(b Andes [?now Pietole], nr Mantua, 15 Oct 70 bce; d Brundisium [now Brindisi], 21 Sept 19 bce). Latin poet. After schooling at Cremona and Milan, he went to Rome as a student. By devoting himself to poetry, he won the favour of Octavian’s powerful counsellor Maecenas and later that of the emperor himself.
The Eclogues (c45–37 bce), Virgil’s first major work, differs from the Idylls of Theocritus and other Alexandrian prototypes in the earnestness of the poet’s response to a harrowing and unpoetic age. His references to wind instruments are not merely ornamental, like those of the Idylls; they form an essential part of his thought. He frequently mentioned the fistula or panpipe, often under the name of calami (see Syrinx). The primitive stipula, in contrast (iii.27), was probably an oat or wheat stalk with one end flattened as a vibrator. For Virgil it symbolized a lack of poetic skill.
A tenuis avena (‘slender oaten pipe’) is mentioned at the beginning and end of the Eclogues (i.2, x.51) and further described by the unique singular calamus (i.10). Traditionally regarded as symbolic of the pastoral genre, it was probably a stipula with finger-holes added. It would thus embody an intermediate stage, known from comparative evidence, being a true musical instrument with a real though limited compass (cf Horace, Ars poetica, 202–3; a tetrachordal or pentachordal range has been conjectured), but lacking the complex construction of the tibia with its separate reed tongue. By contrast the stipula produced only a single sound and is compared in the Eclogues to the cicada’s drone (ii.13). As the 4th-century commentator Servius noted, the avena, in the first poem of the Eclogues, typified a ‘humble style’. Accordingly, its association there with Tityrus casts doubt on the traditional assumption (doubtful on many other grounds) that he was an enviably happy figure singing with full powers; and it complicates, at best, the attempt to identify him with the poet. The avena was used similarly as a genre symbol in lines thought by some after Virgil’s death to be the true beginning of the Aeneid. It is unlikely to have been a tibia with an oaten mouthpiece like some surviving Egyptian pipes, since it is mentioned only in a simple pastoral context by Virgil and Tibullus (ii.1.53, iii.4.71) and with the deprecatory adjective ‘tenuis’ (Eclogues, i.2).
The tibia is mentioned only once in the Eclogues (viii.21, repeated as a refrain) and has no Theocritean parallel. It has been proposed that its presence served to emphasize the mood of lamentation with which the tibia and its Greek counterpart, the aulos, were frequently associated. If so, it serves as a warning against any complacently euphoric view of Virgilian pastoral. Evidently the poet referred here to a single pipe, mentioned by Theocritus in other contexts and not unconvincing in the pastoral scene, but rarely evident in Roman art or literature. Since the terms tibia and aulos alike can be generic, however, it is not clear whether a pipe with an inserted reed tongue (the Greek monaulos) or a reedless pipe (the Greek surinx monokalamos) was meant. The latter may be thought a far more likely instrument for use by herdsmen.
Occasionally Virgil sacrificed consistency in order to accommodate aspects of his own experience; although an oral tradition was natural to pastoral, he permitted himself references to writing (v.14; possibly x.53–4). The cryptic phrase ‘alterna notavi’ (v.14) seems to be a reference, unique in Latin literature, to musical notation; whether it denotes an accompaniment – notation alternating with text, line by line – or an instrumental interlude like the Hellenic diaulion remains uncertain. This forms part of a larger difficulty: for the reader or listener, the shepherds’ piping remains symbolic or characterizing or merely decorative, since it cannot be heard. The poems in consequence inevitably become somewhat artificial, but in compensation the music of the natural world receives strong emphasis and is shown to be related to the singing or playing of men. Certain lines (such as i.1), moreover, display a choice of vowel and consonant which has reasonably been interpreted as an imitation of piping.
Virgil’s works apart from the Eclogues show little concern with music as that term is usually understood. In the Georgics (c36–29 bce) there are only four references to work songs (i.293–6, ii.417) or songs proper to vintage or harvest festivals (i.350, ii.388). Otherwise music was merely decorative: cymbals (iv.64, 150–51) and the Etruscan tibia (ii.193) are mentioned, but the only substantial passage concerns the lyre-playing and singing of Orpheus (iv.464–6, 471–84).
Similarly, in the Aeneid (c26–19 bce) no instrument is prominent except the tuba or battle-trumpet. There is occasional mention of the lituus and cornu, and the buccina appears twice (vii.519, xi.474–5). The latter is seemingly termed ‘pastorale signum’ in the seventh book (vii.513), although this term does not occur in the Eclogues. Signalling was the main function of all these types of military horn. Their serviceableness for music as an art form was not relevant to Virgil’s purpose; for him, as the voice of war, they speak at times in the Aeneid with memorable power. The kithara (concert lyre) appears in one surprisingly detailed technical passage (vi.644–7) concerning a heptachordal lyre plucked alternately with the fingers and with a plectrum. Now clearly identifiable as the double pipes, the tibia is twice named in descriptions of the rites of Cybele and Bacchus that associated it with Etruria, as before, and Phrygia (ix.618–19, xi.737).
The Orpheus of the Aeneid is merely a skilled professional, without the magic force credited to his song in the Georgics, and Circe sings placidly at her weaving like any country wife (vii.12–14; cf Georgics, i.293–4). Portions of the Aeneid were given musical performance, at least from Nero’s time; and according to an early post-classical tradition, excerpts from the pastoral poems were publicly performed as sung mime not later than 43 bce. All Virgil’s works, nevertheless, were written for recitation in an age when a poetic text was complete without any accompaniment. Moreover, his metre was the hexameter, which had for many centuries enjoyed a particular independence in this respect. The musical element should not, therefore, be sought outside a literary context: for the most part it works indirectly through the rhythm, the symmetry, and particularly the countless subtle sound-patterns of his verse.
See also Greece, §I, and Rome, §I.
Book iv of the Aeneid has been the main inspiration for Virgilian music. Aeneas, wandering after the sack of Troy, briefly frees himself in Dido’s new Carthage from the demands of destiny and the need to press on towards the foundation of Rome. Virgil ignored the 400 years that would have separated any real Dido and Aeneas, bringing them together movingly enough to compel even Metastasio to a rare tragic ending in his first original libretto. Pre-Metastasio operas include Didona by Cavalli (1641) and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689). The Metastasio century 1724–1824 begins with settings of Didone abbandonata by Sarro (1724), Albinoni (1725) and Porpora (1725), continues with such composers as Galuppi (1740, 1764), Hasse 1742, rev. 1744), Jomelli (1747, 1749) and Paisiello (1794), and enters the new century with Paer (1810), Mercadante (1823) and Reissiger (1824). Meanwhile J.M. Kraus wrote his Aeneas i Cartago to inaugurate the Royal Opera’s new theatre in Stockholm (1782, but no production until 1799). The most ambitious Virgilian opera is Berlioz’s two-part work (composed 1856–8) based on Aeneid book ii, La prise de Troie and Les Troyens à Carthage. 20th-century works include Malipiero’s Vergili Aeneis (1946), and Enea by Guido Guerrini (1953).
The marriage of Aeneas to the Latin bride Lavinia (book vii) is treated by Collasse in Enée et Lavinie (1690) and P.A. Guglielmi in Enea e Lavinia (1785). Lysenko’s Eneida (1910) made a musical comedy from Kotlyarevs'ky’s parody of Virgil, in which gods and heroes become Ukrainian bumpkins.
The first Spanish setting of Virgil comes in Mudarra’s songs with vihuela accompaniment (1546), exactly 400 years before Malipiero’s La terra for chorus and orchestra. Instrumental music inspired by Virgil includes a Pagan Poem by Loeffler, originally for chamber group (1901), then orchestra (1906), and Déodat de Séverac’s symphonic suite Didon et Enée (1903).
T.E. Page, ed.: The Aeneid of Virgil (London and New York, 1894/R)
T.E. Page, ed.: P. Vergili Maronis Bucolica et Georgica (London and New York, 1898/R)
H.R. Fairclough, ed. and trans.: Virgil (London and Cambridge, MA, 1916, 2/1934–5/R)
C. Day Lewis, ed.: The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil (London, 1966)
R.A.B. Mynors, ed.: P. Vergili Maronis opera (Oxford, 1969)
A. Mandelbaum, ed.: The Aeneid of Vergil (Berkeley, 1971)
R.B. Williams, ed.: The ‘Aeneid’ of Vergil (London, 1972–3)
H.J. Rose: The Eclogues of Vergil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942)
V. Pöschl: Die Hirtendichtung Virgils (Heidelberg, 1964)
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 225ff
M.C.J. Putnam: Virgil’s Pastoral Art (Princeton, NJ, 1970)
P.L. Smith: ‘Vergil’s avena and the Pipes of Pastoral Poetry’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, ci (1970), 497–510
G. Wille: Einführung in das römische Musikleben (Darmstadt, 1977), 131–4
J. Griffin: Virgil (Oxford, 1986)
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN (1), ROBERT ANDERSON (2)