10 - Virgilian epic

Summary

In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, avowedly lowly and humble (cf. EcL 4.1-2), which looked back to the 'Syracusan verse' of Theocritus (EcL 6.1-2). Taking leave of this mode at the end of the final poem of the collection, the shepherd-singer, in his characteristic pose recumbent in the shade of a tree, announces his intention to rise (surgamus, EcL 10.75), presaging the composition of the Hesiodic Georgics. He thereby attributes to that poem a more elevated stylistic level, reiterates a hierarchy within the received types of epos, and begins to map an upward trajectory through those types on to the poet's life-cycle. In the opening lines of the Third Georgic, a further move upwards is envisaged (G. 3.8-9):

temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim tollere humo victor que virum volitare per or a.

I must attempt a way, whereby I too may raise myself from the ground and victorious fly through the mouths of men.