A Visit to Virgil's Country

Extract

There are two regions of Italy which might properly be called ‘Virgil's Country’. One is Mantua and its neighbourhood, where the poet spent his early days on his father's farm and witnessed the turmoils and miseries of the civil wars that ensued on the death of Julius Caesar; the other is the Naples area, where, after settling early in the thirties B.c. on an estate at Pausilypon, Virgil spent most of the rest of his life in comparative freedom from anxiety. The Eclogues describe the experiences of his younger days and his emotional and spiritual reactions to the great upheavals of the late forties B.c., while the Georgics were completed in ‘ignoble ease’ on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Naples from the north. It was here, too, that the Aeneid was composed. The poet carried with him from the district of his birth vivid impressions which contributed much to his peculiar artistic outlook and which remained indelibly with him to the end of his life; but it was at Pausilypon that his art and thought reached the peak of maturity.