Short Histories of the Literatures of the World Volume 11 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ... write a Culex, that it was extant for a time, and that it was displaced by an inferior production by another hand before the time of Lucan. If Virgil did write a Culex it was never published, and was suppressed at his death, and scholars of Claudian times may have believed that in the Culex of the Appendix, a work suitable in date and subject, they had discovered the suppressed poem. But he may never have written such a poem (Plessis, Poesie Latine, p. 260; Ribbeck, Romische Dichtung, ii. 439), and the idea that he did so may have been suggested by the existence of the Culex which we possess. Only, of course, this hypothesis of the acceptance of a non-Virgilian Culex in Claudian times involves the difficulty (it is not necessarily insuperable) of believing that modern scholars can detect a non-Virgilian poem better than Lucan, Martial, or even so enthusiastic a Virgilian as Statius. The last, it is true, was aware of its inferiority of style. The Sea-mew (Ciris, 541 hexameters) describes how Scylla, daughter of Nisus, King of Megara, enamoured of Minos, who is besieging her native city, cuts from her father's head the purple lock on which his and his city's safety depends; how Nisus, so far from feeling gratitude for the treachery by which he has profited, drags Scylla over the sea bound to the stern of his ship, until the gods take pity upon her and she is changed into a sea-mew, while her father is changed into an osprey. It has been shown by Skutsch that the Ciris was probably by Gallus, to whose treatment of the subject Virgil alludes in E. vi. 74. Accordingly it is earlier in date than this eclogue, earlier, that is, than 41 or 40 B.C. The Lydia and the Dirae are both connected with the ejectment of Italian farmers (41 B.C.), to make room for the vete...