'To repeat fair Amaryllis' - A Review of Virgil's 'Eclogues'

Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori

Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.

Carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam.

Songs can even draw the moon down from heaven.

The collection of ten pastoral poems written by Virgil in the dying days of the Late Roman Republic [c. 40-35 BCE] are beautiful, if not (to some extent, admittedly) apocalyptic. Taking Theocritus, the renowned Greek nature-poet, as his almighty inspiration, Virgil constructs an Arcadian scene of shepherd-farmers as they partake in song and praise nature.

Virgil, however, makes the intriguing decision to seat his overarching narrative directly within contemporary Italian realism, bringing to the fore the widespread dispossessions and general upheaval of his own time. In this way, rather than the shepherd-farmers existing separate to, and unfazed by, the trials and tribulations of (predominantly) urban life and the polity at large, they are at the very brunt of it - a wild departure from the Theocritan idyll.

As in Eclogue I, Meliboeus tragically relates to Tityrus (lucky enough to have escaped dispossession): 'nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva' (We are leaving our country's bounds and sweet fields). The Arcadian scene, one of misty-eyed memory of a distant yet fond heritage, is ruptured by the (extra-textual) reality of war and civil strife; the poetic stewards of the land must vacate their ancestral 'patria'. The poem's relation of Virgil's contemporary issues is thereby compelling, illustrating the distinct blot of modern troubles in tandem with the human desire and ability (through, for instance, art and song) to accept, overcome, and persist beyond such obstacles.

This scope of the initially unassuming Eclogues makes it a fascinating read. It is fulfilling to view the fleeting vistas of agricultural life as they come to a curtain-fall whilst, at the same time, wishing upon a greater future to come.