It would be a waste of our time if in this lecture we concerned ourselves solely with the old question whether or no it was Virgil who wrote the Culex. More than enough has been written on this subject to guide those who know an argument when they see it. I should, of course, fail in my duty if I concealed my personal view on the problem of the authorship, and I shall, perhaps, be able to add to the discussion a point or two of my own. But I also want to use this queer problem to illustrate certain minor phenomena in the literary history of the Augustan period. It is the chief value of the so-called Appendix Vergiliana that it provides us with a variety of works of different origin and very unequal quality. Among them some are early products of Virgil himself, some are poems written several decades after his death; some never had anything to do with Virgil, claimed no relation to his works and got into this collection by mere accident, others were conceived as deliberate fakes, i.e. pretended to be written by Virgil.