The Literary Experience of Vergil's Fourth "Eclogue"

The Literary Experience of Vergil's Fourth "Eclogue"Author(s): Bruce ArnoldReviewed work(s):Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Dec., 1994 - Jan., 1995), pp. 143-160Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and SouthStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297755 .Accessed: 12/10/2012 05:20

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THE LITERARY EXPERIENCE OF VERGIL'S FOURTH ECLOGUE

Eclogue 4 is one of the most riddling of ancient poems because of the indeterminacy of the central figure's identity, the mysterious child who is predicted to usher in a golden age of peace. Even fifty years ago H. J. Rose could confess, in response to the questions why Vergil expects the golden age just then and why he foretells the birth of the child, that "the investigator is fortunate if he can thoroughly satisfy himself, and lucky beyond all precedent if he can convince any consid- erable number of readers or hearers."1 The intervening time has not changed the situation much. It still behooves any interpreter of the poem to don the mantle of modesty recommended by Rose; but, having done so, I would like to present in this paper a rather different way of reading Eclogue 4 than is common today.

There are two broad roads of interpretation along which modem scholarship has generally proceeded. Some have approached the poem as a historical cipher by seeking to unmask the child, his parents and an assumed nexus of political circumstances underlying the poem, but such interpretive efforts have lost much of their favor in the most recent times.2 If Vergil had intended to pay an oblique compliment to Pollio or Octavian or even Antony by such lavish predictions for their children, or if, even more indirectly, he meant to commemorate the recent wedding pacts between Antony and Octavia or between Octavian and Scribonia, it must be acknowledged that the poem is not very successful. It is susceptible at the very least to the charge of being

The Eclogues of Vergil (Berkeley-Los Angeles 1942) 165-66. 2J. Beaujeu, "L'enfant sans nom de la IVe Bucolique," REL 60 (1982) 186-215

provides a relatively recent and lucid overview of the major trends in twentieth-century scholarship on the poem, along the way pointing out the weaknesses of various historicizing interpretations. For a more exhaustive review see E. Coleiro, An Introduction to Vergil's Bucolics with a Critical Edition of the Text (Amsterdam 1979) 219-54. He distinguishes thirteen different identifications, to which he adds his own fourteenth, rather forgettable, candidate: Herod's child. More interesting is the general bisection performed on the poem's scholarship by R. G. M. Nisbet, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue: Easterners and Westerners," BICS 25 (1978) 59-78, who examines the conflicting lines of interpretation descending from E. Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes: Geschichte einer religifsen Idee (Leipzig-Berlin 1924) and G. Jachmann, "Die 4. Ekloge Vergils," ASNP 21 (1952) 13-62. The fullest bibliography is W. W. Briggs, "A Bibliography of Virgil's 'Eclogues' (1927-1977)," ANRW II.31.2 (1981) 1267-1357.

The Classical Journal 90.2 (1994) 143-60

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too vague to work as encomium,3 if not also extremely naive. In addition, such interpretations usually rely either on broad consider- ations of genre4 or on analysis of small bits like lines 11-14, which have been construed as a covert reference to the treaty of Brundisium.s They have contributed nothing to an elucidation of the long central panel of the poem (18-45), which provides a detailed depiction of the growth of the puer.

The second approach, preferable in my view, is that which interprets the child in a symbolic sense, usually as an intimation of a forthcoming golden age.6 Here too there are difficulties, both in the

3 The alternative suggested by G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford 1968) 283, that Vergil was being deliberately ambiguous in order to hedge his speculation against an unforeseeable turn of events or to avoid giving offense, perhaps saves the poet from complete failure, but marks him out as a tortuously devious courtier. There are plenty of examples in the Vergilian corpus which demonstrate that deft, intelligible flattery was normally not difficult for the poet to handle.

4 See I. M. Du Quesnay, "Vergil's Fourth Eclogue," PLLS 1976 (Liverpool 1977) 25-99, and G. Williams, "A Version of Pastoral. Virgil, Eclogue 4," in Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, ed. T. Woodman & D. West (Cambridge 1974) 36-45. Interpre- tation of the poem as an epithalamium goes back to D. A. Slater, "Was the Fourth Eclogue Written to Celebrate the Marriage of Octavia to Mark Antony?-A Literary Parallel," CR 26 (1912) 114-19, whose work was later endorsed by the highly influential article of W. W. Tarn, "Alexander Helios and the Golden Age," JRS 22 (1932) 135-60. Rose (note 1 above) 204 rightly asks: "If it is a marriage-hymn, why has it none of the commonplaces appropriate to such a composition, neither praise of the bride and groom or their families, laudation of wedlock in general, reflections on the joy awaiting the wedded pair, or mention of any of the numerous deities of marriage?"

5 Most scholars would like to read an allusion in these four lines, and hence in the general background of the poem, to the treaty of Brundisium made in autumn 40 B.c. But a distinct minority opinion, supported by very credible evidence, argues that the composition of the poem dates earlier to the summer of 41 B.C., before the outbreak of the Perusine war and looking forward to the consulship for which Pollio had been designated over two years earlier: Norden (note 2 above) 14-40; L. R. Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Middletown, CT 1931) 115; Rose (note 1 above) 178-80; L. Berkowitz, "Pollio and the Date of the Fourth Eclogue," CSCA 5 (1972) 21-38; Beaujeu (note 2 above) 188-89. As far as I can see, nothing compels acceptance of one dating over the other, which points up again how truly vague historical allusions actually are in the poem.

6 Since the early seventies there has been a steady stream of valuable studies which have either heavily downplayed or positively rejected the historicists' approach to the eclogue in order to give the literary and stylistic facets of the poem more place in their analysis. Thus, M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art. Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton 1970) 136-65 reads the poem as a generously optimistic vision tenuously uniting pastoral stability and history. C. Pantazzi, "Golden Age in Arcadia," Latomus 33 (1974) 284 understands Vergil to be giving expression "to a millennial optimistic vision ... that is formally opposed to the archaic, pessimistic tale of the Five Ages as it existed exem- plarily in Hesiod's Works and Days." E. W. Leach, Vergil's Eclogues. Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca 1974) 216-32 interprets the child to be "the organizing spirit of the

VERGIL'S FOURTH ECLOGUE 145

apparent naivet6 of such an exuberant expression and in the problem of precisely defining the new millennial order as it is exemplified in the description of the child's growth and achievements. Are we really to suppose that Vergil, whose youth had been passed under the shadow of Rome's most protracted period of civil war and social turmoil, could envision in the treacherous maneuvers of the triumvirs an ideal political order at the threshold of realization?7The decade that followed the composition of this poem proves any such utopian vision to have been grossly illusory. The Roman world plunged onward into ever greater conflicts of arms. Furthermore, if the child is to symbolize a new era or the divine forces at work in constructing an ideal political order, why is he presented as a real child, who is born and grows through distinct stages to meet his heroic destiny?

In what follows I will take a somewhat different approach to reading the symbolic patterns of the poem, one which examines closely a particular nexus of literary allusions that are reflective of more purely literary concerns. Although the pastoral vision Vergil creates in this eclogue is, as he says (2), uplifted to match the dignity of a consul, it remains nevertheless grounded in the fundamental artistic sensibility of the Eclogue collection's pastoral ambience, where poetry is consis- tently featured as the subject of poetry. There are different modes to this poetic self-reflection in which song is created out of song. For example, in some eclogues we see herdsmen who are themselves in the act of creating song in performance, while in others, such as Eclogue 4, we read the eclogue poet's own composition of a song which offers through its self-conscious interplay with literary texts a reading experience within the text itself. Thus, as I intend to demonstrate, the

new age," a model on the example of Plato's ideal ruler of perfection in human society. W. Berg, Early Virgil (London 1974) 155-77, followed by M. Northrup, "Vergil on the Birth of Poetry: A Reading of the Fourth Eclogue," Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 3 (1983) 111-25, sees in the figure of the child "Virgil's literary hero of the future," a program of Roman poetry that would include the Aeneid. P. Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues. A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley 1979) 177-80 also sees the child as "a pastoral myth." Finally, in the opinion of R. Coleman, Vergil. Eclogues (Cambridge 1977) 152, the child "is for Vergil a symbol of the divine forces that will bring the nouom saeculum to pass."

7 W. R. Johnson, "The Broken World: Virgil and His Augustus," Arethusa 14 (1981) 49-56 treats the essential conflict in Vergil's work between what he calls "the metaphor for salus" in the Roman world and the poet's own personal uncertainties. The discrep- ancy which I point to here in Eclogue 4 between an idealized political vision and the realities on the ground, so to speak, can be detected in the Aeneid also. As Johnson (55) says, ". .. for Virgil, Augustus was not so much the achievement of Italy's salus and the world's as he was a symbol for its possible attainment, an image of our needs and our hopes."

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puer is at once the subject of the text to be read and himself a product of reading texts. Any perceived historical content or political symbol- ism in the poem, therefore, will have to be viewed in relation to the literary framework of self-reference in which it is presented.

Although Eclogue 4 is often discussed strictly as an occasional piece, an independent composition with few meaningful ties to the pastoral world of the rest of the collection, it in fact incorporates strong and specific allusions to two other passages where Pollio also figures prominently, 3.84-89 and 8.6-13. In both, Vergil commends his patron for his widely acknowledged literary talents and for the personal encouragement which he, Vergil, has received for his own incipient career. The brief exchange between Damoetas and Menalcas in Eclogue 3, in which Pollio surprisingly obtrudes into the mythical realm of pastoral, concisely illustrates his importance for the bucolic poet (84-89):

D. Pollio amat nostram, quamvis est rustica, Musam: Pierides, vitulam lectori pascite vestro.

M. Pollio et ipse facit nova carmina: pascite taurum, iam cornu petat et pedibus qui spargat harenam.

D. Qui te, Pollio, amat, veniat quo te quoque gaudet; mella fluant illi, ferat et rubus asper amomum.

Pollio has achieved literary prominence, reaching the place where the honey flows and the rough thorn bears an eastern spice, bucolic imagery reflecting on the sweetness of poetry and the idealized pastoral world of song (cf. Theoc. Id. 1.146-47; 5.59; 7.78-85; 8.83; Ecl. 4.25, 29-30).

Hence, despite the salute to Pollio's impressive political credentials as a consul in Eclogue 4, his appearance in the collection is just as much conditioned by the role he has played in encouraging Vergil's bucolic production and by the model he himself has set as an author of "new poems" (3.86) and of "poems which alone rival the Sophoclean cothurnus" (8.10). Furthermore, there is a close conjunction of Apollo's reign and Pollio's consulship in Eclogue 4, which would appear to signal an imminent development in the literary world of Rome in addition to auspicious political leadership. Vergil's laudatory address to Pollio in 11-14 follows directly upon the declaration that "now Apollo reigns" (10).8 Throughout the Eclogues, Apollo presides unequivocally as the

8 Oftentimes critics, following Servius, claim that Apollo's rule belongs to the "last age" before renewal and thus precedes the Saturnia regna. Nevertheless, the insistent repetition of iam in lines 4-10 would lead one to believe that all the phenomena described therein have been initiated together at the same time, although the perfection or rise of "a golden race" is envisioned beyond in the future. See Nisbet (note 2 above)


god of pastoral song and as a conspicuous, divine model for the master poet (cf. 4.55-57; 5.9, 66; 6.3-12, 72-73, 82-83; 7.22-23; 10.21-23).9

Furthermore, the strong verbal echoes between the literary eminence achieved by Pollio in 3.88-89 and the golden age experienced by Vergil's puer invite us to understand the latter condition more as a literary than a political phenomenon.1o In Eclogue 3 the singer Damoetas expresses his approval of the reader who can appreciate Pollio's poetry" by wishing that a person of such discernment might reach the same place occupied by Pollio, viz. where "the honey flows" and "the rough thornbush bears amomum." Now this conception of an idealized production of poetry as a state in which honey flows and amomum abounds is quite distinctly alluded to also in the depiction of the growth of the puer (4.25, 30). In fact, these are the only eclogues in the corpus which make mention of honey or amomum--somewhat surprisingly, since honey at least is commonly associated in the Theocritean bucolics with master singers and pastoral performances. Thus the mutual references between the two poems which proceed from associations with Pollio and poetry appear deliberate and meaningful.

Eclogue 4 contains many other pastoral motifs that incorporate idealized associations with poetry. The infant will receive an effusion of flores (23), a word which by analogy with the Greek ivOo; can allude to poetry.12 Other gifts which the earth pours forth, ivy, baccar and "smiling" acanthus (19-20), are colored by more specific literary associations (cf. 7.25-28).3 The goats who bring home full udders of milk for the portentous babe (21-22) should also recall the prize Thyrsis receives in Idyll 1 for his song on the dying Daphnis. The unnamed goatherd praises him upon receipt of his song by wishing that his mouth may be full of honey (1.146) and by urging him to

59, 62-63. Moreover, it seems improbable on the face of it that Apollo, who plays such a prominent role in defining the idealized pastoral condition throughout the Eclogue Book, should be cut out of the golden age in this poem.

9Thus Berg (note 6 above) 167 and Northrup (note 6 above) 115 explain his role in Eclogue 4. Others see him here only in his capacity as a prophet, which does not accord nearly so well with his function in the collection as a whole.

On the echoes and parallels between Eclogues 3 and 4 see H. W. Garrod, "Virgil's Messianic Eclogue," CR 22 (1908) 150-51; M. Desport, L'incantation virgilienne (Bor- deaux 1952) 237; Berg (note 6 above) 159-61; C. P. Segal, "Pastoral Realism and the Golden Age: Correspondence and Contrast between Virgil's Third and Fourth Eclogues," Philologus 121 (1977) 161-63; Northrup (note 6 above) 118-19 n. 19.

11Qui te ... amat is explained by the preceding, parallel statement, Pollio amat nostram ... Musam.

12 See Northrup (note 6 above) 118 n. 19. 13 See Berg (note 6 above) 169 and Northrup (note 6 above) 118.

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take the proffered goat and milk her (1.151). Both milk and honey, therefore, can function in the bucolic tradition as commemorative emblems of literary productivity and excellence.

The pastoral motifs which Vergil attributes to the second stage of the child's growth (28-30) also help to define the literary field of reference operating in the background to this entire passage. The fields which grow golden molli arista suggest by the unusual collocation of "soft" and "grain"--the combination never occurs in Vergil's later works and is not entirely natural-Vergilian pastoral's self-referential style. The word mollis ("soft, smooth in a refined manner") has a distinctly literary resonance and defines as well as any other word the essence of Vergil's rustic Muse; it occurs in every Eclogue as a determinative epithet, and its significance is later recognized in Horace's trenchant characterization of the Eclogues' style: molle atque facetum (Sat. 1.10.44). The second stage is also characterized by the pastoral description of grapes "ripening on uncultivated briers" and oaks sweating "dewy honey," both images that distinctly recall the idealized literary achievement of Pollio in 3.89 and whose essential elements, wine and honey, frequently symbolize literary inspiration and productivity in the classical tradition.14

The final stage uses the most controversial pastoral imagery in the piece (42-45), the fantastic portrait of grazing lambs which magically change their fleece to match the requirements of the luxury garment trade.15 Whereas the use of ivy, flowers, wine and honey in figurative allusions to poetic production is well known in all genres of classical

14 I1 would not follow Berg (note 6 above) 172-73 and Northrup (note 6 above) 119 in interpreting the agricultural motifs of the second stage as a veiled allusion to a program for the future Georgics. Certainly cultivation of grain, viticulture and honey production are georgic themes and rank higher up on the ladder of civilized culture than the flowers in the first stage. Nevertheless, all these items are deliberately "pastoralized" to make them more reflective of pure literary than georgic concerns. The grain is described as molli, designating it as a pastoral emblem, and the wine and the honey come spontaneously from miraculous, not agricultural, sources. These are themes which are redolent more of the literary golden age which the Eclogues contemplate in various forms than of the harsh world of the farmer which Vergil was later to describe in the Georgics.

15 The strange image has drawn icy comments, beginning with the famous criticism of T. E. Page, P. Vergili Maronis Bucolica et Georgica (London 1898) 129: "There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous and Virgil has here decidedly taken it." See also Williams (note 3 above) 279-80 and Alpers (note 6 above) 184-86. On the other hand, it has often been explained by appeal to Macrobius' recherche citation of an Etruscan prophecy that a ram flaked with gold or purple was a portent of a beneficent reign. But this explanation is rightly criticized by H. C. Gotoff, "On the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil," Philologus 111 (1%7) 75, since the reported prophecy differs significantly from Vergil's actual portrait


poetry, grazing sheep are more distinctively part of the bucolic tradition, in which tending herds (pascere) is an important collateral activity to singing pastoral song. Thus from the first view we have of Tityrus in Eclogue 1, singing on his oaten straw while his cattle wander freely, to Gallus in Eclogue 10, who wishes that he might be a keeper of the herd at the same time as he imagines a pan-pipe plaintively singing of his love, singing and herding are virtually inseparable activities (cf. also 1.77-78; 2.32-33; 3.85; 6.4-5; 8.33).

But again an allusion back to Eclogue 3.84-87 provides the clearest reference for how in Vergil's pastoral ambience grazing an animal can be metaphorically equivalent to poetic production. Damoetas asserts that Pollio appreciates his bucolic Muse, and then calls on the Muses, "Pasture a calf for your reader." Menalcas responds by using the very same metaphor, only on a different scale: "Pollio himself composes new poems: pasture a bull." We can recognize, therefore, in the strange vision of the pascentis agnos who change their colors--in the subtext colores resonates with its secondary sense of rhetorical embellish- ments-an intimation once again in the pastoral imagery of poetic creation and achievement. Vergil returns to the trope again with a slight variation in the last line of the book: "Go home full, evening approaches, go home, my goats." The "full" she-goats, grazed to their satisfaction and thus ready to depart, quite appropriately symbolize the completion of the poet's task, just as the grazing sheep in Eclogue 4 may be read analogously as symbols of a matured pastoral art, the culminating pastoral motif in a sequence of literary self-references which help to establish the literary context against which the growth and developing literary consciousness of the puer is to be interpreted.

Still more significant in this pattern of literary self-reflection is the insistent interplay throughout the eclogue with Catullus 64. The allusions are structurally determinative in a way that is not always fully appreciated.16 Catullus had told the story of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and had carefully placed the setting for his tale in the gilded

16 Berg (note 6 above) 165 claims that "at least 34 of the Eclogue's 63 lines can be shown with reasonable certainty to have a Catullan colouring, either in content or through direct verbal borrowing ... ." That much is dear, although the point of the borrowing still requires better explanation than it has drawn. The historicists account for such allusions as a means of marking the poem as an epithalamium and thereby subtly estab- lishing the historical occasion of the poem's composition in an important wedding. F. Klingner, Virgil. Bucolica. Georgica. Aeneis (Zurich-Stuttgart 1967) 77-80, although devoted to the idea that the puer must be the child of Octavian, the divine man through whom the restoration of the world is achieved, nevertheless has shown how the two poems can be compared from a more literary perspective by pointing out the manner in which Eclogue 4 precisely reverses the thematic course of the Catullan model.

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age of heroes, a time when gods and men still had social intercourse with one another. Vergil marks the close conceptual ties between his own poem and that of Catullus by alluding to the very same idea of the fellowship of gods and men, even imitating some of the vocabulary and syntax from the last lines of the Catullan poem (407-408) in his own conclusion. Just as Peleus shared a banquet with Jupiter and a marriage bed with the goddess Thetis in Catullus' poem, so also the puer is destined to exemplify that golden-age state where gods and men enjoy intimate social intercourse.

There is a still more important structural correlation with the Catullan model which I take to be critical to understanding the sense of Vergil's poem. Catullus has the Parcae sing a prophecy at the marriage feast in which they foretell the heroic exploits of Achilles, the destined offspring of this union. The poet's treatment, however, is laden with irony. Although Achilles belongs to the high mythological age of heroism, his conspicuous violence and bloodthirsty deeds, culminating in the sacrilegious sacrifice of the virgin Polyxena, point directly forward to the contemporary world that Catullus describes at the end of the poem in somber terms, an iron age of moral degradation and bloody strife. Hence, whereas the Catullan model runs in a general course from a golden age of heroism to an antithetical iron age of dark social deterioration, Eclogue 4 presents a deliberate inversion of that basic line of development (8-9): tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum / desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo.....

In both poems, however, the transition from one state to the other is mediated by the birth of a child whose imminent arrival the Parcae prophesy. The birth of the puer in Eclogue 4 mediates between the iron age of civil war and social turmoil, which so permeated the decade of the 40's, and a golden age of moral restoration prophesied for the future. That reverses with deliberate precision the Catullan pattern of movement in which the birth of Achilles mediates between a lost heroic age and the social degradation of the 50's through which Catullus lived. The birth of a child serves in both poems, therefore, as a crucial structural fulcrum for the most important thematic lines of development. As a consequence, it is very probable that Vergil conceived his idea for the birth of the puer not from the stimulus of any particular historical source or person, but from the main literary model which he chose to work with in this poem.'7 The procedure of incorporating specific literary sources in structural inversion is, in fact, a feature common to many of the Eclogues, most obviously 3, 5, 8, 9,

17 Klingner (note 16 above) 77.


10.18 The growth and development of the puer, therefore, which receives its poetic image in the long central panel of lines 18-45, ought to be explained in terms of its interplay with and reversal of Catullus 64.

We are aided in this analysis of lines 18-45 by the summary of the child's growth which Vergil himself provides in the lines immediately preceding (15-17):

ille deum vitam accipiet divisque videbit permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis, pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.

The course of development outlined here in three stages, extending from the reception of a god-like life in 15 to mature rule over the world in 17, encapsulates the basic course of growth found in the ensuing portrait of 18-45: first, the initial reception of life (18-25); secondly, the maturing through participation in the mythological world of classical Greek epos (26-36); and finally, the destined maturation of the child now grown to manhood in a world that has been perfected in peace (37-45).

The first stage of the child's growth (18-25) is that of infancy:

at tibi prima, puer, nullo munuscula cultu errantis hederas passim cum baccare tellus mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho. ipsae lacte domum referent distenta capellae ubera, nec magnos metuent armenta leones; ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores. occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni occidet; Assyrium vulgo nascetur amomum.

The passage alludes significantly to Hesiod's description of the golden race of men in Works and Days 112-19:

18 The singing contest of Eclogue 3, which is modeled on the amoebaean exchange featured in Idyll 6, ends unlike the Theocritean exemplar with the referee being unable to declare a winner. In Eclogue 5 Mopsus laments the death of Daphnis in a manner recalling Thyrsis' song in Idyll 1, but Menalcas responds by celebrating Daphnis in resurrection. In Eclogue 8 Alphesiboeus sings of the magical rites and incanta- tions employed by a woman to bring her lover back, recalling Simaetha's failed efforts in Idyll 2, but the Vergilian lover surprisingly returns. The journey to the city shared by Moeris and Lyddas in Eclogue 9 significantly reverses the course taken by Simichidas and Lycidas in Idyll 7, who walk away from the city toward the country. In Eclogue 10 Gallus is cast in the same pose as Daphnis in Idyll 1, perishing of love. But whereas Daphnis resists Aphrodite and the claims of love.to the end, Gallus concludes his soliloquy by acknowledging his complete submission.

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Like the gods they lived with hearts free of care and completely without labors and misery; neither did wretched old age lie upon them, but always the same in foot and hand they enjoyed themselves in feasting apart from every evil; and they died as if subdued by sleep; but all good things were theirs; and the grain-giving land bore fruit spontaneously and in great abundance; and they gladly possessed their lands in peace with good things in abundance.

Conceptually, Vergil's poetic image of the child's infancy bears a remarkable similarity to Hesiod's first race of men. Both live like the gods of classical Greek epos, unencumbered by death and suffering, yet enjoying the ready availability of all good things.19

Vergil has given a specific pastoral coloring to the golden age theme by including a variety of plants--which are notably absent from the Hesiodic passage-for reasons discussed earlier in this essay, but nevertheless he draws some important motifs from Hesiod as well as a certain style of presentation. In the latter's description, statements asserting the absence of different evils alternate with counterpoised affirmations of golden-age blessings. Vergil employs the very same binary discourse in an even more systematized rhythm between pronouncements, on the one hand, that blessings abound and, on the other hand, that there are no evils to fear.20 Thus he speaks of the goats who bring home milk and in antithesis of the herds who live without fear of lions. The cradle pours forth flowers that delight, while in antithesis the serpent and poisonous plant die. He even sharpens the poetic counterpoint of the last line by juxtaposing occidet, the death of treacherous poison, in enjambment with nascetur, the birth of Assyrian spices. More specifically, however, Vergil repeats the notions of spontaneity and abundance which are important in Hesiod's description (e.g. aitrogdal oXX6v re Ka &peOovov). The designation of golden-age life as one in which blessings pour forth nullo ... cultu and the repetition of ipsae ... ipsa in anaphora emphasize the spontaneity of nature in this setting, while the repetition of fundere, the distinctive image of

19 One should compare also the famous depiction of the gods' abode on Olympus in Odyssey 6.41-46, which is described as never shaken with winds or bad weather, but ever sunny and cloudless, where the blessed gods take their pleasure without end. The absence of every element of discomfort and the overflowing availability of pleasure define the essential condition of the immortals in early Greek epic.

20 J. P. Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London 1983) 3-32 presents a structural analysis of Hesiod's myth of the races in which he shows the pervasive pattern of binary oppositions in the entire passage. He also notes (9-10) that Hesiod's race of gold especially offers a sharp contrast with the iron age. In the same way, Vergil's conception of the puer as a golden-age figure emerges from its essential antithesis to the contemporary iron age background sketched briefly in 8-9 and 13-14.


distenta ... ubera, and the coloring of the passage with adverbs such as passim and vulgo all lend weight to the idea of unlimited abundance so central to the Hesiodic model.

In short, the introductory statement to Hesiod's depiction of golden- age men, itS; Z Oeoi 8' &gov ("they lived like the gods"), corresponds closely with what I take to be the summary in line 15 of Vergil's own portrayal of the infancy of the puer: ille deum vitam accipiet. The Hesiodic echoes reinforce an important point which may be deduced about Vergil's understanding of this stage of growth, that, because the child's life is like that of the gods, it is informed by complete moral innocence. The men of Hesiod's golden race remain, like the gods of early Greek epic with whom they are implicitly being compared, forever young and untouched by moral issues. Their world is one of perfect good and devoid of evil, entirely missing the essential elements by which moral understanding is formed. Of course, this conception fits the idea of infancy very well, a stage where every want is easily satisfied, and which is marked by the absence of any cognition of moral dilemmas. Vergil cleverly signals as much and marks the emphasis which ought to be applied to reading this passage, when he puns in the last line by his reference to the widespread growth of Assyrian amomum. That word, upon which the passage ends, echoes etymo- logically the Greek cognate &Lwpo; ("blameless"), a fitting emblem of the childhood innocence of this first stage of growth.

In the next phase of development, the puer is to have significant contact with the heroic world of classical epos (26-36):

at simul heroum laudes et facta parentum iam legere et quae sit poteris cognoscere virtus, molli paulatim flavescet campus arista incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella. pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis, quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris oppida, quae iubeant telluri infindere sulcos. alter erit tum Tiphys et altera quae vehat Argo delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.

Echoes of Catullus 64 are scattered throughout the poem, but the specific references in this passage to the Argo and Achilles as examples of "the praises of heroes and the deeds of your ancestors" incline me to believe that Vergil is alluding to the golden age as Catullus portrays it. Vergil indicates very precisely that the puer will learn of this world by reading about it (27) and by vicariously participating in the heroic

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atmosphere which is personally evoked for the sensitive reader who relives the journey of the Argonauts and the epic battles of Achilles through literature (34-36). Catullus likewise had evoked the mainline literary tradition of classical Greek epos by reference to these two epic subjects par excellence in order to characterize that heroic era of literature with strong overtones of ambivalence that also tinge the present Vergilian passage. As Hesiod provides a seminal text for conceptualizing an early Greek mythological golden age of perfect moral innocence, which Vergil draws on for portrayal of the infancy of the puer, Catullus provides a classically literary golden age based on the most distinguished models of epic heroism, which are characterized nevertheless with a distinct moral ambiguity.

Furthermore, the Vergilian summary in the outline of the three stages of the child's growth, divisque videbit permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis (15-16), captures both the point critical to Catullus' depiction of the heroic age, as one in which the gods and men still have significant intercourse with each other, as well as the experiential sense of the heroic atmosphere that is grasped by the child's sensitive reading of epic texts. The fact that the puer "will see" this heroic world and "will himself be seen" in return points to the literary visualization at which epic poetry is commonly thought to aim. The literary imagi- nation provoked by an impressionable reading leads the puer both to see the heroic world and to imagine himself within it. Thus the pronounced repetition in lines 34-36 of alter ... altera ... altera ... iterum is explained by the context of the maturing child's experience of reading classical epic texts. He will relive once again the epic tales of the Argo and Achilles.

This second stage in the growth of the puer has often troubled readers because of the reference to remaining "traces of our old crime" (priscae vestigia fraudis) that mar its perfection and thus appear to interrupt a sequential development in golden-age perfection. It is often argued that from a logical standpoint it would be more appropriate for this age of heroes to precede the description of the first stage, which presents a completely positive picture. The apparent retrograde movement back to flawed human conduct in the second stage seems to some to be incongruent with the metaphorical idea embodied in the image of positive growth and development.21

21 See Jachmann (note 2 above) 26, who argues that, since lines 31-36 are out of place, Vergil must have ill conceived the poem in his haste to write it; further, Gotoff (note 15 above) 74 and Coleman (note 6 above) 142. Fantazzi (note 6 above) 295 simply denies that the three stages of growth make up a chronological progression. A variation


We may question, however, whether mere increase in the outward perfections of the golden age is what Vergil is describing through the child's growth. The second stage is characterized as a time in which the puer will be able to read the heroic tales of his ancestors and "to discern what virtue is." The Latin word virtus has a more comprehensive sense than any English translation can accommodate.22 The phrase "discern virtue" certainly refers, on the one hand, to the recognition of the epic heroes' manly courage, but also, I think, to the maturing capacity to understand the underlying moral issues and dilemmas posed by the conventional heroic tales. There can be no question that the journey of the Argo and the exploits of Achilles performed at Troy both include important elements of the "traces of our old crime," viz. broaching the sea by ships and engagement in warfare. In fact, the discernment of what virtus is may also be understood as a critical theme of Catullus 64, which presents the heroic world in just this ambiguous light as an era not only of manly and courageous deeds but also of profound moral failings. It would be more accurate to say that the line of development which Vergil traces here in the child's growth is one of an increasing moral awareness, not merely an intensification of the positive, external features generally attributed to the golden age. From the former perspective, the perfect "life of the gods" outlined in the first stage is, in fact, distinctly lacking. Only good exists, and thus the puer in that stage is incapable of any moral perception of good and evil.

The third stage of growth, in which the puer reaches manhood, confirms the interpretation which I have just expounded. The passage is imbued from beginning to end with a heightened sense of moral consciousness that makes it an appropriate consummation to the preceding line of development (37-45):

hinc, ubi iam firmata virum te fecerit aetas, cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica pinus mutabit merces; omnis feret omnia tellus.

on that approach contends that only 31-36 do not belong to the chronological progression evident enough in the rest of the three stages of growth: C. Becker, "Virgils Eklogenbuch," Hermes 83 (1955) 334-36 and Klingner (note 16 above) 80-82. Even stranger is Berg's interpretation (note 6 above) 175 that the heroic stage "does not constitute a regression from the golden age, but represents the culmination of the puer's career." Having represented the second stage as a "culmination," Berg does not tell us what we are to make of the third stage.

22The Oxford Latin Dictionary defines virtus, first of all, as "manly spirit, valour," and then in an extended sense as "excellence of character or mind," which transfers particularly to "moral excellence, virtue," or "any valuable quality, excellence."

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non rastros patietur humus, non vinea falcem; robustus quoque iam tauris iuga solvet arator. nec varios discet mentiri lana colores, ipse sed in pratis aries iam suave rubenti murice, iam croceo mutabit vellera luto; sponte sua sandyx pascentis vestiet agnos.

The most significant aspect of the culminating stage is the complete disappearance of commercial trafficking through the elimination of merchandising transport across the sea and of dyed wool in the luxury garment industry. Vergil imagines a golden age after the manner of a poetically idealized, primitive pastoral economy, in which the earth and flocks alone provide for all legitimate human needs. There is an obvious, though highly mannered, reflection here of long cherished Roman values which had been celebrated by historians and poets alike in nostalgic depictions of early Rome. Traces of the primitive moral code which honored ownership of land and censored engagement in trade stubbornly hung on in the late Republic, and it is the discriminating sensibility found in this particular moral quality around which the passage as a whole is constructed. The senatorial class at Rome was still legally forbidden ownership of merchant transport ships and involvement, at least in a direct sense, in commercial enterprises.

Hence, the Vergilian passage may be read as a reflection on the deep-seated cultural bias in elitist Roman discourse against trade, which was balanced by feelings of reverence for the earth and the archaic pastoral economy. The statement that begins the passage, "nor shall the seafaring bark exchange (mutabit) its merchandise" (38-39), is echoed significantly at the end by "the ram shall exchange (mutabit) its fleece, now for a sweetly blushing purple, now for a saffron yellow" (43-44). Ships no longer need travel the seas to "exchange" their fleece for all the richly dyed wools of the commercial industry. The thought and the specific imagery surrounding the thought lead us naturally back to reflections on the second stage of the child's growth and the heroic voyage of the Argo, which in its quest for the golden fleece (cf. 44 croceo ... vellera luto) was motivated by greed.23 Furthermore, whereas the spontaneous appropriation of a saffron yellow dye reflects

23 Putnam (note 6 above) 153-55 explains the moral implications of the final stage in much the same way, citing various passages from Augustan poetry that illustrate the significance of dyed wool as a symbol of luxury. See also Fantazzi (note 6 above) 303. Others very recently have seen ironies beneath the surface that either "undercut" (B. Thornton, "A Note on Vergil Eclogue 4.42-45," AJP 109 [1988] 227-28), or "temper" (H. Parker, "Fish in Trees and Tie-Dyed Sheep: A Function of the Surreal in Roman Poetry," Arethusa 25 [1992] 318-20) any positive sense of a golden age.


a newly acquired innocence in a world now devoid of gold and commerce, the culminating sandyx, a bright scarlet dye, can be read analogously as a replacement for the bloody wars of Achilles in the second stage with a completely innocent gaiety of color.

In short, the third stage in the growth of the puer appears to answer in subtle ways all the critical elements found in the second stage,24 and to perfect just what is lacking both in the world as it is conceived through his reading and in his moral sensibility as it is a product of that reading. Whereas in the second stage he begins to understand the dimensions of evil and suffering in the world, he nevertheless is still depicted as being held by the attraction of heroic deeds, despite their morally ambiguous nature. In the final stage he reaches a level of matured moral understanding by which he truly penetrates the flawed causes from which the great heroic deeds of epic have issued.

Moreover, the morally idealized world which the puer comes to perceive in maturity is already modeled in another epic text, Book 5 of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The striking parallels provided by 933-38 have been obvious to critics:

nec robustus erat curvi moderator aratri quisquam, nec scibat ferro molirier arva nec nova defodere in terram virgulta neque altis arboribus veteres decidere falcibu' ramos. quod sol atque imbres dederant, quod terra crearat sponte sua, satis id placabat pectora donum.

More critical yet than Vergil's actual verbal echoes (cf. 41 robustus ... arator with robustus ... moderator aratri) is the idea which he has absorbed from the Lucretian depiction of the earth's spontaneous provision of all legitimate human needs in the economy of primitive man.2 Furthermore, both poets portray this idealized state of human affairs in contrast to an unregenerate world typified by senseless war and "the wicked art of navigation" (DRN 999-1006). Lucretius, in fact, returns repeatedly to the theme of the virtuous bare sufficiency of primitive life which has been undermined by irrational greed,26 the

24Becker (note 21 above) 338; Klingner (note 16 above) 81-82. Vergil's omnis feret omnia tellus also appears to be inspired in part by Lucretius

1.166 ferre omnes omnia possent. However, the contexts are completely different, and the debt remains only at the level of the borrowed turn of phrase to express the idea of spontaneous and abundant generation.

Compare, for example, 5.1117-19 quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet. / divi- tiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce / aequo animo: neque est umquam penuria parvi.

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same essential thought which Vergil chooses to elaborate in the third stage of the growth of the puer.

Most striking is the way Lucretius near the end of the book summarizes the degradation of contemporary society in conceptually identical terms to those used later by Vergil (1423-35):

tunc igitur pelles, nunc aurum et purpura curis exercent hominum vitam belloque fatigant; quo magis in nobis, ut opinor, culpa resedit. frigus enim nudos sine pellibus excruciabat terrigenas; at nos nil laedit veste carere purpurea atque auro signisque ingentibus apta, dum plebeia tamen sit quae defendere possit. ergo hominum genus incassum frustraque laborat semper et in curis consumit inanibus aevum, nimirum quia non cognovit quae sit habendi finis et omnino quoad crescat vera voluptas. idque minutatim vitam provexit in altum et belli magnos commovit funditus aestus.

Lucretius argues that men have been carried out into the deep sea and have stirred up the great billows of war in their limitless greed to

possess more. He uses the luxury garment industry to illustrate his

point, just as Vergil does in portraying the manner in which the puer, now grown to manhood, realizes moral perfection in an idealized primitive economy which excludes such commercial commodities. Hence, Vergil's third stage is essentially a pastorally refined image of the primitivistic Lucretian golden age.

We should understand line 17, therefore, pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem, as a summary of this last stage of growth. It concep- tualizes in reget the perfected maturity of the puer and, in depicting a world which has been pacified by "ancestral virtues,"27 summarizes the main point of the last stage: to realize an idealized primitive economy

27 Interpretation of the sense of line 17 has been much disputed, since the flexible syntax of Latin introduces ambiguities. For example, it is unclear whether the patriis virtutibus are the means of the world's pacification or of the new leader's rule. There is no reason it cannot serve in both ways, denoting the character of the new peace which will come upon the world as well as the grown child's mature conduct. The third stage provides a comprehensive image of a world constructed according to the "ancestral virtues" of the Romans, and the line should be read in this light. The alternative interpretation of patriis, "of his father," reflects the old historicizing interpretation of the puer. It does not seem to matter much that in the late 40's neither Octavian, Antony nor Pollio, the candidates cited most often as the child's father, could be realistically described as a world conqueror in the manner of an Alexander or a Julius Caesar.


infused with traditional Roman notions of moral virtue that involve homage to the earth as the source of self-sufficiency and the absence of mercantile exchange. One may compare Vergil's later portrayal of the mythologized bucolic origins of Rome in Aeneid 8, where once again description of a primitive pastoral economy of bare self- sufficiency is matched by a parallel emphasis on the disastrous consequences of greed which fall upon Cacus.28 Finally, in its con- templation of a pacified or tranquilized world, line 17 foreshadows the whole Lucretian hue of the last stage, for the idea of deep peace and a tranquil way of life, free of both war and the strife occasioned by irrational greed, is central to the Lucretian ideal and to the lost golden age of humankind which he repeatedly evokes in Book 5.29

The growth of the puer, therefore, can be understood as a meaningful, coherent line of development stretching from a state of god-like innocence in infancy to a perfected moral consciousness in maturity. On a parallel plane, one can read in this expansive poetic image of growth and development an equally meaningful progression through successive literary formulations of the golden age, moving from the relatively amoral conception of the golden age in early Greek epic to the ambivalent presentation of the classical Greek heroic age in Catullus, and ending finally with the hard moral absolutism of the Lucretian archaeology. The sequence represents an erudite recapitulation of the literary tradition and, ultimately, the constitution of a highly refined literary consciousness through a progressively sophisticated reading experience. Vergil was responding directly to the Catullan poem, demonstrating his understanding of the irony underlying the song of the Parcae, and using that insight as a basis for the moral education of his puer. For the child grows in carefully guided measures from innocence to a youthful infatuation with epic heroism, and then to mature moral discernment, a moral discrimination in fact similar to that which actually underlies a sophisticated reading of the Catullan model.

If the puer is depicted as a real child in the poem, it is not necessarily because he is a historical figure, but because he embodies a developed literary consciousness. He is less, therefore, a dreamy

28 Observe, for example, the emphatic point made at the end of the episode, when Aeneas is put up to sleep in the same humble dwelling occupied earlier by Hercules (8.362-65): ut ventum ad sedes, 'haec' inquit 'limina victor / Alcides subiit, haec ilium regia cepit. / aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum / finge deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis.'

29 Pacatus and its near synonym placidus occur five times in the archaeology of Book 5. Pacatus: 1154, 1203 (a disputed reading); placidus: 1004, 1122, 1154.

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political symbol or ideal than a literary experience himself, a text to be read containing a reading of texts, which encompasses the possibilities of expressing moral values in the epic form. In 53-59 Vergil voices an aspiration to sing at some future date of the heroism of his prodigy (tua dicere facta), the very same desire which he expresses in regard to Pollio in 8.8 (tua dicere facta). The poet draws a kind of equivalency between the two, but one which only makes sense if we view them both as exemplars of a literary sophistication in the higher genres, epic and tragedy, to which Vergil had apprenticed himself in the more diminutive novitiate of pastoral.

One can see in Vergil's puer, therefore, the first articulated consciousness of a peculiarly Roman program of poetry for the future, probably not a firm indication of the Aeneid,30 but still the promise of an engagement with the classical literary tradition in a manner which would emphasize important Roman values at the same time as it passed the approval of Arcadian Pan for the Alexandrian quality of its erudition and polish (58-59). Certainly the literary sophistication which the puer finally represents as both a progressively more experienced reader and text himself to be read illustrates the intertexuality characteristic of Vergil's Eclogues. There is also, as I have tried to demonstrate, a distinctive moral constituent to the perfection of his literary consciousness, which cannot even at this early date be disasso- ciated from Vergil's own lifelong struggle with the complex problem of moral and political regeneration that informs all of his work.31

BRUCE ARNOLD Mount Holyoke College

30 Both Berg (note 6 above) 170-71 and Northrup (note 6 above) 111, citing the virtually forgotten work of Ruggero della Torre, La quarta egloga di Virgilio comnmentata secondo I'arte grammatica (Udine 1892) 35, come to solutions which are similar to mine. The birth of the puer represents in some respect the birth of Vergil's own poetry. I differentiate myself from these scholars, however, by seeing in the growth of the puer the development of a general poetic sensibility, more a reading of poetry such as would produce a poet than a specific poetic program. Some may question the strangeness of the metaphor: the birth of poetry. Yet it is not alien to the Greek riiro. In fact, Vergil would have found it in one of those passages which are so determinative for the deep engagement with poetry characteristic of the Eclogues, Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.19-20:

pn&a' dl' C 8UP&E pLYa op•oiov dout6iv / r~ite0at ("Nor seek a loudly resounding song to be born from me").

31 An earlier version of this paper was presented at Smith College in February 1990. I wish especially to thank my colleague, Philippa Goold, for her helpful criticism of earlier drafts. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees and to Richard Moorton, CJ's CANE editor, for their valuable advice.

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The Literary Experience of Vergil's Fourth "Eclogue"