‘Vergil: The Poet’s Life’
By Sarah Ruden
Yale University Press, 199 pages

Sylvia Plath, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, James Thurber, Leo Tolstoy—these are not the authors one would expect to appear in a biography of Vergil by an acclaimed translator of “The Aeneid,” which tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan prince who flees the fall of Troy and becomes the illustrious precursor of the Roman Empire.

Sarah Ruden contends that the best way to present the biography of Vergil is to consider him a precursor of modern literature and of the careers of modern writers. She looks to modern literary biography, to the work, say, of Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf, to understand Vergil’s actions.

Ms. Ruden avoids “presentism,” the tendency to interpret the past in terms of contemporary interests and values, by shunning Romanticism.  In Vergil’s time, she emphasizes, the idea of the suffering, alienated poet was inconceivable. Nonetheless, she believes the dynamics of a writer’s career remain relatively stable across time and culture, and that modern literary biography is a tenable model for the recounting of ancient lives.

Vergil, Ms. Ruden argues, was very much tied to the political and cultural program of Augustus, who saw “The Aeneid” as the precious justification of his hegemony. Vergil, so much superior to other writers of his time, attracted imperial favor but also disfavor, as he took too much time to produce his work and seemed reluctant to capitulate to his patron’s eagerness to exploit the poet’s talents.

Ms. Ruden admires Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of William Shakespeare and shows, as he does, how the pressures of time and place affect writers, and how much can be learned from the circumstances in which a writer has to operate.

Writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Ms. Ruden points out, have had to make compromises in their work to suit their patrons, as Vergil did. At the same time, in order to get their work done, writers have to find ways to withdraw from society and politics, and one of the oldest ways is to feign illness.

So it is that in Suetonius and other sources, Vergil’s sicknesses become consequential, as does his decision not to marry — in part, Ms. Ruden reasons, due to his liking for male companionship, a liking tolerated up to a point as long as the poet did not flaunt his sexual predilections.

The main drama of Ms. Ruden’s biography is the contest between Augustus and Vergil. The poet had to carefully handle his ruler’s stipulations and the role of the writer as prestige item. She susses out of Suetonius, the poet’s first biographer, motivations that would otherwise be opaque, seeing in the aloof Vergil behavior designed to deflect the Roman emperor’s demands on the poet’s time. 

As to Vergil’s sensibility, his biographer examines her subject’s writing that extols the country life. He shows a familiarity with occupations such as bee keeping that suggests to Ms. Ruden the poet’s own rural upbringing. 

Given the pages devoted to bees, it is a little surprising that Ms. Ruden does not mention Plath’s famous bee poems that, as in the case of Vergil, are the poet’s way of commenting on human society by situating herself into the keeping of bee colonies that so entranced her father, author of “Bumblebees and Their Ways.”

The final pages of Ms. Ruden’s biography are a harrowing account of what it may have been like for Vergil in his final days, perhaps even becoming a suicide, like Plath, as he grew disenchanted with a life and work subservient to Augustus. The biographer relates Vergil’s anguished denouement as he left instructions to destroy his great work, “The Aeneid.”

Ms. Ruden cites other writers, Rimbaud and Shakespeare, who deliberately left the life of literature, to make Vergil’s own renunciation seem a little less extreme. Yet the overall impression her biography conveys is of a writer who grew to despise his part in the very state that lionized him in order to make him into an imperial prize that made him feel he was no longer his own man.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.” His writing about Roman biography is included in “Essays in Biography.”