Vita Romanorum

How to Write Poetry

Lucilius ... facetus,

emunctae naris, durus componere versus.

nam fuit hoc vitiosus: in hora saepe ducentos,

ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno;               

cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere velles;

garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem,

scribendi recte: nam ut multum, nil moror. ecce,

Crispinus minimo me provocat “accipe, si vis,

accipiam tabulas; detur nobis locus, hora,               

custodes; videamus, uter plus scribere possit”.

di bene fecerunt, inopis me quodque pusilli

finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis.

Horace, Satires 1.4.6-18

Cum Georgica scriberet, traditur cottidie meditatos mane plurimos versus dictare solitus ac per totum diem retractando ad paucissimos redigere, non absurde carmen se more ursae parere dicens et lambendo demum effingere. Aeneida prosa prius oratione formatam digestamque in XII libros particulatim componere instituit, prout liberet quidque, et nihil in ordinem arripiens. ac ne quid impetum moraretur, quaedam imperfecta transmisit, alia levissimis verbis veluti fulsit, quae per iocum pro tibicinibus interponi aiebat ad sustinendum opus, donec solidae columnae advenirent.

Suetonius, Vita Vergilii 22-24

There are almost sixty metrically incomplete lines in the Aeneid, very unevenly distributed, with ten in Book 2, but only one in Book 12, with the sense incomplete only once, in quem tibi iam Troia at 3.340. The incomplete state of some of these lines gives them a special power over the reader; for example, when Aeneas tells Dido Italiam non sponte sequor “I pursue Italy against my will” (4.361). The view that Vergil deliberately left such lines incomplete once had a certain vogue, but is now largely dismissed by scholars. The Vita Vergilii Donati records that Vergil completed Aen. 6.164 and 165 extempore, while reciting the passage, telling his freedman Eros to write down the additions. Attempting to detect Vergil’s tibicines is, however, an exercise in futility. Others naturally tinkered with his text. In Seneca’s Epistle 94, the half-line audentes fortuna iuvat “fortune helps the daring” is completed with piger ipse sibi obstat “a lazy person impedes himself”, but the addition is betrayed by its dullness and its absence from the textual tradition of Vergil himself.