“the sin of lustfulness
  and love’s incontinence.”

Vergil had not then met Siro, but he may have read some of his lectures.

Finally, the strange lines on Cornelius Gallus might find a ready explanation if we knew whether or not Gallus had also been a member of the Neapolitan circle.  Probus, if we may believe him, suggests the possibility in calling him a schoolmate of Vergil’s, and a plausible interpretation of this eclogue turns that possibility into a probability.  The passage (II. 64-73) may well be Vergil’s way of recalling to Varus a well-beloved fellow-student who had left the circle to become a poet.

The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil’s life in Siro’s garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school closed, and Varus gone off to war.  The younger man’s school days are now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla’s experiments had drawn him.  The Eclogues are already appearing in rapid succession.

IX

MATERIALISM IN THE SERVICE OF POETRY

It has been remarked that Vergil’s genius was of slow growth; he was twenty-eight before he wrote any verses that his mature judgment recognized as worthy of publication.  A survey of his early life reveals some of the reasons for this tardy development.  Born and schooled in a province he was naturally held back by lack of those contacts which stimulate boys of the city to rapid mental growth.  The first few years at Rome were in some measure wasted upon a subject for which he had neither taste nor endowment.  The banal rhetorical training might indeed have made a Lucan or a Juvenal out of him had he not finally revolted so decisively.  However, this work at Rome proved not to be a total loss.  His choice of a national theme for an epic and his insight into the true qualities of imperial Rome owe something to the study of political questions that his preparation for a public career had necessitated.  He learned something in his Roman days that not even Epicurean scorn for politics could eradicate.

However, his next decision, to devote his life to philosophy, again retarded his poetic development.  Certainly it held him in leash during the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric poet of the neoteric school.  A Catullus or a Keats must be caught early.  Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm.  The Aetna shows perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic insistence that myths must now give way to facts.  Its author was still too absorbed in the microscopic analysis of a petty piece of research to catch the spirit of Lucretius who had found in the visions of the scientific workshop a majesty and beauty that partook of the essence of poetry.