ebo digna locuti.

Before he had completed his work the poet set out for Greece to visit the
places which he had described and which in his fastidious zeal he seems
to have thought in need of the same careful examination that he had
accorded his Italian scenery. Three years he still thought requisite for
the completion of his epic. But at Megara he fell ill, and being carried
back in Augustus' company to Brundisium he died there, in 19 B.C. at the
age of fifty-one. Before his death he gave instructions that his epic
should be burned and that his executors, his life-long friends Varius and
Tucca, should suppress whatever of his manuscripts he had himself failed
to publish. In order to save the Aeneid, however, Augustus interposed
the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will. The
minor works were probably left unpublished for some time. Indeed, there
is no convincing proof that such works as the Ciris, the Aetna, and the
Catalepton were circulated in the Augustan age.

The ashes were carried to his home at Naples and buried beneath a
tombstone bearing the simple epitaph written by some friend who knew the
poet's simplicity of heart:

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.

His tomb[12] was on the roadside outside the city, as was usual--Donatus
says on the highway to Puteoli, nearly two miles from the gates. Recent
examination of the region has shown that by some cataclysm of the middle
ages not mentioned in any record, the road and the tomb have subsided,
and now the quiet waters of the golden bay flow many fathoms over them.

[Footnote 12: Guenther, _Pausilypon_, p. 201]

INDEX

Acestes
Aeneas
_Aeneid_, the
_Aetna_, the
Alexandrian poetry
Alfenus Varus
Allegory
Ancestry of Vergil
Animism
Annius Cimber
Antiquarian lore in the _Aeneid_
Antony, Mark
Antony, Lucius, at Perugia
Apollodorus, the rhetorician
Apollonius of Rhodes
Archias, the poet
Asianists, the
Atticists, the
_Auctor ad Herennium_
Augustus, cf. Octavius.
Avernus, Lake

Birt's edition of the _Catalepton_
Brutus, M. Junius
_Bucolics_, the, see _Eclogues_.
Burial-place of Vergil

Caecilius of Caleacte
Callimachus
Calvus, C. Licinius
Capua
Cassius, Longinus
_Catalepton_
Catullus, C. Valerius
Celts, the
Child, of the fourth _Eclogue_
Cicero, M. Tullius
Cinna, C. Helvius
_Ciris_, the
Cisalpine Gaul
Civil War, the
Classicism
Cleopatra and Dido
Clodi