Eclogues

Overview

About sixty pages, ten short pastoral poems written around 39 BCE and modelled on Theocritus, Virgil’s first published work. Shepherds sing of love, hold contests, mourn the dead Daphnis and lose their farms to veterans of the civil wars.

The fourth Eclogue foretells a child whose birth will bring back a golden age, later read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ; the tenth consoles the poet Gallus for a lost lover. The songs mix Arcadian landscape with the politics of Rome after Caesar’s assassination.

What happens

Tityrus and Meliboeus. The first poem sets a shepherd at ease under his beech against another driving his goats into exile, one saved by a young god at Rome and the other dispossessed, and the whole collection lives in the space between them.

Corydon and Alexis. In the second the shepherd Corydon sings his hopeless love for the boy Alexis, offering gifts the city boy will never want, and ends by turning back to his half-pruned vines.

Singing matches. The third and seventh stage contests between rival shepherds, capping each other’s couplets before a judge, and the fifth has Mopsus and Menalcas mourn the dead Daphnis and then raise him to the stars.

The golden age. The fourth, addressed to the consul Pollio, foretells a child whose birth will end the iron age and bring back the golden, when the earth gives freely and the lion lies with the flock.

Silenus and the dispossessed. In the sixth the captured Silenus sings the creation of the world and the old myths; in the ninth, two farmers on the road recall the songs of Menalcas, whose poetry could not save his land from the soldiers.

Gallus in Arcadia. The tenth brings the elegist Gallus, dying of love for the faithless Lycoris, into the shepherds’ country, and closes the book with the poet rising to go home as the evening shadows lengthen.

How to read it

Read the first and ninth Eclogues as the political frame of the collection, the confiscations of the triumvirs brought into a world Theocritus had kept free of Rome.

Pay close attention to the fourth, and to how a poem for a consul’s year became a prophecy of Christ, which made Virgil the one Roman poet the Middle Ages could almost canonise.

Notice that Arcadia is a landscape of the mind rather than a region of Greece, and trace how its shepherds singing and grieving became European poetry’s image of lost innocence.

Consider the tenth, where the genre consoles a real poet for a real loss and then says goodbye to itself, and ask what the Eclogues are finally about.

Read these poems alongside the Georgics to see how Virgil moved from the shepherd’s song to the farmer’s labour, and what he kept of Arcadia when he did.

Questions it raises

• Who is the child of the fourth Eclogue, and does the poem’s later career as a Christian prophecy tell us more about Virgil or about his readers?
• Is Tityrus’s ease under his beech a celebration of Octavian’s favour or a quiet reproach, given that Meliboeus is going into exile in the same poem?
• What did Virgil add to Theocritus by bringing Rome into the pastoral, and what did he lose?
• Why does the collection end with a poet from the real world dying of love in Arcadia, and what does the closing line about shade and shadows mean for the genre?
• Is Arcadia a refuge from politics or a place from which to see it more clearly?
• How did ten short poems about shepherds shape eighteen centuries of European verse, and what did Milton and Spenser find in them that we might miss?