[Footnote 3: Cf. Classical Quarterly, 1920, 156.]
This may be paraphrased: "My first song—the Culex—was a pastoral strain. When later I essayed to sing of kings and battles, Phoebus warned me to return to my shepherd song." On this passage Servius has the comment: significat aut Aeneidem aut gesta regum Albanorum. Donatus finally in his Vita says explicitly: mox cum res Romanas inchoasset, offensus materia, ad Bucolica transit. The poem, therefore, was on the stocks before the Bucolics. We may surmise that the death of Caesar, whose deeds seem to have brought the idea of such a poem to Vergil's mind, caused him to lay the work aside.
Returning to the fourteenth Catalepton, we find what seems to be a definite key to the date and circumstances of its writing. The closing lines are:
Adsis, o Cytherea: tuos te Caesar Olympo
Et Surrentini litoris ara vocat.
It was on September 26 in 46 B.C., that Julius Caesar so strikingly called attention to his claims of descent from Venus and Aeneas by dedicating a temple to Venus Genetrix, the mother of the Julian gens. It was on that day that Caesar "called Venus from heaven" to dwell in her new temple.[4]
[Footnote 4: Cassius Dio, 43, 22; Appian, II. 102. There is independent proof that Catalepton XIV is earlier than the Georgics. In Georgics II, 146, Vergil repeats the phrase maxima taurus victima, but the phrase must have had its origin in the Catalepton, since here maxima balances humilis. In the Georgics the phrase is merely a verbal reminiscence, for there is nothing in the context there to explain maxima. On the order of composition of the Aeneid, see M.M. Crump, The Growth of the Aeneid]
Was not this the act that prompted the happy idea of writing the epic of Aeneas? Vergil was then living at Naples, and we can picture the poet fevered with the new impulse, sailing away from his lectures across the fair bay for a day's brooding. Could one find a more fitting place than Venus's shrine at Sorrento for the invocation of the Aeneid?
How far this first attempt proceeded we shall probably not know. Vergil's own words would imply that his early effort centered about Aeneas' wars in Italy; the sixth Eclogue,
Cum canerem reges et proelia,
is rather explicit on this point. Furthermore, the erroneous reference of Calaeno's omen to Anchises in the seventh book (l. 122) would indicate that this part at least was written before the harpy-scene of the third, for the latter is so extensive that the poet could hardly have forgotten it if it had already been written.