The Ciris is a small scale epic poem which relates the myth of Scylla, daughter of king Nisus of Megara, who betrayed her homeland for love, and was transformed into a sea-bird. It is one of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, a collection that has been ascribed to Virgil as his carmina minora. Earlier scholarship has mostly been concerned to prove that the Ciris is not by Virgil, and then to demonstrate that it is a late and derivative composition of little intrinsic merit. The present book argues that Ciris was composed by a contemporary of Virgil, a product of the golden age of Latin poetry. It aims to bring the poem to the attention of modern readers and to rescue it from ill-deserved neglect.

The introduction presents detailed linguistic, literary and historical arguments in support of this early composition date and offers a state-of-the-art account of the textual witnesses and the manuscript tradition. The critical text and apparatus are based on a systematic, first-hand analysis of manuscript evidence as well as the rigorous application of text-critical methods. The new text, as close to the original Ciris as can be achieved, includes over one-hundred and fifty changes from previous editions. By engaging with textual scholarship on the poem from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, the line-by-line commentary provides a comprehensive guide to the numerous textual problems, and is an important contribution to the stylistic and linguistic analysis of golden-age Latin poetry.