It is not, as has been held, a result of rhetorical studies alone; it reveals rather a native good sense tempered with a neoteric interest in psychology and a neoteric exactness in formal composition.  And yet the passage exhibits a great advance upon the geometric formality of the Ciris.  The incident is not treated episodically as it might have been in Vergil’s early work.  The pattern is not whimsically intricate but is shaped by an understanding mind.  While its art is as studied and conscious as that of the Ciris, it has the directness and integrity of Homeric narrative.  Yet Vergil has not forgotten the startling effects that Catullus would attain by compressing a long tale into a suggestive phrase, if only a memory of the tale could be assumed.  The story of Priam’s death on the citadel is told in all its tragic horror till the climax is reached.  Then suddenly with astonishing force the mind is flung through and beyond the memories of the awful mutilation by the amazingly condensed phrase: 

      jacet ingens litore truncus
  avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

There Vergil has given only the last line of a suppressed tragedy which the reader is compelled to visualize for himself.

Neoteric, too, is the accurate observation and the patience with details displayed by the author of the Aeneid.  In his youth Vergil had, to be sure, avoided the extremes of photographic realism illustrated by the very curious Moretum, but he had nevertheless, in works like the Copa, the Dirae, and the eighth Eclogue, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant.  To realize the precision of his strokes even then one has but to recall the couplet of the Copa which in an instant sets one upon the dusty road of an Italian July midday: 

  Nunc cantu crebro rumpunt arbusta cicadae
    nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet.

Throughout the Aeneid, the patches of landscape, the retreats for storm-tossed ships, the carved temple-doors, the groups of accoutred warriors marching past, and many a gruesome battle scene, are reminders of this early technique.

What degrees of conscientious workmanship went into these results, we are just now learning.  Carcopino,[2] who, with a copy of Vergil in hand, has carefully surveyed the Latin coast from the Tiber mouth, past the site of Lavinium down to Ardea, is convinced that the poet traced every manoeuvre and every sally on the actual ground which he chose for his theatre of action in the last six books.  It still seems possible to recognize the deep valley of the ambuscade and the plain where Camilla deployed her cavalry.  Furthermore, there can be little doubt that for the sake of a heroic-age setting Vergil studied the remains and records of most ancient Rome.  There were still in existence in various Latin towns sixth-century