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Updated: May 17, 2025
I may here add that I have, with little success, endeavoured, by consulting various works, to decide how far the period of variation in birds has generally determined the transmission of characters to one sex or to both. For instance, the males of Tanagra aestiva and Fringilla cyanea require three years, the male of Fringilla ciris four years, to complete their beautiful plumage.
While the Ciris, like the Peleus and Thetis, is over-free with involved and parenthetical sentences, it has on the whole fewer run-over lines so that indeed the frequent coincidence of sense pauses and verse endings almost borders on monotony. Culex et Ciris, etc. Giessen, 1914; Rand, Harvard Studies, XXX, p. 150. The introduction which was written last is more reminiscent of Lucretius.
This method of re-working old lines reveals an extraordinary gift of memory in the poet, who so vividly retained in mind every line he had written that each might readily fall into the pattern of his new compositions without leaving a trace of the joining. The Culex seems to have been completed in September 48 B.C., and the main part of the Ciris was written not much later.
It was from this group, not from Homer or Ennius, that Vergil learned his verse-technique. The exquisite finish of the Aeneid was the product of this technique meticulously reworked to the demands of an exacting poetic taste. The Ciris gave Vergil his first lesson in serious poetic composition, and no task could have been set of more immediate value for the training of Rome's epic poet.
Indeed the artistry of most of the verses discussed is, as any reader will notice, more on the plane of the later work than of the Ciris, written about 47-3 B.C. It is safe to say that Vergil did not in his youth write the sonorous lines of Aen. I, 285-290, just as they now stand.
The dedication of the Ciris reveals Vergil still eager to win his place as a rival of Lucretius. We may paraphrase it thus: "Having tried in vain for the favor of the populace, I am now in the 'Garden' seeking a theme worthy of philosophy, though I have spent many years to other purpose. Now I have dared to ascend the mountain of wisdom where but few have ventured.
There may well have been a number of similar epigrams directed at Antony himself, but if so they would of course have been destroyed during the reign of the triumvirate. Antony's vindictiveness knew no bounds, as Rome learned when Cicero was murdered. Vergil's dedication of the Ciris to Valerius Messalla was, as the poem itself reveals, written several years after the main body of the poem.
In his speech he uses every art of persuasion: he awakens in turn curiosity, surprise, pity, admiration, sympathy, and faith. The passage is as curiously wrought as any episode of Catullus or the Ciris.
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.
The Ciris with all its flaws is one of our best examples of the romantic verse tales made popular by the Alexandrian poets of Callimachus' school. The old legends had of course been told in epic or dramatic form, but changing society now cared less for the stirring action and bloodshed that had entertained the early Greeks.
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