Illustration: Octavia overcome by Virgil's Verses.]

In B.C. 27 the emperor was in Spain, and thence he addressed a request
to let him have some monument of his poetical talent, to celebrate the
emperor's name as he had done that of Maecenas. Virgil replied in a
brief letter, saying, "As regards my 'Aeneas,' if it were worth your
listening to, I would willingly send it. But so vast is the
undertaking that I almost appear to myself to have commenced it from
some defect in understanding; especially since, as you know, other and
far more important studies are needed for such a work." In the year
B.C. 24, we learn from the poet Propertius, that Virgil was then busy
at the task, and in all probability the former may have heard it read
by its author. The old Latin commentators preserve several striking
notices of Virgil's habit of reading or reciting his poems, both while
he was composing them and after they were completed, and especially of
the remarkable beauty and charm of the poet's rendering of his own
words and its powerful effect upon his hearers. "He read," says
Suetonius, "at once with sweetness and with a wonderful fascination;"
and Seneca had a story of the poet Julius Montanus saying that he
himself would attempt to steal something from Virgil if he could first
borrow his voice, his elocution, and his dramatic power in reading;
for the very same lines, said he, which when the author himself
read them sounded well, without him were empty and dumb. He read to
Augustus the whole of his "Georgics," and on another occasion three
books of the "Aeneid," the second, the fourth, and the sixth, the last
with an effect upon Octavia not to be forgotten, for she was present
at the reading, and at those great lines about her own son and his
premature death, which begin "_Tu Marcellus cris_," it is said that
she fainted away and was with difficulty recovered. She rewarded the
poet munificently for this tribute to her son's memory. For three
years longer he worked steadily on the poem, and in B.C. 19 he
resolved to go to Greece and devote three entire years to polishing
and finishing the work. He got as far as Athens, where he met Augustus
returning from the East, and determined to go back to Italy in his
company. He fell ill, however, during a visit to Megara, the voyage
between Greece and Italy did not improve his health and he died a few
days after landing at Brundisium, in the year B.C. 19. His body was
transferred to Naples,