Again, I'm spending time in doctors' and hospital waiting rooms, drinking vile stuff – well actually no so vile, nowadays they mask the barium with a fruit smoothie taste – and waiting for the stuff to work through my body before a CT-scan. In circumstances like these, ambitious nonfiction is not the thing to read. (My apologies to Mary B.)
However, keeping in with the "Roman Revolution" theme, I grabbed an old favorite, David Wishart's I, Virgil – unfortunately it seems to be seriously out of print right now. For those readers who know Wishart only from the Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus mystery novels, with their wine-swilling hero and his anachronistic modern gumshoe language, this 1995 novel would come as a real surprise.
'I, Virgil' is a well researched biographical novel, (albeit with a few unexplained lapses: Marcus and Decimus Brutus were not brothers, for one). Here we have Virgil, narrating the story of his life and times, drawing succinct portraits of his contemporaries and elders, from Brutus to Antonius, Maecenas and Horace to Asinius Pollio, and last but not least of that enigmatic figure, Augustus, whom the poet in his narrative deliberately calls 'Octavian' throughout – the ending of the novel will show why clearly. Major events, such as the proscriptions and the land grab for the veterans are vividly related through single instances. At the same time, the narrator does not spare himself and his real and imagined failings.
The book covers the time from Virgil's childhood in the 60s BCE – with a theme of fratricide – to his impending death in 19 BCE, almost the same time span as The Roman Revolution. Reading the novel alongside that work is easy: one does not have to change gear; the poet (and his author) see the major players in the same light as Ronald Syme did.
All in all, this is a solid, compact novel, and if you find it in your library it is well worth reading. One would like to see more like this from the author, entertaining though his mysteries are.
For a really ambitious treatment of Virgil though, one has to go to The
Death of Virgil by the Austrian Modernist writer – and later exile in America – Hermann Broch. For me it's an ongoing project: I haven't been able to finish reading the novel (in its original German) yet. It requires extreme concentration and a lot of uninterrupted time.
Virgil texts online
Suetonius: Life of Vergil
Aelius Donatus: Life of Virgil
The Secret History of Virgil by by Alexander Neckam, said to be based on a History by Gaius Asinius Pollio
