philosophy, from philosophy to poetry, and to poetry of the Catullan
romances, as a matter of course. It was Cytheris, the fickle actress--if
the scholiasts are right--who opened his eyes to the fact that there were
themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales;
and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months
of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman
self-pity, this first poet of the _poitrinaire_ school. His subsequent
career was meteoric. Octavian, fascinated by a brilliancy that hid a
lack of Roman steadiness, placed him in charge of the stupendous task
of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The
romantic poet lost his head. Wine-inspired orations that delighted his
guests, portrait busts of himself in every town, grotesque catalogues of
campaigns against unheard-of negro tribes inscribed even on the venerable
pyramids did not accord with the traditions of Rome. Octavian cut his
career short, and in deep chagrin Gallus committed suicide.

The tenth _Eclogue_[6] gives Vergil's impressions upon reading one of the
elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army
post in Greece after the news of Cytheris' desertion. In his elegy the
poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East
away from his beloved.

"Would that he might have been a simple shepherd like the Greeks about
his tent, for their loves remained true!" And this is of course the very
theme which Vergil dramatizes in pastoral form.

[Footnote 6: This is the interpretation of Leo, _Hermes_, 1902, p. 15.]

We, like Vergil, realize that Gallus invented a new genre in literature.
He had daringly brought the grief of wounded love out of the realm of