Eclogues

This article is about a major work of Virgil. For the genre of poetry known as "bucolics" or "eclogues", see Eclogue. For the poems by Dante, see Eclogues (Dante).

The Eclogues (/ˈɛklɒɡz/; Latin: Eclogae [ˈɛklɔɡae̯]), also called the Bucolics, is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil.

The opening lines of the Eclogues in the 5th-century Vergilius Romanus

Background

Taking as his generic model the Greek bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by offering a dramatic and mythic interpretation of revolutionary change at Rome in the turbulent period between roughly 44 and 38 BC. Virgil introduced political clamor largely absent from Theocritus' poems, called idylls ("little scenes" or "vignettes"), even though erotic turbulence disturbs the "idyllic" landscapes of Theocritus.

Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called not an idyll but an eclogue ("draft" or "selection" or "reckoning"), populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and performing amoebaean singing in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Performed with great success on the Roman stage, they feature a mix of visionary politics and eroticism that made Virgil a celebrity in his own lifetime.

Like the rest of Virgil's works, the Eclogues are composed in dactylic hexameter.

Structure and organization

Incipit page of Eclogue 1 in a 1482 Italian translation of Bucolics

It is likely that Virgil deliberately designed and arranged his book of Eclogues.

Several scholars have attempted to identify the organizational/architectural principles underpinning the construction of the book. Many of these attempts have been catalogued and critiqued by Niall Rudd. Rudd refuted a number of cruder organizational theories, including theories that the Eclogues are organized

• in chronological order
• by geographic setting, with Italian settings alternating with non-Italian settings

Most commonly the structure has been seen to be symmetrical, turning around eclogue 5. The following scheme comes from Steenkamp (2011):

1 – Confiscation of land

2 – Love song

3 – Singing contest

4 – Religion and the world that will be

5 – The 'pastor' becomes a god

6 – Mythology and the world that was

7 – Singing contest

8 – Two love songs

9 – Confiscation of land

The tenth eclogue stands alone, summing up the whole collection. At the same time, some scholars have recognised that the first nine eclogues fall into groups of three: 1–3 and 7–9 with strictly pastoral settings and 4–6 less pastoral.

A further symmetry was identified by Brooks Otis (1964): in his view, eclogues 1, 4, 6 and 9 are not Theocritan, 2, 3, 7 and 8 are Theocritan, and 5 and 10 are Theocritan with a "specifically Roman, contemporary bearing".

Numerous verbal echoes between the corresponding poems in each half reinforce the symmetry: to give one example from many, "Plant pears, Meliboeus" (1.73) = "Plant pears, Daphnis" (9.50). Eclogue 10 has verbal echoes with all the earlier poems.

However, the arrangement of the eclogues into three groups of three does not prevent the collection also being seen as divided at the same time into two halves, with a second opening at the beginning of eclogue 6. Thomas K. Hubbard (1998) has noted, "The first half of the book has often been seen as a positive construction of a pastoral vision, whilst the second half dramatizes progressive alienation from that vision, as each poem of the first half is taken up and responded to in reverse order."

The average length of each eclogue is 83 lines, almost exactly the same as the average length (81.4 lines) of poems in Tibullus's first book of elegies published a few years later, also with ten poems. Some scholars have developed numerical theories, noting for example that eclogues 2 + 8 = 3 + 7 = 181 lines, while eclogues 1 + 9 = 4 + 6 = 150/149 lines. Similar numerical phenomena are found in other authors. However, the significance of these findings is not clear. The exact number of lines also differs slightly according to the text used.

Eclogue 1

Main article: Eclogue 1

A dialogue between Tityrus and Meliboeus. In the turmoil of the era Meliboeus has been forced off his land and faces an uncertain future. Tityrus recounts his journey to Rome and the "god" he met there who answered his plea and allowed him to remain on his land. He offers to let Meliboeus spend the night with him. This text has been viewed as reflecting the infamous land-confiscations after the return of Mark Antony and Octavian's joint forces from the Battle of Philippi of 42 BCE, in which Brutus and Cassius (the orchestrators of Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE) were defeated.

Eclogue 2

Main article: Eclogue 2

A monologue by the shepherd Corydon bemoaning his unrequited love for the handsome boy Alexis (the boss's darling) in the height of summer.

Eclogue 3

Main article: Eclogue 3

A singing competition between Menalcas and Damoetas. Palaemon is the judge and pronounces the contest a tie.

Eclogue 4

Main article: Eclogue 4

Capping a sequence or cycle in which Virgil created and augmented a new political mythology, Eclogue 4 reaches out to imagine a golden age ushered in by the birth of a boy heralded as "great increase of Jove" (magnum Iovis incrementum), which ties in with divine associations claimed in the propaganda of Octavian, the ambitious young heir to Julius Caesar. The poet makes this notional scion of Jove the occasion to predict his own metabasis up the scale in epos, rising from the humble range of the bucolic to the lofty range of the heroic, potentially rivaling Homer: he thus signals his own ambition to make Roman epic that will culminate in the Aeneid. In the surge of ambition, Virgil also projects defeating the legendary poet Orpheus and his mother, the epic muse Calliope, as well as Pan, the inventor of the bucolic pipe, even in Pan's homeland of Arcadia, which Virgil will claim as his own at the climax of his eclogue book in the tenth eclogue. Biographical identification of the fourth eclogue's child has proved elusive; but the figure proved a link between traditional Roman authority and Christianity. The connection is first made in the Oration of Constantine appended to the Life of Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea (a reading to which Dante makes fleeting reference in his Purgatorio). Some scholars have also remarked similarities between the eclogue's prophetic themes and the words of Isaiah 11:6: "a little child shall lead".

Eclogue 5

Main article: Eclogue 5

Eclogue 5 articulates another significant pastoral theme, the shepherd-poet's concern with achieving worldly fame through poetry. This concern is related to the metabasis Virgil himself undertakes thematically in Eclogue 4. In Eclogue 5, the shepherds Menalcas and Mopsus mourn their deceased companion Daphnis by promising to "praise ... Daphnis to the stars – / yes, to the stars raise Daphnis". Menalcas and Mopsus praise Daphnis out of compassion but also out of obligation. Daphnis willed that his fellow shepherds memorialize him by making a "mound and add[ing] above the mound a song: / Daphnis am I in woodland, known hence far as the stars". Not only are Daphnis's survivors concerned with solidifying and eternizing his poetic reputation, but the dead shepherd-poet himself is involved in self-promotion from beyond the grave through the aegis of his will. It is an outgrowth of the friendly poetic rivalries that occur between them and of their attempts to best the gods, usually Pan or Phoebus, at their lyric craft. At the end of Eclogue 5, Daphnis is deified in the shepherds' poetic praise: "'A god, a god is he, Menalcas!' / ... Here are four altars: / Look, Daphnis, two for you and two high ones for Phoebus." Menalcas apostrophizes Daphnis with a promise: "Always your honor, name and praises will endure." Ensuring poetic fame is a fundamental interest of the shepherds in classical pastoral elegies, including the speaker in Milton's "Lycidas".

Eclogue 6

Main article: Eclogue 6

This eclogue tells the story of how two boys, Chromis and Mnasyllos, and a Naiad persuaded Silenus to sing to them, and how he sang to them of the world's beginning, the Flood, the Golden Age, Prometheus, Hylas, Pasiphaë, Atalanta and Phaëthon's sisters; after which he described how the Muses gave Gallus (a close personal friend of Virgil's) Hesiod's reed pipe and commissioned him to write a didactic poem; after which he told of Scylla (whom Virgil identifies as both the sea monster and the daughter of Nisos who was transmuted into a seabird) and of Tereus and Philomela, and then we learn that he has in fact been singing a song composed by Apollo on the banks of the Eurotas.

Eclogue 7

Main article: Eclogue 7

The goatherd Meliboeus, a recurring character, soliloquizing remembers how he happened to be present at a great singing match between Corydon and Thyrsis. He then quotes from memory their actual songs (six rounds of matching quatrains) and recalls that Daphnis as judge declared Corydon the winner. This eclogue is based on pseudo-Theocritus Idyll VIII, though there the quatrains are not in hexameters but in elegiac couplets. Scholars argue about why Thyrsis loses. The reader may feel that despite the very close parallelism of his quatrains with Corydon's, they are less musical and sometimes cruder in content.

Eclogue 8

Main article: Eclogue 8

This eclogue is also known as Pharmaceutria ("Sorceress"). The poet reports the contrasting songs of two shepherds whose music is as powerful as that of Orpheus. Both songs are dramatic (the character in the first being a man and in the second a woman), both have refrain and both, as printed, comprise ten sections of exactly the same length, though the correspondence in the last three sections is staggered. Amaryllis assists Alphesiboeus with a love spell.

Eclogue 9

Main article: Eclogue 9

This poem dramatizes the preliminaries of a friendly singing-match that never takes place. Young Lycidas meets old Moeris on his way to town and learns that Moeris's master, the poet Menalcas, has been evicted from his small farm and nearly killed. They proceed to recall snatches of Menalcas's poetry, two translated from Theocritus and two relating to contemporary events. Lycidas is anxious for a singing-match, while admitting that he is no match for two contemporary Roman poets whom he mentions by name, but Moeris pleads for forgetfulness and loss of voice. They walk on towards the city, postponing the competition until Menalcas arrives.

Eclogue 10

Main article: Eclogue 10

In Eclogue 10, Virgil caps his book by inventing a new myth of poetic authority and origin: he replaces Theocritus' Sicily and old bucolic hero, the impassioned oxherd Daphnis, with the impassioned voice of his contemporary Roman friend, the elegiac poet Gaius Cornelius Gallus, imagined dying of love in Arcadia. Virgil transforms this remote, mountainous, and myth-ridden region of Greece, homeland of Pan, into the original and ideal place of pastoral song, thus founding a richly resonant tradition in western literature and the arts.

This eclogue is the origin of the phrase omnia vincit amor ("love conquers all").

See also

• Aeneid
• Georgics
• The Golden Bough

Further reading

• Buckham, Philip Wentworth; Spence, Joseph; Holdsworth, Edward; Warburton, William; Jortin, John, Miscellanea Virgiliana: In Scriptis Maxime Eruditorum Virorum Varie Dispersa, in Unum Fasciculum Collecta, Cambridge: Printed for W. P. Grant; 1825.
• Coleman, Robert, ed. (1977). Vergil: Eclogues. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29107-0.
• Gosse, Edmund William (1911). "Bucolics" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 733.
• Hornblower, Simon; Antony Spawforth (1999). The Oxford Classical Dictionary: Third Edition. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866172-X.
• Hunter, Richard, ed. (1999). Theocritus: A Selection. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57420-X.
• Van Sickle, John B. (2004). The Design of Virgil's Bucolics. Duckworth. ISBN 1-85399-676-9.
• Van Sickle, John B. (2011). Virgil's Book of Bucolics, the Ten Eclogues in English Verse. Framed by Cues for Reading Out-Loud and Clues for Threading Texts and Themes. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-9799-3.|

External links

• The Eclogues (Internet Classics Archive)
• The Eclogues (translated by H.R. Fairclough for the Loeb Classical Library)

• The Bucolics and Eclogues by Virgil at Project Gutenberg (in Latin)

• The Bucolics and Eclogues by Virgil at Project Gutenberg (in English)
• French translations (Bibliotheca Classica Selecta)
• Latin texts and German translations
• An appreciation by Samuel Johnson
• The Eclogues public domain audiobook at LibriVox