Servius, therefore, seems to be correct in regarding Julius as the
subject of the passage in the first book, and it follows that the passage
contains memories of the year 46 B.C., whether or not the lines were, as
I suggest, first written soon after Caesar's triumph.
The fifth book also, despite the fact that its beginning and end show a
late hand, contains much that can be best brought into connection with
Vergil's earlier years. It is, for instance, easier to comprehend the
poet's references to Memmius, Catiline, and Cluentius in the forties than
twenty years later.
Vergil's strange comparison of Messalla to the _superbus Eryx_ in
_Catalepton_ IX, written in 42 B.C.,[6] is also readily explained if we
may assume that he has recently studied the Eryx myth in preparation for
the contest of Book V (11. 392-420). The poet's enthusiasm for the _ludus
Troiae is well understood as a description of what he saw at Caesar's
re-introduction of the spectacle in 46. At Caesar's games Octavian, then
sixteen years of age, must have led one of the troops:[7] in the fifth
book Atys the ancestor of Octavian's maternal line led one column by the
side of Iulus:
Alter Atys, genus unde Atii duxere Latini (1.
Pages:
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84