12 - Poetry and power: Virgil's poetry in contemporary context

Summary

Virgil is at first sight an unlikely prospect as a politically engaged writer. As depicted by his ancient biographers, he is a retiring, even reclusive type, of a philosophic rather than an active nature, uncomfortable in Rome and eager to leave it. By comparison, his fellow-poet Horace, who fought at Philippi and may have witnessed Actium, assumes an almost Hemingway-esque air of bravado. But the ancient Lives also insist on Virgil's proximity to figures of power throughout his literary career, from Asinius Pollio to Maecenas and ultimately to Augustus himself, and repeatedly trace connections between those personal contacts and the prominence of contemporary history in Virgil's poetry. Thus the First Eclogue, in which the shepherd Tityrus relates how he was forced to give up his property but regained it in Rome through the intervention of a godlike youth, was soon read as a poeme a clef with Tityrus representing Virgil and the youth Octavian. We are told that the Georgics, which contains in the proem to Book 3 clear references to the triple triumph of 29 celebrating victory over the forces of Antony and Cleopatra, was read by Virgil to Octavian on his return to Italy from the East in the summer of that year.