Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo
  Proice tela manu, sanguis meus.

[Footnote 7:  Cic. Ad Att.  VIII, 11, 4; X, 4, 8.]

This is the poet’s final conviction regarding the civil war in which he served; his first had not differed widely from this.

Vergil’s one experience as advocate in the court room should perhaps be placed after his retirement from the army.  Egit, says Donatus, et causam apud judices, unam omnino nec amplius quam semel.  The reason for his lack of success Donatus gives in the words of Melissus, a critic who ought to know:  in sermone tardissimum ac paene indocto similem.  The poet himself seems to allude to his disappointing failure in the Ciris:  expertum fallacis praemia volgi.  How could he but fail?  He never learned to cram his convictions into mere phrases, and his judgments into all-inclusive syllogisms.  When he has done his best with human behavior, and the sentence is pronounced, he spoils the whole with a rebellious dis aliter visum.  A successful advocate must know what not to see and feel, and he must have ready convictions at his tongue’s end.  In the Aeneid there are several fluent orators, but they are never Vergil’s congenial characters.

III

THE “CULEX”

It was apparently in the year 48—­Vergil was then twenty-one—­that the poet attempted his first extended composition, the Culex, a poem that hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of Spenser.  This is indeed one of the strangest poems of Latin literature, an overwhelming burden of mythological and literary references saddled on the feeblest of fables.

A shepherd goes out one morning with his flocks to the woodland glades whose charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative rhapsody.  The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is about to strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save him.  But—­such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore—­the shepherd, still in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life.  At night the gnat’s ghost returns to rebuke the shepherd for his innocent ingratitude, and rather inappropriately remains to rehearse at great length the tale of what shades of old heroes he has seen in the lower regions.  The poem contains 414 lines.

The Culex has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism, and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic criteria.  Though it was accepted as Vergilian by Renaissance readers simply because the manuscripts of the poem and ancient writers, from Lucan and Statius to Martial and Suetonius, all attribute the work to him, recent critics have usually been skeptical or downright recusant.  Some insist that it is a forgery or supposititious work; others that it is a liberally padded re-working of Vergil’s original.  Only a few have accepted