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Houghton, L. B. T.
2019.
Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance.
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EARLY RESPONSES TO VIRGIL'S FOURTH ECLOGUE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2018
Extract
The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.
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References
1 That is not to say that the dating of the poem itself has proved uncontroversial: see e.g. Berkowitz, L., ‘Pollio and the Date of the Fourth “Eclogue”#x2019;, CSCA 5 (1972), 21–38Google Scholar; Du Quesnay, I. M. Le M., ‘Vergil's Fourth Eclogue’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 1 (1977), 30–1Google Scholar.
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3 Clausen, W. (ed.), Virgil. Eclogues (Oxford, 1994), 126Google Scholar. On the political career of Asinius Gallus (consul in 8 bc), see e.g. Shotter, D. C. A., ‘Tiberius and Asinius Gallus’, Historia 20 (1971), 443–57Google Scholar; Bosworth, A. B., ‘Tacitus and Asinius Gallus’, AJAH 11 (1977), 173–92Google Scholar; Flower, H. I., The Art of Forgetting. Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 143–8Google Scholar; Devillers, O., ‘Les passages relatifs à Asinius Gallus dans les Annales de Tacite’, REL 87 (2009), 154–65Google Scholar. On his identification with the child of the eclogue, see Waltz, R., ‘La IVe églogue et Asinius Gallus’, in Mélanges Paul Thomas. Receuil de mémoires concernant la philologie classique, dédié à Paul Thomas (Bruges, 1930), 738–46Google Scholar.
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6 Cf. Houghton, L. B. T. and Buckley, E., ‘Si quid mea carmina possunt…: Reflections on the Virgilian Tradition’, JRS 99 (2009), 207Google Scholar with n. 3, citing Hinds, S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1987), 135Google Scholar, on Ovid.
7 The relative dates of the two poems are disputed: for discussion see Clausen (n. 3), xxii with n. 34. What is most important for our purposes is that Eclogue 6 follows Eclogue 4 in a sequential reading of the collection.
8 See Servius on Ecl. 6.41: quod autem dicit ‘regna Saturnia’, fabularum ordinem vertit (‘As for the fact that he says “Saturn's reign”, he changes the order of the stories’); also e.g. Gee, E., Aratus and the Astronomical Tradition (Oxford, 2013), 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 22; Cucchiarelli, A. (ed.), Publio Virgilio Marone. Le Bucoliche (Rome, 2012), 346Google Scholar; Paschalis, M., ‘Semina ignis: The Interplay of Science and Myth in the Song of Silenus’, AJPh 122 (2001), 201–22Google Scholar; Clausen (n. 3), 192; Johnston, P. A., Vergil's Agricultural Golden Age. A Study of the Georgics (Leiden, 1980), 9–10Google Scholar; Coleman, R. (ed.), Vergil. Eclogues (Cambridge, 1977), 187Google Scholar; Rudd, N., Lines of Enquiry. Studies in Latin Poetry (Cambridge, 1976), 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Segal, C. P., ‘Vergil's Sixth Eclogue and the Problem of Evil’, TAPhA 100 (1969), 410–11Google Scholar; Skutsch, O., ‘Symmetry and Sense in the Eclogues’, HSPh 73 (1969), 164–5Google Scholar. A smaller-scale reversal might be seen in the following line, where the punishment implied by Caucasias…volucris is mentioned before furtum…Promethei.
9 Segal (n. 8), 411.
10 So Coleman (n. 8), 187: ‘probably a necessary metrical variant for Saturnium regnum’.
11 See especially Ecl. 5.86–7, quoting 2.1 and 3.1; such internal recollection may indeed be present in the lines preceding Ecl. 6.41, where Silenus’ song recounts how altius atQUE CADaNT submotis nubIBUS iMBRes (‘and showers fall from the clouds removed on high’, 6.38) – cf. maioresQUE CADuNT altis de montIBUS uMBRae (‘and longer shadows are falling from the high mountains’, Ecl. 1.83). If this rather slight echo is accepted, Ecl. 6.39, with its reference to the time when silvae (cf. Ecl. 4.3) first begin to rise, might be seen as an implicit acknowledgement of the allusion to the first of Virgil's pastoral poems.
12 See e.g. Clausen (n. 3), 121–2; Cucchiarelli (n. 8), 238–9.
13 Johnston (n. 8), 50; Galinsky, K., Augustan Culture. An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 95Google Scholar; R. A. Apostol, ‘Rome's Bucolic Landscapes: Place, Prophecy, and Power in Aeneid VIII’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan (2009), 126; Zanker, A. T., ‘Late Horatian Lyric and the Virgilian Golden Age’, AJPh 131 (2010), 501Google Scholar. For discussion of Virgilian variations on the theme of the Golden Age, see also Ryberg, I. S., ‘Vergil's Golden Age’, TAPhA 89 (1958), 112–31Google Scholar; Reckford, K. J., ‘Some Appearances of the Golden Age’, CJ 54 (1958), 79–87Google Scholar; Reynen, H., ‘Ewiger Frühling und goldene Zeit: zum Mythos des goldenen Zeitalters bei Ovid und Vergil’, Gymnasium 72 (1965), 415–33Google Scholar; Mähl, H.-J., Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis (Heidelberg, 1965; repr. Tübingen, 1994), 69–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schiebe, M. Wifstrand, Das ideale Dasein bei Tibull und die Goldzeitkonzeption Vergils (Uppsala, 1981), 19–53Google Scholar; Wallace-Hadrill, A., ‘The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology’, P&P 95 (1982), 20–5Google Scholar; Pavan, M., ‘Aurea (aetas, gens; aurea saecula)’, in Corte, F. Della (ed.), Enciclopedia Virgiliana (Rome, 1984–91)Google Scholar, i.412–18.
14 See Gale, M. R., Virgil on the Nature of Things. The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 24, 45, 50, 58, 71–2. Zanker (n. 13), 501, analysing Virgil's treatment of the Golden Age in the Georgics, draws attention to ‘multiple versions within the same text’ (see also 502 n. 23).
15 See Johnston (n. 8), esp. 62–89; also Galinsky (n. 13), 95; Wifstrand Schiebe (n. 13), 40, who nonetheless traces a relationship between Ecl. 4 and the praise of Italy at G. 2.136–76 (32–6).
16 Cf. Mähl (n. 13), 88–9.
17 Hardie, P., The Last Trojan Hero. A Cultural History of Virgil's Aeneid (London and New York, 2014), 3, 95–6Google Scholar, sees the entire plot of the Aeneid as patterned on conceptions articulated in the fourth Eclogue.
18 See Cucchiarelli (n. 8), 237–8 (‘Lo stesso Virgilio ha contribuito a confondere i suoi lettori, riutilizzando il linguaggio profetico dell'ecloga 4 per Augusto in Aen. 6, 791–807’ [237]); Cucchiarelli, A., ‘Aeneid 6’, CR n.s. 65 (2015), 455Google Scholar; Geue, T., ‘Princeps “avant la lettre”: The Foundations of Augustus in Pre-Augustan Poetry’, in Labate, M. and Rosati, G. (eds.), La costruzione del mito augusteo (Heidelberg, 2013), 59–60Google Scholar, 61–2. The emphatic reference to Augustus as vir (‘the man’) in Aen. 6.791 might be seen as an insinuation of the ultimate fulfilment of the prediction at Ecl. 4.37, hinc, ubi iam firmata VIRUM te fecerit aetas… (‘Then, when your age now strengthened has made you a man…’).
19 See e.g. Austin, R. G., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos liber sextus (Oxford, 1977), 243Google Scholar on Aen. 6.792.
20 And in fact the majority of the other words in Aen. 6.790 can also be found in the eclogue: magnum (cf. magnus…ordo, Ecl. 4.5), caeli (caelo…alto, Ecl. 4.7), ventura (venturo…saeclo, Ecl. 4.52).
21 For a less celebratory reading of the lines, and of the Golden Age theme in the Aeneid more generally, see Thomas, R. F., Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), 1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Boyle, A. J., ‘The Canonic Text: Virgil's Aeneid’, in Boyle, A. J. (ed.), Roman Epic (London and New York, 1993), 98Google Scholar.
22 This assertion is arguably inconsistent with the reference at Aen. 7.203 to Saturni gentem haud vinclo nec legibus aequam (‘the race of Saturn, just not through chain nor through laws’); for contradictions in Virgil's presentation of the Saturnian Golden Age, see below, n. 24.
23 Apostol (n. 13), 25–6, sees a close relationship between Eclogue 4 and these lines in Aeneid 8, and a shared political resonance for Virgil's contemporaries (on the political implications of Saturn's rule as described by Evander, see also ibid., 134–40).
24 See e.g. Thomas (n. 21), 2–3; Perkell, C., ‘The Golden Age and its Contradictions in the Poetry of Vergil’, Vergilius 48 (2002), 28–34Google Scholar. For discussion see also Apostol (n. 13), 132–3, 134–5; and for further consideration of possible inconsistencies in Virgil's treatment of Saturn and the Golden Age, see Ware, C., Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition (Cambridge, 2012), 178–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar (‘To attempt to define the golden age from studying the Eclogue and the Aeneid is to confront a series of paradoxes’ [181]); O'Hara, J. J., Inconsistency in Roman Epic. Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Cambridge, 2007), 100–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perkell (this note); Pavan (n. 13).
25 On Tibullus’ treatment of the Golden Age here, see especially Newman, J. K., ‘Saturno Rege: Themes of the Golden Age in Tibullus and Other Augustan Poets’, in Radke, A. E. (ed.), Candide Iudex. Beiträge zur augusteischen Dichtung. Festschrift für Walter Wimmel zum 75. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1998), 225–46Google Scholar; Morelli, A. M., ‘I “Saturnia regna” nell'elegia 1, 3 di Tibullo’, MD 26 (1991), 175–89Google Scholar; Wifstrand Schiebe (n. 13), esp. 84–90; Bénéjam, M. J., ‘L’âge d'or de Tibulle’, in Thill, A. (ed.), L’Élégie romaine. Enracinement, thèmes, diffusion (Paris, 1980), 91–103Google Scholar. For a further Tibullan description of the benefits of the Golden Age, see Tib. 2.3.67–76, where at line 74 the speaker prays for the return of one aspect of that age, though not the age as a whole. Eclogue 4 is often invoked as a point of reference for Tibullus 2.5, where we find the words Saturno rege fugato (2.5.9), reference to the Sibyl (2.5.15), and an emphasis throughout on the divine sponsorship of Apollo: see e.g. Cairns, F., Tibullus. A Hellenistic Poet at Rome (Cambridge, 1979), 85–6Google Scholar; Miller (n. 2), 260–5.
26 On this recurring feature of descriptions of the Golden Age, see e.g. Levin (n. 4), esp. 10–11, 19–20, 177.
27 pinus, Tib. 1.3.37 / Ecl. 4.38; navita, Tib. 1.3.40 ~ nautica, Ecl. 4.38; merce, Tib. 1.3.40 ~ merces, Ecl. 4.39; subiit iuga…taurus, Tib. 1.3.41 ~ tauris iuga solvit, Ecl. 4.41. Particularly in the last instance, the coincidence between line numbers in the two poems suggests the possibility here of ‘stichometric intertextuality’ (on which see e.g. Hinds, S., Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry [Cambridge, 1998], 92Google Scholar n. 80; D. Lowe, ‘Women Scorned: A New Stichometric Allusion in the Aeneid’, CQ n.s. 63 [2013], 442–5). Morelli (n. 25), 180, remarks ‘Il brano sull'età dell'oro in Verg. Ecl. 4 costituisce il termine di riferimento essenziale per Tibull. 1, 3, 35 ss.’
28 For the parallels see commentators ad locc.; Zanker (n. 13), 500 with n. 17; and for discussion see now also Gutt, N., ‘Tibulls Elegie 1,3 als “Antwort” auf Vergils 4. Ekloge? Perspektiven für eine transtextuelle Deutung’, Eisodos (2016), 17–27Google Scholar.
29 Wallace-Hadrill (n. 13), 21, argues of Eclogue 4 that ‘One should not mistake the tone of the poem for one of optimism…The Eclogue, professedly hopeful, offers only fantasy’; if so, Tibullus’ implied caricature of the celebratory tone of his model may be tendentious.
30 See esp. Feeney, D., Literature and Religion at Rome. Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge, 1998), 28–40Google Scholar; Putnam, M. C. J., Horace's Carmen Saeculare. Ritual Magic and the Poet's Art (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000)Google Scholar; Barchiesi, A., ‘The Uniqueness of the Carmen Saeculare and Its Tradition’, in Woodman, A. J. and Feeney, D. (eds.), Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace (Cambridge, 2002), 107–23Google Scholar.
31 See e.g. Feeney, D., Caesar's Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 2007), 133Google Scholar; Mattingly, H., ‘Virgil's Fourth Eclogue’, JWI 10 (1947), 17–18Google Scholar.
32 See Barker, D., ‘“The Golden Age Is Proclaimed”? The Carmen Saeculare and the Renascence of the Golden Race’, CQ n.s. 46 (1996), 438–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Barker (n. 32); see also Feeney (n. 31), 133–4; Putnam (n. 30), 118–22.
34 See Barker (n. 32), 445: ‘The Carmen Saeculare…may be read as specifically rejecting the mystical plenty of the Eclogue. For such plenty it substitutes a prayer for the conventional fertility of the earth, which discounts both the fantastic and the luxurious’; also Galinsky (n. 13), 102–5; Zanker (n. 13), 504–8; Thomas, R. F. (ed.), Horace. Odes Book IV and Carmen Saeculare (Cambridge, 2011), 59Google Scholar (‘No room here for corn spontaneously yellowing in the fields, wine running freely in channels, or sheep dyeing themselves on hillsides of Italy’).
35 Barker (n. 32), 445; on these lines see also ibid., 442, and Putnam (n. 30), 119–20, interpreting the repeated iam (‘now’) of Carm. saec. 53 and 57 as an echo of the same repetition in Ecl. 4.6–7.
36 See Putnam (n. 30), 120; Zanker (n. 13), 505 (‘the return of the Virgin in Virgil's fourth Eclogue is echoed by the return of the Virtues in Horace's Carmen Saeculare’); Thomas (n. 34), 80 (‘extravagant language, with a hint at, but ultimately with studious avoidance of, the terminology of Virgil's returning golden age at Ecl. 4.6’). On Roman virtus, see especially Eisenhut, W., Virtus Romana (Munich, 1973)Google Scholar; Edwards, C., The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993), 20–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and index s.v. virtus; McDonnell, M., Roman Manliness. Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge and New York, 2006)Google Scholar.
37 On the orientalism of the fourth Eclogue, see Nisbet, R. G. M., ‘Virgil's Fourth Eclogue: Easterners and Westerners’, BICS 25 (1978), 59–78Google Scholar (repr. in Nisbet, , Collected Papers on Latin Literature, ed. Harrison, S. J. [Oxford, 1995], 47–75Google Scholar).
38 See Baldry, H. C., ‘Who Invented the Golden Age?’, CQ n.s. 2 (1952), 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘This looks like an echo of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, but the reference is too slight to give any clear indication of the source of its thought’; Cucchiarelli (n. 8), 250 on Ecl. 4.6 (‘una significativa rivisitazione dell'ecloga 4’); also Zanker (n. 13), 509 n. 46.
39 See Zanker (n. 13), 508–9.
40 On the relationship between Eclogue 4 and Odes 4.15, see further Putnam, M. C. J., Artifices of Eternity. Horace's Fourth Book of Odes (Ithaca, 1986), 287–91Google Scholar; Zanker (n. 13), 509–10. Note in particular the ‘stichometric intertextuality’ (on which see above, n. 27) of aetas at the end of the fourth line of each poem; the two passages are compared by Breed, B. W., ‘Tua, Caesar, aetas: Horace Ode 4.15 and the Augustan Age’, AJPh 125 (2004), 248Google Scholar (see also Du Quesnay [n. 1], 60: ‘The relationship of the puer to his aetas is clearly thought of in the same way as the relationship of Augustus to his aetas’).
41 See Putnam (n. 40), 287: ‘Many of the major poems of the Augustan era comment on this manifesto’. On the limitations of the poem for interpreting the general cultural milieu of the Augustan age, note, however, Galinsky (n. 13), 93: ‘the fourth Eclogue cannot be considered as a programmatic matrix of things to come and as being so influential, at Augustus’ own time (as opposed to later ages), that it would allow us to use it as a frame of reference for aspects ranging from imagery in art to the ideology of the ruler’.
42 On later panegyrical (and other) appropriations, see esp. Bietenholz, P. G., Historia and Fabula. Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1994), 209–13Google Scholar; de Armas, F. A., The Return of Astraea. An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón (Lexington, KY, 1986)Google Scholar; Costa, G., La leggenda dei secoli d'oro nella letteratura italiana (Bari, 1972)Google Scholar; Levin (n. 4); Mähl (n. 13), 99–102; Grant, W. L., ‘A Classical Theme in Neo-Latin’, Latomus 16 (1957), 690–706Google Scholar. Still later examples are considered by Binder, G., ‘Goldene Zeiten: immer wieder wird ein Messias geboren… Beispiele neuzeitlicher Aneignung der 4. Ekloge Vergils’, in Burkard, T., Schauer, M., and Wiener, C. (eds.), Vestigia Vergiliana. Vergil-Rezeption in der Neuzeit (Berlin and New York, 2010), 51–72Google Scholar.
43 Hardie (n. 17), 1. On Eclogue 4 in early American political discourse, see also Reinhold, M., Classica Americana. The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, MI, 1984), 225Google Scholar, 229, 233, 238–9.
44 See e.g. Du Quesnay (n. 1), 84: ‘because it concentrates on the emotions of the occasion rather than on historical facts it transcends the moment to become of universal and perennial interest’.
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