EARLY RESPONSES TO VIRGIL'S FOURTHECLOGUE

Abstract

The fourthEcloguepresents 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 40bc(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 originalpuerof Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourthEclogueto 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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