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Chapter 4 THE CULEX

Word Count: 1454    |    Released on: 01/12/2017

, a poem that hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of Spenser. This is indeed one of the strange

him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save him. But-such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore-the shepherd, still in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life. At night the gnat's ghost ret

ave usually been skeptical or downright recusant. Some insist that it is a forgery or supposititious work; others that it is a liberally padded re-working of Vergil's original. Only a few have accepted it as a very youthful failure of Vergil's, or as an attempt of the poet to parody the then popular romances. Recent objections have not centered about metrical technique, di

red for him by election to the office of pontiff[1] when he was approaching his fifteenth birthday and before he assumed the toga virilis. Vergil was then twenty-one years of age-nearing his twenty-second birthday-and 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 cor

irms this. Octavius received the office made vacant by the death of Domitius at Pharsalia (Aug. 9). His birthday was Sept. 23, 63. This high office is the first ind

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

sical Philology,

Even the names of natural objects, like trees, birds, and beasts came into literature with their Greek names, which had to be explained to the Roman boys. Hence the teacher of literature at Rome must waste much time upon elucidating the text, telling the myths in full, and giving convenient compendia of metamorphoses, of Homeric heroes, of "trees and flowers of the poets," and the like. Epidius himself, a pedagogue of the progressive style, had doubtless proved an adept at this sort of thing. Claiming to be a descendant of an ancient hero who had one day transformed himself into a river-god, he must have had a knack for these tales. At any rate we are told that he wrote a book on metamorphosed trees.[4] When Octavius read the Culex, did he recognize in the quaint passage describing the shepherd's grove of metamorphosed trees (124-1

be strung together playfully in the form of a story." That Martial considered it a boy's b

Culicem, stud

sitis, Arma v

. Hist. XVII. 243; Suet

te 5: L

opter culicis si

riae per ludum

que voces, licet

6: Martial

s us into the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two

did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the verse, the treatment of the caes

tic and metrical studie

her, Classical Quarterl

XXXI, p. 266, and Clas

11, 163; Warde Fowler,

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