decision of writing pastorals. Since Messalla's
verses were in Greek they had, of course, been written two years before
this while he was a student at Athens. Would that we knew this heroine
upon whom he represents the divinities as bestowing gifts! Propertius,
who acknowledged Mesalla as his patron later employed this same motive
of celestial adoration in honor of Cynthia (II. 3, 25), but surely
Messalla's _herois_ was, to judge from Vergil's comparison, a person of
far higher station than Cynthia. Could she have been the lady he married
upon his return from Athens? Such a treatment of a woman of social
station would be in line with the customs of the "new poets," Catullus,
Calvus, and Ticidas, rather than of the Augustans, Gallus, Propertius,
and Tibullus. Vergil himself used the motive in the second _Eclogue_ (l.
46), a reminiscence which, doubtless with many others that we are unable
to trace, Messalla must have recognized as his own.

The pastoral which Vergil had translated from Messalla is quite fully
described:

Molliter hic _viridi patulae sub tegmine quercus_
Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant,
Dulcia jactantes alterno carmina versu
Qualia Trinacriae doctus amat iuvenis.

That is, of course, the very beginning of his own _Eclogues_. When he
published them he placed at the very beginning the well-known line that
recalled Messalla's own line:

Tityre, tu _patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi_.

What can this mean but a graceful reminder to Messalla that it was he who
had inspired the new effort?[3]

[Footnote 3: Roman writers frequently observed the graceful custom of
acknowledging their source of inspiration by weaving in a recognizable
phrase or line from the master into the very first sentence of a new
work: cf. _Arma virumque cano_--[Greek: Andra moi ennepe] (Lundstroem,
_Eranos_, 1915, p. 4). Shelley responding to the same impulse paraphrased
Bion's opening lines in "I weep for Adonais--he is dead."]

We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his
_Eclogues_ is a recognition of Messalla's influence. Conversely it is
proof, if proof were needed, that the ninth _Catalepton_ is Vergil's. We
may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth _Catalepton:_

pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas,

as a statement that in the autumn of 42, Vergil had already written some
of his _Eclogues_, and that these early ones--presumably at least numbers
II, III, and VII--co