The virtues that win a place in Elysium indicate the same fusion of
religion with humanitarian sympathies:
Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,
Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artis,
Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo:
Omnibus his nivea cinguntur tempora vitta.
His Elysium is far removed from Homer's limbo; truly did he deserve his
place among those
Phoebo digna locuti.
Before he had completed his work the poet set out for Greece to visit the
places which he had described and which in his fastidious zeal he seems
to have thought in need of the same careful examination that he had
accorded his Italian scenery. Three years he still thought requisite for
the completion of his epic. But at Megara he fell ill, and being carried
back in Augustus' company to Brundisium he died there, in 19 B.C. at the
age of fifty-one. Before his death he gave instructions that his epic
should be burned and that his executors, his life-long friends Varius and
Tucca, should suppress whatever of his manuscripts he had himself failed
to publish. In order to save the Aeneid, however, Augustus interposed
the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will.
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