A man in a crude robe walked along the side of the road. Like all other roads, this one, too, cutting across old Etruria like a sword, would finally bring him to Rome. But would Rome open its gates to him? And if so, would he get back his father's holding? Or would he, Virgil, become a pitiful client of one of Rome's wealthy men? Or, still, would he pass day after day waiting for handouts of bread and for gladiators' games? 

"Rome! Rome!" Virgil repeated the bristling short word differently each time — with hope, with desperation, with anger, and contempt. The order to take his land from him came from Rome. What do present-day Romans know of land? Have they ever mustered it in their hands? Have they ever ploughed it, going to the field without a stitch of clothes as custom required? Have they ever shed their sweat upon it, or lain beneath an oak split by lightning, or grazed goats in nutgroves? For them who spent days and nights carousing, land had neither colour nor smell. They did not feel its soul. Yet it was on them that a tiller's fate depended. They could return his land if they wished. But how to reach their cold hearts? With rhetoric? But he, Virgil, had not finished the school or rhetoricians. His speech was as slow as a river flowing across a plain. Connections? No, his dead father had no influential relatives. His verse? But would the Romans, who worshiped war alone, respond to his simple rural songs? 

Virgil had sent a scroll of his verse to Maccenas. How would the man take to it? Perhaps single Virgil out among the dozens who came to his white-columned house? Perhaps he would rush up and say: "I have read your verse, my Publius. You are the Roman Homer. No, Etruscan not Roman. You come from Mantua. I come from Clusium. My forebears were kings. Yours, I am sure, were priests. And you, my Publius. are a magician." 

Virgil smiled sadly, knowing he was going too far in his dreams. "Yes, my forebears were priests," he said to himself. "Hence my name, Maro, the same as Apollo's priest whom Homer extolled. But my father was a tiller, and also kept bees. Now the beehives and the land belong to one of Octavian's veterans. I want neither glory nor fame. All I want is my land back." 

Virgil seated himself on a treestump beside the road. Stone-girded peaked Etruscan burial mounds rose to right and left. They were reminiscent of the nipples of a giant she-wolf lying on its back. Romulus and other Roman kings had sucked the milk of wisdom from these nipples. The Etruscans had taught them to build sewers, to erect bridges and temples, and also the art of writing and of the theatre. The arts rose to illumine the country like the sun. Then satiety came with the gratification of wishes, with wealth. 

But what was this? The oblique rays of the evening sun? Or a cobweb of invisible threads? Or the strings of a long departed world? Virgil touched them, and they spoke in the voices of his ancestors, they sang like the petals of a flower, like the pure, ringing jets of a mountain stream. It was inspiration, a gift of the Muses. Virgil crossed an unseen line, beyond which lay the intangible. Now he could be a tree or a budding flower, he could go down to the nether world or ascend to the stars. He could spin his narrative in the name of any hero he liked.

 "I'll pick Aeneas," the poet thought. "He was a wanderer and an outcast like me. Troy had been taken from him like Mantua was from me. He departed, carrying his old father on his back. And I carry my father's love for my land. Aeneas's descendants founded Rome. But he could have stayed in Carthage with Dido, the queen who fell in love with him. If that had happened, sheep would still be grazing where the Forum stands today. Instead of marble palaces there would be thatched huts on the Palatine. And Hannibal would not have crossed the Alps in his march on Rome. Nor would Roman legions be stationed on the Rhine and Danube. And godless veterans would not chase farmers off their land. And me, I would not be writing my verse in the language of the Romans but in that of my ancestors. Yes, everything would have been different. But even Aeneas had no power over his past. He could change nothing. But the future — every step he made could mean something." 

Virgil followed the road to Rome. He had a heavy jaw, and pink cheeks beneath the tan on his face. From afar, this tall, slightly hunched man with long bony arms, might have been taken for a shepherd. But those who saw his eyes were blinded. It would strike them that nothing was impossible for this man. Maecenas would open the doors of his house to him. Augustus would speak to the end of his long life of how he had met the dispossessed Mantuan. And someone would write of his as yet unfinished Aeneid that Roman writers and those of Greece should pay heed to it for it was more important even than the Iliad. 

Yet he would not be satisfied, and begged on his deathbed that the Aeneid should be consigned to the flames. It was published, however, and his contemporaries took it as the salvation of Troy, restored in his poetry. To his last breath, Virgil would think he had accomplished nothing, that the best lines were yet unwritten.

Alexander Nemirovsky, "Tales Of The Ancient World"

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