35 pages • 1 hour read
VirgilThe Eclogues
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Eclogue 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Eclogue 6 Summary
In a brief couplet at the start, the speaker refers to the Muse of comedy and good cheer, Thalia, describing how she prefers he write pastoral poetry (“to play with Syracusan verse […] to inhabit the woodlands;” Lines 1-2). He tried to compose another genre of poetry, epic (“singing of battles and kings,” Line 3), but the god Apollo (called Cynthius here) encouraged him to write pastoral forms. The speaker alludes to the military exploits of Varus, a contemporary Roman of Virgil’s time, before proceeding with his pastoral story (Lines 6-12). He commands the Pierides (another name for the Muses) to begin (Line 13).
Two boys, Mnasyllus and Chromis, find the woodland god of drunken revelry, Silenus, hungover and asleep in a cave. With the help of a nymph, the boys bind the god with his own garlands as they want him to sing a song. Laughing, Silenus agrees, while darkly hinting at “another reward” for the nymph (Lines 13-30).
Silenus sings of the initial forming of the cosmos, the cosmogony (Lines 31-41). He then sings about mythological figures—including Pyrrha, who survived a great flood in the early days of man (Line 42), Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for mankind (Line 43), and Pasiphae, who fell in love with a bull (Lines 46-60).
In Line 65, Silenus abruptly shifts topics to the initiation of Gallus, another Roman poet and a close friend of Virgil. The Muses, Apollo’s retinue, decorate Gallus in greenery and give him a reed pipe (Lines 65-74). Silenus questions why he should speak of frightening monsters like Scylla and other disturbing stories, like the rape of the mythological heroine Philomela (Lines 75-82). The river Eurotas heard such tales when Apollo grieved by his banks long ago (Lines 83-87).
Eclogue 6 Analysis
Eclogue 6 is one of the collection’s more mysterious poems as its source texts are unknown to modern scholarship.
The poem opens with the speaker’s explanation for why he prefers to write pastoral poetry over ancient literature’s most elevated genre, epic. The Muse Thalia prefers “Syracusan” verse; Virgil references Theocritus, who invented pastoral poetry and was from Syracuse. The military exploits of Roman statesman Varus would be better suited for epic, which covers topics like nation-building and heroism (like Virgil’s later masterpiece, the Aeneid). After this short introduction, Virgil invites the Pierides (another name for the Muses) to begin. Ironically, this is a common literary device used to start an epic poem, not a pastoral one.
Two young men trap the hungover Silenus, a woodland party god, as they want him to sing a song. Silenus’s threatening nature is quickly enforced. In a moment meant to be comedic to ancient audiences, he suggests he will assault the nymph who helped the boys trap him (Lines 26-27). Many of Silenus’s mythological references are united by the violent aspects of love—such as the story of Queen Pasiphae who was sexually obsessed with a bull (Lines 46-60). This emphasizes the dichotomy between love as a creative force—a foundational one as is the nature of cosmogony (Lines 32-41)—and a destructive force that ruins human relationships and affairs.
Virgil revisits the theme of arts being passed down from one generation to the next. Silenus carefully picks the elements he wants to share with the boys and withholds the less savory ones (i.e., the monstrous Scylla and Philomela, who were both sexually assaulted and subsequently transformed). Virgil’s younger contemporary Ovid would flesh out this ancient connection between disordered love and metamorphoses in his own epic poem, the Metamorphoses.
