Commentary Inf I 70

This much-debated verse has left many in perplexity. In what sense are we to take the phrase sub Iulio? What is the implicit subject of the verb fosse? What is the precise meaning of tardi ('late')? Virgil was born in 70 B.C., Julius died in 44 B.C., and Virgil died in 19 B.C. (For a discussion in English see Wigo.1975.1.) Hardly any two early commentators have the same opinion about this verse. Has Dante made a mistake about the date of Julius's governance? Or does sub Iulio only mean 'in the days of Julius'? Was Virgil's birth late for him to have been honored by Julius? Or does the clause indicate that, although he was born late in pagan times, it was still too early for him to hear of Christianity? The most usual contemporary reading is perhaps well stated by Padoan (DDP Padoan.Inf.I.70): the Latin phrase is only meant to indicate roughly the time of Julius, and nothing more specific than that; when Julius died, Virgil was only 26 and had not begun his poetic career, which was thus to be identified with Augustus, rather than with Julius. Alessio and Villa (Ales.1993.1), p. 49, point out, however, that there was at least one source that would have made Dante's line make clear literal sense: a ninth-century French text of the works of Virgil with a vita Virgilii that insisted that the poet was born after Julius had come to political power (in the triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus). Thus it is at least possible that all the exertion of commentators is vain and that Dante is resorting to a source that makes Virgil's life run under the authority of both the first two Caesars. (It is important for modern readers to know that Dante believed that Julius was in fact the first Roman emperor.) For a development of this discussion, suggesting that the difficult verse has a fairly straightforward explanation, see Dean.2000.1. De Angelis and Alessio point out the following. Various biographies of Virgil at least potentially available to Dante placed the Roman poet's birth in 59-58 B.C. (not in the year 70) and also told that Julius held his first consulship in Mantua in 59 B.C. Thus Virgil in these lines refers to these two facts and really means that he was born sub Iulio, while lamenting that Caesar's death in 44 B.C., when Virgil was only fourteen or fifteen years old, deprived him of the opportunity to have been known to Caesar once he had begun writing his Eclogues, ca. 30 B.C. This seems clearly the best hypothesis that we currently have in order to explain this line.