The Eclogues

While Virgil’s Eclogues seems to celebrate farming and shepherding in the Roman countryside on a surface level, its poetic world has little connection to the realities of ancient agriculture. Pastoral is a highly literary genre, one consciously removed from the harsh realities of rural life. It was developed not by real farmers (like the early Greek poet Hesiod, who grew up on a working farm), but by urban dwellers who romanticized the country as an escape from the stresses of modern life. In this regard, pastoral is closer to the Romantic movement of the 19th and 20th centuries than to a farmer’s manual. As the poet Alexander Pope describes, pastoral’s illusion consists “in only exposing the best side of a shepherd’s life and in concealing its miseries” (Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, Alexander Pope).

The ancients credited the Greek poet Theocritus with inventing the pastoral genre in the third century BCE. While the details of Theocritus’s life are largely lost to history, modern scholars know he was native to Syracuse, a city on the Italian island of Sicily (thus Virgil often refers to pastoral forms as “Syracusan” or “Sicilian”). Theocritus’s pastoral collection Idylls is the most important intertext for Virgil’s Eclogues; many of Virgil’s poems are based on (or recut from) Theocritean characters and themes. Virgil heavily models Eclogue 2 on Theocritus’s Idyll 4, where the cyclops Polyphemus laments his unrequited love for the sea nymph Galataea. Theocritus also pioneered other features of the Eclogues, from singing competitions to the genre’s accepted meter, dactylic hexameter, which it shares with epic.

Modern readers might feel as if Virgil plagiarized, but in antiquity, literary imitations were not frowned upon. The mark of a skilled poet was not his originality, but rather his ability to rework the themes and set pieces of his predecessors into a new, unique pastiche. Like many ancient poems, the Eclogues is an erudite (or scholarly) work. Virgil assumes his reader to be familiar not only with a rich tapestry of Greek and Roman myths, but also older pastoral poems. The importance of this transmission and transformation of texts across generations is reflected in the work itself. Virgil often includes scenes of one generation’s artistic knowledge being passed down to the next. (A prime example can be found in Eclogue 5, where the elderly Menalcas gifts his favorite pipe to his younger colleague, Mopsus, Lines 84-94.) In a metaliterary sense, such images reenact Theocritus (and the Eclogues’ many other influencers) passing the poetic torch to Virgil.

Despite Virgil’s deep sense of poetic inheritance, he also pioneered many new pastoral aspects himself. He was the first to write pastoral poetry in Latin and is universally acknowledged as the most skilled of the Roman pastoral poets. While Theocritus kept politics separate from his work, Virgil boldly brought contemporary issues into his idyllic pastoral world. He makes his intent clear in Eclogue 1, where land appropriations end the narrative for one shepherd before the story even begins. He also invented the legendary pastoral land Arcadia (sometimes called Arcady). Arcadia became extremely popular with Renaissance fans of pastoral in Italy. From there, Virgil’s work was adopted by the west and influenced artists and writers such as the Romantics.