Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 52, White Flowers Die.

This is the first of six programs on Rome's most famous author, Publius Virgilius Morrow, known to us today as Virgil.

And this show is on Virgil's echlogs, a collection of 10 poems that he put into circulation around 38 or 37 bc.

This episode and the next five will allow us to explore the works of Virgil with a fair amount of detail, not only

the Aniad, the undisputed epic poem of Rome, but also the works that Virgil issued in the decade

before composing the Aniad, two collections of poems

that also ended up being tremendously influential in literary history.

Before we get into the eclogs today, I want to tell you a bit about Virgil's life, what we know about it at least.

Where he came from, what his education was like, and moreover how a provincial from the distant north of modern day Italy survived

a series of massive civil wars, navigated a complex and evolving patronage system and became, along with Homer, the Deuteronomist and

St Paul, one of the most important writers in human history. Virgil lived from 70 to 19 b.C. and thus, like his near contemporary Horace, Virgil watched the collapse of the Republic and the birth of the Principate.

Unlike Horace, however, Virgil had little to say about himself.

As biographer Peter Levi writes, quote,

Virgil is an intensely personal poet,

yet he is anonymous.

The lives that we have of him were written in late antiquity

and are full of fantasies."

As with a number of other Latin writers from the same period, scholars have traditionally

tried to pin down biographical facts about Virgil from his poems,

...