The Eclogues and The Georgics

"The Eclogues are a collection of 10 pastoral poems, and they derive from bucolic Greek literature—“bucolic” is essentially Greek for “pastoral.” Virgil sourced his models from a fashionable domain of literature, that of Alexandrian Egypt, that is, the Egypt that had been ruled by Greeks since its conquest by Alexander the Great . A famous library was there, and the ruling dynasty cultivated very learned people who wrote rather precious, manneristic literature, which elite Roman youth took up during the late Republic. Virgil’s main model for the Eclogues was the Idylls of the Alexandrian poet Theocritus. These are mainly scenes of rural life, with herdsmen piping in the shade and love affairs between herdsmen and young boys and girls who are conveniently hanging around. It’s all very artificial, an urban version of the pastoral life. Virgil adopts this mode, but he’s earthier than Theocritus. It’s a weird combination overall. On the one hand, you have exquisite Alexandrian poetry as a source. You almost get the sense that an author who was a creature of the Alexandrian metropolis had never seen a living sheep or goat, except moments before its sacrifice in a temple. But Virgil did have a rural background. He wasn’t a peasant; his family had enough money to educate him; but he knew the practicalities of keeping sheep and goats. He evidently couldn’t maintain a light touch in his depictions, no matter how derivative these were of shepherd personae as romantic poseurs and touchy aesthetes. (The actual persons in the ancient world were, as a rule, hardworking slaves.) “He is somebody who knew the agony of civil war” This heightened, hardened element in the Eclogues is best seen in the blatant intrusion of practical elements. Herding is, after all, not a fantasy but a business—like the business of literature itself, just an activity requiring luck, sacrifice, and negotiation, and at best winning support and lasting a while. As the first Eclogue opens, one herdsman’s been thrown off his land and is leading his flock away, with no prospect of a refuge, and nursing a ewe who has just miscarried. He meets a carelessly piping herdsman whose livelihood is saved because the divine Augustus let him keep it. Readers from early on assumed that Virgil had sealed the deal for imperial patronage and was allowed to keep his family’s estate, though land all around it had been confiscated to pay off soldiers from Augustus’s victorious forces. Throughout the Eclogues , there are pastoral stand-ins for friends and patrons and fellow protégés—it’s often impossible to tell the exact difference—in Augustus’s circle; the poet Gallus, under his own name, gets a long depiction as a rural tragic lover. In Alexandria, literary sucking up resulted in sickly confections, because this was in essence court poetry; but Romans enjoyed relative equality and were all political animals, who had had participatory government for hundreds of years. Political alliances were just life. Even the Eclogues , the most artificial of Virgil’s three major works, have this hard core. They are only thematically about farming. The rough model is Hesiod, a Greek poet who wrote around 700 BCE. Hesiod writes about farming, and probably was a farmer, and only a part-time poet. He has a lot of practical, hard-nosed things to say about scratching a living out of the land, in a district he frankly calls a dump. Also in the background was a disquisition on agriculture by the great Roman statesman Cato the Elder, a work from the mid-second century BCE. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We have no reason to believe that Virgil was ever a professional farmer—as in getting his hands dirty or having to worry how the crops did; he made an excellent living from patronage and was able to spend many years away from home. The Georgics had other purposes; they open with a dedication to Maecenas, who was Augustus’s cultural director, and end with a fabulously beautiful version of the story of Orpheus and Euridice, depicting a poet who is so confident in his art that he thinks he can conquer death. He goes down and he fetches his beloved from the underworld after she has died—not that this works out very well. But the very account of his grief is an unexampled triumph of art: Orpheus does succeed, because his story is immortal when a genius like Virgil takes it up. The Georgics see Virgil starting to transcend everything: his Greek and Roman models, and patronage, and everything else. Roman history, in its ups and downs, depended a lot on the fate of farmers. Romans imagined themselves as hardy independent farmers, who would go off to fight Rome’s wars and then come back and farm again. In fact, the Roman state was hollowed out by the decay of farming. As Roman wealth and power grew, there came to be giant estates owned by the super-rich and worked by slaves. As the small farmers lost their land, they migrated to Rome and became a rootless mob. They were available, along with provincials, as full-time professional soldiers, but such people had much less allegiance to the Republic, and much more to the general who would pay them off with loot and confiscated land—such as, reportedly, Virgil’s farm until Augustus gave it back. The Roman Republic would not have fallen, or the Empire arisen, without the loss of the family farm. Comparisons between the US and Rome are reflexive, but only because the parallels are so persuasive: the US wouldn’t be threatened with the loss of its democracy now if the heartland weren’t hollowed out by mammoth agribusinesses. Right. Augustus wanted a phony depiction of Rome as it had been—peopled by hardworking, independent-minded, hardy sons of the soil. That was the remote past, and he was in power because of a very different dispensation obtained. But certainly in Roman folklore and mythology, farming continued to be very important."