an accident, to sacrifice mere logic of form for fragments of vital
emotion and flashes of new scenery, and finally that he enriched the
Latin vocabulary with fecund words are in no small measure the effect of
his early intensive work on the _Ciris_ under the tutelage of Catullus.

Vergil apparently never published the _Ciris_, for he re-used its
lines, indeed whole blocks of its lines with a freedom that cannot be
paralleled. The much discussed line of the fourth _Eclogue_:

Cara deum suboles, magnum Jovis incrementum,

is from the _Ciris_ (I. 398), so is the familiar verse of _Eclogue_ VIII
(I. 41):

Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error,

and _Aeneid_ II. 405:

Ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra,

and the strange spondaic unelided line (_Aen_. III. 74):

Nereidum matri et Neptuno Aegaeo,

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