Vergil - A Biography | Page 9

addressed to a young
lad just highly honored, but after all to a schoolboy whom Vergil had,
presumably two years before, met in the lecture rooms of Epidius. Does
this provide a key with which to unlock the hidden intentions of our
strange treasure-trove of miscellaneous allusions? Let the reader
remember the nature of the literary lectures of that day when
dictionaries, reference books, and encyclopedias were not yet to be
found in every library, and school texts were not yet provided with
concise Allen and Greenough notes. The teacher alone could afford the
voluminous "cribs" of Didymus. Roman schoolboys had not, like the
Greeks, drunk in all myths by the easy process of nursery babble. By
them the legends of Homer and Euripides must be acquired through
painful schoolroom exegesis. Even the names of natural objects, like

trees, birds, and beasts came into literature with their Greek names,
which had to be explained to the Roman boys. Hence the teacher of
literature at Rome must waste much time upon elucidating the text,
telling the myths in full, and giving convenient compendia of
metamorphoses, of Homeric heroes, of "trees and flowers of the poets,"
and the like. Epidius himself, a pedagogue of the progressive style, had
doubtless proved an adept at this sort of thing. Claiming to be a
descendant of an ancient hero who had one day transformed himself
into a river-god, he must have had a knack for these tales. At any rate
we are told that he wrote a book on metamorphosed trees.[4] When
Octavius read the Culex, did he recognize in the quaint passage
describing the shepherd's grove of metamorphosed trees (124-145)
phrases from the lecture notes of their voluble teacher? Are there
reminiscences lurking also in the long list of flowers so incongruously
massed about the gnat's grave and in the two hundred lines that detail
the ghostly census of Hades? If this is a parody at all, it is to remind
Octavius of Epidian erudition. In any case it is a kind of prompter of
the poetic allusions that occupied the boys' hours at school. The simple
plot of the shepherd and the gnat was selected from the type of fable
lore thought suitable for school-room reading. It served by its very
incongruity as a suitable thread for a catalogue of facts and fiction.
Vergil himself furnishes the clue for this interpretation of the Culex, but
it has been overlooked because of the wretched condition of the text
that we have. The first lines[5] of the poem seem to mean:
"My verses on the Culex shall be filled with erudition so that all the
lore of the past may be strung together playfully in the form of a story."
That Martial considered it a boy's book appropriate for vacation hours
between school tasks is apparent from the inscription:[6]
Accipe facundi Culicem, studiose, Maronis, Ne nucibus positis, Arma
virumque legas.
[Footnote 4: Pliny, _Nat. Hist_. XVII. 243; Suetonius, De Rhetoribus,
4.]
[Footnote 5: Lines 3-5: lusimus (haec propter culicis sint carmina docta,
omnis ut historiae per ludum consonet ordo notitiae) doctumque voces,
licet invidus adsit.]
[Footnote 6: Martial, XIV. 185.]
The Culex is then, after all, a poem of unique interest; it takes us into

the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two lads whose
names come first in the honor roll of the golden age.
The poem is of course not a masterpiece, nor was it intended to be
anything but a _tour de force_; but a comprehension of its purpose will
at least save it from being judged by standards not applicable to it. It is
not naïvely and unintentionally incongruous. To the modern reader it is
dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired no
doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the
obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology
betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be
to take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he
wrote currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the
modulation of the verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses[7] and the
phrasing compare rather favorably with the Catullan hexameters which
obviously served as its models, that in the best lines the poet shows
himself sensitive to delicate effects, and that the pastoral scene--which
Horace compliments a few years later--is, despite its imitative notes,
written with enthusiasm, and reminds us pleasantly of the Eclogues.
[Footnote 7: For stylistic and metrical studies of the Culex, see The
Caesura in Vergil, Butcher, Classical Quarterly, 1914, p. 123; Hardie,
Journal of Philology, XXXI, p. 266, and Class Quart. 1916, 32 ff.;
Miss Jackson, Ibid. 1911, 163; Warde Fowler, _Class. Rev_. 1919, 96.]

IV
THE "CIRIS"
It was