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_?