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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Vergil belongs to that small class of poets who have been ljx)gethergrtunate. Admired not only for his rare genins, .-Hut also for hisrare character, which made him one of the most sympathetic men of his age,1 he was spoken of with enthusiasm by all his fellow-poets, the best of whom were ready, as we may learn from their works, freely to acknowledge his superiority. He had enemies?genins always has? but he could well afford to forget them in the esteem with, which he was regarded by great men of every kind and by the whole Roman people, which, on hearing his verses recited in the theatre, rose as one man and sainted the poet, who happened to be present, with the acclamations usually reserved for Augustus. He certainly, from what he saw in his lifetime, had every reason to anticipate the immortality of his fame in future ages. Signs of the poet's popularity are apparent in every sphere. In the upper classes, among whom it was the fashion to take an interest in literature, the learned lady described by Juvenal, (according to the scholiast Statilia Messalina, the wife of Nero, ) who appears surrounded by grammarians and rhetoricians, dealing earnestly and voluminously with the literary questions of the day, discusses the character of Dido, and considers the relative merits of Vergil and Homer.3 Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, a courtier of much influence and a dilettante in literature, probably very much of the same calibre as his imperial master, undertook a Latin paraphrase of Homer and a Greek one of Vergil, and on these Seneca, in his work addressed to him, pours forth eulogies,4 which are probably as sincere as those he at the same time bestowed on the future hero of the Apocolocyntosis. In the theatre too Vergil's popularity was no less striking; not only .

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