was to Cicero the earmark of this style.  The Ciris has it less often than Catullus.  Being somewhat unjustly criticized as an artifice it was usually avoided in the Aeneid.  There are more harsh elisions in the Ciris than in the poet’s later work, reminding one again of Catullan technique.  In his use of caesuras Vergil in the Ciris resembles Catullus:  both to a certain extent distrust the trochaic pause.  Its yielding quality, however, brought it back into more favor in various emotional passages of the Aeneid; but there it is carefully modified by the introduction of masculine stops before and after, a nuance which is hardly sought after in the Ciris or in Catullus.  Finally, the sentence structure has not yet attained the malleability of a later day.  While the Ciris, like the Peleus and Thetis, is over-free with involved and parenthetical sentences, it has on the whole fewer run-over lines so that indeed the frequent coincidence of sense pauses and verse endings almost borders on monotony.

[Footnote 2:  See especially Skutsch, Aus Vergils Fruehzeit, p. 74; Drachmann, Hermes, 1908, p. 412 ff.; L.G.  Eldridge, Num.  Culex et Ciris, etc.  Giessen, 1914; Rand, Harvard Studies, XXX, p. 150.  The introduction which was written last is more reminiscent of Lucretius.  On the question of authenticity, see Drachmann, loc. cit.  Vollmer, Sitz.  Bayer.  Akad. 1907, 335, and Vergil’s Apprenticeship, Class.  Phil. 1920, p. 103.]

These are but a few of the minor details that show Vergil in his youth a close reader of Catullus, and doubtless of Calvus, Cinna and Cornificius, who employed the same methods.  It was from this group, not from Homer or Ennius, that Vergil learned his verse-technique.  The exquisite finish of the Aeneid was the product of this technique meticulously reworked to the demands of an exacting poetic taste.

The Ciris gave Vergil his first lesson in serious poetic composition, and no task could have been set of more immediate value for the training of Rome’s epic poet.  In a national epic classical objectivity could not suffice for a people that had grown so self-conscious.  Epic poetry must become more subjective at Rome or perish.  To be sure the vices of the episodic style must be pruned away, and they were, mercilessly.  The Aeneid has none of the meretricious involutions of plot, none of the puzzling half-uttered allusions to essential facts, none of the teasing interruptions of the neoteric story book.  The poet also learned to avoid the danger of stressing trivial and impertinent pathos, and he rejected the elegancies of style that threatened to lead to preciosity.  What he kept, however, was of permanent value.  The new poetry, which had emerged from a society that was deeply interested in science, had taught Vergil to observe the details of nature with accuracy and an appreciation of their