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Updated: June 6, 2025
There is another element in the poem that is as significant as it is prosaic, a spirit of carping at poetic custom which reminds the reader of Philodemus' lectures. Philodemus, whether speaking of philosophy or music or poetry, always begins in the negative. He is not happy until he has soundly trounced his predecessors and opponents.
He studied with Zeno of Sidon, to whom Cicero also listened in 78, a masterful teacher whose followers and pupils, Demetrius, Phaedrus, Patro, probably also Siro, and of course Philodemus, captured a large part of the most influential Romans for the sect. Cic. Tusc.
A fragment of Philodemus, recently deciphered, reveals the teacher adopting in his lectures the very point of view which we have already found in Piso. The fragment is brief and mutilated, but so much is clear: Philodemus criticizes the party of Cicero for carrying the attack upon Antony to such extremes that through fear of the liberators a reaction in favor of Antony might set in.
And yet not so strange when we bear in mind that the books of Philodemus reveal Vergil and Quintilius Varus as fellow students at Naples. Surely Servius has provided the key.
His early work ranged very widely in its experiments in style, and Horace's Ars Poetica written many years later shows that Vergil had to the very end been criticized by the extremists for taking liberties with the language. The epigram begins as though it were an erotic poem in the style of Philodemus.
Among Greeks resident at Rome the best known teachers were Phaedrus and Zeno; a book by the former on the gods was largely used by Cicero in the first book of his De Natura Deorum. A little later Philodemus of Gadara, parts of whose writings are still extant, seems to have risen to the first place. In the time of Cicero this system obtained more disciples among the foremost men.
Furthermore his theories of literary art are frequently in accord with Horace's Ars Poetica on the very points of chaste diction and precise expression which this Augustan group emphasized. It would not surprise his contemporaries if Horace restated maxims of Philodemus when writing an essay to the son and grandsons of Philodemus' patron.
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.
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