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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
As the third pastoral poet, Calpurnius Siculus was the first to take up the genre fully formed. For all their many differences, Theocritus and Vergil had given bucolic poetry an established frame of reference, a characteristic subject matter, and a self-contained mythology. From a poet in Calpurnius' position whose work would inevitably be measured against that of his predecessors, one would expect a certain amount of generic self-consciousness, taking such forms as an implicit evaluation of the tradition, numerous allusions and specific verbal borrowings, and, ideally, an assurance that the genre had not been exhausted, that is to say, some open-ended indication of the new directions in which pastoral might turn. The first of these elements is clearly present in the poetry, but the last remains elusive. A major imaginative influence upon his genre is something Calpurnius did not provide for antiquity. Unlike his contemporaries, Persius and Lucan, he has no conspicuous literary heir, nor do the Einsiedeln fragments or the slim corpus of Nemesianus give much proof of his having invigorated the tradition. Indeed the effect of Calpurnius upon the pastoral is rather comparable to that often assigned to Paradise Lost upon the epic: he closed it off for centuries. But this fact need not stand in the way of an evaluation of the poet's artistry, nor originality. My argument in this paper is that Calpurnius' originality in adapting the pastoral tradition to his own sense of the temper of the Neronian Age was so extreme as to constitute a reluctant denial of the validity of pastoral mythology for contemporary Rome.
1. This essay is a continuation of the studies of Calpurnius Siculus undertaken in 1972 with the aid of a grant from the American Philosophical Society. The first paper, ‘Corydon Revisited: An Interpretation of the Political Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus’, was published in Ramus 2 (1973) 53–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A shorter version of the present paper was delivered before the Post-Augustan Society at the Annual Meetings of the American Philological Association, December 1974. A bibliography of critical essays since 1954 appears in ‘Corydon Revisited’, 90, note 2. To this should now be added the following: Verdière, Raoul, ‘La bucolique post-Virgilienne’, Eos 56 (1966) 161–185Google Scholar; Gunther Scheda, , Studten zur Bukolischen Dichtung der Neronischen Epoche (Bonn, 1969) 46–66Google Scholar; Korzeniewski, Dietmar, Hirtengedichte aus Neronischer Zeit, Texte zur Forschung, Band I (Darmstadt, 1971Google Scholar); Bardon, H., ‘Bucolique et Politique’, Rh. M. 95 (1972) 1–13Google Scholar; Cizek, Eugen, L’Epoque de Néron et ses controverses idéologiques (Leiden, 1972) 369–378Google Scholar.
2. This is to except such echoes of Calpurnius as were collected by Schenkl, H., Calpurnii et Nemesimi Bucolica (Leipzig/Prague, 1885Google Scholar) whose list has now been expanded by Korzeniewski, above note 1.
3. Opinions of Calpurnius’ originality and his contribution to the development of the genre have generally turned upon the imperial panegyric of Eclogues 1, 4 and 7. In his recent discussion, Bardon, above note 1, argues that both Vergil and Calpurnius allowed their ‘Roman predisposition towards politics’ to lead them to break with Theocritus’ precedent of keeping his encomia separate from his pastoral poems. What was in Vergil, Bardon suggests (13), only an uneasy compromise between the political and apolitical worlds became shocking servility in Calpurnius. Similar opinions are also given by Rosenmeyer, Thomas, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, 1969) 123–124Google Scholar, and Verdière, above note 1, 162–168. My own theory that the remarks on Nero are ironically intended, op. cit., above note 1, makes no effort to controvert the fact that these remarks were understood by later poets as serious encomium and imitated in that vein – the most attractive imitation, perhaps, being that which occurs in the April Eglogue of Spenser’s Shepherds’ Calendar – yet it seems unfair to make Calpurnius chiefly responsible for post-classical proliferations of pastoral encomia when the encomiastic tradition offered so many patrons more engaging than Nero.
4. The development and characteristics of the style nouveau are given detailed treatment by Cizek, above note 1, 263–365.
5. Cizek, above note 1, 372, notes only a certain ‘baroque’ delicacy in the courtliness of the sentiments to distinguish Theocritus’ manner from that of the poets he imitated.
6. For a fuller treatment of pastoral theory see Leach, E. W., Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca, New York, 1974) 25–50Google Scholar.
7. See ‘Corydon Revisited’, above note 1, 77–86.
8. Op. cit., above note 1, 168.
9. This assessment of the Vergilian landscape which differs from conventional notions of its ‘unreality’ is more fully explained in Leach, above note 6, 70–117. For the opposite view see, inter al., Bardon, above note 1, 3–5.
10. Save where exceptions are noted, quotations follow Giarratano, Caesar, Calpurnii et Nemesiani Bucolica, 3rd ed (Turin, 1966Google Scholar). I have also consulted the following editions: H. Schenkl, above note 2; Keane, C. H., The Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus and M. Aurelius Nemesiamis with Introduction, Commentary and Appendix (London, 1887Google Scholar; rep. Hildesheim, 1969); Verdiére, Raoul, T. Calpurnit Siculi De iaude Pisonis et Bucolica et M. Annaei Lucani De laude Caesaris Einsidlensia carmina, Coll. Latomus 19 (Brussels, 1954Google Scholar); Dietmar Korzeniewski, above note 1.
11. Satyricon 42: sed rectus, sed certus, amicus amico, cum quo audacter posses in tenebris micare (‘But he was upright, but he was steady, a friend to his friend, with whom you could confidently flash fingers in the dark’). Keene, above note 10, 69, ad vs. 26, describes the game remarking on the fact that it is still played in Italy; Korzeniewski, above note 1, 90, ad vs. 26, gives Nonius’ definition (347, 27M, 550L: micare est sortiri digitis: ‘Micare is to cast lots with the fingers’) and cites discussions of the term.
12. Vergil, by contrast, has castaneae molles (Ec. 1.81: soft chestnuts) omitting the burrs.
13. So Emmanuele Cesareo, La Poesia di Calpurnio Siculo (Palermo, 1931) 13, who believes that the cognomen Siculus signifies the poet’s allegiance to a Sicilian, or Theocritean style. As the most sympathetic of Calpurnius’ interpreters, Cesareo attributes much originality to the poet’s descriptions of nature (iv: ‘uno squisito poeta pastorale, che eccelle in quadretti compastri sempre freschi e sovente originale’). The majority of scholars have followed the hard line taken by Lenchantin de Gubernatis, M., ‘La natura in T. Calpurnio Siculo’, Classici e Neolatini 8 (1912) 75–90Google Scholar, allowing him credit for nothing but the imitation of details appropriate to bucolic settings.
14. Eclogue 4.3: … insueta statione sedes? (‘[Why] do you sit in an unaccustomed place?’). Insueta, the reading of 4 mss. (NGHV), appearing in Schenkl, above note 2, and restored by Korzeniewski, above note 1, now seems to me to make better sense than the infesta (from three versions of the V ms.) used by most later editors and upon which I had based my comments on these lines in ‘Corydon Revisited’, above note 1, 65–66. The plane tree does not appear in Vergil’s Eclogues and seems rather exotic for pastoral. It is mentioned in Georgics 4.146 as a shade tree for drinkers. Calpurnius’ setting here may well owe something to Phaedrus 230 BC and the plane tree by the Ilissus. This, to Socrates, is an unacustomed place, since he seldom leaves the city, and the substance of the dialogue conducted there is to be taken back to Lysias in the city (278B).
15. Corydon, vss. 153–162, begins to develop a fantasy career for himself, and his brother seconds his wish for better fortune, but Meliboeus (168–169) reminds the pair of their pastoral duties.
16. In Ae. 8.314–315, Fauni and Nymphae are the ancient inhabitants of Italy. Verdière, above note 1, 161–162, notes the antiquarian flavor of the reference to Faunus’ prophecy in Eclogue 1. The presence of Faunus here links the two poems and it seems symbolically appropriate that the forest deities who represent preagricultural Italy should be a part of the audience for the two agriculturists just as wild beasts are intermingled with the tame.
17. Where de Gubernatis, above note 13, 82, had seen these lines as an example of irresponsible exaggeration, Korzeniewski, above note 1, 90, ad vs. 10, correctly identifies the Orpheus paradigm and gives a series of references.
18. See the discussion by Frankfort, Henri in Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago, 1946Google Scholar; rep. Penguin, Baltimore, 1972) 180–182.
19. De Re Rustica 2. Intro.-1.5.
20. Theocritus, Idyll 1. 33–35.
21. Estimations of this poem have varied widely, but all turn upon the assumption that Calpurnius intended Lycidas to appear as a sympathetic protagonist. Cesareo, above note 13, 23ff, finds a realistic psychological portrayal in his indignation and hatred of his rival, while Verdière, above note 1, 171, thinks that a poor understanding of feminine psychology is revealed.
22. Cesareo, above note 13, recognizes an element of the grotesque in these complaints (‘Surely there can’t be that much blood’), but thinks Calpurnius is attempting to illustrate the care that herdsmen lavish upon their flocks.
23. These parallels are also noticed by Korzeniewski, above note 1, 92 ad vss. 1–21, while Rosenmeyer, above note 3, 134, comments on the assimilation of woman to heifer in the conclusion.
24. Notions concerning the major source of the poem have greatly affected estimations of its tone. Hubaux, Jean, Les thèmes bucoliques dans la poésie latine (Brussels, 1930) 223Google Scholar, stressed the Ovidian source and commented on Lycidas’ elegiac gallantry, as also Cizek, above note 1, 375, while Korzeniewski, above note 1, 93–94, ad vss. 45–91, finds similarities with the pleading letters in the Heroides. But Verdière, above note 1, 169, defends the Theocritean model arguing that Calpurnius has only softened the brutality of the original situation by overtones of the Ovidian apology. In fact neither original is very close to the poem. In Ovid Amores 1.7, the girl remains with her lover; her affections, but not her person, must be won back. In Theocritus there is no attempt to win her back. Most important, the contrast between the dives amator and young lover figures in Calpurnius alone.
25. Lycidas (vss. 73–74) does not go so far as to want Mopsus dead, but cannot refrain from thoughts of a grotesque humiliation. For discussion of the Cyclops in Ovid, a parody of Theocritus’ Idyll 11, see Leach, E. W., ‘Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Ramus 3 (1974) 128–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26. In Eclogue 7.53–56 and 57–60 there are no repetitions of words.
27. Compare Eclogue 3.26–27.
28. Rosenmeyer, above note 31, 102, compares Lycidas and the Cyclops but takes the former’s pride in wealth as a kind of inevitable development in the later pastoral.
29. Cesareo, above note 13, 21, observes that the ‘image of boy and girl united in work and song looks back to idealized passages in Vergil’.
30. Eclogue 3.20 and also Ae. 2.135, where Sinon lurks obscurus in ulva (‘hidden in the sedge’).
31. On this poem also opinions have varied widely according to individual taste. Keene, above note 10, 117, found the subject uninteresting but liked the descriptions. Hubaux, above note 24, 223–224, Cesareo, above note 13, 61–80, and Grant, W. L., Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill, 1965) 72–73Google Scholar, speak of ‘didactic pastoral’ as a genuine innovation and consider the poem one of the best, while Verdière, above note 1, 171, is wholly negative about a poem that, for him, ‘exsude d’ennui’ and is ‘rien d’autre qu’un digest des Géorgiques’.
32. The several scholars who have noticed this organizational pattern are those most favorably disposed to the poem: Cesareo, above note 13, 80; Grant, above note 31, 72; Korzeniewski, above note 1, 102. It has not, however, been employed as a basis for interpretation, save as Cesareo remarks on Calpurnius’ sense of the treachery of spring (71), the tyranny of summer (76), and the way in which winter appears as ‘a gigantic and fierce enemy of the shepherd’ (78).
33. Cesareo, above note 13, 90, sees that the defeat of the reader’s expectations is an aspect of the poem’s design.
34. For discussion of the asperity in Theocritus’ fifth Idyll see Lawall, Gilbert, Theocritus’ Coan Pastorals: A Poetry Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) 52–65Google Scholar, and on Vergil’s third Eclogue, see Leach, above note 6, 170–182.
35. Korzeniewski, above note 1, 107, ad vs. 23, identifies aridus (‘dry’; ‘hoarse’) as a term from the vocabulary of stylistic criticism, citing passages in Cicero and Quintilian. Verdière, above note 1, 172, believes that the poem contains veiled allusions to the schools of Neronian poetry that are now virtually impenetrable. However, it may not be necessary to carry this search beyond the limits of the book, since the debates in the fourth poem show Calpurnius’ awareness of a distinction between an urbanized and a rustic style in pastoral and provide sufficient basis for an ars poetica here.
36. The inappropriateness of these stakes has not gone unnoticed. Rosenmeyer, above note 3, 164, thus observes: ‘Trouble does start when the gifts and prizes begin to be inappropriate to the bower.’ The horse, in his opinion, belongs to the world of epic and represents Calpurnius’ straining of the limits of the genre. Korzeniewski, above note 1, 107, ad vss. 43–45, refers to the necklace worn by a deer in a picture of Cyparissus in the Domus M. Lucretii in Pompeii (IX.3.5). An allusion to Cyparissus would be appropriate here, since the story has homosexual overtones (Ovid, Met. 10. 106–143) and Lycidas associates Astilus’ refinement with homosexuality.
37. ‘Die “panegyrische Tendenz” in den Carmina Einsidlensia’, Hermes 94 (1966) 344–360Google Scholar, and above note 1, 4–5.
38. See esp. Silvae 1.3 and 2.2. These poems have recently been discussed by Pavlovskis, Zoja, Man in an Artificial Landscape: The Marvels of Civilization in Imperial Roman Literature (Leiden, 1973Google Scholar), as celebrations of the triumph of technology in the subjugation of nature; yet they contain an obvious awareness of pastoral mythology.
39. Cizek, above note 1, 157–158, remarks on the particular emphasis given to royal authority in the Phaedra and Thyestes suggesting that these two plays were written after 61 A.D. and reflected Seneca’s bitter experience of the fate of virtue in its conflicts with power.
40. Grimal, Pierre, in his edition, L. Annaei Senecae Phaedra (Paris, 1965) 33–43Google Scholar, comments on Seneca’s originality in the development of picturesque elements in the monody. In his opinion Hippolytus’ frequent allusions to nature are meant to convey an Epicurean strain in his thought. Heldmann, Konrad, Untersuchungen zu den Tragodien Senecas, Hermes Einzelschriften 31 (Wiesbaden, 1974) 71–85Google Scholar, notes a sense of unreality in the expansiveness of the geographical picture which he understands as a world Hippolytus constructs for himself alone. Given the absence of emotional conflict from the monody, a situation unusual for Senecan prologues, he suggests that Hippolytus is being characterized primarily as a type figure of the young hunter, an ideal representative of his world. Pastoral elements in the play were also mentioned by Eva Stehle Stigers in a paper ‘Love/Death in Seneca’s Phaedra’ at the APA December 1974.
41. As Grimal, above note 40, 46, ad vs. 112, observes, the speech is parallel to that in Euripides Hippolytus 215ff., but assumes greater importance within the context of Seneca’s intensification of Hippolytus’ relationship with nature. The contrast between Hippolytus’ pastoral vision of nature, and Phaedra’s concept of nature under the influence of amor is brought out by Grimal, 9ff., and Heldmann, above note 40, 85. One sees it clearly in vss. 700ff. when Phaedra declares her passion in phrases that echo Vergil’s description (Georgics 3. 242–283) of animals driven by amor.
42. The story is mentioned briefly in Euripides’ Hippolytus 336–337, 341, and Ovid Heroides 4.165, but Seneca may well have noticed the way in which Vergil develops Pasiphae’s obsession as a perversion of pastoral desire in Eclogue 6.46–60. In A.A.1. 289–326 Ovid brings out the comic possibilities of this misdirected pastoralism.
43. The text for Seneca is Leo, F. ed., L. Anrmei Senecae Tragoediae (Berlin, 1879, rep. Berlin, 1963Google Scholar).
44. Grimal, above note 40, 90, ad vs. 483ff., notes Seneca’s departures from Euripides’ development of the concept of sophrosyne, pointing out especially that arguments generally applied to wisdom are here applied to ‘la vie sauvage’ and that Seneca’s character differs from his predecessor in having no desire to gain public favor.
45. Both Grimal, above note 40, 91, and Cizek, above note 1, 157–158, mention the connection between Hippolytus’ speech and this letter.
