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Updated: June 15, 2025
By quoting the precise words of this speech Servius has provided us with a solid criterion for accepting what is consistent in the statements of Vergil's earlier biographers and eliminating some conjectures. The passage reads: "When ordered to leave unoccupied a district of three miles outside the city, you included within the district eight hundred paces of water which lies about the walls."
The comparison is the more startling because our Messalla later explicitly rejected all connection with the first Valerius and seems never to have used the cognomen Publicola. The explanation of Vergil's passage is obvious.
It was this that stirred Cicero's ire, and Cicero did not hesitate to expose the man's career. Vergil's lampoon is interesting then not only in its connections with Catullus and the poet's own boyhood memories, but for its reminiscences of Cicero's speeches and the revelation of his own sympathies in the partizan struggle.
Vergil's memories of the boy at school, the recipient of the Culex, the leader of the Trojan troop at Caesar's games, the lad of sixteen sitting for a day in the forum as praefectus urbi, seem very recent in the pages of the epic. It would be futile to attempt to pick out definite lines and claim that these were parts of the youthful poem.
The narrow imperialism of the urban aristocracy finds no support in him. Not the city of Rome but Italy is the patria of the Aeneid, and Italy as a civilizing and peace-bringing force, not as the exploiting conqueror. Here we recognize a spirit akin to Julius Caesar. Vergil's hero Aeneas, is not a Latin but a Trojan.
After Philippi Cornificius kept up the hopeless struggle in Africa for several months until finally he was defeated and put to death. If he be Vergil's Daphnis we have an explanation of why his identity escaped the notice of curious scholars.
Siro's villa apparently proved attractive to Vergil, for he made Naples his permanent home, despite the gift of a house on the Esquiline from Maecenas. This, however, is not Vergil's last mention of Siro, if we may believe Servius, who thinks that "Silenum" in the sixth Eclogue stands for "Sironem," its metrical equivalent.
The epigram on the former takes the form of a parody of Catullus' "Phasellus ille," a poem which Vergil had good reason to remember, since Catullus' yacht had been towed up the Mincio past Vergil's home when he was a lad of about thirteen. Indeed we hope he was out fishing that day and shared his catch with the home-returning travelers.
In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to Epicureanism than modern critics too often obsessed by a misapplied odium philosophicum have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its attitude towards art banal.
The story of Vergil's tiff with a soldier, for example, is apparently an inference from Menalcas' experience in Eclogue IX. 15; but "Menalcas" appears in four other Eclogues where he cannot be Vergil. The poet indeed was at Naples, as the eighth Catalepton proves.
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