the
great abundance of sense-teeming collocations, the depth of sympathy
revealed in such tragic characters as Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, the
insistent study of inner motives, the meticulous selection of incidents,
the careful artistry of the meter, the fastidious choice of words, and
the precision of the joiner's craft in the composition of traditional
elements, all suggest the habits of work practiced by the friends of
Cinna and Valerius Cato.

[Footnote 1: For a careful study of this subject see Duckett,
_Hellenistic Influence on the Aeneid,_ Smith College Studies, 1920.]

The last point is well illustrated in Sinon's speech at the opening of
the second book. The old folktale of how the "wooden horse," left on the
shore by the Greeks, was recklessly dragged to the citadel by the Trojans
satisfied the unquestioning Homer. Vergil does not take the improbable
on faith. Sinon is compelled to be entirely convincing. In his speech he
uses every art of persuasion: he awakens in turn curiosity, surprise,
pity, admiration, sympathy, and faith. The passage is as curiously
wrought as any episode of Catullus or the _Ciris_. It is not, as has been
held, a result of rhetorical studies alone; it reveals rather a native
good sense tempered with a neoteric interest in psychology and a neoteric
exactness in formal composition. And yet the passage exhibits a great
advance upon the geometric formality of the _Ciris_. The incident is not
treated episodically as it might have been in Vergil's early work. The
pattern is not whimsically intricate but is shaped by an understanding
mind. While its art is as studied and conscious as that of the _Ciris_,
it has the directness and integrity of Homeric narrative. Yet Vergil
has not forgotten the startling effects that Catullus would attain by
compressing a long tale into a suggestive phrase, if only a memory of the
tale could be assumed. The story of Priam's death on the citadel is told
in all its tragic horror till the climax is reached. Then suddenly with
astonishing force the mind is flung through and beyond the memories of
the awful mutilation by the amazingly condensed phrase:

jacet ingens litore truncus
avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

There Vergil has given only the last line of a suppressed tragedy which
the reader is compelled to visualize for himself.

Neoteric, too, is the accurate observation and the patience with details
displayed by the author of the _Ae