book, in speaking of the descent of the royal Roman line, he derives it, as was regularly done in Augustus’ day, from Silvius the son of Aeneas and Lavinia (VI, 763 ff.).  We must notice also that in the Aeneid as in the Georgics Augustus is regularly called ‘Augustus Caesar’ or ‘Caesar,’ whereas in the only other references to Julius in the Aeneid the poet explicitly points to him by saying ‘Caesar et omnis Iuli progenies’ (VI, 789).

Servius, therefore, seems to be correct in regarding Julius as the subject of the passage in the first book, and it follows that the passage contains memories of the year 46 B.C., whether or not the lines were, as I suggest, first written soon after Caesar’s triumph.

The fifth book also, despite the fact that its beginning and end show a late hand, contains much that can be best brought into connection with Vergil’s earlier years.  It is, for instance, easier to comprehend the poet’s references to Memmius, Catiline, and Cluentius in the forties than twenty years later.

Vergil’s strange comparison of Messalla to the superbus Eryx in Catalepton IX, written in 42 B.C.,[6] is also readily explained if we may assume that he has recently studied the Eryx myth in preparation for the contest of Book V (11. 392-420).  The poet’s enthusiasm for the ludus Troiae is well understood as a description of what he saw at Caesar’s re-introduction of the spectacle in 46.  At Caesar’s games Octavian, then sixteen years of age, must have led one of the troops:[7] in the fifth book Atys the ancestor of Octavian’s maternal line led one column by the side of Iulus: 

  Alter Atys, genus unde Atii duxere Latini (1. 568).

[Footnote 6:  See Chapter VIII.]

[Footnote 7:  The brief account of Nicolaus of Damascus (9) mentions that Octavius had charge of the Greek plays at the triumphal games.]

Then, too, marks of youth pervade the substance of the book.  The questionable witticisms might perhaps be attributed to an attempt to relieve the strain, but there is an unusual amount of Homeric imitation, and inartistic allusion to contemporaries which, as in the youthful Bucolics, destroys the dramatic illusion.  Thus, Vergil not only dwells upon the ancestry of the Memmii, Sergii, and Cluentii, but insists upon reminding the reader of Catiline’s conspiracy in the Sergestus, furens animi, who dashes upon the rock in his mad eagerness to win, and obtrudes etymology in the phrase segnem Menoeten (1. 173).  One is tempted to suspect that the whole narrative of the boat-race is filled with pragmatic allusions.  If the characters of his epic must be connected with well-known Roman families, it is at least interesting that the connections are indicated in the fifth book and not in the passages where the names first meet the reader.  Does it not appear that the body of the book was composed long before the rest, and then left at the poet’s death not quite furbished to the fastidious taste of a later day?