et of his career. The chief criticism is
directed against a want of proportion and an apparent lack of artistic
sense betrayed in choosing so strange a character for the ponderous
title-role. These are faults that Vergil later does not betray.

Nevertheless, Vergil seems to have written the poem. Its ascription to
Vergil by so many authors of the early empire, as well as the concensus
of the manuscripts, must be taken very seriously. But the internal
evidence is even stronger. Octavius, to whom the poem is dedicated, is
addressed _Octavi venerande_ and _sancte puer_, a clear reference to the
remarkable honor that Caesar secured for him by election to the office of
pontiff[1] when he was approaching his fifteenth birthday and before
he assumed the _toga virilis_. Vergil was then twenty-one years of
age--nearing his twenty-second birthday--and we may perhaps assume in
Donatus' attribution of the _Culex_ to Vergil's sixteenth year a mistake
in some early manuscript which changed the original XXI to XVI, a
correction which the citations of Statius and Lucan favor.[2] Finally,
when, as we shall see presently, Horace in his second _Epode_, accords
Vergil the honor of imitating a passage of the _Culex_, Vergil returns
the compliment in his _Georgics_. We have therefore not only Vergil's
recognition of Horace's courtesy, but, in his acceptance of it, his
acknowledgment of the _Culex_ as his own.[3]

[Footnote 1: Vellius, II. 59, 3, pontificatus sacerdotio _puerum_
honoravit, that is, before he assumed _the toga virilis_ on October 18th.
Nicolaus Damascenus (4) confirms this. Octavius received the office made
vacant by the death of Domitius at Pharsalia (Aug. 9). His birthday was
Sept. 23, 63. 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. See _Classical Philology_, 1920, p. 26.]

[Footnote 2: Anderson, in _Classical Quarterly_, 1916, p. 225; and
_Class. Phil_. 1920, p. 26. The dedicatory lines of the _Culex_ imply
that the body of the poem was already complete. Whether the interval was
one of weeks or months or years the poet does not say.]

[Footnote 3: _Classical Philology_, 1920, pp. 23, 33.]

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 p