of re-working old
lines reveals an extraordinary gift of memory in the poet, who so vividly
retained in mind every line he had written that each might readily fall
into the pattern of his new compositions without leaving a trace of the
joining. Critics who have tried the task have been compelled to confess
that the criterion of contextual appropriateness cannot alone determine
whether or not these lines first occurred in the _Ciris_.]

V

A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT NAPLES

The _Culex_ seems to have been completed in September 48 B.C., and the
main part of the _Ciris_ was written not much later. Now came a crisis in
Vergil's affairs. Perhaps his own experience in the law courts, or the
conviction that public life could contain no interest under an autocracy,
or disgust at rhetorical futility, or perhaps a copy of Lucretius brought
him to a stop. Lucretius he certainly had been reading; of that the
_Ciris_ provides unmistakable evidence. And the spell of that poet he
never escaped. His farewell to Rome and rhetoric has been quoted in part
above. The end of the poem bids--though more reluctantly--farewell to the
muses also:

Ite hinc Camenae; vos quoque ite jam sane
dulces Camenae (nam fatebimur verum,
dulces fuistis): et tamen meas chartas
revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.

It is to Siro that he now went, the Epicurean philosopher who, closely
associated with the voluminous Philodemus, was conducting a very popular
garden-school at Naples, outranking in fact the original school at
Athens. It is not unlikely that this is where Lucretius himself had
studied.

It is well to bear in mind that the ensuing years of philosophical study
were spent at Naples--a Greek city then--and very largely among Greeks.
This fact provides a key to much of Vergil. Our biographies have somehow
assumed Rome as the center of Siro's activities, though the evidence in
favor of Naples is unmistakable. Not only does Vergil speak of a journey
(Catal. V. 8):

Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis,

and Servius say _Neapoli studuit_, and the _Ciris_ mention _Cecropus
horrulus_, and Cicero in all his references place Siro on the bay of
Naples,[1] but a fragment of a Herculanean roll of Philodemus locates the
garden school in the suburbs of Naples.

[Footnote 1: _De Fin_. II. 119, Cumaean villa; _Acad_. II. 106, Bauli;
_Ad. Fam_. VI. 11.2; Vestorius is a Neapolitan; of. _Class. Phil_.
1920