How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC. 

Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death. And there’s no reason to doubt the skeleton of Suetonius’s life: that Vergil was unmarried, with no children; both his brothers died when he was young; his father went blind; and he also had a half-brother, Valerius Proculus, through his mother, who is thought to have remarried after her husband’s death.

There are debates about Vergil’s background. Suetonius says he had lower-class parents; but some critics have suggested his father was from the grand equites class. And in later life Vergil certainly moved among the great and the good, including the greatest of them all – the Emperor Augustus.

Vergil assumed the toga of manhood at 15, went to school in Milan and studied philosophy in Naples rather than Athens (the usual gap-year destination for smart Romans), but his genius elevated him into elite circles. In Naples, he lived near other literary grandees, although he often withdrew to Sicily and Campania.

Suetonius also suggests that Vergil was gay. Not only was he unmarried but he was ‘of desire more inclined than usual towards boys’. Vergil was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (‘Virgin’), a pun on his name, which sounded like virgo, Latin for the Greek word parthenos, meaning a sheltered, unmarried girl. All in all, he comes across as a deeply sympathetic figure: gentle, shy, chronically ill and a genius, his intellectual powers increasing as he grew older.