“He is,” says Dryden, “everywhere elegant, sweet and flowing in his hexameters.” But it was not only Augustan English poets that fell under his spell.
Virgil’s lines are also the medium of a subtle and powerful music which has stamped his words unforgettably on the memories of countless readers in the Western world ever since. He has previously paid Virgil the compliment of adapting his words for his own opening address: Or sei tu quel Virgilio… “Are you that Virgil…?” It is an unmistakable echo of the half-incredulous question Dido addresses to her Trojan guest as he reveals his identity: Tune ille Aeneas… “Are you that Aeneas…?” This poetic style is what Dante learned from Virgil, as he tells him when they meet at Hell’s gate: “You alone are the one from whom I took the fine style that has brought me honor”- lo bello stile che m’ha fatto onore. They drew on the achievements of his predecessors in the epic meter-Ennius and Lucretius-to create a Roman epic style and a poetic eloquence of enormous range, one that moves effortlessly from the impassioned rhetoric of Dido’s denunciation of Aeneas to the pastoral tranquillity of Evander’s humble dwelling on what will one day be the site of Rome’s great buildings from the love songs and banter of imaginary Sicilian shepherds to the fire and slaughter of Troy’s destruction. They were lines that opened up new vistas for Latin poetry by the originality and dexterity of their adaptation of the Greek models-Theocritus, Hesiod, and, above all, Homer. Virgil had lived only fifty-one years, but, in spite of his slow rate of composition (seven years for the 2,183 lines of the Georgics), he left the huge legacy of three works that contain close to 16,000 hexameter lines.
Among the few items in the highly unreliable biographical tradition that have a ring of truth are his remark that he created a poem like a she-bear, gradually licking it into shape, and the report that as he lay dying at Brindisi in 19 BC, he ordered his executors to destroy the manuscript of his major work, the Aeneid, because it lacked a final revision (an order, fortunately, countermanded by Augustus).
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