quacunque illa levem fugiens secat aethera pennis, ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras, illa levem fugiens raptim secat aethera pennis.[1]
[Footnote 1: These four lines occur again in the Georgios, I. 406-9.]
The Ciris with all its flaws is one of our best examples of the romantic verse tales made popular by the Alexandrian poets of Callimachus' school. The old legends had of course been told in epic or dramatic form, but changing society now cared less for the stirring action and bloodshed that had entertained the early Greeks. The times were ripe for a retelling from a different point of view, with a more patient analysis of the emotions, of the inner impulses of the moment before the blow, the battle of passions that preceded the final act. We notice also in these new poems a preponderance of feminine characters. These the masculine democracy of classical Athens had tended to disregard, but in the capitals of the new Hellenistic monarchies, many influential and brilliant women rose to positions of power in the society of the court. A poet would have been dull not to respond to this influence. This new note was of course one that would immediately appeal to the Romans, for the ancient aristocracy, which had always accorded woman a high place in society and the home, had never died out at Rome. Indeed such early dramatists as Ennius and Accius had already felt the need of developing the interest of feminine roles when they paraphrased classical Greek plays for their audiences. Thus both at Alexandria and at Rome the new poets naturally chose the more romantic myths of the old regal period as fit for their retelling.
But the search for a different interpretation and a deeper content induced a new method of narration. Indeed the stories themselves were too well known to need a full rehearsal of the plot. Action might frequently be assumed as known and relegated to a significant line or two here and there. The scenic setting, the individual traits of the heroes and heroines, their mental struggles, their silent doubts and hesitations, became the chief concern of the new poets. Horace called this the "purple-patch" method of writing.
The narrative devices, however, varied somewhat. Some poets discarded all idea of form. They roamed through the woods by any path that might appear. This is the way that Tibullus likes to treat a theme. Whatever semi-apposite topic happens to suggest itself, provided only it contains pleasing fancies, invites him to tarry a while; he may or may not bring you back to the starting point. Other poets still adhere to form, though the pattern must be elaborate enough to hide its scheme from the casual reader, and sufficiently elastic to provide space for sentiment and pathos. In his sixty-eighth poem Catullus employs what might be called a geometrical pattern, in fact a pyramid of unequal steps. He mounts to the central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a corresponding series. In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the epyllion which the author of the Ciris clearly had in mind, Catullus used an intricate but by no means balanced form. The poem opens with the sea voyage of Peleus on which he meets the sea-nymph, Thetis. Then the poet leaps over the interval to the marriage feast, only to dwell upon the sorrows of Ariadne depicted on the coverlet of the marriage couch; thence he takes us back to the causes of Ariadne's woes, thence forward to the vengeance upon Ariadne's faithless lover; then back to the second scene embroidered on the tapestry; and now finally to the wedding itself which ends with the Fates' wedding song celebrating the future glories of Peleus' promised son.
The Ciris, to be sure, is not quite so intricate, but here again we have only allusions to the essential parts of the story: how Scylla offended Juno, how she met Minos, how she cut the lock, and how the city was taken. We are not even told why Minos failed to keep his pledge to the maiden. In the midst of the tale, Carme suspends the action by a long reference to Minos' earlier passion for her own daughter, Britomartis, which caused the girl's destruction, but the lament in which this story is disclosed merely alludes to but does not tell the details of the story. The whole plot of the Ciris is in fact unravelled by means of a series of allusions and suggestions, exclamations and soliloquies, parentheses and aposiopeses, interrogations and apostrophes.
In verse-technique[2] the Ciris is as near Catullus' Peleus and Thetis as it is the Aeneid: indeed it is as reminiscent of the former as it is prophetic of the latter. The spondaic ending which made the line linger, usually over some word of emotional content, (l. 158):
At levis ille deus, cui semper ad ulciscendum
was to Cicero the earmark of this style. The Ciris has it less often than Catullus. Being somewhat unjustly criticized as an artifice it was usually avoided in the Aeneid. There are more harsh elisions in the Ciris than in the poet's later work, reminding one again of Catullan technique. In his use of caesuras Vergil in the Ciris resembles Catullus: both to a certain extent distrust the trochaic pause. Its yielding quality, however, brought it back into more favor in various emotional passages of the Aeneid; but there it is carefully modified by the introduction of masculine stops before and after, a nuance which is hardly sought after in the Ciris or in Catullus. Finally, the sentence structure has not yet attained the malleability of a later day. While the Ciris, like the Peleus and Thetis, is over-free with involved and parenthetical sentences, it has on the whole fewer run-over lines so that indeed the frequent coincidence of sense pauses and verse endings almost borders on monotony.
[Footnote 2: See especially Skutsch, Aus Vergils Frühzeit, p. 74; Drachmann, Hermes, 1908, p. 412 ff.; L.G. Eldridge, Num. Culex et Ciris, etc. Giessen, 1914; Rand, Harvard Studies, XXX, p. 150. The introduction which was written last is more reminiscent of Lucretius. On the question of authenticity, see Drachmann, loc. cit. Vollmer, Sitz. Bayer. Akad. 1907, 335, and Vergil's Apprenticeship, Class. Phil. 1920, p. 103.]