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.
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