A child is born: the enduring mystery of ’s fourth Eclogue Luke Houghton

‘The last age of Cumaean song has 6.791–4 he writes: V in the Vatican combines words from now come; the great sequence of the Virgil’s fourth Eclogue with a line from ‘Here, here is the man you often ages is born anew. Now the Virgin Horace’s Carmen saeculare: hear promised to you – too returns, the reign of Caesar, descendant of a god, who In Sixtus’ time the reign of Saturn returns; now a new lineage is sent will once again establish the returns, and Plenty pours wealth down from heaven on high. You, Golden Age in Latium through from her full horn. chaste Lucina, look with favour on fields once ruled by Saturn…’ the child now being born, at whose appearance the iron race first will Motifs from Eclogue 4 have been recy- A light in the darkness cease and the golden race will arise cled in praise of rulers ever since. As throughout the world…’ successors of the first emperor Augustus, This adoption of phrasing and imagery Roman Emperors and Holy Roman Virgil’s fourth Eclogue is one of the from Eclogue 4 to celebrate kings, queens, Emperors after them were regularly strangest poems to have come down to us emperors, dukes, and popes was only one greeted on their accession with acclama- from antiquity. Its exotic, extravagant element in the fortunes of this remarkable tions of the return of the Golden Age and proclamations of peace, plenty, and a new poem. Equally (if not more) widespread of peace and prosperity in the natural world order have been associated with the was the use of the fourth Eclogue in reli- world drawn from Virgil’s lines. The worship of Dionysus, the Eleusinian gious contexts. imperial usurper Carausius, who declared Mysteries, the , and the From an early date similarities had been himself emperor in Britain in A.D. 286, prophecies of Isaiah. Even in the decades noticed between Virgil’s portrait of the issued coins featuring the letters RSR and following the poem’s composition the new Golden Age, in which ‘herds will not INPCDA, which were deciphered only in identity of the mysterious child whose fear great lions’ (Ecl. 4.22) and ‘the 1998 by Guy de la Bedoyère as abbrevi- birth will usher in the renewed Golden serpent too shall perish’ (Ecl. 4.24), and ated quotations from the fourth Eclogue – Age seems to have been a matter of the Hebrew prophecies of Isaiah, in which redeunt Saturnia regna (‘the reign of dispute. It may be that Virgil consciously ‘the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, Saturn returns’, line 6) and iam nova pro- kept obscure the real significance of his and the leopard shall lie down with the kid’ genies caelo demittitur alto (‘now a new description of the wonders that the earth and ‘the sucking child shall play on the lineage is sent down from heaven on will experience in the consulship of Gaius hole of the asp’ (Isaiah 11). When this was high’, line 7). Asinius Pollio – a sensible move, perhaps, combined with references in Virgil’s Certain monarchs and royal dynasties in view of the unsettled political situation poem to the return of the Virgin and the became particularly identified with this of the time. No-one wants to be shown up descent of a miraculous child from Virgilian material: the Hapsburg emper- by events as an incompetent , heaven, ‘who will rule a world made ors, for instance, with their claims to particularly if the other side proves victo- peaceful by his father’s virtues’ (Ecl. universal empire, were frequently saluted rious, and at the time of the Treaty of 4.17), early Christian readers drew the with prophecies of a new Golden Age, Brundisium in 40 B.C., traditionally iden- inevitable conclusion. Virgil became a while Queen Elizabeth I of England, the tified as the occasion for Virgil’s poem, conscious or unconscious prophet of the Virgin Queen, naturally attracted tributes nobody knew quite how things were going coming of Christ, inspired to foretell evoking the return of the unnamed Virgin to turn out. How long would the new events that would not take place until of Eclogue 4 (in Virgil’s poem a reference alliance between Octavian and Mark twenty years after his death. A speech to the virgin Astraea, the goddess of Antony last, and who would emerge as attributed to the emperor Constantine, Justice, who was said to have fled the earth ruler of the Roman world? who made Christianity the official religion at the end of the Golden Age). The title of of the Roman Empire, offers a reading of the 2007 film Elizabeth: The Golden Age the fourth Eclogue along these lines, as a Poetry and propaganda is thus only the latest example in a long prediction of the birth of Christ: ‘Who, tradition of such descriptions of then, is the virgin who was to come [Ecl. Elizabeth’s reign – and similar expres- One result of the vagueness of Virgil’s 4.6]? Is it not she who was filled with, and sions had in fact been used to praise her language in the fourth Eclogue is that the with child of, the Holy Spirit? … Those father Henry VIII and grandfather Henry imagery of this enigmatic poem has been who search deeply for the import of the VII by poets and scholars familiar with the applied in later ages to a bewildering vari- words [Ecl. 4.8–10], are able to discern the use of such language in the courts of ety of individuals and historical situations. Divinity of Christ’. Renaissance Italy and elsewhere in Virgil himself set the pattern, reusing the The view of Virgil – or of the Sibyl of Europe. Even popes got in on the act. A theme of the returning Golden Age to cele- Cumae, who is given as the source for the Latin couplet in the library of Pope Sixtus brate Augustus in book 6 of the Aeneid. At prophecies of his poem (‘the last age of

4 Cumaean song’, Ecl. 4.5) – as a prophet of the Latin word vates, which means both the promised Messiah was to endure for ‘poet’ and ‘prophet’, while the prophecy centuries. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the of ‘the age of gold’ (compare the ‘golden Roman poet Statius tells how he was race’, gens aurea, at Ecl. 4.9) brought on converted to Christianity by reading by ‘the ever-circling years’ (a cyclical Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, the full meaning conception of time comparable to Virgil’s of which was not clear to its author, who announcements of a renewed sequence of for that reason never embraced ages in Ecl. 4.5 and 12), and of the estab- Christianity and so cannot enter Paradise lishment of peace ‘over all the earth’ (see with Dante: Ecl. 4.9, toto…mundo), unmistakably recalls ideas and expressions from You first directed me to Parnassus Eclogue 4: ‘ancient splendours’ indeed! to drink in its caves, and first after God it was you who enlightened me. You acted like someone who goes by Coming around again night, who carries the light behind him and does not help himself, but It may not always be easy to think of our makes people wise after him, when own times as a new Golden Age, but the you said: ‘The age renews itself; long life enjoyed by Virgil’s most cryptic justice returns and the earliest time poem in later art and literature is by no of humankind, and a new lineage means over. Seamus Heaney’s Bann descends from heaven.’ Through Valley Eclogue, first published in 1999, you I was a poet, through you a echoes the fourth Eclogue to express the Christian… (Dante, Purgatory poet’s hopes for peace in Northern Ireland, 22.64–73). and a new opera on the emperor Nero, Neron Kaisar, by composer John Peel with a libretto by M. D. Usher, opens with The ever-circling years Nero’s mother Agrippina singing lines from the fourth Eclogue as she strokes her Another striking result of this reading of son’s face. There is even an instrumental the fourth Eclogue is the appearance of track by the Greek black metal band Sibyls in paintings in churches, holding Varathron with the title Redeunt Saturnia scrolls with quotations from Virgil’s regna. poem. In Rome alone there are no fewer The fourth Eclogue is still very much than four examples of this, to say nothing with us, and while it may no longer be of the Sibyl of Cumae represented on the possible to know what it meant to its marble pavement of Siena Cathedral with author and his contemporaries, the mean- a caption from Eclogue 4. It is often ings it has taken on for different readers in suggested that Michelangelo’s famous later centuries provide ample evidence of figure of the Sibyl of Cumae in Rome’s this curious poem’s continuing power to Sistine Chapel was inspired by the fourth inspire artists and writers who have fallen Eclogue – but in this case it is impossible under its strange but compelling spell. to make out any words in the Sibyl’s book, so the suggestion cannot be conclusively Luke Houghton teaches Classics at the proved. Further instances of quotations University of Reading, UCL and Birkbeck from the poem in religious art can be seen College, London. He is currently working in churches in France, Spain, Germany, on the reception of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and the Netherlands; the latest example in a number of different times, places, and I’ve come across is an early-twentieth- artistic media, and is hopeful that this century stained glass window in work will eventually contribute to a new Aberdeen. Golden Age in the study of this mysterious Even today many people are familiar poem. with at least one example of the religious interpretation of the fourth Eclogue, with- out necessarily being aware of the Virgilian origins of the passage. In one of the best-known Christmas carols, It came upon the midnight clear (words by Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1810–76), we find the lines: For lo! the days are hastening on By prophet bards foretold, When, with the ever-circling years Comes round the age of gold; When Peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendours fling, And the whole world give back the song, Which now the angels sing. The reference to ‘prophet bards’ suggests

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