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Updated: June 1, 2025


Several of the Catalepton may belong to this period. The very first, addressed to Vergil's lifelong friend Plotius Tucca, is an amusing trifle in the very vein of Philodemus. The fourth, like the first in elegiacs, is a gracious tribute to a departing friend, Musa, perhaps his fellow-townsman Octavius Musa.

Indeed, there is no convincing proof that such works as the Ciris, the Aetna, and the Catalepton were circulated in the Augustan age. The ashes were carried to his home at Naples and buried beneath a tombstone bearing the simple epitaph written by some friend who knew the poet's simplicity of heart: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.

Mantua indeed, a "Latin" town after 89 B.C., did not become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it, but Vergil's father, according to the eighth Catalepton, had earlier in his life lived in Cremona.

However, after all is said, Vergil had questioned some of the Alexandrian ideals of art before he came under the influence of Philodemus, and the seventh Catalepton gives a hint that Varius thought as Vergil.

If he took part in the work of that stormy winter's campaigns, when more than one fleet was wrecked, we can comprehend the intimate touches in the description of Aeneas' encounters with the storms. The thirteenth Catalepton, which mentions the poet's military service, is not pleasant reading.

Conversely it is proof, if proof were needed, that the ninth Catalepton is Vergil's. We may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth Catalepton: pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas, as a statement that in the autumn of 42, Vergil had already written some of his Eclogues, and that these early ones presumably at least numbers II, III, and VII contain suggestions from Messalla.

The story of Vergil's tiff with a soldier, for example, is apparently an inference from Menalcas' experience in Eclogue IX. 15; but "Menalcas" appears in four other Eclogues where he cannot be Vergil. The poet indeed was at Naples, as the eighth Catalepton proves.

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