The certainty that the biographical notices of Virgil and the accounts transmitted of his personal characteristics can be traced to contemporary sources and to information derived from contemporaries, gives to the main statements of Donatus a value which does not attach to the meagre notice of Lucretius preserved in the writings of Jerome. On the other hand, while it is believed by his English Editor that the actual features of Lucretius have been transmitted, engraved on a gem, no reliance can be placed on the authenticity either of the busts, such as that shown in the Capitoline Museum, or of the portraits prefixed to various MSS., and all different from one another, which profess to transmit the likeness of Virgil.
The testimony of inscriptions, of the earliest MSS., and of the Greek rendering of the word, has led to the general adoption in recent times of the name P. Vergilius Maro, as that by which the poet should be known(146). Yet it is an unnecessary disturbance of old associations to change the abbreviation so long established in all European literature into the unfamiliar _Vergil_. He was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 B.C., the first consulate of Pompey and Crassus. The Romans attached a peculiar sacredness to their own birth-days and to those of their friends; and the birth-day of Virgil continued long after his death to be regarded with the sanctity of a day of festival(147). The year of his birth is the first year of that decade in which many of the men most eminent in the Augustan era were born. Virgil was a little younger than Pollio and Varius; a little older than Gallus, Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus, and perhaps Maecenas. All of these men obtained high distinction, and took their place as leaders of their age in action or literature in early youth. The distinction of Virgil was acquired at a somewhat later period of life than that of any of his illustrious contemporaries.
This year is also important as marking the close of the wars and disturbances which arose out of the first great Civil War, and the commencement of a short interval of repose, though hardly of order or security. Lucretius in his childhood and early youth had witnessed the Social War, the bloody strife of Marius and Sulla, and the prolongation of these troubles in the wars of Sertorius and Spartacus: and the memory of the first Civil War seems to have impressed itself indelibly on his imagination and powerfully to have affected his whole view of human life, as the horrors of the first French Revolution imprinted themselves indelibly on the imagination of those whose childhood had been agitated or made desolate by them. Virgil's childhood and early youth were passed in the shelter of a quieter time. He had reached manhood before the second of the great storms which overwhelmed the State passed over the Roman world. The alarm and insecurity felt at Rome during the interval may have caused some agitation of the calmer atmosphere which surrounded his childhood; but the peace of his earliest and most impressible years was marred by no scenes of horror, such as the massacre at the Colline Gate, the memory of which perhaps survives in those lines of Lucretius in which the miseries of a savage life are contrasted with those of times of refinement:--