PERVIGILIUM. See Vigil.

PERVIGILIUM VENERIS, the Vigil of Venus, a short Latin poem, in praise of spring as the season of love and flowers. Written professedly in early spring on the eve of a three-nights’ festival (Vigil) in honour of Venus (probably April 1-3), it describes in warm and poetical language the annual aλvakening of the vegetable and animal world in spring through the all-pervading influence of the foam-born goddess, whose birth and connexion with Rome and the Caesars are also touched upon. The joyous tone which runs through the poem passes suddenly at the close into one of lyric sadness: “The nightingale is singing, but I am silent. When comes my spring ?” It consists of ninety-three verses in trochaic tetrameter catalectic and is divided into strophes of unequal length by the refrain, “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet.” The author, date, and place of composition are unknown. Formerly it was ascribed to Catullus, but from its late Latinity, approximating in some points to Italian, it can hardly have been earlier, and was probably later, than the latter half of the 2d century a.d. It is certainly earlier than Fulgentius (about 480-550 a.d.), who imitated it. The references to Hybla and Etna (or Enna), from which some have thought that the poem is Sicilian, need be no more than poetical allusions to Sicily as the flowery land. Virgil’s description of spring (Georg., ii. 323-342) is imitated somewhat closely; compare especially verse 62 with Virgil’s 327; again, v. 85 is a copy of Aeneid, xi. 458. This seems to disprove Bernhardy’s conjecture that the poem is a translation from the Greek. From its exuberant rhetoric Orelli ascribes it to an African poet of the 3d or 4th century a.d. Bücheler places it between Florus and Nemesianus, i.e., in ...