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