J08 THE BIRDS OF VIEGIL. 



was accidental, and was probably no more to the poet's taste 

 than any other result of an education and an occasional 

 residence in the huge city of Rome. If we compare what is 

 known of his life with the general character of his poetry, 

 we get a very different result. 



The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his native 

 country of Cisalpine Gaul, almost under the shadow of the 

 Alps, three hundred miles away from Eome. His parents 

 were ' rustic,' and he himself was brought up among the woods 

 and rushy meads of Mantua and Cremona. 'Doubtless there 

 is many a reminiscence of his early years in the Georgics, 

 where his love of the woods, in which he must have wandered 

 as a boy, meets us in every page.' ^ In that day it is probable 

 enough that the great plain of the Po was still largely occupied 

 by those- dense forests, the destruction of which is said to be the 

 chief cause of the floods to which the river is liable. Much land 

 must also have been still undrained and marshy : and we 

 can still trace in the neighbourhood of Mantua the remains 

 of those ancient lake-dwellings which an ancient people had 

 built there long before the Gauls, from whom our poet was 

 perhaps descended, had taken possession of the plain. These 

 woods and marshes, as well as the land which Eoman settlers 

 had tilled for vine or olive, must have been alive with birds 

 in Yirgil's day. There would be all the birds of the woods, 

 the pigeons and their enemies the owls and hawks; there 

 would be cranes and storks in their yearly migrations, and 



' Ancient Lives of Virgil (Prof. Nettleahip), p. 33. 



