Eclogues
Eclogues
by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)
THE LITERARY WORK
Ten pastoral poems set in an imaginary landscape after the battle of philippi (42 bce); first circulated in Latin between 42 and 38 bce, though some argue for a later publication or revision c. 35 bce.
SYNOPSIS
The reader is invited to bear witness to life in “Arcadia,” a place created by poetry, an idealized rural scene where people live in harmony with nature.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
According to classical sources, Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 bce) was born in Andes near Mantua (modern Mantova) in Cisalpine Gaul to a modest family, where he grew up on a farm. He received his early education in the nearby towns of Cremona and Mediolanum (modern Milan), later traveling to Rome to study philosophy and rhetoric (and possibly mathematics and medicine). Ancient tradition relates that Virgil studied the philosophy of Epicureanism near Naples with an inspiring teacher named Siro. Recently published papyri scrolls found in the buried city of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples confirm that he was closely associated with the most famous Epicurean philosopher at the time, Philodemus, who dedicated one of his works to Virgil. It is generally assumed that the budding poet returned from the Epicurean “garden” to his father’s farm where he continued his studies, but this intellectual idyll was interrupted by the military confiscations of farmers’ property in his region. Virgil composed his Eclogues in this troubled time, and their success assured him of the protection of Octavian. From then on, the poet’s life moved between Rome and an estate at Nola (near Naples) given to him by Octavian. It was at this estate that he composed the four books of the Georgics(29 bce), a poem on farming and other rural pursuits (georgika is Greek for “things of the earth”), composed in the didactic tradition of Alexandrian verse. Virgil’s next project was the Aeneid (also in Classical Literature and Its Times), an epic poem on the Trojan hero Aeneas, modeled on the Homeric epics and widely recognized as one of the most important and greatest works of Roman literature. Virgil died in Brundisium in 19 bce and was buried in Naples. His life and work have been cleverly condensed into verse featuring a list of places and landscapes (lines cited in this and all excerpts that follow have been translated by D. Dutsch):
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.
Mantua gave birth to me; Calabria then snatched me away.
Now [Naples, the city where the Siren]
Parthenope [is buried] holds me.
I sang of pastures, farmlands, and leaders
[of armies].
(Donatus, Tiberius Claudius, vita, paragraph 123)
The title of Virgil’s Eclogues is derived from the Greek ekloge, meaning “choice” or “selection,” although the collection has also been well-known since antiquity as the Bucolics (Greek boukolikos), the origin of our word “bucolic,” or pastoral. To understand Virgil’s journey from his pastoral poems, or Eclogues, through didactic poetry to the epic Aeneid, we must begin with the dramatic events following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 bce.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Up front—(un) civil war. The political murder of Julius Caesar in 44 bce ignited a civil war between
VIRGILIAN GOSSIP
While we know little about Virgil’s private life, two affectionate allusions in the poems of Horace afford us glimpses of it. The first speaks to Virgil’s friendly disposition, as Horace gratefully remembers how “Virgil, the kindest of men” introduced him to the literary patron Maecenas (Horace, Satires, book 1, poem 6, line 54). The second is a brief allusion to an episode during the trip to Brundisium in 37 bce (made famous by Horace’s fifth satire). It shows both poets unable to play ball with their companions because of poor health: Horace is indisposed because of an eye problem, while the author of the Eclogues apparently suffers from indigestion (Horace, Satires, 1.5.49X Chronic hearth problems are a recurring theme of Aelius Donatus’s Life of Virgit (fourth century CE), which also abounds in tidbits unconfirmed by more reliable sources. For example, Donatus offers a description of Virgil’s physical appearance, claiming that he was dark and tall, and had a “rustic appearance” (whatever this might mean), Donatus also speaks of Virgil’s paralyzing timidity: the poet apparently visited Rome rarely and when recognized on the street used to run and seek refuge in the nearest house. This shyness allegedly prevented Virgil from becoming a lawyer; as the Life would have it, the poet’s one and only attempt to deliver a speech in court ended in disaster, since the brilliant writer was an appallingly dull speaker. Shyness seems also to have been why the inhabitants of Naples, where Virgil lived as an adult, nicknamed him “parthentas,” or “Mr. Virgin,” Finally, Donatus offers, that “when it came to pleasure, he [i.e., Virgil] preferred boys”,. a statement possibly made up on the sole basis of the poetic declarations of love for men or boys in the Eclogues(Donatus, Tiberius Claudius, vita, paragraph 25).
Caesar’s assassins, led by Marcus Brutus and Cassius Longinus, and those who declared themselves Caesar’s heirs and avengers. Three powerful figures emerged from the latter faction: Caesar’s former allies, Mark Antony (83–31 bce) and Marcus Lepidus (d. 12 bce), and Octavian, the dictator’s 19-year-old grandnephew, who was posthumously adopted by Caesar in his will as his son and legal heir (63 bce-14 ce). Octavian was Virgil’s future protector, who would later assume the name of Caesar Augustus. The three joined their forces in an official alliance, the second triumvirate (43 bce) and were formally appointed by the Assembly as “Officials to Reestablish the Order in the Republic.” They set about this task by publishing the List of politically undesirable individuals to be hunted down and executed. This brutal procedure, known under the innocuous name of “proscription,” was an effective way not only of eliminating political and personal enemies, but also of obtaining funds, since those who were listed had their property confiscated for the benefit of the Roman treasury. The Caesarians desperately needed these funds to pursue the forces of the anti-Caesarians who had fled to Greece. First, however, they had to face the infamous pirate Sextus Pompeius (also on the List), whose forces, strengthened by the arrival of some of the proscribed, prevented the armies of the triumvirs from crossing the Adriatic Sea. Only after a great battle outside the straits of Messana was Sextus’s grip weakened enough to allow the triumvirs’ armies to cross and confront their adversaries. Two decisive battles then took place at Philippi in Macedonia (42 bce), where first Cassius and then Brutus committed suicide. The victors proceeded to divide the Roman world among themselves: Antony obtained the East, reputed for its wealth; Africa fell to Lepidus; and the western provinces of the Empire and Italy to young Octavian, who was also in charge of confiscating the land from Italian farmers to be distributed to the veterans. The confiscations made Octavian the most hated man in Italy and, as the relationships among the triumvirs quickly soured, the partisans of Antony did their best to take advantage of this extreme unpopularity. Antony’s wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius attempted to seize power in Rome, encouraging those affected by the confiscations to ignore Octavian’s orders; Octavian struck back immediately, chasing the Antonians and their army away from Rome. They then took refuge in the town of Perusia, which surrendered to Octavian only after several months of siege (in 40 bce); according to ancient sources, mass executions of Antony’s partisans followed. In the summer of 40 bce Antony came back to Italy from the East, bringing an army with him; open confrontation seemed inevitable when, in the fall of 40 bce, the friends of the two triumvirs managed to orchestrate an agreement between Octavian and Antony at Brundisium. The poet and politician Gaius Asinius Pollio (Virgil’s friend and protector) represented Antony, while Gaius Maecenas (the same Maecenas whose name became synonymous with the patronage of art and whom Virgil was soon to meet) represented Octavian. The alliance they negotiated was to be strengthened by the marriage of Antony (his enterprising wife Fulvia was now dead) to Octavia, the sister of Octavian. But the prospect of peaceful alliance did not live up to its promise. The relationship between Octavian and Antony continued to deteriorate, finally ending, nine years later, in Octavian’s triumph in the battle of Actium (31 bce) and Antony’s death. Thus ended the civil wars and the Roman Republic: though the tradition of the Roman Senate and Republican political offices remained, Octavian (later as Augustus) became de facto the sole ruler of Rome.
A period of relative peace and prosperity followed. The time between the proscriptions of 43 bce and the death of Augustus in 14 ce (or sometimes the shorter period beginning with the assumption of his new name in 27 bce) is known as “the Augustan era.” The literary output of the poets active in this short period whose works have survived—Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid—would be a source of inspiration for readers and writers for the next 2,000 years. A part of this era of impressive literary creativity coincided—paradoxically—with war, famine, confiscations, and displacements that affected all of the older poets, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus. (Ovid would have his share of bad luck later, when he was banished by Augustus for an unspecified “crime” to Tomis in 8 ce.)
Backdrop—famine and confiscations
The triumvirs’ proscriptions (43 bce) directly affected 300 families of senatorial rank and 2,000 of equestrian, or business-class, rank. Prizes were awarded to those who helped capture the victims; freedom was granted to slaves willing to denounce their masters. Soon bands of lawless prize-hunters roamed Italy. No one—proscribed or not—was entirely safe. At the same time, the country was torn by famine as the ships of Sextus Pompeius frequently kept vital supplies of Egyptian grain from reaching Rome. The confiscations that began after the battles at Philippi (42 bce) weakened an already ailing economy through the forced change in ownership of thousands of estates. The injustice of these confiscations, which touched thousands of innocent inhabitants of Italian cities, provoked an outrage.
The Caesarians had promised land to the soldiers recruited before the confrontation with Cassius and Brutus. Eighteen cities had then been marked out as prizes for the soldiers’ valor, Cremona near Mantua, the town where Virgil went to school, among them. Now, after the war, the veterans who had fought at Philippi demanded their prize. The cities and their inhabitants protested in vain, suggesting that the burden be shared by all; Octavian carried out the plan. More than a hundred years later, Appian of Alexandria in his Roman History offered a dramatic reconstruction of the popular feelings at the time when the dispossessed marched to Rome:
They came to Rome in crowds, young and old, women with children, to the forum and to the temples; they lamented, saying that they had committed no crime for which they—Italians—should be driven from their fields and their houses, like people conquered in war. The people of Rome felt their pain and wept with them, especially because they knew that the war had been waged and the prizes of victory given not on behalf of the Republic but against the people themselves, to change the form of government,… so that democracy should never again lift its head.
(Appian, Roman History,5.2.12)
The confiscations most severely affected the owners of middle-sized estates (the tiniest farms were eventually exempted and the wealthy and influential citizens holding the largest ones often man-aged to keep their property). These midsize estate owners received no compensation and were often condemned to misery. Violent protests and armed conflicts between the dispossessed and the veterans ensued. Years were to pass before the turmoil finally subsided. The frustration, injustice, violence, and famine of the years of the civil war provide the emotional background for Virgil’s Eclogues. This nightmarish anti-Arcadia is more than a shadow passing over the pastoral scenes—it is the very raison-dēêtre behind the compassionate landscape of Virgil’s pastorals.
Closeup on local history—paradise confiscated
Mantua (modern Mantova) was a town in the province of Cisalpine Gaul that covered the Po Valley and extended to the Alps. Virgil’s town lay on the river Mincius (modern Mincio) in a particularly lush part of this fertile region, now in northern Italy. The town was and still is quite literally encircled by small lakes full of fish that attract swarms of waterfowl. This corner of paradise has always drawn settlers, the oldest traces of whom date to the second millennium bce. In the middle of the first millennium bce, an Etruscan village was built on the site of previous settlements; the Romans conquered it a few hundred years later, in the second century bce. This opulent, quiet town provided an ironically idyllic background for the drama of Octavian’s dispossessions.
Since antiquity, scholars have speculated about the degree to which the Eclogues reflect the details of Virgil’s personal experience and his relationships with the prominent Mantuans who oversaw the redistribution of lands between 43 and 40 bce. Was his father’s Mantuan farm confiscated? Did Virgil at any time appeal to the governor of Cisalpine Gaul or to Octavian himself for its restoration? Did he succeed? The honest answer is: we do not know. We can, however, identify three historical figures of Virgil’s patrons and friends and pinpoint the time each of them spent in Cisalpine Gaul as well as his position in Mantua. The rest is a matter of conjecture.
Pollio, the man whom Virgil flatters in Eclogue 3 and to whom he dedicates his fourth eclogue, is Caius Asinius Pollio. Governor of Cisalpine Gaul in 43 bce and a supporter of Mark Antony, Pollio would later help negotiate the agreement between Antony and Octavian at Brundisium. Pollio was also a poet, tragedian, and historian of the Roman civil wars, and he founded the first public library in Rome in the atrium of the Temple of Liberty. The cowherds Damoetas and Menalcas in Eclogue 3 (one of the earliest composed) suddenly sing of Pollio. Damoetas boasts that Pollio appreciates his pastoral Muse, “albeit she is rustic,” to which Menalcas responds praising the “novel verses” that Pollio composes himself. These verses were probably tragedies, of which we have nothing except for the opinion of Tacitus, who dismisses them as “old-fashioned and dry” (Tacitus, Dialogus, 21.7). For Virgil’s shepherds, however, Pollio was nothing less than an inspiration: “Whoever loves you, Pollio, may he come / Where you too are happy to come! [to the place visited by Muses] / May honey flow for him, harsh bramble bear fragrant spice” (Virgil, Eclogues, poem 3, lines 88–89). This blessing for those who want to enter the realm of the Muses together with Pollio is addressed to a circle of literati surrounding the governor in Mantua; Virgil was in all likelihood one of them.
Gaius Cornelius Callus would also have been a part of this Mantuan circle, like pollio, Callus was both a poet and a politician. He was destined for a brief but brilliant career: Octavian was to appoint him the first Roman governor of Egypt (after Antony’s death), but later would formally renounce his friendship, which led to his prosecution by the Roman Senate and eventually his decision to commit suicide in Egypt. At the time Virgil was composing his Eclogues, Callus was already an established poet who later would be considered the founder of the new literary genre of Latin Love Elegy (of his four books of The Loves, or Amores, we have today only one line). His poetry was greatly admired by Virgil, who later paid a passionate homage to Callus in his tenth and final eclogue: “[Muses of Pieria] you shall make my song great for Callus; / For Callus, my love grows every hour as fast as green alder shoots up-wards in early spring” (Eclogues, 10.72–73)
Publius Alfenus Varus was another prominent figure in Mantuan politics, succeeding Pollio as the governor of Cisalpine Gaul in 42 bce. His name appears in Eclogues 9 and 6. Number 9 quotes a “yet unfinished” song that Menalcas (one of the cowherds of Eclogue 3) sang for Varus: “Varus! Your name, if only Mantua survives, / — Alas! Mantua, too close to wretched Cremona!—singing swans will carry up to the stars” (Eclogues, 9.27–29). Varus was a well-educated man (author of legal treatises) and a clever politician who later rose to the consulship (39 bce). When he was governor, Mantua might have indeed been threatened by confiscations. The 18 municipalities originally marked for the veterans proved insufficient and eventually as many as 40 towns might have become involved. The most common practice was to extend the territory of dispossessions to include towns in the vicinity of those whose lands had already been redistributed. This practice is probably behind the bitter complaint about Mantua’s closeness to the town of Cremona in the poetic lines above.
Mantua was apparently known for the swans that visited the surrounding lakes: Virgil treats the reader of the Georgics (2.198–199) to a nostalgic glimpse of the field that Mantua lost (possibly in the confiscations) with his description of snowwhite birds against the green tide. The birds, the lakes, and the grass are still near Mantua for all to see. As for the singing swans of Eclogue 9, they obviously allude to a poet’s appeal to the governor Varus for the town to be spared. One cannot infer that this is a formal plea concerning Virgil’s personal estate. Nor can one link the skirmish that almost ended with the death of two shepherds, described in Eclogue 9, to an event in Virgil’s own life. Displacement or violent death would, however, have been the fate of many a citizen of Mantua and Cremona, and traces of their collective experience are interwoven in the vibrant tapestry of Virgil’s pastorals.
The Poems in Focus
Contents summary
Virgil’s Eclogues is an elaborately arranged book of pastoral poems. First composed by Theocritus of Sicily, such poems usually feature shepherds who compete in songs praising the beauty of the landscape along with the charms of a beloved boy or girl. Most eclogues are miniature scenes that introduce diverse pastoral figures and their songs. Eclogue 4, sung by Virgil and his Sicilian (Theocritean) Muses, is an exception.
The Eclogues fall into two sequences of five poems each, 1–5 and 6–10; the longest poems, 3 and 8, occupy symmetrical positions within this arrangement. Poems 2 and 7, which are quite faithful to the type of poetry they model (Greek verse by Theocritus), follow the more daring poems, 1 and 6, which likewise occupy parallel positions in the collection. The fifth eclogue contains subtle allusions to the first, thus enclosing the first half. The sixth eclogue, with its reference to previous pastoral writing (“My Muse was first to deign to amuse herself with Syracusan poetry”), marks a new beginning. These are only the most conspicuous patterns of Virgil’s design; there are others as well—“Virgil,” it has been noted, “is a poet of labyrinthine intricacy” (Clausen, p. xxii). Here is an overview of the labyrinth in relation to his Eclogues:
Eclogue 1 Tityrus, an older man who, thanks to a “divine” youth, will keep his land, discusses his destiny with Meliboeus, whose land has been confiscated. Eclogue 2 Virgil tells his reader how Corydon wooed Alexis, a handsome boy who rejected Corydon’s rustic attentions. Eclogue 3 Two shepherds, Menalcas and Damoteas, compete in alternating verses (which include praises for Pollio); old Palaemon declares both worthy of the first prize. Eclogue 4 Invoking the pastoral Muses, Virgil sings a prophetic song announcing that Pollio has begun his year as one of the consuls of Rome. A new age of peace will begin, symbolized by a newborn child. Eclogue 5 Two shepherds, Menalcas and Mopsus, meet to sing together; they propose several themes we know from the previous eclogues before settling on a theme of their choice—the death of Daphnis, an idealized shepherd who was deified after his passing. Eclogue 6 Virgil, addressing Varus, tells how two boys have captured Silenus, an ever-intoxicated old sage (in keeping with an old motif of the wise man who needs to be forced to share his immense knowledge). In exchange for his freedom, Silenus sings a song about the origin of the world, ending in a eulogy for Cornelius Gallus, the poet and politician in Virgil’s circle who later kills himself. Eclogue 7 Meliboeus recounts how Daphnis summoned him to witness the contest between Thyrsis and Corydon. (The latter wins.) Eclogue 8 Two songs of unhappy love are cited and dedicated to an unidentified patron. Damon’s song is a lament over an unhappy lover who committed suicide; Alphesiboeus’s song recounts the magical gestures and incantations that a woman uses to bring back her beloved Daphnis. Eclogue 9 Lycidas and Moeris (figures from Theocritus’s Idylls) meet as Moeris drives his flock to its new owner; they try to remember the songs of Menalcas. Eclogue 10 Virgil (invoking the nymph Arethusa as his muse or spirit of artistic inspiration) tells how Cornelius Callus, represented as an unlucky lover, was received in Arcadia as a new living form of Daphnis. In the final strophe, or stanza, Virgil takes his leave from pastoral poetry.
This general “map” of the Eclogues can hardly do justice to the complexity of the poems. Close-ups of two poems will better serve this purpose.
Eclogue 1
Two shepherds discuss their destinies—Meliboeus’s land, the verse implies, is being confiscated; Tityrus’s is not. Meliboeus, who speaks first, contrasts the leisure enjoyed by Tityrus with his own fate:
Tityre tu patulae recumbans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena.
Nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva,
nos patriam fugimus. Tu Tityre lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.Tityrus, reclining under the cover of a spreading beech.
you rehearse woodland music on your slender reed. We are
leaving our native land and its gentle fields. We are
fleeing our own country. You, Tityrus, at ease in the
shade, teach the woods to echo the name of pretty Amaryllis.
(Eclogues, 1.1–5)
The intricate beauty and music of the Latin lines is impossible to render in an English translation; note the reiterations of tu and nos (“you” and “we”) and the echo resounding in the Latin reference to the forests that repeats the name of Tityrus’s beloved: Amaryllida silvas. In Latin, Virgil’s reference to the echoing sounds echoes itself.
Tityrus explains that his happiness is god given and takes a solemn oath to worship always that god who permitted his cows to graze and his music to be: Tityrus’s poetry comes as a natural consequence of the wellbeing of his flock: “He allowed my cows to wander, as you can see, and me/To play anything I wish on my rustic reed” (Eclogues, 1.9–10). Meliboeus answers; first he sings of the herd of goats that he must hastily drive to their new master in town. One of the goats has just given birth (and can hardly walk); her twin kids, “the hope of the flock,” had to be abandoned. But he does not wish to dwell on this outrage against nature’s creative act. With curiosity rather than with envy (Eclogues, 1.11), he gently asks Tityrus for the name of the “god” who answered “his plea” (probably to spare his land from being confiscated). To this, Tityrus gives an evasive yet pointed answer—the city of Rome, he says, is greater than any other city. In Rome, he, an old man and apparently a slave, found “freedom” and is infinitely grateful to the one who granted it to him. The solemn tone of this confession is deflected when Tityrus playfully adds that he would have visited Rome earlier but was too much in love with Galatea to care. Only recently, since his feelings for his current beloved (Amaryllis) allowed for some leisure, he undertook the journey to Rome that gave him his freedom.
The praises Meliboeus sings for Tityrus’s fate offer the readers an opportunity to glimpse this extraordinary setting where Greek shepherds/poets deify Roman political figures. It is a place where people share emotions with elements of landscape: pines and orchard trees call upon the now-absent Tityrus along with Amaryllis. Meliboeus knows this scenery in intimate detail and imagines Tityrus’s future in Arcadia with photographic precision: his song zooms in on the rocks surrounding the pasture, the marshy plants, the shade, the sound of the bees, the species of birds that visit the nearby crags and trees. Such precision contrasts with the crude outline of the outside world. Meliboeus envisages his own future in stock-epithets: it will take him to “thirsty Africa,” “swift-flowing Amu-darya,” or “Britain cut off from the rest of the world” (Eclogues, 1.63–66). But this all will happen tomorrow. Tonight Meliboeus is welcome to stay with Tityrus; the menu will feature: “ripe fruits, soft chestnuts, and a generous quantity of cottage cheese” (Eclogues, 1.81–83).
Eclogue 4. This often-misunderstood eclogue is the brightest in the collection; for all its erudite references, it is most of all a true explosion of joy with playful, almost childlike, qualities. The poem opens with an invocation to the Muses of pastoral poetry, who are asked to sing with the poet a slightly grander song than usual, one worthy of a consul (this is the reader’s first clue to the identity of the poem’s addressee). The next seven lines speak in a roundabout fashion (which lends itself easily to mystical interpretations) of the new era about to begin, alluding to the birth of a child who will bring back the Golden Age.
Now the last age of the song of Cumaean Sibyl [a prophetess] has come,
and the great sequence of centuries begins anew: the Virgin [Justice] returns,
old Saturn’s realm returns; a new offspring is sent down from heaven.
(Eclogues, 4.1–4)
Though apparently sent from heaven, the child described in Eclogue 4 will be human: he will need the help of Diana-Lucina (here the goddess of childbirth) to come into the world and will be born after several months (of his mother’s pregnancy). The birth year will be that of Pollio’s consulship—40 bce. (Since this was the year Octavia and Antony married, some scholars suggest that the mysterious “boy” could well be the child eagerly expected from that union, but Virgil himself never says so.) The child will lead the life of gods and “by ancestral virtues will rule a world at peace” (Eclogues, 4.17). The next strophe flashes forward to offer a graceful pastoral image of the divine child living in an earthly paradise replete with flowers, milk, and spices:
Earth herself will cradle you, spreading gentle flowers.
Goats themselves will bring home their udders full of milk
and the cattle will not fear mighty lions. Destroyed will be
the snake and the faithless herb of poison will be destroyed.
Assyrian spice will grow everywhere.
(Eclogues, 4.23–25)
As soon as the child learns to read, he will study the praises of heroes and the deeds of his father—apparently his ancestry is human after all. As he grows, the earthly paradise will acquire new miraculous features: grapes will grow on thorny bushes and oak trees will ooze honey. But even this paradise will not yet be complete: traces of ancient treachery will still remain and the Age of Heroes with its wars will be repeated. Only when the child turns into a man will the true Golden Age arrive. As recounted by the ancient Greek writer Hesiod in Theogony , not only wars, but also all other kinds of labor, including agriculture, will then cease. Virgil caps this description of nature undisturbed by any craft with a humorous image:
Not any more will the wool learn to deceive with different colors,
but in the pastures the ram himself will dye his fleece
to the gentle blush of purple or to saffron yellow.
Golden-red dye on its own accord will clothe the feeding lambs.
(Eclogues, 4.42–45)
FOUR (OR FIVE) AGES OF HUMANKIND
In Roman myth, the god Saturn (in Greek, Cronus) is father of I Jupiter (Zeus), king of the gods, Saturn’s name is associated with the good old days, an earlier, happier age occupied by a Golden Race. The idea comes from the Myth of the Ages or Generations, most famously presented by the Greek writer Hesiod in Theogony (c. 700 bce; also in Classical Literature and Its Times). According to this version, Cronus ruled over the earliest generation, that of Gold; people lived long and happy lives and the earth brought forth fruits of its own accord. The Silver Age followed; the people of that generation were children for the first hundred years of their lives and then died after a short and violent adulthood. The next two generations, that of Bronze and that of Heroes, can be conflated into one, as there are few differences between them and the notion of heroes is grafted upon an otherwise coherent scheme that associates the generations with metals of decreasing value, The heroes of the Bronze Age saw violence and war (the great epic wars, such as the siege of Troy). Hesiod’s own time was the Age of Iron, a time of cruelty and injustice in which people must labor to sustain themselves. There were still worse times, taught Hesiod, to come.
After discussing the purple sheep with golden stripes, Virgil turns his attention to a grander scale; he imagines the Fates both ordering their spindles to spin such golden times and urging the child “offspring of gods, offshoot of Jupiter” to grow faster (Eclogues, 4.49).
Needless to say, the Golden Age will also be the perfect time to write. Virgil playfully promises to surpass all the legendary poets of nature—Orpheus, Linus, and even Pan, the god
ARCADIA—FANTASY OR REALITY?
Arcadia is in fact a central region of Peloponnese, the peninsula that forms the southern part of Greece. The inhabitants of this region, which is divided by mountains into isolated valleys, regard themselves as the descendants of the Pelasgians, the mythical pre-Greek population. One of the local legends has it that the tribe’s hero, Pelasgus, grew out of the uncultivated Arcadian soil. Among divinities, Pan, the goat-god, patron of goatherds, shepherds, and their music, was worshipped on every mountain in Arcadia, His name, meaning “everything” in Greek, prompted ancient interpreters to view Pan as the embodiment of the universe. This name also offers an apt description of the god’s immense sexual appetite; Pan is one of mythology’s most relentless rapists, His victims are often the nymphs, gentle female spirits who personified their different habitats: springs and streams were personified by nymphs known as Naiads, trees by nymphs known as Dryads, meadows and flowers by the Limoniads, and grottos and hills by yet other varieties of these semi divine female spirits. With its peculiar legends and history of isolation, Arcadia functioned in the Creek imagination as a metaphor for the wilderness and rusticity.
Pastoral poetry was born of an urbane nostalgia for a simpler world of shepherds who sing of Pan and the nymphs. It was for a cultivated audience of weary inhabitants of the large Hellenistic cities that Virgil’s predecessor, the poet Theocritus, fantasized such a world into existence, Theocritus chose to locate it in his native Sicily, also reputed for rustic simplicity, but his narrative poems mentioned specific sites located elsewhere as well (including some in Arcadia), Virgil’s “Arcadia” is more a product of the poet’s fantasy, serving as an imaginary background for his Latin poetry. The name itself occurs rarely in the poetry and is always combined with features of Italian, not Greek, topography and with facts of Roman life under Octavian (war and dispossessions). It is perhaps best to compare Virgil’s attitude towards Arcadia with his attitude towards Sicily, Consider the famous invocation, “Sicilian Muses, let us sing a slightly grander song,” at the beginning of Eclogue 4. By mentioning Sicil (theocritus’s setting) Virgil indicates that he expects the originality of his poem to be measured against the literary conventions established by Theocritus. More precisely, Sicily is a place of departure for Virgil; he will take his Muses and readers beyond the limits of the genre. In a similar fashion, the actual Arcadia needs to be understood as a place we must leave behind if we are to reach the literary Arcadia that Virgil’s poetry establishes for readers.
of Arcadia himself. He ends his poem addressing the mysterious newborn boy:
Begin, my little boy to smile, recognizing your mother.
Ten months [of pregnancy] has brought her a long hardship.
Begin my little boy! Who has not smiled at his parent has never
feasted with a god or slept with a goddess.
(Eclogues, 4.60–63)
Augustan poets and the concept of Arcadia—nostalgia for the Golden Age
Exquisitely beautiful, endlessly surprising in its playful transformations, the background of the Eclogues is more than an empty theatrical decor. It is a living landscape whose presence is not to be taken for granted. There is only one way to summon it—through singing or, if we wish to lift the veil on Virgil’s pastoral disguise, through poetry. In the very first lines of the first eclogue, Meliboeus sums up the difference between Tityrus’s fate and his own as that between singing and leaving: “you rehearse your songs” and “we [whose lands have been confiscated] must leave” (Eclogues, 1.1–4). “Singing” in this equation stands for “remaining in Arcadia,” so it comes as no surprise that exile will condemn Meliboeus to silence, for there is no pastoral song without Arcadia. Nor is there an Arcadia without its songs: Lycidas in Eclogue 9 fears that, had the singers (Menalcas and Moeris) died, his comforting world would simply have ceased to exist: “Who would sing the nymphs into being,” he wonders; “Who would sprinkle the ground/With flowering herbs? Who would clothe the springs in fresh shade?” (Eclogues, 9.19–20).
The landscape of the eclogues is clearly one of joy and beauty (locus amoenus) sung into existence by poetry. But the motives for its creation are not purely aesthetic; Arcadia is an emotional necessity. Lycidas in Eclogue 9 says so when he refers to the songs as solacia —a source of relief from sorrow. In Eclogue 5 Menalcas goes so far as to describe pastoral poetry as fulfilling an urgent physical need:
O divine poet, to us your song is as welcome
as sleep in the grass is to those who are weary, as
quenching of thirst with fresh water from a leaping brook
is in the midst of the summer.
(Eclogues, 5.45–47)
Against weariness (excess) and thirst (lack), poetry offers soothing scenery attuned to human emotions. The programmatic first lines of the first eclogue suggest that the experience of knowing and being known to the surreal literary countryside is the essence of the pastoral song. Tityrus, stretched out in the shade, teaches the forests the name of his beloved; when she, in her turn, misses him, the pines and springs call upon Tityrus—they presumably know his name. Harmony between the landscape and the figures within it permeates the Eclogues. Nymphs and naiads (river nymphs) spice wildflowers with cinnamon to help Corydon woo his “cruel Alexis” (Eclogues, 2.45–50). Nymphs and fierce lions mourn Daphnis—rivers and hazel bushes bear witness to the mourning. The presence of beautiful Alexis, whom so many desire, assures the fertility of chestnuts and juniper trees. Rocks of the cold Lycaeon stream feel for Gallus when, abandoned by his beloved, he mourns. Virgil suggests that this imaginary place of connectedness and compassion is “Arcadia,” alluding to an ancient Greek land that, according to myth, grew its first inhabitant, Pelasgus, out of its own soil (Eclogues, 10.31–33). Through poetry the composer and the listener are briefly transferred into a place beyond historical time, where people are one with nature.
Eclogue 4 promises a similarly blissful experience, but situates it in computable time—the future. Here Virgil evokes a more familiar myth, that of the Four (or Five) Ages of humankind. The conceit of the poem, that the cycle of time is complete, that the present Iron Age is over, and that the world should begin anew with the Golden Age, allows Virgil to represent the gradual fading of the present forms of evil: vipers and poison; open warfare, and toil. The expected age of plenty is strongly reminiscent of the idealized countryside evoked in the other eclogues.
While this is never stated directly by Virgil, it is legitimate to assume that the desire to create a safe haven, be it a poetic Arcadia or a dream of the Golden Age, would have been inflamed by the grim circumstances of the civil war and the reality of the confiscations in Virgil’s native Mantua. Virgil’s friend, Horace, in his Epode 16 (written at the same time as some of the eclogues), openly expresses an intense weariness with Rome’s constant wars:
“A second generation is now worn out by civil wars; Rome herself is ruined by her own strength” (Horace, Epode 16.1–2). The poet speaks in the name of the entire “generation of cursed blood” he expects the sacrilege of the fraternal war to ruin Rome and does not wish to see the relics of Romulus desecrated. Horace’s solution (like Virgil’s) is an escape to a Utopia, but this time the sanctuary is painfully beyond reach; it lies in the Islands of the Blest, which Jupiter reserved for the survivors of the Golden Age to occupy in this Age of Iron. On the islands, as in the countryside of Virgil’s Eclogue 4, goats offer their udders of their own accord and no vipers hide in the grass. And, like Virgil, Horace believes that his writing directs the worthy towards this unattainable refuge:
…saecula quorum piis secunda vate me daturfuga.
…the Ages [of Bronze and Iron] from which a propitious escape is granted to those who are pious with
me as their poet.
(Horace, Epode 16.66)
The same feelings—weariness with the complexities of the present and nostalgia for an imaginary Golden Age—are discernible in the work of the elegiac poets of the Augustan period, only they locate the longed-for sanctuary in different places. Tibullus contrasts an idyllic description of the Golden Age, free of toil and warfare, with the perils of contemporary life. In another poem he suggests that the idyllic peace is neither in the future nor in some remote group of islands; it was the reality in Rome’s preurban past, at the time before the city was founded by Romulus; now Rome’s chance to become Arcadia is lost forever. His younger contemporary Propertius uses the Golden Age ironically, with reference to love affairs, implying that it may still be alive in those ephemeral happy moments lovers spend together. Later, however, he reverts to Tibullus’s wistful vision of past (and lost) happiness.
The Eclogues thus can be read as Virgil’s answer to the same question that Horace was to pose (and answer) in his Epode 16: “Is there any refuge from the trauma of civil war?” Of all the responses mentioned, Virgil’s is not only the most extensive but also the most compelling, perhaps because the genre he used to write his poetry is particularly amenable to escapism.
Sources and literary context
The Eclogues was the first book of pastoral poems in Rome, but the genre was a Greek invention. It was developed in the 270s bce by Theocritus, a poet who left his native Sicily for Alexandria. There he composed his Idylls (“Pictures”), some of which offered the urban(e) audience a literary refuge of affected rusticity. Theocritus’s well-organized “pictures” were poêmes à clef (that is, poems featuring barely disguised real people). His poems dramatized debates between Alexandrian literati, transforming them into contests between Sicilian goatherds. Thus, from the very beginning, pastoral poetry was both a place of refuge and a metaphor representing the literary vocation. Theocritus may have invented pastoral poetry, its tone, its distinctive form called “amoebean dialogue” (a version of the traditional singing contest, wherein one speaker responds to the other’s utterance with the same number of lines, preferably on the same topic), even the names of some of Virgil’s shepherds and cowherds. But he did not create Arcadia; Arcadia is the intimate landscape of Virgil’s mind. The Greek poet’s descriptions of the landscapes of Sicily or the Island of Cos (the birthplace of his patron, Ptolemy) read like a versified guidebook for learned tourists. To sense the difference, compare the following excerpt from Theocritus’s first idyll with its imitation in Virgil’s Eclogue 10:
Where were you, when Daphnis was in pain, where were you Nymphs?
Was it the pretty valley of Peneius or Pindus [the names of a river and a mountain range in Thessaly]?
Certainly it was not the big stream of the [Sicilian] river Anapus,
Nor the pike of Aethna, not the holy water of Acis [another Sicilian river].
(Theocritus, 1.66–69)
What groves, what glens have kept you maiden Naiads
When Gallus was pining away from unworthy love?
For neither the ridges of Parnassus [mount near Delphi] nor those of Pindus
Held you back, nor yet the Aonian [Thessalian spring of] Aganippe.
(Eclogues, 10.9–12)
Differences in precision and focus are immediately apparent: for Theocritus’s general “Where?” Virgil substitutes nouns suggestive of various places in the woodland (glens and groves) that make the presence of his naiads (river nymphs instead of Theocritus’s general nymphs) more tangible. The suffering lover is Gallus, a real person, rather than a pastoral stereotype as in Theocritus. Virgil substitutes for the references to Sicilian rivers in Theocritus’s verse, the name of the spring Aganippe, probably taken from Callus’s poetry, thus adding another personal touch to his description. Most important, unlike the predictable nymphs of Theocritus, who must be in Sicily because they are not in Thessaly (they seem to visit only well-advertised places), Virgil’s nymphs spend their time in unnamed woodlands. They could be everywhere. The geography of the Eclogues, though tangible, is ultimately elusive: readers can glimpse it, briefly touch its textures, smell its flowers, hear its sounds, but they can never explore it, or point to it on a map. Virgil’s Arcadia at once is and is not the stylized Sicilian scenery in Theocritus’s idylls; Virgil’s is and is not the countryside of Mantua tormented by Octavian’s confiscations. Unlike the knowable landscapes of the Idylls, Arcadia remains a mystery.
Reception
Virgil’s Eclogues was an immediate success. Even before its publication the book gained Octavian’s approval and ensured his protection for its author. Soon not only the literary circles, but also larger audiences recognized Virgil’s talent. In his Dialogue, the historian Tacitus reports the following event: one day Virgil happened to be present in the theater when his poems were recited (most likely the Eclogues or excerpts from the Georgics). When the audience realized he was there, they gave him a standing ovation, “just as though he were Augustus himself” (Tacitus, 13.5). Even before the Aeneid, Virgil had already become a classic, an author to study in the schools (thanks to the grammarian Caecilius Epirota). After Virgil died, his reputation as a sage and the conviction that he knew everything (including the future) led to the practice of using his poetry for fortune-telling. Virgil’s fourth eclogue was, along with the Aeneid, the best-known Latin poem in early Christianity. This eclogue, with its invocation to the Virgin and to the coming of the holy child, lent itself easily to Christian interpretations. Very few Romans of late antiquity would have believed that Virgil meant the Virgin “Justice” rather than the Virgin “Mary” or that he was writing about the expected child of Antony and Octavia (who would turn out to be a daughter) rather than Christ. Instead, the author of the Eclogues was pronounced a “natural Christian,” having allegedly prophesized the birth of Jesus Christ, foreseeing Christianity without having been exposed to its teaching. This “odor of sanctity” did not prevent others from perceiving Virgil as a magician of sorts. The English spelling Virgil instead of the expected Vergil (the poet’s Latin name was Vergilius) dates to that time and in fact reflects the linking of his name to the word virga (“branch” and “magic wand”) or virgo (“virgin”).
—Dorota Dutsch
For More Information
Alpers, Paul. The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Appian of Alexandria. Roman History. Trans. Horace White. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Clausen, Wendell. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Conte, Gian Biagio. Latin Literature. Trans. J. B. Slodow. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Donatus, Tiberius Claudius. Interpretationes Vergilianae [Interpretations of Virgil]. Stuttgart, Germany: Teubner, 1969.
_____Life of Virgil. Trans. David Scott WilsonOkamura. http://virgil.org/vitae/
Horace. Odes and Epodes. Trans. Niall Rudd. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
_____ Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica [Art of Poetry]. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Leach-Winsor, Eleanor. Vergil’s Eclogues. Landscapes of Experience. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974.
Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Pelling, Christopher. “The Triumviral Period.” In The Cambridge Ancient History: The Augustan Empire. Vol. 10. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Tacitus. Dialogus de Oratoribus [A Dialog on Oratory]. Trans. W. Peterson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Theocritus. The Greek Bucolic Poets. Trans. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.
Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. Vols. 1–6. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.