October 15, 70 BC– Virgil:
“Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.”
I am not much of a classicist, but I have long planned to adopt a French Bulldog & name it Virgil. Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, as he was referred to in my singles Roman Classics class, was born in a region of Northern Italy near Mantua. The name “Virgil” is from the Latin- virga, or “wand”. In the ancient Roman manner, & in present day Australia, poets were thought to be gifted with mystical & supernatural powers.
Legend has it that when Virgil was in the womb, his mother had a dream that she gave birth to a laurel branch, that when planted, sprung within moments into a tree heavy with fruit & flowers. The very next day, Virgil’s mother was walking along a dirt path when she suddenly flung herself into a ditch & delivered an extraordinarily mild-mannered child & all who encountered him remarked that he destined for greatness.
Virgil was said to have been a lovely, if not particularly healthy guy. A bit prissy, he was an ascetic, notoriously picky about food & wine. Although he avoided the gym, Virgil was assuredly a homosexual. He had a large collection of original Broadway Cast Albums & was noted for his floral designs & hosting superb & kicky brunches. He had an especially close relationship with a man named Alexander, whom he wrote about as “Alexis”.
Virgil intended his great work The Aeneid to be the Roman counterpart to the Greek author Homer‘s The Odyssey & The Iliad. The Aeneid is a sort of very early Valley Of The Dolls.
Virgil left this world to live with the gods in 19 BC. He had asked that The Aeneid go with him to the grave. Apparently unsatisfied with the manuscript, he dictated in his will that it be destroyed, but his former classmate & patron Emperor Augustus, to the immense benefit of generations of Latin scholars & literary enthusiasts, turned it over to Virgil’s besties Tucca & Varius (note to self: terrific dog names?). The men gave the manuscript a bit of polish, adding nothing to the text, but correcting obvious errors. Although the epic includes a moving episode between the male lovers Nisus & Euryalus, Virgil’s greatest gay works are in his later collection, The Eclogues. The second of those poems is to his beloved Alexis:
The shepherd Corydon with love was fired
For fair Alexis, his own master’s joy
Although he was a popular poet in his lifetime, with a noted blog & short pieces in literary magazines, The Eneid is Virgil’s masterpiece, giving him more fame than he had ever enjoyed during his lifetime. In the years following his death, Virgil acquired a mystical persona. That nutty poet Dante even selected him as the guide through The Underworld in his The Inferno, made in to a popular film in 1974 AD starring Steve McQueen, Paul Newman & Faye Dunaway.
On his deathbed, Virgil composed the following epitaph, which was inscribed on his tombstone in Naples:
Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces (“Mantua gave me birth; Calabria took me away; & now Naples holds me; I sang of pastures, farms, leaders”).
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