The fifth Eclogue, written probably in 41 B.C., is a very melodious Daphnis-song that has always been a favorite with poets.  It has been and may be read with entire pleasure as an elegy to Daphnis, the patron god of singing shepherds.  Those, however, who in Roman times knew Vergil’s love of symbolism, suspected that a more personal interest led him to compose this elegy.  The death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar is still thought by some to be the real subject of the poem, while a few have accepted another ancient conjecture that Vergil here wrote of his brother.  The person mourned must, however, have been of more importance than Vergil’s brother.  On the other hand, certain details in the poem—­the sorrow of the mother, for instance—­preclude the conjecture that it was Caesar, unless the poet is here confusing his details more than we need assume in any other eclogue.

It is indeed difficult to escape the very old persuasion that a sorrow so sympathetically expressed must be more than a mere Theocritan reminiscence.  If we could find some poet—­for Daphnis must be that—­near to Vergil himself, who met an unhappy death in those days, a poet, too, who died in such circumstances during the civil strife that general expression of grief had to be hidden behind a symbolic veil, would not the poem thereby gain a theme worthy of its grace?  I think we have such a poet in Cornificius, the dear friend of Catullus, to whom in fact Catullus addressed what seem to be his last verses.[3] Like so many of the new poets, Cornificius had espoused Caesar’s cause, but at the end was induced by Cicero to support Brutus against the triumvirs.  After Philippi Cornificius kept up the hopeless struggle in Africa for several months until finally he was defeated and put to death.  If he be Vergil’s Daphnis we have an explanation of why his identity escaped the notice of curious scholars.  Tactful silence became quite necessary at a time when almost every household at Rome was rent by divided sympathies, and yet brotherhood in art could hardly be entirely stifled.  From the point of view of the masters of Rome, Cornificius had met a just doom as a rebel.  If his poet friends mourned for him it must have been in some such guise as this.

[Footnote 3:  Catullus, 38.]

In this instance the circumstantial evidence is rather strong, for we are told by a commentator that Valgius, an early friend of Vergil’s, wrote elegies to the memory of a “Codrus,” identified by some as Cornificius:[4]

  Codrusque ille canit quali tu voce canebas,
  Atque solet numeros dicere Cinna tuos.

[Footnote 4:  Scholia Veronensia, Ecl.  VII, 22.  The evidence is presented in Classical Review, 1920, p. 49.]

That “shepherd” at least is an actual person, a friend of Cinna, and a member of the neoteric group; that indeed it is Cornificius is exceedingly probable.  The poet-patriot seems then, not to have been forgotten by his friends.