Vergil: The Poet’s Life
By Sarah Ruden.
Yale University Press, 2023.
Hardcover, 200 pages, $26.
Reviewed by Paul Krause.
Vergil is the greatest Roman poet. We know him as the poet of the Aeneid, the Eclogues, and the Georgics. Vergil is also Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory, and the poet most frequently cited by Saint Augustine in his luminous writings. Despite this, we don’t know much about Vergil—we know more about the Vergil constructed and spoken of by other authors, a Vergil often created by the “nonsense in later eras” and “activist readings” which taint our understanding of Rome’s grandest poet.
Sarah Ruden, the eminent classicist and translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, takes a step back to remove Vergil from the constraints of later mythmaking and find the historical poet. We can talk about the Aeneid. And while this is good and laudable, we should also seek to talk about Vergil. As Ruden writes, “As always, there has to be something about the author himself that is vital to the thing called literary achievement.”
From 70 to 19 BC, Vergil walked the warm soil of the classical world. He lived in a time of strife and turbulence. His homeland of Cisalpine Gaul was quickly becoming a Roman colony, an administered province rather than just a colony having been conquered by the Romans. During this transition, Vergil lost his family farm until the intervention of Maecenas, to whom the Georgics is dedicated. This was the time of the Caesarian Civil Wars, Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, his murder, the War of the Triumvir, leading to the eventual ascendancy of Octavian as Augustus Caesar, who would then become Vergil’s patron and supported the poet’s creation of the grand epic he is ubiquitously known for.
One of the problems in coming to know the historical Vergil is that he “leaves no letters to or from himself, nor any other personal documents of any kind unless a tomb inscription of doubtful authenticity counts.” Furthermore, the ancient biographies of Vergil, such as from Suetonius, are plagued with all the problems a modern historian faces when reading ancient texts: what is accurate and what is embellishment? The modern biographer, as Ruden notes, is tasked with parsing through the limited data of ancient writings, an occasional piece of archeology, and more often than not, what we do know of the broader world and worldview inhabited by the subject of a biography.
To this extent, Ruden relies on the glimpses of Vergil’s own home and identity in his poetry. This is then married to the broader knowledge we have of rural life, for Vergil was a child of the countryside. Looking at the Georgics and Eclogues as reflective of Vergil’s heart, Ruden writes, “With high confidence, I would posit that from his earliest years Vergil loved the relative quiet and openness of the country, as well as its various natural beauties.” This seems apt given that Vergil is generally recognized as one of the great mythmakers of the Arcadian Idyll, the pastoral paradise of classical literature where man, beast, and bee are harmonized as one—or at least they seek such harmonization despite the hardships and problems all around them. This love for the pastoral countryside, as Ruden decisively shows, must undoubtedly stem from Vergil’s childhood and his growth into young adult life. The world Vergil knew and the world that left the greatest impression on him—therefore influencing his own poetic constructions—was the rural countryside he grew up in, played in, suffered in, and nearly died in.
The recovery of the family farm allowed Vergil to be sent for a literary education in Naples. His family was likely too poor to send him to Athens, the premier destination for any sort of artistic, literary, or philosophical education. Naples, though, was a popular secondary destination. While at school, Vergil was not much of a success. Ruden compares him to other famous dropouts and flunks, but Vergil’s failings in formal learning make him all the more inspiring—despite being a substandard student, he would go on to become the Latin language’s greatest poet (even though contemporaries often made fun of his “rustic” Latin).
Entering into adult life, the turbulence of the civil wars had subsided. Octavian was now Augustus Caesar, the de facto emperor of Rome despite pretensions of continuity with the republican past. Vergil had already published the Eclogues, his poem singing of strife, change, and hope in the countryside, a work undeniably influenced, as Ruden makes clear, by the poet’s own life. Themes of land confiscation, poverty, but also joy in song and homesickness abound. In the Eclogues, Vergil had also praised, albeit briefly, Augustus. Now Vergil’s star was about to shine brightly under the patronage of the emperor.
What was the patronage under Augustus actually like? While Augustus was “vindictive” and his desire for “revenge became worse over time,” there was a certain distance between the emperor and Vergil which permitted the poet’s creative subtleties to flourish. “Octavian did not have the power, or did not have the desire, to have himself and his ambitions promoted blatantly,” Ruden writes. This was to our benefit, over two millennia later, because this relative freedom allowed Vergil to hone his style and form and create a poem that at once acknowledges and endorses Augustan moralism and patriotism, while including many “ironies,” “ambiguities,” and “protests.” Vergil needed the patronage of the emperor, as many artists of the ancient world required patronage of some sort to provide cover and sustenance while creating their masterpieces, but this patronage did not require him to be wholly subservient to the emperor.
The creation of the Aeneid, then, was a labor of love and creativity. Vergil didn’t have to fear exile and death, as a much older Ovid did later in life, which permitted creative play in the construction of the poem. Nevertheless, he was burdened by the demands of a “powerful, control establishing figure.” Thankfully, Vergil was able to weave his way through the slowness of his construction and the demands of Augustus. Ruden notes that Vergil likely only wrote “at the average rate of two lines a day.”
But those “two lines a day” became immortal verse precisely because of the care that Vergil took in crafting his poem. Ruden explains how the construction of the Aeneid was like the construction of a house, one in which careful and deliberate decisions were made, remade, and remade again in order to have something beautiful and worthwhile at the conclusion. Sadly, Vergil never technically completed his poem. In being summoned to Rome, chronically ill as he often was, the great poet eventually died en route to Rome with the Aeneid unfinished. The immortal verse we have today is mostly, though not entirely, finished—but the immortality of Vergil’s verse is a testament to his genius that an unfinished poem is regarded as one of the finest of all-time and the greatest of the Latin language.
Sarah Ruden has done the impossible in giving us an Olympian biography of Rome’s paramount poet. She treats Vergil with care and devotion, a love for her subject rather than her own ideological desires for him. What she does best in this splendid biography is reveal how “Vergil had fully internalized both the actual land as he knew it, the land in literature as it stood, and the land in its political and emotional dynamics, and he let it unwind in a new kind of beauty. This motion helped make his work dreamlike and full of otherworldly power.” Sarah Ruden’s Vergil: The Poet’s Life is now the greatest companion piece to reading Vergil’s enduring poetry.
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView and the author of, most recently, Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature (Stone Tower Press, 2024).
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