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The Eclogues may be studied in a number of different ways—as biographical material, as social and political documents, as poems. I am here concerned only with the last. In this first collection of Virgil’s poetry we already see some of the qualities which were to play their part in the Georgics and the Aeneid, and also some qualities which were not to reappear in these two more ambitious works. Essentially the Eclogues are set in a minor key; they do not aim at power or dramatic tension; their relationship with human experience is of a circumscribed kind; their method is mannered, largely conventional and traditional, often very imitative of Theocritus; they sing of beauty and sorrow and death, but in my view they do not generally explore these things. They are delicate and fragile poems, presented in a diction which charms and soothes, in a metre whose cadences have always captivated those with enough Latin to read them.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1967
Footnotes
page no 6 note 1
E. de Saint-Denis’s Budé edition (1942) is outstandingly good in its presentation of the poems as literature, with just enough commentary for the necessary background. J. Perret’s slender edition (1961) is sensitive and attractive; Holtorf’s (1959) is much fuller. We still lack an English commentary to replace Page and Conington. The major literary studies (in addition to the older books by Sellar, Glover, Prescott, Rand—p. 4 n. 1) are: H. J. Rose, The Eclogues of Vergil (Berkeley, 1942); and Otis, Guillemin, Perret (p. 4 n. 2). There are useful essays in E. V. Rieu’s Penguin translation, and in G. Stégen’s two volumes (Namur, 1955 and 1957). The factual aspects of the poems, with full bibliography, are gathered and discussed in Büchner’s article s.v. Vergilius in Pauly-Wissowa, RE (1955).
References
page no 6 note 2 On the continuity of Virgil’s poetic development see especially Otis, Klingner, Commager’s Intro, (p. 4 n. 2).
page no 7 note 1 See Wilkinson, L. P., Golden Latin Artistry (Cambridge, 1963), 37 Google Scholar ff., 194 ff., and Holtorf’s edition, 253 ff.
page no 7 note 2 The phrase has been much discussed: see especially Rose, ch. ii. The meaning of molle is defined in the passage in Horace by its context in opposition to forte. epos (i.e. the ‘powerful’, the ‘sublime’ is not sought in the Eclogues). Facetus seem to me to combine the ideas of bright, as opposed to dark and morbid, and sophisticated and playful, as opposed to rustic. Spence (Polymetis) defines Virgil’s shepherds as rural not rustic, genteel not homely.
page no 7 note 3 See Rose, chs. ii and vii; for an unsympathetic account of Virgil’s ‘close and indeed servile imitation’, see Conington’s edition vol. i., pp. 5 ff.
page no 8 note 1 See Snell, B., The Discovery of the Mind (trans. Rosenmeyer, Oxford, 1953), ch. 13 Google Scholar: ‘Arcadia, the discovery of a spiritual landscape.’
page no 8 note 2 Servius on Ecl. x. 46 says ‘hi autem omnes versus Galli sunt, de ipsis translati carminibus’. On the whole subject see Skutsch, F., Aus Vergils Frühzeit (Leipzig, 1901)Google Scholar, and Gallus und Vergil (Leipzig, 1906); Skutsch, O., RhM xcix (1956), 193 Google Scholar ff.; Stewart, Z., HSP lxiv (1959). 179 Google Scholar ff; Elder, J. P., HSP lxv (1961), 109 Google Scholar ff; Kidd, D. A., BICS xi (1964), 54 Google Scholarff.; on the Callimachean and neoteric background see Clausen, Wendell, GRBS v (1964), 181 Google Scholar ff., and A. M. Guillemin (p. 4 n. 2) esp. ch. iv, ‘Le livre du cercle’.
page no 9 note 1 On this see Wilkinson, L. P., Hermes xciv (1966), 320 Google Scholar ff., and Rose, ch. iii.
page no 9 note 2 Some have disagreed, but cf. Holtorf, 40 ff., 128 ff.
page no 9 note 3 Herrmann, L., Les masques et les visages dans les Bucoliques de Virgile (Brussels, 1930)Google Scholar; for a more moderate allegorical interpretation see Phillimore, J. S., Pastoral and Allegory (Oxford, 1925)Google Scholar. On the characters generally see Hahn, E. A., TAPA lxxv (1944). 196 Google Scholarff.
page no 9 note 4 See A. S. F. Gow on Theoc. Idyll vii.
page no 9 note 5 Servius has some good remarks on this: e.g. on Ecl. iii. 20 he mentions a particularly far-fetched allegorical explanation of the loss of Menalcas’ goat, and continues: ‘sed melius simpliciter accipimus; refutandae enim sunt allegoriae in bucolico carmine, nisi cum (ut supra diximus) ex aliqua agrorum perditorum necessitate descendunt’; and on Ecl. iii. 71, speaking of the ten apples which Menalcas gave to his mistress, he says ‘et volunt quidam hoc loco allegoriam esse ad Augustum de decem eclogis—quod super-fluum est; quae enim necessitas hoc loco allegoriae?’ See W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil2 , 155-6, and E. de Saint-Denis’s Bucoliques (Budé), 13 and 43-44. A2
page no 10 note 1 See Rose, ch. vi, where the non-correspondence of particular details is used (wrongly in my view) to eliminate Caesar from the poem.
page no 10 note 2 As we have seen, it is not without precedent in Theocritus vii, and we find it in the Lament for Bion, but Virgil takes it so much further that we are entitled to call it new.
page no 10 note 3 See Grant, W. L., Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill, 1965)Google Scholar. It has not always been to everyone’s taste: cf. Conington on the Eclogues ( vol. i, p. 3: ‘for this corruption probably no writer is so heavily chargeable as Virgil’), and Dr. Johnson on Milton’s Lycidas.
page no 10 note 4 See Royds, T. F., Virgil and Isaiah (Oxford, 1918)Google Scholar, and Mayor, J. B., Fowler, W. Warde, Conway, R. S., Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue (London, 1907)Google Scholar.
page no 10 note 5 See Comparetti, D., Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. Benecke (London, 1885)Google Scholar; Courcelle, P., REA lix (1957), 394 Google Scholar ff.
page no 11 note 1 See Tarn, W. W., JRS xxii (1932), 135 Google Scholar ff., Rose, ch. viii, and the Budé Intro, to Ecl. iv.
page no 11 note 2 It is still disputed which of the two was earlier; see Snell, B., Hermes, lxxiii (1938),.237 Google Scholar ff., Wimmel, W., Hermes lxxxi (1953), 317 Google Scholar ff., Ixxxix (1961), 208 ff., Duckworth, G.E., TAPA, lxxxvii (1956), 281 Google Scholar ff.
page no 11 note 3 H. J. Rose’s chapter on Ecl. iv, like much of the rest of his book, is ironical about “debate, controversy, and more or less plausible and intelligent theorising’”, but is almost wholly taken up with precisely those activities.
page no 11 note 4 Maury, P., Lettres d’Humanité iii (1944), 71–147 Google Scholar; Perret, Virgile2 , 15 ff.; Otis, 129 ff., Duckworth, G. E., AJP lxxv (1954) 1 Google Scholar ff.
page no 12 note 1 Perret recognizes this when in his second edition he abandons some of the numerical correspondences which he had previously accepted from Maury, especially those concerned with magic numerical significance. See also my comments on the structure of the Aeneid, pp. 40—41.