He preferred to be away from Rome, and when he was compelled to go there and was recognized and hailed on the streets, he would flee for refuge into the nearest house. Poor health and his shy nature and love of study made him a recluse. Horace tells us that on a journey to Brundisium in 37 B.C., he and Virgil were unable to join their fellow travelers in their games for he had sore eyes and Virgil was suffering from indigestion. In appearance Virgil was tall and dark, his face reflecting the rural peasant stock from which he came. Their authenticity is in doubt, however, and only a few can be considered genuine. The minor poems ascribed to Virgil, known generally as the Appendix Vergiliana, belong, perhaps, to this youthful period of his life. When Virgil's father died, she remarried and bore another son, Valerius Proculus, to whom Virgil left half his fortune. His mother had lost two other sons, one in infancy, the other at the age of 17. His father was blind and possibly ailing. Virgil returned from Rome to his family's farm near Mantua to spend his days in study and writing and to be near his parents. Temperamentally, or by inclination for the aggressively articulate Roman lawyers who had inherited Cicero's mantle. He was shy, retiring, and of halting speech-no match physically, His education prepared him for the profession of law (the alternative was a military career), but he spoke only once in court. Virgil began his study in Cremona, continued it at Milan, and then went on to Rome to study rhetoric, medicine, and mathematics before giving himself to philosophy under the tutelage of Siro the Epicurean. Because the marriage improved his position, Virgil's father was able to give his son the education reserved for children of higher status. His father, either a potter or a laborer, worked for a certain Magius, who, attracted no doubt by the intelligence and industry of his employee, allowed him to marry his daughter, Magia. 15, 70 B.C., at Andes near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul (modern Mantova, 20-25 miles southwest of Verona) of humble parentage. It is impossible to understand the Aeneid without an awareness of the political situation of the period. Of all the Augustans, Virgil was the most laudatory of the Emperor's achievements. Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, realized the propaganda value of literature, and so he cultivated writers, encouraged them to eulogize his new regime, and subsidized them if necessary. Together they are known as poets of the Golden Age of Latin literature, or more simply, as Augustans. Virgil's contemporary poets were the lyricist and satirist Horace and the writers of elegy Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Virgil's life spans the bloody upheavals of the last decades of the violent Roman civil war (133-31 B.C.) and the first years of the era of order, stability, and peace created by Augustus (the grandnephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, he succeeded him in power at Rome). The Romans regarded his "Aeneid," published 2 years after his death, as their national epic. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), or Publius Vergilius Maro, was the greatest Roman poet.
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