Culex, larger and more noisy, trumpets his presence in the night watches: but the mischief he causes is in inverse ratio to the noise he makes.

III THE "CULEX"

It was apparently in the year 48Vergil was then twenty-onethat the poet attempted his first extended composition, the Culex, a poem that hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of Spenser.

The Culex has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism, and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic criteria.

Vergil was then twenty-one years of agenearing his twenty-second birthdayand we may perhaps assume in Donatus' attribution of the Culex to Vergil's sixteenth year a mistake in some early manuscript which changed the original XXI to XVI, a correction which the citations of Statius and Lucan favor.

Finally, when, as we shall see presently, Horace in his second Epode, accords Vergil the honor of imitating a passage of the Culex, Vergil returns the compliment in his Georgics.

We have therefore not only Vergil's recognition of Horace's courtesy, but, in his acceptance of it, his acknowledgment of the Culex as his own.

The dedicatory lines of the Culex imply that the body of the poem was already complete.

The Culex, therefore, is the work of a beginner addressed to a young lad just highly honored, but after all to a schoolboy whom Vergil had, presumably two years before, met in the lecture rooms of Epidius.

When Octavius read the Culex, did he recognize in the quaint passage describing the shepherd's grove of metamorphosed trees (124-145) phrases from the lecture notes of their voluble teacher?

Vergil himself furnishes the clue for this interpretation of the Culex, but it has been overlooked because of the wretched condition of the text that we have.

The first lines of the poem seem to mean: "My verses on the Culex shall be filled with erudition so that all the lore of the past may be strung together playfully in the form of a story."

The Culex is then, after all, a poem of unique interest; it takes us into the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two lads whose names come first in the honor roll of the golden age.

[Footnote 7: For stylistic and metrical studies of the Culex, see The Caesura in Vergil, Butcher, Classical Quarterly, 1914, p. 123; Hardie, Journal of Philology, XXXI, p. 266, and Class Quart.

Culex et Ciris, etc. Giessen, 1914;

The designation does not fit the Culex, which is the only poem besides the Aetna that could be in question.

The young Octavius, also, whose boyhood is so sympathetically sketched by Nicolaus (5-9)a leader among his companions always, but ever devoted and generousseems to peer through the portrait of Ascanius.[10] Vergil's memories of the boy at school, the recipient of the Culex, the leader of the Trojan troop at Caesar's games, the lad of sixteen sitting for a day in the forum as praefectus urbi, seem very recent in the pages of the epic.

The Eclogues were not yet out, but the Culex was in circulation, and he made the pastoral scene of this the basis of an epodethe secondwritten with no little good-natured humor.

[Footnote 2: Horace's scenes (his memory is visual rather than auditory) unmistakably reproduce those of the Culex; cf.

Culex 148-58 with Epode 26-28; Culex 86-7 with Epode 21-22; Culex 49-50 with Epode 11-12; etc.

Culex 148-58 with Epode 26-28; Culex 86-7 with Epode 21-22; Culex 49-50 with Epode 11-12; etc.

Culex 148-58 with Epode 26-28; Culex 86-7 with Epode 21-22; Culex 49-50 with Epode 11-12; etc.

[Footnote 6: Horace had doubtless seen not only the Culex but several of the other minor works that Vergil never deigned to put into general circulation.]

In the youthful Culex Vergil had dwelt somewhat too emphatically upon the song-birds and the cool shade, and had drawn upon himself the genial comment of Horace that Alfius did not find conditions in the country quite as enchanting as pictured.

There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic.