it as a very youthful failure of Vergil’s, or as an attempt of the poet to parody the then popular romances.  Recent objections have not centered about metrical technique, diction, or details of style:  these are now admitted to be Vergilian enough, or rather what might well have been Vergilian at the outset of his career.  The chief criticism is directed against a want of proportion and an apparent lack of artistic sense betrayed in choosing so strange a character for the ponderous title-role.  These are faults that Vergil later does not betray.

Nevertheless, Vergil seems to have written the poem.  Its ascription to Vergil by so many authors of the early empire, as well as the concensus of the manuscripts, must be taken very seriously.  But the internal evidence is even stronger.  Octavius, to whom the poem is dedicated, is addressed Octavi venerande and sancte puer, a clear reference to the remarkable honor that Caesar secured for him by election to the office of pontiff[1] when he was approaching his fifteenth birthday and before he assumed the toga virilis.  Vergil was then twenty-one years of age—­nearing his twenty-second birthday—­and we may perhaps assume in Donatus’ attribution of the Culex to Vergil’s sixteenth year a mistake in some early manuscript which changed the original XXI to XVI, a correction which the citations of Statius and Lucan favor.[2] Finally, when, as we shall see presently, Horace in his second Epode, accords Vergil the honor of imitating a passage of the Culex, Vergil returns the compliment in his Georgics.  We have therefore not only Vergil’s recognition of Horace’s courtesy, but, in his acceptance of it, his acknowledgment of the Culex as his own.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Vellius, II. 59, 3, pontificatus sacerdotio puerum honoravit, that is, before he assumed the toga virilis on October 18th.  Nicolaus Damascenus (4) confirms this.  Octavius received the office made vacant by the death of Domitius at Pharsalia (Aug. 9).  His birthday was Sept. 23, 63.  This high office is the first indication that Caesar had chosen his grandnephew to be his possible successor.  The boy was hardly known at Rome before this time.  See Classical Philology, 1920, p. 26.]

[Footnote 2:  Anderson, in Classical Quarterly, 1916, p. 225; and Class.  Phil. 1920, p. 26.  The dedicatory lines of the Culex imply that the body of the poem was already complete.  Whether the interval was one of weeks or months or years the poet does not say.]

[Footnote 3:  Classical Philology, 1920, pp. 23, 33.]