[Footnote 3: Cf. _Classical Quarterly_, 1920, 156.]
This may be paraphrased: "My first song--the _Culex_--was a pastoral
strain. When later I essayed to sing of kings and battles, Phoebus
warned me to return to my shepherd song." On this passage Servius
has the comment: significat aut Aeneidem aut gesta regum Albanorum.
Donatus finally in his _Vita_ says explicitly: mox cum res Romanas
inchoasset, offensus materia, ad Bucolica transit. The poem, therefore,
was on the stocks before the _Bucolics_. We may surmise that the death
of Caesar, whose deeds seem to have brought the idea of such a poem to
Vergil's mind, caused him to lay the work aside.
Returning to the fourteenth _Catalepton_, we find what seems to be a
definite key to the date and circumstances of its writing. The closing
lines are:
Adsis, o Cytherea: tuos te Caesar Olympo
Et Surrentini litoris ara vocat.
It was on September 26 in 46 B.C., that Julius Caesar so strikingly
called attention to his claims of descent from Venus and Aeneas by
dedicating a temple to Venus Genetrix, the mother of the Julian gens. It
was on that day that Caesar "called Venus from heaven" to dwell in her
new temple.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80