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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Culex, therefore, is the work of a beginner addressed to a young lad just highly honored, but after all to a schoolboy whom Vergil had, presumably two years before, met in the lecture rooms of Epidius. Does this provide a key with which to unlock the hidden intentions of our strange treasure-trove of miscellaneous allusions?
The Culex is then, after all, a poem of unique interest; it takes us into the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two lads whose names come first in the honor roll of the golden age.
It must be supposed that Culex fasciatus is only found where yellow fever prevails. The propagation of the disease depends upon the introduction of an infected individual to a locality where this mosquito is found, at a season of the year when it is active.
The most important of them, the Culex, or Gnat, is a poem of about four hundred lines, in which the incident of a gnat saving the life of a sleeping shepherd from a serpent, and being crushed to death in the act, is made the occasion for an elaborate description of the infernal regions, from which the ghost of the insect rises to reproach his unconscious murderer.
This high office is the first indication that Caesar had chosen his grandnephew to be his possible successor. The boy was hardly known at Rome before this time. Phil. 1920, p. 26. The dedicatory lines of the Culex imply that the body of the poem was already complete.
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.
If we can accept the Culex in its present form as genuine, the development of Virgil's genius is shown to us in a still earlier stage. It is true the critics torment us by their doubts. Some insist that it cannot be by Virgil.
The Culex lineatus, which belongs to the Cano Tamalamec, is only perceived in the valley of the Rio Grande de la Magdalena, at a league north of the junction of the two rivers; it goes up, but scarcely ever descends the Rio Grande.
On the Rio Magdalena the Culex cyanopterus is dreaded, particularly at Mompox, Chiloa, and Tamalameca. At these places this insect is larger and stronger, and its legs blacker. It is difficult to avoid smiling on hearing the missionaries dispute about the size and voracity of the mosquitos at different parts of the same river.
For some time it was claimed that this species would breed only in clean water, but it has been found that it is not nearly so particular, some even claiming that it prefers foul water. I have seen them breeding in countless thousands in company with Stegomyia scutellaris and Culex fatigans in the sewer drains in Tahiti in the streets of Papeete.
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