It is a truth now commonly accepted that Vergil was the inventor of pastoral as a genre. As with so many genres the seeds can be found in Homer (Griffin 1992), and many of the characteristic elements are found in the artfully rustic poems of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus: shepherds, while in the hills pasturing their sheep, compose songs and exchange these (and sometimes abuse) when their herding brings them into contact with one another; the beauties of the countryside are described with loving detail, and there is regular reflection on love and death. However, the Theocritean corpus includes a high proportion of poems that are urban, mythological or panegyrical, while containing no material that is distinctively bucolic; and unlike Vergil, he seems not clearly to have marked any distinction between the different parts of his oeuvre. For the other Greek poets known as Bucolici (Moschus, Bion and their anonymous associates) the most significant pastoral feature is when the poet takes on the guise of a cowherd. It took the genius of Vergil, perhaps under the influence of a collection of Greek Bucolic poems, to refine what had been a partial mode into a genre that has had an impact on the history of poetry quite out of proportion to the space it occupies on the library shelf (see Martindale 1997: 107-9, for a more theoretical discussion).
Vergil takes the varied constituents of Theocritus’ poetry, and strains them and moulds them into a persistently pastoral form. He begins the Eclogues with Tityrus lying under the shade of the spreading beech tree, and ends it rising from the spot where he has woven a basket while singing and pasturing his goats until evening has come and they are full. But in between he has much comment on Roman politics and many references to mythology, including some narratives; and the two poems that have the least pastoral material (4, 6) both start with strong assertions of their generic affiliation:
Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus. non omnis arbusta iuuant humilesque myricae; si canimus siluas, siluae sint consule dignae.
Sicilian Muses, let us sing something a little grander. Not everyone is delighted by shrubs and humble tamarisks; if we sing woods, let them be woods worthy of a consul.
{Eclogues 4.1-3)
The pastoral Muses are ‘Sicilian’ because Theocritus was from Syracuse. ‘Woods’ (siluae), along with ‘shade’ {umbra; e. g.1.4, 10.75-6), is Vergil’s favoured meto-nym for the genre. These lines open a sequence that is indeed paulo maiora, with 4 saluting Pollio as consul at the start of a new golden era, and 5 setting a lament for Daphnis against a celebration of his apotheosis. Poem 6 then marks the start of the second half of the book and the supposed return to a more typically pastoral mode of discourse:
Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere uersu nostra neque erubuit siluas habitare Thalea. cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem uellit et admonuit: ‘pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen.’
My Muse first deigned to play in Syracusan verse, and was not ashamed to inhabit the woods. When I began to sing kings and battles, Cynthian Apollo tweaked my ear and advised: ‘A shepherd, Tityrus, ought to pasture his sheep so they get fat, but utter a refined song.’
{Eclogues 6.1-5)
This functions as a commentary on the progress of the book so far: in this account, poems 1-3 (evoked by Tityre at 6.4, and by the citation of the opening verses of 2 and 3 in 5.85-6) have been playful, and set firmly in the woods. Apollo, designated by his Callimachean name Cynthius at this moment where (as in the prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia) he guides the poet away from epic grandeur, responds to the higher material he observes in 4-5, and urges Vergil to complete the pastoral book in a minor key. This articulation of the ten-poem book is reinforced by the strong closure at the end of poem 3:
Claudite iam riuos, pueri; sat prata biberunt.
Shut off the streams now, boys; the meadows have drunk enough.
(Eclogues 3.111)
Also by the way poem 10 marks its final position in its first word, Extremum, matching the Prima with which the second half of the book has begun.
The artful complexity of the book’s organization is one of its great delights. As was observed already by the ancient commentator Servius, mimetic and nonmimetic poems alternate. Modern editions obscure this by adding the names Damon and Alphesiboeusin the margins at 8.17 and 64; in 7 similarly the repeated Corydon and Thyrsis are rendered unnecessary by verse 20 - but the whole poem is in the mouth of the herdsman Meliboeus. Odd-numbered poems exploit the form to present exchanges, polemical and competitive in 3 and 7, collaborative in 5. However, in poems 1 and 9, the effect of the land-confiscations is such that one of the herdsmen no longer has the heart to sing (carmina nulla canam (‘I shall sing no songs’), says Meliboeus at 1.77; nunc oblita mihi tot carmina (‘now I have forgotten so many songs) says Moeris at 9.53). Here we see one clear manifestation of Vergil’s genius, as he uses structure and form to enhance his meaning, and exploits two different ways of using pastoral to comment on contemporary politics: on the margins the shepherds’ world and the pastoral genre are upset by the intrusion of disruptive reality, of soldiers and the city; at the book’s idyllic heart, in poem 5, the allegorical mode reflects on the death and deification of Julius Caesar.
Though the allegorical reading of the Fifth Eclogue has been disputed by some, it seems hard to avoid in a poem written less than a decade after 44, especially when one notices the emphasis on astra in the account of Daphnis’ apotheosis. These stars recall the comet that appeared during Caesar’s funeral games (Ramsey and Licht 1997), and was taken as a sign of the heavenly ascent of Diuus Iuliur. cf. the snippet of song cited by Lycidas:
Daphni, quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus? ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum.
Daphnis, why do you look up at the risings of ancient constellations? Look, the star of Caesar, son of Venus, has come out.
(Eclogues 9.46-7)
Reference to Daphnis destabilizes the identification of pastoral hero with the Roman dynast at the same time as drawing attention to it. Dionaei helps clarify the allegorical reading of Daphnis’ mother, who laments his death in the first of the pair of songs in poem 5. In the Theocritean model for the dying Daphnis (Idyll 1), it is Aphrodite who brings about the death; Vergil creates a delightful effect by conjuring up the same goddess as a mourner for his allegorized Daphnis.
Political panegyric is an appropriate constituent of a book that recreates the Theocritean mode; so is the prophecy that we find in 4, which uses the imminent birth of a child to look ahead to the future Golden Age he will enjoy, and thus caps Idyll 16, which merely foresees a victory for Hieron of Syracuse over the Carthaginians. Though we may find poetic allegory in Idyll 7 and read as Ptolemy the Zeus to whose attention Simichidas’ poems have come, yet Theocritus never seems to use the figure of the herdsman as an image of the ruler: that is a Vergilian development, and one he maintains into the epic Aeneid, where Aeneas is repeatedly figured as pastor (2.308; 4.71; 12.587). Another distinctive feature is the way he increases the solemn force of his prophecy (and simultaneously hedges his bets) by leaving open the identity of the child in 4. The dating of the poem to the consulship of Pollio associates it with the Treaty of Brundisium and the marriage between Antony and Octavia that sealed the agreement between the dynasts. The Herculean language of 4.17 (pacatumque reget patriis uirtutibus orbem [he will rule the world tamed by his father’s or ancestors’ or country’s valour]: see Clausen 1994: 122), and the reference to the place of Jove in the child’s ancestry (49) confirm the reading of the baby as the expected offspring of Antony, descendant of Anton, son of Hercules. But nothing is said that prevents the identification of the boy with any male Roman citizen born in the consulship of Pollio. The iuuenisdeus in 1 and the tragedy-writing general of 8.6-13 are likewise unnamed. Indeed nowhere in the whole book do we meet the names either of Antony or of Octavian (the deus in 1; and the patron addressed in 8 [see Clausen 1994; others think Pollio]).
Emulation of Theocritus at points turns to competition, especially (and appropriately) in the amoebaean (i. e. responsive and competitive) pair 3 and 7. Poem 3 responds to the wonderful cup offered as a reward for Thyrsis’ song in Idyll 1, which has pictures of a woman and two men courting her, an old man fishing, and a boy constructing a cricket-cage while two foxes find food in the vineyard he is supposed to be watching (this vignette famously symbolizes the whole genre). Theocritus’ passage has rightly been seen as a masterpiece of realism (Zanker 1987: 79-81), the vividness of the description delightfully at odds with the verbal interpretation and the implausibility of such detailed artistry on a herdsman’s wooden cup. Rather than describe pictures at similar length, Vergil moves the realism to the context, in imitation of the non-Theocritean Eighth Idyll, and he keeps capping his models. In Idyll 8, Menalcas is unwilling to stake one of the flock, because his parents count them every evening; Vergil’s Menalcas has a father, and a stepmother, a far more threatening figure, at least in literature, and they both count the flock twice a day, and one of them the kids too. He offers not a cup, but cups (pocula.. .fagina, the beechwood echoing the fagus of 1.1, and thus making the cups symbolic of the Eclogues). The realism lies not in the carvings, for the cups improbably contain images of the Alexandrian astronomer Conon - and another whose name realistically escapes the speaker’s memory (though Vergil encourages us to remember Aratus, the Hellenistic poet of the heavens, whose name is found anagramatized in curuus arator [bending ploughman] in the lines that describe his work: Fisher 1982; Springer 1983-4). And then Damoetas caps Menalcas by claiming to own two more cups by the same artist. Damoetas and Menalcas are declared equal at the end of 3; Eclogue 7 has a victor, Corydon, the lovesick singer of Vergil’s Second Eclogue, who overcomes Thyrsis, in Theocritus the mastersinger, whose tale of Daphnis in Idyll 1 has earned him the cup without any contest.
Imitation of Theocritus starts in the first five lines (Eclogue 1, with Meliboeus speaking, and echoing the repetitions of sounds and words that we find opening Idyll 1):
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.
Tityrus, you lie under the cover of the spreading beech-tree and practise the woodland Muse on your slender pipe; we are leaving the borders of our homeland and the sweet fields, we are going in exile from our homeland; you, Tityrus, at ease in the shade teach the woods to echo the beauties of Amaryllis (or, perhaps, teach the beautiful Amaryllis to make the woods resound).
(Eclogues 1.1-5)
The book begins with a profound contrast between the restful ease of Tityrus and the grim departure of Meliboeus. Even at the book’s opening, pastoral is revealed as existing already when the woods echo the lovely name of Amaryllis, but also as abandoned, through the exile of Meliboeus. The shepherd remains for ever in the shade of the trees, but ‘we’ (nos) - the speaker, the author, the reader - know even as we catch sight of the idyllic scene that this is somewhere we cannot stay. As the poem progresses, it is Meliboeus, speaking in a spirit ofnostalgia, who gives us most ofthe vivid description of the countryside; Tityrus, who has seemed an embodiment of pastoral ease, tells us about the city, and not the local market town, but Rome itself, where he has found the political favour that enables him to retain his land and his place in the pastoral world. For Vergil, such bliss does not come through primitive innocence; it is created by a man imitating a lost past, and depends upon his exploiting Italy’s system of patronage, under which all roads lead to Rome.
This first poem is masterly in evoking the delights of the locus amoenus and setting up the contrast between country and town, but it brings out specific issues too: the confiscations of land to provide for the veterans of Caesar (67-72), the extraordinary extent to which Rome dominates Italy (19-25), and the way that its empire has given a reality to geographical fantasy (61-6): as a prospective Roman legionary Meliboeus can expect to see unimaginably distant places (so too Gallus at 10.64-8). There is realism also in the loss of Meliboeus’ kids (12-15), and in the qualifications he admits to his celebration of Tityrus’ farm (46-8; the following lines are far more lyrical):
Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt et tibi magna satis, quamuis lapis omnia nudus limosoque palus obducat pascua iunco.
Lucky old man, your land will remain yours then, and it is big enough for you too, though bare stone covers all the pasture, and marsh with mud-loving reed.
If poems 1, 4, 5 and 9 display pastoral’s capacity for reflection on political issues, 2, 8 and 10 explore love, and 6 crystallizes the interest in mythology, with a summary of Silenus’ wonderful song that begins with creation out of chaos (an imitation of Orpheus’ enchanting song at Argonautica 1.496ff., done with several Lucretian touches) and passes through a miscellany of myths. Some are touched on in a brief phrase: lapides Pyrrhae iactos [the stones thrown by Pyrrha, 6.41] quickly evokes the whole myth of Deucalion’s flood and mankind’s rebirth. Others are lingered over with emotional intensity, in particular the love of Pasiphae for the bull (6.45-60). The singer consoles her in her misfortune, quotes her summoning of the nymphs to help her find the animal in the woods, and contrasts her infatuation with the madness of the Proetides. The inset adumbration of their tale imitates the kind of structure we find in Catullus 64, where the marriage of Peleus and Thetis embraces the ecphrastic narrative of Ariadne, and this evocation of neoteric style is confirmed when the commentator Servius reveals a double echo of Calvus’ lo (a uirgo infelix [ah, unfortunate girl], 47, 52). The queen who wishes to play the part of a cow is contrasted explicitly with the maidens who are made to think they have become cows, and allusively with the nymph who was really changed into a heifer. Then we move to the poet’s own time, with the investiture of his fellow poet Gallus by Linus and the Muses. The fragments that survive of Gallus’ work (6 whole and 5 part lines) are in elegiac couplets, and Ovid treats him as the first of the sequence of four love elegists (followed by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid himself: Tristia 4.10.51-4), but Vergil’s narrative in verses 64-73 implies that he also worked on more elevated topics, in particular an aetiological account of the grove of Apollo at Gryneum in Asia Minor, presumably in hexameters. In poem 4 we should be struck by the boldness that allows a poet living amid civil strife to have a vision of an imminent Golden Age. So here Vergil’s elevation of his friend to mythical status is an extraordinary assertion of poetic confidence; and he covertly includes himself in the scene, with the epithet aMARO (see Carter 2002). The song as a whole functions as a genealogy of Vergil’s poetry, in which Theocritus for once plays a lesser role, and Apollonius and Lucretius, Calvus and the neoterics come to the fore.
Even love is used to reflect on the power and uses of song. The persona in Damon’s song (8.17-60) produces a suicide note, a gift for Nysa, the girl who has betrayed him; in Alphesiboeus’ response, the female voice uses her carmina as charms to draw Daphnis back from the city. This is the first time the city has appeared since poem 1, and it is a shocking indication that we are nearing the margins of pastoral, especially as the figure who has abandoned the countryside (even if temporarily) is Daphnis, the model herdsman of Theocritean Idyll 1. Movement to the city dominates 9, before Gallus returns in 10, this time in the role of the lovesick Daphnis of Idyll 1. The comments of Servius and elements shared with passages in the elegists confirm that the soliloquy Vergil gives him exploits Gallus’ own writing: as often in elegy, we find the despair of love set against travel and war, and interest in poetic genre. Pastoral song seems to offer Gallus an alternative to elegy, but in the end he finds no truer medicine here, and admits that neither woods nor songs please amid the bitterness of love. What has seemed to announce a change of genre for Gallus comes to mark a change for Vergil himself, and he says farewell to bucolic with eight verses packed with closural images and pointers to the Georgies (Kennedy 1983) culminating in the final line in the concepts of home, satiety, arrival, evening and departure:
Ite domum saturae, uenit Hesperus, ite capellae.
Go home, she-goats, now you are full, evening comes, go home.
World History
