Who Is Buried in Virgil's Tomb?

By JAMES SHAPIRO

Published: March 21, 1999

VIRGIL
His Life and Times.
By Peter Levi.
248 pp. New York:
St. Martin's Press. $27.95.

Virgil's epitaph, once thought to have been written by the poet himself, neatly sums up the story of his life, death and works:

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

''Mantua was my birthplace; I died in Calabria; and now I rest at Parthenope. I sang of pastures, farms and leaders.'' Virgil would be celebrated in his own day -- and for the next 2,000 years -- for the three remarkable works alluded to in this epitaph: his pastoral ''Eclogues''; his didactic poem on farming, the ''Georgics''; and most of all, his epic on the founding of Roman rule, the ''Aeneid.''

The epitaph, and most of what we know about Virgil, comes down to us through a fourth-century version of a lost second-century biography by Suetonius. It rapidly covers the circumstances of Virgil's early years, schooling and move to Rome; his health (weak stomach, throat and head); sexual preference (young men); and what he looked like (tall, dark and rustic). It also established how long it took Virgil to complete his three great poems, each about double the time of the previous one: the ''Eclogues'' (three years), the ''Georgics'' (seven) and the ''Aeneid'' (eleven, plus the three he had planned for revision). Finally, this early biography makes much of Virgil's close ties with his patron, Augustus, to whom Virgil personally recited the ''Georgics'' shortly after Augustus' forces defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, and to whom he would later read completed books of the ''Aeneid'' as well. Suetonius is also the source of the story that Virgil wished to have the ''Aeneid'' burned at his death -- a request that Augustus overruled. There's not much else to go on: some additional scraps that turn up centuries later, a largely (if not entirely) spurious collection of his early writings; and the internal evidence from his poetry. To that we can add stray comments by contemporary writers (which are as trustworthy, one imagines, as the praise or gibes of fellow writers for Norman Mailer or V. S. Naipaul). All told, pretty slim material for a biography, made all the more difficult by the fact that ancient biographers had no compunctions about mixing truth and gossip; contemporaries must have been especially eager to know more about the reticent Virgil, so that the temptation to embellish his life story must have been unusually strong.

For most of Virgil's 52 years Italy was torn by civil strife, and it's not easy to separate his life and poetic output from these stormy times. He began the ''Eclogues'' right after Julius Caesar was assassinated and the blood bath in Rome began; the ''Aeneid'' was written after this long period of upheaval was resolved by the imposition of one-man rule -- and that man was Augustus.

If, following writers from Edward Gibbon to Ronald Syme, you see Augustus as tyrannical and manipulative, you are left with two choices: the first, in Robert Graves's blunt terms, is to conclude that Virgil ''brought . . . discredit'' on his ''sacred calling'' for his ''subservience'' to Augustus. The second is to claim in Virgil's defense that his work subtly but unmistakably subverts imperialism. The passage usually invoked in support of this view is the final scene of his final poem, where Aeneas furiously slays Turnus after Turnus admits defeat and begs for his life. This is the same Aeneas who had earlier taken prisoners of war to sacrifice upon the pyre of a fallen friend. Virgil, so this reading goes, ends his epic by showing the dehumanizing side of empire; its personal and social cost was simply too high. It follows that Virgil wanted to burn the ''Aeneid'' because he no longer believed in the political order it espoused.

On the other hand, if you accept (and therefore believe that Virgil accepted) Augustus as a leader who sought to restore order to a society riven by civil war, viewing Virgil as critical of empire is a fantasy of modern liberals; there's no doubt that Virgil really believed in Roman ''imperium sine fine'' -- empire without end. Earlier biographies of Virgil in this century -- including those by Andre Bellessort and his student Robert Brasillach -- took this position to a disturbing extreme, seeing Virgil's advocacy of one-man rule as an endorsement of fascism (Brasillach was later executed as a Nazi collaborator). According to this school, Virgil's desire to burn his poem was an esthetic choice, the act of a perfectionist unwilling to let an unpolished work survive him.