Vergil - A Biography | Page 8

sermone tardissimum ac paene indocto
similem. The poet himself seems to allude to his disappointing failure
in the _Ciris_: expertum fallacis praemia volgi. How could he but fail?
He never learned to cram his convictions into mere phrases, and his
judgments into all-inclusive syllogisms. When he has done his best
with human behavior, and the sentence is pronounced, he spoils the
whole with a rebellious dis aliter visum. A successful advocate must
know what not to see and feel, and he must have ready convictions at
his tongue's end. In the Aeneid there are several fluent orators, but they
are never Vergil's congenial characters.

III
THE "CULEX"
It was apparently in the year 48--Vergil was then twenty-one--that the

poet attempted his first extended composition, the Culex, a poem that
hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of
Spenser. This is indeed one of the strangest poems of Latin literature,
an overwhelming burden of mythological and literary references
saddled on the feeblest of fables.
A shepherd goes out one morning with his flocks to the woodland
glades whose charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative
rhapsody. The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is
about to strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time
to save him. But--such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore--the
shepherd, still in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life. At
night the gnat's ghost returns to rebuke the shepherd for his innocent
ingratitude, and rather inappropriately remains to rehearse at great
length the tale of what shades of old heroes he has seen in the lower
regions. The poem contains 414 lines.
The Culex has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism,
and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic
criteria. Though it was accepted as Vergilian by Renaissance readers
simply because the manuscripts of the poem and ancient writers, from
Lucan and Statius to Martial and Suetonius, all attribute the work to
him, recent critics have usually been skeptical or downright recusant.
Some insist that it is a forgery or supposititious work; others that it is a
liberally padded re-working of Vergil's original. Only a few have
accepted it as a very youthful failure of Vergil's, or as an attempt of the
poet to parody the then popular romances. Recent objections have not
centered about metrical technique, diction, or details of style: these are
now admitted to be Vergilian enough, or rather what might well have
been Vergilian at the outset of his career. The chief criticism is directed
against a want of proportion and an apparent lack of artistic sense
betrayed in choosing so strange a character for the ponderous title-role.
These are faults that Vergil later does not betray.
Nevertheless, Vergil seems to have written the poem. Its ascription to
Vergil by so many authors of the early empire, as well as the concensus
of the manuscripts, must be taken very seriously. But the internal
evidence is even stronger. Octavius, to whom the poem is dedicated, is
addressed Octavi venerande and sancte puer, a clear reference to the
remarkable honor that Caesar secured for him by election to the office

of pontiff[1] when he was approaching his fifteenth birthday and before
he assumed the toga virilis. Vergil was then twenty-one years of
age--nearing his twenty-second birthday--and we may perhaps assume
in Donatus' attribution of the Culex to Vergil's sixteenth year a mistake
in some early manuscript which changed the original XXI to XVI, a
correction which the citations of Statius and Lucan favor.[2] Finally,
when, as we shall see presently, Horace in his second Epode, accords
Vergil the honor of imitating a passage of the Culex, Vergil returns the
compliment in his Georgics. We have therefore not only Vergil's
recognition of Horace's courtesy, but, in his acceptance of it, his
acknowledgment of the Culex as his own.[3]
[Footnote 1: Vellius, II. 59, 3, pontificatus sacerdotio puerum honoravit,
that is, before he assumed the toga virilis on October 18th. Nicolaus
Damascenus (4) confirms this. Octavius received the office made
vacant by the death of Domitius at Pharsalia (Aug. 9). His birthday was
Sept. 23, 63. This high office is the first indication that Caesar had
chosen his grandnephew to be his possible successor. The boy was
hardly known at Rome before this time. See Classical Philology, 1920,
p. 26.]
[Footnote 2: Anderson, in Classical Quarterly, 1916, p. 225; and
_Class. Phil_. 1920, p. 26. The dedicatory lines of the Culex imply that
the body of the poem was already complete. Whether the interval was
one of weeks or months or years the poet does not say.]
[Footnote 3: Classical Philology, 1920, pp. 23, 33.]
The Culex, therefore, is the work of a beginner