214 The Birds of Virgil. 



He loved Campania, and he loved Sicily 1 ; at 

 Tarentum also he is found, probably visiting the 

 friendly and jovial Horace. The hill-country of 

 the peninsula, and of the island that belongs to 

 it, became a part of his poetical soul ; and as he 

 probably spent much of his time at his own 

 Cisalpine farm, after he was restored to it by 

 his patron's kindly influence, he must have been 

 constantly moving among all the phases of Italian 

 landscape in the plain, on the hills, by the sea. 



Everything, then, in Virgil's history, shows him 

 a genuine poet of the country, and at the same 

 time no one who really knows his poems can deny 

 that they fully bear out the evidence of his life. 

 It is true that he drew very largely on other 

 poets, and could not " disengage himself from the 

 antecedents of his art." From Homer, Hesiod, 

 Aratus, or Theocritus, for example, come nearly 

 all the passages in his works in which birds are 

 mentioned. But though they descend from these 

 poets, and bear the features of their ancestors, 



1 " Habuit domum Romae Esquiliis juxta hortos Maecena- 

 tianos, quamquam secessu Campaniae Siciliaeque plurimum 

 uteretur." (Life by Suetonius, ch. 13.) 



