The Eclogues

If any of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana are genuine (which is unlikely), then they may have been juvenilia. Virgil enters the canon of world literature with his first major collection, the Eclogues, which probably appeared around 39–38 bce. The Eclogues are ten short hexameter poems (the longest is 111 lines long) in the pastoral genre. The original title was Bucolica, “cowherd songs.”¹⁷ Eclogae means “selections” (from a larger corpus) and it is unfortunate that a version of this later title has become usual in English. Bucolica as a title signals a clear allusion to pastoral poetry (in Greek, ta boukolika) and to Theocritus in particular (note the refrain “begin the bucolic song” in Idyll 1; in Moschus 3.11, the pastoral poet Bion is called a cowherd, boukolos). The collection makes frequent reference to Theocritus’s Idylls: commentators note four separate echoes in the first line alone. But the intertextuality with earlier Roman poetry is equally dense: the opening lines are also significantly Lucretian (see Lucretius), and the “Song of Silenus” in the sixth poem seems to interact with a broad selection of contemporary poetry, though we are now able to pick up only a few hints of this interaction.¹⁸

This combination of the Greek and the Roman, the ancient and the contemporary, and the rustic and the sophisticated is typical of the collection as a whole. Although we do not know exactly in what form the poems of Theocritus and the other bucolic poets circulated in Rome, it is likely that any edition included not only the strictly pastoral poems like Theocritus’ first idyll but also urban mimes like Idyll 15 and the encomiastic poems Idylls 16 and 17. In one sense, Virgil carries this mixture further: just as Theocritus addresses his friend Nicias in the frame of Idyll 11, Virgil addresses Varus in Eclogue 6 (though in that poem Virgil himself is called “Tityrus” by Apollo) and Pollio (possibly) in Eclogue 8; but his contemporaries also make an appearance within the bucolic setting (3.84–91, 6.64–73, 9.47, 10 passim). Idyll 7, the nearest equivalent in Theocritus to such a practice, is much less explicit. In another sense, however, Virgil is more consistently pastoral than Theocritus: the encomiastic birth poem Eclogue 4—explicitly paulo maiora, “a little greater” (in theme)—still contains more rural themes than Idylls 16 and 17 (cf. Ecl. 4.3, 21–2, 42–45, 55–59).

The ten poems in the collection are intricately arranged around the central poem, Eclogue 5. The first and ninth poems deal with the subject of the land confiscations; the second and third contain long laments by star-crossed lovers; the third and seventh are both “amoebean,” with exchanges of song; and the fourth and sixth are the most obviously “elevated” of the collection. Eclogue 5, another amoebean exchange, describes the apotheosis of Daphnis, and Eclogue 10 concludes the collection with Cornelius Gallus taking on the role of dying lover played by Daphnis in Theocritus’s first idyll. Some scholars have additionally identified numerological correspondences, of varying degrees of persuasiveness, within the collection.¹⁹ Certainly Eclogue 4, which is sixty-three (nine times seven) lines long, is structured around the magical number seven, but this may have special point in view of the poem’s oracular tone and subject-matter.

Despite the paired arrangement of poems within the Eclogues, the collection responds equally well to a serial reading. There is a clear movement from the first poem, in which Tityrus describes how his land was saved, to the ninth, in which Moeris says that he was not so fortunate: “our poems, Lycidas, have as much power amongst the weapons of Mars as they say the Chaonian doves have when the eagle comes” (9.11–13, with an allusion to the eagle of the legionary standard; for the doves, see Dodona and cf. Chaones). Eclogue 6 opens with a “proem in the middle” which echoes the opening of Callimachus (3)’s Aetia and establishes the pastoral deductum carmen (“fine-spun song”) as the equivalent to Callimachus’s “slender muse” (Ecl. 6.5; cf. 6.8).²⁰ At the end of the collection, Gallus gives in to love (10.69), the poet rises from his pastoral ease in the shade (10.75–76), and the goats are told to go home, having now been fed to satiety (10.77).

As all this suggests, the Eclogues are highly “artificial” and self-conscious. The relation between the world of song and the world outside is a central concern.²¹ Virgil toys with a variety of partial identifications in the poems: at 5.86–87 Menalcas claims to have written Eclogues 2 and 3, and at 9.10 Lycidas says that the same character “saved all with his poems,” but Apollo calls the narrator Tityrus at 6.4 and it is not hard to see him in the idle singer of an empty day in the first poem (cf. G. 4.565–566). In a broader sense, he is also the helpless Corydon of Eclogue 2 and the magical Silenus (see satyrs and silens) of Eclogue 6. Interwoven with, and inseparable from, the literary texture are the celebrated descriptive passages that so appealed to Romantic enthusiasts like Samuel Palmer: the buzzing bees and cool springs of the pastoral world (cf., e.g., 1.51–58). The union of the two was an inheritance from Theocritus which Virgil passed on to the West, particularly through Renaissance imitators like Mantuan and especially Sannazaro; although Arcadia is mentioned only rarely in the poems (7.4, 26, 10.31, 33; cf. 4.58–59, 10.26) and its significance is disputed, the Eclogues came to define Arcady as a place where poetry and love meet with or avoid the worlds of politics, cities, and empires.²²

One of the Eclogues came to have particular significance for later readers: Eclogue 4, with its description of the birth of a child whose lifetime will see the world’s return to the golden age. Even for contemporary readers, there were several possible candidates for the identification of the child (the modern favourite is an anticipated son of M. Antonius (2) and Octavia, a hope already dashed by the time of the Eclogues’ publication), but the poem can equally be read as a broader allegory of renewal; Christian readers naturally saw reference to the birth of Jesus (Constantine, Oratio ad sanctum coetum 19–21; PL, 8.454–466).²³ The influence of Jewish messianic writing on the poem is nowhere a required hypothesis, but is not in itself unlikely.²⁴

(See also pastoral poetry, Greek and pastoral poetry, Latin.)

The Georgics

Virgil’s call to himself to “rise” at the end of the Eclogues (10.75, surgamus) was answered by a rise in generic level with his next work, the Georgics, a didactic poem in four books on farming (Book 1 deals with crops, Book 2 with trees and shrubs, Book 3 with livestock, and Book 4 with bees). Again there are Hellenistic Greek models. Little can be said of the lost Georgica of Nicander, but it is clear from the surviving fragments of Callimachus’s Aetia that it was an important model: like Virgil’s Georgics, it had a four-book structure involving important links between the proem of the third book and conclusion of the fourth.²⁵ Aratus (1)’s Phaenomena was both a central Hellenistic text (translated by Cicero and P. Terentius Varro Atacinus) and of particular relevance to the discussion of weather in Book 1 of the Georgics (cf. also the translation of a passage from Eratosthenes at G 1.233–251). But there was also an important archaic model in Hesiod’s Works and Days (cf. 2.176, Ascraeum . . . carmen, “Hesiodic song”), and the relationship to Lucretius’s De rerum natura is so central that the Georgics may be seen as the work of an “anti-Lucretius.”²⁶ In the Georgics, Lucretius’s confident exposition of the power of reason is “remythologized” into a more sceptical and yet more accepting attitude towards the natural world and its traditional divinities (2.490–494).

Just as Aratus’s Phaenomena had been based on a prose treatise of Eudoxus (1), and Lucretius’s De rerum natura on various Epicurean texts, so the Georgics also has important prose models, though none is as central as in those other texts. Virgil’s sources for agricultural lore were various, but the most significant was Varro’s Res rusticae, published in 37 bce.²⁷ Varro’s influence is felt especially in Books 3 and 4 (but note also the parallels between Rust. 1.1.4–7 and the opening invocation of the gods in G. 1.8–23, and between Rust. 1.69.2–3 and the end of Book 1). The didactic narrator is portrayed as a saviour-sage taking pity on “the farmers . . . ignorant of the path” (1.41), but the poem’s practical advice avoids technical precision (in contrast to the fragments of Nicander) and the addressee is the markedly non-rustic Maecenas (1.2, 2.41, 3.41, 4.2), who is addressed with Lucretian overtones.²⁸ As with the De rerum natura, the central concern is rather the place in the world of human beings and their possibilities of happiness.

In the established manner of much didactic poetry, passages of direct instruction are interspersed with apparent digressions, descriptive or reflective passages with a more figured relationship to the main theme such as Jupiter’s paternal disruption of the golden age (1.121–159) and the “praises of Italy” (2.136–177). On the Lucretian model, the concluding section of each book in particular stands out: the troubles of Italy in Book 1 (464–514), the virtues of the country life in Book 2 (475–540), the Noric plague in Book 3 (478–566, imitating the end of the De rerum natura), and especially the “epyllion” of Aristaeus and Orpheus that ends Book 4 (315–558).²⁹ This last section dramatizes (but also in part deconstructs) the opposition between the successful conquest of nature through hard work (Aristaeus) and the pathos of loss and failure (Orpheus), a theme which can be traced throughout the Georgics and which has led to a debate over the “optimism” or “pessimism” of the work (for similar disputes over the Aeneid, see below).³⁰ The contemporary relevance of this opposition is reinforced by a constant comparison between the bee society of Book 4 and Virgil’s Rome.³¹

The poem concludes with an epilogue (modelled in part on the conclusion to Callimachus’s Aetia) in which Virgil contrasts Augustus’s “thundering” on the Euphrates with his own easeful retirement in Naples (4.559–564) and looks back to the Eclogues, here depicted as the playful work of his youth (4.565–566).³² At the opening of Book 3, Virgil had promised to write a political epic (3.46–48), a familiar enough move in a poetic recusatio (refusal to handle a topic), but just as Callimachus at the end of the Aetia prophesies a move “down” to the Iambi (fr. 112), so at the end of the Georgics we are left feeling that for Virgil the next move would be “upwards” in the hierarchy of genres.³³

The Aeneid

Virgil’s final work was the Aeneid (in Latin Aeneis), an account in twelve books of hexameter verse of the flight of Aeneas from Troy and his battles in Italy against Turnus (1) to found a new home which would be the origin of Rome. As an epic, the Aeneid occupies the summit of ancient generic classification. Epic was the sustained narration of great events (“kings and heroes,” according to Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1) by an inspired and omniscient but distanced narrator (see vates); it was also the genre in which the anxiety of influence was greatest, since any epic was inevitably read against Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, by common consent the greatest poems of antiquity. In the Aeneid, intertextuality with these two poems is intense: the standard study takes sixty pages just to list the most obvious parallels.³⁴ The fundamental framework is that of the Odyssey (note also the focus on the hero in the poem’s title).³⁵ The first half of each epic describes the wanderings of the hero, the second half his fight for victory in his (adopted) home, and Aeneas is harried by Juno as Odysseus is by Poseidon. The anger of Juno (Aen. 1.4, 11) also corresponds to the anger of Achilles (and Apollo) in the Iliad, however, and the end of the poem is more like the battle between Achilles and Hector in Iliad 22 than the killing of the suitors in Odyssey 22.³⁶ One may also characterize the first six books of the Aeneid as “Odyssean,” in contrast with the poem’s second, “Iliadic” half.³⁷ But the correspondences with both epics go much further and much deeper.³⁸ The relationship is signalled in the famous opening words of the poem: arma virumque cano, “arms and the man I sing,” where “arms” points to the Iliad, “man” to the Odyssey (and “I sing” perhaps to so-called cyclic epic: cf. Ilias parva fr. 1).

Two other epics are also of importance for the Aeneid: the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, on the one hand, and Ennius’s Annales, on the other.³⁹ The relationship with Ennius, who chronicled Rome’s foundation and imperial expansion up until his own day, is of great ideological significance.⁴⁰ But the range of material whose traces may be detected in the Aeneid is vast: it includes other earlier epics such as Greek cyclic epic (see Epic Cycle) and Naevius’s Punica, Greek and Roman tragedy, Hellenistic poetry, lyric and elegy, and many other genres, including prose genres such as historiography and antiquarian writing.⁴¹ The Aeneid thus both preserves epic’s narrower generic norms and expands epic in the direction of the generic variety that critics such as M. Bakhtin have seen as peculiar to the modern novel (a tendency extended even further by Ovid). Each included genre brings with it its own resonances ranging from the “private” focus of elegy to the moral seriousness of historiography.⁴²

Although the particular version of the Aeneas legend presented in the Aeneid has become canonical, the versions of the myth in the preceding tradition were many and varied, and reconstructing the tangle of alternative narratives against which the Aeneid situates itself has always been a standard critical procedure.⁴³ It is clear that many of the details offered by Virgil were by no means the standard ones in his day, that his sources were multiple, and that he experienced no compunction about free invention. As in the Odyssey, Virgil carries his reader into the middle of events (in medias res) at the outset of the poem: Aeneas, on his way to Italy, is blown off course to North Africa by a storm instigated by Juno (Book 1). There he meets Dido and tells her the story of the fall of Troy (Book 2) and of his subsequent wanderings (Book 3). He and Dido become lovers, and he forgets his mission; Mercury is sent to remind him, and his departure leads to Dido’s tragic suicide (Book 4). In Book 5, the threat of another storm forces Aeneas to land in Sicily, where funeral games for his dead father Anchises are celebrated. After Juno instigates the Trojan women to burn the ships, some of the group are left behind in Sicily and Anchises appears in a dream to urge Aeneas to visit the Sibyl of Cumae (near Naples). The first half of the epic concludes with Aeneas’s consultation of the Sibyl and his visit with her to the underworld, where he meets his father and receives a vision of the future of Rome (Book 6), the so-called “parade of heroes.”

The events of the poem’s second half are described by Virgil as a “greater work” (7.44, maius opus). Landing in Latium, Aeneas sends a successful embassy to the Latin king Latinus, but Juno uses the Fury Allecto (see Erinyes) to incite the young Rutulian king Turnus and Latinus’s wife Amata to encourage war. Aeneas’s son Iulus kills a pet stag while hunting, and from that small spark a full-blown war develops. Before battle commences we are given a catalogue of Italian forces (Book 7). In Book 8, Aeneas, advised in a dream by the river Tiber, visits the Arcadian king Evander, who is living on the future site of Rome. Evander’s young son Pallas joins the Trojan forces, and Aeneas receives a gift of armour from his mother Venus, including a shield which (like the parade of heroes in Book 6) depicts future events in the history of Rome, most notably the battle of Actium (Book 8). The succeeding books describe the fighting between the Trojans and Latins, with emphasis being given to the tragic cost of the war. The young lovers Nisus (2) and Euryalus die in a night expedition (Book 9); Turnus kills Pallas; Aeneas kills both the equally tragic youth Lausus and his father the evil Mezentius (Book 10); and the female warrior Camilla, Turnus’s ally, is killed by a spear through her breast (Book 11). Finally, in Book 12, Aeneas and Turnus meet in single combat despite Juno’s attempts to delay the duel. Aeneas is victorious, and hesitates over whether to spare Turnus until he sees the sword-belt that Turnus had taken from the dead Pallas. In a paroxysm of love and anger, he then slaughters Turnus.

Throughout the Aeneid, as this summary suggests, there is a strong narrative teleology, reaching beyond the events of the story to the future Rome. Fate is a central concept; it coincides with the will of Jupiter, though the exact relationship between Jupiter and Fate is kept vague.⁴⁴ Juno, pained and angry at past events (1.25–28), attempts always to retard the progress of the action, acting as a sort of “counter-fate” (7.294, 313–316). She is always doomed to failure: at the end of the epic she is reconciled to the fate of Aeneas (12.808–828) but we know that this is only temporary (10.11–15).⁴⁵ Onto the opposition between the king and queen of heaven (1.9) may be projected many other binary oppositions in the poem: heaven and hell, order and disorder, reason and emotion, success and failure, future and past, epic and tragedy. The treatment of these binary oppositions has been the central issue in criticism on the Aeneid. Although in general they coincide with one another, the correspondence is never absolute: if Juno naturally turns to Allecto and the underworld (7.312), Jupiter, god of the bright sky (1.253), also uses the infernal Dirae (see Erinyes) as the instruments of his wrath (12.849–852). If Aeneas, like Hercules (cf. 8.299; cf, 2.314), represents reason and self-control, he also concludes the epic with an act of passion when furious anger overcomes him and he slays Turnus (12.946–947). It is possible to see such apparent inconsistencies as “energizing contradictions” which reflect a complex worldview.⁴⁶ Alternatively, as in the “two voices” school of criticism that came to prominence at Harvard in the 1960s, they may be seen as undermining or subverting claims to dominance on the part of Roman order and the “Herculean” model.⁴⁷ One may also, with the deconstructionists, see the instability of the aforementioned oppositions as a manifestation of the inherent instability of all polarities. Naturally, simple appeal to the text or its historical setting cannot settle which of these approaches is to be adopted.

Three particular aspects of the debate among these schools of thought should be mentioned. First, the opposition between Jupiter and Juno is a gendered one, and many of the other oppositions identified in the poem—reason versus emotion, for example—relate to ancient (and modern) conceptions of typically male or female characteristics. Women in the Aeneid feature predominantly as suffering victims who stand in opposition to the progress of history (Juno, Dido, Amata, Camilla, Juturna), and this feature of the poem may be read either as an affront to the values of martial epic or as reinforcing them (since such women are always ultimately brushed aside). Accordingly, Virgil’s treatment of gender is distinctive and central to the interpretation of the poem, whether the focus is on heroic ethics or on family relations.⁴⁸

Second, the political aspects of the oppositions are not merely implicit. The hero of the epic is pius Aeneas (1.378; see pietas and religion, Roman, terms relating to), a man marked out by attachment to communal values who after the fall of Troy turns away from individual heroism to save his father, and who in Carthage rejects personal happiness for the sake of his son’s future and the destiny of Rome (4.267–276). This subordination of the individual to the collective is often seen as a primary component of Roman ideology, and its embodiment in Aeneas is a central feature of the epic. At the same time, as in Virgil’s earlier work, the pain and loss suffered by individuals are at least equally prominent in the poem.⁴⁹ The issue of the relationship between individual and community is raised in a different form by the question of the poem’s relationship to the new autocratic rule of Augustus. In antiquity, it was commonly believed (Servius, Aen. pref.) that the Aeneid was written in order to praise Augustus, who receives explicit panegyric from Jupiter (1.286–296, though Caesar at 1.286 is ambiguous), from Anchises (6.791–805), and in the narrator’s description of the shield which Vulcan makes for Aeneas (8.671–728). Much of the imagery of the Aeneid can be related to Augustan symbolic discourse, and there are many typological links between Augustus and Aeneas and other figures such as Hercules.⁵⁰ On the other hand, many have seen the poem’s tragic elements as incompatible with a celebration of power. It is impossible to separate the question of the Aeneid’s political tendency—in its crudest form, whether we are to understand it as pro- or anti-Augustan—from the wider ideological issues mentioned above, and, once again, the debate cannot be resolved by an appeal to text or history.⁵¹ (See propaganda.)

Finally, these same issues have also surfaced in relation to the philosophical aspects of the Aeneid. Just as the Georgics may be read as a reply to the De rerum natura, so the Aeneid may be seen as again “remythologizing” Lucretian rationalism.⁵² As Aeneas rejects retirement in Carthage or Sicily in favour of his fate in Italy, so the Aeneid turns from “ignoble ease” (G. 4.564) to severe civic and imperial commitment (compare 6.851 with Lucr. 5.1130, though there is more than one way of reading the intertextuality). Several passages of the Aeneid are explicitly philosophical in their language, most notably Anchises’ account of the soul in 6.724–751; this passage contains both Stoic and Platonic elements, and such eclecticism is typical and unsurprising in a period during which the two schools drew closer to one another thanks to figures such as Antiochus (11) and Posidonius (2). But debates over the philosophy of the Aeneid have concentrated on ethics and the theory of the passions, especially anger. Is the Aeneid essentially a Stoic text, which deprecates emotion? Or is it rather Peripatetic, and does it therefore endorse a proper measure of anger?⁵³ Others have looked to Cynicism, still others to the Epicurean theory of anger as presented in Philodemus’s De ira.⁵⁴ Any decision on these matters must involve a consideration of the poem’s imagery, as well as of explicit statements by the characters and narrator, and yet evaluating these images is not a simple matter. The poem’s depiction of the gods is similarly complex: although they may at times function as metaphors for psychological activity on the human plane, they cannot simply be reduced to allegory.⁵⁵

The classic status of the Aeneid is immediately apparent in the parody of its opening line (and 7.41) in the first of Ovid’s Amores (date uncertain, but perhaps before 7 bce), where it is treated as epitomizing epic openings generally.⁵⁶ Intertextuality with the Aeneid is the chief means by which Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s De bello civili, and—especially—the works of the Flavian epicists generate meaning: in these works, the Aeneid is figured as the official voice of the empire, to be subverted or recuperated.⁵⁷ But just as all Greek literature situates itself against Homer, so traces of the Aeneid can be seen in every genre of Latin verse and prose, Christian as well as pagan.⁵⁸ Inevitably, this role as a machine for generating meaning in others, a stable backdrop for new dramas, may lead to a simplification of the possibilities of the original text, but the links established by imitations between various parts of the Aeneid also often offer the possibility of new critical insights into the Aeneid itself.⁵⁹