Taken in conjunction with other hints, these two poems show us where the
poet's sympathies lay during those years of terror. There may well have
been a number of similar epigrams directed at Antony himself, but if
so they would of course have been destroyed during the reign of the
triumvirate. Antony's vindictiveness knew no bounds, as Rome learned when
Cicero was murdered.
VIII
LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN
Vergil's dedication of the _Ciris_ to Valerius Messalla was, as the poem
itself reveals, written several years after the main body of the poem.
The most probable date is 43 B.C., when the young nobleman, then only
about twenty-one, went with Cicero's blessing[1] to join Brutus and
Cassius in their fight for the Republic. Messalla had then, besides
making himself an adept at philosophy--at Naples perhaps, since Vergil
knew him--and stealing away student hours at Athens for Greek verse
writing, gained no little renown by taking a lawsuit against the most
learned lawyer of the day, Servius Sulpicius. Cicero's letter of
commendation, which we still have, is unusually laudatory.
[Footnote 1: Cicero, _Ad Brutum_, I, 15.]
The dedication of the _Ciris_ reveals Vergil still eager to win his place
as a rival of Lucretius.
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