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

though more reluctantly-f

amenae (nam fatebimur verum, dulces fuistis): et t

minous Philodemus, was conducting a very popular garden-school at Naples, outranking in fact th

ely among Greeks. This fact provides a key to much of Vergil. Our biographies have somehow assumed Rome as the center of Siro

os vela mit

tes docta d

ero in all his references place Siro on the bay of Naples,[1] but a fragment of a

.2; Vestorius is a Neapolitan; of. Class. Phil. 1920, p. 107, and Am. Jour. Philol

he with Varius and Plotius came up from Naples to Sinuessa to join Maecenas' party on their journey to Brundisium; Vergil wrot

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 confin

n 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 pu

m totam occupaverun

Epicurus we may learn from the Herculanean villa where his own library was found, for it contained a veritable museum o

ee Class. Phil

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 t

iter 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 c

at. i. 5.55; i. 10. 44-

oo fragmentary to be certain, but the space calls for names of the length of [Greek: Plo]tie] and [Gre

-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 you

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 i

orily 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 express

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 cours

extraordinary honors for political purposes, but Roman literatu

oter 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

ed that his book was the source fo

the idle rich near by, and thither they withdrew at vacation time if necessity called them to Rome for more arduous tasks. Andronicus, the Syrian Epicurean, brought to Rome by Sulla, made his home at nearby Cumae; Archias, Cicero's client, also from Syria, spent much time at Naples, and the poet Agathocles lived there; Parthenius o

ade.[8] That is one reason why Apollo's oracles at Cumae and Hecate's necromatic cave at Lake Avernus still prospered. When Vergil exp

An Economic History

e had seen any of the Sibylline oracles, now found in the third book of the collection, which contains so strange a syncretism of Mithraic, Greek, and Jewish conceptions, but we can no longer doubt that he was in a general way well informed and quite thoroughly

eems to have done so, though some of our manuscripts of his Vita contain the phrase de qua ambigitur. Again, the texts of the Aetna which we have agree also in this ascription. Internal evidence proves the poem to be a work of the period between 54 and 44, which admirably suits Vergilian claims. Its close dependence upon Lucretius gives the first date, its mention of the "Medea" of the artist Timomachus a

us meditanti mi

ido tribuistis

esides the Aetna that could be in question. It is best, therefore, to take the Aetna[11] into account in st

id the conclusion that Seneca attributed the Aetna to Vergil in ad Lucilium 79, 5: The words "Vergil's

the word caecus with reference to abstruse and

etna derides as trivial (264-74) he seems to apologize for abandoning science, in

ation. The true cause of volcanic eruption, he says, is that air is driven into the pores of the earth, and when this comes into contact with lava and flint which contain atoms of fire, it creates the explosions that cause such destruction. A

he sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the very majestic sadness of his materialism carried the young poet off his feet. But the mechanism of Aetna remained merely a puzzle with little to inspire awe, and the theme contained inherently no deep meaning for humanity-which, after all, the scientific problem must possess to lend itself to poetic treatment. The poet indeed realized all this before he had finished. He sought, with inadequate resources, to stir an emotion of awe in describing the eruption, to argue the reader into his own enthus

sic or poetry, always begins in the negative. He is not happy until he has soundly trounced his predecessors and opponents. The author of the Aetna has learned all too well this scholastic method, and his acerbity

the end, apologetically inserted on Lucretius' theory of sweetened medicine, as rather in the poet

nimi ac jucu

ours enough on tr

i in parvis, te

cupation is s

quisque bonis e

s, haec rerum es

worthy of man's di

olum pecudum

s in humum grav

um dubiasque ex

re caputque at

quae sint magn

nci

agnificence of the Lucretian logic. The man who wro