Bucolics

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For the genre or type of poetry known as "eclogue", see Eclogue.

The Bucolics (also called the Eclogues) is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil.

Imitating the Greek Bucolica ("on care of cattle", so named from the poetry's rustic subjects) by Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by offering a dramatic and mythic interpretation of revolutionary change at Rome in the turbulent period between roughly 44 and 38 BC. Virgil introduced political clamor largely absent from Theocritus' poems, called idylls ("little scenes" or "vignettes"), even though erotic turbulence disturbs the "idyllic" landscapes of Theocritus.

Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called not an idyll but an eclogue ("draft" or "selection" or "reckoning"), populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and making songs in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Performed with great success on the Roman stage, they feature a mix of visionary politics and eroticism that made Virgil a celebrity, legendary in his own lifetime.

Capping a sequence in which Virgil created and augmented a new political mythology, his fourth eclogue reaches out to imagine a golden age ushered in by the birth of a boy heralded as "great increase of Jove", which links to divine associations in propaganda of Octavian, the ambitious young heir to Julius Caesar. Biographical identification of the child has proved elusive; but the figure proved a convenient link between traditional Roman authority and Christianity. Eusebius first described this connection in his Oration of Constantine ^[1], and the Emperor Constantine chose to embrace this idea, treating this eclogue as a Messianic prophecy (a reading to which Dante makes fleeting reference in his Purgatorio). Some scholars have also remarked similarities between the eclogue's prophetic themes and the words of Isaiah: "a little child shall lead".

In Eclogue 10, Virgil caps his book by inventing a new myth of poetic authority and origin: he replaces Theocritus' Sicily and bucolic hero, the impassioned oxherd Daphnis, with the impassioned voice of his friend, the elegiac poet Gaius Cornelius Gallus, imagined dying of love in Arcadia. Virgil transforms this remote, mountainous, and myth-ridden region of Greece, homeland to the god Pan, into the original and ideal place of pastoral song, thus founding a richly resonant tradition in western literature and the arts.

[edit] References

^ Oration of Constantine http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2503.htm

Clausen, Wendell (1994). Virgil: Eclogues. Clarendon, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198150350.
Coleman, Robert, ed. (1977). Vergil: Eclogues. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521291070.
Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth (1999). The Oxford Classical Dictionary: Third Edition. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019866172X.
Hunter, Richard, ed. (1999). Theocritus: A Selection. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052157420X.
Van Sickle, John B. (2004). The Design of Virgil's Bucolics. Duckworth. ISBN 1853996769.