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Updated: May 17, 2025
The whole plot of the Ciris is in fact unravelled by means of a series of allusions and suggestions, exclamations and soliloquies, parentheses and aposiopeses, interrogations and apostrophes. In verse-technique the Ciris is as near Catullus' Peleus and Thetis as it is the Aeneid: indeed it is as reminiscent of the former as it is prophetic of the latter. was to Cicero the earmark of this style.
But both didactic poetry and the little epic were largely cultivated, and the greater epic itself was not without followers. The extant poems of the Culex and Ciris have already been noted as showing with what skill and grace unknown poets, almost if not absolutely contemporary with Virgil, could use the slighter epic forms.
There is a pleasing self-consciousness in the poet's reflections never too obtrusive that reminds one of Catullus. It implies that poetry is recognized in its great role of a criticism of life. But most of all there is revealed in the Ciris an epic poet's first timid probing into the depths of human emotions, a striving to understand the riddles behind the impulsive body.
The Ciris, to be sure, is not quite so intricate, but here again we have only allusions to the essential parts of the story: how Scylla offended Juno, how she met Minos, how she cut the lock, and how the city was taken. We are not even told why Minos failed to keep his pledge to the maiden.
The poet of the Ciris, the Copa, the Dirae, and the Bucolics is never far to seek in the Aeneid. It would be a long story to trace the flowering in the Aeneid of the seedling sown in Vergil's boyhood garden-plot.
The Ciris has it less often than Catullus. Being somewhat unjustly criticized as an artifice it was usually avoided in the Aeneid. There are more harsh elisions in the Ciris than in the poet's later work, reminding one again of Catullan technique. In his use of caesuras Vergil in the Ciris resembles Catullus: both to a certain extent distrust the trochaic pause.
Now came a crisis in Vergil's affairs. Perhaps his own experience in the law courts, or the conviction that public life could contain no interest under an autocracy, or disgust at rhetorical futility, or perhaps a copy of Lucretius brought him to a stop. Lucretius he certainly had been reading; of that the Ciris provides unmistakable evidence. And the spell of that poet he never escaped.
Vergil, who thoroughly disliked Antony, must then have felt that for the present, at least, a barrier had been raised between him and Messalla. Accordingly the Ciris also was abandoned and presently pillaged for other uses.
Spine, alteration of, to suit the erect attitude of man. Spirits, fondness of monkeys for. Spiritual agencies, belief in, almost universal. Spiza cyanea and ciris. Spoonbill, Chinese, change of plumage in. Spots, retained throughout groups of birds; disappearance of, in adult mammals. Sprengel, C.K., on the sexuality of plants. Springboc, horns of the.
That Vergil has penetrated a richer vein of sentiment, that he has learned to regard passion as something more than an accident, to sacrifice mere logic of form for fragments of vital emotion and flashes of new scenery, and finally that he enriched the Latin vocabulary with fecund words are in no small measure the effect of his early intensive work on the Ciris under the tutelage of Catullus.
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