The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11).Footnote 1 Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague.Footnote 2 It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem.Footnote 3 If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’Footnote 4 But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.
1. Virgil
The earliest identifiable responses to the fourth Eclogue, with the possible exception of Horace's sixteenth Epode,Footnote 5 come from the author himself. The first of these indicates that the story of the poem's reception had begun even before the collection in which it now stands had left Virgil's study.Footnote 6 In the résumé of Silenus’ narrative of world history in the sixth Eclogue, we find a reference to Saturnia regna (repeating the phrase from the end of Ecl. 4.6, redeunt Saturnia regna) as the period following the Flood, when the earth was repopulated from stones cast by Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha (Ecl. 6.41–4):Footnote 7
After this he tells of the stones hurled by Pyrrha, the reign of Saturn, and the Caucasian birds, and Prometheus’ theft. To these he adds at what spring the sailors called out for Hylas, left behind, how the whole shore echoed ‘Hylas, Hylas’…
Commentators from Servius onwards have noted this unexpected departure from the usual historical sequence: traditionally the Age of Saturn preceded the depopulation and restoration of the world in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha.Footnote 8 Yet the relocation of the Golden Age between the deluge and the expedition of the Argonauts (6.43–4) might be seen as offering a retrospective contribution to the interpretation of the fourth Eclogue. The lines in Eclogue 6 cast Saturnia regna as consequent upon a renewal of humankind after near-total destruction; the era immediately preceding the revival of Saturnia regna proclaimed by Eclogue 4 (a revival that will involve a repetition of the age of heroes, including a new voyage of the Argo, 4.34–5) is thus implicitly characterized as a cataclysm on the scale of the Flood – and this is indeed an image used elsewhere to denote the civil wars ended by Octavian's ascendancy (see Horace, Odes 1.2.1–12, where we even have mention of the return of a saeculum, 5–6).
Might the repetition of Saturnia regna in Eclogue 6 thereby serve to hint at the political situation that led to the creation of the fourth Eclogue? Perhaps, as Charles Segal remarks, ‘These very concise allusions should not be pressed too hard’:Footnote 9 after all, in the song of Silenus the punishment and crime (in that order) of Prometheus come between Saturnia regna and the loss of Hylas, so that the sequence connecting Golden Age and age of heroes is not a direct transition – and in the fourth Eclogue the repeat of the heroic age forms part of the process by which the Golden Age is to be established, not a sequel to it, as in the later poem. It has also been suggested that the verbal repetition from Eclogue 4 was dictated by metrical considerations, rather than by the desire to create a thematic link or dialogue between the two pieces.Footnote 10 In view of the striking internal echoes elsewhere in the Eclogues,Footnote 11 however, it is difficult to rule out the possibility of a deeper engagement between these two items signposted by the shared line-ending here.
The hopes inspired by the Pact of Brundisium, with which the optimistic pronouncements of Virgil's poem have generally been associated,Footnote 12 were soon crushed by the resumption of hostilities, and by the time that Virgil came to compose the Georgics and the Aeneid, the character of Roman politics had changed forever with the emergence of Octavian, later Augustus, as the holder of supreme power in the state and empire. Although the princeps’ position was by no means as secure as it might have seemed with hindsight later in his reign, the Sibylline equivocation of the eclogue was no longer feasible, particularly for a writer under the patronage of Augustus’ minister Maecenas. In his two subsequent works, we see Virgil repositioning the fourth Eclogue, implicitly ‘correcting’ or recasting it as an anticipation of the blessings of the Augustan supremacy, in a way that reclaims the language and imagery of the earlier poem to reflect (at least apparently) the poet's support for the new regime.
The vision of the Golden Age presented in the first book of the Georgics (G. 1.125–59), despite exhibiting among its principal characteristics the absence of agriculture (1.125) and the spontaneous generation of natural produce (1.127–8), is noticeably different from the marvels of the returning Golden Age in Eclogue 4.Footnote 13 The former occurred in the remote past, and was haunted by the threat of sloth (G. 1.124) – a surprisingly negative presentation, surely conditioned by the largely (but not wholly) positive connotations with which Virgil invests agricultural labour in his didactic poem. As so often in the Georgics, however, the poet later complicates his overall position by treating the same thematic material from a different perspective.Footnote 14 The idealized view of rural life offered at the end of the second book culminates in the assertion aureus anc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat (‘this life golden Saturn once led on earth’, 2.538), which creates a clear link with the Saturnia regna of Ecl. 4.6 and the restored gens aurea of Ecl. 4.9; the inhabitants of the countryside are moreover said to be the last people among whom Justice (the Virgo of Ecl. 4.6) passed before leaving the earth (G. 2.473–4). Unusually, this Saturnian Golden Age in Georgics Book 2 – unlike the pre-Jovian Golden Age of the first book – not only makes allowance for the practice of agriculture, a feature specifically absent from the spontaneously fertile world of the fourth Eclogue (4.40–1), but is actually predicated upon it.Footnote 15 Insofar as the agricultural life is presented in Virgil's treatise as a morally preferable alternative to warfare, and in particular to warfare between brothers (see especially G. 1.505–8, 2.495–6), the political implications of exalting this idealized rural existence to the status of a Saturnian Golden Age are clear. Since the poem appears to suggest that its author's fervent hope is for a reflorescence of Italian agriculture under the tutelage of Octavian, who will bring to the world – and more specifically to the land of Italy, Saturnia tellus (2.173) – the peaceful conditions needed for unhindered cultivation (1.498–501), the implicit conclusion is that the only hope for achieving a latter-day restoration of the kind of life led by ‘golden Saturn’ lies in the supremacy of Caesar's heir.Footnote 16
The somewhat oblique intimation conveyed by Virgil's comparison of the farmer's existence to the lifestyle of Saturn in the Georgics is spelled out far more explicitly in the Aeneid,Footnote 17 where in the parade of future Roman notables shown to Aeneas in the underworld the hero's descendant Octavian, now Augustus, is introduced expressly as the subject of prophecy and as the restorer of the Golden Age (Aeneid 6.791–7):
This, this is the man you so often hear promised to you – Augustus Caesar, sprung from a god, who will found again the Golden Age in Latium through the fields once ruled by Saturn, and will extend the empire over Garamantes and Indians; his earth lies beyond the stars, beyond the paths of the year and the sun, where Atlas, bearer of the heavens, turns on his shoulder the axle studded with shining stars.
Within the narrative of the poem, the many promises associated with Augustus by the speaker, Anchises, no doubt indicate previous prophecies which we may imagine his addressee, Aeneas (tibi, 6.791), to have heard – although none of those so far relayed to him in the course of the poem has referred to a specific descendant. For the reader, however, Anchises’ allusion to the frequency with which Augustus Caesar has been promised surely recalls earlier anticipations of Augustus within the epic, such as Jupiter's prophecy to Venus in Book 1 (1.286–8), and perhaps also the more general prediction of the rule of Aeneas’ descendants over the Trojans at Iliad 20.307–8. But above all, the language used of the reign of Augustus here serves to connect his principate with the epochal promises of the fourth Eclogue:Footnote 18 it is Augustus, in particular, who will restore Saturnia regna (Ecl. 4.6, echoed in regnata…Saturno, Aen. 6.793–4), inaugurating new saecula (6.793; cf. saeclorum…ordo, Ecl. 4.5) which will possess the same golden (aurea, 6.792) character as the ‘golden race’ (gens aurea, Ecl. 4.9) of the eclogue. Might the collocation GENuS AUREA at Aeneid 6.792 even represent a verbal play on the phrase from the earlier poem, literally inscribing gens aurea within the description of Augustus’ restoration of the Golden Age? If so, we can see Virgil replicating on a textual level the action of Augustus in the terrestrial sphere, reintroducing in his prophecy of the princeps’ accomplishments the promised age foretold in the fourth Eclogue.
Again, while the epithet divi genus (‘sprung from a god’, 6.792) may be intended to recall the title divi filius, ‘son of a god’, used officially by Augustus,Footnote 19 it might also be seen as an equivalent to the designation of the child of the fourth Eclogue as deum suboles (‘offspring of gods’, 4.49), casting Augustus in retrospect as the miraculous puer of the new age. Such an association is reinforced by Anchises’ announcement immediately before this passage, hic Caesar et omnis Iuli / progenies magnum caeli ventura sub axem (‘Here is Caesar, and the whole progeny of Iulus that is to come beneath the great axle of heaven’, 6.789–90). Not least among the progenies of the deified Caesar, we may suppose, is Augustus himself, the next figure to be introduced in the catalogue. Both the language of divine descent and the use of the term progenies (cf. nova progenies, Ecl. 4.7) serve to identify Caesar's heir with the emblematic child of the Golden Age, leaving no doubt that the reader is expected to revise any lingering uncertainty over the identity of the mysterious puer in the earlier piece.Footnote 20 Clearly, in view of the multitude of theories that continued to circulate on the question long after the composition of the Aeneid, Virgil's retrospective attempt to impose Augustus’ features on the nameless child of the eclogue was not altogether successful, though it may have contributed to Octavian's continuing presence among the ranks of possible candidates. But by re-appropriating the vocabulary and imagery of the fourth Eclogue to glorify the first of the emperors,Footnote 21 the poet ensured for this passage and its source a long and often hackneyed afterlife among later holders of the office who sought to model their public presentation on that of ‘il buono Augusto’ (Dante, Inferno 1.71).
What Augustus’ restoration of aurea…saecula to Latium might entail is indicated by the reappearance of the theme in the eighth book of the Aeneid, where Evander describes the primitive state of the region under Saturn, who united the race and gave it laws,Footnote 22 and gave the land its name from his having lain hidden there (quoniam latuisset, 8.319–23). By implication, then, the age of Augustus as envisaged in Aeneid 6 will witness another coalescence of the people of Latium – that is, the Romans – after the divisive civil wars, and the return of law. This suggestion is confirmed in the following lines (Aen. 8.324–7), where peace is alliteratively singled out as the defining characteristic of the Saturnian age, and the degeneration of this primeval tranquillity is associated with the emergence of belli rabies (‘the mad rage of warfare’) and amor…habendi (‘love of possession’) – traditional features of the myth of decline (as later reflected in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.131, insidiaeque et vis et amor sceleratus habendi: ‘ambush and violence and accursed love of possession’), but also elements in the conventional analysis of the causes of the recent civil conflict in Roman literature of the time (see e.g. Hor. Epod. 7.11–14; Livy, preface 11–12):
The age which they call golden existed under that king: like this he ruled the peoples in untroubled peace, until gradually a worse and discoloured age succeeded it, along with the mad rage of warfare and love of possession.
The expression quae perhibent (‘which they call’, 8.324) no doubt points to previous accounts of the myth of the ages in literature prior to Virgil – but also, surely, to the use of the exact phrase aurea…saecula at Aeneid 6.792–3; to Hesiod and Aratus we must add Anchises. The renewal of Saturn's reign under the heir of Caesar will reverse the sequence of historical decay, replacing the crazed appetite for war and the lust for acquisition with unbroken peace. And, although in the fourth Eclogue Virgil talks not of aurea…saecula (‘the Golden Age’) but of gens aurea (‘the golden race’, Ecl. 4.9), he nonetheless links this with the dawning of the new saeculum (see Ecl. 4.5, 52) and the return of the reign of Saturn (Ecl. 4.6), so there is perhaps some justification for including the poet's earlier piece as well under the multiple allusion of Aen. 8.324–5.Footnote 23 The suggestion is reinforced by Diomedes’ response to the Latin ambassadors at Aen. 11.252–3, which refers to the ancient virtues of their race with the words fortunatae gentes, Saturnia regna, / antiqui Ausonii (‘fortunate peoples, kingdom of Saturn, ancient folk of Ausonia’), explicitly evoking the line-ending of Ecl. 4.6. Those who detect in the Aeneid a darker, less celebratory note draw attention to the discrepancy between the peaceful condition of Saturn's rule in Evander's account and the militaristic character of Augustus’ imperial Golden Age as prophesied in Book 6.Footnote 24 On either reading, there can be little doubt that Virgil's references to the return of the Golden Age carry with them contemporary political connotations, and that, even if the potential complexity of the poet's handling of these themes has not always been perceived or matched by his emulators in subsequent periods, the associations they perpetuated have played a significant part in the later fortunes of Virgil's poetry in the political sphere.
2. Tibullus and Horace
Between the appearance of the Georgics and that of the Aeneid, if we follow the traditional chronology of the elegist's career, falls the first book of Tibullus’ elegies. In the third poem of the collection, the lover is pictured lying sick on a distant island, lamenting that he has been brought to this pass by following his patron Messalla on the latter's expedition to the east. How much better, he exclaims, would it have been to have lived in the Golden Age before warfare and voyaging were brought into the world (Tibullus 1.3.35–50):
How well they used to live under the rule of Saturn, before the earth was opened up into long roads! Not yet had the pine tree scorned the dark waves, and offered billowing canvas to the winds, nor had the wandering sailor, seeking profit in unknown lands, weighed down his ship with foreign wares. At that time the sturdy bull did not go under the yoke, the horse did not champ bits in its tamed mouth, no home had doors, there was no stone planted in the countryside to rule the fields with set boundaries. The oaks themselves used to put forth honey, and of their own accord the ewes used to bring udders full of milk to their carefree owners. There were no armies, no anger, no wars, and the cruel craftsman had hammered out no sword by his pitiless skill. As things stand, under Jupiter's lordship there are slaughter and wounds without end; now we have the sea, now suddenly a thousand ways to death.
The conception of the Golden Age here is much closer to that later displayed in the opening book of Ovid's Metamorphoses than it is to the panegyrical presentation of the same theme in the fourth Eclogue.Footnote 25 The reign of Saturn took place in the remote past, and now seems beyond hope of recovery; as in Ovid, its blessings are to a large extent enumerated negatively, as the absence of undesirable features of the current dispensation.Footnote 26 Tibullus’ use of the phrase Saturno…rege (‘under the rule of Saturn’, 1.3.35) might nonetheless invite comparison with the Saturnia regna of Virgil's poem (Ecl. 4.6); the lines on the absence of seafaring and agriculture in the elegist's vision of prelapsarian felicity share a number of items of vocabulary with verses on the same subject in the eclogue;Footnote 27 and the two positively expressed features of the Golden Age here – oaks producing honey, and obliging dairy provision on the part of livestock – are recognizable as elements from the natural spontaneity of the world in response to the growth of the miraculous puer (IPSAE MELLA dabant QUERCUS, ultroque FEREBANT / obvia securis UBERA LACTIS oves, Tib. 1.3.45–6 ~ durae QUERCUS sudabunt roscida MELLA, Ecl. 4.30; IPSAE LACTE domum reFERENT distenta capellae / UBERA, Ecl. 4.21–2).Footnote 28 The evident parallels in expression between the two pieces, not to mention the variations clearly being introduced by Tibullus in his version of the subject (dabant for sudabunt, oves for capellae), serve to open up a dialogue between the elegiac utopia and the restored Golden Age of Virgil's pastoral, an exchange with possible political implications. for the elegiac lover-poet, the reign of Saturn is firmly consigned to the past, and stands in antithesis to the present age of truculence and travel, in keeping with his antipathy throughout the collection to warfare and violence (see also Tib. 1.1.73–8, 1.10). The self-consciously disreputable speaker of the elegies (see e.g. Tib. 1.1.53–8) not only disavows the warrior's calling, but also suggests that the fabulous age of peace and prosperity proclaimed by Virgil has failed to materialize. Trade, seafaring, and war still go on; the mythical improbabilities of Virgilian prophecy remain precisely that – possible only in a vanished, irrecoverable past. The degradation of the present is too far advanced to be reversed by politically motivated platitudes, and the apparent optimism of the fourth Eclogue is replaced by a bleaker vision of contemporary realities.Footnote 29
The exuberant predictions of the eclogue are once again qualified, though from a rather different standpoint, in a later, more ceremonial Augustan context. At Augustus’ ludi saeculares of 17 bc, a festival held specifically to celebrate the inauguration of a new saeculum, a significant element in the proceedings was the performance of Horace's Carmen saeculare, commissioned for the occasion.Footnote 30 In view of the theme of the festivities, we might expect the accompanying hymn to be imbued with more than a faint aura of Virgil's verses on the renewal of saeclorum…ordo (Ecl. 4.5; see also 4.52, venturo…saeclo); it has even been speculated that had Virgil not died two years earlier, he would have been the princeps’ first choice for the commission.Footnote 31 Whatever the truth of that, there are a number of places in Horace's hymn where comparison appears to be invited with the language and subject matter of the fourth Eclogue:Footnote 32 we have an invocation to the Parcae (Carm. saec. 25–8), with terminology recalling that of Ecl. 4.46–7; mention is made of Lucina, goddess of childbirth (Carm. saec. 15; cf. Ecl. 4.10); the new age is associated with Apollo as its tutelary deity (Carm. saec. 1, 34; cf. Ecl. 4.10); and the fertility of the earth (tellus) is a prominent motif (Carm. saec. 29; cf. Ecl. 4.19, 39). But recognition of the similarities evoked by these features serves rather to point up the differences between the two poems, as Duncan Barker has demonstrated.Footnote 33 While Horace follows Virgil in emphasizing the theme of natural abundance, his vision confines itself to circumstances that might be thought realistically possible, in distinct contrast to the exotic hyperbole and mythological extravagances of the eclogue;Footnote 34 indeed, his studied practicality begins to sound almost Soviet in the infamous prayer at Carmen saeculare 17–20 for the goddess of childbirth to ‘prosper the decrees of the Fathers concerning the yoking of women and the marriage law fertile in new progeny’ (patrum… / prosperes decreta super iugandis / feminis prolisque novae feraci / lege marita). This proles nova (‘new progeny’) is emphatically not the celestial nova progenies of Ecl. 4.7; and, although Horace's immediately preceding prayer implores diva, producas subolem (‘goddess, may you bring forth offspring’, Carm. saec. 17), it is clear that the offspring in question is to be imagined as rather more mundane in its nature and ancestry than the cara deum suboles (‘dear offspring of gods’) addressed at Ecl. 4.49, who ‘will take on the life of the gods’ (deum vitam accipiet, 4.15).
This process of drawing the reader in to expect a repeat of the fourth Eclogue before staging a revisionary withdrawal from Virgil's messianic excesses is most strikingly enacted precisely where Horace's expression becomes most figurative. In the parade of personifications returning to earth at the turn of the new saeculum, as Barker notes, we find not the Greek maiden symbolizing Justice, but ‘the return of a host of Roman virtues – Fides, Pax, Honos, Pudor and Virtus’ (Carm. saec. 57–60):Footnote 35
Now Faith and Peace and Honour and ancient Modesty and forsaken Virtue dare to return, and blessed Plenty appears with her full horn.
In the wake of the feminine singular ending of neglecta and the mention of returning (redire, cf. Ecl. 4.6), the reader who has been attuned to Horace's Virgilian subtext by echoes of Eclogue 4 earlier in the Carmen might reasonably expect, on reaching the penultimate syllable of line 58, to find a declaration of the return of Virgo, as in the sixth line of Virgil's poem. But the final syllable of the line suddenly reveals the personification in question to be not Vir-go, but Vir-tus – not the mythological, female, Greek abstraction of Virgil's messianic reverie, but the thoroughly male (though not, of course, grammatically masculine), Roman quality of Virtus, manliness.Footnote 36 In the space of one syllable, what had looked like a simple rehash of Virgilian material is drastically repositioned on the spectrum of both nationality and gender politics: the manly Roman revival under Augustus supersedes the imported virginal mysticism of Virgil's earlier prophecy. As one would expect in the context of the ludi saeculares, Horace's picture of the new saeculum serves to endorse the Augustan settlement, but its engagement with the theme of the turn of the age presents a very different conception of the incipient era from the esoteric eschatology of the fourth Eclogue, the oriental flavour of which might have been thought to sit uncomfortably with the tenor of Augustus’ presentation of his rule in the years following his victory at Actium.Footnote 37
Horatian ambivalence towards the wonders of the Virgilian Golden Age may be detected once more in the final book of the Odes. Here, in the second poem of the collection, Horace contemplates the possibility of a return in aurum…priscum (‘to ancient gold’, 4.2.39–40) and sets this in relation to the reign of Augustus – but in a way that indicates that he does not regard these two phenomena as commensurate or equivalent. The grand Pindaric poet Iullus Antonius, says Horace, will sing of Caesar (Odes 4.2.37–40),
than whom the fates and kindly gods have given to the world nothing greater or better – nor will they, though the times return to ancient gold.
If there is an evocation here of the fourth Eclogue,Footnote 38 Horace's treatment of the theme of the returning Golden Age nonetheless diverges significantly from its manifestation in the earlier poem. The reversion of the times to ancient gold is characterized not as an incipient process or a definite prospect for the future, but as a hypothetical scenario – and in any case its fulfilment would make little difference, since the status of Augustus as the gods’ greatest gift to earth remains unaffected.Footnote 39 Emphatically, then, the prognostications of the eclogue have been rendered irrelevant by the surpassing greatness of the Augustan present; the colourful mythology of ultima Cumaei…carminis aetas (‘the final age of Cumaean song’, Ecl. 4.4) has given way to the radiant reality of tua, Caesar, aetas (‘your age, Caesar’, Odes 4.15.4), as Horace puts it in the final ode of his book.Footnote 40
Conclusion
Passages such as these demonstrate that among Virgil's own generation the fourth Eclogue was already an established point of reference for writers seeking to fit the events of their own time into a broader historical scheme, and thereby to reflect on the present political situation.Footnote 41 It can be seen, moreover, that Virgil's contemporaries – unlike much later use of the poem for the purposes of panegyric – do not mechanically recycle the language and imagery of the eclogue to fit the generic demands of courtly commendation, but engage in intricate dialogue with its thought and expression, effecting creative variations on the themes and terminology of this already influential and adaptable poetic prototype.
Thus began the long tradition of appropriating Virgil's fourth Eclogue for the purposes of political panegyric. Over the next millennium and a half the practice would extend to every corner of Europe,Footnote 42 and later on it was to spread yet further, as acclamation of novus ordo saeclorum became a staple element in the articulation of the political aspirations of the emerging United States.Footnote 43 It may be that the very opacity of expression which has made the original historical implications of the poem so difficult to determine, combined with the absence of specific contemporary detail, has played some part in its durability as a source of congratulatory quotations and a model for appropriative adaptation.Footnote 44 A complete history of the fortunes of this remarkable poem would touch on many different branches of Western culture, and would span almost every historical period; but the foundations of this edifice were laid even before Virgil's death, and it is with these early responses – a number of them destined to exert a significant impact in their own right – that any survey of the prodigious afterlife enjoyed by this enigmatic but perennially compelling text must begin.
