There seem to be three points of attack.  Cimber, to judge from Cicero’s invective, was suspected of having risen from servile parentage, and of trying, as freedmen then frequently did, to pass as a descendant of some unfortunate barbarian prince.  Since his brogue was Celtic (tau Gallicum) he could readily make a plausible story of being British.  Vergil seems to imply that the brogue as well as the name Cimber had been assumed to hide his Asiatic parentage.  The second point seems to be that Cimber, though a teacher of rhetoric, was so ignorant of Greek, that while proclaiming himself an Atticist, he used non-Attic forms and vaunted Thucydides instead of Lysias as the model of the simple style.  Finally, it was rumored, and Cicero affects to believe the tale, that Cimber was not without guilt in the death of his brother.  Vergil is, of course, not greatly concerned in deriding Atticism itself:  to this school Vergil must have felt less aversion than to Antony’s flowery style; it is the perversion of the doctrine that amuses the poet.

Taken in conjunction with other hints, these two poems show us where the poet’s sympathies lay during those years of terror.  There may well have been a number of similar epigrams directed at Antony himself, but if so they would of course have been destroyed during the reign of the triumvirate.  Antony’s vindictiveness knew no bounds, as Rome learned when Cicero was murdered.

VIII

LAST DAYS AT THE GARDEN

Vergil’s dedication of the Ciris to Valerius Messalla was, as the poem itself reveals, written several years after the main body of the poem.  The most probable date is 43 B.C., when the young nobleman, then only about twenty-one, went with Cicero’s blessing[1] to join Brutus and Cassius in their fight for the Republic.  Messalla had then, besides making himself an adept at philosophy—­at Naples perhaps, since Vergil knew him—­and stealing away student hours at Athens for Greek verse writing, gained no little renown by taking a lawsuit against the most learned lawyer of the day, Servius Sulpicius.  Cicero’s letter of commendation, which we still have, is unusually laudatory.

[Footnote 1:  Cicero, Ad Brutum, I, 15.]

The dedication of the Ciris reveals Vergil still eager to win his place as a rival of Lucretius.  We may paraphrase it thus: 

“Having tried in vain for the favor of the populace, I am now in the ‘Garden’ seeking a theme worthy of philosophy, though I have spent many years to other purpose.  Now I have dared to ascend the mountain of wisdom where but few have ventured.  Yet I must complete these verses that I have begun so that the Muses may cease to entice me further.  Oh, if only wisdom, the mistress of the four sages of old, would lead me to her tower whence I might from afar view the errors of men; I should not then honor one so great with a theme so trifling, but I should weave a marvelous fabric like Athena’s pictured robe ... a great poem on Nature, and into its texture I should weave your name.  But for that my powers are still too frail.  I can only offer these verses on which I have spent many hours of my early school-days, a vow long promised and now fulfilled.”