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Virgil and the Confiscations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Michael Winterbottom
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Extract

This brief article tries to make sense of the first and ninth Eclogues with as little recourse as possible to evidence from outside the poems. In particular, it does without the doubtful aid of Servius, who arguably knew little more than we about the meaning and background. Where I give no references (except for the most familiar historical events) I am conjecturing, or adopting the conjectures of others. I have cut secondary references to a minimum, because the doxography of the Eclogues is too vast to be entertaining. Those who are new to the problems can easily find their bearings in the books of H.J. Rose, L.P. Wilkinson, and Gordon Williams. Old hands will know where I am being original: rarely, of course, if ever, for in this field of scholarship more than most it is true that ‘nihil iam dictumst quod non dictum sit prius’.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 1976, pp. 55 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1976

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References

NOTES

1. The Eclogues of Vergil (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1942), ch. 3; The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge 1969), ch. 2; Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford 1968), 307–28. It is with this last that I share most, though not all.

2. In any case Williams, 308–9, rightly stresses that Ecl. 1 is not set in any identifiable part of Italy; nor, despite the allusion to Mantua, is Ecl. 9 (Ibid. 317).

3. At most, it might be thanks for not having lost a farm, or for some unknown act of protection; even then the emphasis on the worthlessness of the farm seems ungracious. But the crucial point is that Tityrus shows no sympathy for Meliboeus, beyond offering him temporary hospitality; but Virgil can hardly have wished to represent himself as the complacent witness of the sufferings of others. Tityrus is made old and grizzled precisely to prevent us from identifying him with Virgil, and from transferring his complacency to the poet. On the other hand, Virgil does show sympathy for Meliboeus, by writing the poem. What Tityrus and Virgil do have in common I state in the text.

4. And to be in a position to save is itself in a way invidious; see Cic. Sull. 72: ‘quia maius est beneficium quam posse debet ciuis ciui dare, ideo a uobis peto ut quod potuit tempori tribuatis, quod fecit ipsi.’ The stress on the protection of Tityrus only makes worse the non-protection of Meliboeus.

5. Virgil seems perfectly happy with Varus in Ecl. 6. So perhaps he did not feel that Varus' failure to relieve Mantua was culpable. Or, more radically, the lines may not imply that Varus was in a position to save the city; see K.Büchner, PW, Sonderdruck, P. Vergilius Maro, col.218: ‘Ebenso aber ist es denkbar, dass nur bei Rettung Mantuas der Dichter äusserlich und innerlich in der Lage sein, Varus zu preisen.’ See also Williams, 322, whose arguments from 9.27–9 can thus be evaded.

6. This seems to be implied by ‘ueteres migrate coloni’ (4). But the background is not altogether clear (Williams, 313–14).

7. The first two extracts are certainly Menalcas'. If 37 ‘id quidem ago’ means, as the commentators assume, ‘'tis that I am busy with’, namely trying to recall one of the songs of Menalcas' (Page; but the line is very abrupt on any account after 30–6), 39–43 will be his. 46–50 might be Moeris' (‘te’, 44), but symmetry would suggest that if three extracts are Menalcas' the fourth should be too. If this is true, Virgil will be emphasizing that even though Lycidas (33–4) and perhaps also Moeris (51–5) are poets in their own right, they can only, in the new circumstances and the absence of Menalcas, sing the poems of another; and even those they are fast forgetting (38, 45, 53).

8. The pessimistic echo is normally used (though see Williams, 327) to prove the priority of the ninth Eclogue. But context matters; there is nothing optimistic about the lines addressed to Daphnis in their present position. The echo, I have suggested, is of the poem where 9. 46–50 were originally placed.

9. I have been much helped by the advice and encouragement of Robin Lane Fox, and by the stimulation of countless pupils, not least Andrew Frost.