‘I am not a bird’ said the Irishman ‘to be in two places at once’; and it is another injustice to his distressful country that we call this speech a bull. The bird which is in two places at once is the Virgilian swan. Aeneas is bidden to behold these fowl alighting or alighted on the earth, and with the same breath is told that even as they are sporting together in the zenith, so are his scattered ships united in the harbour or the harbour-mouth. To evade the contradiction they propose to give the perfects in v. 398 the force which the perfect has for instance in ‘fuimus Troes’, and to interpret the line ‘and have ceased from circling the sky and from singing’. This interpretation is so obscure to its own inventors that they cannot agree when it was that the circling and singing took place, Ladewig and Wagner putting it before the swoop of the eagle, Weickert and Forbiger afterwards.