Virgil's Eclogues

By Virgil, Len Krisak and Gregson Davis

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues.

The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry.

Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780812205367

Virgil

Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) was a Roman poet. He was born near Mantua in northern Italy. Educated in rhetoric, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy, Virgil moved to Rome where he was known as a particularly shy member of Catullus’ literary circle. Suffering from poor health for most of his life, Virgil began his career as a poet while studying Epicureanism in Naples. Around 38 BC, he published the Eclogues, a series of pastoral poems in the style of Hellenistic poet Theocritus. In 29 BC, Virgil published his next work, the Georgics, a long didactic poem on farming in the tradition of Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the last decade of his life, Virgil worked on his masterpiece the Aeneid, an epic poem commissioned by Emperor Augustus. Expanding upon the story of the Trojan War as explored in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the hero Aeneas from the destruction of Troy to the discovery of the region that would later become Rome. Posthumously considered Rome’s national poet, Virgil’s reputation has grown through the centuries—in large part for his formative influence on Dante’s Divine Comedy—to secure his position as a foundational figure for all of Western literature.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE TRIO OF MASTERPIECES THAT VIRGIL COMPOSED during the prolonged sunset of the Roman Republic¹ begins with the collection of ten poems that we have come to know by the conventional title Eclogues (Selections). Though these exquisite short poems inaugurate the sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are neither less elegant in style nor less profound in philosophical insight than the later, more extensive works.

The book of Eclogues appeared on the scene approximately seven years before the decisive naval battle of Actium in 30 B.C.E. Octavian’s triumph over Antony and Cleopatra in that contest brought the protracted Civil Wars to a close—an era scarred by radical social and political upheavals. The violent disintegration of the political fabric of the Republic had occasioned widespread anxiety among all sectors of society, and the establishment of a stable peace—the pax Augusta—was yet to materialize. An acute awareness of the disruption of the sociopolitical order is refracted through the artistic prism of the Eclogues. Their youthful author, who was to breathe new life into the Hellenistic genre of bucolic poetry, had very recently emerged from philosophical studies in an Epicurean school centered in the Bay of Naples, where Greek teachers such as Philodemus and Siro counted the Roman poets Horace and Varius among their associates and pupils.²

Virgil is a poet of ideas. Like his close friend, Horace, he thought deeply about the philosophical prerequisites for attaining inner tranquility, and about the limits on the human capacity to cope with extremes of adversity. He consistently explored these issues through the medium of poetry in all three of the major genres in which he worked: bucolic, didactic, and epic. While the traces of a deep philosophical Bildung are manifest throughout his poetic œuvre, these need to be extrapolated, in the case of the bucolic poems, from the conversations among his poet-herdsmen. At the same time, such extrapolations should not be guided by a desire to confine the various and sometimes competing worldviews expressed obliquely in the poems to the dogmas of any particular school.

When Virgil eventually composed the prologue to his magisterial epic, the Aeneid, he famously foregrounded the question of the nature of the Olympian gods in his idiosyncratic variation on the epic invocation of the muse: Can anger so intense possess the minds of gods? (tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Aeneid 1.11). The rhetorical interrogation represents a startling new note in the discourse of epic prologues, but it would be a mistake to suppose that Virgil’s interest in such ethical paradoxes made its first appearance in the opening lines of the Aeneid. It is a regrettable aspect of the reception of the Eclogues that the prevailing orthodoxy tends to treat the collection as lightweight and charming verse, while their philosophical underpinnings have by and large retreated to the margins of critical exegesis. The Eclogues are in desperate need of rescue from centuries of trivialization of their intellectual content.

The Eclogues have been conventionally assigned to the genre of the pastoral. As a few perceptive critics have noted,³ however, the label is misleading on several nontrivial counts, for the complex of traits that came to define the pastoral tradition in later European literature is only superficially connected with Virgilian bucolic. It would be no exaggeration to state that the post-Virgilian pastoral genre (if we set aside the later Latin practitioners of the imperial period, such as Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus), which properly begins in the Italian Renaissance, is tangential in many important respects to the Roman poet’s transmutation of Hellenistic bucolic poetry. A less anachronistic nomenclature for the genre would be the older term, bucolic, which connects the Virgilian generic inflection with a dominant subgroup of poems in the corpus of the Greek Hellenistic poet Theocritus. Virgil’s book of Eclogues harks back to, and transforms, Theocritean bucolic verse, but in opening up a new space within the earlier Greek genre it does not, as is still commonly repeated in the standard commentaries, sponsor an idealized, utopian Arcadia that is the stuff of later European poets and critics alike.

Let us engage in a round of timely iconoclasm about the nature of Virgil’s Arcadia. In blatant contradistinction to a world of utopian fantasy and escapist bliss, the world of the Eclogues is permeated through and through with portrayals of human infelicity, catastrophic loss, and emotional turbulence. The defining tenor of these poetic sketches is a profound anxiety about the human capacity to cope with misfortune. A cursory review of the dominant themes of the ten poems in the cycle makes it ineluctably clear that Virgil’s primary concern is with the world of human misery rather than with frivolous escapist constructions of an alternative universe purified of anguish and angst. A brief poem by poem synopsis of the predominant themes of Virgilian bucolic will be an instructive exercise.

The opening programmatic Eclogue juxtaposes a herdsman who is currently experiencing good fortune (Tityrus) with one who is a recent victim of misfortune (Meliboeus). The latter is in deep distress after having been dispossessed of his farm, while the former has had his plot restored following a presumed dispossession. At the conclusion of their exchange, the fortunate herdsman offers consolation to his despondent interlocutor in the form of an invitation to share a meal in his humble abode. Tityrus carefully contextualizes his present felicity at more than one juncture in the course of the dialogue: he explains to Meliboeus that it is contingent on the disposition of a divine benefactor and, more important, that his life has in the past been subject to vicissitude. E.2 is an anguished monologue chanted by a herdsman whose love is unreciprocated and who eventually manages to place a limit (modus) on his torment by recognizing his pathological condition (dementia) through the exercise of singing ("O Corydon, O Corydon! What is this madness?").⁴ The third poem in the series exposes the emotional underbelly of the herdsmens’ interpersonal relations. In the succinct formulation of Guy Lee, the author of the Penguin bilingual edition of the Eclogues: Two shepherds meet and taunt each other with accusations of theft, sexual perversion, malicious damage to property, jealousy and musical incompetence.⁵ This accurate précis hardly amounts to a portrayal of utopian bliss.

The fourth Eclogue, which has earned the sobriquet Messianic because of its reference to a miraculous child (puer)

Reviews for Virgil's Eclogues

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

These poems provide the foundation for a definition of pastoral. Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called not an idyll but an eclogue, populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and singing in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. The eclogues, written under the patronage of Maecenas highlight individual characters like Corydon and Alexis. In David Ferry's beautiful translation they come alive in a contemporary idiom. As Michael Dirda has said, this is a "volume to buy, read , and treasure."

[joririchardson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Before the famous Greek author Virgil wrote "The Aeniad," he completed these ten pastoral works of poetry.I found these poems to be enjoyable to read and fairly easy to get through, but more often than not highly vague. The meaning or subject of the poems was not always apparent.Thus, I read the "Eclogues" again, this time aided by a study guide in the back of my edition. It proved to be extremely helpful, and I would definitely recommend that any reader use something similar.The language of this poetry is flowing and pretty, classical and intelligent, sensual, merry, and at times tragic.There are hints of divinities, love affairs, and even homosexuality in Eclogue II.The charmingly simple, yet nonetheless powerful, themes of these short poems focus on things such as shepherds, singing contests, sexual desire, twins, and soldiers.I enjoyed reading this book, but not as much as other poetry of the time period.Also look into - Sappho.

[dirkjohnson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Virgil's Eclogues are the second and most influential step in the establishment of the pastoral mode in European and European colonial poetry (the first were some of Theocritus' Idylls). One is of course entitled to an opinion, but one should be aware that one's opinion of Virgil's poetry really doesn't matter; it certainly doesn't have any bearing upon the quality or influence of his poetry. Personally, I prefer many of the Ancient Greeks to any of the Romans. I also frequently feel that Virgil receives too much attention relative to the Greeks. There are many reasons for this, many of them historical. I'm not trying to change things with regard to who is more popular. Virgil was among the greatest of all poets who have ever lived. His Eclogues are perfect gems of the genre, strung on a single necklace. I'll go so far as to say that no poet has ever been greater than Virgil, not even Homer (pretending for the moment that Homer was a single person). To me, both the Odyssey and the Iliad are far superior to the Aeneid. Even this isn't a fair comparison because I've read Homer in Greek but not Virgil in Latin. Yet I must say that Homer didn't write the equivalent of Virgil's Eclogues nor of his Georgics, so Virgil has greater breadth. And, even though I prefer the Idylls of Theocritus to the Eclogues of Virgil, Virgil's Eclogues are more completely of the genre toward which Theocritus only pointed, and as such they are a more finished work of art as a whole than the Idylls, which aren't all written in the same genre. It's true that Virgil copied Theocritus, but also true that Theocritus didn't write an enduring epic poem, or any epic poem as far as we know. Seeing ratings below three for any poetry of Virgil's (since it's Virgil's poems that gets rated in aggregate, not any particular translation or edition) only makes me wonder how someone so ignorant could even end up with a LibraryThing account in the first place. If you don't like Virgil, that's fine. There's no question but that you're entitled to your own likes and dislikes. But please don't presume to rate Virgil or any other truly great poet unless you've read him or her very deeply. If you still think he sucks after reading him deeply in Latin, please do rate him low. And, in that case, please let me know why you think so. But even then it's only one opinion against the judgment of 2,000 years of readers and scholars.On the other hand, possibly those rating Virgil's poetry on the low end of the scale are actually rating the translation or the edition that they read. Such a rating is completely valid, but, unfortunately, such a rating has no meaning whatsoever on LibraryThing. I wonder if there might be a way to create a composite rating for an author with separate ratings for each work and individual editions of each work. This would be something I might find truly useful. But it's probably difficult to do and most people likely don't care anyway.Regarding the edition of the Eclogues at hand, the one translated by David Ferry and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I will only say that the translation is very, very good. Ferry has clearly read his Virgil carefully and draws over into English some of Virgil's excellences, which is to say that Ferry is a good poet himself. Even though I haven't studied Latin formally, I like having the Latin en face since so much of Latin is transparent to even an ignorant one such as I am.