There is still one point to be noticed in connexion with the district in which Virgil was born and passed his early youth. It was from Julius Caesar that Gallia Transpadana received the full Roman citizenship. But before he established this claim on their gratitude, the 'Transpadani,' as we learn from Cicero's letters, were thoroughly devoted to his cause(159), and it was among them that his legions were mainly recruited. One of the spiteful acts by which the aristocratic party showed its animosity to Caesar was the scourging of one of the inhabitants of the colony of Novum Comum (Como) by order of the Consul Marcellus,--an act condemned by Cicero on the ground that the victim of this outrage was a 'Transpadanus(160).' Caesar was in the habit of passing the winters of his proconsulate in this part of his province, especially at Verona, where he was the guest of the father of Catullus. The name of Caesar must thus have become a household word among this people. They must have soon recognised his greatness as a soldier, and felt the fascination of his gracious presence. They must have been grateful for his championship of the provinces against the oppressive rule of the Senate, and for the protection afforded by his army from dangers similar to those from which their fathers had been saved, after many disasters, by his great kinsman, Marius. They did not share the sentiments of distrust excited among the aristocracy at Rome by Caesar's early career, and had no reason to regard the permanent ascendency of one man as a heavier burden than the caprices of their temporary governors. From the favour which Virgil received from leaders of the Caesarean cause before his fame was established, and from his intimacy with Varius the panegyrist of Julius Caesar, it may be inferred that in adhering to the cause of the Empire he was true to the early impressions of his boyhood. He was one of the first to feel and make others feel the spell which the name of Caesar was destined henceforth to exercise over the world.
Latin literature in the Augustan Age drew its representatives not only from a wider district than the preceding age, but also from a different social class. The men eminent as poets, orators, and historians in the last years of the Republic were for the most part members of the great Roman or Italian families. They were either themselves actively engaged in political life, or living in intimacy with those who were so engaged. Whatever tincture of letters was found in any other class was confined to freedmen or learned Greeks, such as Archias and Theophanes, attached to the houses of the nobility. The fortunes of the two great poets of the Augustan Age prove that no barrier of class-prejudice and no necessary inferiority of early education prevented free-born men of very humble origin from attaining the highest distinction, and living as the trusted friends of the foremost men in the State. Virgil and Horace were the sons of men who by the thrift and industry of a humble occupation had been able to buy small farms in their native district. Virgil's father had not indeed, like the father of Horace, risen from a servile position. He is said to have begun life as a hired assistant to one Magius, who, according to one account, was a potter, according to another a 'viator' (or officer whose duty it was to summon prisoners before magistrates). He married the daughter of his master, being recommended to him, as is said by his biographer, by his industry (ob industriam). The name of Virgil's mother was Magia Polla. His father is said to have increased his substance among other things by keeping bees (silvis coemendis et apibus curandis),--a fact which perhaps explains the importance given to this branch of rural industry in the Georgics. Virgil thus springs from that class whose condition he represents as the happiest allotted to man, and as affording the best field for the exercise of virtue and piety. He and Horace, after living in the most refined society of Rome, are entirely at one in their appreciation of the qualities of the old Italian husbandmen or small landowners,--a class long before their time reduced in numbers and influence, but still producing men of modest worth and strong common sense like the 'abnormis sapiens' of the Satires, and like those country neighbours whose lively talk and homely wisdom Horace contrasts with the fashionable folly of Rome; and true and virtuous women, such as may have suggested to the one poet the lines--