-Ml 
 
i 
 
 THE 
 
 YOUTH OF VERGIL 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE JOHN RYLANDS 
 LIBRARY ON 9 DECEMBER, 19 14 
 
 BY 
 
 R. S. CONWAY, LiTT.D. 
 
 HULME PROFESSOR 01- LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 
 Reprinted from " The Bulletin of the fohn Rylands Library " 
 
 fuly, 191 5 
 
THE 
 
 YOUTH OF VERGIL 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE JOHN RYLANDS 
 LIBRARY ON 9 DECEMBER, 19 14 
 
 BY 
 
 R. S. CONWAY, LiTT.D. 
 
 HULME PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 
 Reprinted from " The Bulletin of the fohn Rylands Library " 
 
 July, 191 5 
 

 THE YOUTH OF VERGIL.^ 
 By R. S. CONWAY. Litt.D. 
 
 HULME PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 MANCHESTER. 
 
 IN Other lectures delivered in this Library an attempt has been made 
 to consider, in the light of the events of Vergil's time, the view 
 which the poet gives us of different sides of human experience, 
 such as the relation of Man to Nature, or the conception of an ideal 
 sovereign. Our inquiry was then based upon what he wrote at the 
 time of his fullest power ; the Georgics having been begun probably 
 in his thirty-fourth year, and published in his forty-first, and the 
 Aeneid having been left unfinished at his death ten years later. 
 
 The object of the present lecture is a more difficult, and, in seem- 
 ing, perhaps a less fruitful endeavour, to frame, if we can, some picture 
 of the development of Vergil's thought before he set himself to any 
 national task. For this is the great difference between the Georgics 
 and the Aeneid on the one side, and almost all the poet's work that 
 preceded them on the other. Both the two great poems have national, 
 or more than national scope. All those which precede them — if we 
 except the IV and V Eclogues, exceptions which we shall see 
 really prove the rule because they mark a transition — are in a sense 
 private performances. Yet just for this very reason the poems of 
 this date have an interest of their own, just because in them Vergil 
 had that greater freedom which belongs to an artist not yet widely 
 known. Youth has its privileges of free experiment, of moods shifting 
 between daring invention and gentle, playful loitering in old ways, 
 between fervent outpouring, where the new spirit breaks into vehement 
 almost violent utterance, and studies modelled humbly upon the work 
 
 ^ A Lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on December 9, 
 1914. In printing it I am deeply indebted to the kind and searching criticism 
 of my friend Prof. W. B. Anderson. 
 
2 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 of others, where the poets chief ambition is to represent in a new 
 material the work of some older master. Such a period is difficult to 
 study, because one is apt to judge the work of early years by the 
 work of the artist's maturity, and hence to think little of passages ad- 
 mirable enough in themselves, because they fall short of what came 
 later. Another difficulty must be faced in the case of a poet who, 
 like Vergil or Shakespeare, so far outshone in the end every one of his 
 contemporaries that the student finds it difficult to believe that his 
 early work may have been deeply indebted to the encouragement and 
 example of some of the very writers whose fame was destined to be 
 completely eclipsed by his. 
 
 Vergil in his youth was one of a group of writers full of poetic 
 ambitions ; Varius, Cinna, Varus, Tucca, Pollio, and Vergil's 
 own bosom-friend Gallus, to mention no others, were all wniters 
 of verse ; but the economy of the centuries has swept away every 
 trace of the big or little books of all these poets, except that from 
 Gallus one interesting poem has been preserved, because it had come 
 to be bound up with some of the early writings of his greater friend. 
 In this case, therefore, we have, as we shall see, a basis for comparing 
 Vergil's work with that of one of his contemporaries ; but the rest is 
 silence. We know nothing of the' authors of the other non-Vergilian 
 poems bound up with some genuine ones in what is called the Ap- 
 pendix Vergiliana} Nor do we even know (I wish we did) the 
 people whom Vergil has represented in some of his earlier poems as 
 conversing or competing with himself. If we did, we should begin 
 to understand the Eclogues ; and if we only understood them, they 
 would be among the parts of Vergil's work read with the keenest 
 interest. 
 
 That brilliant scholar Prof. Franz Skutsch of Breslau, who died 
 two years ago, had lived long enough to open an entirely new path 
 for study by explaining for the first time the meaning of two of the 
 most difficult of the Eclogues, VI and X, and indeed VIII as well. 
 He showed ^ that as continuous poems they had practically no mean- 
 ing at all, just as much and as little as the bibliography of a poet in a 
 catalogue. For centuries scholars and schoolmasters have been 
 
 ^ In what follows I have generally accepted Ellis' text. 
 '^In the volumes entitled " Aus Vergil's Fruhzeit," Leipzig, 1901 and 
 1905. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 3 
 
 hammering away in the desperate effort to discover a story where 
 there is only a series of subjects of stories, and a romance in what 
 is only a description of the plots of many romances ; and the 
 unfortunate schoolboy, fed upon such husks, naturally deemed the 
 author of the stuff that needed the incredible explanations offered 
 to him a creature past finding out and certainly not worth finding. 
 Well, we may hope that no more schoolboys will be tormented with 
 the effort to discover in Eclogues VI and X anything but friendly 
 metrical catalogues of the different poems which Gallus had written. 
 But the rather sorry story of the study of these two poems must warn 
 us against assuming that the other Eclogues are intelligible with no 
 better means of interpretation than we at present possess. In the 
 first Eclogue, for example, what scholar has or ever had the remotest 
 credible notion who Amarylhs was, or who Galatea, or why 
 Tityrus should be represented as having been set free from slavery 
 after he became the possession of Amaryllis instead of Galatea, or 
 what kind of possession of him was ever claimed by these ladies, if 
 they were creatures of flesh and blood at all. Here we have an 
 example of a well-known passage of three lines ^ which is totally un- 
 intelligible ; but which has been interpreted and translated with sub- 
 lime stupidity for some nineteen centuries by people who would not 
 confess their ignorance. 
 
 We have strayed, perhaps, rather far from the purpose immedi- 
 ately before us, that of defining the period of Vergil's poetic life 
 which we are now to consider ; but perhaps the digression is not 
 wholly irrelevant. It will at least show that the work that Vergil 
 published before he was thirty needs a good deal of study, and it 
 will also serve to explain why this lecture will invite attention 
 especially to the earlier, indeed the boyish work of the poet, written 
 between his sixteenth and his twenty-fourth years. If we can view 
 this in its proper perspective, it may tell us something of the growth 
 of that wonderful boy's spirit. But we must proceed with caution, 
 because in the bundle of poems in which this juvenile work of Vergil 
 is included, there are a certain number which it is quite certain cannot 
 possibly have been written by Vergil himself. Examples are the 
 poem addressed to Messala, the leader of a coterie which was in 
 
 ^Ecl. 1.31-3. 
 
4 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 some ways the rival of that of Maecenas ; and the lament for Maecenas, 
 called by his name and written after his death and therefore long after 
 Vergil's, by some young writer who tells us frankly that he could not 
 claim to be called a friend of the great patron. In these circum- 
 stances the rule that must guide us is to disregard for the purpose of 
 any serious argument all the poems except those which fulfil two con- 
 ditions ; they must bear some distinctive trace of Vergil's manner, 
 and they must contain no passage which for any clear reason it is 
 difficult to attribute to him. These tests still leave us, I think, some 
 four or five poems which we may confidently attribute to Vergil, 
 notably the Culex, which we will shortly consider ; the Moretum, 
 or " Farmer's Salad " a curiously interesting genre picture of rustic 
 life ; ^ three charming little epigrams on Priapus, the god of gardens ; 
 and two not less charming autobiographical poems, which if they were 
 not written by Vergil were certainly written by some poet trciined 
 in precisely the same style and breathing the same gentle spirit. Of 
 those about which doubt is possible, the picture of the tavern-hostess, 
 known as the Copa, is the most important, and the internal evidence " 
 for its Vergilian authorship, I confess, seems to me rather difficult to 
 disregard. 
 
 Beyond and after these stands the delightful poem of the transition, 
 the climax to which Vergil's earliest poetic ambitions brought him, 
 only to disclose that even so he had barely realized his power. This 
 was, of course, the IV Eclogue,'^ which partly by accident but more 
 by nature blossomed into a peculiar sanctity and lent to its author the 
 title and influence of an inspired Christian teacher.* Some of the 
 chief features of the poetry of this Eclogue we shall be able, I think, 
 to trace in course of growth ; and we shall recognize that that wonder- 
 
 ^ Mr. J. W. Mackail writes of this {Class. Rev. XXII. (1908), p. 72) : 
 " The internal evidence for the Vergilian authorship is so good that it 
 would require but little external support ". 
 
 '^ See below, p. 26. 
 
 ^ This dates from 40 B.C. The Fifth was written some two years sooner, 
 probably at the celebration of Julius Caesar's memory on his birthday in 
 July, 42. The mourning of Rome for his assassination is represented by 
 the sorrow of the rivers and the forests for the fair shepherd Daphnis. 
 Did ever a young poet approach a grave theme by steps more shy ? 
 
 ^ See The Messianic Eclogue of Vergil (Mayor, Fowler & Conway ; 
 published by John Murray, 1 907). 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 5 
 
 ful poem is not an isolated curiosity, but like the flower which follows 
 a morning of spring sunshine upon a bank of violets in bud. 
 
 Let us take, as a kind of background to our view, the poem al- 
 ready mentioned, once attributed to Vergil but now clearly shown to 
 be the work of his friend Gallus. This miniature epic, called the 
 Ciris, which contains some 540 lines, is dedicated to Messala, and 
 tells the story of Scylla of Megara. This lady, as the poet points out 
 in thirty or forty lines, is to be carefully distinguished from the more 
 famous Scylla who was the neighbour of the whirlpool Charybdis and 
 whose gentle way it was to he in wait in the cliffs of Sicily to prey 
 upon sailors as they passed. This, the Homeric Scylla, is of course 
 only some old-world sailor's picture of a tropical cuttle-fish : but the 
 Scylla who is the subject of the Ctris was the daughter of Nisus, 
 the King of Megara, on whom Minos, King of Crete, was making 
 war. Now this Nisus held his throne by a tenure which a modern 
 monarch would think peculiar, but which is famiUar to us in the folk- 
 lore of many lands. He had a rose-coloured lock of hair in the 
 middle of his head, and so long as this remained uncut, his kingdom 
 also was destined to remain safe. Unluckily for him, his only 
 daughter Scylla fell in love with the invader. King Minos, though how 
 she came to set eyes upon him the poem does not tell us, beyond the 
 fact that Scylla had somehow offended Juno and that Juno sent Cupid 
 to kindle in her a passion for Minos. Contrast this with the First 
 Book of the Aeneid and remember the perfectly natural and credible 
 way in which the growth of the passion of Dido for the stranger king 
 /Eneas is traced. But in Gallus* poem, however Scylla's love be- 
 gan, she becomes at once its hopeless victim ; she wanders, or rushes, 
 through the city hke a bacchante or a priestess of Cybele, not stop- 
 ping — so we are told — either to perfume her hair or put on slippers 
 or necklace, but continually making excuses to go to the walls to watch 
 the Cretan army, of which Minos is in command. She cannot spin 
 or weave or play the psaltery ; her cheeks lose all their colour, and 
 she is sure that her despair will kill her. ' She sees rotten-little death 
 creeping over her flesh,' so the poet describes ^ her condition. But 
 she at once thinks of the expedient of cutting off the fatal lock from 
 
 ^ Tabidulamque videl labi per uiscera mortem (I. 1 82). The di- 
 minutive adjective is perhaps less absurd in Latin than in the nearest 
 rendering possible in English, but it is every whit as undignified. 
 
6 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 her father's head and sending it to Minos as a means both of intro- 
 ducing herself to him and »of securing his affection. Here the poet 
 inserts ^ a few Hnes of prudent but (where they stand) rather prosaic 
 digression, suggesting that perhaps after all she was ignorant of the 
 fatal effect that the cutting of this lock would have upon her father's 
 fortunes ; but he does not stay to consider why, if she did not know 
 this, it should ever have occurred to her to send such a curious present 
 to the prince whom she wished to attract as a suitor. Young ladies 
 are not wont to send locks of their father's hair to strangers as tokens 
 of their affection, so far as my experience goes. Without solving 
 this difficulty the poet proceeds, in fifteen lines, to prophesy the ulti- 
 mate fate of Nisus and Scylla, viz. to be changed into birds. And 
 by way, we may suppose, of relief to this somewhat lugubrious pro- 
 spect, he calls upon all the creatures of the air who ride upon the 
 clouds or traverse the sea and the forests — the lines are undeniably 
 pretty — to ' rejoice that their number is to be increased by this royal 
 pair,' Nisus and Scylla, for they will augment the number of princely 
 kinsmen and creatures of their own rank who have been turned 
 from human beings into birds, of whom particular specimens are 
 mentioned. Why the birds, whether originally human or not, should 
 be so pleased about the new arrivals, does not appear ; but apparently 
 there was no doubt about it in the poet's mind, because he repeats the 
 word Rejoice three times over. This curious diversion of the narrative 
 is thoroughly in the Alexandrine style, giving the poet an opportunity 
 of showing his knowledge of mythical ornithology, and linking up his 
 own particular myth with several others of the same kind, a process 
 with which, on a vast scale, most of us are tolerably familiar in Ovid's 
 Metamorphoses. Coming back to his story, the poet proceeds to 
 another type of composition beloved of Alexandrine and later poets, 
 namely an interview between a heroine and her confidante. Scylla 
 rises at night, scissors in hand, to attack her father's head ; but she is 
 caught on the way by her old nurse, who after scolding her in twenty- 
 four heroic lines throws a cloak over * chilly-little ' Scylla's * saffron- 
 
 M cannot resist the suspicion that these lines (185-89) are Vergil's; 
 they are marked by most Vergilian pauses (see below, p. 9 footnote) £md 
 some Vergilian diction. If so, were they written by him as a suggested 
 beginning for a new turn to the story? In 1. 190 Tu must surely be right 
 for the Heu of the (XV-cent.) codices. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 7 
 
 coloured night-dress ' ; and after another 1 00 Hnes of conversation puts 
 her back into bed, taking care to extinguish the light by turning its 
 wick upside down. Then she stays gently patting Scylla to quiet her, 
 and sits up beside her all night ' bending over her chilly-little eyes, 
 propped up on her elbow '. This thrilling scene has filled altogether 
 1 50 lines. In the morning the nurse persuades Scylla to try magic 
 arts in the hope of persuading Nisus to make peace. They, however, 
 are all exhausted in thirty lines, and then the nurse joins in the original 
 plot. But after this, the story begins to gallop at breakneck speed : 
 in no more than four lines Nisus is robbed of his rosy lock of hair, his 
 city captured, and Scylla carried off (presumably by Minos, though we 
 are not told how) and dragged through the sea by a rope attached to 
 one of the ships. This passage is most characteristic of the author's 
 manner. 
 
 * Again, therefore, Scylla becomes the foe of her father's head ; 
 then the lock of hair which blossomed with Tyrian purple is cut ; then 
 Megara is taken and the oracles of the gods made good ; then the maiden, 
 daughter of Nisus, suspended in strange fashion from the tall ships, is 
 dragged through the blue sea.' 
 
 Clearly our narrator can make up for lost time when he chooses. 
 Having got his heroine thus speedily into the water, what does it occur 
 to him to say next ? No modern reader could guess. 
 
 ' A great number ^ of nymphs admire her in the water. Father 
 Ocean admires her, and fair Tethys, and Galatea, hurrying her eager sisters 
 along. The nymph, too, who is wont to traverse the great seas with a 
 team of fishes, and a sea-green car of two-footed horses, Leucothea, and 
 the little Palaemon beside his divine mother. Also the two gods whose 
 destiny it is to live alternate days, the dear offspring of Jupiter, his great 
 sons, the children of the daughter of Tyndareus ; ^ they too admire the 
 maiden's snowy limbs.' 
 
 But this admiration is quite platonic ; not one of all this menagerie 
 of sea-gods lifts a finger or a flapper to help her. 
 
 That is how the poet of the Ciris comports himself at the tragical 
 climax — he simply runs away from it. Indeed "runs" is too weak 
 a word — he bolts. And then he takes refuge behind a whole ware- 
 house of mythological furniture. This stuff serves to fill sixteen lines 
 
 ^ Complures, the most prosaic of all possible epithets. 
 
 ^ That is. Castor and Pollux, described in only four different ways. 
 
8 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 devoid of any trace of naturalness or pity. Then suddenly we come 
 upon two which strike a note from a different world. 
 
 Raising to heaven, poor maid, her burning eyes. 
 Her eyes, for bonds held fast those tender hands. 
 
 No lovers of Vergil will need to be told who wrote these lines ^ 
 or why we have a sudden outbreak of feeling in the midst of a frigid 
 piece of Alexandrine fantasy. 
 
 There follows an oration of some fifty lines, the variations in 
 
 which are hardly less remarkable. Scylla begins with a request to the 
 
 winds to keep quiet for a little while she speaks ; and then turns to a 
 
 careful account of her own kinship with them according to the best 
 
 mythology. Minos is then denounced for having broken his bargain 
 
 with her (though we have never been told when the bargain was 
 
 made). Then come a few lines (418-24) of penitence naturally 
 
 and feelingly worded, succeeded by rhetorical self-reproaches in which 
 
 she dwells on the luxury and artistic adornment of her father's palace, 
 
 sacrificed by her in order to befriend Minos. 
 
 ' The rich palace with its delights did not move me, with its frail coral 
 and tear-like gems of amber, nor all the crowd of attendant nymphs of 
 my own age. Love conquers everything ; what would he not have con- 
 quered ? My temples will not now be moist with rich myrrh, nor will 
 the bridal pine-torch kindle for me its chaste flame ; nor will my bed- 
 stead be of ivory nor spread with Assyrian purple rugs. These are great 
 complaints ; nor will even the earth, common mother of all things, bury 
 her foster-child with a handful of sand* 
 
 Gallus clearly flattered himself on a knowledge of feminine taste ; 
 and at the critical points of the tragedy, here as before," he leaves 
 room in his heroine's thoughts for these grave matters of toilet and 
 furniture I 
 
 When the speech is ended we have a geographical description in 
 twenty lines of the places which the ship passes, for an Alexandrine 
 poet was always expected to display a knowledge of geography. 
 The last seventy lines give the metamorphosis, carefully narrated. 
 Scylla and her father are turned into a pair of birds, Scylla becoming 
 the Ciris, or osprey, and her father the Hahaeetus, a larger kind of 
 sea-eagle. 
 
 ^ Aen. II. 405-6, where the order has been made more pointed, with 
 two other slight improvements. 
 
 ^ LI. 1 67-70 ; see above, p. 5. The detail is thoroughly Alexandrine, 
 as Prof. W. B. Anderson reminds me ; of. Apoll. Rhod. III. 828 ff. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 9 
 
 Even this brief description of the framework of the poem will, I 
 hope, have been enough to suggest, if not to prove, that it is quite 
 impossible ^ to attribute any but occasional parts of it to Vergil ; and 
 in fact we have definite ground for believing that it was not written 
 by him but by his intimate friend Gallus. For in a note on Eclogue 
 X (1. 46) Servius remarks that ' all these lines,' presumably those in 
 the context, ' are taken from the poems of Gallus ' ; and a little 
 farther on (11. 58, 59) we have two striking phrases which appear 
 in the aris (\l 196 and 299). 
 
 And again in Eclogue VI, which, no less than the Tenth, as 
 Skutsch has shown," is a catalogue describing a number of different 
 poems, there are four lines allotted to Scylla, the daughter of Nisus. 
 More than three of them are taken up with distinguishing her from the 
 Homeric Scylla and are taken directly from the Preface to the Czrzs 
 with the change of a single epithet. These lines in the sixth Eclogue 
 follow immediately two in which the poet is instructed to sing about 
 * the origin of the Grynean grove ' ; on which Servius remarks that 
 this was the title of * the poems of the Alexandrine writer, Euphorion, 
 which Gallus translated into Latin '. We know that the poems of 
 Euphorion consisted of bits of mythology worked up into miniature 
 
 ^ Let me add two confirmatory points of a definite nature which to 
 some minds may be more convincing than any general estimate of poetic 
 character. The first is the use of several words which appear nowhere 
 in the works certainly attributed to Vergil, e.g. the two diminutives /rz^z- 
 du/us (U. 251, 348) and tabidulus (1. 182): the Greek words sophia 
 (1. 4), peplos (1. 21), thallos (I. 376); and the colloquial use of nulla 
 (1. 1 77) for nunquam. The second point is one which will appeal 
 especially to those who have been through the discipline of composing 
 Latin hexameters, the remarkable frequency of long stretches of the Ciris 
 with no pauses, or very few, anywhere except at the end of the line. 
 Thus in the first eleven lines there are no pauses at all elsewhere ; in the 
 next ten only three, and those very slight ; in the next twenty only five. 
 Similarly in 11. 72-88 there are very few except at the end of a line, and 
 there is a pause at the end of every one of them. The same monotony 
 appears in Catullus* hexameters. But even in the most youthful work of 
 Vergil the variation of the pauses is marked, and in fact this part of 
 Vergil's technique is not the least beautiful of his gifts to Latin poetry. 
 And in the lines which we noted in the Ciris as being possibly, for 
 other reasons, due to Vergil (4 1 8-24) there are no less than seven pauses 
 at other points than the end ; and so in 403 and in 1 85-89. 
 
 ^ See p. 2 footnote. 
 
10 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 epics, just of the type which the Ciris represents ; and it is quite 
 natural that in describing another of the poems from this book, the 
 story of Philomela, Vergil should use one line (81) which appears 
 almost wholly in the Ctris (51). This definite information from 
 Servius has been made by Skutsch the basis of a careful and con- 
 vincing analysis of several of the Eclogues of Vergil which have to do 
 with Gallus and contain quotations from the Ciris. The practice of 
 complimenting a poet by summarizing his poem and giving a line or 
 two from it was familiar in the poetical circles of Vergil's youth ; and 
 other examples are Ovid's memorial poem on Tibullus {Amores III. 
 9) and Statins' birthday poem on Lucan {Silvae II. 7). 
 
 Before we leave the Ciris it is worth while to notice some of the 
 changes that Vergil made in the lines he took over. The treatment 
 which the Homeric Scylla gave to sailors is described thus by Gallus 
 {Cir. 61) :— 
 
 deprensos canibus nautas lacerasse marinis 
 quite a compact line, marching straight to the outside of the fact. 
 But when Vergil changes {Eel. VI. 77) the mechanical deprensos 
 into a ! timidos a new note of both dramatic and pathetic intensity 
 is suddenly introduced. And in the same Eclogue (1. 8 1 = Ciris, 1. 
 5 1 ) we have another change to exactly the same purpose in the sub- 
 stitution of infelix for an adjective of mere colour {caeruleis). 
 
 On the other hand four lines taken over without any change are 
 among those which the schoolboy finds among the hardest in the 
 Georgics, because their connexion with the context in which they 
 stand is implied rather than indicated — the lines describing the pursuit 
 of the osprey by the sea-eagle, supposed to re-enact the vindictive 
 pursuit of Scylla by her father, which appear in the list of signs of fine 
 weather {Georgics \. 406-9). They come from the conclusion of 
 the Ciris where of course they are more in place. These examples, 
 besides their intrinsic interest, give valuable evidence of the priority 
 of the Ciris ; and there are a great number of others.^ 
 
 ^ I may be permitted to quote here a few sentences in which Mr. J. W. 
 Mackail {Class. Rev. XXII. 1908, p. 69), expresses his own conclusions 
 in the light of Skutsch's discovery : — 
 
 " That the Ciris is the work of Gallus, to something of the same ex- 
 tent as the Eclogues are the work of Vergil, we cannot, I think, in view 
 of the whole evidence reasonably doubt. But the two young poets were not 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 1 1 
 
 From this brief survey of the work of Vergil's friend and com- 
 panion we turn to the earliest poem of Vergil himself. The Culex 
 is a poem of 4 1 3 lines, which, according to a strongly confirmed 
 tradition (Donatus, Vita Vergilii, 1 7), he wrote when he was sixteen 
 years old, i.e. in the year 54 B.C. Before testing this tradition let 
 me give some account of the poem. The subject, as the title implies, 
 is the story of a gnat (or mosquito), a curious theme for a poet even 
 in his teens. But no one who has realized the delight with which 
 in his Georgics Vergil dwells on the hfe of the smallest creatures, 
 swallows and flycatchers, ants and bees, field mice and moles, will 
 think it strange that the boy's imagination should have been caught 
 by so common a feature of shepherd's life in Northern Italy as the 
 swarms of gnats that ' possess the misty tracts of woodland and green 
 forest ' {Culex, 22). Pales, the goddess of flocks and herds, is invited 
 to take an interest in the story and to bless the poet while he moves, 
 like the gnat, ' midway between the valley and the stars ' — a pretty 
 conceit which would appeal to a clever schoolboy, as describing in the 
 same phrase the free, swift, airy movements of the tiny creature, and 
 the range of his own poetic ambition between humble subjects natural 
 
 only linked by a close friendship, and inspired by common aims and en- 
 thusiasms. They worked at their art together. . . . Coleridge in later 
 years gave a statement of what he had contributed to Wordsworth's pieces, 
 and Wordsworth to his, in the Lyrical Ballads. . . . The poems came into 
 being through the interpenetration of genius between the two : their authors 
 were the Wordsworth who was influenced by Coleridge, and the Coler- 
 idge who was influenced by Wordsworth. Such, or of such a kind, was 
 the relation between Vergil and Gallus. And this would be true even if 
 it were the case that the sensuous, brilliant, erratic Gallus was as far below 
 Coleridge in essential poetic genius as the brooding, solitary Vergil was 
 above Wordsworth. 
 
 "... We may trace, I think, in the Ciris a genius that had developed 
 faster than Vergil's, that was more quick and alert. It is the common case 
 of early brilliance which shoots ahead, but soon comes to its limit. . . . 
 The author of the CiJ'is seems to write with ease and to have a great 
 natural gift of imitating the style of his predecessors. The Ciris begins 
 with four lines which are pure Catullus, followed by a dozen which are 
 pure Lucretius. The first fifty lines are indeed throughout a brilliant 
 exercise or variation in a synthesis of these two styles. Then the Ver- 
 gilian note comes in for the first time, in half a dozen lines (48-53) which 
 are full of Vergilian phrases [and of Vergilian pauses. — R.S.C.1. It is as 
 though Vergil himself had sat down by Gallus and guided his pen, or as 
 though Gallus had suddenly felt and begun to reproduce Vergil's own 
 melody and phrasing." 
 
12 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 to a farmer's son and the heights of poetic achievement represented 
 by the stars/ 
 
 Here are the opening lines roughly rendered ; they are simple 
 and here and there quite prosaic in diction : — 
 
 We have played in verse, Octavius, with the Muse, 
 
 The homely Muse of country festivals 
 
 Framing the song, and like a tiny spider 
 
 Shaped our first cobweb ; now the play is done. 
 
 The Gnat shall be its name ; so shall the line 
 
 Of playful story fear no jealous eye, 
 
 But run in time with truth, and win thy praise. 
 
 ^ These forty lines exhibit in their structure a rather interesting parallel 
 to the exordium of the Georgics, which is of much the same length (42 
 lines). In both Prefaces the passage invoking the help of rustic deities of both 
 Greek and Italian origin (12 lines in the Culex, 18 lines in the 
 Georgics) is put in the middle, between passages which to a modern 
 reader seem more directly relevant. For in each case the opening lines 
 (11 in the Culex and 5 in the Georgics) give the name and purpose 
 of the poem with the name of the person to whom it is dedicated ; and the 
 concluding passage (17 lines in the Culex and 19 in the Georgics) 
 explains the special claim of the subject to the help of the chosen 
 patron. This parallelism is of particular interest to me, because if we are 
 satisfied, as I hope we shall be, of the Vergilian authorship of the Culex, 
 it supplies a confirmation of the interpretation which I have suggested 
 {Class. Association Proceedings, Manchester, 1906, p. 35) for the ad- 
 dress to Caesar in this part of the Georgics. It is the passage in which 
 the question is asked what kind of deity Caesar will assume ; whether he 
 will be a god of earth or heaven or sea or of the underworld, and this has 
 given great trouble ; some commentators, indeed, have turned their own 
 puzzlement into an excuse for deriding the poet. The puzzle becomes 
 clear, I venture to think, so soon as one sees that the four alternatives are 
 really literary ; that is to say, the question which the poet of the Georgics 
 is really asking is what kind of subject he shall choose for the poem which 
 Caesar is to patronize. Shall he write on Astronomy or Agriculture or 
 Exploration oversea or the life of the After-world ? All were subjects on 
 which other authors of his time were busy, and the last was that to 
 which he himself felt a paramount attraction all through his life, and to which 
 at length he devoted the greatest Book of the Aeneid. Now in the 
 dedication of the Culex to a boy whose name is Octavius, the first para- 
 graph, as we have seen, mentions him by name only, but, just as in the 
 Georgics, the third paragraph tells us also what other subjects the poet 
 might have chosen, but does not think fit for a poem dedicated to him ; he 
 wHill not write of war, such as that between Zeus and the giants, or that 
 of the Centaurs ; nor of the feat of Xerxes in cutting a canal through 
 Mount Athos or building a bridge over the Hellespont ; nor of the invasion 
 of Greece by the Persians. Is not this parallelism of structure remarkably 
 close ? 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 13 
 
 For whoso thinks to blame the Muse's jest. 
 We will account him lighter than the Gnat 
 In both his name and person. But one day 
 This playful Muse will speak in deeper tones, 
 Pruning her poems to be worth your heed, 
 If changing times can make my toil secure. 
 
 Lusimus, Octavi, gracili modulante Thalia, 
 atque, ut araneoli, tenuem formauimus orsum ; 
 lusimus : haec propter Culicis sint carmina dicta, 
 omnis ut historiae per ludum consonet ordo 
 notitiae : doctumque uoces, licet inuidus adsit. 
 quisquis erit culpare iocos Museunque paratus, 
 pondere uel CuHcis leuior famaque feretur. 
 posterius grauiore sono tibi Musa loquetur 
 nostra, dabunt cum securos mihi tempora fructus, 
 ut tibi digna tuo poliantur carmina sensu. 
 
 After the Preface one of the three characters of the rustic drama, 
 the Shepherd, is introduced to us, driving his flock of goats out of 
 their sheepfold to the pasture near the top of the mountcun where 
 * the sunny sw£urd covers the spreading hills '. When the shepherd 
 appears the sun has just risen, filling the sky with wonderful colours, 
 and at midday the flock find their way down into the valley, with its 
 many-hued and many-scented plants pleasant for the reader to 
 imagine and for the sheep to nibble ; some of the sheep take the 
 opportunity of watching their reflexions in the stream beneath them. 
 The details of the scene bear many resemblances to the description 
 of the shepherd's retreat in Book II of the Georgics (467-74) ; and 
 the lines that follow (57-97) are quite clearly an early study of the 
 whole passage in the Georgics (458-531) in which the happiness 
 of the countryman is contrasted with the unhealthy and pretentious 
 luxury of the town. The opening Hnes will show its purpose : — 
 
 How good the shepherd's blessings if untaught 
 And uncorrupt, he scorns not humble ways ! 
 Dreams that no luxury knows refresh his sleep 
 And laugh at cares that wring the miser's heart. 
 
 O bona pastoris, si quis non pauperis usum 
 mente prius docta fastidiat, et probet illi 
 somnia luxuriae spretis incognita curis 
 quae lacerant auidas inimico pectore menteb 
 
14 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 After the shepherd and the deHghts of his work have been put 
 before us, we follow him to the midday watering of the sheep : — 
 
 The wandering flock 
 Move slowly ^ at his summons to the shoal 
 Beneath the whispering spring, the clear blue pool 
 Under green banks asleep in mossy shade. 
 
 Note here again how the boy-poet revels in colour. When the 
 sheep are all safe from the sun, the shepherd finds a place for his own 
 siesta ; the wood, we learn, was that in which a queen of tragedy 
 rested after the terrible madness in which she had slain her own son, 
 Pentheus ; it is a place where the wild-gods of the hillside join the 
 nymphs of the trees and of the springs in dance and song, so that the 
 river Peneus itself stops to listen to them. Every one of the trees 
 has its colour and its story, and at the climax of the description the 
 different colours and shapes are interwoven in a wonderful scheme 
 of decoration which, if I am not mistaken, Tennyson has copied in 
 his description of CEnone's bower. The wood is full of birds ; their 
 twitterings, and the plash of the spring with its echoes, and the 
 chirp of the grasshoppers in the heat, and the touch of the whispering 
 breeze in the tree-tops, all lull the shepherd to sleep ; the epithets 
 describing his careless slumber are intentionally repeated from the 
 passage describing rustic Hfe. But now the plot begins to thicken ; 
 the shepherd asleep, the second character appears. A great serpent 
 comes to cool himself in some soft pool. I need hardly say that he is 
 furnished with all the colours that the most respectable, indeed dis- 
 tinguished, serpent could desire to appear in ; his eyes are fiery, his 
 tongue quivers, and his crest is splendidly erect. He is indignant that 
 some man has come to a pool which he counted his own, and he 
 poises to attack him. The sleeper's hours seem numbered, but help 
 is at hand. A little gnat in pity rouses him to escape the danger, 
 planting her ^ sting full in the middle of the shepherd's forehead — 
 if that is the meaning of a rather corrupt line — ; the shepherd 
 wakes, but in anger, and kills the gnat. Then seeing the serpent he 
 at first retreats, but soon plucks a bough from a tree and beats the 
 snake to death ; so ends the first half of the poem. But that night 
 
 ^ Reading reptabant with Heinsius. 
 
 * In Latin culex is masculine, but nothing shall shake my conviction 
 that in English gnat is (or ought to be) feminine. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 15 
 
 when the shepherd has put his flock to rest amid the shadows and 
 fallen asleep himself, he is visited by the ghost of the gnat, who re- 
 proaches him for the ingratitude which she has suffered : — 
 
 Because I counted your life dearer than my own I am now the sport 
 of the winds in empty places. You are resting at ease in happy sleep, 
 saved from bitter calamity ; but my form is driven across the waves of Lethe 
 by the powers of the world below. 
 
 After this brief preface the gnat, or at all events her poet, takes 
 advantage of the Shepherd's sleeping hours to give him a picture, in 
 1 50 lines, of the underworld to which she is now condemned. One 
 must confess that the little creature has made a very good use of her 
 time ; for having only left the upper world after midday, by nine or 
 ten o'clock at night she is prepared to lecture with eloquence and feel- 
 ing on all the things and persons that are to be found in the region 
 she has newly entered. This incongruity once granted, we must, I 
 think, admit that the vision is arranged with no small skill and with 
 flashes of real poetry which give promise of the power with which 
 the poet later on handled the same themes. First of all come Tisi- 
 phone and Cerberus ; then the penalties of the wicked ; on which the 
 gnat naively remarks that the sight of other people's misery makes 
 her forget her own, a touch which, if it is boyish, is also thoroughly 
 Vergilian. The gnat adds, if the text and its apparent interpretation 
 can be trusted, that she is willing to suffer the penalty again if she 
 may have some opportunity of doing other like service. Among the 
 criminals we have some of the figures familiar to us in the great vision 
 of the Aeneid, with others for whom later on Vergil found no 
 place.^ Then we pass by a brief transition to Elysium, where Perse- 
 phone leads a procession of maidens in honour of the noble women 
 who abide there. It is an interesting feature in the boyish picture ; 
 there are women among the Blessed — Alcestis, Penelope, Eurydice. 
 At sixteen he admitted women, properly qualified of course, to the full 
 franchise of Elysium ; but, alas, after thirty years' experience he could 
 find no women whom he cared to admit — at all events none by name 
 — to any part of the afterworld save the mourning plains of Limbo. 
 And then follows the story of Eurydice in a brief twenty-five lines, 
 full of points which both remind us of the richer treatment of the story 
 
 ^ Otus and Ephialtes are added, Sisyphus and the Danaids, Medea 
 and Procne, Eteocles and Polynices. 
 
16 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 in the Fourth Book of the Georgics and disappoint us in the com- 
 parison — and yet lines, I venture to say, which if they had not been 
 so far transcended would have been treasured as themselves not un- 
 worthy of a true poet. The passage is too long to render here. Let 
 us notice only the end where Eurydice is described as 
 
 ' faithfully carrying out the bidding of the gods and not moving her eyes or 
 speaking ; but Orpheus was more cruel, who in his hunger for a dear kiss 
 broke the divine command. 'Twas a love that claimed forgiveness, a gentle 
 fault, if Tartarus had but known.* 
 
 dignus amor uenia ; gratum, si Tartara nossent, 
 peccatum ; meminisse graue est. 
 Here we have the original of a wonderful line in the later version ; 
 cum subito incautum dementia cepit amantem, 
 ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes. 
 
 A sudden madness seized the unheeding lover, 
 Worthy forgiveness, if Hell could forgive. 
 
 Then we pass to the manly heroes, first the Greeks, Peleus and 
 Telamon, then Ulysses and his comrades, and then many Trojans, 
 who avoid the Greeks even in Elysium. This abiding enmity is a 
 feature reproduced from the Homeric underworld ; but in Vergil's 
 more mature conception it is retained only in the shades of Limbo ; 
 in his Elysium all enmity is blotted out ; there is no night there. 
 The mention of Agamemnon suggests the fate of his comrades who 
 were shipwrecked, in some twenty lines. But by this time the gnat 
 is beginning to be a little ashamed, or, at all events, afraid, of her 
 own learning, and concludes her revelation by a ten-line-catalogue 
 of Roman heroes. Here again we have anticipations of the Sixth 
 Book of the Aeneid^ and one or two figures for whom later on 
 Vergil had no room, such as Horatius, Curtius, and Mucius Scaevola. 
 Last of all come the Scipios 
 
 Whose conquering name the walls of ruined Carthage 
 Beneath their doom of weeds still shudder at. 
 
 And so the gnat passes from the happy lot of these immortal heroes 
 to her own misfortune and again reproaches the shepherd for his 
 cruelty, finally, however, invoking upon him not, like most other 
 ghosts, a curse, but a gentle blessing. * I depart never to see thee 
 more ; but do thou dwell happy beside thy stream and the green 
 forest land and the pastures.' After so kind a visit the shepherd is 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 17 
 
 struck with remorse, and rears a great tomb of earth and grassy sods 
 in honour of the gnat, planting it with a crowd of wonderful flowers, 
 and setting upon it an inscription saying that the shepherd offers to the 
 gnat this tomb in gratitude for her having saved his life. So the poem 
 ends in a garden of colour and fragrance, warm with the gratitude 
 paid by a human member of creation to a tiny non-human creature 
 who had sacrificed herself for his sake. Will any reader of the 
 Georgics, I wonder, venture to say that all this is not Vergil 
 through and through ? 
 
 But perhaps some hard-headed critic may reply, '* After all, can 
 this boyish stuff, however playful its purpose, be really attributed to a 
 master-poet ? Need we think that Vergil was the author of so many 
 weak lines, so many descents into mere prose ? " Let me then first 
 remind you that Vergil himself did all he could to suppress the 
 Culex, and indeed the whole of his youthful work ; and then 
 compare the case of Tennyson, who suppressed many thousand ^ lines. 
 So we learn from his son, who in his biography prints among other 
 specimens a poem called Anacaona. It is worth while, I think, 
 to reproduce two or three stanzas of this juvenile work, which is 
 quite comparable to the feebler parts of the Culex. 
 
 A dark Indian maiden, 
 
 Warbling in the bloom'd liana, 
 Stepping lightly flower- laden, 
 
 By the crimson-eyed anana, 
 Wantoning in orange groves 
 
 Naked, and dark-limbed, and gay, 
 Bathing in the slumbrous coves, 
 In the cocoa- shadow'd coves, 
 
 Of sunbright Xaraguay, 
 Who was so happy as Anacaona, 
 
 The beauty of Espagnola, 
 
 The golden flower of Hayti? 
 
 All her loving childhood 
 
 Breezes from the palm and canna 
 Fann'd this queen of the green wildwood, 
 
 Lady of the green Savannah ; 
 All day long with laughing eyes, 
 
 Dancing by a palmy bay, 
 
 ^ He mentions in a letter, quoted in the Biography (p. 10), one boyish 
 epic which alone contained 6000. 
 
18 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 In the wooded paradise, 
 
 Of still Xaraguay ; 
 None were so happy as Anacaona, 
 
 The beauty of Espagnola, 
 The golden flower of Hayti ! 
 
 In the purple island, 
 
 Crown'd with garlands of cinchona, 
 Lady over wood and highland, 
 
 The Indian queen, Anacaona, 
 Dancing on the blossomy plain 
 
 To a woodland melody ; 
 Playing with the scarlet crane. 
 The dragon-fly and scarlet crane, 
 
 Beneath the papao tree ! 
 Happy, happy was Anacaona, 
 
 The beauty of Espagnola, 
 
 The golden flower of Hayti ! 
 
 Yet this facile Muse grew into the power which inspired The 
 Passing of Arthur^ and In Memoriam. 
 
 If we turn to the positive evidence for the authenticity of the 
 Culex, no reasonable person can, I think, remain in doubt. In the 
 first place, as Mr. J. W. Mackail rightly says,^ " the external evidence 
 for the Vergilian authorship is so good, that but for internal considera- 
 tions it would be accepted without question ". Martial twice attri- 
 butes a poem of this name to Vergil (VIII, 56, qui modo uix Culicem 
 fleuefat ore rudi; and XIV, 185). Suetonius in his Life of 
 Lucan (Reifferscheid, p. 50) quotes a saying of that poet comparing 
 his own youthful work to the Culex ; Donatus in his Life of 
 Vergil, states that Vergil wrote it when he was sixteen years old ; and 
 then goes on to describe the story of the poem just as we have it, 
 quoting the last two lines. Statins makes CaUiope prophesy {Siluae 
 II. 7, 73), that Lucan will write his poem on the death of Pompey at 
 a younger age than Vergil's when he wrote the Culex ; and in 
 the Preface to Book I of the Siluae^ he appeals to the example of 
 this poem, saying that * there is none of the great poets who has 
 not preluded his works by some compositions in lighter style '. Mr. 
 Mackail adds justly that "in a matter of this sort, Statins, who was 
 not only a scholar and poet but a profound student and positive 
 worshipper of Vergil, could hardly be mistaken. That the poem 
 
 1 Class. Rev. XXII. 1908, p. 72. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 19 
 
 known to Statius was a different one from the poem which we possess 
 there is not the slightest ground for supposing." 
 
 But the internal evidence, which has been recently collected, is 
 even more conclusive. No less than eighty definite resemblances be- 
 tween the Culex and Vergil's acknowledged work have been 
 traced ^ by Miss Elizabeth Jackson, Faulkner Fellow of the Univer- 
 sity of Manchester ; and even that list does not exhaust the points 
 that might be cited. Let me quote here a few examples of the kind of 
 resemblance which have carried absolute conviction to my mind. I 
 started with great unwillingness to regard the poem asVergilian, mainly 
 because of the lightness of the treatment and the overfluency of decora- 
 tion, so unlike the depth of suggestion which is perhaps the most 
 wonderful of all the characteristics of the poetry of Vergil's prime. 
 
 (1 ) nee faciles Ditis sine iudice sedes, 
 iudice qui uitae post mortem uindicat acta. 
 
 {Cul. llb^i 
 nee uero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice sedes. 
 
 {Aen. VI. 431.) 
 
 (2) non Hellespontus pedibus pulsatus equorum. 
 
 {Cul. 33.) 
 demens ! qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen 
 acre et cornipedum p u 1 s u simularat equorum. 
 
 {Aen. VI. 590-1.) 
 
 (3) si non A s s y r i o feruent bis lauta colore 
 Attalicis opibus data vellera. . . . 
 
 {Cul. 62.) 
 alba neque A s s y r i o fucatur lana ueneno 
 
 {Georg. II. 465.) 
 
 The whole passage in the Georgics shows repeated resem- 
 blances ; and the relation between the two, and their common kin- 
 ship to a Lucretian episode (II, 1 4 ff.) are carefully discussed by Miss 
 Jackson (I.e.). 
 
 (4) et p i e e r aurato procedit Vesper ab Geta. 
 
 {Cul. 203.) 
 et inuito processit Vesper Olympo. 
 
 {Ed. VI. 86.) 
 
 (5) ad S t y g i a s reuoc atus aquas, uix ultimus amni 
 
 extat nectareas diuom qui prodidit escas. 
 
 {Cul. 240.) 
 tuStygias inhumatus aquas amnemq ue seuerum 
 Eumenidum aspicies. 
 
 {Aen. VI. 374.) 
 
 1 Class. Quarterly, V. 1911, p. 163. 
 
20 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 (6) aduersas praef e r r e faces. 
 
 {Cul. 1^1.) 
 (unereasque infer re faces. 
 
 {Aen. VII. 337.) 
 
 (7) gramineam ut uiridi foderet de c a e s p i t e terrain 
 iam memor inceptum peragens sibi cura laborem 
 congestum cumulauit opus. 
 
 {Cui. 393.) 
 pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen. 
 
 {Ed. I. 68.) 
 
 " Such soft echoes of sound are peculiarly important ; they would 
 hardly occur to a mere imitator, but they might well linger in the 
 mind of the poet who first conceived them. If Vergil did not write 
 the Culex, it would seem that he must at all events have known 
 it by heart for a long period of years "} 
 
 That the preface of the poem was written before 44 B.C. is be- 
 yond doubt,^ and we shall soon see that 50 B.C. is a more probable 
 date. It follows that these resemblances between it and the un- 
 doubted poems of Vergil (which are all later than that date) cannot 
 be due to imitation of these poems by the author of the Culex, 
 but must imply an intimate acquaintance with the Culex on the 
 part of Vergil himself. It may reasonably, therefore, be asked of 
 those who think that the poem is quite unworthy of Vergil — it 
 is, of course, unworthy of his maturity — whether he would have 
 been likely to give careful attention to such a poem — so careful, in 
 fact, as to have learnt it almost by heart. No one, I think, will be 
 inclined to differ from Dr. Warde Fowler, perhaps the weightiest and 
 most conservative authority in this country on the study of Vergil, 
 when he writes "* : "It seems to me to have been proved by Miss 
 Jackson that the poem is an early work of Vergil ". 
 
 Being now in possession of the general content and character 
 of this poem we may turn to the interesting biographical questions 
 connected with the circumstances of its composition and its dedication 
 to someone called Octavius. The third part* of the Preface (11. 24- 
 41) begins thus : — 
 
 ^ Miss E. Jackson, I.e. p. 169. 
 
 ^ See, e.g. Skutsch, Aus Vergils Fruhzeit, p. 1 34. 
 
 '^ Class. Rev. XXVIII. 1914, p. 119. 
 
 ^ The threefold division has already been noticed, p. 1 2 footnote. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 21 
 
 * And do you in whom my confidence is fixed, if only what is written 
 be worthy enough, revered child of the Octavian house, come like some 
 bird of good omen to speed my attempt. Come innocent boy, for this 
 page sings to you of no dire warfare like the conflict between Jove and 
 the giants.' 
 
 Who was this Octavius ? Why was the poem dedicated to 
 him, and why especially on the ground of its having a peaceful subject ? 
 It is to be a gentle theme told in unambitious verse, fit for his own 
 powers if Phoebus will but guide him ; that is to say, in the language 
 of prose, the poet is choosing a subject which most people would 
 think too humble for poetry. 
 
 The preface concludes with a prayer which is in many ways 
 
 characteristic, that glory of this kind (i.e. of an interest in such subjects) 
 
 may rest for ever like a shining crown upon his forehead, that he 
 
 may always have a place in a home of honour and affection {sede 
 
 pi(i), and that the unharmed life of security, which is his due, may 
 
 be the theme of men's gratitude through many happy years shining 
 
 in prosperity. We may fairly ask whether any poet but Vergil in 
 
 that age, would have composed such a blessing ? The repetition 
 
 of the word lucens, ' shining ' is a mark of Vergil's taste ; and the 
 
 desire for the child, that he should be in pia sede, is not less 
 
 Vergilian ; while the closing wish that he shall earn men's gratitude, 
 
 is the crown which Vergil sets upon the highest group of the souls 
 
 whom he places in Elysium, those who by good service have made 
 
 at least some few remember them. 
 
 quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo 
 
 {Aen. VI. 664). 
 
 Dr. Warde Fowler's conclusion ^ can hardly be resisted. '* The 
 Octavius to whom the poem is dedicated was the future Augustus. 
 There is one other possible candidate for the honour (see Leo's 
 edition, p. 22), but there is an almost universal agreement that the 
 language of these lines forbids us to think of any boy but the nephew 
 of the dictator Julius Caesar." 
 
 But now mark what follows from this. Let me quote Dr. 
 Warde Fowler again : — 
 
 "All this dedication seems to me to suggest that Octavius was 
 very young, a puer in the strict sense of the word. He is asked to 
 
 ^ Class. Rev. XXVIII. 1914, p. 119. 
 
22 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 accept the poem because the theme is not warlike but homely. His 
 whole life is before him : he has as yet done nothing heroic, and is, 
 indeed, not of an age to listen to tales of war and bloodshed ; nay, 
 the poet seems to suggest a hope that he may live to be a man of 
 peace. I cannot think that such a poem, with such a dedication, 
 could have been addressed to Octavius after he had taken his toga 
 virilis. That event ' took place on October 1 8, 48 B.C. . . . The 
 epithets sanctus and uenerandus are mainly suggested by the tender 
 age and innocence of the boy. I am ready to accept the view that they 
 are rendered still more appropriate by the fact that this boy was the 
 nephew of the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, to whom the Transpadani, 
 with the poet's family beyond doubt among them, had long been 
 looking up as their political champion. 
 
 ** . . . If we could be sure that the two boys had already met when 
 the dedication was written, we should also be justified in seeing a 
 characteristic Vergilian tenderness in these words ; for Octavius, if we 
 may trust the famous bust, was a beautiful and discreet boy, and the 
 poet's love for all young creatures was marked ; Euryalus, Lausus, 
 Pallas — has any poet ever touched with such pure tenderness of feeling 
 the most beautiful types of boyhood in portraits such as these ? I am 
 inclined to think that Vergil and Octavius may actually have met in 
 the year 50 B.C., when the elder was about twenty and the younger 
 thirteen. At the end of the eighth book of the ' De Bello Gallico ' 
 Hirtius tells us that Caesar came to Cisalpine Gaul early in that year, 
 and was busy canvassing in the province ; also that he was received in 
 the Transpadane part of the province, to which the poet's family 
 belonged, with great acclaim, and was feted wherever he went.^ We 
 are not told that he summoned his nephew from Rome to spend the 
 summer with him. But Octavius was the one hope of the family, and 
 Romans like Cicero and Caesar felt tenderly towards the boys in 
 whom they placed their hopes, and wished to see them after long 
 absence, like our Indian parents of to-day. 
 
 " It is pleasant to think it quite possible that Vergil may have seen 
 
 ^ This appears to me to render completely untenable the view suggested 
 by Robinson Ellis {CI. Rev. X. 1896, p. 182) that the poem dated from 45- 
 44. But the very interesting links between the scene of 11. 1 09- 1 56 and 
 the Thesprotian region, with which Robinson Ellis was mainly concerned 
 in that article, deserve fuller investigation. 
 
 ^ Cum liberis omnis multitudo obuiam procedebat. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 23 
 
 Octavius at Mantua, or even talked with him. In any case, I would 
 suggest that this year 50 B.C. is a likely one for the date of the dedi- 
 cation, though the poem as a whole may have been composed earlier, 
 perhaps when the lad Vergil was only sixteen, as Donatus tells us 
 in his life of the poet." 
 
 To this I venture to add a few lines from the postscript which 
 Dr. Fowler allowed me to append to the article just quoted : " It 
 seems most probable, indeed almost necessary, to suppose that in the 
 Tradspadane country Caesar would have met so able and important 
 a landowner as Vergil's father. Anyone who has been at Pietole 
 must realize what a sweep of country is described in the Ninth 
 Exlogue (7-9).^ Speaking from memory, I should think that this 
 would mean an extent of not less than ten miles at whatever point 
 of the compass the colles may be located. The support of such a 
 man, especially as his prosperity was not more conspicuous than 
 his knowledge of agriculture and of bee-keeping and his enthusiasm 
 for learning, was just such a source of strength as the enlightened 
 Julius would be most anxious to draw to his own side ; and know- 
 ing what we do of the relation between Vergil and his father, from 
 almost every book of the Aeneid^ who can doubt that the old man 
 would have seized every opportunity of putting the shy and lovable 
 genius of the lad into as close touch as he could with the great and 
 god-like patron of the Transpadanes ? 
 
 " Altogether it appears to me that the picture which Dr. Warde 
 Fowler conjures up of the big boy Vergil taking the little boy 
 Octavius round the Mantuan farm and showing him, to their common 
 delight, all the creatures and places to which he himself was equally 
 attached as boy, farmer, and poet, is one of the probabilities far too 
 good not to be true." 
 
 In any case we may regard it, I think, as established beyond any 
 doubt that Vergil and Octavius were acquainted before the future 
 emperor was fifteen years old. 
 
 Let us turn in conclusion to two of the poems (VII and X) in the 
 
 ^ qua se subducere colles 
 incipiunt mollique iugum demittere cliuo 
 usque ad aquam. 
 
 This argument of course depends on the trustworthiness of the tradition 
 
 connecting the modern Pietole with the ancient Andes. 
 
24 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 small collection known as the " Katalepton ". These two have been 
 almost universally acknowledged as genuine, although it must be con- 
 fessed that some of their surroundings in the collection are quite 
 un-Vergilian. Both of them contain the name of the Epicurean philo- 
 sopher, Siro, whom we know from Suetonius as Vergil's teacher, and 
 whom he regarded with veneration. The later of the two poems 
 sprang from the misfortune that befell Vergil and his father in the Civil 
 War ; for when they were expelled from their own ample estate they 
 took refuge in the small country house with the modest ground 
 attached that had once belonged to Siro, and ' by him had been counted 
 great riches *. The other, which is worth considering in full, marks 
 an interesting epoch in the poet's inward history. It records the im- 
 pressions with which he left school and parted from the two branches 
 of education which were then in chief vogue at Rome, viz. rhetoric 
 and grammar ; and also how it seemed his duty to bid good-bye, or 
 almost good-bye, to his chief delight, that of writing poetry, because 
 he felt it laid upon him to be a philosopher. 
 
 Ite hinc, inanes, ite, rhetorum ampullae, 
 inflata rore non Achaico uerba, 
 et uos, Selique Tarquitique Varroque, 
 scholasticorum natio madens pingui, 
 ite hinc, inane cymbalon iuuentutis. 
 tuque, o mearum cura, Sexte, curarum, 
 uale, Sabine ; iam ualete, formosi. 
 nos ad beatos uela mittimus portus, 
 magni petentes docta dicta Sironis, 
 uitamque ab omni uindicabimus cura. 
 ite hinc, Camenae, uos quoque ite iam, — sane 
 dulces Camenae ; nam fatebimur uerum, 
 dulces fuistis : et tamen meas chartas 
 reuisitote, sed pudenter et rare. 
 
 Begone, ye barren flowers of speech, 
 
 The stuff that rhetoricians teach, 
 
 Big words by Attic wit ungraced ; 
 
 And you, dull tribe of ample waist. 
 
 Whose barren joy it is to hammer 
 
 Young heads with ding-dong rules of grammar ; 
 
 You too, my friend of friends, good-bye ! 
 
 No more to your fair class come I ; 
 
 But setting sail 'neath sterner skies. 
 
 And seeking havens of the wise. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 25 
 
 Great Siro's lofty lore I'll hear 
 And ransom life from every fear. 
 Away, ye Muses, yes, away ! 
 Though playmates dear, ye must not stay. 
 And yet, ah ! yet, — steal back again. 
 Just modestly, just now and then. 
 
 In this boyish poem' we see Vergil in his first love for philosophy, 
 a love directed to a very different side of that protean creature from 
 the severe and sober Stoicism which claimed him in the end. One 
 can well believe that the lines bidding farewell to his fellow- school- 
 boys — a farewell which refers merely to the end of their daily com- 
 panionship in study — were very likely written when Vergil was fresh 
 from reading the whole of Lucretius' poem, De Rerum Natura, in 
 which, as we all know, the poet-philosopher, while embracing the 
 ethical teaching of Epicurus, worked out his physical system into a 
 heroic and often brilliantly successful attempt at a scientific setting 
 forth of the laws of the universe. This poem was published after 
 its author's death in 55 B.C., when Vergil was fifteen ; and in 
 writing the Culex, some time before 50 B.C. (very likely in 54), 
 Vergil had shown that he was familiar ^ with the easier parts of it. 
 In the years that followed we may conjecture that he had mastered 
 the more technical part, and had felt the glow of admiration for the 
 author which even now fills the mind of every reader who comes 
 fresh to its wonderful attack upon difficult problems. Who can doubt 
 that Vergil hoped, as every young philosopher does when his en- 
 thusiasm is first kmdled, that he might live to out-do his master and 
 himself to penetrate somehow to the great secret of the universe ? 
 That is what he means by beatos partus ' the happy havens of the 
 wise '. 
 
 But how was this to be done ? What path was the young 
 philosopher to follow ? Remember the date — 55 to 50 B.C. — the 
 years of a steadily darkening horizon in the political world, when 
 the shadow of the most gigantic of the Civil Wars that even Rome 
 had suffered was deepening month by month ; the years in which 
 active politicians went about Italy, sometimes even in Rome, with 
 gangs of hired cut-throats to protect themselves from violence and 
 practise it on their opponents ; years of which a lurid picture has 
 
 ^ See, e.g. p. 19, the third example. 
 
26 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 been drawn for us in Cicero's defence of Milo. Now, as I think 
 Dr. Warde Fowler has pointed out, the day-to-day, hand-to-mouth 
 philosophy of pleasure, which says "eat and drink as happily as 
 you may, for to-morrow we shall probably die," has never found 
 much favour among men except in epochs when the framework of 
 society has been loosened and when regular occupation, property, 
 family-ties, and life itself have all become precarious. In such times 
 men's working faith in the steadiness of the universe, in the existence 
 of a good providence, is shaken ; and old-fashioned principles corres- 
 ponding to the ordinary conduct of life in settled periods (the prisca 
 supercilia of the Copa, I. 34) sound hollow and impossible. 
 The connexion of these two ideas is very clear all through Lucretius* 
 poem ; amidst the horrors of political life, nature still provides her 
 simple pleasures for anyone who will take them without question and 
 without vain dreams of avarice and ambition or cruel dreams of 
 power. It is under the influence of this teaching that we find Vergil 
 very soon after his poetry begins. 
 
 The charming elegiac poem called Copa, or Mine Hostess, which 
 is full of Vergilian beauties of language ^ and scenery, gives us a vivid 
 picture of the Epicurean creed at its best. I had hoped to be able to 
 include some account of it ; but time forbids. Notice only the end- 
 ing. After enumerating the delights of rest in the garden of her 
 wayside hostelry and bidding the tired, dusty wayfarer come and 
 taste them, the hostess ends with a brief and sudden touch of solem- 
 nity in the last line : — 
 
 Mors aurem uellens, Viuite, ait, uenio. 
 ' Death plucks your ear and cries. Live now, I come '. 
 
 After all, that is the end of every Epicurean sermon, and it is a 
 text of which men are apt to grow rather tired ; such stimulus as it 
 gives is very soon spent. In the agony of the Civil Wars the youth 
 
 ^ Among the more formal points of Vergilian style may be mentioned 
 the half-plaintive introductory question Quid iuuat (1. 5, of. Aen. II. 776) ; 
 the repetition of esti^V 20-21. of. Georg. IV. 387, Aen. VI. 792, IX. 205); 
 and among more substantial likenesses rumpunt arbusta cicadae (1. 27, cf. 
 Georg. III. 327) ; prolue uitro (I. 29, cf. Aen. I. 739) ; and the construction 
 suaue rubentia (1. 19, cf. e.g. Aen. VI. 201), The riddle which Mr. J. 
 W. Mackail leaves unsolved {Latin Literature, p. 105) may perhaps be 
 answered in some degree by regarding the poem as a study of the Epi- 
 curecin creed. 
 
THE YOUTH OF VERGIL 27 
 
 of Rome went through an even crueller though less ennobling discip- 
 line than that to which the youth of Europe has now suddenly been 
 called. Childish things were put away because, in the end, they 
 must be, and with them the pleasure-philosophy of Epicurus. The 
 condition of society which had at first encouraged its growth, at length 
 had crushed it by sheer weight of misery. In ten dreadful years from 
 50-40 B.C. the Epicurean view of life proved an empty consolation 
 to hearts broken by anarchy and carnage. But at the end of those 
 ten years there rose some faint hope — -the hope of a new and peace- 
 ful world born from mighty travail, to be governed by the offspring of 
 the Octavius to whom Vergil's boyish poem had been dedicated. 
 In Eclogue IV, which was to celebrate the birth of a child to 
 Augustus, a poem written in Vergil's thirtieth year, we find a tran- 
 sition from the materialistic despondency of Lucretius to a combina- 
 tion of the Epicurean sense of the intrinsic beauty and sweetness of 
 the natural world with a deeper, more ethical conception of man's 
 work within it. Read from this point of view, even that famous 
 Eclogue will be found to possess new interest. But there is a well^:" 
 known passage in which Vergil takes a step farther ; the great lines 
 {Georg. II, 458-540) written probably some time between his 
 thirty-third and thirty-ninth years, in which he expresses his still ad- 
 miring reverence for Lucretius, but goes on to declare his own new 
 and deeper conviction. By this time the Epicurean teaching holds 
 definitely the second place in Vergil's thoughts. He will take all the 
 knowledge that its science can give ; but the key to life is not there ; 
 it is in piety, in hard work, in gratitude to mysterious superhuman 
 powers, and, above all, in wonder, wonder at the undying mystery 
 of smiling and frowning skies, of love and pain, of life and death. ^^ 
 
 Happy indeed is he whose skill can find 
 The cause of each and all things, mastering so 
 Fear and stern Fate, and hearing undismayed 
 The hungry roar of Death's advancing flood. 
 Yet not unblest that other, who has learnt 
 To know the sacred creatures of the woods. 
 Pan with his pipe, and hoary old Silvanus 
 And all the fairy sisterhood at play. 
 Nought cares he for the pomp of crowds and courts. 
 Rome rises, kingdoms fall, he works unmoved. 
 He views the rich and knows no pang of envy, 
 Succours the poor without a grudging thought. 
 
28 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 Far from the clash of arms, the just, kind earth 
 
 Pours out before him plentiful reward ; 
 
 Peace without fear, a life of solid truth 
 
 Full of a thousand pleasures, — open fields 
 
 Free air and moving waters, cliffs and woods. 
 
 Cool mountain valleys, herds of lowing kine. 
 
 Soft lawns and bowers where sunburnt shepherds rest. 
 
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