s 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. A successful advocate must know what not to see and feel, and he
must have ready convictions at his tongue's end. In the _Aeneid_ there
are several fluent orators, but they are never Vergil's congenial
characters.

III

THE "CULEX"

It was apparently in the year 48--Vergil was then twenty-one--that the
poet attempted his first extended composition, the _Culex_, a poem that
hardly deserved the honor of a versified translation at the hands of
Spenser. This is indeed one of the strangest poems of Latin literature,
an overwhelming burden of mythological and literary references saddled on
the feeblest of fables.

A shepherd goes out one morning with his flocks to the woodland glades
whose charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative rhapsody.
The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is about to
strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save
him. But--such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore--the shepherd, still
in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life. At night the
gnat's ghost returns to rebuke the shepherd for his innocent ingratitude,
and rather inappropriately remains to rehearse at great length the tale
of what shades of old heroes he has seen in the lower regions. The poem
contains 414 lines.

The _Culex_ has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism,
and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of
stylistic criteria. Though it was accepted as Vergilian by Renaissance
readers simply because the manuscripts of the poem and ancient writers,
from Lucan and Statius to Martial and Suetonius, all attribute the work
to him, recent critics have usually been skeptical or downright recusant.
Some insist that it is a forgery or supposititious work; others that it
is a liberally padded re-working of Vergil's original. Only a few have
accepted it as a very youthful failure of Vergil's, or as an attempt of
the poet to parody the then popular romances. Recent objections have not
centered about metrical technique, diction, or details of style: these
are now admitted to be Vergilian enough, or rather what might well have
been Vergilian at the outs