In addition to these materials for the biography of Latin writers, in some few cases the imagination is assisted in realising their character and genius by the preservation from ancient times of their statues, busts, images impressed on gems, or other kinds of portraiture. But in the case of men of letters, it is not often that reliance can be placed on the authenticity of such memorials, except in such instances as that of Cicero, where a great name in literature was combined with prominence in public life.
The data for a knowledge of the life, circumstances, and personal characteristics of Virgil are supplied partly by direct statements contained in his poems or inferences founded on them; partly by the indirect impression of himself stamped on these poems; partly by casual notices in the works of other poets, and especially of Horace; and partly by statements in the Life of the poet originally prefixed to the Commentary of Aelius Donatus,--a grammarian who flourished in the fourth century A.D.,--and founded on, if not an actual reproduction of, the Life originally contained in the work of Suetonius.
The directest record of his tastes and feelings is contained in one or two of the minor poems published among the Catalepton(141), which may without hesitation be treated as genuine. A fragment of a prose letter to Augustus has been preserved by Macrobius, which confirms the traditional account of the poet's estimate of the Aeneid and of his devotion in later life to philosophical studies(142). The Eclogues and Georgics add something to our information, but as the representation in the first of these works is for the most part dramatic, and as the purpose of the second is purely didactic, the evidence they supply is much less vivid and direct than that supplied by Horace, Catullus, and the elegiac poets in regard to their lives and pursuits; and even where the allusions to matters personal to himself are unmistakeable, they require to be interpreted by knowledge derived from other sources.
The Georgics and those parts of the Aeneid which are specially ethical and didactic, as that part of Book VI. from line 264 to 751, throw most light on Virgil's spiritual nature and on his convictions on the questions of most vital interest to man. But in these parts of his works Virgil has not revealed himself with such distinctness and consistency as Lucretius has done in his great philosophical poem. The personality of Lucretius was simpler and more forcible: the passion to utter his strong convictions prevailed in him over all considerations of art. The colouring of his own heart and spirit, of his enthusiasm or melancholy, appears in Virgil rather as a pervading and subtly interpenetrating influence, than as the direct indication of his true self. His artistic taste enforced on him reserve in expressing what was personal to himself; his nature was apparently more open to varied influences of books and men than that of Lucretius; he was endowed with the many-sided susceptibility of a poet, rather than with the simpler, more energetic, but narrower consistency of a philosophical partisan. Equally with Lucretius he throws his whole heart and being into the treatment of his subject; but in Lucretius the two streams of what is personal to himself and what is inherent in his subject are still distinguishable. In Virgil the imaginative sentiment of the poet and the strong tender heart of the man seem to be inseparably united. It would be impossible to distinguish them by analysis,--to abstract from the bloom of his poetry the delicate sweetness which may have pervaded his performance of the common duties and his share in the common intercourse of life.