Ode to Virgil

Today we have a single, solitary mosaic. In the Bardo National Museum in Tunisia — a treasure trove we explore piece by piece across our Tunisian journey — an entire small palace hall is dedicated solely to this masterpiece.

Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC, Andes, nowadays Virgilio, Lombardy — September 21, 19 BC, Brundisium, today’s Brindisi, Apulia) was a Roman poet of the Augustan period. His first famous cycle of pastoral poems, the Eclogues (39 BC), gave its name to the entire genre. He was a member of the literary circle patronized by Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, whose name became a common noun for a patron of the arts. He wrote the didactic epic on agriculture, the Georgics, but achieved immortal fame through his unfinished epic masterpiece, the Aeneid.

The Romans believed that with his three major works, Virgil surpassed the great Greeks Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer. As early as the early Empire, Virgil’s three masterpieces were included in the school curriculum. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the Aeneid remained one of the few classical texts that continued to be actively read and studied. In his Divine Comedy, Dante famously chose Virgil to be his guide through the afterlife.

Long after these North African mosaic artists captured the poet flanked by his muses, the emotional depth of the Aeneid continued to strike readers to their core. Hector Berlioz famously recalled in his Memoirs how reading the fourth book of the epic in his youth became an overwhelming, almost physical experience:

He found the way to my heart and kindled my nascent imagination. How often, when construing to my father the fourth book of the ‘Aeneid’, I felt my chest swelling, my voice coming under stress and breaking! One day, moved from the start by the sound of my voice as I translated the line:

“At regina gravi jamdudum saucia cura,”

I was laboriously approaching the climax of the drama. But on reaching the scene when Dido expires on her funeral pyre… my lips trembled, the words that struggled to come out were unintelligible. Then at the line:

“Quaesivit coelo lucem ingemuitque reperta.”

at this sublime image of Dido searching for the light in the heavens and groaning when she had found it, I was seized with a convulsive shaking, and, unable to continue, stopped abruptly.

As for the muses surrounding Virgil on our mosaic, both of them are hard at work in our academic department as well:

• Calliope (Greek Καλλιόπη, meaning “beautiful-voiced”) was the eldest daughter of the supreme god Zeus and the Titaness of memory, Mnemosyne. One of the nine Muses, she is the patron of epic poetry, science, and philosophy. She was the mother of Orpheus and, according to some versions, Homer (by Apollo).
• Polyhymnia (Greek Πολυύμνια, meaning “she of many hymns”) was Calliope’s sister, the Muse of sacred poetry, agriculture, and pantomime, the patroness of orators and rhetoric, and the mythical inventor of the lyre.