However, we are not entirely left to conjecture.  There is indubitable evidence that Vergil began an epic at this time, some fifteen years before he published the Georgics.  It seems clear also that the epic was an Aeneid, with Julius Caesar in the background, and that parts of the early epic were finally merged into the great work of his maturity.  The question is of such importance to the study of Vergil’s developing art that we may be justified in going fully into the evidence[3].  As it happens we are fortunate in having several references to this early effort.  The ninth Catalepton, written in 42, mentions the poet’s ambition to write a national poem worthy of a place among the great classics of Greece (l.62): 

  Si patrio Graios carmine adire sales.

The sixth Eclogue begins with an allusion to it: 

  Prima Syracusio dignata est ludere versu
  Nostra, nec erubuit silvas habitare Thalia. 
  Cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
  Vellit et admonuit, pastorem Tityre pinguis
  Pascere oportet oves, deductum dicere carmen.

[Footnote 3:  Cf. Classical Quarterly, 1920, 156.]

This may be paraphrased:  “My first song—­the Culex—­was a pastoral strain.  When later I essayed to sing of kings and battles, Phoebus warned me to return to my shepherd song.”  On this passage Servius has the comment:  significat aut Aeneidem aut gesta regum Albanorum.  Donatus finally in his Vita says explicitly:  mox cum res Romanas inchoasset, offensus materia, ad Bucolica transit.  The poem, therefore, was on the stocks before the Bucolics.  We may surmise that the death of Caesar, whose deeds seem to have brought the idea of such a poem to Vergil’s mind, caused him to lay the work aside.

Returning to the fourteenth Catalepton, we find what seems to be a definite key to the date and circumstances of its writing.  The closing lines are: 

  Adsis, o Cytherea:  tuos te Caesar Olympo
    Et Surrentini litoris ara vocat.

It was on September 26 in 46 B.C., that Julius Caesar so strikingly called attention to his claims of descent from Venus and Aeneas by dedicating a temple to Venus Genetrix, the mother of the Julian gens.  It was on that day that Caesar “called Venus from heaven” to dwell in her new temple.[4]

[Footnote 4:  Cassius Dio, 43, 22; Appian, II. 102.  There is independent proof that Catalepton XIV is earlier than the Georgics.  In Georgics II, 146, Vergil repeats the phrase maxima taurus victima, but the phrase must have had its origin in the Catalepton, since here maxima balances humilis.  In the Georgics the phrase is merely a verbal reminiscence, for there is nothing in the context there to explain maxima.  On the order of composition of the Aeneid, see M.M.  Crump, The Growth of the Aeneid]