The _Ciris_ with all its flaws is one of our best examples of the
romantic verse tales made popular by the Alexandrian poets of
Callimachus' school. The old legends had of course been told in epic
or dramatic form, but changing society now cared less for the stirring
action and bloodshed that had entertained the early Greeks. The times
were ripe for a retelling from a different point of view, with a more
patient analysis of the emotions, of the inner impulses of the moment
before the blow, the battle of passions that preceded the final act. We
notice also in these new poems a preponderance of feminine characters.
These the masculine democracy of classical Athens had tended to
disregard, but in the capitals of the new Hellenistic monarchies, many
influential and brilliant women rose to positions of power in the
society of the court. A poet would have been dull not to respond to this
influence. This new note was of course one that would immediately appeal
to the Romans, for the ancient aristocracy, which had always accorded
woman a high place in society and the home, had never died out at Rome.
Indeed such early dramatists as Ennius and Accius had already felt the
need of developing the interest of feminine roles when they paraphrased
classical Greek plays for their audiences. Thus both at Alexandria and
at Rome the new poets naturally chose the more romantic myths of the old
regal period as fit for their retelling.
But the search for a different interpretation and a deeper content
induced a new method of narration. Indeed the stories themselves were too
well known to need a full rehearsal of the plot. Action might frequently
be assumed as known and relegated to a significant line or two here
and there. The scenic setting, the individual traits of the heroes and
heroines, their mental struggles, their silent doubts and hesitations,
became the chief concern of the new poets. Horace called this the
"purple-patch" method of writing.
The narrative devices, however, varied somewhat. Some poets discarded
all idea of form. They roamed through the woods by any path that might
appear. This is the way that Tibullus likes to treat a theme. Whatever
semi-apposite topic happens to suggest itself, provided only it contains
pleasing fancies, invites him to tarry a while; he may or may not bring
you back to the starting point. Other poets still adhere to form, though
the pattern must be elaborate enough to hide its scheme from the casual
reader, and sufficiently elastic to provide space for sentiment and
pathos. In his sixty-eighth poem Catullus employs what might be called a
geometrical pattern, in fact a pyramid of unequal steps. He mounts to the
central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a
corresponding series. In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the _epyllion_
which the author of the _Ciris_ clearly had in mind, Catullus used an
intricate but by no means balanced form. The poem opens with the sea
voyage of Peleus on which he meets the sea-nymph, Thetis. Then the poet
leaps over the interval to the marriage feast, only to dwell upon the
sorrows of Ariadne depicted on the coverlet of the marriage couch; thence
he takes us back to the causes of Ariadne's woes, thence forward to the
vengeance upon Ariadne's faithless lover; then back to the second scene
embroidered on the tapestry; and now finally to the wedding itself which
ends with the Fates' wedding song celebrating the future glories of
Peleus' promised son.
The _Ciris_, to be sure, is not quite so intricate, but here again we
have only allusions to the essential parts of the story: how Scylla
offended Juno, how she met Minos, how she cut the lock, and how the city
was taken. We are not even told why Minos failed to keep his pledge to
the maiden. In the midst of the tale, Carme suspends the action by a long
reference to Minos' earlier passion for her own daughter, Britomartis,
which caused the girl's destruction, but the lament in which this story
is disclosed merely alludes to but does not tell the details of the
story. The whole plot of the _Ciris_ is in fact unravelled by means of
a series of allusions and suggestions, exclamations and soliloquies,
parentheses and aposiopeses, interrogations and apostrophes.
In verse-technique[2] the _Ciris_ is as near Catullus' _Peleus_ and
_Thetis_ as it is the _Aeneid_: indeed it is as reminiscent of the former
as it is prophetic of the latter. The spondaic ending which made the line
linger, usually over some word of emotional content, (l. 158):
At levis ille deus, cui semper ad ulciscendum
was to Cicero the earmark of this style. The _Ciris_ has it less often
than Catullus. Being somewhat unjustly criticized as an artifice it was
usually avoided in the _Aeneid_. There are more harsh elisions in the
_Ciris_ than in the poet's later work, reminding one again of Catullan
technique. In his use of caesuras Vergil in the _Ciris_ resembles
Catullus: both to a certain extent distrust the trochaic pause. Its
yielding quality, however, brought it back into more favor in various
emotional passages of the _Aeneid_; but there it is carefully modified by
the introduction of masculine stops before and after, a nuance which is
hardly sought after in the _Ciris_ or in Catullus. Finally, the sentence
structure has not yet attained the malleability of a later day. While the
_Ciris_, like the _Peleus and Thetis_, is over-free with involved and
parenthetical sentences, it has on the whole fewer run-over lines so that
indeed the frequent coincidence of sense pauses and verse endings almost
borders on monotony.
[Footnote 2: See especially Skutsch, _Aus Vergils Frühzeit_, p. 74;
Drachmann, _Hermes_, 1908, p. 412 ff.; L.G. Eldridge, _Num. Culex et
Ciris_, etc. Giessen, 1914; Rand, _Harvard Studies_, XXX, p. 150. The
introduction which was written last is more reminiscent of Lucretius. On
the question of authenticity, see Drachmann, _loc. cit_. Vollmer, _Sitz.
Bayer. Akad_. 1907, 335, and _Vergil's Apprenticeship_, _Class. Phil_.
1920, p. 103.]
These are but a few of the minor details that show Vergil in his youth a
close reader of Catullus, and doubtless of Calvus, Cinna and Cornificius,
who employed the same methods. It was from this group, not from Homer or
Ennius, that Vergil learned his verse-technique. The exquisite finish of
the _Aeneid_ was the product of this technique meticulously reworked to
the demands of an exacting poetic taste.
The _Ciris_ gave Vergil his first lesson in serious poetic composition,
and no task could have been set of more immediate value for the training
of Rome's epic poet. In a national epic classical objectivity could not
suffice for a people that had grown so self-conscious. Epic poetry must
become more subjective at Rome or perish. To be sure the vices of the
episodic style must be pruned away, and they were, mercilessly. The
_Aeneid_ has none of the meretricious involutions of plot, none of the
puzzling half-uttered allusions to essential facts, none of the teasing
interruptions of the neoteric story book. The poet also learned to avoid
the danger of stressing trivial and impertinent pathos, and he rejected
the elegancies of style that threatened to lead to preciosity. What he
kept, however, was of permanent value. The new poetry, which had emerged
from a society that was deeply interested in science, had taught Vergil
to observe the details of nature with accuracy and an appreciation of
their beauty. It had also taught him that in an age of sophistication the
poet should not hide his personality wholly behind the veil. There is
a pleasing self-consciousness in the poet's reflections--never too
obtrusive--that reminds one of Catullus. It implies that poetry is
recognized in its great role of a criticism of life. But most of all
there is revealed in the _Ciris_ an epic poet's first timid probing into
the depths of human emotions, a striving to understand the riddles behind
the impulsive body. One sees why Dido is not, like Apollonius' Medea,
simply driven to passion by. Cupid's arrow--the naive Greek equivalent
of the medieval love-philter--why Pallas' body is not merely laid on the
funeral pyre with the traditional wailing, why Turnus does not meet his
foe with an Homeric boast. That Vergil has penetrated a richer vein of
sentiment, that he has learned to regard passion as something more than
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
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
_Ciris_ provides unmistakable evidence. And the spell of that poet he
never escaped. His farewell to Rome and rhetoric has been quoted in part
above. The end of the poem bids--though more reluctantly--farewell to the
muses also:
Ite hinc Camenae; vos quoque ite jam sane
dulces Camenae (nam fatebimur verum,
dulces fuistis): et tamen meas chartas
revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.
It is to Siro that he now went, the Epicurean philosopher who, closely
associated with the voluminous Philodemus, was conducting a very popular
garden-school at Naples, outranking in fact the original school at
Athens. It is not unlikely that this is where Lucretius himself had
studied.
It is well to bear in mind that the ensuing years of philosophical study
were spent at Naples--a Greek city then--and very largely among Greeks.
This fact provides a key to much of Vergil. Our biographies have somehow
assumed Rome as the center of Siro's activities, though the evidence in
favor of Naples is unmistakable. Not only does Vergil speak of a journey
(Catal. V. 8):
Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis,
and Servius say _Neapoli studuit_, and the _Ciris_ mention _Cecropus
horrulus_, and Cicero in all his references place Siro on the bay of
Naples,[1] but a fragment of a Herculanean roll of Philodemus locates the
garden school in the suburbs of Naples.
[Footnote 1: _De Fin_. II. 119, Cumaean villa; _Acad_. II. 106, Bauli;
_Ad. Fam_. VI. 11.2; Vestorius is a Neapolitan; of. _Class. Phil_.
1920, p. 107, and _Am. Jour. Philology_, XLI, 115. For other possible
references, see _Am. Jour. Phil_.1920, XLI, 280 ff.]
Even after Siro's death--about 42 B.C.--Vergil seems to have remained at
Naples, probably inheriting his teacher's villa. In 38 he with Varius and
Plotius came up from Naples to Sinuessa to join Maecenas' party on their
journey to Brundisium; Vergil wrote the _Georgics_ at Naples in the
thirties (_Georg_. IV. 460), and Donatus actually remarks that the poet
was seldom seen at Rome.
As the charred fragments of Philodemus' rolls are published one by one,
we begin to realize that the students of Vergil have failed to appreciate
the influences which must have reached the young poet in these years of
his life in a Greek city in daily communion with oriental philosophers
like Philodemus and Siro. After the death of Phaedrus these men were
doubtless the leaders of their sect; at least Asconius calls the former
_illa aetate nobilissimus_ (_In Pis_. 68). Cicero represents them as
_homines doctissimos_ as early as 60 B.C., and though in his tirade
against Piso--ten years before Vergil's adhesion to the school--he must
needs cast some slurs at Piso's teacher, he is careful to compliment both
his learning and his poetry. Indeed there seems to be not a little direct
use of Philodemus' works in Cicero's _De finibus_ and the _De natura
deorum_ written many years later. In any case, at least Catullus, Horace,
and Ovid made free to paraphrase some of his epigrams. And these verses
may well guard us against assuming that the man who could draw to his
lectures and companionship some of the brightest spirits of the day is
adequately represented by the crabbed controversial essays that his
library has produced. These essays follow a standard type and do not
necessarily reveal the actual man. Even these, however, disclose a man
not wholly confined to the _ipsa verba_ of Epicurus, for they show more
interest in rhetorical precepts than was displayed by the founder of the
school; they are more sympathetic toward the average man's religion, and
not a little concerned about the affairs of state. All this indicates a
healthy reaction that more than one philosopher underwent in coming in
contact with Roman men of the world, but it also doubtless reflects the
tendencies of the Syrian branch of the school from which he sprang; for
the Syrian group had had to cast off some of its traditional fanaticism
and acquire a few social graces and a modicum of worldly wisdom in its
long contact with the magnificent Seleucid court.
Philodemus was himself a native of Gadara, that unfortunate Macedonian
colony just east of the Sea of Galilee, which was subjected to Jewish
rule in the early youth of our philosopher. He studied with Zeno of
Sidon, to whom Cicero also listened in 78, a masterful teacher whose
followers and pupils, Demetrius, Phaedrus, Patro, probably also Siro,
and of course Philodemus, captured a large part of the most influential
Romans for the sect.[2]
[Footnote 2: _Italiam totam occupaverunt_. Cic. _Tusc_. IV, 7.]
How Philodemus taught his rich Roman patrons and pupils to value not only
his creed but the whole line of masters from Epicurus we may learn from
the Herculanean villa where his own library was found, for it contained
a veritable museum of Epicurean worthies down to Zeno, perhaps not
excluding the teacher himself, if we could but identify his portrait.[3]
[Footnote 3: See _Class. Phil_. 1920, p. 113.]
The list of influential Romans who joined the sect during this period is
remarkable, though of course we have in our incidental references but a
small part of the whole number. Here belonged Caesar, his father-in-law
Piso, who was Philodemus' patron, Manlius Torquatus, the consulars
Hirtius, Pansa, and Dolabella, Cassius the liberator, Trebatius
the jurist, Atticus, Cicero's life-long friend, Cicero's amusing
correspondents Paetus and Callus, and many others. To some of these the
attraction lay perhaps in the philosophy of ease which excused them from
dangerous political labors for the enjoyment of their villas on the Bay
of Naples. But to most Romans the greatest attraction of the doctrine lay
in its presentation of a tangible explanation of the universe, weary as
they were of a childish faith and too practical-minded to have patience
with metaphysical theories now long questioned and incomprehensible
except through a tedious application of dubious logic.
Vergil's companions in the _Cecropius hortulus_, destined to be his
life-long friends, were, according to Probus, Quintilius Varus, the
famous critic, Varius Rufus, the writer of epics and tragedies, and
Plotius Tucca. Of his early friendship with Varius he has left a
remembrance in _Catalepton_ I and VII, with Varus in _Eclogue_ VI. Horace
combined all these names more than once in his verses.[4] That the four
friends continued in intimate relationship with Philodemus, appears from
fragments of the rolls.[5]
[Footnote 4: Cf. Hor. _Sat_. i. 5.55; i. 10. 44-45 and 81; _Carm_. i.
24.]
[Footnote 5: _Rhein. Mus_., 1890, p. 172. The names of Quintilius and
Varius occur twice; the rest are too fragmentary to be certain, but
the space calls for names of the length of [Greek: Plo]tie] and [Greek:
Ou[ergilie] and the constant companionship of these four men makes the
restoration very probable.]
Of the general question of Philodemus' influence upon Varius and Vergil,
Varus and Horace, the critics and poets who shaped the ideals of the
Augustan literature, it is not yet time to speak. It will be difficult
ever to decide how far these men drew their materials from the memories
of their lecture-rooms; whether for instance Varius' _de morte_ depended
upon his teacher's [Greek: peri thanatou], as has been suggested, or to
what extent Horace used the [Greek: peri orgaes] and the [Greek: peri
kakion] when he wrote his first two epistles, or the [Greek: peiri
kolakeias] when he instructed his young friend Lollius how to conduct
himself at court, or whether it was this teacher who first called
attention to Bion, Neoptolemus, and Menippus; nor does it matter greatly,
since the value of these works lay rather in the art of expression and
timeliness of their doctrine than in originality of view.
In the theory of poetic art there is in many respects a marked difference
between the classical ideals of the Roman group and the rather luxurious
verses of Philodemus, but he too recognized the value of restraint and
simplicity, as some of his epigrams show. Furthermore his theories of
literary art are frequently in accord with Horace's Ars Poetica on the
very points of chaste diction and precise expression which this Augustan
group emphasized. It would not surprise his contemporaries if Horace
restated maxims of Philodemus when writing an essay to the son and
grandsons of Philodemus' patron. However, after all is said, Vergil had
questioned some of the Alexandrian ideals of art before he came under the
influence of Philodemus, and the seventh Catalepton gives a hint that
Varius thought as Vergil. It is not unlikely that Quintilius Varus,
Vergil's elder friend and fellow-Transpadane, who had grown up an
intimate friend of Catullus and Calvus, had in these matters a stronger
influence than Philodemus.
There are, however, certain turns of sentiment in Vergil which betray a
non-Roman flavor to one who comes to Vergil directly from a reading of
Lucretius, Catullus, or Cicero's letters. This is especially true of the
Oriental proskynesis found in the very first _Eclogue_ and developed into
complete "emperor worship" in the dedication of the _Georgics_. This
language, here for the first time used by a Roman poet, is not to
be explained as simple gratitude for great favors. It is not even
satisfactorily accounted for by supposing that the young poet was
somewhat slavishly following some Hellenistic model. Catullus had
paraphrased the Alexandrian poets, but he could hardly have inserted a
passage of this import. Nor was it mere flattery, for Vergil has shown
in his frank praise of Cato, Brutus, and Pompey that he does not merely
write at command. No, these passages in Vergil show the effects of the
long years of association with Greeks and Orientals that had steeped
his mind in expressions and sentiments which now seemed natural to him,
though they must have surprised many a reader at Rome. His teachers at
Naples had grown up in Syria and had furthermore carried with them the
tradition of the Syrian branch of the school that had learned to adapt
its language to suit the whims of the deified Seleucid monarchs. As
Epicureans they also employed sacred names with little reverence. Was not
Antiochus Epiphanes himself a "god," while as a member of the sect he
belittled divinity?
Naples, too, was a Greek city always filled with Oriental trading folk,
and these carried with them the language of subject races. It is at
Pompeii that the earliest inscriptions on Italian soil have been found
which recognize the imperial cult, and it is at Cumae that the best
instance of a cult calendar has come to light. It is a note, one of the
very few in the great poet's work, that grates upon us, but when he wrote
as he did he was probably not aware that his years of residence in the
"garden" had indeed accustomed his ear to some un-Roman sounds.[6]
Octavian was of course not unaware of the advantage that accrued to the
ruler through the Oriental theory of absolutism, and furtively accepted
all such expressions. By the time Vergil wrote the Aeneid the Roman world
had acquiesced, but then, to our surprise, Vergil ceases to accord divine
attributes to Augustus.
[Footnote 6: Julius Caesar began as early as 45 B.C. to invite
extraordinary honors for political purposes, but Roman literature seems
not to have taken any cognizance of them at that time.]
Again, I would suggest that it was at Naples that Vergil may most readily
have come upon the "messianic" ideas that occur in the fourth _Eclogue_,
for despite all the objections that have been raised against using that
word, conceptions are found there which were not yet naturalized in the
Occident. The child in question is thought of as a Soter whose _deeds_
the poet hopes to sing (l. 54), and furthermore lines 7 and 50 contain
unmistakably the Oriental idea of _naturam parturire_, as Suetonius
phrases it (_Aug_. 94). Quite apart from the likelihood that the Gadarene
may have gossiped at table about the messianic hopes of the Hebrews,
which of course he knew, it is not conceivable that he never betrayed any
knowledge of, or interest in, the prophetic ideas with which his native
country teemed. Meleager, also a Gadarene, preserved memories of the
people of his birthplace in his poems, and Caecilius of Caleacte, who
seems to have been in Italy at about this time, was not beyond quoting
Moses in his rhetorical works.[7]
[Footnote 7: It is generally assumed that his book was the source for the
quotation in _Pseudo-Longinus_.]