pleasing self-consciousness in the poet's reflections--never too
obtrusive--that reminds one of Catullus. It implies that poetry is
recognized in its great role of a criticism of life. But most of all
there is revealed in the _Ciris_ an epic poet's first timid probing into
the depths of human emotions, a striving to understand the riddles behind
the impulsive body. One sees why Dido is not, like Apollonius' Medea,
simply driven to passion by. Cupid's arrow--the naive Greek equivalent
of the medieval love-philter--why Pallas' body is not merely laid on the
funeral pyre with the traditional wailing, why Turnus does not meet his
foe with an Homeric boast. That Vergil has penetrated a richer vein of
sentiment, that he has learned to regard passion as something more than
an accident, to sacrifice mere logic of form for fragments of vital
emotion and flashes of new scenery, and finally that he enriched the
Latin vocabulary with fecund words are in no small measure the effect of
his early intensive work on the _Ciris_ under the tutelage of Catullus.

Vergil apparently never published the _Ciris_, for he re-used its
lines, indeed whole blocks of its lines with a freedom that cannot be
paralleled. The much discussed line of the fourth _Eclogue_:

Cara deum suboles, magnum Jovis incrementum,

is from the _Ciris_ (I. 398), so is the familiar verse of _Eclogue_ VIII
(I. 41):

Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error,

and _Aeneid_ II. 405:

Ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra,

and the strange spondaic unelided line (_Aen_. III. 74):

Nereidum matri et Neptuno Aegaeo,

and a score of others. The only reasonable explanation[3] of this strange
fact is that the _Ciris_ had not been circulated, that its lines were
still at the poet's disposal, and that he did not suppose the original
would ever be published. The fact that the process of re-using began even
in the _Eclogues_[4] shows that he had decided to reject the poem as
early as 41 B.C. A reasonable explanation is near at hand. Messalla, to
whom the poem was dedicated, joined his lot with that of Mark Antony and
Egypt after the battle of Philippi, and for Antony Vergil had no love.
The poem lay neglected till he lost interest in a style of work that was
passing out of fashion. Finding a more congenial form in the pastoral he
sacrificed the _Ciris_.

[Footnote 3: Drachmann, _Hermes_, 1908, p. 405.]

[Footnote 4: Especially in 8, 10, and 4. This method