This barnstormer bucketful of a reading, in the new 150-page format of the noughties, is another fillip for freshening revival of attention to the Eclogues (joining the Duckworth fold alongside Brian Breed's 2006 Pastoral Inscriptions, hailed first by Richard Hunter at BMCR 2007.03.39). Saunders’ neat introduction, pointing out that his thorough refashioning of earlier drafts crafted under the extreme skies of Tromsø must be environ-mentally shaping his, and now (differentially) our, vision of these beloved poems, could leave you guessing nevertheless that he's playing with an armature of ‘eco-criticism’ because it metaphilologically entangles poetological ‘bucology’ with ‘eclology’ rather more than because a greening politics is now ready to re-launch early Virgil. By contrast, sticking a fifteenth-century Georgics illustration on the front cover with Virgil Writing {in} a Field of Sheep and Goats is initially plain perplexable: spilling ink on the vellum's picture plane, it surely ‘belongs’ on the back, sc. of the grazing parchment-to-be written {upon}? But no, ultimately it dawns, S. finds the dialogue encased between VE and VG already installed, by prequel, as the axis driving the Eclogues’ own internal engine.
Ch. 1 ‘Catasterisms’ presents the divine cups and their competing emblem, the heifer, of what is at stake in the bucosmic tendency fraction of epic according to the elusive setting-up in, and as, E3, before vividly directing the beefy enactment of this poetry's bid for sublation to the Milky Way in, and as, E5. Stealing Catullan-Callimachean Aratean-Theocritean, and (vitally) Lucretian imagery of straight-from-store mint-condition Orphic rapture, twinned astrophysics and verse launch heavenbound for fame. S. will much later return to the interface with elegy that palms us off here with the Lock of Berenice for our concealed/enchiselled/in excelsis paradigm for a probing poetics (especially p. 158 n. 46). Thus far, he's concerned to get us to see how thoroughly the terms for writing and reading are encoded and encrypted into t/his new Latin lexicon for the bucolic repertoire (caelare, celare, condo; pecus and cicuta …). Splendidly, S. envisages Daphnis getting verse to drive him to nirvana, with cups of milk from that heifer to fuel them both (E5.67). If the promised ‘playful …, daring and often unexpected sense of humour’ (p. 1) is played down so far, that is in the interests of easing us into seeing how all of us readers share common ground beneath our differing skies, climates — and views. Turn back to Guy Lee's wonderful skittish version of the daft kidding on plagiarism in, and as, E5 (‘A reading of Virgil's fifth Eclogue’, PCPhS 203 (1977), 62–70) and it will hit home that S.'s re-direction of focus away from the characterological poetics eloquently advocated by Paul Alpers (The Singer of the Eclogues. A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (1979)) comes at a price. But hard cheese, Amaryllis — the mood will lighten up boreally as we go.
Ch. 2 ‘Cosmology’ runs us on, to Daphnis’ star in E9, squinting the astro-nomadic reader up and down the signa of the text (suspicis, 46) to satnav the kid goat in the herd and, and as, the kid among the constellations (H-A-E-D-O by – ‘coupleted’ – acrostich at 43, 45, 47, 49, 51). S. thoughout performs the metacritical truth that miniaturist worlds imaged in a puddle (this time farmyard piddle) permit, as they enjoin, minute intratextuality between even the most unmarked of semes: the dyad signorum, 9.46 ~ signa, 3.40 marvellously concentrates the mind for suspicion sub specie mundi. And S. knows Virgil's book so well, he will field every recurrent notation that world-consciousness can find in this echoic wood. On top of which, by staring ‘through the clear night’, aka reading through to subtext (pura … sub nocte, 44), S. lifts the gaze to clock Caesar catasterized alongside that Kid by intertextually out-starring Aratus’ Orion (just where any such eventuality was proscribed, at Phaen. 323). Quitting E9 at the close with incipit and depone, haedos and nox (60, 62; 62, 63), as against E3's amoebaean duet, leaves us half-ways toward a ‘road-song’ start-up for the aether: here two more pairs of — not cupfuls, but — slurps of song-bite model, this time around, stakes for star-making by balladeering. Intricate charting of the other stars in Virgil's sky (Cancer, Virgo-and-Vesper) brings on E4, with the wedding as figure for song's enacted promise of fulfilment to come, ready to perform ‘post-epithalamial’ melding of Catullus 61 with 64's Ariadne through 66's Lock come to shine beside Virgo (66.65). What songs will count? Both songs in E8 for a start, one for and the other against the coniunx, as the uni-verse releases stardust for down-to-earth response (E4.7, E6.30, etc.).
Ch. 3 ‘Geography’ descends to examine how Rome-centered Eclogues imprint the planet, fetching up at E10's Arethusa, as insinuated vector for renewal (subterlabere, 4; not least renewal of Idyll 1), but renewal always already born as a repeat, like Gallus stuck fast at the intermingling corridor in bucolic between elegiac love and epic soldiering: don't be too sure who ‘wins’ in these stakes, who ‘submits’, because bucolic modality teases with a lisible-risible game of chase. (Is the last line a ‘snake’ laddering us back to E1 – to that sundown conclusion? So S.)
Ch. 4 ‘Topography’ further narrows the field of envisioning, to hit the (none-so-playful) land confiscations, and the book's sternest of political dares: if poetic settings perform (as) literary typology, does that turn writing into entirely self-reflexive, ethically-ideologically neutral (or undecidably baffled), operator of competition in the stakes for viewing figures? Specifically, what follows if S. persuades that the confiscations are ‘paradigmatic of, rather than antithetical to, the conventions of bucolic competition’? Now the topic suits bucolic self-definition in contradistinction from martial epic, indeed opens a scenario ideal for ‘amoebaean’ disputation within the Eclogues from the word go, as Tityrus and Meliboeus face off the ‘wood-muse’ against the ‘field-muse’ (~ auena vs calamus), in a post-Lucretian bout between aetiological and developmental contestations of genre: to the timeless phenomenon of music, counterpose the ‘here and now’ event in reality, as you hear red-corner Tityrus’ brand of ‘call and response’ singing counter(ed by) blue-corner Meliboeus’ ‘loss of prize / animals’ — both sides now in the bucolic drove of herding and farming, where the nostalgia pitch comes from the ‘newcomer’ developer, colonist, and forerunner of his veteran dis-placer, and another ‘new wave’ of poetry opposes the latest blues to the primeval cotton-picking stock … ‘What goes around, comes around’ is S.'s moral, musing from the Arctic circle. His deconstruction delivers properly canny relief from easy nostalgia-pathos rooted polarizing in past-oral poetry, but (to put everyman's query on the ethics of deconstruction so) if protest singer-songwriting needs folk songs to play opposite — does that make them undifferent? Whether exegetically, to string his argument along, or by conviction, S., (as) you see, scrambles the book, and his ‘environmentality’ bulldozer steamrolls the enclosural force that gathers this cowpat of a cosmos into the fold built between E1 and E9 (as most of us recognize it: more than ‘a’ fold, ‘the’ fold). The chapter winds down with intrication of the deductum carmen self-profiling as finespun weaving overlaid with wedding (and so catasterism), colonial re-settlement, plus cultural transferral (and literary translation from Greece to Rome), and sharpens the point that, like many a binary opposition in S.'s Eclogues, ‘making a sheep fat’ and (not but) ‘a Muse slender’ accommodates correlation: a neoteric Italian Meliboeus needs a Callimachean Tityrus to riff on, not to reproduce.
Ch. 5 ‘Landscape’ comes right out and tells us where this broadway is headed for market; in the opposite direction from the entrenched legacy of Schiller's sentimentalism, with its delusion that ‘nature’ is what is over there, through the picture frame, yonder where we are not. But Virgil's land is nothing if not dynamic, intensively worked over rather than just there, as was, and is, Theocritus’ before him, and the events of poetic composition and contest are happenings. Ekphrastic iconizing makes verbal-plastic cups, pipes and basket, from the beech, reeds, and hibiscus that background the scenarios for singing of, and with, them. And as E1 at once enacts, the songs are made with the perceptions of landscape that materialize in, and as, the songs, so the ‘landscapes’ (under a tree/behind a hedge, soldier on a field/goats on a cliff) are a contest in perception, on the model, S. urges, enshrined in Idyll 11 and wheeled out in full panoply in E2 as landbound clodnik Polyphemus’ wooing of (lactescent) sea-nymph Galatea goes glug again. Corydon the artist ‘reads’ the world to paint it — ecce! — a world of vivid weaving, painting, making, of ‘picking and, as, reading’ (lego). The apparently one-voice poem may compete with Iollas, but it also ‘catasterizes’ Alexis, thereby reanimating (but reapplying) Meleager's Alexis epigram (AP12.127), Damoetas’ Polyphemus song of Id. 6, and so on — and conscripting readers to bring ‘into view’ the ecology that his songs stock so that he can figure ‘in them’. Renewed in reading; reading as renewal — S.'s refrain.
Ch. 6 ‘Physics’ names bucolic nature in its constitutive operations. First E6 spins cosmology as so much herding in, and as, singing. Pens in Apollo as commissioning patron, then audience and reader, and finally co-singer-cum-songwriter and composer, as the tiered roles fold into and out of one another Eurotas, trees, valleys, stars, Silenus, Tityrus, Apollo — then/since Virgil and his Romans, and now/first us, us Latinists. This song, like, but not same as, any other, has to find a Beginning — a start, a re-start, always already begun, and as pre-echo heading on out and coming our way. It finds Vision through re-envisioning anew, differently once more, the sights seen in, and as, the songbook. It generates new life, conceptualized in, and as, the child of E4. It impacts through the collision of circumstantiality — and here S. unveils his full Lucretian epiphany — so that E7's chance meeting in unum (1) cues a bucolic feat of ordering analogous to the driving of a herd, a writing of letters to make a text, and (yes) the description of atomic nature. Back to E4, where the Boy/Wonder emblematizes, in the anonymous abstract, the cycle of readerly instigation, reception, regeneration, and participation in the cosmos and its envisionment, as Destiny's Child learns to read, then/so bless the world with renewed life, with freshly graphic perceptions of the universe, both embodying and practising ekphrastic sight, seer, seen, and seeing. In literary terms, pastoral's vermilion sheep lift poetic horizons to epic Golden Fleece (with Catullus’ 64's Fateful spinning-singing of epithalamial text of heroic apotheosis). As self-dramatization, victory achieved in contest with Pan and Orpheus is sealed into the inevitable dénouement of …— Beginning (sc. about to begin again: incipe, 60).
This churning and lyrical virtuoso performance leaves us to ponder ‘till the sheep, or make that the goats (the goats as well?), come home’, for as S. winds us up to a lather of litany and a pitcher of rapture, so he wittily calls us in with the ‘witty reworking of a line from Idyll 11 [12–13 ~ E4.21–2] to represent the golden age ideal of goats finding their own way home, the original of which depicts Polyphemus’ flock having to do the same because their herdsmen [sic — just about the only blemish in the copy] is too wrapped up in his song and his love to bother to lead them there himself’ (pp. 150–1). And his pen really has gathered the most compelling round-up of reasons to release these best of beasts (back) into the ecosphere.
