Eclogues

Eclogues (Lat. Eclogae or Būcolica)of Virgil, ten unconnected pastoral poems written in imitation of Theocritus, Idylls I–II, those Idylls which are mainly bucolic (i.e. pastoral), at the suggestion of Pollio, Virgil's literary patron at the time. (For the meaning of ‘eclogue’ see above.) Eclogues seems not to have been the title used by Virgil, who apparently called the book (and the poems) Bucolica. The ancient authorities state that Virgil began the Eclogues when he was 28, i.e. in 42 BC, and that he spent three years in their composition. The second and third Eclogues are generally considered the earliest, written 42–41. However, not all were written between 42 and 39. Eclogue 10 is later, and Eclogue 8 may well be dedicated not to Pollio but to Octavian and refer to his campaigns of 35 BC. Universal agreement on dates cannot be reached, but Virgil was certainly engaged in the composition of the Eclogues from 43 to at least 37, and they probably circulated among the poet's friends before publication. They won immediate popular success; they were recited in the theatre, where their author was publicly acclaimed. Their present arrangement is not chronological but governed by artistic considerations of symmetry and contrast. The odd-numbered poems are dialogues, the even-numbered are narratives for only one speaker. (The following Eclogues are discussed in roughly chronological order.)

In Eclogue 2 the shepherd Corydon laments that his love for the boy Alexis is unrequited. This theme, of ‘the passionate shepherd to his love’, and much of the detail, are taken from Theocritus (Idylls 3 and 11). Eclogue 3 is also indebted to Theocritus for its form and characters—an exchange of banter between two rival shepherds, Damoetas and Menalcas, leading to a singing match (see AMOEBOEAN VERSE)—and some of the content: the two pairs of cups, for example, offered as the stake in the contest, recall the description of the cup of Idyll 1. In Eclogue 5, also rich in echoes from Theocritus, two shepherds celebrate in song the death and deification of Daphnis. The shepherd Menalcas reveals himself as the composer of Eclogues 3 and 4 and the way is thus open to see Daphnis too as an allegorical figure, concealing an identity relevant to Virgil's own times. Since after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC it had been decreed that divine honours should be paid to him as if he were a god, some scholars, from antiquity onwards, have thought that Daphnis represents Caesar, if not in particular at least in general terms. Eclogue 7, of uncertain date, describes a singing match between Corydon and Thyrsis, two Arcadian herdsmen (the first reference to Arcadia in connection with pastoral poetry); by staging this on the banks of his native river Mincius, Virgil demonstrates the detachment of his pastoral world from any specific landscape. The poem is notable for the grace and beauty of the pastoral songs. Eclogues 1 and 9 are concerned with shepherds whose farms have been confiscated for the settlement of soldiers after the battle of Philippi in 42, when Virgil perhaps lost his own farm. Both poems may have been coloured by the poet's own experiences but they are not autobiographical: his concern is a general one for the sufferings inflicted by war. Eclogue 1 contrasts the good fortune of Tityrus, who made his first journey to Rome under the threat of eviction and was rewarded by being allowed to keep his farm through the intervention of ‘a young man’, with the enforced exile of Meliboeus who had not left his home. Eclogue 9 depicts a similar situation. Two countrymen fall into conversation on the way to town; Moeris has just been evicted, and Lycidas recalls how Menalcas, a poet, tried to save the district by his poetry but failed.

In Eclogue 4, which owes nothing to any Greek predecessor, the poet looks forward to the birth of a child who will inaugurate a new era. This poem has been more discussed than any other short poem in Latin; throughout the Middle Ages it was accepted as a Messianic prophecy of the birth of the Christ-child given under divine inspiration. St Jerome was exceptional in expressing disbelief. Several contemporary children have also been suggested as the subject: a child of Pollio, an expected child of Mark Antony and Octavia, a child of Octavian and Scribonia, even Octavian himself. The poem can be dated to 40 BC, near the time of the Treaty of Brundisium. It may well be that the child is for Virgil simply a symbol of the forces which he hoped would bring about the dawn of a new age. Eclogue 8 is dedicated to an unnamed person, usually thought to be Pollio, the campaigns referred to taken to be those of 39; Servius, however, says that the dedicatee is Octavian, and it has been suggested that the campaigns are his of 35. The Eclogue is modelled mainly on Idylls 1 and 2 of Theocritus, and consists of a singing match between Damon and Alphesiboeus: the first sings a lament for his faithless mistress, the second relates the incantations and magic by which a girl hopes to win back her lover. Eclogue 6 remains obscure to us because we know little of its literary background; it does not have much to do with pastoral and bears little resemblance to Theocritus. It consists of a song sung by Silenus in which he recounts the creation of the world in the style of Lucretius as a prelude to some allusively narrated myths. The narrative is interrupted by a description of Virgil's friend and fellowpoet Gallus accepting his vocation as a poet, in language reminiscent of Callimachus in the Aitia. Eclogue 10, possibly the last to be written, in 37 (but see Eclogue 8 above), has Gallus as the subject, represented as dying of hopeless love for his absent mistress Lycoris. This is the boldest juxtaposition of the Arcadian and the real world that Virgil aspires to, and one that was to have great influence on the style and content of later pastoral poetry (see below).

Virgil extended the character of pastoral in new directions. The Eclogues became the models of pastoral poetry and the inspirers of pastoral romance and drama in later ages (for the Idylls of Theocritus were little read until the Renaissance). Unlike Theocritus in general (whose Idyll 7 is the exception) he allowed elements of contemporary reality to intrude into his Arcadian world, using myth and symbolic imagery to allude to recent history. This was an innovation decisive for the later development of pastoral, providing a precedent for the introduction of elaborate allegory into the genre. Virgil was also the first to use pastoral as a vehicle for moral criticism of the society of his own day. From Petrarch and Boccaccio onwards pastoral became a recognized form for expressing political and ecclesiastical controversy and eulogy.

Virgil created a simple world which is an image of life but distinct from it, and his Eclogues derive their haunting quality from the implied relationships between the two. But not many later pastoral poets were content merely to imitate Virgil. Calpurnius (first century AD) and Nemesianus (third century) enlarged the scope of this literary mode by using it more enthusiastically than had Virgil as a vehicle for panegyric, and in this they were followed by the eighth- and ninth-century poets of Charlemagne's court. Virgil's Eclogues were interpreted as allegory by generations of commentators, and as a result allegory was thought to be an essential feature of the mode. Latin pastoral written in the Middle Ages thus came to have very little to do with shepherds unless they were specifically allegorical (in contrast with an entirely independent vernacular pastoral where the shepherd was the key figure). Petrarch, for example, used the eclogue form to inveigh against the bad government of specific popes and rulers. The richness of English Renaissance pastoral, exemplified by the poets Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and Shakespeare, springs from the successful blending of the Virgilian and the vernacular traditions, as well as the poets' own belief in the mode as one that could be taken seriously. But by the eighteenth century pastoral had lost its vitality and degenerated into the witty parodies of John Gay or the saccharine effusions of Alexander Pope's imitators.