Vergil: The Poet’s Life

Ruden (The Face of Water), who has translated Virgil’s The Aeneid among other ancient Greek and Roman works, delivers a studious if unsatisfying biography of the poet. According to the ancient Roman historian Suetonius, Virgil was born to a wealthy father in rural Mantua, Italy, in 70 BCE, but Ruden concedes that the circumstances of his childhood remain largely unknown. She pieces together much of his youth by inference, speculating that his mother likely followed the typical practice of employing enslaved women to “nurse, bathe, and play with... infants and toddlers,” while admitting that “we do not know anything about [his mother’s] personality or activities as an individual.” This sort of conjecture is endemic throughout, as when Ruden suggests that Virgil might have bungled the single case he argued in his brief legal career and feigned chronic illness to get the “privacy and free time” needed to write, and that his death in Brundisium, ostensibly from heatstroke, may have been due to foul play incited by Emperor Augustus, who might have been displeased that Italy’s most revered poet had decided to decamp to Greece. Ruden does her best to weave a coherent account out of the sparse evidence and her speculation is largely reasonable, but the gaps in the historical record remain conspicuous. This valiant effort doesn’t quite overcome a surfeit of uncertainty. (Aug.)