chapter seven

EROTIC VICISSITUDE WRIT LARGE (ECL. 6)

Nor does one who avoids unhealthy love [amorem] lack the enjoyment of Venus, but rather he reaps those advantages that are without penalty; for a purer pleasure [volup- tas] is thereby guaranteed to healthy [sanis] than to love-sick persons [miseris]. Lucretius1

The problem of erotic pathology is a central topic that Vergil illuminates in two of the most structurally important poems in the Eclogues: Ecl. 6, which is positioned as a programmatic overture to the second half of the collection, and Ecl. 10, which provides closure to the entire ensemble. Both of these complex masterpieces have elicited voluminous scholarly investi- gations aimed at decoding their elusive principles of coherence and unity of aesthetic design.2 Our limited objective in this excavation of the “inter- play of ideas” in Ecl. 6 is not to ofer a strictly diachronic reading of the whole poem, but rather to elucidate the conceptual apparatus that Vergil employs in elaborating the theme of deranged passion (amor insanus) and its severely negative repercussions on the attainment of human felicity. The main body of the eclogue is occupied by the notorious “Song of Silenus.” In the course of this embedded performance, the reader is con- fronted with an over-arching narrative account of erotic adversity “writ large.” Before embarking on an analysis that seeks to extrapolate the broader philosophical framework underpinning the efusions of the Silenus-per- sona, it is expedient to draw attention to certain aspects of the prelude (a “generic disavowal”)3 that foreshadows the ambitious thematic scope of the embedded catalogue-poem.

1 DRN 4.1073–1076: “Nec Veneris fructu caret is qui vitat amorem,/ sed potius quae sunt sine poena commoda sumit./nam certe purast sanis magis inde voluptas/quam miseris.” 2 See e.g. Leach (1968); Putnam (1970) 195–221; 342–394; Conte (1986) 100–129. 3 I have initiated and sought to promote this terminology in place of the conventional designation, recusatio, which is fundamentally misleading, since it ignores the “paradoxical intent” of the form. See Davis (1991) 28–30. 122 chapter seven

The prelude to Ecl. 6 has been minutely (and justi ably) deciphered as an elegant enunciation of a “Callimachean” esthetic program with its foregrounding of a motif—the intervention/interdiction of Apollo—that is adapted from the famous prologue to the Aetia.4 The idea that it con- stitutes a literary manifesto is a valid and widely accepted interpretation of the passage, and it would be superuous to go over this well-trodden path in the context of the present inquiry. Instead I shall focus my observa- tions on those aspects of the “generic disavowal” that are most pertinent to the latent problematic of how to achieve an amor that is positive and con- tributes to human ourishing. A brief sketch of the rhetorical basis of the disavowal apparatus is, however, a necessary preliminary to understanding the Vergilian replay of the form. It is a critical axiom that the concept of genre, for the major Augustan poets, is founded on the notion of stylistic decorum—a notion that presup- poses a conventional correlation between level of style and subject-matter. A primary function of the disavowal strategy, however, is to challenge a particular traditional correlation of content and form by means of an apolo- getic strategy that, paradoxically, may occasionally annex elements of the presumably alien genre. Even more important to the hidden agenda of the rhetorical device is the opportunity it afords the author to rede ne a novel poetic space against the conveniently arti cial foil of the “other” genre. Thus the author of Ecl. 6  rst represents his choice of bucolic poetry as having been ordered by an imperious Apollo who derails his original intention to compose a grand-style heroic encomium (1–9): Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere uersu nostra neque erubuit siluas habitare Thalea. cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem uellit et admonuit: ‘pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen.’ nunc ego (namque super tibi erunt qui dicere laudes, Vare, tuas cupiant et tristia condere bella) agrestem tenui meditabor harundine Musam: non iniussa cano. Our muse, Thalea, was the  rst5 to  nd worth in composing poetry in the Syracusan strain, and did not blush to make the woods her home. When I proposed to sing of kings and wars, Cynthian Apollo pulled my ear and

4 See the seminal contribution to the topic by the late Wendell Clausen (1964). 5 A comparative analysis of the common “primus motif” in Augustan poetry (the conven- tional claim to have been the  rst among the Latin poets to have composed in a particular genre pioneered by the Greeks) strongly favors this reading of the sentence’s syntax. There