The Virgilian tradition preserves three problematic and somewhat contradictory sets of testimonia about Virgil's role in framing his own corpus as a ‘career’. On the one hand, there are the passages where Virgil himself clearly marks his own progression from Eclogues to Georgics to Aeneid. These include instances of self-quotation (Ecl. 5.85–7; Geo. 4.566) and promises of future work in higher style (Ecl. 8.6–13, Geo. 3.46–8) as well as less explicit passages whose imagery is now interpreted as foreshadowing the pastoral–didactic–epic progression – for example, the closing lines of Eclogues 1 and 10 often read as a transition to the harsher world of the Georgics. Reinforcing and completing these internal signposts are two pseudo-Virgilian texts. First, there is Virgil's supposedly self-composed ‘epitaph’, which neatly concludes cecini pascua rura duces (‘I sang pastures, farms, and war-leaders’). The other passage is the famous ille ego prologue which, according to Servius and Donatus, originally opened the Aeneid. It offers a brief literary biography of the poet: first I composed with a ‘slender reed’ (gracili … auena); then I left the woods and produced a work ‘pleasing to farmers’ (gratum opus agricolis), ‘but now’ (at nunc) I sing of arms and the man. The potent combination of Virgil's own statements, the pseudepigraphical additions, and the canonization of the Aeneid quickly transformed the Virgilian corpus into a poetic version of the cursus honorum.