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Updated: May 17, 2025
It was at about this same time, 48 B.C., that Vergil began to write the Ciris, a romantic epyllion which deserves far more attention than it has received, not only as an invaluable document for the history of the poet's early development, but as a poem possessing in some passages at least real artistic merit.
The poet himself seems to allude to his disappointing failure in the Ciris: expertum fallacis praemia volgi. How could he but fail? He never learned to cram his convictions into mere phrases, and his judgments into all-inclusive syllogisms. When he has done his best with human behavior, and the sentence is pronounced, he spoils the whole with a rebellious dis aliter visum.
It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast hoard of material. There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic. Wherever the work had received the final touch, the composition shows a flawless unity.
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.
Its yielding quality, however, brought it back into more favor in various emotional passages of the Aeneid; but there it is carefully modified by the introduction of masculine stops before and after, a nuance which is hardly sought after in the Ciris or in Catullus. Finally, the sentence structure has not yet attained the malleability of a later day.
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 Ciris, another piece of somewhat greater length, on the story of Scylla and Nisus, is more certainly the production of some forgotten poet belonging to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla, and is of interest as showing the immense pains taken in the later Augustan age to continue the Virgilian tradition.
The eager offering of flowers and a many-hued statue of Cupid reminds one rather of the youth who in the Ciris begged for inspiration with hands full of lilies and hyacinths. However, we are not entirely left to conjecture. There is indubitable evidence that Vergil began an epic at this time, some fifteen years before he published the Georgics.
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