." That Martial considered it a boy's book appropriate for vacation
hours between school tasks is apparent from the inscription:[6]

Accipe facundi _Culicem_, studiose, Maronis,
Ne nucibus positis, _Arma virumque_ legas.

[Footnote 4: Pliny, _Nat. Hist_. XVII. 243; Suetonius, _De Rhetoribus_,
4.]

[Footnote 5: Lines 3-5:
lusimus (haec propter culicis sint carmina docta,
omnis ut historiae per ludum consonet ordo
notitiae) doctumque voces, licet invidus adsit.]

[Footnote 6: Martial, XIV. 185.]

The _Culex_ is then, after all, a poem of unique interest; it takes us
into the Roman schoolroom to find at their lectures the two lads whose
names come first in the honor roll of the golden age.

The poem is of course not a masterpiece, nor was it intended to be
anything but a _tour de force_; but a comprehension of its purpose will
at least save it from being judged by standards not applicable to it. It
is not naively and unintentionally incongruous. To the modern reader it
is dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired
no doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the
obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology
betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to
take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote
currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the
verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses[7] and the phrasing compare
rather favorably with the Catullan hexameters which obviously served as
its models, that in the best lines the poet shows himself sensitive to
delicate effects, and that the pastoral scene--which Horace compliments
a few years later--is, despite its imitative notes, written with
enthusiasm, and reminds us pleasantly of the _Eclogues_.

[Footnote 7: For stylistic and metrical studies of the _Culex_, see _The
Caesura in Vergil_, Butcher, _Classical Quarterly_, 1914, p. 123; Hardie,
_Journal of Philology_, XXXI, p. 266, and _Class Quart_. 1916, 32 ff.;
Miss Jackson, _Ibid_. 1911, 163; Warde Fowler, _Class. Rev_. 1919, 96.]

IV

THE "CIRIS"

It was at about this same time, 48 B.C., that Vergil began to write the
_Ciris_, a romantic epyllion which deserves far more attention than it
has received, not only as an invaluable document for the history of the
poet's early development, but as a poem possessing in some passages at
least real artist