Antony, Mark
Antony, Lucius, at Perugia
Apollodorus, the rhetorician
Apollonius of Rhodes
Archias, the poet
Asianists, the
Atticists, the
Auctor ad Herennium
Augustus, cf.  Octavius. 
Avernus, Lake