Should you ever find yourself in need of medicine in Wales, remember that fferyllfa is the word for pharmacy. What’s strange, though, is that it’s named after Fferyllt, the Welsh rendering of Virgil. Why would a Cambrian chemist take its name from a Roman poet?
The answer lies in the magical power of that man and his work. Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC) abandoned his rural origins in Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy) for the cultural hubbub of Rome. His first major work, the Eclogues — ten bucolic poems inspired by the Sicilian pastoralist Theocritus — explored the challenges posed to rural bliss by the destabilising forces of passion, ambition, and urban life. The personal tragedy that Virgil’s family farm had been seized by Octavian (later Augustus) to reward soldiers for service in the civil war following Julius Caesar’s assassination is scarcely hidden.
The poem won the attention of Octavian’s close friend and cultural attache, Maecenas. For his next work, a four-book poem framed as a farming manual, this figure served as his august patron. The Georgics is perhaps the most complex work of Latin literature: it charts man’s ambiguous relationship with nature, the gods, political power, and mortality. In the Eclogues, a love-sick shepherd sings that omnia vincit amor, “love conquers all”; in the Georgics, Virgil changes the tune: labor omnia vincit / improbus, “bloody hard work conquers all”. The poem ebbs and flows between optimism and pessimism, meditating on how our best means of living well is to toil with nature and harvest the modest rewards of a well-ordered life.
Politics won’t wait up for poetry, however. While Virgil painstakingly honed his craft, Octavian and Mark Antony’s power-sharing agreement fell through; after the defeat and suicide of the latter — along with Cleopatra — Octavian inaugurated Rome’s Imperial era as Augustus Caesar. To legitimise rule by one man, in a proud republic that had permanently banished monarchy five centuries before, was no simple matter. But by reaching beyond Romulus and Remus, to the distant tale of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who escaped the Fall of Troy by forging a new people with the indigenous Italians of Latium, a fresh framing was possible. Julius Caesar, and his adopted successor Augustus, claimed descent not just from Aeneas but from his divine mother Venus: the founding of the Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty was thus no less divine than the founding of Rome itself.
The project — the Aeneid — was one Virgil could not refuse: if the most powerful man in the world demands something from the greatest poet in the world, wheels must turn. But it is telling that Virgil fled from the limelight in Rome for a quieter life in Naples (Neapolis). Never married, and nicknamed Parthenias (Mr Virgin), it seems that Virgil found both solace and strain in his epic undertaking. A letter survives from him to Augustus that confesses his belief that he undertook the project “almost through some mental defect”.
Composing no more than a few lines a day, Virgil deliberately dragged his heels and, after ten years, sought to buy more time by visiting Greece. But a rapid illness killed him before the poem could be finished. His deathbed wish to consign the poem to the flames was ignored; Augustus commissioned two fellow poets to spend three years editing the manuscript. What they did (and did not) change remains one of the great insoluble questions of literary history. But the result, a twelve-book epic of some 10,000 lines, which explores the human suffering inherent to a world driven by irresistible celestial, cultural, and political forces, is one of the most powerful, profound, and spectacularly beautiful art works in any medium. It is one of the few poems that only becomes more rewarding on each rereading.
Without Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, and much of the western canon would be unrecognisable
The Aeneid instantly became the Roman’s national epic and the staple of school curricula. All subsequent Latin literature was written in its light, and shadow. So mystical were the poet’s powers that Vergilius became associated with virga, a magic wand; Virgil (in English pointedly spelled without an e) was taken to be a wizard, whose Fourth Eclogue was reread as a messianic prediction of Jesus’ coming. People would open the Aeneid at a random point, and this Virgilian Lottery (Sortes Vergilianae) would offer up a quasi-oracular verse foretelling their future. Emperor Hadrian and King Charles I are just two of the better known practitioners.
Without Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, and much of the western canon would be unrecognisable; if the Aeneid had gone up in flames, we would inevitably feel the chill. So if medieval Welshmen decided that Virgil was the man who possessed magical healing powers for humankind, they weren’t too far wrong.
