The aspirations of Virgil as presented or implied in the Proteus and the Orpheus are, I have argued, quite enormous. Virgil depicts himself as a poet capable of aspiring to a universal mode of poetry, a universality manifested both in its unlimited content – literally the whole universe – and its incorporation of all modes of speech. And yet after all the hyperbole of these episodes there is the second Euphratesparallel. The Georgics ends in a sphragis, a personal ‘seal’, or signature, ‘a vehicle for discussion of the poet's literary achievement’:

I sang this song on the care of fields and herds and on trees whilst great Caesar lightened at the deep Euphrates and in victory bestowed justice throughout the willing peoples, and embarked on the path to Olympus. In that time I, Virgil, was nourished by sweet Parthenope, flourishing in the pursuits of inglorious leisure, I who toyed with the songs of shepherds and in the boldness of youth sang of you, Tityrus, beneath the shelter of a broad beech-tree.

This passage, though, seems mainly designed to dissemble Virgil's literary achievement. Here, at the end of the poem, Virgil depicts himself not as a poetic analogue of his ruler but very firmly as Octavian's subordinate: any aspiration to be poeta creator is abandoned.

The sphragis is thus an exercise in self-diminution. The ignobleness of Virgil's poetic vocation (564) contrasts implicitly with Octavian's military success. Virgil's otium in the same place recalls the pejorative uacuae mentes of 3.3 whose taste in literature Virgil there dismissed and the ‘inglorious’ literary option of 2.486, and in direct contradiction of the clear political content of the preceding 300 lines defines him precisely as not politically engaged. The term lusi in 565, similarly, implies a triviality which is representative of Alexandrian programmatics.