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, p. 107, and Am.  Jour.  Philology, XLI, 115.  For other possible references, see Am.  Jour.  Phil.1920, XLI, 280 ff.]

Even after Siro’s death—­about 42 B.C.—­Vergil seems to have remained at Naples, probably inheriting his teacher’s villa.  In 38 he with Varius and Plotius came up from Naples to Sinuessa to join Maecenas’ party on their journey to Brundisium; Vergil wrote the Georgics at Naples in the thirties (Georg.  IV. 460), and Donatus actually remarks that the poet was seldom seen at Rome.