and a score of others. The only reasonable explanation[3] of this strange fact is that the Ciris had not been circulated, that its lines were still at the poet's disposal, and that he did not suppose the original would ever be published. The fact that the process of re-using began even in the Eclogues[4] shows that he had decided to reject the poem as early as 41 B.C. A reasonable explanation is near at hand. Messalla, to whom the poem was dedicated, joined his lot with that of Mark Antony and Egypt after the battle of Philippi, and for Antony Vergil had no love. The poem lay neglected till he lost interest in a style of work that was passing out of fashion. Finding a more congenial form in the pastoral he sacrificed the Ciris.
[Footnote 3: Drachmann, Hermes, 1908, p. 405.]
[Footnote 4: Especially in 8, 10, and 4. This method of re-working old lines reveals an extraordinary gift of memory in the poet, who so vividly retained in mind every line he had written that each might readily fall into the pattern of his new compositions without leaving a trace of the joining. Critics who have tried the task have been compelled to confess that the criterion of contextual appropriateness cannot alone determine whether or not these lines first occurred in the Ciris.]
V
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT NAPLES
The Culex seems to have been completed in September 48 B.C., and the main part of the Ciris was written not much later. Now came a crisis in Vergil's affairs. Perhaps his own experience in the law courts, or the conviction that public life could contain no interest under an autocracy, or disgust at rhetorical futility, or perhaps a copy of Lucretius brought him to a stop. Lucretius he certainly had been reading; of that the Ciris provides unmistakable evidence. And the spell of that poet he never escaped. His farewell to Rome and rhetoric has been quoted in part above. The end of the poem bids—though more reluctantly—farewell to the muses also:
Ite hinc Camenae; vos quoque ite jam sane dulces Camenae (nam fatebimur verum, dulces fuistis): et tamen meas chartas revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.
It is to Siro that he now went, the Epicurean philosopher who, closely associated with the voluminous Philodemus, was conducting a very popular garden-school at Naples, outranking in fact the original school at Athens. It is not unlikely that this is where Lucretius himself had studied.
It is well to bear in mind that the ensuing years of philosophical study were spent at Naples—a Greek city then—and very largely among Greeks. This fact provides a key to much of Vergil. Our biographies have somehow assumed Rome as the center of Siro's activities, though the evidence in favor of Naples is unmistakable. Not only does Vergil speak of a journey (Catal. V. 8):
Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis,