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1966 - 1967

PROCEEDINGS OF THE VIRGIL SOCIETY No. 6, 1966-67

(Editor: H. MacL. Currie, M.A., Queen Mary College, Mile End Road, London, E.l.)

Contents

Lectoribus Editor ii

Lecture No. 78 'The Tenth Eclogue" 1 by C.G. HARDIE, M.A.

Lecture No. 79 "Virgil and the Christian Latin Poets" 11 by A. HUDSON-WILLIAMS, B.A., M.Litt.

Lecture No. 80 'The Georgies in After Times” 22 (Summary) by L.P. WILKINSON, M.A.

Lecture No. 81 'The Architecture of the Georgies" 25 Presidential Address by SIR JAMES WDUNTFORD, M.A., D.Litt.

Lecture No. 82 'Allegorical Interpretations of Virgil" 34 by F. ROBERTSON, M.A.

Articles 'The Shield of Aeneas" 45 by PROFESSOR D.E. EICHHOLZ, M.A.

'Vergil and the Pre-Greek Gods" 49 by PROFESSOR T.J. HAARHOFF, M.A., B.Litt.

'Servius - Commentator and Guide" 50 by R.D. WILLIAMS, M.A.

Book Reviews 56-59

Lithographically produced and distributed for the Virgil Society by H.W. Walden & Co., 18 Station Approach, London, S.W.ll - September, 1967. ~ ii -

LECTORIBUS EDITOR

We must begin by expressing warmest thanks to the President and Fellows of the British Academy who once again have allocated from their Research Fund a generous grant towards the cost of publication of this issue of The Proceedings. In February our President, Sir James Mountford, took the chair at the A.G.M. and afterwards delivered his Address, the full text of which appears in this issue. We were very happy to welcome him and hear his words. Avoid­ ing the mathematical mysticism which has figured to some extent in Virgil studies of recent years, he expounded an approach to the architecture of the Georgies based on literary insight and common sense. We look forward to his next Presidential Address. This issue carries some extra metrum contributions and we are grateful to their authors. We hope to continue this feature and cordially invite the submission of articles or notes on points in Virgil scholarship. We are ready to give particularly sympathetic consideration to papers of the more speculative kind. It is often highly instructive and useful to hear someone else thinking aloud. During the past year we have been working to extend the circulation of The Proceedings amongst the libraries of Canadian and American universities, colleges and high schools, and have some success to report. The drive for members continues - please support it and introduce a friend to the Society. Costs are always increasing, and at the last A.G.M. the Council sought and was granted leave to raise the ordinary annual subscription at its discretion to a limit of 12/6d. A decision on the matter is expected after the Council meeting in November. The Council and Office-bearers wish to thank all members at ho^e or abroad who have faithfully supported the Society during the year. V.S. Lectures, No. 78 THE TENTH ECLOGUE A lecture delivered to the Virgil Society 22nd October 1966 by C.G. Hardie, M.A.

The Eclogues of Virgil are among the most puzzling poems that have come down to us from the ancient world. The Tenth is no easier to understand than the Fourth or the Sixth, and it has attracted much, though less special attention than, for instance, the linked problems of the First and Ninth, At a meeting of this Society, nine years ago, on the 19th October 1957, I spoke about the Fourth Eclogue (Lecture Summary No. 42) and six years ago, on 22nd October 1960, on the Sixth Eclogue (No. 50). I must begin today by making a rather different point about the Fourth Eclogue than I made then, and then proceed to say briefly much the same about the Sixth, repeating myself somewhat because Gallus in the Tenth cannot be understood without some theory of what Gallus means in the Sixth. The importance of the Fourth Eclogue in Virgil's development lies, in my opinion, in that the poet of the humble pastoral, the imitator of the Alexandrian school, the ’neoteric1 follower of Callimachus and Catullus, one of the 'cantores Euphorionis1" for the first time, in a moment of intense enthusiasm, conceived of himself as one day in the future called to be the Roman Homer. The climax of the Fourth Eclogue is not the growing up, the accession and the triumph of the child in unifying and pacifying the world, but the thought that Virgil will be the poet of this divine life and victory. The victory is over the 'prisca fraus* of Prometheus, of which all men inherit the consequences, and over the 'nostrum scelus' of Romulus in killing Remus, to which all Romans owe their fratricidal tendency to civil war. After 'aspice venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo' (52) Virgil breaks out: o mihi tum longae maneat pars ultima vitae, spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta: non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus, nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit, Orphei Calliopea, Lino formosus Apollo. Pan etiam, Arcadia mecum si iudice certet, Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum. The diffident poet has here soared far above his source in Theocritus, Id. 1.3: μετλ Πανα τδ δεύτερου άθλον and he has committed the hybris of Marsyas, of the Picae and of Misenus in Aeneid 6, 172, when he challenges Triton: demens, et cantu vocat in certamina divos The Fourth Eclogue is an adaptation of the Song of the Fates in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis. In prophesying the greatness of Achilles the Fates hint at Homer, the vates sacer without whom this greatness would be forgotten, the vates that Alexander the Great looked for in vain. The marriage of Peleus and Thetis was the last time that Gods mingled freely with men, and Catullus ends with a lament over the crimes and civil wars of Rome. Virgil's Parcae prophesy the reversal of this, and Virgil quotes the refrain of Catullus' Song of the Fates. The Fourth Eclogue is also an answer (I think) to the pessimism of Horace's - 2 -

Sixteenth Epode: flight from Rome to the far west beyond the bounds of the Empire is too quick despair, for the golden age will be restored here at the very centre, in Rome itself, recognizably begun here and now, though to be consummated only later, but within a generation. The historical circumstances that evoked this enraptured vision from Virgil, the Peace of Brundisium, and the marriage of Antony and Octavia that sealed it, soon passed away; and Rome, Italy and the Empire were soon in almost as bad a way as before. Though Virgil receded from his high hopes for Rome and himself, the thought of himself as an epic poet remained with him. The child of the Eclogue was not forthcoming, but the spark which was to become the Aeneid had been struck; poca favilla gran fiamma seconda, as Dante says, Par. 1. 34. Eventually in the Aeneid a second Achilles who is also a second Odysseus and Jason, appears in Aeneas (though Tumus has also much of the character of Achilles). The rapture died away, and in the Sixth Eclogue of the following year, 39 B.C., Virgil takes a cool look at it: "When I thought of an epic, reges et proelia, after the manner of Homer or Ennius," he says, "Apollo tweaked my ear, in admonition and reminder of Callimachus' literary principles: the pastoral poet must stick to his humble style." But Virgil then proceeds to something that is much more than a pastoral. He takes as his theme a myth that Aristotle had made the climax of a famous dialogue on the immortality of the soul, and that the historian Theopompus had used to point a contrast between the city at war and the city of justice and religion. Silenus sings as movingly as Apollo himself or as Orpheus, and his theme is the creation of the world and the corruption introduced into it by Prometheus and by inordinate sexual love, as exemplified by heroes of myth, Hercules and Pasiphae. But when Phaethon's excess of ambition is extinguished, and Hippomenes wins Atalanta, there is recovery, and suddenly Gallus, Virgil's exact contemporary, his fellow-poet and friend, also a member of Pollio's circle, appears, in a mythical setting, on Mount Helicon. At first he is, like Pasiphae, wandering, errantem, but one of the Muses meets him, and leads him to the whole company, in whose midst the shepherd Linus, divino carmine pastor, the Linus of the Fourth Eclogue, gives him the pipe of Hesiod and tells him with it to celebrate the origin, the aition, of Apollo’s grove at Gryneum. The meaning of this has been endlessly disputed; a bibliography of special articles in this century contains at least thirty items. I can only outline my own view: Gallus is like Virgil, a poet of love, though Virgil seems to rank the elegy above the pastoral when in the Tenth Eclogue he asks Gallus not to be ashamed of a pastoral in his honour; and love ranks lowest in the hierarchy of poetic matter and genres. Didactic is on a higher level; tragedy and epic are the supreme kinds of poetry. Contrast Dante in the de vulg. Eloq. who classes Amor along with Virtus and Salus (by which he does not mean Salvation, though the Comedy might suggest it). Virgil then displays as the climax of this Eclogue the promotion of a poet to a higher level, from love to Hesiodic and Callimachean didactic poetry. Now Servius says that Virgil here alludes to a poem that Gallus actually wrote, translating and adapting into Latin a poem by Euphorion of Chalcis on the Grynean grove of Apollo. But there is no evidence that Euphorion ever wrote any such poem, nor that Gallus wrote anything but his four books of Amores in honour of Lycoris, that is, Volumnia Cytheris, the actress of mimes, Cicero's 'mimula'. Servius as usual is making unjustifiable inferences from the text of Virgil, combining 6, 72 with 10, 50; Chalcidico quae sunt mihi condita versu. - 3 -

Virgil in the Eclogue is suggesting a 'progress of poesy', and hinting that if Gallus will show the way and advance to higher things, he, Virgil, will be able to follow and make of Hesiodic didactic poetry a step towards epic. Gallus never played on Hesiod's pipe, which Virgil offered him, but the Georgies are what, eventually, Virgil drew from it 'Romana per oppida’, in Latin. Now in the Sixth Eclogue, if the eight lines 74 to 81, about Scylla and Philomela, were cut out, the poem would move smoothly and naturally to its climax, quo se plus iactet Apollo, omnia quae Phoebo quondam meditante etc. Scylla and Philomela are an intrusion, and Virgil seems almost to say so by beginning quid loquar? As in Housman's parody, 'Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?' I suggest that it is because the theme, the tragic themes of Love, cannot be so easily dismissed and hurried past. Now the next Eclogue in chronological order is the Eighth. I do not believe, with several scholars, Buchner and Rohde, for instance, that the Seventh Ls late; ia lB3d I think it was the second in chronological order, after the Second Eclogue. But Virgil in his final arrangement inserted it here because it showed him obeyj.n^· Apollo's behest in the Sixth Eclogue, to remain pastoral, which the Sixth Eclogue, for all its pastoral opening and close, had not done. The Eighth Eclogue, however, shows the real movement of Virgil's mind. It is very Theocritean, especially of course the adaptation in the second part, the Song Alpho-iboeus, of the Pharmaceutria: yet it also introduces itself with almost epic grandeur and solemnity. Both parts tell of tragic love (because, in Virgil's opinion, to be overpowered by magic and to be dragged back from the city, aburbe, (109) is surely not a happy issue), and both have contributed largely to Virgil's final study of tragic love, in Dido, in Aeneid 4. Brooks Otis has recently analysed the masterly movement of the first part. But the most surprising thing in the Eighth Ec togue is the iisertion of lines 6 to 13, interrupting the presentation of the scene of Damon and Alphesiboeus. Peter Levi has recently drawn attention, in Hermes 94 (1966), 73-79: 'The dedication to Pollio in Virgil's Eighth Eclogue', to the extreme oddity of these lines: the person to whom they are addressed is not named, and if he is Pollio, why;is he returning from Macedonia to Rome by way of Timavus? If his tragedies are Sophoclean, why does Virgil need to blazon them throughout the world? and why has Pollio not already got a poet's wreath of ivy for them? I have no solution of these puzzles, unless to guess that they arise from the fact that Pollio was displaced by Augustus and Maecenas as Virgil's patron about this time. The lines are perhaps the debris, or a first draft, of a rejected dedication to Pollio - preserved by Pollio in the first sep­ arate publication of the Eclogue but rejected by Virgil in the official collection of the whole Ten Eclogues. The lines ther. resemble the celebrated lines about Helen in Aeneid 2, rejected but somehow preserved. I only observe that Virgil repeats from the Fourth Eclogue the idea of himself as a writer of a contemporary heroic epic, and repeats the actual phrase 'tua dicere facta': (7-8) en erit unquam ille dies, mihi cum liceat tua dicere facta? The day is not so far in the future: Pollio is not an unborn and unconceived infant but ex-consul, proconsul and winner of a triumph. His 'facta' already exist in the world of history, not of hopeful imagination. It is not clear who is to give Virgil penni-ssion to begin an epic; presumably the Apollo of Eclogue 6, of whom Virgil says 'non iniussa cano'. (cf, 'accipe iussis carmina coepta tuis'). Line 11 too, if it really belongs where it is (it is a formula which tends tj belong to Jupiter, and to begin a poem, cf. Eclogue 3, 60) and if it scans; a te principium, tibi desinam, shows that Virgil intended the Eclogue to be his last, from which he would proceed to a higher flight. These liies to Pollio belong to - 4 - late 39 B.C. when Pollio was on the way back from his summer campaign in his province of Macedonia to Rome, to celebrate his triumph on October 25th (CIL . Fasti Triumphales, p.77), But Virgil was unable to find his new and higher Hesiodic subject. He paused in uncertainty and bafflement, as he was to do later, and for much longer, before taking the greater step forward from didactic to epic poetry, between the Georgies and the Aeneid. In the Eighth Eclogue there is a passing reference to the ambitions of the pastoral poet, among the adynata of Damon*s unhappy lover (8,55): certent et cycnis ululae, sit Tityrus Orpheus. In Eclogues 4 and 6 Tityrus had aspired to be Orpheus: now the lover in despair classes it bitterly as 'an impossibility'. So after the Eighth Eclogue comes a long pause, at least a year, perhaps nearer two. The desertion of Gallus by Lycoris by its references to the Rhine and the northern cold points to the winter of 38-37, when according to Dio 48, 49 Agrippa crdssed the Rhine. Lycoris seems to have followed one of Agrippa's officers (not Marcus Antonius as Servius with his usual historical inaccuracy says, since Antony was in the East, and had anyhow renounced Cytheris on his marriage to Fulvia, c. 46 B.C.). Cytheris had a 'triumvirate' of famous lovers, Brutus the tyrannicide, Antony, and Gallus. To take a woman on a campaign was improper, but no doubt Cytheris went as an entertainer (as a member of ENSA, as we used to call it), the actress of mimes, and diseuse of Virgil's Eclogues treated as mimes. I want to suggest that Virgil now, now that Lycoris had left Gallus, expected him to graduate to a higher kind of poetry, leaving Amores behind, or at least to lament the 'End of the Affair' in a final elegy, and then brace him­ self for a higher flight. But Gallus as a poet did nothing; indeed he ceased to be a poet, and turned from the 'studia ignobilis oti' to a military and administ­ rative career, the career which ended with the governorship of Egypt - and with suicide. The four books of Amores about Lycoris remained his complete oeuvre. Virgil thus lost his leader, behind whom he too would progress to higher themes. He was on his own, but he clung to the mask of Gallus, and behind it made his own transition. This suggestion depends on the interpretation of the lines in the Tenth Eclogue, 9-12: Quae nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellae Naides, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat? nam neque Parnasi vobis iuga, narn neque Pindi ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe. They are, of course, modelled on Theocritus' Idyll 1, 66-69. In his commentary Gow does not bring out the full meaning of these lines, although Milton's imitation in Lycidas 50-63 implies the fuller interpretation that Robert Ogilvie has since given in JHS 82 (1962). Gow gays only that 'the local nymphs, had they been in their usual haunts, would have intervened to save Daphnis'. Ogilvie defines the nature of their expected but denied help: 'the only death which water-nymphs can prevent is death by drowning'. Edward King was 'drowned on his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637'. Ogilvie closes the ’ring' in Thyrsis's song by identifying the river of 1.140 not with the Styx, but with the Anapos at the beginning (68). Virgil's opening 'Quae nemora,..' etc. at once puts Gallus in the position of the dying Daphnis in Idyll 1, and reminds us that in the Fifth Eclogue Virgil had continued Thyrsis' story after D-aphnis' death, with the contrasted pictures of lamentation after his death and joy after his resurrection. But Gallus is not literally dying, and his distress is not because he refuses, like Daphnis,

·<*· to acknowledge his love and defies Aphrodite, but because his love is unrequited (cf, Philargyrias; indigni: impari, quia contemnebatur) and Lycoris has left him. In Theocritus Priapus tells Daphnis that his girl is looking for him everywhere (82-85). What help then does Gallus need from the ’puellae Naides’? He is not in danger of drowning. Virgil's Naiads are indeed water-nymphs, but it is the springs of poetic inspiration that belong to them, and Virgil himself has just begun by invoking a nymph of a fountain, Arethusa, as his Muse. The Naides then are the Muses, even if they are attributed to Pindus (which is not one of their usual haunts), just because Theocritus has mentioned Pindus (cf. A.D. Fitton-Brown, Greece and Rome 8 (1961): ’Muses on Pindus'). Neither Conington nor Gow is of much help, but Servius in his dry (and inaccurate) way puts his finger on the point: est quaedam Theocriti Ecloga, in qua suos amores deflere Daphnis inducitur; this is inaccurate (Daphnis laments his own death, but refuses to admit to any amores); and Servius’ next words 'huius omnem ordinem ad hanc eclogam transtulit' is one of his usual exaggerations, but when he says later 'quia diximus easdem es;je nymphas quas etiam musas, videtur hoc dicere, quia, si cum ipso fuissent musae, id est si dedisset operam scribendis carminibus, non incidisset in tantas amoris angustias1, he is on the right track, Virgil is reviving the idea, with which Theocritus' Eleventh Idyll opens, the bantering remarks to the physician Nicias that he cannot cure Love, but poetry can, witness the example of Polyphemus. The Second Eclogue, Virgil's first essay in pastoral, adapts this (and Callimaelms * parallel epigram, 46) to Corydon and Alexis, with Virgil's habitual teasing reversal, in that Corydon is described as singing 'studio inani1 at the beginning, but at the end has cured himself of his 1 insanus amor’. The Tenth Eclogue has much in common with the Second, and several echoes; if poetry had in the Second Eclogue been the cure of love, it is in the Tenth found to fail - tanquam haec sit nostri medicina furoris. Guillaume Stegen (Latomus 12 (1953), 70-76, and Comme;:taire sur cinq Bucoliques de Virgile, Namur (1957) 111-130) speaks of Virgil's ’astonishment that the Muses have not inspired Gallus', and Servius auctus here adds to Servius’ comment: 'vel (rogat) cui· eum amantem musae deseruerint, cum propter ingenium earum esset antistes.” In what sacred groves or mountain glades were they, when without a moment's hesitation, they had deserted their sacred haunts on Parnassus, Pindus and Helicon? Virgil mentions 'Aonie Aganippe’ because in the Sixth Eclogue Gallus had been led by a Muse to the Muses' haunt, Aonas in montes. Gallus was well known to the Muses. They should have responded to his call (or even without being called), when even woods and tamarisks responded with tears of sympathy. Virgil uses a strong, almost colloquial, form of words 'neque iuga ulla moram fecere' (for 'moram non fecere') (there are many examples in Plautus, cf. Catullus 8, 14: cum rogaberis nulla; Livy 24.36,8: postquam ea nulla contigerat; and in this same poem, 56: non me ulla vetabunt frigora); 'no thought for Parnassus or Pindus gave you pause, nor even Pegasus' fountain on the Aonian mount'. Cecil Day Lewis seems to me to have reversed the meaning when he says 'No duties kept you upon the ridges of Mount Parnassus or Pindus’. On the contrary, it was their duty to be at their post, on Parnassus or Pindus, and they had deserted it. I take 1.10, 'indigno cum Gallus amore peribat', to mean not ’when Gallus was writing his love elegies', however much he may have represented himself as suffering, but ’after Cytheris had left him'. The situation of the Tenth Eclogue is that Cytheris has left him for someone else, and for good, hence 'indigno’. Nor do I believe that we can infer from Servius’ comment on 1.46: 'hi autem omnes versus Galli sunt, de ipsius translati carminibus' and from Propertius' 'imitation’ in 1 ,viii,7-8 (tu pedibus teneris positas fulcire pruinas, tu potes insolitas, Cynthia, ferre nives: Propertius may well be imitating Virgil) that Gallus described Lycoris crossing the Alps to the Rhine, though he may have described her departure to a cold climate. Where we can check on Servius' comments such as this, (e.g. on A,4,1: - 6 - Apollonius1 Argonautica...Inde totus hic liber translatus est) they are exagg­ erated. I do not believe that Virgil's purpose is to honour Gallus' poetry, but to fill the gap that his dereliction has left The Muses are absent, but there is an implied answer to Virgil's question 'quae nemora9'; the 'nemora' and 'saltus' which claimed them were those of Arcadia (or Pieria), where Virgil found them at home for him, and so Virgil can step in in Gallus' place. This interpretation resembles that given recently by Mr. D.A. Kidd, on 1 Imitation in the Tenth Eclogue' in Bulletin XI (1964) of the Institute of Classical Studies, London, pp. 54-64, but also differs sharply. For Mr. Kidd the 1 nemora et saltus' are pastoral country, the country, Arcadia, where Gallus in fact was. The Muses, he says, could not bear to remain aloof on Parnassus or Pindus, and so came to Gallus in Arcadia, and he quotes Jacques Perret, Les Bucoliques, Paris (1961), p 109 in support, that 'the nymphs did come to Gallus8. But Gallus at first is alone 1 sola sub rupe', and then Virgil tells us who did come, venit, three times repeated in successive lines, 19-21, and twice more in 24 and 26: (I cannot agree with Mr. Kidd about lines 44-45: Martis in armis either: see later). But not the Muses. Gallus wrote no pastoral poetry, and never visited Arcad’a, except in the imagination of Virgil in this Eclogue. So Virgil at the beginning says to Are„husa 'pauca meo Gallo ...carmina sunt dicenda', and at the end to the Muses of Pieria: vos haec fac­ ietis maxima Gallo.' Virgil has an answer to the question 'quae nemora?' (surely it is not an exclamation as Perret would have it) and the other seemingly rhet­ orical question 'neget quis carmina Gallo?' (3) turns out also to have an answer. The Muses, who refuse a poem to Gallus, grant to Virgil a poem for Gallus. He appeals with success to his nymph Arethusa, and at the end he speaks as though she were all the Muses of Pieria: 'haec sat erit, divae, vestrum cecinisse poetae, Pierides'(71-72), the same Pierides as those to whom he had said 'go ahead', Pergite Pierides, in the Sixth Eclogue. If the Muses were not on Parnassus, Pindus or Helicon, they were in Pieria (not Arcadia), But Virgil had a special reason for invoking Arethusa by name, when before he had called on the Sicelides Musae (E.4.1) or recalled the Muses of Syracuse (E.6.1· prima Syracosio etc.). In Theocritus the dying Daphnis says farewell to Arethusa (1.117), and summons Pan from Maenalus and Lycaeus to Sicily. In Virgil gods and shepherds (but not the Muses) visit Gallus in Arcadia, and Virgil establishes the connect­ ion between Arethusa and Arcadia by an allusion to what fheocritus does not mention, the fable that the Alpheus plunges into the sea to reappear 340 miles to the west as the spring Arethusa by or in the sea off Ortygia, the island citadel of Syracuse. This fable is quoted by Pausanias 5,7.3 from an oracle given about 734 B.C. to Archias of Corinth, founder of Syracuse. Moschus (frag.3(7)) turns this into a love story in which the Alpheios pursues the nymph Arethusa and is taught by Love to dive so deep that the sea does not notice his passage, and there is no mixing of fresh with salt water. Virgil adjures, or threatens, Arethusa: so may Doris not violate your purity with her brine, in proportion as you come to my help (cf. E.9.30-31). Virgil wants the pure water that flows down the Alphaeus from Arcadia, and in this way we are prepared to find Gallus in Arcadia: (15) Maenalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycaei; Pan is there, deus Arcadiae, and has no need to come to Sicily, as he is asked to do by Daphnis in Theocritus, Id.1.124-5. Already in earlier Eclogues Virgil had evoked Arcadia as the home of pastoral song, as in the Seventh (4) Arcades ambo; (25-26) Pastores.„.Arcades. and in the Eighth Damon calls his song Maenalios versus and mentions Pan (24) as inventor of the pipe and, as we have seen, in the Fourth Pan is the greatest pastoral poet, and his Arcadians are the - 7 - connoisseurs of such poetry. But the Tenth Eclogue is by far the most complete evocation of Arcadia as ’a spiritual landscape* (in Bruno Snell’s words: Antike und Abendland (1945): 'Akadien, die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft', reprinted in The Discovery of the Mind, Blackwell, Oxford (1953), 281-309). This is not the place to discuss Virgil’s possible sources for his conception or the immense development of it in Renaissance poetry and seventeenth-century land­ scape painting. Suffice it to say that Virgil here evokes Arcadia only to turn away from it. ’Soli cantare periti, Arcades’, he says, but he will cease from pastoral song. The Life of Arcadia, even with its poetry and its hunting, is inaccessible, and this because of the power of Love. Poetry, even pastoral, is not the cure of Love: 'neque carmina nobis ipsa placent' The passage from pastoral poetry to didactic and eventually to epic is possible, but not by trans­ cending Love and rendering it innocuous. The poet must carry the wound of Love with him on his way, and feed it with his heart’s blood: vulnus alit venis. This is why the Georgies is so full of the theme of Love, especially in Book 3, even among the Gods, Saturn and Ceres (92-95), Pan deus Arcadiae himself (391-3); Leander (257-63), quid iuvenis. The attempted moral of the Georgies is the Hesiodic ’labor omnia vincit', but it breaks down with the plague in Book 3, and the plague on the bees in 4,251. The Fourth Book caresses the idea of a world without sexual I*ove, the world of the Bees, in its first half, but returns in the second to the inevitable theme of tragic love, in Aristaeus, Orpheus and Eurydice. The climax of the Tenth Eclogue is the last line of Gallus’ monologue: omnia vincit amor: et nos cedamus Amori. 'Et nos* is the frequent formula for the application of the moral tale to an individual. It applies, however, not at all to Gallus, only to Virgil. The met­ aphorically dying Gallus did not die physically or submit to love; he threw off Lycoris and began a successful new career at the age of thirty; but as a poet he died, committed poetical suicide like the hero of Damon’s song m E.8, after perhaps giving a new personal Roman voice to Love elegy, if indeed he showed the way to Tibullus and Propertius (see Georg Luck, The Latin Love-Elegy, Methuen, London, 1959). Of the Tenth Eclogue Conington says (p.116): ’here, as in E.1, the identification of the shepherd and poet is so rudely managed as to amount to absolute confusion’. But the confusion of which Conington complains is not that between Gallus and Virgil, between the actual situation of Gallus and the use that Virgil makes of it to analyse his own situation as a poet - and this is not a confusion either. Conington himself is caught in a much more elementary confusio that of thinking Gallus to be ’at one and the same moment a soldier aud a shepherd, serving in the camp in Italy, and lying under a rock in Arcadia’. The ’n^ked simplicity’, he continues, 'of the explanation has caused it to be missed : Gallus is taking a holiday in Arcadia! Such 1itera1-mindedness scarcely fits a man to become a commentator on Virgil, at least on the Eclogues; and, in this case, it rests on a misconstruing of lines 44-45, against which Servius warns us already: nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes. Servius says: *ex affectu amantis ibi se esse putat, ubi amica est, ut 'me’ sit ’meum animum', cf. on 42: ’iterum ad amatam redit', apostrophizing Lycoris as though she were present. ’Insanus amor' cannot be taken with ’Martis’ when 1.22 has 'Galle, quid insanis?* and 1.38 'furor' of love The same idea of being trans­ ported 'animo’ in imagination, comes again shortly after (58) iam mihi per rupes videor lucosque sonantis/ire, I do not agree with Mr. Kidd (loc.cit.p.60) that this destroys the effect of the following antithesis, that Lycoris is far away from her lover. The point is not simply that she is 'procul a patria' and 'me sine sola', but that she has chosen to be 'me sine sola’, but not ’sola’ absolutely, rather 'alium secuta’ (23). - 8 -

Mr. Kidd develops Hartmann's suggestion, Mnem.40 (1912) 222-8, of a purely figurative interpretation of Gallus’ war, Martis in armis. not that he is the lover making war (Ovid's 'militat omnis amans'), but the lover warred upon by Venus and Cupid, the plural hostis of 1.45, a theme well-documented in Theocritus, Moschus, Meleager and Propertius. Mr. Kidd acknowledges the oddity of mentioning Mars and not Venus and Cupid, but argues that 'Martis arma' may mean defensive armour, and that it is probably a quotation from one of Gallus' elegies. I find this metaphorical language very difficult to accept so soon after the literal 'per horrida castra' of 1.23, Amor is Gallus’ great enemy, lines 28 and 29, and twice again in 1,69. The plural 'adversos hostis’ for Venus and Cupid seems to me impossible here, whatever it might be in Eclogue 8,50, where we have the combined efforts of the 'improbus ille puer'; and of 'crudelis tu quoque, mater'. To express Mr. Kidd's meaning Virgil would have had to say 'Amor oppresses me with his arms, which are worse than the literal arms of Mars' or the like. Conington and others have also been misled by thinking of Gallus as already a political or military figure as well as a poet, because they swallow Servius' absurd conjectures that Gallus was one of a board of triumviri agris dividundis in 41 B.C. with Pollio and Alfenus Varus, and that he secured the restoration of Virgil's estate or Virgil's indemnification after the confiscation. But Appian's detailed account makes it clear that there was no such board; Octavian kept the whole matter in his own hands, except where he was compelled by pressure from Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, to appoint a single Antonian to plant Antony's soldiers in the territory of a single city. Gallus was a plain citizen, thirty years old, while Pollio was a praetorius, with the consulship in his pocket, and so was Varus probably. Virgil does not address Gallus as a patron, but as an equal, a contemporary, a fellow-poet. If he were anything else, it would have been impossible to praise him in the Sixth Eclogue, while refusing to praise Varus. In any case, too, Virgil lost his estate, and we can be absolutely sure of this, because Virgil says so in the Georgies 2, 198-9: et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos. (swans = poets as in E.9 29). But is there in the Eclogue a confusion between Gallus and Virgil? I used to think so, because lines 50-51: ibo, et Chalcidico quae sunt mihi condita versu, carmina, pastoris Siculi modulabor avena, seemed to me so undramatic, so abrupt, such an interruption of what Gallus might say in Arcadia, in order to state what Virgil himself was doing in the Eclogue, viz. transposing Gallus' elegies into pastoral form. I have never indeed gone so far as to believe Servius when he says (at 1.46): 'hi autem omnes versus Galli sunt, de ipsius translati carminibus.’ This remark supported Franz Skutsch in his notion that the Tenth Eclogue, like the Sixth also, was a catalogue poem, an anthology of phrases and themes from the Amores of Gallus. Skutsch's Aus Vergils Fruhzeit (1901), with its second part, his Gallus und Vergil (1906), was a very original, refreshing and important contribution, and may be said to have started the modem discussion of the Eclogues, as Heinze (1902) did that of the Aeneid. Much of its importance lay in the immediate reaction, the famous rebuttal by Leo, Hemes 37 (1902) and 42 (1907) = Kleine Schriften (1960), II, 29-70, esp. 68, n.l, and, for the Tenth Eclogue, Rudolf Helm's excellent article in Philologus 61 (1902), 271-91. Helm upholds the unity of the poem, and thinks it the best of the Eclogues because the First is not unified, the Fourth is obscure, and the Sixth underdeveloped. The Tenth has more imagination and more charming scenery than the Second. He - 9 - makes two points in particular: Gallus cannot have written any pastoral poetry himself; otherwise Virgil could not say 'nec te paeniteat pecoris'. Also, Gallus rejects the consolation of writing pastoral poetry, as he rejects the distraction of hunting. If the poem was intended as a consolation of Gallus, it represents the consolation as wholly vain. Lines 50-51, then, 'ibo et Chalcidico' etc., are not a foreign intrusion of Virgil himself, as he removes the mask of Gallus for a moment. They are part of the development of Gallus' thought as Virgil represents it, though they represent a fresh start after the tender apostrophe to Lycoris of 46-49. Gallus' first consolation is that the Arcadians, 'soli cantare periti' if their poetry will tell the story of his love, 'si fistula dicat amores*, will make Gallus rest quietly in his grave, 'o mihi tum quam molliter ossa quiescant'. Then he wishes that in life he might have been 'one of you', 'aut custos gregis', and evokes from the Third and Seventh Eclogues Phyllis and Amyntas. But Phyllis re­ calls Lycoris, and at once Gallus is with her on the Rhine. He turns away, however; he cannot be an Arcadian, but he can try to turn his tune from elegy to pastoral, and do for himself while alive what before he had imagined the Arcadians doing for him after his death. But., for the moment, a little awkwardly perhaps, he jumps ahead to carving his verses, his amores, on the bark of trees 'in silvis inter spelaea ferarum'. It is not clear what 'mistis lustrabo Maenala nymphis' refers to. Conington takes it to mean hunting, as with Diana's nymphs in 0d.6.105 or Aen.1.498-502. But hunting is mentioned in the next line 'aut acris venabor apros', and I suggest that Virgil thinks of bacchic oreibasia, as in G.2.487: virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta. But no sooner is Gallus hunting in imagination than he rejects the image: tanquam haec sit nostri medicina furoris, and, chiastically, he goes on to reject pastoral poetry 'neque carmina nobis/ipsa placent', and the whole pastoral world, 'ipsae rursus concedite silvae', even those silvae which 'respond­ ent omnia' (8). No kind of labour, whether of poetry or hunting; no change of scene can be of any service. This is the truth of which Pan had warned Gallus, just before Gallus began in his monologue to search for possible consolations and escapes. Pan's message is clear; but it is not clear to me why Menalcas and his fellows, and even Apollo should put rhetorical questions to Gallus, 'unde amor iste tibi?* (21), 'Galle, quid insanis?' (22) - Apollo even adds what Gallus is well aware of, that Lycoris has left him (22-23), unless to inform us, the readers, and to lead up to Pan's utterance. Silvanus, we may note, comes too, but says nothing. Why do we have a Roman god here amid the Greeks, unless Virgil perhaps regarded Silvanus as the Latin form of Silenus (the poet of the Sixth Eclogue)? Silvanus reappears in G.1, 20. Pan's conclusion, 'ecquis erit modus? Amor non talia curat' (28), repeats the conclusion reached by Corydon in the Second Eclogue (68); 'quis enim modus ad­ sit amori?' Corydon seems to find a cure in poetry. But the Tenth Eclogue seems to declare this to be an illusion. Now Gallus, in my reconstruction, in fact abandoned poetry. Is his decision to be Virgil's also? Virgil indeed abandons pastoral poetry. What makes the difference is, I suggest, the pipe of Hesiod which Linus gave Gallus in the Sixth Eclogue. The Tenth Eclogue recreates the divine and mythical sphere of the Sixth, in which, as in the Golden Age, gods and men inter- . mingle and, in that sphere of imagination and inspiration, Hesiod's pipe, that Gallus will not use, is picked up by Virgil. Virgil realizes now clearly what he had adumbrated in the Sixth Eclogue as .'a dream of Helicon'; for Gallus' is his own dream, if he can put himself in Gallus' place, and this he does in the Tenth Eclogue by taking on himself Gallus' burden, when Gallus himself would not shoulder it. The dream in the Sixth Eclogue is Callimachus' dream, when he was called to be the poet of the Aetia, but Virgil no doubt thought also of Ennius' dream of Homer reincarnate in himself, and Dante says of the poets who imagined the Golden Age that 'forse in Parnaso esto logo sognaro' (Purg.28.141). 'Esto logo' is the Earthly Paradise, where are those Beati, quorum tecta sunt peccata (Purg.29.3 = Psalm 31.1). “ 10 -

For a poet, the Golden Age restored means the plenitude of inspiration, as in the Fourth Eclogue. It would take too long to work out how in the Georgies Virgil gets to grips with this problem of inspiration and dramatizes it in the climax of the poem, in the person of the Arcadian Aristaeus. Bu; one thing must be said about Gallus and the Georgies in this context of Virgil's slow and costly, painful yet exultant development from Alexandrian pastoral to Roman epic. Servius' story, in his comments on E.10.1 and G.4.1,(about the elimination of the 'Galli laudes' from 5.4) has been and continues to be, endlessly discussed. There is now, rightly in my opinion, 3cme consensus in dismissing Servius' story as untrustworthy. But I hope that my account of Gallus' involvement for Virgil in Virgil's passage from pastoral to didactic on the way to epic po-itry may explain how Servius' story could arise. Paratore, in Virgilio (1945), 161. has said that the gift of Hesiod's pipe in the Sixth Eclogue foreshadows the Georgies. In the Tenth, Gallus is transposed into the pastoral mode, and Virgil then, through him, says farewell to the Pastoral, the charming dream of Arcadia. But, if I am right in supposing that Virgil steps in because Gallus, far from playing on Hesiod's pipe, silenced even his Love-Elegy, then Virgil had nothing more to learn from Gallus as a po^t, and it was in Gallus only as poet that Virgil was interested. In the Tenth Eclogue Virgil ducked all he could out of the poetry of Gallus, and so Gallus, like Pollio, disappears. But one might well expect that, if Gallus medifted the transition to the Georgies, he should appear in the Georgies, especially as towards the end of the Tenth Eclogue Virgil speaks of his growing Icve for Gallus, cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas, quantum vere novo viridis se subiicit alnus (73-74) cf. 54. I conjecture that Pollio was perhaps the author of Servius' story. He cannot have liked to vanish from Virgil's poetry and be displaced by Maecenas (named four times in the Georgies). We do not know how Maecenas captured Virgil for Augustus, and then through him Horace. It was more than nine months (Sat.1.6.61) before the famous journey to Brundisium (Hpr.Sat.1.5.40) in the winter of 38-37, about the time of Pollio's triumph: is this perhaps (as I have suggested above) why the lines to Pollio in the Eighth Eclogue are so odd, half-hearted and inexplicit? We know anyhow that Pollio continued to take an interest in Virgil's poetry, because he made a perceptive criticism of the Aeneid, recorded by Servius on A.11.183. Horace at least did not drop Pollio (0d.2.1; Sat.1.10). I mention all this because Virgil's development is much more complicated and mysterious than is implied by simple formulations about the purpose of the Tenth Eclogue (usefully collected by Wolf Steidle in Serta Philologica Aenipontana (i.e. Innsbruck) (1962), 'Zwei Vergilprobleme' 2 'Zum Verstandis der zehnten Ekloge', 320-334). Servius suggests that it is a consolation of Gallus for the loss of Lycoris; but, he adds, if you look below the surface, 'altius intuenti, vituper­ atio est; nam impatientia turpis amoris ostenditur'(just as in the First Eclogue he finds praise of Augustus, with sharp reproach under the surface: on E.1,12; 'et invidiose tempora Augusti carpit latenter*; 27; 'et item latenter carpit tempora'), and on 10.44 he explains: 'hinc usque ad finem amatoris inconstantia exprimitur, cui electa displicent statim'. Servius sees dimly that a consolation which ends with despair is not much of a consolation. In modern times, the Tenth Eclogue has been seen rather as some kind of comparison and contrast of Love-Elegy and Pastoral. Is it praise of Gallus' poetry? or does it recommend pastoral as a superior 'remedium amoris' to elegy? Is it some kind of competition with Gallus? Is Gallus adjured not to despise pastoral, because in the event Virgil's pastoral can do justice to Gallus' situation better than Gallus himself can? But Virgil cannot be recommending the Pastoral, in the very moment when he abandons it. I - 11 - suggest that the question cannot be answered by taking the Eclogue in isolation, especially from the Sixth Eclogue, and apart from Virgil's whole development. To support my way of looking at the problem would require an analysis of the Georgies, in which Virgil's problem, of how to advance from didactic to epic, becomes acute and is answered symbolically by the story of Aristaeus. Even the Aeneid did not remove Virgil's hesitations and doubts about the whole epic enterprise. When he began it, he wrote to Augustus (Macrob.Sat.1.24.10): ‘tanta incohata res est, ut paene vitio mentis tantum opus ingressus mihi videar', and on his death-bed, he wanted to burn it. In conclusion, I would like to notice two examples in the Tenth Eclogue where Virgil uses in a metaphorical or symbolical sense images that in earlier Eclogues he had used literally. This shows a habit of allegorical thought. First, in the Sixth Eclogue, Virgil speaks of the shepherd as literally engaged in producing fat sheep, and contrasts this with producing slender lissom verse: 'pastorem, Tityre, pinguis/pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen'. Sheep and song, ovis and carmen, are contrasted. But in the Tenth Eclogue the sheep tended by the shepherd stand for the poetic production of the poet: (16) 'stant et oves circum (nostri nec paenitet illas, nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poet a') (notice here Virgil's playful and surprising inversion of 'nostri...illas', where we should expect 'nec illarum nos paenitet', parallel to 'nec te paeniteat'). Again, in the Second Eclogue, Corydon is made by Virgil to contrast the weaving of baskets from withies, a utilitarian occupation, with thinking and poetizing about love: 'quin tu aliquid saltem potius, quorum indiget usus, viminibus mollique paras detexere iunco?' But in the Tenth Eclogue the weaving of a basket is a figure for the composition by a pastoral poet of a poem. 'Haec sat erit divae, vestrum cecinisse poetam, dun sedet et gracili fiscellam texit hibisco'. The 'fiscella' is here the poem that Virgil has just completed for Gallus. This habit of imagery in the poem induces inevitably in its last line a double meaning: ‘ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.* The 'capellae' are the collection of Eclogues; they are full-fed, have had put into them all that Virgil could put into this form. The sun sets on them, but for Virgil 'tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new'.

V.S. Lectures, No. 79 VIRGIL AND THE CHRISTIAN LATIN POETS A lecture delivered to the Virgil Society 19th November 1966 by A. Hudson-Williams, B.A., M.Litt. By Christian Latin poetry, I ought first to explain, I mean the poetry of Christian content written during the late Latin period, principally the fourth and fifth centuries. With the sixth century this poetry, broadly speaking, may be said to come to an end, to be succeeded subsequently by medieval poetry. I do not propose to, nor am I able to, discuss the latter. Between the death of Juvenal in the early second century and the emergence of - 12 -

Claudian towards the end of the fourth no great name had arisen in Latin pagan poetry. It was during this century that Christian Latin poetry, some­ what belatedly, began to develop. The delay in its development was due not so much to Christian disapproval of poetry in itself as to the decadent state of pagan letters: contemporary poetry was regarded as the toy and plaything of grammarians and rhetoricians and, as such, unsuitable for the conveyance of serious thought. Nevertheless, the urge to produce a Christian poetry that might compete with pagan was felt early in the fourth century and this gave rise to a new and flourishing period of Latin poetry. The fundamental basis of this poetry was the combination of Christian with the traditional pagan elements. That Christian poetry should suddenly emerge as something entirely new, untouched by the poetry of paganism, was in itself improbable; it was made not only improbable, but virtually impossible, by the principal literary influence of the time, the scholastic education. A primary element in this education was an intensive study of the classical Latin poets, above all of Virgil. These poets were read and re-read, scrutinized, interpreted, and committed to memory. Men of culture could not fail to be impregnated with their works and their poetical tastes moulded according to classical tradition. · The Church· Fathers, as we might suppose, shrank from these pagan influences and viewed them with some distaste. But the great masters were too much for them. They had become part of their being and could not be shrugged off at will. To Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, and others Virgil was a vivid presence all their lives. Quotations from him and other pagan writers abound in patristic works. Certainly, Virgil continued to enjoy the highest reputation and esteem. The fourth Eclogue was commonly regarded as a Messianic prophecy and Constantine went so far as to give this view his official sanction. The poet was indeed the anima naturaliter Christiana to whom Dante refers. If Virgil exercised a powerful influence on the Christian prose writers, the indebtedness of the poets was bound to be wide indeed. The first to compose on any scale, with the exception, perhaps, of the unrepresentative Commodian, seems to have been the Spanish priest, Juvencus, who wrote about 330. His aim was to produce a Christian epic adorned with terrene embellishments, and the result was four books of hexameters, entitled Euangelia and embodying the Gospel narrative, mainly according to St. Matthew. This poet has often been criticized for a timorous anxiety to adhere closely at the same time to the language of Virgil and to the text of the Gospel. The criticism is, I think, exaggerated. The contribution of Juvencus was that of a pioneer and had value. In'his day the work was highly esteemed, and by none more than by Juvencus himself; to us his adaptation of pagan to Christian seems dull and pedantic. Juvencus had not solved the problem of building on pagan tradition a new poetry of Christian sentiment and inspiration. Ambrose, later in the century, showed in his hymns what could be achieved by simplicity of language and metre and a tempered use of the past; but his hymns were for purely liturgical, not literary ends, and he had little immediate following. Minor works appeared in the course of the century, but it was not till towards its end that there appeared a figure of outstanding ability in the Spanish layman, Prudentius, commonly regarded as the greatest of the Christian Latin poets. Prudentius aimed at creating a Christian poetry which would both have artistic equality with the pagan and also provide a vehicle for genuine Christian feeling. No mere imitator, he utilized the traditional poetic language with skill and imagination, freed himself from the shackles of the hexameter by the employment of a variety of metres, and in the literary hymn, the allegorical epic, and the martyr ballad, originated new literary genres. Contemporary with Prudentius is - 13 - the second most able Christian poet, Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, a favourite pupil of Ausonius, by whom Paulinus' dereliction of the Muses was keenly regretted. The author of numerous poems in different metres, Paulinus is best known for those addressed to Felix, the patron saint of Nola, which show considerable freshness and a warm humanity. In the succeeding century poets continued to write on Christian themes with varying degrees of skill and success: their work, though it includes some hymns, is mostly of epic or didactic character. Among them are these: Marius Victor, (according to Gennadius) a rhetor of Marseilles, composed a free version of Genesis with much philosophic discussion; Sedulius, in his Carmen paschale, described in five books various biblical episodes; Dracontius, a barrister of Carthage under the Vandals, wrote three books De laudibus dei; on the threshold of the Middle Ages, Alcimus Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, produced a biblical epic in five books with allegorical explanations; and finally, towards the end of the sixth century, Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, was the author of numero is poems on both secular and religious themes. All' these works, apart from the poems of Fortunatus are composed in hexameters. All are heavily indebted to Virgil, as well as to Ovid, Horace, Lucretius and other classical poets. Where the range of classical and other sources is so wide and the product is so often an amalgam of several, it may not be wise to concentrate on one individual model. The poets were steeped in the classical writers and tracing the various strands of their influence in any given work or passage is something beyond the power of man. A further vital influence, I need not say, was the Bible, another the vast field of patristic literature. Yet the position of Virgil is unique: no poet was so much read, admired, and imitated as he, and the borrowing is so frequent and so obvious, that no apology seems necessary for his individual consideration. In exploiting their classical models, the Christian poets, like their pagan predecessors, felt few qualms: these models, mendacia though they might represent, were regarded as a common treasury upon which they could draw at will and the same currency could be utilized over and over again. There were, moreover, Christian centos, notably of Proba, who displayed a diabolical ingenuity, if we may properly apply the phrase to so pious a woman, in relating episodes of the Old and New Testament solely in Virgilian lines and half-lines. And the composer of the cento De ecclesia received from an admiring public, though not from the Church, the title Maro junior. No poet but Virgil was put to such use at this time and here we see the strongest evidence of the amazing esteem in which he was held. That the works of the highly educated should abound in reminiscences of Virgil is not surprising: more significant is their appearance in the performances of ruder folk. They include the Christian poet, Commodian, who wrote a series of instructional poems, it may be, as early as the third century, in language and verse that are equally uncouth. Yet, amid this welter of vulgarisms and horrific versification, there peep out here and there echoes of Virgil, for the most part correctly applied. Heavy as is their debt to Virgil, the poets are sparing in direct allusions to him. Juvencus (Praef.10 ff.) speaks of the dulcedo Maronis and his undying glory, but goes on to refer darkly to the mendacia of ancient epic as contrasted with his own, whose veracity may save him from the fires to come Commodian (Apol. 583 f.) tells us that Virgil, Cicero, and Terence are indeed read, but have noth'.ng to say about life. The more sensitive, notably Prudentius, are significantly silent: it was a delicate relationship, upon which it was unnecessary to dwell. For all their many borrowings, there were certain features of the Aeneid which it was clearly impossible for the Christian poets to pursue. An essential feature - 14 - of Virgil's epic is the prominent role accorded to the gods. These, I need not say, must go out of the window, penates and all. They receive short shrift from Prudentius in his work Against Symmachus. Here I must express my indebtedness to Christian Schwen's work, Vergil bei Prudentius (1937), a most valuable con­ tribution, from which I have not hesitated to draw here and elsewhere. Schwen shows how Prudentius not only ridicules the gods and the powers ascribed to them, but does so with a satirical exploitation of Virgil's own description: for example, (Symm.1.86 ff.) he sneers at Mercury's alleged role of ψυχοπομπός , and even apparent ability to raise the dead, with obvious reference to the Mercury passage in Aeneid 4 (239 ff.); and the grave passage in Aeneid 6 (777 ff. ) des­ cribing the founding of Rome by Romulus, son of Mars, with the approval of Jupiter, is openly derided (Peri.10.411 ff.); likewise, the Phrygii penates (Aen.3.148; Peri.2.448). Bitter scorn, too, is cast on the union of Venus and Anchises (Symm. 1.166 ff.); the worship of Augustus is denounced as infamous (Symm.1.245 ff.); and the power of Fatum, the mainstay of the Aeneid, is roundly ridiculed (Symm.2.409; cf. 471, 486). Paulinus of Nola (if he be the author of Carmen 32) similarly denounces the gods and, by implication, Virgil himself (c. 32.55 f.): in refer­ ence to Juno he writes 'quam Vergilius notat auctor eorum/dicendo et soror et coniunx*, a quotation, here openly, and unusually, acknowledged, from Aeneid 1. 47. These attacks on the ancient gods, it may be observed, were not merely rhetorical; paganism, though indeed tottering, had not yet disappeared, and there were those who still clung fondly to traditional beliefs and felt uneasy about forsaking the gods of old. With the gods, iL was obvious, pagan mythology too must go. As Paulinus writes in a poem addressed to the reproachful Ausonius (c, 10.21 f.): 'negant Camenis nec patent Apollini/dicata Christo pectora'. In the adaptation of pagan poetry to Christian ideas here would seem to lie a most difficult problem: were not the gods and the myths an intrinsic element in that poetry? The Christians did not, however, allow this to disturb them unduly. A magnificent substitute from which to draw they found in the limitless resources of the Old Testament; the Bible could indeed be a primary source of inspiration. Nor did they abandon pagan mythology in its entirety; to some extent they were able to come to terms with it. Characteristic of their work is the widespread application to Christian concepts of certain designations and epithets which figure in pagan mythology; for example, the terms Tartarus and Avernus are commonly applied to Hell, likewise Acheron and Styx: thus Dracontius (3.642) speaks of 'dominum uenientem in Tartara Christum' (a verse-ending found also in Paulinus and others). Sometimes these terms appear alongside the orthodox Christian term: for example, in a passage of Prudentius (Ham.958-62), Tartarus, gehenna and Avernus all jostle cosily together. Conversely, Olympus is used of the Chrislian Heaven, and Elysium is the reward of the just. Such terms had no doubt become literary cliches and were regarded as mere poetical ornamentation. Yet many an eyebrow has been raised at their bold­ ness, particularly in the frequent reference to the Deity as Tonans. At times, indeed, these poets appear to have felt twinges of unease and found dubious shifts to salve them. Comparetti disapprovingly calls attention to the expedient of substituting for the traditional invocation of the Muse a 'Domine, labia mea aperies'; and the last point of horror is reached, he feels, when they seek inspiration of the God who had induced eloquence in Balaam's ass (as does Orientius, 1.27 ff.). A similar attitude is displayed by these poets in their ready appropriation of poetical phrases or verses used of pagan mythology. Thus Paulinus (c. 4.1) aid others echo the words of Virgil, but slightly altered, in addressing the Almighty: 'omnipotens genitor, rerum cui summa potestas' (cf. Aen.10.100, 668); indeed, the omnipotence of God is not uncommonly expressed in Virgilian language. - 15 -

Yet care had to be exercised: in Paulinus' exploitation of Aen.1.254 'hominum sator atque deorum' the word deorum has to go, but reappears in the nominative singular, 'deus ut cunctorum hominum sator' (c. 19.307). Prudentius adapts the designation of Aeneas nate dea (Aen.1.582, 615, etc.) in addressing Christ with the words 'Iesu/nate deo* (Apoth.418). Sedulius (c. 2.63) invokes the Virgin Mary with the words, necessarily modified, with which Aeneas invokes Anchises (Aen.5.80): 'salue, sancta parens'. On somewhat similar lines Prudentius (Apoth. 394) transfers Virgil's words regarding the site of Aeneas' city (Aen.3.393) to Christ himself: 'requies o certa laborum' (otherwise Drac,1.559 'mors mundanorum requies uel certa laborum', where Arevalo's conjecture meta for certa is doomed from the start). And Paulinus (_c. 14.79 f.) writes unashamedly 'amor omnia Christi/ uincit'. We may now turn to some examples of Christian work in the epic style and observe Virgiiian influence in operation. Poets saw in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, a rich source of epic material, and a favourite subjects was Genesis: there are, for example, several accounts of Paradise and its inmates, Adam and Eve; both Dracontius (1.180) and Avitus (1.193) begin their description with the Virgiiian verse-beginning est locus (Aen.3.163); here the Georgies could be of help and were exploited by Marius Victor. An instructive instance of an epic account heavily influenced by the Virgiiian manner is Avitus' description (5.371-721) of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea (Exod.13.18-14 fin.). The Exodus narrative, which occupies about thirty-five verses, is expanded by Avitus to some three hundred and fifty lines. In his account, which is mostly clear and well expressed, Virgiiian turns and motifs are employed, the arrival of day and of night is clearly announced in poetic language, and transitions and resumptions in the narration are indicated by such Virgiiian f ormulae as ergo ubi, protinus, haec inter, ecce, hinc subitus, and the conclusion of a speech by talibus and uix haec perdixerat. Avitus regards the Israelites and the Egyptians as two opposing armies. In the Bible the Israelites are indeed represented as an organized host (armati), but not as the heavily armed warriors whom Avitus depicts in epic detail. It is char­ acteristic that he should start off (5.371): 'primo conspicuus fulgebat in ordine ductor*, i.e. Moses, just as Virgil begins his catalogue of Italian warring tribes in Aeneid 7.647 'primus init bellum (Mezentius)*. In the evening appears the pillar of fire in all its brilliance: 'obstipuere uiri' (412), much as in Aeneid 9.123 (cf. 2.120, etc.) upon seeing the heavenly portent and the transformation of the ships 'obstipuere animi Rutulis'. Meanwhile the Egyptians are enraged by the flight of the Israelites and one of them makes a long speech of a rhetorical char­ acter (472-96). In describing (477-9) the dislocation of the country's economy by the departure of the gens famula, both in thought and in language the speaker is inspired not by Exodus, but by Virgil's account (Aen.4.86-9) of the suspension of activities in Carthage occasioned by the lovemaking of Dido and Aeneas. Various other examples of Virgiiian language, motifs, or technique follow: for instance, (502-25) the long description of the Egyptian armour comparable with that of the Italian armour in Aeneid 7.624-40; tie approach of the Egyptian host seen as a cloud of dust (530) like that of Turnus' army in Aeneid 9.33 (cf.8.593); the dismay of the Israelites and their despairing exclamation (547-8) 'o terque quaterque beati,/Aegyptus quos morte tulit', which corresponds to that of Aeneas in Aeneid 1.94-6: 'o terque quaterque beati,/quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub montibus altis/contigit oppetere'; and (672) the final utterance of the chastened Pharaoh, as the waters envelop him, 'non haec humanis cedit uictoria bellis', in which he is assisted by the words of Iapvx in Aeneid 12.427 (cf. 2,777 f., 5.56) 'non haec humanis opibus, non arte magistra/proueniunt'. The book ends with some rhetorical moralizing alien to the manner of Virgil, and an allegorical - 16 - interpretation of the episode, the purging of sin by the waters of baptism. A more original work than that of Avitus is the bizarre poem of Prudentius, the Psychomachia, the battle of the soul, the first Latin allegorical epic. This poem, though much criticized in modern times - Puech finds it insupportable and terms it a 'serious parody of the Virgiiian epic', attained immense popul­ arity in the Middle Ages and had far-reaching influence on medieval poetry art and sculpture. The action consists of a series of fights between the Virtues and the Vices, each of which ends with the crushing defeat of the particular Vice engaged. In between the fights the combatants deliver speeches of varying length, and the poem ends with the final victory of the Virtues and the building of a temple in which Christ may dwell. The work is deeply indebted to Virgiiian technique, motifs, and language almost throughout. The personifications go through all the motions and postures of the heroes of the Aeneid; they strut, preen themselves, and taunt on similar lines; and their speeches are followed by the Virgiiian dixerat or haec ubi dicta dedit; in that which is beyond belief (497) recourse is had to Virgil's cautionary clause si credere dignum est (Georg. 3.391, Aen. 6.173). The poet begins with an invocation of Christ that corresponds to Virgil's invocation of the Muse in Aeneid 1,8-11. The first line 'Christe, graues hominum semper miserate labores* is but a slight modification, censured by Puech and praised by Professor Rapisarda, of Aeneid 6.56 'Phoebe, grauis Troiae semper miserate labores*. In the succeeding fights Virgiiian motifs and language are freely drawn upon. They are drawn upon too in the speeches: for example, as Schwen in his full discussion shows, when Reason stems the advance of the con­ quering Avarice, the latter gives vent to her disappointment in a monologue which has close affinities with the two monologues of the frustrated Juno in Aeneid 1 and 7: the opening lines (511 f.) reveal the similarity at once - 'uincimur, heu, segnes nec nostra potentia perfert/uim solitam'; in Aeneid 1.37 Juno exclaims 'mene incepto desistere uictam' and again in 7.310 'uincor ab Aenea' .. Like Juno, Avarice has recourse to treachery: (551 ff,) she assumes the form of a Virtue, Thrift, just as in similar language Allecto in Aeneid 7.415 transforms herself into an old woman. But Thrift has, of course, a special significance, for Avarice may pass for Thrift in real life. In this poem Prudentius' debt to Virgil is undoubtedly great. Yet there is much that is anything but Virgiiian. The work as a whole lacks unity, the fights are unreal, and the personifications, as they move mechanically in their pre­ scribed roles, have little individual interest. In the exercise of their prowess the Virtues display a savagery that is as un-Christian as it is unladylike and the poet describes the horrid carnage they effect with all the relish of a Seneca or Lucan. The speeches are wordy and full of theology and preaching. Amid the Virgiiian surroundings biblical touches appear here and there: (99 f.) Chastity dips her polluted blade in the waters of Jordan; and (163) the trusty squire of Patience is not fidus Achates but Job, The final scene, the building of the temple by the victorious Virtues, while it may owe one or two touches to Aeneid 1, draws largely upon the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21, And here this amazing performance comes to an end. Its immense popularity in the Middle Ages may be ascribed to its combination of allegory, moralizing, and Christianization of Virgil. For most moderns Prudentius deploys his indubitable talent more successfully elsewhere. So much for epic. In general it may be said that both in epic and in other poetical forms Virgil's influence lies for the most part in technique, language, and literary motifs. The essential spirit of Virgil is less prominent; it was something beyond the capacity of most to reproduce. Yet in the basic motive of - 17 - the Aeneid there is one poet who passionately echoes the deep convictions of his predecessor. The conception of the founding of the Roman state by divine will and of its development into a great empire for the just ordering of the world was adopted in a modified form by Prudentius, and given all the weight of a religious belief. In his relationship to Virgil Prudentius occupies among the Christian poets a unique position. Like others he was deeply indebted to Virgil in those matters to which I have referred, but none other is so impregnated with Virgil's passionate faith in the holy and eternal nature of Rome's mission in the world. Prudentius was intensely patriotic and shared with conservative pagans such as Symmachus all their love for Rome and her splendid past; for him, as for Virgil, she is pulcherrima Roma (Peri.11.231; Georg.2.534), whose immortality is assured. But she is now a Christian Rome, and it is. the accomplishment of the Christian Rome that Prudentius celebrates in his polemical work Against Symmachus and in the second martyr-hymn.■ All this, is admirably discussed by Friedrich Klingner in his Romische Geisteswelt. He shows how Prudentius found something comparable between his own time and that of Virgil; the latter represented the foundation of the Empire and the climax of Roman achievement in the secular sense; Prudentius' own day represented the victory of Christianity under Theodosius and the imperial condemnation of paganism. Virgil saw in Roman history the gradual development of a divine mission to give order and good government to the world; Prudentius went further - he saw in it the divine purpose of preparing the world for the advent of Christ and the ultimate triumph of Christianity in his own day. The last stage in the process foreshadowed by Virgil has now been reached and he exclaims character­ istically in Apotheosis 446 f. !iam purpura supplex/sternitur Aeneadae rectoris ad atria Christi'; the descendant of Aeneas is, of course, Theodosius. Rome is now head of the eternal heavenly empire and the words of Virgil I am about to quote have a meaning undreamt of by him: in the Contra Symmachum Prudentius describes how Theodosius won his bloodless victories over the enemies of Christianity and (1.539 f,) 'taught Quirinus' realm how to have power for everlasting in a supremacy that is from Heaven* (Thomson); he then adds in words used by Virgil of Jupiter (Aen.1.278 f,) 'denique nec metas statuit nec tempora ponit:/imperium sine fine docet'. This modernization of Virgil, the weaving of the Virgiiian conception of Rome into a Christian texture, is the creation of Prudentius. No other poet develops such a theme. Paulinus of Nola has a deep regard for Rome and (c.13.29 f.) refers to her changed role: Nola, he says, is second only to Rome herself, 'quae prius imperio tantum et uictricibus armis,/nunc et apostolicis terrarum est prima sepulchris'; but this is as far as he goes. In this discussion of the wider influences of Virgil’s work I should make a brief mention of the Christianized eclogue. Apart from a comic cento composed in the form of a Virgiiian eclogue, the only example we find in this period is a short poem De mortibus boum, written about 395 by the rhetor Endelechius, not indeed in hexameters, but in asclepiads. Bucolus, who has lost his herds from cattle-plague learns from Tityrus that his animals have been immune, and that the reason for this is the, sign of the cross marked on the foreheads of his oxen; he then listens to a sketchy exposition of Christianity from Tityrus, and, being assured by the latter that simple faith is the new religion's only requirement, eagerly agrees to adopt it; Aegon, who is present, follows suit. In this poem motifs have been taken from Virgil's first Eclogue and from Georgies 3; two of the three names are Virgiiian, and so is the pattern of the dialogue. Virgil's influence, as is inevitable, is most clearly seen in works of epic type. In those of dogmatic and theological content it is bound to be less prominent, though here too it is always liable to be present, mostly in single passages involving action or description as well as in occasional moralizing. In general, it is naturally the hexameter works, not the lyrical, which are most susceptible. A very1 susceptible type of passage is the biblical. It is reasonable - 18 - that Paradise should be described in phraseology culled from Virgil's account of Elysium: thus Dracontius (3.752 f.) prays, felicitously enough: 'inter odoratos flores et amoena uirecta/in nemus aeternum ueniam sedesque beatas*. Schwen dis­ cusses two relevant passages of Prudentius. In Apoth.650-63 the poet depicts Christ's stilling the storm in language comparable to Virgil's narration of the storm and its stilling by Neptune in Aeneid 1.52-143 and in phraseology other­ wise Virgiiian; in his treatment he shows freedom and skill, utilizing Virgiiian language and motifs according as they occur to him and serve his purpose; it is a good example of spontaneous reminiscence as opposed to slavish and direct imitation. With the aid of Virgiiian technique he can also lend interest and life to a biblical original: in Hamartigenia 409-23 his catalogue of the armed forces that range themselves with the devil is based on Joshua 11.1-5, but whereas the biblical text is content with a long string of names accompanied by the rslevant geographical details, Prudentius separates the names and characterizes each particular people with some detail of armour or fighting method in accordance with the technique of the catalogue in Aeneid 7.641-817. While Virgiiian influence is most conspicuous in hexameter works, it may also occur in lyric. A notable instance is found in Prudentius' hymn in honour of the birthday of Christ (Cath.11). Salvatore showed quite recently, though he is not the first to have done so, that this owes some of its inspiration - and it is happy - to the fourth Eclogue. Here, you will remember, Virgil speaks of the return of the Virgin, the birth of the divine child, and the new age of gold. These themes Prudentius transfers to his hymn. It is a good example of the poet's sympathy, unobtrusively shown, with his predecessor. Prudentius has more affinity with the spirit of Virgil than has any of the other poets One could cite other examples of felicitous passages of Virgiiian inspiration, but any sort of classif­ ication is elusive, and time is short. A feature of the work of the Christian poets is their practice of contamin­ ation, the amalgamation of two or more sources in a single passage. A passage, not discussed by Schwen, which provides a good example, is Prudentius, Cath.9.11-13: the words, which form part of a famous hymn, run '(deus) ipse fons et clausula/ omnium quae sunt, fuerunt, quaeque post futura sunt./ipse iussit, et creata, dixit ipse, et facta sunt*. Here we find, first, an echo of the nymph Cyrene's picture of Proteus m the fourth Georgic (392 f.), 'nouit namque omnia uates,/quae sint, quae fuerint, quae mox uentura trahantur’, and, secondly, an echo of Psalm 148.5 'ipse dixit, et facta sunt: ipse mandauit, et creata sunt'. A quaint example of this practice occurs in Dracontius, Satisf.37 f.: 'errauit per prata uagus mala gramina pastus,/et qui homo bos fuerat de boue factus homo est'. Who is this who ranges the meadows fed on rank grasses? It is Nebuchadnezzar, and he feeds on rank grasses for no better reason than that the serpent does so in Aeneid 2.471 'coluber mala gramina pastus*. Now the correspondence between the king's fortunes and those of Io evoked in the poet's mind a line from Ovid's Heroides, 14.86: 'cum bos ex homine est, ex boue facta dea'; this he adapts with some skill, but the general result is patchwork,. In Paul.Nol.c.27,158 f. 'uox turturis altae/ ia nostra tellure sonat' we see a cles.r representation of Cant. .2.12 'uox turturis audita est in terra nostra' with the addition of the so.iewhat unexpected epithet altae. Hartel in his list of non-biblical models here notes Eel.1.58 ‘nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo'. The similarity is not very obvious. Can it be that aeria is the source of altae? A further feature of the exploitation of Virgil is the tendency to echo in a figurative sense expressions and. sentences whose application in the original is literal. An obvious example is the figurative use of the word error and the like. Thus language used of the Trojans1 wanderings over the seas may be applied to those of sinful or heretical men; they a:?e referred to as erroribus or fluctibus - 19 - acti, aequore toto iactati, and so on. Here we may note Sedul.c.5,421, where the poet reflects the biblical (Matth.28.19) baptizantes (sc. omnes gentes) in the words 'omnesque in fonte lauari', which he has clearly borrowed from Eel.3.97 'omnis (capellas) in fonte lauabo'. An interesting example of this practice occurs in Paul.Nol. c. 21.70 f., where the poet alludes in symbolical language to the maiden, Eunomia, whom Christ has appointed to be his heavenly bride (cf. Matth.9.15) and has bathed with the unguent of his name: 'tincta comas animae et mentis caput uncta pudicum/spirat eo sacros sponsi caelestis odores'. Paulinus has imparted a mystic beauty to the description of Venus in Aeneid 1.403 f. 5ambrosiaeque comae diuinum uertice odorem/spirauere'. In their imitation of Virgiiian expressions, sentences, or passages, the poets show varying degrees of servility or freedom. A line or phrase may be preserved in its entirety without any modification, or it may be subjected to all sorts of dis­ memberment and alteration of language, metre, construction, and sense. When Dracontius thus addresses God (2.32 f.): 'sanctus ubique tuus complectitur omnia, princeps,/spiritus inmensam penetrans per saecula molem', we can sense an unmist- akaole echo of Aeneid 6.726 f. 'spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus/mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet', but the verbal resemblance is dim. On the other hand, in Paul.Nol. c, 26,83 f, 'humanis opibus sperare salutem/nulla salus' the poet has utilized the phraseology of Virgil's line (Aen.2.354) 'una salus uictis nullam sperare salutem' to clothe an entirely different thought. A neat enough exploitation of a Virgiiian rhetorical framework is found in a Sedulius passage (c,2.6-8) where the poet compares the guilt of Eve with the perfidy of the serpent: 'heu, noxia coniux.'/noxia tu coniux magis an draco perfidus ille?/perfidus ille draco, sed tu quoque noxia coniux'. You will remember the passage in the Eclogues (8.47-50) where the cruelty of Medea, who slew her children, is weighed against the wickedness of Amor, who taught her· 1saeuus Amor docuit natorum sanguine matrem/commaculare manus: crudelis tu quoque, mater./crudelis mater magis an puer improbus ille?/improbus ille puer: crudelis tu quoque, mater'. Sometimes, words of Virgil may be clearly echoed by an imitator and yet be battered out of construction and meaning into something quite new. A well-known line of Virgil, not discussed by Schwen, is the reproach of Anchises in Aeneid 6.806: 'et dubit­ amus adhuc uirtutem extendere factis?' There is but a faint glimmer of this in the words of Prudentius (Symm.1.587-90): 'et dubitamus adhuc Romam tibi, Christe, dicatam/in leges transisse tuas...terrenum(que) extendere regnum?* Here the con­ struction and meaning of dubitamus is entirely altered: it is now used, not with the infinitive to mean 'hesitate', but with the accusative and infinitive to mean 'doubt', and the character of the sentence is transformed; the belated appearance and different use of extendere further emphasize the remoteness from the original. All this indicates the futility of attempts to alter a text in order to effect conformity with a model. In their numerous imitations the poets naturally meet with varying success according to their innate abilities or the favour of fortune; their echoes may be felicitous, they may be supportable, they may be awkward, or positively vicious. It is sometimes the case that a poet may purloin a phrase or expression which in its original surroundings enjoyed a happy relationship with its neighbours, but which the skill of the purloining poet is insufficient to harmonize with its new setting (Lofstedt has an illuminating article on the subject in Eranos 47, 1949, 148 ff,). In reviewing his sinful past (3.567 ff.) Dracontius finds himself unable to enumerate his crimes even if 'ora tot exurgant, quot dentes ossibus albent', and to subsequent echoes in other poets. At ossibus Glaeser held up his hands in horror and immediately conjectured oribus, and I am sorry to see that Professor Courcelle in an article in the R.E.L. (33, 1955, 257) adopts this corruption without comment. It is seldom that we find in these poets an echo that is ungrammatical or meaning­ less, I have elsewhere (C.Q. 9, 1959, 71 f.) called attention to an apparent ϊ - 20 - instance in the accomplished Paulinus, viz.c.16.222 f. Felix, after a long absence, has reappeared, and his incredulous friends, who have abandoned hope of his life 'uerane te facies? aiunt, tune ille beatus/redderis?* In the question uerane te facies the accusative _te has no construction: its presence is due to Aeneid 3.310 'uerane te facies, uerus mihi nuntius adfers?', where te is the object of adfers. It may be that the poet had but a hazy memory of the original and vaguely supposed the ellipse of some such verb as rogo. Commodian has some­ thing even stranger to offer. In Apol.174 he refers to the devil insinuating himself into the ignorant 'per latices animae', words which look suspiciously like a barbarous reflection of Aeneid 10.601 * tum latebras animae pectus mucrone recludit1; in a corresponding passage (1.26) of the anonymous Carmen aduersus Marcionem, which has very close kinship with Commodian, the Virgiiian phrase is correctly echoed. The more sophisticated lexica rise to the occasion and duly record a word latex, formed from lateo, and found in Commodian. As I have indicated, a Virgiiian passage can sometimes throw light on a passage that has been influenced by it. An unusual example occurs in Prudentius (Cath.3.75), where reference is made to a favourite theme of the Fathers, the chastity of the bee: 1(apis) nexilis inscia conubii' The passage is discussed by G. Meyer (Philol.93, 1939, 401 f.), who calls attention to the striking usage of the epithet nexilis but finds aid in the cognate passage, Georg.4.498 f. 'neque concubitu indulgent nec corpora segnes/in Venerem soluunt aut fetus nixibus edunt'. He puts forward the interesting view that nexilis was suggested to Prudentius by the alternative (but unsuitable) lection nexibus (for nixibus), which he thinks the poet read in his Virgil manuscript (conubii corresponding to Virgil's concubitu); he may well be right. An inevitable question arises: to what extent were these poets conscious of their imitations’!5 In the wider sphere of epic technique those concerned were no doubt consciously following in the steps of the master. Again, Prudentius, as we have seen, has Virgil very close to his mind when he is proclaiming the Christ­ ian Rome; he is in all awareness building on the Virgiiian conception. Moreover, both he and Paulinus of Nola deliberately use the words of Virgil - Paulinus, indeed, mentions him by name - in their satirical depiction of the pagan gods. With regard to the longer passages based on Virgil, in many the poets must have been well aware of their imitation; in others the haphazard appearance of the borrowings suggests that echoes both of motifs and of language are the result of spontaneous and unconscious, or at least semi-conscious reminiscence. A vast proportion of their imitations, however, consists of brief echoes of phrases, expressions, or indeed whole sentences, and they were doubtless to a large extent utilized without conscious borrowing. Many of them had come to be part of the poetic vocabulary. Virtually all poets after Virgil, from the epic poets to Martial and Juvenal, contain echoes of his work, and these in turn they passed on to others and so ensured their further employment. The Christian poets were so familiar with the works not only of Virgil and the other classical poets but also of their imitators, that their minds -could not fail to be filled with all sorts of Virgiiian and other turns and their pens to use them, as occasion arose. It is interesting to read that the author of the cento De ecclesia spontaneously improvised the last six lines, which involve a dozen unrelated scraps of Virgil, in response to his audience's rapturous calls of 'Maro iunior'. As I have suggested, the constructionless half-line of Paulinus, 'uerane te facies', may well be due to the poet's use of a half-forgotten original. And the phrase ossibus albent was no doubt floating about in the foggy brain of Dracontius and its component members, owing to their frequent association in poetical works, regarded by him as Siamese twins, and consequently incapable of separate exist­ ence. Many of these echoes seem to us comic and amusing. That the poets and their readers saw nothing comic in them is due partly to a different attitude, - 21 - partly to the unconscious nature of their borrowings. There are, of course, innumerable passages, where we cannot be sure whether we have an association with Virgil or not. At Commod.Instr.1.5.5 'initium (= initio) caelum, terram deus et mare fecit' Martin refers to Aen.6.724 'principio caelum ac terram camposque liquentis/.. .spiritus intus alit', and there is indeed some resemblance. He does not, however, indicate the real source, Gen.1.1 ’in principio creauit deus caelum et terram'. The famous line of Virgil may have afforded some subsidiary support but little more. (Why did the poet alter principio? Because the acrostic required an initial _i,) I have tried to give some idea - and it is, I fear, very sketchy - of the way in which Christian poetry was influenced by Virgil in the fourth, fifth, and earlier sixth, centuries. Towards the latter part of this period, and indeed earlier, conditions for literary activity had become increasingly difficult as the result of the barbarian incursions, and the decay of poetry was inevitable. The last of these poets may be said to be Fortunatus. His numerous poems, both secular and Christian, are clearly under classical influence. Yet in some of the Christian poems, such as the famous Passion hymn, Vexilla regis prodeunt, this influence has receded and there are signs of a new outlook in poetry. Fortunatus is the precursor of the medieval spirit and the new types of religious poetry that were to appear. Was the influence of Virgil and the classical poets detrimental to Christian poetry? Did the subjection to this powerful element deprive the work of vitality and spontaneous expression? As I earlier remarked, in the literary circumstances the poetry could hardly fail to originate in the form it did, and in the hands of the better poets the classical influence was tamed and turned to fruitful account. In their exposition of Christian sentiment these poets could, and frequently did, express themselves in terms of their own, and echoes of the masters may be occasional only. The poets naturally vary considerably as well in the extent as in the manner of their borrowings, both according to their abilities and the type of composition involved. A Juvencus, indeed, is unlikely to stir the spirit, but many have been moved by the works of Prudentius; and Paulinus1 accounts of the doings at Nola have freshness and charm. Yet criticism of Christian poetry there will always be. Comparetti writes scathingly of the contrast between the matter and the form. In a much quoted sentence he goes so far as to declare that this not infrequently borders on the grotesque and ridiculous to anyone not blinded by the fervour of religious faith. The judgement is harsh. To the best Christian poetry it is certainly unjust. Moreover, it was not for critics of the twentieth century that this poetry was written but for readers in the early period of Christianity. It was the work of men belonging to an age when literary attitudes and taste were something entirely different from our own. This was, after all, a period of transition, and it is to the credit of the Christian writers that they gave Latin poetry a new force after a long space of langue» and stagnation. Nevertheless, it may be just to say that Christianity never found its truest poetical expression as long as its utterances were subject to the influences of old. Its poetry was couched in a language that was purely literary and artificial; its metrical forms a mystery to the many; and the savour of classical echoes the enjoyment of the few. It was inevitable that at some time the Christian spirit should find a more natural outlet in a different form of verse and of language; and it was no coincidence that its development took place in a time when Roman civilization was completely transformed. But this belongs to another age and another epoch. ~ 22 -

V„S. Lectures, No. 80 THE GEORGICS IN AFTER TIMES by L P. Wilkinson, M.A. (Resume of a paper read to the Society on 21st January 1967, which is intended, in revised form, to be the final chapter of a book on the Georgies.)

Within three years of its appearance the Georgies became one of the first contemporary poens to be read m school, and throughout the remainder of classical antiquity it slared in the extraordinary reverence paid to all Virgil's work. It continued to be read through the thousf nd years of the Dark and Middle Ages. If we bear in mind that the relative lengths of the Bucolics, Georgies and Aeneid are as2:5:20, the Georgies is cited as frequently as the other works by grammarians and metrists such as Aldhelm. It also played an integral part in the strange con­ ception of the 'Rota Virgilii', in which the Virgiiian corpus was regarded as embodying a hierarchy of triads grounded in the nature of things; not only of plain, middle and grand styles of writing, but of stages of social evolution (pastoral, agricultural, martial), of kinds of life (contemplative, sensual, active) of social ranks (shepherd, farmer, soldier), of locales (pasture, ploughland, castle or town), of animals (sheep, cow, horse), of trees (beech, fruit trees, laurel or oak), of implements (crook, plough, sword). But if we scrutinise the literature more closely, we find that the echoes from the Georgies are proportionally fewer, especially after the Carolingian period. Curtius has insisted that the influence of the Bucolics in later times was hardly less than that of the Aeneid; but the Georgies recedes into the back­ ground. In the later Middle Ages the Bucolics receaed too. Dante refers four times to the Pollio, not certainly to any other Eclogue; and he has only two or three references to the Georgies as against a hundred to the Aeneid. Chaucer seems to have known only the epic. Nor have we from these thousand years, so far as I know, any poem of georgic subject matter. The nearest approach is the Hortulus of Walafrid Strabo, a work of the early ninth century. This owes its conception, its verse-technique, and a number of words and phrases to the Georgies, and its monastic author cultivated his garden ipse manu. But Virgil notoriously renounced the theme of gardens; and in any case this is not an organic poem like the Georgies, but consists, after an introduction, of twenty-seven short poems on the uses of various plants, mainly vegetables. Ulterior significance comes in only at the end, where the lily and rose are treated as symbols of faith and martyrdom, leading up to a doxology to the Virgin. This is not to disparage it. It Is a charming wor.:, worthy of the de luxe Eton-edited edition produced last year by the Hunt Botanical Library of Pittsburgh. In spite of the fact that the monasteries owned often huge agricultural estates, the evidence suggests that, except in some early Benedictine and again in some early Cistercian houses, monks rarely worked on the land themselves. The poets whose Christian and Secular poems are described in the three large volumes of the lamented Dr. Raby are unlikely to have been close to the soil. There were odd things in the Georgies that interested Christians from early times. The doctrine of divine immanence seemed to be presaged by the deum namque ire per omnes passage as well as by the corresponding passage in Aeneid VI. But more remarkable is their appropriation of Virgil's idealised bees. These had the especial merit of propagating their species without sexual intercourse, and thus providing a paradigm for the Virgin Mary. There was a ceremony performed on Easter Eve in some places for a thousand years, the Blessing of the Candles. It included an oration in praise of candles and of the materials that composed them - 23 - in which the Georgies were* often drawn upon when it came to beeswax. We should also expect the Georgies to be allegorised in a Christian sense, like the Aeneid, in the Middle Ages. Fulgentius, who really started the industry in the fifth or sixth century, flinches at the prospect. 'The Bucolics and Georgies *, he says 'contain truths of such profundity that it is impossible fully to fathom them.* But he does reveal that for him Book I is concerned with Astrol­ ogy, II with Physiognomy and Medicine, III with Augury and IV with Music. The end of IV was 'apotelesmatic*. This episode was always popular, especially the included story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Boethius saw this as allegorical of the soul that looks backward from the highest good to Tartarus again. In a poem on Amor et Amicitia which has been attributed to Abelard ’saevus amor' is instanced by the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid, of Leander and Hero from Georgies III, and as climax of Orpheus and Eurydice from Georgies IV. But in so far as the Georgies was popular, it was for set pieces such as these, not for the main, agricultural part of the poem. We unfortunately know little of the Georgica Spiritualia of the early thirteenth century now attributed to John of Garland, for the 116 odd hexameters of moral excerpts we have need not be typical. This or other poems may have preceded the Agricultura Sacra of Naogeorgus, alias Thomas Kirchmayer, published in 1550, a work in five books of hexameters indebted, but not markedly, to Virgil. It instructs man in the care of the soul, his estate. There may also have been medieval pre­ decessors of the moralisation which was a feature of the translation published in 1519 by Michel Guillaume de Tours. According to him the four Books of the Georgies represent the four cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, courage and justice. The soul must be cultivated by the Catholic faith, manured by reading the scriptures and listening to homilies, watered by thoughts of the paradise to come, sown with virtue, and tended with the implements of the Ten Commandments, In Book IV the young bullock killed to regenerate the stock of bees is Christ, the room with four windows where the act is to be performed is the Cross with its four arms of charity, humility, obedience and patience. What I have not found so far is any medieval exposition of the Georgies as embodying the 'Gospel of Work’, an aspect more congenial to modem, and especially Protestant, minds. So much for the Middle Ages. What has surprised me, and may surprise others, is how little mark the Georgies made compared with the Bucolics, let alone the Aeneid. The midwife of the Renaissance was Petrarch. In striking contrast to Dante and Chaucer, he quotes quite freely from the Georgies, though not in proport­ ion to the rest of Virgil and with a tendency to pick out tags and mottoes. Labor omnia vincit, he said as he struggled up the Mont Ventoux on the prototype of all m odem mountain-climbs, and again in his speech when he was crowned on the Capitol. Yet although a keen and lifelong gardener, he never sought to emulate the Georgies as he did the Bucolics when founding the humanistic pastoral allegory and the Aeneid in his Latin epic Africa. Most of the Humanists were townsmen; and when, about 1425, Maffeo Vegio was constrained by plague to reside in the country, he complained m an amusing poem of discomforts not mentioned by Virgil in his laus ruris. It was only late in the fifteenth century, when the communes were threat- ened by foreign invaders, that they began to lift up their eyes to the peace of the countryside and to the hardy peasant stock from which they hoped for salvation. The first georgic poem of the Renaissance was Politian’s Rusticus of 1483, an introduction in 570 hexameters to be recited before his lectures on Hesiod and the Georgies. Its success initiated the vogue for didactic poetry in Italian, which continued throughout the sixteenth century. The most illustrious example, though modelled on Virgil, was not about agriculture, but about Syphilis, the scourge brought back from Hayti by Columbus' men and spread over Europe by the disbanded mercenaries of Charles VIII and to the far east by Vasco da Gama. The author, - 24 - Fracastoro, was a Veronese doctor. But some of these poems were agricultural, Giovanni Rucellai's charming Le Api on bees (1539) being followed by Luigi Alamanni's full-scale La ColtTvazione, a work of genuinely didactic intention. Alamanni was an exile in France, and his poem was dedicated to Francois I in 1546. Our scene now shifts, in fact, to France. There was some tendency there to bypass the Georgies, as being an agricultural treatise; but Montaigne, living on his country estate in Perigord, was an enthusiast in whose numerous quotations from Virgil there is for once a slight preponderance on this side of his work. Ronsard, who knew Virgil by heart, has nearly 200 echoes of the Georgies besides specific imitations; and here one finds a tendency that became almost universal, to favour a few sections only, and those not from the didactic stretches that form the main part of the work. 60% of Ronsarcfs echoes come from seven passages totalling only 25% of the original. The English Renaissance followed in the wake of France, and even Scotland, and some two centuries behind Italy. Here again we have the same sense of the Georgies receding. Thus although in the pattern of sixteenth century grammar- school syllabuses, when it was an alternative to the Bucolics, Professor Clarke has observed that if either was omitted it was probably the Georgies. No one translated the work into English before Abraham Fleming's plain crib of 1589. In the sixteenth century it was in the doldrums not only in England but all over Europe, the only considerable work it inspired being Rene Rapin's Horti of 1665, a poem on which Mrs. Dubois enlightened the Virgil Society a few years ago. The eighteenth century revival and boom seems to have begun in England, perhaps with the publication in 1697 of Dryden's translation. Prefixed to this was a short essay complaining of past neglect and introducing the poem with understanding and enthusiasm. The author, it was later revealed, was the young Joseph Addison. He insisted on the distinction, often confused in the past, between pastoral and georgic. He was also feeling for the idea that the poem was, in its net effect, not didactic but descriptive, and also for a conception of the organic or symphonic unity of the poem. The vogue that followed was astonishing. This was the great age of country-house life and agricultural interest, of the educated class catered for by the Gentleman's Magazine, founded ii 1731. Its poets were in no doubt that their medium should be what they called 'verse Miltonick'. But in fact they developed only one or other aspect of the Virgiiian original, and no one produced anything comparable with it. Some essayed genuine didactic, of whom the first was also the best - John Phillips with his Cyder of 1706. This found a public ready for it, both at home and in translation abroad. 'It need not shun the presence of the original', was Johnson's too indulgent verdict. In Italy Alamanni's poem was rediscovered, twenty editions appearing between 1716 and 1781, and in France de Rosset produced a poem on agriculture in nine books. Others then, more promisingly, developed t/ie descriptive aspect of the Georgies. John Dyer, whose Fleece was to be one of tue chief didactic poems, was also a pioneer of descriptive poetry with his Grongar Hill. Nature was the goddess of the age. Sometimes she simply represented the countryside, and the theme 0 fortunatos blended with Horace's Beatus ille was elaborated ad nauseam, as it had been in sixteenth century France. But here there came an interesting shift. The same passage that supplied the theme Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes, congenial to the innocent Epicureans of the age that enjoyed peace after the turmoil of civil war happened also to supply by contrast that of F"iix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas; and Nature now became envisaged as rerum natura, the universe made known b Newton. The new science appealed to the rising middle class of practical men; and it was here blended with natural religion and Stoic moralising. - 25 - Towering above these poets, by common consent, was James Thomson, whose Seasons began to appear in 1726 and became progressively more impregnated with the Georgies. Completed in 1744, it took Europe by storm,* and exercised a profound influence not only on literature but on landscape-painting such as that of Gainsborough. The greatest influence of the Georgies in this century was probably exercised indirectly through Thomson. Towards the end of it there appeared garden- georgics, such as William Mason's of 1772-82 which helped to spread over Europe Hie craze for the English garden as against the old formal gardens associated, with Le Notre and Rapin; and the case for and against 'Capability' Brown and his landscape- gardening was argued out in verse. Professor Dudley has recently given the Virgil Society a very just impression of these poets, and I will not dwell on them. They pullulated in France and Italy as well as England; but they produced nothing to rival the overall effect of the Georgies.

V.S. Lectures, No. 81 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE GEORGICS Presidential Address delivered to the Virgil Society 18th February 1967 by Sir James Mountford, M.A., D.Litt.

There is no reason to disbelieve the tradition handed down in the Life of Virgil written by Donatus, that the poet spent seven years on the composition of the Georgies; and the fact that there are less than 2200 lines in all the four books together, indicates what great pains he bestowed on the perfection of his work. It must have been about the year 37 B.C. when he was 32 or 33 years old, that he undertook the task in earnest; for Octavian, after his return from the campaign of Actium and the subsequent settlement of the Eastern Empire, invited Virgil in the middle of 29 B.C. to come to his Campanian villa at Atella and read the whole work to him. Virgil however, dedicates his four books not to Octavian, but to his personal patron Maecenas. It is Maecenas who is addressed in the brief summary of the work with which Book I begins: Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites conveniat... (1.1-3) It is Maecenas whose favour is asked for early in the second book: tuque ades inceptumque una decurre laborem, o decus, o famae pars maxima nostrae, Maecenas... (Ι'..9-“±1) And in the third book Virgil speaks in more specific terms when he unmistakably states that this work was commissioned, as it were, by Maecenas: I.iterea Dryadum silvas saltusque sequamur intactos, tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa; te sine nil altam mens incohat... (III.40-42) On the basis of this explicit reference to the haud mollia iussa of Maecenas it has been not unreasonably assumed that the Georgicr are in som > general way Virgil's contribution to t.n agrarian policy which, as early as the year 37 B.C., Octavian and Maecenas are supposed to have had clear .y in mind. At a first glance it may seem strange that a Roman poet who had previously written under the influence and in partial imitation of the pastoral style of - 26 - Theocritus and who later was to be the author of Rome's greatest epic, should have undertaken to write four books in verse on farming. How could one who had the wit and the elegance to write the Eclogues and the vision to compose the Aeneid, bring himself, even at the request of a patron as powerful as Maecenas, to employ his talents and genius on so unpromising a theme? There is no doubt that there were agrarian problems. After the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C., many veteran soldiers had been settled on the land; having spent long years in the army, they knew little of agriculture; and it must have been far from easy to get them adapted to their new mode of life. What use is it to put a man on a piece of land and expect him to make a living unless you provide him with some kind of guidance - a necessity which politicians have generally recognised and which must have been clearly appreciated by Octavian and his advisers. If the newly created farmer were unable to make his farm support him, he would dispose of it or abandon it, drift to the towns and become a menace to law and order. Yet when we look at the Georgies, we may well doubt whether Virgil provided a sufficiently practical handbook of instruction for men like those to whom he himself had forfeited, or almost forfeited, his own paternal farm. It is true that the Georgies contain a very great dea.1 of practical information; but relat­ ively little of it is imparted in the direct and simple form in which it might be found in Cato's de agricultura or in Varro's almost contemporary de re rustica;. and the sum total of the purely and strictly didactic material is considerably less than one half of the whole work. Indeed, Virgil himselfdisclaims any intention of encompassing the whole of his subject: non ego cuncta meis amplecti versibus opto (11.42) In so far as his work was intended to be related to an agrarian policy of Octavian and Maecenas, Virgil evidently did not propose to compete with the technical manuals on their own ground. His real contribution was one of attitude. He has no illusions about farming or farmers. He is well aware that the earth is an unwilling and niggard­ ly taskmistress (invita terra, 1.224), that the land needs subduing and taming (exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis, I.99), and that there is never a time for rest (nec requies quin aut...aut..., II.516). In his more pessimistic moods he envisages progressive degeneracy as a law of nature (sic omnia fatis in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri, 1.199). The farmer himself is covetous (avarus, 1.47) and yet unwilling to learn (possum multa tibi veterum praecepta referre/ni refugis tenuesque piget cognoscere curas, I.176-7). It was important that the new farmers, and indeed those who had been longer established, should be efficient; but it was in the circumstances of the times still more important that despite all its difficulties they should not utterly resent their lot. The whole point of the Georgies is misunderstood if we do not appreciate that in this work Virgil sets agriculture in a wider and deeper context and that his main con­ cern is with feeling rather than facts. We cannot know for certain what precisely were the wishes and commands, the haud mollia iussa, of Maecenas; but that shrewd statesman surely expected something more than a versified Varro; and it is reason­ able to suspect that he and Virgil were at one in realising the good which might be achieved by appealing to the emotions even more than to the practical needs of the Romans of their day. Virgil, we may feel sure, had much more than a farming population in mind; after all, the veterans turned fanners might not have the opportunity, the inclination, or the literacy to read the new poem. From Virgil's 4th Eclogue and from some of the Epodes of Horace we are left in no doubt that the corruption and violence of the times had implanted an oppressive feeling of guilt in the hearts 27 - of some of the finer spirits of Rome (cf, sceleris vestigia nostri, Eel.4.13; impia devoti sanguinis aetas, Hor.,Epod.16.9). There was a yearning for a return of a golden age or at least for some kind of escape from the civil conflicts of the last generation. Virgil clearly longs for a restoration of the kind of life which had been lived when Rome was achieving her greatness; and if that could not in all details be a practical plan, at least the ideals of the old Romans should be renewed and something of their character and habits regained. It was from the plough that Rome in times of stress had summoned some of her greatest men to save her. It was not only the veterans, then, who might derive a much-needed inspiration from the Georgies; might not the poem convey a lesson to all Romans, and not least to those whose ideals were dulled by the luxury and the intrigues of city life? If Virgil could show that labour in the fields had a dignity of its own, that it was not merely a series of menial and servile tasks but a method of life which brought its own special happiness, he would be performing a valuable service to the state and would in some measure be helping to recall that golden age of which he dreamed. No prose manual, no ordinary catalogue of hints for farmers could achieve these larger aims; it was only through poetry that the minds and hearts of men could be touched so that they were brought back to a realisation of the essential goodness of a life pursued in close communion with nature. We may take it then that a wide and far-seeing patriotism was one of the chief motives which impelled Virgil to the writing of the Georgies. There were two other motives, however, to which attention should be drawn. The first is one of personal loyalty, the other is one of personal pride. It is evident from Virgil’s own words that he had an intense admiration for Octavian and a profound conviction that the well-being of Rome was very intimately bound up with the stability of Octavian's rule. Unless we are prepared to abandon the usual interpretation of the 1st and 9th Eclogues and the tradition of the early commentators, Virgil had personal reasons for gratitude to Octavian who had saved him from the worst effects of the confiscations of 41 B.C. The acquaintance of the two men may well have dated even from boyhood when Virgil may have met the young nephew of Caesar while the conqueror of Gaul was wintering in N. Italy. At any rate the importance of Octavian in the eyes of Virgil is unmistakable in the Georgies. At the beginning of Book I, Virgil does not call for inspiration from the Muses; he asks rather the favour of the gods of the countryside, Liber, Ceres, the Fauni, the Dryads, Pan, Minerva and Silvanus; and from line 24 to 42 he addresses Octavian Caesar as if he too were a god. The meaning of this involved and highly elaborated passage is clear; Octavian is not only assured of immortality in whatever sphere of influence he may choose; he is beneficent and it is to him that men may look for the fulfilment of their desires. Thus, at the very outset of the work and in the clos­ est relation to the deities who have favoured mankind in the past, attention is drawn to the hopes of the future, which for Virgil are centred in the rule of Octavian. At the end of this same first book there is an even more striking passage in which Virgil expressed his most profound thoughts on the state of Rome and the part which Octavian is to play (489 ff.). 1 It came to pass,' he writes, 'that a second time Philippi saw Roman battle lines engage in civil strife and the heavenly powers thought it not unmeet that twice with Roman blood Emathia and the broad plains of Haemus should be fattened. Yes, and the time will come when in those lands the husbandman, tilling the earth with his curved plough, will find Roman javelins eaten up with mouldering rust, or with heavy hoe will strike against empty helmets; and as he digs up the earth, their graves, he will marvel at the mighty bones. 0, ye gods of our country, ye gods sprung from our soil, and Romulus, and Vesta our mother, who preservest Tuscan Tiber and the Palatine hill of Rome, prevent not this youth at least from coming to the succour of a ruined generation (hunc saltem - 28 - everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo/ne prohibete, 500-1).* 'Long ago', he continues, "have we fully expiated by our blood the perjuries of Laomedon; for a long time now has the palace of heaven been envying us thee, o Caesar, and complaining that triumphs here below can interest thee, where good is put for evil and evil for good (quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas, 505).' There could be no more striking expression of Virgil's conviction that the only hope lies in Octavian. The tone of this passage is a marked contrast to that of the 4th Eclogue. There Virgil was looking forward to a golden age that was imminent. Now, several years later, he is more impressed than ever with a sense of national guilt; and instead of a confident expectation, all he can muster is a piteous prayer, not to the imported gods of Greek mythology, but to the native deities of Rome for the safety of hie iuvenis. This passage was almost certainly written long before Octavian's final victory at Actium in 31 B.C., during those anxious years when the follies of Antony were making it more and more certain that civil strife would be renewed. At the beginning of the 3rd Georgic, however, Virgil is in a happier frame of mind. There, in highly embellished and allegorical language he describes how, when his present task is finished, he will write of the deeds of Octavian, of his victory over Egypt, his settlement of Asia and his projected subjugation of the Parthians. Actium is now an event of the past and Virgil'ss words are no longer those of despair. But it is important, I think, to notice that here at the beg­ inning of the second half of the Georgies,ahe still draws the attention of his reader to the central importance of Octavian. Nor does fie fail m the calm and quiet ending of the 4th Georgic to direct his reader's mind once more to this new and greater Caesar who gives law and order to mankind and marks out his path to immortality: per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo (562). Enlightened patriotism and personal loyalty, however, are only part of the complex motivation which gave birth to the Georgies. First and foremost Virgil was a poet; and when at the end of his Georgies he speaks of his writing as the studia ignobilis oti (4.564), we must not be misled by his modesty into thinking that he was in any way ashamed of his task. For a poet, the broad theme of the Georgies had a special attraction; and half way through the second book Virgil himself gives us the clue to his poetic ambition when he claims kinship with Hesiod: 'For thee, 0 Italy, I venture to discourse of themes of ancient glory and works of ancient art and dare to unlock those sacred springs and sing through Roman towns an Ascrean lay': tibi res antiquae laudis et artis ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes, Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen. (11.174) Apart from Hesiod, Virgil was too deeply steeped in the literature of Alexandria to forget the didactic poems of Aratus on the signs of the weather or of Nicander on herbs and snakes. The tradition of didactic poetry was old and well-established and to it other Latin writers had contributed. Cicero, for example, in his youih had turned Aratus into Latin, and Virgil's own friend Aemilius Macer of Verona had written on themes resembling those of Nicander; and though Virgil outlived his own Epicureanism and the influence of Siro, his teacher in philosophy, his work shows how close a student he had been of the great poem of Lucretius. Into this domain of poetry the maturing Virgil entered with his Georgies and just as he had challenged comparison with Theocritus in his Eclogues, so now he matches his powers with those of Hesiod. In writing the Georgies, Virgil set himself a most difficult problem; for his purpose, as I have suggested, was not single but three-fold. As the writer of a didactic poem he proposed in the first place to deal with much of the routine of the life and work of the farmer; in the second place it was his intention so to - 29 - widen the scope of his poem that it should have a message of importance for all Romans and should point the way to a happier world under the rule of a wise guide such as Octavian; and thirdly he owed it to his deepest instincts to write some­ thing worthy of the Muse whom he served. These three purposes he has harmonised with one another and has so organised and balanced the whole poem that all three strands have been interwoven with such seemingly effortless skill that the result­ ing fabric is both beautiful and strong. What I have so far said has been by way of necessary preliminary to the main theme of my lecture, but yet closely related to it. I have called this paper 'The Architecture of the Georgies1, and I hope the title is not wholly misleading. We cannot know what passed through the poet's mind as he composed his work; there are no earlier drafts to show what alternatives he pondered and rejected; into the secrets of his study we cannot pry. But the finished poem is its own evidence of the conscious artistry with which it was wrought. What I now propose to do is to try and trace the way in which Virgil has planned and arranged his material in relation to his dominating purposes. A poem, especially if it be one of any considerable length and always if it can lay claim to greatness, has some points in common with good architecture. It has within itself a coherent design; its various members and parts are related to one another according to some principles of harmony and proportion which the reader will consciously or subconsciously apprehend. Furthermore, like a good building, it is in part conditioned by the function which it sets out to serve and its outward form in some way represents or symbolises its purpose. Now whether we consider the design of the Georgies as a whole or turn our attention to the many details and graces, it is evident that the mind and hand of a supreme master has been at work. It will be most convenient to treat first the broad planning of the work, then the impressive introductions and epilogues to the various books, and finally some episodes of particular interest. The didactic material was of necessity the foundation on which Virgil decided to build. There is no important aspect of the life of the farmer upon which he has not touched and, whatever else he had also in mind, the Georgies certainly contain much that would be of use as a practical guide for the Roman farmer. Naturally there are many points in which modern scientific farming is in advance of Virgil; but when we bear in mind the resources and habits of the ancient farmer, it is clear that Virgil has not shirked the labour and tedium of arranging and presenting his informative material. In each of the four books he has given an exposition of one of the major branches of Italian farming activity. In Book I, you will recall, he deals with the ordinary crops for which ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing were necessary. He tells the farmer the proper time for ploughing, the kind of soil to select for particular crops, the most suitable rotation of crops and the proper care and draining of the land; he discusses the making of agricultural implements; and, since weather plays so vital a part in the farmer's life, he includes the phenomena which were thought to foretell approaching storms or the return of fine weather and clear skies. Book II is concerned with trees and the soils best fitted for them. Special attention is given to the cultivation and propagation of the vine and the olive, two trees which in Mediterranean lands from pre-historic times to the present day have had an importance which we who live in more northern latitudes can hardly appreciate. The amount of space which Virgil devotes to them, far from being capricious reflects the life of his times. In Book III he is concerned with animals: with cattle, horses, sheep, dogs and goats. His precepts for the care and breeding of them and his detailed observation of their habits show the intimate knowledge of a man who loved the countryside. In Book IV the subject is bees. The keeping of bees, which we think of mainly as a hobby for courageous amateurs, provided the main sweetening agent before the sugar cane and beetroot had been discovered and treated. - 30 - In these four books, then, Virgil covers in an orderly and sufficiently comprehensive way the usual activities of the farm. It is worth noting, I think, in view of some points I shall be making later, that these four books have been kept to something like the same length: the first contains 514 lines, the second 542 lines and the third and fourth 566 lines each. This general plan would seem to have affected to some extent the kind of detailed treatment Virgil has given to the subjects of each book. In the third book, for example, there were many separate items of instruction which needed to be stated about horses and cattle; and Virgil’s writing is in consequence highly concentrated; but in the fourth book much less positive information needed to be given about the keep­ ing of bees; and there Virgil is freer to describe their habits with that subtle and playful humour which makes the fourth book one of the most delightful parts of the Georgies for modern readers. If the Georgies had consisted solely of didactic material, however skilfully arranged, the effect would have been monotonous. There would have been simply four flat plane surfaces with no relief. Virgil, however, in the planning of his work has given variety in two important ways: first by the magnificent introd­ uctions and epilogues to the several books; and secondly by the episodes within the books. These devices, however, serve not only to give relief from the purely informative subject matter; they also contribute to the other purposes which Virgil had at heart. Let me first recall to mind the introductions and epilogues. At the beginning of Book I there are 42 lines devoted to a glorification of Octavian in which his assured divinity is emphasised. At the end of that book there is a passage of 50 lines (464-514) which, commencing with the murder of Julius Caesar, ends with a prayer for Octavian’s safety and his continued rule over the destinies of Rome. At the beginning of Book II there is no striking introduction; after a short invocation to Bacchus, Virgil plunges immediately into the theme of vine and olive. But at the end there are 83 lines (458-540) in which the farmer's life and all the peace and good order it represents, are the subject of a long panegyric. This is the well-known passage beginning: O fortun­ atos nimium, sua si bona norint/agricolas. A moment's reflection will show that the impressive introduction to Book I and the two great epilogues are more than purple patches. The glorification of Octavian with which the poem opens is related to the end of the first book with its despairing prayer for better times and the safety of Octavian; and that in its turn is related to the end of Book II with its declaration of faith that better times depend upon a return to the mode of life lived by the Romans when the rural population was the backbone of the state: hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, hanc Remus et frater, sic fordis Etruria crevit scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma (532-4) Considered in relation to each other, these three magnificent passages in the first two books are not only the vehicle of Virgil's own thoughts upon the problems of his times, but they are also, as it were, solid and well-wrought pillars which give shape and design to the whole poetic edifice. The third book we find opens with another great passage (1-48) in honour of Octavian. Here the significant thing architecturally is that the theme of this introduction is much more directly reminiscent of the opening of Book I than of the ending of Book II. It unmistakably binds Book III to Book I with its develop­ ment of an earlier train of thought. The epilogue, however, to the third book is of a different kind, consisting of a vivid description amounting to nearly 90 lines (478-565) in which Virgil tells of a plague which afflicted all the livestock of the countryside. The gods of the country and in particular Pales, whom Virgil briefly invoked at the opening of the book, have forsaken those who look to them for aid and the book ends with a picture - 31 - of unrelieved tragedy and desolation. In direct contrast to this, at the end of the fourth book Virgil describes a method for recovering the stock of bees when through some mischance they have failed. This long passage (281-558) contains the story of Aristaeus and the marvellously narrated myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Yet the essential point is the benefit bestowed on man through divine help and guidance, a most apposite counterpart to the ending of the third book with its gloomy recital of a plague. It is evident then that in addition to the four large expanses of didactic material, Virgil has given to his structure a kind of outer framework: the imp­ ressive introductions to Books I and III and the epilogues to each of the four books. The beginning of III recalls the beginning of I; the end of II matches the end of I; and the end of IV is related as a significant contrast to the end of III. In this way the fabric of the Georgies is bound into a single whole and the didact­ ic content of the poem is given its Virgiiian perspective by being set amid these stupendous passages in which the poet expresses his wider vision of the needs of his country and the tribulations and hopes of mankind. May we now turn our attention for a while to the episodes within the poem for which it is justly famous and by which it is often best known. However interested he himself or some of his readers might be in the details of farming practice, Virgil has from time to time relieved the tedium of the precepts he had to offer, by breaking up the larger expanses of exposition by digressions from his major themes. In the first book there are three striking and important episodes: the first (118-159) emphasises the necessity of labour as a law of the universe; the second is a description of a storm on land (316-334); and the third is a picture of a storm at sea (356-373). In Book II we have one of the most famous of them all, the so-called praises of Italy (136-176); in that book, too, we have the description of a fire in the vineyard (303-311), a description of spring (323-342) and an account of the origin of tragedy (380-396). In the third book there are four noteworthy episodes: the chariot race and its history (103-122), the fight of the bulls (219-241), farming in Africa and Scythia (339-383), and the catalogue of snakes in Italy (416-439). In the first half of Book IV, where the didactic element is of a lighter kind, there are nevertheless several delightful digressions of which the most obvious are the description of the battle between the king bees (67-87), the poet's apology for not treating of gardens (116-148), and his disquis­ ition on the divine sagacity of the bees (219-227). These episodes very considerably in length and are not arranged within the books in any regular pattern but presumably were so disposed as to relieve monotony where it seemed desirable or, in some instances, to emphasise a lesson Virgil wished to convey. It is important, however, to note how they all arise naturally from the immediate subject matter of the context in which they are set. Some of them, such as the storm scene in Book I and the vineyard fire in Book II, are in essence picturesque expansions of Virgil's own precepts to the farmer to be on his guard against the many dangers which beset him. Others, such as the fight of the bulls in Book III and the fight of the king bees in Book IV, though purely descriptive, have an air almost of inevitability in a poem of the countryside. Three of the episodes, however, seem to have a wider significance. Take first the resounding passage beginning at line 118 of Book I with its account of the degeneration which followed the golden age. It is in effect a stern warning to the farmer that he must not expect an easy life; for hard work is an inexorable law of nature. Take again the praises of Italy in Book II which is so clearly intended to arouse or revive in the minds of all Romans, whether they are farmers or not, a deep love of their native land and an appreciation of its beauty and munificence. Similarly the description of farm and pastoral life in Africa and Scythia in Book III is much more than a display of the poet's knowledge; it presents to the Roman a picture of - 32 - how hard life can be amongst less fortunate peoples and suggests to him that he has blessings he would do well to count. It is surely not wholly by chance that these three are the longest of all the so-called episodic passages; not by chance that they are all almost the same length of 42, 41 and 44 lines respectively; nor by chance that there is one in each of the first three books. No ancient poet had a finer sense of form and structure than Virgil and these three chief episodes, like the introductions and the epilogues, are an essential element in the architecture of the poem. I should like here to pause and examine the skill with which Virgil has introduced these episodes and built them into the fabric of his work, by reading you the first episode of Book I in its context. After giving advice about plough­ ing, harrowing, irrigation and draining, Virgil continues: and yet, though industrious men and labouring oxen experience all these toils in tilling the ground, this is not all: for there is the greedy goose and Strymonian cranes; and succory with its bitter roots chokes the crops, and the shade of trees does them harm. The great sire himself willed that the path of tillage should not be a smooth one (pater ipse colendi/haud facilem esse viam voluit, 121-2), and he first disturbed the fields by the husbandman's art and whetted human wit by many a care, nor suffered heavy sloth to rust his realm. Before the rule of Jove no tillers used to subdue the fields (ante Ipvem nulli subigebant arva coloni, 125); it was impious then even to mark the field or distinguish it by a boundary line. Men's gains were for the common store; of her own free will, more readily than now, the earth bore all things when none sollicited her gifts. Jove it was who added deadly slime to black serpents, he it was bade the wolves to prowl, the sea to swell; he it was who shook honey from off the leaves, and hid fire out of sight and checked the streams of wine that once ran in every brook, so that experience, by taking thought, might evolve the various arts little by little, seeking for the blade of c o m in furrows, striking forth the fire hidden in veins of flint. Then first the rivers felt the hollowed alder skiff; then sailors numbered the stars and called them by their names, the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the bright bear of Lycaon. Then was the taking of wild animals in toils and the snaring of birds discovered, and how to encircle great forest glades with hounds. Then was hard iron and the blade of the grating saw first used; for the men of the golden age cleft the splitting wood with wedges. So various arts succeeded. Labour overcame all difficulties, labour that cannot tire and the pressure of need amid the pinches of life. Ceres was the first to teach mortals how to turn the land with iron ploughshare. But presently to corn were added its own troubles, and it was ordained that noxious mildew should eat the stems and that the lazy thistle should bristle in the fields; the crops die and in their stead arises a prickly growth and amidst the neat c o m fields the unfruitful weeds and barren wild oats lord it in the land. Now unless you too give the weeds no rest with unwearying harrows and make a noise to scare the birds and with your billhook restrain the boughs of'the dark overharg.ng country, and with vows invoke the rain, alas, you will idly gaze on your neighbour's great heap of corn and find comfort for your own hunger by shaking the oak in the wild woods." You will not have failed to observe how the mention of the many labours of the farmer leads to the declaration that Jupiter himself had so ordained it; how the mention of the great sire, leads to the reference to the golden age, then to the inventiveness of mankind when nature no longer provided for them. The tribute to the aid afforded by Cere£ to struggling mortals leads back once more to the tasks which must be performed by the farmer if he is to retain his mastery of the land. The transitions are achieved with consummate skill and smoothness. Here we have no purple patch stuck on in the way Horace deprecates in his Ars Poetica, - 33 - no trivial adornment, but something which is not only appropriate to its setting but reinforces the deeper message Virgil wished to impart. If we had time to examine the other episodes of the poem we should find in all, I think, the same evidence of cunning construction, the same appropriateness and the same careful preparation for their introduction and the same skilful trans­ ition back to practical affairs. The praises of Italy in Book II, for example, has often been reprinted with telling effect apart from its context; but it is worth observing that before comparing Italy with other lands, Virgil has prepared the reader by elaborating the topic that some soils are better than others for the various trees. His illustrative summary of the products of foreign lands which immediately follows, the ebony of India, the citron of Persia and so forth, might awake an envy perhaps in the mind of his Roman reader; but then with telling effect we are launched on the magnificence of: Sed neque Medorum silvae ditissima terra nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus laudibus Italiae certent, non Bactra neque Indi totaque turiferis Panchaia pinguis harenis. (136-9) And when some 40 lines later the panegyric draws to its close, the reference to Hesiod (176) prepares us once again for the less elevated levels of precept and admonition. Before leaving the episodes, however, I should like to say a few words about two of the shorter ones which at first sight might seem to be no more than indulg­ ences of the poet's fancy. The first of these is in the second book. From line 346 to 370 Virgil gives his reader instructions for planting young vines, preparing supports, and restraining the luxuriance of the leaves. After these 25 lines he tells the farmer to fence his vineyard against cattle, sheep, and goats. The mention of the goat, however, seems to have tempted him to a needless digression about the relation between the goat and Attic tragedy and Roman country festivals. He then returns to all the other tasks of pruning and the hoeing of the vineyard. I was long puzzled by this digression on tragedy, rustic festivals and Bacchus, until I noticed that without it Virgil would have dismissed the need for the proper fencing of the vineyard in some nine lines. Yet this fencing was as important an operation as the planting of the young vines or the tending of them when they are growing strong. To the planting and pruning Virgil has given 25 lines; the dig­ ression on tragedy and rural festivals expands the section on fencing to 26 lines. But, you may say, is not this a sacrilegious suggestion that Virgil padded out his work and that he was more concerned with arithmetic than with poetic inspiration? That would be to misunderstand my point. The more I read Virgil, the more impressed I become with his sense of balance and his conscious endeavours to assign just so much space to a topic as its inherent importance demands. And you will, in any case, notice that in this very instance, when the function of this episode is to give due bulk and weight to a topic, the subject matter of the episode itself is afdmirably adapted to the immediate context. A similar explanation, I suggest, will account for the description of snakes in Book III (416-439). The danger of snakes to cattle and sheep was, it appears, a serious one. Virgil has just devoted exactly 10 lines to the types of feeding best adapted to the production of a fine crop of wool, exactly 10 lines to the feeding for a good yield of milk, and exactly 10 lines to the gods that guard the sheep. Should he then pass over the risks of loss from poisonous snakes in a few words? That, I believe, is why Virgil here gives us so vivid a description in 20 lines or so of the snakes of Italy. It seems incredible to me that in this kind of context Virgil should simply have allowed his delight in description to run away with him. He is too critical and too self-disciplined a poet for that. Whatever we find in Virgil, we may be sure is there for a definite and conscious purpose; in him inspiration and deliberate and calculated artistry are rarely if ever - 34 - sundered. This sense of balance pervades the whole of the Georgies. Take the passage on the farmer's implements in Book I (160-175). After 2 lines of introduction Virgil briefly mentions in 7 lines the ploughshare, the wagons, dredges, drags, rakes, wicker baskets, hurdles and winnowing fans. The remaining 7 lines he gives to the plough itself, which is the most important implement of them all; but though he could with some advantage to his reader have explained its making in even greater detail, he has refrained from upsetting the balance even of a small section of his poem by expanding a topic beyond what he considered approp­ riate to its importance. On a larger scale, the first part of the third book provides an interesting example. After his panegyric of Octavian, Virgil settles down to the details of stock farming (49 ff.). But notice how he controls his material by alternating passages of approximately 20 lines with others of approximately 30 lines. To the choice of cattle for breeding he gives 23 lines; to the choice of horses 31 lines; then as an interlude 20 lines describe chariot races; we return to the care and tending of horses with 34 lines; the care of calves with 22 lines, and the care of colts with 30. This is the kind of balance which is conscious and deliberate with­ out being crudely mechanical. It arises, I believe, from Virgil's innate sense of- form; and from the point of view of the reader it is invaluable m assisting him to sense the progress and sequence of the poem. Virgil does not demand that his reader should grasp and encompass too great a bulk of didactic material without a pause; and while he varies the length of his successive sections, he creates the impression of harmony and proportion between them. In this paper I have tried only to show how the sense of balance and form has operated in the general plan and in some of the details of Virgil's poem. The design is nobly conceived and the separate members are moulded by a fine and con­ sistent sense of proportion. A poem, it is true, depends for its greatness on something more than structural features; and just as a noble design m a building is not compatible with trivial or poor materials, so a great poem like the Georgies must needs be fashioned from the choicest language and the subtlest rhythms. But the proper examination of the individual stones which have been used in Virgil's structure is a theme which would demand much more than a single lecture. For to­ day, I shall be satisfied if I have left you with the conviction that if we read Virgil m a spirit of humble enquiry and with a sympathetic receptivity, he will always have much to teach us about the finer and more subtle points of literary technique in which he proved himself, in the Georgies no less than in the Aeneid, to be one of the world's greatest masters.

V.S. Lectures, No. 82 ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF VIRGIL. A lecture delivered to the Virgil Society * 18th March 1967 by F. Robertson

"The Eclogues look at us with enigmatic eyes' says Franz Skutsch: and it is principally- ii the Eclogues that we find ourselves taking refuge in some kind of allegorising in order to give cogent meaning to otherwise mellifluous but baffling poems. But allegory as a critical tool has been set to work on the Georgies and the Aeneid too: and the 'allegorise_'S' - to use an ugly word for an unattractive concept - range in time fron Seriius in the 4th century to Herrmann and many others in the 20th. The nature of allegory too varieswildly - from mystical/ religious interpretations and moralising to historical and personal allusion. It - 35 - would therefore be impossible within the scope of one lecture to give an adequate survey of all the types and instances of allegory to be found in the history of Virgiiian scholarship - and I cannot pretend to regret this enforced limitation on my subject matter. What I propose to do is firstly to review the background against which allegorical interpretation was first applied to Virgil; and secondly to discuss some instances of a particular kind of allegory - which we might rough­ ly call 'historical* - and its plausibility. The Greek word ά,λληγΌρία is a chameleon, and capable of very broad interpret­ ation: it simply means saying one thing and meaning another; and it could reason­ ably be applied to a mere metaphor. (The Greeks in fact did not use the term, but spoke of Υπόνοιαi or underlying meanings.) The standard example of deliberate allegory in Greek is the poem of Alcaeus which is generally interpreted as referr­ ing to contemporary politics through the metaphor of the Ship of State - AcrovwiTipt Ά ν άνέμων στάετιν a poem which Horace (Odes,i.14) has transformed, without making it quite clear whether he retains the allegory or not, into 0 navis, referent in mare te novi fluctus, o quid agis? fortiter occupa portum, nonne vides ut nudum remigio latus... But the Alcaeus poem is a black swan, a lonely example in classical Greek poetry. The only real examples of deliberate allegory are Plato's myths, which are allegory of a special kind, to which Plato has the graciousness to provide a key - as in the famous allegory of the Cave - and these are in a sense extended similes. Allegory really occurs extensively in Greek only as a method of interpretation and not of composition: and of course it begins with Homer who was after all τ Λ χ τ φ xat Ϋ|γ·εμ&ν τηί σοφίας — if not the beginning of wisdom at least a father and guide in the pursuit of wisdom. The early philosophers sought to win support for their physical theories of the universe by reference to the Homeric poems and so to recruit the widespread regard for Homer in the service of philosophy. Such interpretation, which occurs in the fifth century, consisted mainly in physical equations such as Zeus = ether, Hera = air, Hephaestos = fire: (when Homer talks of Hephaestos fighting with the river Scamander it does indeed look like a simple allegory - fire fights with water). Thus the physical philosophers explained the story of Hera being bound by Zeus to two anvils as the description of a physical phenomenon; Hera, the air, is bound by Zeus, the upper air, to earth arid sea, the two anvils. In this way the philosophers might enlist the help of the poets: and indeed it was easier for them to ignore earlier philosophers than to ignore the poets who, because of their prime place in Greek education were regarded as the divinely wise and inspired teachers of mankind. We may usefully compare the attitude of the Middle Ages to Virgil, which is so delightfully described by Comparetti in 'Virgil in the Middle Ages *: such was their respect for the wisdom not to say clairvoyance of the master poet that they naturally looked for all kinds of hidden meanings in his poetry. Alongside physical allegory we also find, in 5th century Greece and later, moral allegorising of Homer. The gods represent human qualities: Athene = skill, Ares = violence, Aphrodite = passion. Hermes represents logos or skill in argument: and so when Hermes cedes the victory to Leto, etymology helps us to the notion that words give way before Lethe - forgetfulness. And so the apologists who wish to defend Homer against the charge of impiety levelled by Xenophanes can explain the stories as allegories about moral qualities and not really about gods at all. It is a short step from this to the allegorising of Stoics like Antisthenes - the kind of moralising from Homer which we find in Horace, Epistles 1.2. - 36 - Troiani belli scriptorem, Max'me Lolli, dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste relegi qui quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.

rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen... (HOR.Epp.1.2.1-4, 17-18). Antisthenes saw Odysseus as a model of endurance and virtue, a model for all stoics to emulate. the lotus represents pleasure, the Cyclops savagery, Scylla shamelessness, Charybdis gluttony, the Sirens flattery. This type of interpret­ ation has some affinities with the modern search for symbols and images in poetry. The Stoics in fact had a long tradition of allegorical interpretation and Cicero (N.D.1.41) criticizes the method of Chrysippus. Chrysippus, he says, tries to fit the stories of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer to his own statements about the gods so that the most ancient poets might appear to have been stoics without suspecting it; volt Orphei Musaei Hesiodi Homerique fabellas accommodare ad ea quae ipse primo libro de deis immortalibus dixerat, ut etiam veterrimi poetae qui haec ne suspicati quidem sint, Stoici fuisse videantur. This allegorical method was taken over by Alexandrian Jews of whom our greatest extant representative is Philo, who lived in the 1st century of our era, and whose influence on all succeeding patristic writers was immense. Philo s phil­ osophy was founded on the belief that Greek philosophy - all the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras - was not only consistent with the Hebrew Script­ ures, but actually had its origins in the sacred books and was in a sense merely borrowed from them: on this basis he constructed hi' philosophy by widely and ruthlessly allegorising the scriptures to produce from them the discoveries o Greek philosophy. One of his books, for instance, is called an 'Allegorical commentary on Genesis*. There i s no reason to believe that Philo was the first to explain the scriptures in this way, but in any event the Jewish mind was much more prone to mysticism than the more rationalistic Greek; and some of the Old Testament books, like the Book of Job, may in fact be allegorical: that, fortunately, hardly concerns us at the moment. It is certainly true that Philo's method gained momentum and was adopted by the Christian church as an instrument of policy: he abused it himself and certainly the early fathers from Clement and Origen to St. Augustine made very broad and deliberate use of allegorical inter­ pretation whether (as in the case of some Homeric allegorists) as an instrument of apologetics - to reconcile sr,me of the apparent severity and cruelty of the ancient God of the Old Testament with the conception of a gracio s and loving Father in the New - or as an instrument of higher interpretation, as a clue to the deeper meanings of the scripture. The Christian Fathers believed the Old Testament to be an inspired pre­ figuration of the New, and not merely in broad outlines but in details of fact. Just as surely as the prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah in symbolic language, so the very actions of the patriarchs prefigured what was to happen in the New Testament. Augustine says just this in the De Doctrina Christiana, III, xxii.32: Omnia quae in Veter's Testamenti libris gesta continentur, non solum proprie, ed etiam figurate accipienda sunt. I shall illustrate with just two curious but quite typical examples. The Song of Songs 4.2 reads as follows: 'Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are shorn.* The Song has been interpreted as an allegory in which Christ addresses his beloved, the church, Augustine carries this a stage further so that the teeth of the beloved are the Saints: Et tamen nescio quomodo suavius intueor sanctos cum eos quasi dentes Ecclesiae video praecidere ab erroribus homines. 'I Like to think of the saints as the teeth of the church* cutting - 37 - men off from error.' More elaborate is the allegorical preface of Prudentius to the Psychomachla (he appends similar prefaces to the Apotheosis, Hamartigenia and the two books Contra Symmachum). Genesis 14 and 15 describe how Lot, after being captured by enemy kings, is rescued by Abraham with 318 servants: When Abraham returns tri­ umphant he is given bread and wine by Melchisedec: and presently Sarah presents him with a child. So our soul (Sarah) will not produce legitimate progeny, i.e. good thoughts and deeds, until it is victorious with the aid of Christ (the 318 servants) over evil thoughts: and after this victory comes the eucharist (the bread and wine from Melchisedec). Christ is represented by the mystical number 318 (in Greek numerals TIH; T was taken to represent the cross, because of the form of the letter, IH were of course the initial letters of *Γησονς in Greek). The allegorical approach was so central in Christian theology that at the time when Prudentius wrote, at the end of the 4th century, he found allegory a natural vehicle. His Psychomachia has the distinction of being the first completely allegorical poem, without any human actors, in European literature. Prudentius was not however a great originator but he merely reflected the spirit of the age and the Psychomachia has had an influence on literature and art out of all prop­ ortion to its merit. It is a poem in Virgiiian epic style about the battle in the soul between Virtues and Vices, which was in fact a fairly common theme stemming particularly from Seneca and the great North African priest Tertullian. This is the first of the flood of allegories of personification which appealed to the Middle Ages. The main characteristic of this type of allegory is that the charact­ ers are personifications: where the Greek philosophers had sought a general truth in old stories about the gods, Prudentius and his like told a general truth by means of personified abstractions. The foundations of this type of allegory really go back to a Roman habit of personification, a habit exemplified by their building temples to abstract figures like Libertas. Plautus introduces his Trinummus with the characters Luxuria and Inopia: and Horace has some vivid personifications like Cura riding pillion post equitem sedet atra Cura: and pallida Mors which knocks on every door. But classical writers were not prone to allegory, although they knew of allegory as a figure of speech they had learned at the grammar schools. The 4th century A.D., however, perhaps because of the church, was far different: and as the Middle Ages advanced, so the taste for allegory grew until we even find Ovid allegorised. Prudentius was a product of his age, and C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love stresses the fact that personified allegory was as natural to the pagan Claudian as to the Christian poet: it was just the 4th century way of thinking. Now Servius, Macrobius and Donatus, our Virgiiian commentators, also belonged to the 4th century; and while I do not wish to attach too much significance to this fact, we are bound to feel that this is one argument against our too ready acceptance of what these commentators say about allegory in Virgil: we should do well to bear in mind what C.S. Lewis says (Allegory of Love, p.62) 'when allegory becomes a man's natural mode of expression it is inevitable that he will find more and more allegory in the ancient authors whom he respects.’ Servius was in fact very conservative in this matter - thereby fitting one half of Housman's famous aphorism about critics: 'it may be true that all good critics are conservative' for he explicitly rejects allegory in the Eclogues except in connection with the confiscations. Refutandae enim sunt allegoriae in bucolico carmine nisi cum...ex aliqua agrorum perditorum necessitate descendunt. Shall we rush in where Servius feared to tread? Our whole consideration of the background in fact leads us a priori to expect not to find any extensive use of allegory by Virgil, and conversely to find allegorical interpretations in commentators of the 4th century and after. - 38 - And so, turning to Virgil, I wish to ignore the instances which we certainly find of personified abstractions - like Faina in IV and the well-known gathering of personifications in Hades - Luctus, ultrices Curae, pallentes Morbi, Metus and so on - and the very occasional instances where the gods seem to have an allegor­ ical significance, and concentrate only on the sort of allegory which we find instanced in Servius and which is inferred by many modern critics, at least in the Eclogues. This is allegory of a special kind - we might call it historical allegory - consisting in occult references by Virgil to contemporary persons or events. This is the kind of allegory which has been widely postulated as underlying the eclogues, from the time of Servius, through a grand climacteric of allegorical interpretations of all kinds in the Middle Ages, to our own day when the extreme view is defended by Leon Hermann in Les masques et les visages dans les Eclogues de Virgile where each personage in the poems is equated with a historical charact■ er who is represented by the same persona throughout the collection: another extremist whom I will just mention is J. FitzSimon who in 'The Ten Christian Pastorals of Virgil' finds messages concerning Christianity in all ten eclogues by means of a code in which - very roughly - certain groups of letters can stand for certain other groups, and almost any one letter for any other. The poems were written in cipher, he says, because of official antagonism to Christianity; and all the ancient poets worth their salt had foreknowledge of Christianity, like their Jewish brethren, and wrote such secret messages for posterity: the key which had been handed down from generation to generation was lost until rediscovered by FitzSimon. More moderate writers make less extravagant but almost equally dogmatic statements. Comparetti who is a very careful as well as a captivating writer says: 'Virgil had in fact made use of allegory, as everyone knows, in the Bucolics'; and T.E. Wright in 'Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship' says: 'Their true signific­ ance must lie beneath the surface if only we could find the key', and, 'We know that Menalcas in Eclogue 9 is Virgil himself, and other real persons doubtless also masquerade under the fictitious names of Daphnis, Mopsus etc,' Now this is a special kind of allegory. Allegorical criticism of Homer had seen a relationship between the facts of the story told by Homer and the truths of philosophy or of the physical universe: Christian allegory saw a parallelism between actions and sayings of the Old Testament and the events of the New Test­ ament: and Medieval allegory while more widely ranging tended to be abstract allegory which told a general or particular truth by means of personified characters The Eclogues on the other hand are taken to be a special kind of poems a clef It has been argued that the loves of shepherds, their rustic banter and musical contest which form the subject-matter of pastoral poetry, were no less barren in 42 B.C. as poetic material than they would be today; that Theocritus' highly successful introduction of vulgar country topics to the scholarly and artificial society of Alexandria could not be emulated by Virgil in Rome; and that Virgil therefor© cleverly adapted these poems to his own society, embodying in the simple framework of the Arcadian shepherd-life a skilful but occult commentary on the lives and loves of his own circle of friends. J.S. Phillimore in his extremely interesting and provocative paper 'Pastoral and Allegory' compares Virgil and his Transpadane circle of artistic friends with a group of exiled Scots in London: and just as 16th or 17th century Scots might have written poetry to one another - even, perhaps, Latin poetry - so Virgil, he suggests, wrote his little poems for the benefit of this circle, skilfully weaving with words supplied mostly by Theocritus a web of con­ temporary allusion to which we - and this, I'm afraid is only too true - lack the detailed knowledge which alone would supply the key. Now this is an attractive theory, and one which we are strongly inclined to accept if only because of the very annoying fact that we cannot seem to understand the meaning of the Eclogues; and that is one thing which scholars cannot bear. Hence Skutsch's vivid phrase, already quoted, that they 'look at us with enigmatic eyes'. And these metaphorical - 39 - eyes have fascinated scholars for many years. It is certainly tempting to look for personal references in the poems, and particularly in those eclogues which to us seem very often to lack point. The third Eclogue, for instance, where Menalcas and Damaetas - as shepherds sometimes do, I suppose - regale one another with what is politely termei 'rustic banter' not unlike the verbal battle between Sarmentus and Cicirrus on Hors.cess journey to Brundisium, tempts us at least to sympathise with some of the allegorical suggestions in Servius. Menalcas for example (lines 16 sq.) accuses Damaetas of stealing Damon's goat: and Servius preserves the story that Virgil is referring to the theft by Varus of a tragedy written by Virgil - a play, perhaps, on the etymology of τραγωδία , goat-song: and, to quote another example, Virgil's friends may I suppose have seen the joke when Menalcas' ram fell in the river (lines 94-5) 'Don't go too far, sheep: the bank isn’t safe: the ram himself is still drying his fleece.8 Parcite oves nimium procedere: non bene ripae creditur: ipse aries etiam nunc vellera siccat. They may possibly have seen the point that, so Servius says, Virgil himself was the aries, who fell in the river when chased off his farm by the centurion Arrio. Horace after all describ’d the Eclogues as facetum - witty, or humorous - as they no doubt are in places. It is incidentally perhaps worth noticing a possible explanation of how this identification of Virgil with the ram arose. In his preface to the Eclogues Servius mentions the meaning of some of the proper names, including Tityrus - 'Laconum lingua tityrus dicitur aries maior qui gregem anteire consuevit'; and on the very same page in Thilo and Hagen's text, Servius also says 'hoc loco Tityri sub persona Vergilium cebBmus accipere’, It would have been a simple matter for someone to link the two statements and apply them to the ram in our example: a ram is in fact far from being an appropriate symbol for Virgil if we consider the other references we have to his personal appearance, and his alleged nickname of Virgo: it would be much easier to see a reference to Arrio but the line about the ram in any case is hidden away in a poem which has no overt reference to Virgil or his farm and in a context which gives no clues whatever to help us identif·' the reference in the way that is suggested. However ome of the Eclogues would most certainly have added point if we could accept Phillimore’s theory and find the keys: or if we could, as Herrmann claims to do fit the faces to all the enigmatic eyes Many attempts have been made at 'solving’ the Eclogues on these lines and I obviously cannot discuss them in detail at this point. But I should like to put the theory to the test by con­ sidering one or two of the poems and the proposed solutions. A useful example for testing is Eclogue V for the reason that it is widely believed to be allegorical, while on the other hand it is not one of Servius' own pet allegories concerned with Virgil's farm. The Eclogue tells of a meeting between the shepherds MSnaicas and Mopsus who agree to sing to one another: Mopsus sings a lament for Daphnis - Daphnis is mourned by his mother, who embraces him and rails against the gods and the cruel stars, and also by all Nature. Menalcas in his turn sings of the apotheosis of Daphnis, who looks in wonder at the gate of heaven and the clouds and stars under his feet: Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis. The suggestion that Mena! c.· s is Virgil and Mopsus a poet-friend need not detain us long: the identification of Menalcas with Virgil springs merely from the belie, which some people hold that Menalcas = Virgil in other poems, and for the identity of Mopsus we have no real clue beyond the fact that he is younger than Virgil. But what makes this in my view the worst sort of allegorising is the simple fact that the identification of the two shepherds with real persons adds precisely nothing - 40 - to our understanding or appreciation of the poem which is an artistic entity without such unnecessary trappings which are merely the result of the allegor­ ising habit: before we make such identifications we need to be convinced not only that Virgil does introduce real ersons under fictitious names but that he generally does. However. the real point of dispute concerns the identity of the dead Daphnis. Serv'as has his suggestions: many say simpliciter, says Servius, that Virgil is lamenting fa certain Daphnis* - (I should nave said that was a good premise) - but others, he says, assert that he is allegorically referring to Juliiis Caesar, 'who was killed by Cassius and Brutus with 23 wounds, and hen.ce Virgil says crudeli funere by a cruel death'. In all fairness Servius adds that a cruel death could refer to almost any death. Others suggest QXiintiliua Varus, he says. 1'hut seems a good list of can­ didates to begin with: but it is swelled by Donatus' suggestion of Virgil's brother Flaccus (who is only mentioned this once) and by modern pretenders like Catullus, the suggestion of Herrmann. The very number of the candidature makes us dubious, and in fact most suggestions are easily dealt with, like Catullus who died ten years too early and (even more convincing) Quintilius Varus who died ten years too late, after the poem was written: so that we can hardly assume that Servius preserves an authoritative and early tradition at this point. The most popular identification has been with Caesar, especially by those who still believe that Virgil was first and foremost a political pamphleteer, writing in support of Augustus' regime. But there are in my view insuperable objections to this view. Caesar's mother predeceased him and therefore cannot with any propriety be regarded as embracing his corpse: the counter to this is that Virgil meant the mother of Caesar's gens, namely Venus the Aeneadum genetrix; the allegorical reference, says D.L, Drew, is to the laying of Caesar's body in . an imitation temple of Venus mentioned by Suetonius. But the case against Caesar rests on much more: he is described as puer - and Caesar was almost 60 when he died: he is a poet, and Menalcas says that Mopsus sings as well as Daphnis (alias Caesar) did; Mopsus will be another Daphnis - tu nunc eris alter ab illo - surely a bold thing to say if Caesar is meant, unless we become more deeply involved and make Mopsus = Augustus. It is only with great ingenuity that scholars can make the institution of Bacchic revels - attributed to Daphnis in the poem - appropriate to Caesar: Bacchus had elephants in his processions and so had Caesar, says Drew. And surely Virgil was running the risk of unsympathetic laughter if not a reprimand from Augustus himself for representing on Daphnis', i.e. Caesar's epitaph: Of his beautiful flock the even more beautiful guardian Formosi pecoris custos formosior ipse when even his troops were not likely to nominate the bald-headed Caesar for a prize m any beauty contest. But the decisive argument, after all, is the mere fact that all the rale"- ancies to Caesar have to be sought out with not a little ingenuity: i::' ”V.;:“gil wanted to paint Caesar he could surely outline his characteristic features for all the world to recognise, and he would most certainly avoid features which were inappropriate. When Mi1ton borrowed from Virgil, as Virgil had borrowed from Theocritus and the Lament for Bion, to lament Edward King, he d.'.d not in all con­ science tell us much about his friend, except, allegorically, that they had been at college together For we were nursed upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and :ί 11. Together both, ere the high lawns appeared Under the opening eyelids of the Morn We drove a-field..... - 41 - and that he was drowned, and in the appropriate place, Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? For neither were ye playing on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high..... These facts any reader would glean from Lycidas without recourse to a commentator: and in the end, Virgil's poem makes perfectly good sense if we take him to mean just what he says; that he is lamenting Daphnis, a mythological shepherd. The contemporary reader, between 42 and 40 B.C., might well think of Caesar and his comet and of a possible contemporary apotheosis: there may well be features of Daphnis which particularly encourage thoughts of Caesar: and Virgil in the end may have wished to make oblique reference o Caesar's death, just as in Aeneid V Acestes' arrow which was metamorphosed i.ito a comet can hardly fall to arouse thoughts of Caesar's comet. But Latin litera ure is full of oblique contemporary references of this kind: and this is very diff rent fromsaying that the fifth Eclogue is an allegory on Caesar's death, and that Daphnis is Caesar. The Eclogues concerning Virgil's or his father's farm constitute, as Servius saw, a different problem. Is this special pleading on our part, or are they really different? Eclogue 9 gives quite plain evidence, that the seating is not Sicily but Italy, and that the time is not any time but the time of he confiscations. Vare, tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobs, Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae, cantantes sublime ferent ad sidera cycni. 'Varus, if only Mantua is left to us, Mantua alas too near to poor Cremona, swans will raise your name to the stars in song.1 Varus (i.e. Alfenus Varus) was one of the triumvirs who assigned the confiscated lands: and we have a plain appeal to him to leave undisturbed the lands of Mantua which are suffering from their nearness to Cremona which had been on the wrong side in the civil war. This gives the background to the plain facts told by Moeris: /a stranger is possessing our holding:' to which Lycidas replies that he hadhe6rd that Menalcas had saved all that land by his poetry. That is the sum total of the allegory in the poem, the rest of which is concerned with singing and poetry in conventional pastoral style. The surprising thing is really that the allusion is so clear: the facts are stated unmistakably and quite specifically/ with the proper names of Varus and Mantua. There is little doubt that Virgil has the nom de plume Menalcas here: one might almost imagine the pseudonym to be due to Virgilks natural modesty. He mentions his friends by name, but not himself. Now let us examine Eclogue 1, the sister Eclogue to 9. It is a dialogue between two Italian farmers: Meliboeus who tells us in plain and outspoken terms that he has been driven from his holding by an army veteran; and Tityrus who by contrast is very much at his ease under the spreading beech-tree enjoying undist­ urbed possession of his land. So much is clear: and without entering into the complicated and very vexed questions which arise from detailed examination of the poem we can look at the identification of these farmers. Servius says explicitly and more than once that Tityrus stands for Virgil, but with the very sensible reservation - hoc loco - at this point: Tityrus represents Virgil only places and not throughout the poem as a whole. The reservation is very necessary, since Tityrus is an old man whose beard has been growing white (Virgil was 28 when he started the Eclogues); he is (or has been) a slave; and he is in any case of a character very different from Virgil's own: he isn't interested in Meliboeus' plight at all, and it has been well said that Meliboeus himself, who bears no - 42 - malice but only sorrow, speaks much more as Virgil's mouthpiece. I am not envious, but rather surprised: so much upset i;=s there everywhere in the fields. non equidem invideo, miror magis: undique totis usque adeo turbatur agris. It would be nearer the truth therefore to say that Virgil 'ε both Tityrus and Meliboeus, or, if you prefer it neither. The simplest explanation of the poem is as a dialogue between t· :■ representatives of the farmers near Mantua, or for that matter anywhere in Italy, who have been involved in the confiscations. Tityrus has been fortunate and Meliboeus less so, and Virgil has dramatically and sympathetically described the personal heartbreak and suffering involved in s.:ch a. policy. That this is so is, I think, made clear by the statements of the two farmers when they seem to speak for a class of people: Tityrus uses the plural pueri whenquoting the words of Augustus; and Meliboeus even more clearly speaks for all the dispossessed farmers But we others will go, some to parched Africa, some to Scythia and chalky Oaxes, some to the Britons on the edge of the world. At nos Irnc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, pars Sc 'thiam et rapidum cretae veniamus Oaxen et penitus toto divisos orbe Brita nos. Certainly Virgil has been, according to tradition, personally concerned in hese confiscations, but we shall never know the precise details of his case. Some of what he says through the mouth of Tityrus is true of himself, just as Meliboeus too no doubt speaks for the poet: like most writers ana, particularly, most young writers, Virgil is being to a certain extent autobiographical: but I have never heard it said that David Copperfield was an allegorical figure because to a certa'n extent he represented Dickens; and I see no rea«cn for continuing the tradition that T'tyrus or Menalcas or anyone else equalled Virg'l. There, I think, is the vital point writers of antiquity were acquainted with the type of allegory where Zeus = ether, Apollo = the sun, the ark = the cross: or for example in Plato's Cave, the images on the wall represent the material things in the world. and it was natural o them when they assumed the Eclogues to be allegorical, to look for the equation which would provide the key: and therefore we find such equations as Tityrus - Virgil, Daphnis = Caesar. Some moderns follow them into the same trap, and M. Herrmann even insists that the one equation, like the key to an atlas gives the key to all the poems in the collection, so that Virgil = Menalcas throughout and so on. There is no clear foundation for such identification of the pastoral characters with Virgil's friends and enemies, and there is the added arg ment against it that Virgil, when he wishes to, introduces his friends under their own names. No doubt there are veiled allusion.. t contemporary persons and events, but the most we can honestly do is to note the allusions when we can, with our limited knowledge, trace them: and the path to such allusions is, I firmly believe, a one-way street which is only to be negotiated from the known fact to the literary allusion: we must beware of trying to read the Eclogues with a view to finding out the facts like, for instance, the location of Virgil's farm. The poems are a quick­ sand of fact, fiction, and reminiscence from Greek literature, and any conclusions we draw from them can never be verified except from known historical facts. Now treating the Eclogues as allegories does I feel lead us into this error and for that reason I should hesitate to call them allegorical at all: but if we do call them allegories let us at any rate be sure what we mean by the term. We are not justified in saying that Eclogue 1 is an allegory in which Tityrus = Virgil, because then we might logically work out equations sometljiing like this v = t ; But T is old and a slave ' . . V is old and a slave, - 43 - or at any rate V is something else which in the allegory = old and slave. We can only say, with Servius, that Tityrus may equal Virgil at a particular point and in a particular aspect, and that only if we can prove by reference to the facts that this is so. I am reminded of a picture which I carry in my mind from 'The Cloister and the Hearth', of an inn in the Black Forest where a very old servant comes in with the drinks and Charles Reade whimsically says 'enter grisled Ganymede': the whole point of the picture is that the old servant bore absolutely no resemblance to the beautiful youth stolen by Jupiter, except this one point of resemblance that they were both cup-bearers: and such must be our conception of Tityrus as repres­ enting Virgil - he does so only when and where we can prove a resemblance. Of the most famous Eclogue of all - the Messianic Eclogue which centuries of Christian writers took for granted was an inspired prophecy of the birth of Christ - I obviously have no time to speak. But one thing only I will say, that in this case the allegorists are the more hard-headed and in general less fanciful scholars who think the subject of the poem is the Peace of Brundisium. If we are merely concerned with identifying the child whose birth is celebrated in the poem, then we are not allegorising, because Virgil says in no uncertain terms that a child has been born, and so clearly does he say it that we are most reluctant to believe that it is some personified abstraction which smiles up into its mother's face. Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem, matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses: incipe parve puer: qui non risere parenti, nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est. Begin, little child, to recognise your mother with a smile, after her long suffering: begin, little child: a child who has not smiled on his parents is never considered worthy of a god's board or a goddess's couch. Whatever special reasons we may have for believing the Eclogues to be largely allegorical, few of us would be willing to look on the Aeneid itself as basically an allegorical poem, as D.L. Drew has argued, I believe the same arguments hold as I have put forward with regard to the Eclogues: we do accept the fact that the Aeneid contains a wealth of contemporary allusion much of which is lost on us because of our lack of historical detail, but surely the subordination of the whole epic to a propagandist theme, as a glorification of Augustus in the person of Aeneas does less than justice to Virgil. That is not how great epics are made. We are well aware that the Aeneid is the epic of Rome, the story of a nation's spirit and not merely the legend of its founder: Virgil writes in depth, and gathers up his own times in the simple story from a legendary past, in a very complex and delicately woven web. His method, as in the Eclogues, is allusive: and books like Drew's 'Allegory of the Aeneid' perform a useful function in noticing some Qjf the contemporary allusions, or parallels. For example, Drew compares the arrival of Aeneas at the site of Rome (in Book VIII) where Evander is sacrificing to Hercules, with the arrival of Augustus at Rome from Naples in 29 B.C. to celebrate his triumph - an event which was bound to be imprinted very clearly on the memory and imagination of e ery Roman. He also points out the parallel between Hercules, whose feast is being celebrated, saevis, hospes Troiane, periclis servati facimus, meritosque novamus honores. (Aeneid,VIII.188-9) and Augustus who was given the oak leaves 'ob cives servatos' - a parallel which was fairly commonly drawn at the time. But I find it difficult to follow Drew when he deduces the propagandist purpose of the whole scene and in fact the whole book, namely that just as Hercules is worshipped by these rites, so Augustus ought to be worshipped. The words which Evander uses to defend Hercules must be taken, he Fays, to apply to Augustus, as a defence of emperor-worship. - 44 - 'non haec sollemnia nobis, has ex more dapes, hanc tanti numinis aram vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum t imposuit’ These solemn ceremonies and this ritual feast, this altar of such sanctity, have not been imposed by idle superstition which disregarded the ancient gods.’ In other words, having established a parallelism between Augustus and Hercules at this point, Virgil in effect says 'for Hercules read Augustus in what follows': we have yet another equation. This instance I do not mind overmuch, for Virgil draws many parallels between Augustus and Hercules· but all the dangers of allegorical treatment are apparent in another of Drew's parallels. In Aeneid VIII 26P Evander, talking of the sacrifice to Hercules, says ex illo celebratus honos laetique minores servavere diem ’From that time these rites have been practised, and the anniversary joyfully kept by succeeding generations.* Evander is a contemporary of Hercules, and by saying that succeeding generations - 'minores - have kept the feast he :s guilty of an anachronism. he talks as if he were living in Virgil's day, and in fact so says Drew, the poet is speaking out of Evander's mouth. Therefore Evander - Virgil: and we have corroborative evidence: Evander is an Arcadian and Virgil is a native of Transpadane Gaul, the Arcadia of the Bucolics: and Evander s fate is the same as Virgil's: me pulsum patria pelagique extrema sequentem fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum his posuere locis 'Fortune and inevitable fate have set me here, driven from my homeland and follow­ ing the utmost limits of the sea' for Virgil in the same way had been driven out of his home near Mantua to take refuge in Rome. Criticism of such parallels is too easy, and its sting has been removed by Drew's own prophecy that these likenesses would be 'conjured away by the cold voice of scepticism'. But I must protest at the conclusions which Drew deduces from the equation Evander = Virgil. Since Evander has met Anchises, Aeneas’ father, so Virgil must have met Julius Caesar, Augustus' adoptive father, since Axigustus = Aeneas. Such mathematical deductions from one basic equation may be logical, but they are not the legitimate weapons of literary criticism. As Sainte- Beuve says of the suggestion that Drances - the orator of the Latins, and a kind of barrack-room lawyer - represents Cicero, 'ici je me rivolte". It may well be that Virgil draws characteristics from Cicero to make up his fictitious character, just as he presents elements of Augustus in Aeneas, and of Cleopatra in Dido. The enunciation of such resemblances helps our appreciation of the characters in the story as it no doubt helped Virgil's Roman readers even more. But we are :’.n no way justified in equating characters or conversely in assuming that every character must have his counterpart in real life: what do we gain by saying that Achates = Agfipjpa, Q-r, stranger still, that Mnestheus = Maecenas? I will add only one more ilillStfti.tion from Drew which I find amusing, and which at the same time shows how we are tempted to argue in the wrong direction along our one-way street because of a parti pris. There is a well-known passage m Aeneid IV which some people find strange because of the sentiment it expresses Dido, when Aeneas is leaving her, says she would have felt much less forlorn if only she had a little Aeneas left behind playing in the court to remind her of his father: - 45 -- Saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi parvulus aula luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta viderer. The explanation, says Drew, is simple: Sidonia Dido is obviously Scribonia; now Scribonia, as is well known, was divorced by Augustus immediately after their daughter Julia was born. Unfortunately Augustus had wanted a son, and if Julia had been a boy history might have taken a different course just as surely as if Cleopatra's nose had been a bit longer: Augustus might never have divorced Scribonia if only a little Augustus had been playing in the courtyard. On such threads of gossamer are allegorical theories woven.

THE SHIELD OF AENEAS Some Elementary Notions * by Professor D. E. Eichhols - d ------t c t t :------Mich ingenuity has been spent on attempts to interpret Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas (VIII.625-731), but so far not with much success. This lack of success seems to have been largely due to the neglect of certain elementary facts. Perhaps by drawing attention to these facts and their implications I may help to clear the ground. It is hardly necessary to recall that, whereas the scenes dm the shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII.478-608) are taken from life in peace and War, those on Aeneas' shield concern the history of Home. Seven scenes are briefly described: 1. The suckling of Romulus and Remus by the she-wolf (630-634); 2. The rape of the Sabine women followed by the making of a treaty between Romans and Sabines (635-641); 3. The punishment of Mettus Fufetius for his treachery (642-645); 4. Porsenna, Horatius Codes, Cloelia (646-651)· 5. Manlius, thanks to the sacred geese, defending the Capitol from the Gauls (652-662); 6. The dance of the Salii, the Lupercalia and other ceremonies (663-666); 7. The Underworld, with Catiline in Tartarus and Cato in Elysium (666~670). These seven scenes take up 41 lines. Four more lines describing the sea with dolphins swimming in it (671-674) provide the setting for an eighth scene (675-728) of 54 lines, longer than all the rest put together - Actium, followed by the triumph of Augustus. This is a somewhat miscellaneous collection of subjects, and scholars have tried to comfort themselves and us by finding either one unifying theme ora pattern of several themes. Warde Fowler attempts the former. In his commentary on Book VIII (Aeneas at the Site of Rome, Oxford, 1917, pp. 103 ff.), he maintains that we have here scenes'of escapes from terrible perils, both moral and material, ending with the Battle of Actium, the most wonderful escape of all*. But, as he himself admits, the sixth scene, depicting the dance of the Salii and other ceremonies, does not fit into his scheme, and he can explain its presence only by suggesting that Virgil included it at the request of Augustus (op.cit., p.107). Miss J„R„ Bacon, in her article 'Aeneas in Wonderland' (Classical Review liii (1939), pp.97- 104), recognizes this difficulty and also others, for example that the theme of narrow escapes accounts 'only by some stretch of the imagination for the Sabines' (p.102). One might say that this is equally true of the Mettus passage. Just as Virgil omits the perils that preceded the treaty with the Sabines, so too he omits the dangerous situation that provoked Tullus to punish Mettus so savagely. Miss Bacon introduces another element, an important one: It is that the scenes 'are, except for Actium, narrow escapes on the site that Aeneas has just seen* (I.e. ). - 46 -

Except also for the Mettus scene (Livy 1,27 4 and 1.28), one should add. And again, what of the Salii scene? It takes place in Rome, but where Is the escape from danger? Perhaps It would have been better to discard the narrow escapes. Brooks Otis, in his recent book Virgil, a Study in Civilized Poetry, tries to be more comprehensive. He speaks (p.341) of 'the main theme which is the constant opposition of virtus, consilium and pietas to the forces of violence in all Roman history'. Where does the she-wolf display these qualities? If Livy (1.4) is right, she was the kindly but unknowing instrument of destiny, and one wonders if Virgil implies any more, if as much. And again the Salii raise their ugly heads. Their scene may represent pietas, but if so, it is pietas in a vacuum, opposed to nothing. Brooks Otis sums up (p.342): 'Everywhere violence is defeated, evil is punished, religio is observed.' It might be truer to say: 'Everywhere either violence is defeated, or else evil is punished, or else religio i^ observed.' But in this case, we are still left with a miscellany. Warde Fowler and Brooks Otis try to find a unifying theme. On the other hand, W.L, Drew (The Allegory of the Aeneid, Oxford, 1927, pp. 26-31) applies a slightly different method in an attempt to discover a pattern of themes. He gathers the seven early scenes on the shield into four groups, each of which is supposed to exemplify one of the four Augustan virtues, uirtus, dementia, justitia, pietas. Thus: (a) From the she-wolf (1) the twins imbibe uirtus (Virgil, however, makes her attend to less lofty needs); (b) The Sabine Women and the treaty (2) exemplify dementia (but would not something like prudentia and the willingness to accept a peaceful solution occur more readily to anyone who did not know the key?); (c) The punishment of Mettus (3) and Porsenna, C o d e s , Cloelia (4) stand for iustitia. (This might suit the punishment of Mettus, but even here one would be more inclined to think of respect for fides and detestation of those who violate it. As for the Porsenna scene, lo/e of independence (libertas, 648), hatred of tyranny, and audacious courage more readily occur to one, and there are no doubt other possibilities); (d) Manlius and the sacred geese (5), the Salii, etc (6) and Tartarus and Elysium (7) all illustrate pietas. (This is more convincing than the other suggestions, even though Virgil seems to separate (6) and (7) with his phrase hinc procul addit (666), which Drew desperately attempts to explain away: I shall return to this phrase later. But does (5) merely exemplify pietas? Could one not also see in it good fortune or providence? And does not (6) imply pietas? Does not (7) symbolise pietas much less forcibly than the ultimate triumph of good (Cato) over evil (Catiline) in the state?). My purpose in discussing Drew's scheme was not to pick holes, but to show how difficult it is to be certain what moral is to be drawn from each of the scenes if one looks at them with an open mind. In most cases several possibilit­ ies are by no means excluded. Any attempt to impose a pattern of themes is likely to encounter difficulties no less serious than those which we have noticed in attempts to discover a unity of theme. Until one or other of these methods justifies itself, we must suppose that both are defective; and there is nothing to be lost by starting again and looking for quite a different principle of design. If we go back to the beginning of the passage, we find that Vulcan had depicted on the shield 'Italian history and the triumphs of Rome' (res Italas Romanorumque triumphos, 626), 'the whole descent of the stock to be, starting with (or sprung from ) Ascanius, and wars fought one after another' (genus omne futurae/stirpis ab Ascanio, pugnataque in ordine bella, 628-9), that is, all pre- Roman history from Ascanius onwards, and at least all the main military events of - 47 - Roman history too. Needless to say, it is a truly miraculous shield, comparable with Turnus’ fire-breathing helmet (VII. 785-88). This, then, according to Virgil nimself, ij what is on the shield, all of Rome's prehistory starting with Ascanius and at least all he^ major wars up to his own time; and we must not forget what he tells us. It is paying him scant respect and doing him little service to proceed as if there were nothing on the shield other than the scenes he has chosen to describe. Now all the pictures on the shield of Achilles are described in 126 lines. This passage sets the scale for Virgil, and possibly reduces it somewhat, the »· Aeaeid being a shorter poem than the Iliad and presumably having been planned as such. How was Virgil to reproduce his vast subject in no more than 126 lines? This was his main problem. Of course, it was impossible for him to do so complete­ ly. Virgil himself implies as much if non enarrabile ('not to be described u full') in the pr.ra^e cli^ei non enarrabile textum (625) is something more than a bare reminiscence of *tt φατειός (Hesiod,Scutum 144, 161) and ol> φατόζ (ibid. 230); and it should be something more if Virgil is writing here with Virgiiian economy. However instead of attempting the impossible, Virgil attempts what is practicable, and in his hands successful, although by no means simple. After announcing the great theme (626-29), he jumps from Ascanius to Romulus, omitting the Alban period, which is sketched in Book VI (760-776). Then he sets out to create the impression that he is portraying the whole of Rome's history. This is his primary aim. Five historical scenes take us rapidly from Romulus as a baby t<$ 390 H.C. But they are not supposed to be the only scenes from tais period on the shield. Virgil hints at this When after the she-wolf scene he says that 'not far from this’ (nec procul hinc, 635) was the scene of the Sabine women, 'Not far’ must mean that there were some intervening scenes, though probably not many, if only because the lapse of time was not great. Similarly, haud procul inde (642) suggests that there w e ’e some scenes left undescribed between the treaty with the Sabines and the punishment of Mettus. Numa was here, but exhibited because Virgil wanted to introduce religious rites at a different point, as we shall see. Just five scenes are selected from the whole so as to serve as chronological landmarks registering the lapse of time from the childhood of Romulus dovn to 390 B.C., Therefore the main principle of selection in this part of the portrayal was nothing more sophisticated than chronological succession. Incidentally, of course, it was desirable that the scenes chosen should make sense plastic art. Or that at any rate some of them should. It may be doubted whether Virgil's visual realiz­ ation of the artefact was complete when he made darkness protect the Gauls (658) or caused the bushes to be bespattered with blood from the two halves of Mettus' body (642-45). Incidentally, but again perhaps only incidentally, it was desirable that the scenes should be in various ways as dramatic as they are brief. But as Virgil reaches 390 B.C., space, however sparingly used, is being used up. There are still centuries to go, and the grand climax is still to come, a climax which, in view of its importance for the poem as a whole, requires and indeed deserves at least as much space as is given to all the rest of the scenes put together. This is where Virgil plays a weak hand like the master that he is. From the suckling of Romulus to the geese on the Capitol (630-56) time appears to move very quickly. Virgil, however, proceeds to develop the Capitol in a fuller and more leisurely way than any of the others that precede it. The tempo slows as the Gauls stealthily approach (657-58), and finally there is no movement from them at all (659-62). It is as if time were beginning to stand still. In the next scene (663- 666), which on the shield is the design adjacent to the Gauls (hie, 663), time is - 48 - standing still. The dances of the Salii and the other religious activities are timeless. The scene that follows, that of the Underworld (666-70), begins also by being timeless, but almost immediately confronts us with two figures who had existed very much in time, Catiline first and then the younger Cato^, the one now in Tartarus, the other now in Elysium. Thus, almost before we are conscious of the fact, time has proved to have moved on, transporting us in a flash to the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63-62 B.C. and beyond, for Cato lived until 46 B.C. Now Virgil is within sight of his goal, 31 B.C. and the following years, with plenty of space still left in which to present his final scene. We may complain that Virgil has taken us by surprise. And so he has, but not without giving us a warning. After the picture of religious ceremonies, he introduces the Underworld with the phrase hinc procul addit ('Far from here...’, 666), a sure indication that the next historical landmark will be far ahead in time, presumably with many undescribed scenes intervening. It is in one of these that we must look (in vain) for Hannibal, whose absence from Virgil’s account so greatly surprises Warde Fowler (op.cit.,pp.107-8) and Miss Bacon (op.cit.,p.102). The adoption of a chronological scheme with a tight schedule still left Virgil with some freedom in the choice of his scenes, and it may yet be possible for some scholar to prove that within the dominating scheme the scenes were selected to illustrate a theme or group of themes. Until this is done, however, it might be best merely to say that Virgil has chosen scenes that are creditable to Rome and flatter Roman pride. This, however, amounts to a truism; and it does so, I suspect, because Virgil's overriding aim was quite different. This is not to deny that he shows a characteristic sense of fitness in deciding to restrict himself to early episodes in Roman history for his preliminary scenes. Their primitive colouring and usually their occurrence in Rome itself serve to link them to the prehistoric Rome of the earlier parts of the book. There are e\Ten echoes, some of them unmistakable. The Salii have already danced, at the festival of Hercules (285-88). As for the Luperci (667), their cave has been shown to Aeneas (343-44), and the hut of Romulus (654) may be intended partly to remind us of its forerunner, Evander1s cottage. I have tried to offer an analysis which would account satisfactorily for all the scenes that Virgil has included in his description of the shield, including the troublesome and apparently anomalous Salii scene. I have attempt­ ed to show that it is more appropriate to explain Virgil’s composition of the earlier part of the episode in terms of movement rather than of content. In other words, the structure here is dynamic rather than thematic. The notions that have been pursued in this paper may seem naive. I do not think, however, that they make Virgil seem naive. On the contrary, they may help us to apprec­ iate the skill and imagination that he has shown in his handling of a difficult problem. In describing the shield, he has succeeded in his aim of causing us to feel that we have traversed the whole of Roman history up to his own time as the successive scenes are displayed to us. This aim he has achieved by the manipul­ ation and control of movement. To use a commonplace image, it is as if he had found a torrent and diverted it into a lake with a subterranean outlet from which his stream emerges many miles further one, within sight of its great estuary. This image, I think, is not inappropriate. The passage flows naturally. The artifice of the hand that controls its course and speed is all but concealed. The adroitness and the boldness of the composition all but escape notice. NOTES 1. This is an expanded version of a ’communication * given to the Bristol Branch of the Classical Association on March 10th, 1967. 2. Servius thought that Virgil was referring to the elder Cato, but this is - 49 - unlikely for various reasons. See Conington’s note ad loc. and Warde Fowler (££. cit.,p,109). If I am right in thinking that historical events are here presented by Virgil in strictly chronological order, Cato here must be the younger Cato. Virgil could not refer first to Catiline, and then to the elder Catp.

VERGIL AND THE PRE-GREEK GODS by Professor T.J. Haarhoff» M.A., B.Litt. W.F. Jackson Knight strikes the right note in the opening lines of the Aeneid ’Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger' and therefore persistently thwarted Aeneas in carrying out his destined mission - a mission that formed the theme of Vergil’s epic. And Knight well translates Vergil's own wondering comment on the legend, and that inevitably formed the framework of the Roman Epic, ’it is hard to believe Gods in Heaven capable of such rancour'. Like Euripides, Vergil accepted the traditional story but changed its meaning. Both poets adopted the Olympian gods established in tradition but criticised them in so far as they were gods made by man in his own image. Vergil's personal beliefs, I think, are found, though incompletely stated, in Aeneid VI. 723 ff. It is sometimes forgotten that Vergil had a deep regard for those old national deities who had an individual existence in Italy before the Greek gods were equated, sometimes very roughly, with what seemed their Italian counterparts. Mars^ for example, wss largely concerned with agriculture, before he was given the role of Ares. These old Italian deities were regarded by the Romans as spiritual forces of an impersonal kind; this conception of God as spirit was perhaps nearer to Ctiristian thought than the later anthropomorphic gods, as Cyril Bailey once remarked. Compare St. John IV.24: πνβΰμα b θβός God is Spirit; not a Spirit. But the brilliantly imaginative representations of the Greek anthromorphie gods held tremendous advantages for literature and proved irresistible to the artistic mind. Yet Vergil was a philosopher as well as a poet and had in fact in his youth contemplated devoting himself almost entirely to science and philosophy under the guidance of Siro; for I believe Catalepton V is genuinely Vergilian. As a philosopher and a humanist, he objected to the insults offered to Deity by the attribution of primitive human feelings. He criticised the low motives of Juno - which included the bribery of Aeolus - and her alliance with the hellish Fury Allecto (flectere si superos nequeo, Acheronta movebo) - an alliance that may be due to the interpretation of men, because in the end, Vergil's Juno is converted to the Trojan-Italian cause (Aen.XII, 818 ff.). Now it is interesting to note that when Vergil is deeply moved, he appeals, not to the Greek gods, but to the ancient Italian concepts of the Divine. Such an occasion we find towards the end of Georgic I at a time when renewed clouds of civil war were threatening (about 46 B.C.) and the Roman world was compared, in a fine simile, to a chariot with which the horses had run away - ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens fertur equis auriga (the agitated weak caesura) neque audit currus habenas. With all the anguish of those who had suffered the horrors of the Civil wars (impia bella) and had begun to hope that the new ruler could at last restore stability, Vergil prays that Octavian - hunc saltem invenem - may be spared, in spite of Rome's past guilt and present confusion, to perform this task. And what deities does he appeal to? (1) to the di patrii, the gods of the fatherland, the ancestral gods; (2) to the Indigetes, a term of which we do not know the details, - 50 - but which must refer to something ancient and traditional, belonging to Italy. Aeneas is called 'indigetem' (Aen.794) by Jupiter and described as destined for Heaven and the stars. (3) Romulus, the traditional legendary founder of the urbs aeterna, symbol of Roman rule. (4) Vesta mater, to Vergil the most Roman concept of all, Vesta of the Roman hearth, long before she was equated to Hestia, the symbol of the family and of the State, which is the family writ large and is endowed with the tradition of the Vestal Virgins. This was not a Greek idea. Vesta is so important that she is described as the one who preserves Tuscan Tiber and the Roman Palatine (most ancient of Roman sites) - quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas (singular, with quae referring to Vesta). Now the poet who is perhaps nearest to Vergil in his regard for the country­ side, is Tibullus. He has a deeply rooted religious feeling for Tellus Mater, as distinct from the Alexandrian attitude of Propertius and Ovid. When he is lying sick at Corcyra, as Luck points out, (’Latin Love - Elegy1, p.70) he invokes di patrii where Propertius would have appealed to dique deaeque omnes of the Greek Pantheon. He frequently calls on Pales, Silvanus, Ceres in their Italian context, as Vergil does. He dwells on the typical Italian concept of the Genius, of whom Horace says (Epist.II.2.187) that he goes with us (comes) to influence of destiny (natale — astrum) and that he is naturae deus humanae - an ascription of high power and an acknowledgement of the spiritual element behind human life. So too, Tibullus uses the Roman Genius in the place of the Alexand­ rian Graces, a purely Roman conception in the place of Greek convention. In the attitude to the old Italian ideas of deity there is a certain affinity between Vergil and Tibullus which is related to their deep regard for the Italian countryside and which is contrasted in certain passages to their literary adoption of the Olympian gods. Vergil's thought however is deeperthan that of Tibullus; but we cannot go into that now.

SERVIUS - COMMENTATOR AND GUIDE by R.D. Williams,M.A.

Servius' commentary on Virgil is widely used by classical scholarship as a source book for antiquarian information of all sorts - mythology, religion, law, social and political history, geography, philosophy, and so on; and it is invaluable for its citations of ancient authors and authorities which we would not otherwise have. My question is - how reliable, how helpful, is Servius for the understanding of Virgil? If he tells us that saeva Iuno (Aen.1.4) is an archaism for magna Iuno, should we believe him? If he says that finem dedit ore loquendi (Aen.6.76) means 'he defined to her that she should speak it with her lips', do we accept it? If we try to classify his attitudes, to place him in the context of his times and of his personal excellencies and limitations, we shall better be able to see when he is likely to be correct, and when he may be in error; we may be less inclined to unreasonable panegyric or violent denigrat­ ion of his judgment. In what follows all the examples quoted occur both in the shorter version (S) and the longer version (DS). I do not think the picture would very greatly change if examples were taken from those parts of DS which do not occur in S; but it is no part of my present intention to discuss this complicated relationship.1 Let us consider then some of the special attitudes and prejudices of Servius, beginning with the most general and obvious one, that his chief interest is in learning for its own sake. He lived at a time when pedantry was unusually pervasive - we may illustrate this from the qualities admired in - 51 - Virgil by various characters in Macrobius' Saturnalia (roughly contemporary with Servius): they salute not only a great poet but an encyclopedia, an antiquarian source-book. After an attack on Virgil by one Evangelus, the others agree to state what they find most admirable in Virgil. Vettius says 'his knowledge of priestly lore', Flavianus 'his knowledge of augural lore', Eustathius 'his imitation of Greek authors', Albinus 'his knowledge of antiquity'. After further discussion they all agree that he really excels in ars rhetorica: they discuss the four types of oratory, and decide that Virgil is surpassing in all of them. They then return to imitation, and a long list is given of Virgiiian borrowings from Homer, then from other Greeks, then from Roman authors. Finally Servius (who is a character in the Saturnalia) expounds some of the difficult passages, and the emphasis is on the learning both of Virgil and of Servius. My point here is exemplified in Servius' introductory note on Aeneid 6, to which he comes with special relish as the most learned book of all: 'totus quidem Vergilius scientia plenus est, in qua hic liber possidet principatum*. We must not then look in Servius for imaginative interpretation, for penet­ rative insight into the poet's intention, for any of the sensitive warmth or sympathetic enthusiasm that we find in Longinus. When he tells us for example in his introductory comment to the Aeneid that Virgil's intention was to imitate Homer and praise Augustus through his ancestors (Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus) this is not the literary judgment of a critic who has considered the poem deeply and reached a carefully weighed conclusion, but the superficial answer of the commentator to the question he must answer - what is the purpose of the author, scribentis intentio? When he tells us at the beginning of Aeneid 4 that the whole book is taken from Apollonius Arg.3 ('Apollonius Argonautica scripsit, et in tertio inducit amantem Medeam; inde totus hic liber translatus est') he does not seem to us to have reacted the heart of the matter; when he goes on 'sane totus est in consiliis et subtilitatibus, nam paene comicus stilus est, nec mirum ubi de amore tractatur' we do not feel that this summarises the impact of the book. This literary insensitivity and stereotyped scholarship is well discussed by T.R. Glover (Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, Chapter VIII). Saintsbury (A History of Criticism, vol.I. 334 f.) comments thus on Servius' method: 'You construct, or accept from tradition as already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds, hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply refer it to the classification'. And again 'But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing'. James Henry (Aeneidea, vol.iii. p.77) is more outspoken still: 'Servius, the third of the commentators of whom I have here been led to speak, derives from the accident of his having lived so much nearer to the time of Virgil a double advantage over the other two: viz. a vernacular knowledge of the language, and access to sources of information respecting Virgil which have since been lost. Notwithstanding these two great advantages, Servius (or whoever else may have been the author of the commentaries ascribed to Servius) was, owing to defects in himself, infinitely inferior as a commentator of Virgil both to Voss and Heyne. Totally destitute of poetical sentiment, and stone-blind to Virgil's fascinating grace and elegance, Servius sees nothing in the Aeneid but a mere matter-of-fact narrative, such as might have come from the pen of an Aratus or an Avienus, and writes comments on it which bear the same relation to those of Heyne and Voss as we may suppose critiques upon the dramas of Shakespeare, written some two hundred years ago by the master of a village grammar school in Yorkshire, would bear to those of Schlegel.' But while we may well agree that Servius lacks literary insight and penetration, we should not therefore discount his other qualities. We should attempt instead to define in what ways his love of learning rather than of literature have affected his outlook. - 52 - One particular way, which especially concerns us now, in which Servius' pedantry found expression was in his passion for the 'Rules', rules of grammar, rhetoric, metre and so o n . 3 He had a rich heritage of predecessors in this field extending back more than four centuries (look for example at Books 8 and 9 of Quintilian), and he commands a formidable and prodigious technical vocab­ ulary. He was himself a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, one of its acknowledged masters (Macrob.Sat.6.6). There is perhaps no harm in using tags like acyrologia, tapeinosis, cacemphaton, antiptosis, hysteron proteron and so on, unless you are using them as labels to conceal the fact that you cannot make out what the poet has really said and so you are altering it to what you can understand. The figure hypallage (’transferred epithet') is much abused in this connexion; the implication often is that once the commentator has divined this trick of the poet, and transferred the epithet back, all becomes well. The winner in this line is ’antiptosis’, the substitution of one case for another. It is a kind of joker card: it gives carte blanche. In some cases when Servius uses it no harm is done: at Aen.5.609 Iris descends to earth per mille coloribus arcum and Servius says 'aut subaudis factum, aut antiptosis est mille colorum'. To call the ablative of description antiptosis for the genitive of description is accept­ able. But in the difficult phrase at Aen.11.149 f. feretro Pailante reposto/ procubuit super (which must mean that when the bier was set down on the ground Evander threw himself on Pallas) Servius says 'posito Pallantis feretro, nam antiptosis est': the ablative for Servius has the meaning of a possessive genitive which can happen under the label antiptosis, but not in any other way, and it is quite unacceptable. I pick just one or two other examples of 'figures' used to justify an unacceptable explanation. In Aen.2.348 Servius cannot accept fortissima frustra pectora as meaning 'hearts full of unavailing courage', and invokes the figure hyperbaton (dislocation of word order) so as to take frustra with succurritis four lines further on (cf.5.389). In Aen.2,129 Servius is worried about the phrase rumpit vocem^ (Calchas has been silent for ten days, now he breaks into speech); it is a strange phrase, presumably an imitation of the Greek prjyvtvat φωνήν. But Servius finds a special pigeon-hole in his bureau of figures for this: 'per contrarium'. Elsewhere Virgil has rumpere silentia, 'break silence', so rumpere vocem can, per contrarium (vox being contrary to silentium), mean the same, 'break silence'. For, says he disarmingly, sometimes you have to understand a phrase as it stands, sometimes as the opposite: 'aliqua interdum simpliciter, interdum per contrarium intelleguntur'. As a final example of Servius' figures, consider metonymy, the substit­ ution for a given word of another word of allied meaning. Nobody will object when he tells us on Aen.1.171 that Ceres is used by metonymy for frumentum: but we may feel more unhappy when he tells us on 5.525 (liquidis in nubibus) 'nubes pro aere posuit. Nubes enim liquidae esse non possunt'. We cannot remove Virgil's words at will in this fashion: if he tells us that nubes are liquidae he is challenging us to visualise how they can be so - they are to be thought of*not as dark, heavy, massed storm clouds but as yielding, thin, unsubstantial wisps of cumulus. The figure metonymy becomes a more menacing obstacle to understanding in an example like Aen.12.451. Here the Trojans sweep over the plain like a dark cloud coming from the sea abrupto sidere. Servius' explanation, which most commentators have followed, is that sidus is metonymy for tempestas. Now'in phrases like triste Minervae/sidus (Aen.11.259-60) we can accept Servius’ comment that sidus is equivalent to tempestas. But this can only be so when the context is appropriate: it is patent that sidus abrumpitur cannot mean ’a storm breaks out'. I thiik the phrase actually means 'when the sun's light is cut off*.5 - 53 -

Servius has a firm attitude towards grammar. Consider this comment on Lucan: Servius tells us (on Aen.3.326) that fastus (pride) is fourth and fastus (calendar) is second declension: 'unde erravit Lucanus (10.187) dicendo nec meus Eudoxi vincetur fastibus annus*. This is the confident and severe remark of a grammarian who will permit neither school-boys nor poets to deviate from the rules. If a deviation can be classed as a figure all is well (Aen.1.104 avertit: 'pro avertitur, et est figura creberrima'; 4.401 cernas: 'honesta figura si rem tertiae personae in secundum referas'); but when Virgil (Aen.3.70) speaks of the south wind lenis crepitans (using an adjective adverbially with a participle contrary to prose u-sage) Servius says firmly that Virgil has incorrectly used the double epithet: 'duo epitheta posuit vitiose'. ι On matters of metre and word-music Servius is again severely limited by the rules. In Aen.5.481 Virgil describes the crashing of the ox to the ground in a line of most unusual rhythm - sternitur exanimisque tremens procumbit humi bos. The monosyllabic ending causes a dislocation of the expected rhythm. On this Calvert says: 'the ponderous final monosyllable, which is also the subject of the sentence, is no doubt intended not only to suggest to the mind the heavy thud with which the ox fell, but also to keep the reader's mind in suspense in expectation of something grand or startling'. Page conveys the same more briefly - a 'well- known instance of sound accommodated to sense'. But Servius' view is different - it is a very poor line because it breaks the rule about monosyllabic endings: 'pessimus versus in monosyllabum desinens'. We find Servius very ready to explain Virgil’s diction as being imposed upon him for metrical reasons - metri causa. In some cases we can agree; e.g. on Eel. 5.36 he tells us that the plural hordea6 is used for the singular (hordeum, which would only with difficulty go into a hexameter) usurpative metri causa. But when Servius says on 5.457 ille vacat, nam metri causa additum est we feel that Virgil is not likely to have inserted ille solely for the metre71 (cf. on 1.3, 6.186); and his similar comment on 5.467 dixitque et ('vacat -que metri causa, et maluit perissologiam facere quam uti communi syllaba, quae frequens vitiosa est') seems harsh; the two verbs are linked more closely together by -que et than they would be by et. On the other hand in the phrases ore locutus, ore loquendi he rescues Virgil from 'perissologia' (redundancy) by quite wrong explanations of Aen.6.76 finem dedit ore loquendi and Aen.9.317 sic ore locutus. Servius has some severe rules about alliteration and assonance: he does not allow triple alliteration, and says (on Aen.3.183 casus Cassandra canebat) 'haec compositio iam vitiosa est, quae maioribus placuit, ut Anchisen agnovit amicum (3.82) et sale saxa sonabant (5.866)'. Similarly he did not like a word to begin with the letters with which the previous word ends (cacemphaton): on Aen.2.27 Dorica castra he says 'male est compositio, ab ea syllaba incipere, qua superior finitus est sermo' (cf. on Geo.2.13 glauca canentia, Aen.3.203 caeca caligine). He seems to have been especially sensitive to ca-. He did not approve of constr­ uctions like cristaque tegit galea aurea rubra (9.50) where he is at pains to point out that two of these words are nominative and two ablative, 'quos metrica ratione discernimus', and he ends crossly 'sane huiusmodi versus pessimi sunt'. Similarly on 4.504 at regina pyra he says 'vitiosa est elocutio, quae habet exitus similes, licet sit casuum dissimilitudo'. On 5.556 tonsa coma pressa corona he appears to have taken tonsa and coma together. In 3.292 f . portuque subimus/ Chaonio et celsam... he seems very confused metrically, telling us that if we read Chaonios it is difficult to scan as it involves eliding the £: 'difficilis est scansio, excluso s ’. He might have said straight off that Chaonios is inadmissible metrically. I turn now to the influence on Servius of the change in the Latin language - 54 - between Virgil's time and his. Spoken Latin in his time was diverging more and more from the literary language (cf. his slip into the post-Classical construct­ ion at Aen.9.30 'commemorat nonnullos dicere quod tribus alveis fluat'); and the literary language itself, though archaising in many respects, had naturally undergone changes since the time of Virgil. For example he is worried about the word infractus, which he rightly explains at 5.784 as valde fractus, but on 12.1 he rejects this meaning and says it signifies 'unbroken'; this is a meaning which was current in his time, but not in Virgil's. Similarly he is able to extricate Aeneas from blame in 2.711, where Aeneas' instructions are et longe servet vestigia coniunx: his wife is to follow 'far behind', and the result is that she is lost. But Servius says that longe is equivalent to valde, so that the meaning would be 'let her firmly follow'„ Now longe is in Classical Latin equivalent to valde in certain contexts, e.g. where there is an idea of compar­ ison, e.g. longe maximus, 'far the biggest', 'truly the biggest'; this gradually led to a loose extension of the word so that by the time of Apuleius (but not before8 ) it was possible to say longe opulentus, 'truly rich*. Servius has been misled by his own usage, as also e.g. in Aen.1.13, 5.406, 12.44. Allied to this are some examples of alleged archaism in Virgil supported by quotations from Ennius: on Aen.1.4 saevae Iunonis he explains saeva as magna,9 comparing Ennius induta fuit saeva stola; and on 6.545 he explains explebo numerum as minuam, quoting Ennius navibus explebant sese terrasque replebant. Compare 5.524 where he says sera means gravia, and quotes Sallust serum enim bellum in angustiis futurum. In none of these instances is his interpretation justified. Finally Servius was a defender of Virgil against his detractors. We know a certain amount about the anti-Virgilian critics,10 starting with Agrippa's objection to a new kind of ’cacozelia', and moving on through Carvilius Pictor's Aeneid-omastix to Herennius' collection of Virgil's faults. From what we can gather the objections seem mainly to have been on small points of detail, apparent errors and contradictions, and excessive imitation (to which Virgil replied that it was easier to steal his club from Hercules than a line from Homer). Servius seems to have felt himself bound to answer these people, twice using the term Vergiliomastix of them (Eel.2.23, Aen.5.521), sometimes using phrases like quaeritur, quaestiones, sometimes by his comment bene indicating that he is answering someone who had said male.11 On 5.517 (the archery contest in which the competitors shoot at a dove) he tells us that to blame Aeneas for using as a target the bird sacred to his mother is inanis, because the passage is taken from Homer (a weak defence, one feels). A few lines further on (5.521), Acestes, left without a target because the dove has flown away, shoots an arrow into the empty air to display his skill. Servius tells us that the critic of Virgil finds fault because this is no test of an archer's skill, but counters by saying that it is the view of experts that you can tell a man's skill by his style of shooting. He defends well on 3.203 (the Trojans sail for three days of continual darkness): bene 'incertos', quia quantavis sit obscuritas, tamen noctis est manifesta discretio; unde superflua quaestio est eorum qui dicunt 'tres dies quomodo transisse scierunt si noctem a di -'iscernere non poterant?* On 5.404-5 obstipuere animi: tantorum ingentia septem/terga boum plumbo insuto ferroque rigebant, Servius changes the punctuation to make tantorum go with animi (a ludicrous suggestion) because of the idea that tantorum boum is stultum when he had said 'seven'; it seems here that tantorum has been confused with tot. Again on 5.813-4 he changes the punctuation so as to read tutus quos optas poi-tus accedet; Averni/unus erit tantum amissum quem gurgite quaeres; his aiu is to avoid the criticism that Venus had asked that they should reach the Laurentian Tiber, not the harbour of Avernus, and it leads him to explain the reference as being to Misenus (not Palinurus). Finally at 3.341 Andromache asks Aeneas if - 55 - little lulus still has thoughts of his mother Creusa who was lost in Troy - amissae cura parentis. But Servius says that if this were the meaning, the thought occurs 'How did she know Creusa was dead?' Some think, he goes on, that her prophetic husband Helenus could have,told her, or perhaps she heard Aeneas shouting in the streets of Troy before she was carried away into captivity, Dut both these explanations, he concedes, lack force (utrumque viribus caret). Therefore parentis is not his mother, but his mother-land, Troy. We see very clearly how Servius’ desire to defend Virgil against inadvertency of narrative has led him into absurdity.12 I have tried to illustrate what seem to me to be some of the special interests, prejudices and limitations of Servius which have coloured his comment­ ary, and sometimes led him into untenable or unhelpful remarks: his pedantic approach, his passion for figures and grammar and rules, the difference between his Latin and Virgil's, his antagonism to the hostile critics of Virgil. In this way we may identify reasons for error in Servius, so that his mistakes should not discredit him when the limitations I have defined are not operating. If we recognise his pet failings, we shall better be able to appreciate his monumental work of enormous erudition and (far more often than not) solid common sense. The contrast between the workmanlike assistance which Servius gives us in understanding Virgil (occasionally misguided though he may be) and the dreary verbosity of the contemporary commentary by Tiberius Claudius Donatus is total. If we define and account for Servius’ shortcomings as a commentator, his excellences will be better able to speak for themselves. NOTES (1) For an excellent popular presentation of the main lines of the problem see A.F. Stocker, Vergilius, 1963, 9-15; for the full account we must wait for the Eptlegomenon to the Harvard edition of Servius. (2) See also D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. Benecke, ch.V; J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol.i, p. 231. (3) See in general E. Thomas, Essai sur Servius et son commentaire sur Virgile, Paris, 1880; and for a full discussion of Servius' figures and technical terms see J.L. Moore, A.J.Ph. 1891, 157 f., 267 f.; cf. also C. de Trooz, Mus.Beige, 1929, pp. 229 f., and E.G. Sihler, A.J.Ph. 1910, pp. 1 f, The index by Mountford and Schultz (New York, 1930) is an invaluable aid to this study, (4) Cf. also Servius on Aen.3.246. (5) See R.D. Williams, C.JR. , 1956, 104. (6) Cf. Servius auct. (DS) on Geo.1.210, quoting Bavius and Maevius: 'hordea qui dixit superest ut tritica dicat': 'whoever says barleys may as well say wheats'. (7) Henry in a splendidly unconvincing note supports Servius, citing 'The frog he would a-wooing go' and many other examples of metrical 'ekes'. (8) L. and S. cite Statius, but the instances they give are wrongly interpreted. (9) The reason for this is interesting, as it illustrates Servius' interest in etymology (like other Roman grammarians he accepts wildly improbable derivations) as well as his desire to give an answer to critics of Virgil: 'cum a iuvando dicta sit luno, quaerunt multi cur eam dixerit saevam; et putant temporale esse epitheton, quasi saevam circa Troianos, nescientes quod saevam dicebant voter’'.*» tt magnam tt . « (10) See Suetonius-Donatus 43 f . . F.W ToWili;, C. J. 1929-30, pp. 662 f. , and especially H. Geor^i*, Die /mtike Aneiskritik (1891), where the matter is treated exhaustively. - 56 - (11) An escape was afforded in a few instances by the apparently canonical list of the twelve loci insolubiles to which Servius refers on 9.363 (cf.9.412, 5.626, 12.74). These do not seem to us now to afford insuperable difficulties. (12) Cf. also 3.4, 3.379, 4.399, 5,68.

BOOK REVIEWS

MEYER REINHOLD, VERGIL: AENEID, ECLOGUES, GEORGICS: DETAILED ANALYSES AND SUMMARIES& Barron’s Educational Series Inc., New York, 1966. 95 cents. E.M.W. TILLYARD, THE ENGLISH EPIC AND ITS BACKGROUND. A Galaxy Book, O.U.P. (New York). 18/-. FOR SERVICES TO CLASSICAL STUDIES: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF FRANCIS LETTERS ed. by M. KELLY. F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1966. 4 dollars, 50 cents (Australian). M.P.O. MORFORD, THE POET LUCAN, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1967. 25/-.

Mr. Reinhold's book belongs to a class of pedagogic literature which is produced on an extensive scale in the U.S.A. Works of this kind now exist covering a very wide range of 'classical' authors both ancient and modern. They assume little knowledge or even judgment in the user, serving up to him a great amount of pre-digested information and opinions, and they usually include test questions or papers to ensure that the student is proceeding along the right lines. Where the study of Latin and Greek is severely restricted or not possible at all resort to approaches of this type becomes understandable, attempt­ ing as they do to give the student a synoptic account of great works and reveal the secrets of their composition. 'Classics in translation' courses (for which this book is clearly designed as an aid) abound on the other side of the Atlantic and are becoming more widely recognised in this country as a means of keeping alive a knowledge of, and interest in, the writers of Greece and Rome. We must not complain too much about the yoke of necessity. But it is a pity that Virgil has to wear it too. Dr. Tillyard's book first appeared in 1954. Now we have this welcome paper­ back edition. Seven works form its core - Piers Plowman, The Faerie Queene, Arcadia, Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Holy War, Pope's Iliad and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - but much else comes within Dr. Tillyard's ambit (Gavin Douglas's Aeneid, Berners’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, Elyot's Image of Governance, Cowley's Davideis etc.). His object is to examine different manif­ estations of the epic spirit in English literature down to the end of the eight­ eenth century when neo-classicism ceased to be effective. There is naturally much about Virgil of whom Tillyard shows sympathetic understanding. Readers will be reminded of that other excellent work of criticism (to which Tillyard acknow­ ledges a debt), the late C.S. Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost in which, within brief compass, so much good sense is talked about Virgil’s contribution to the development of epic. Francis Letters was a devoted Virgiiian whose popular work on the poet, published in 1946, contains many sharp insights. He followed this in 1953 with a book on Sophocles which showed a sensitive and discerning mind. For Services to Classical Studies is a memorial volume with an appreciation of Letters by Sir Robert Madgwick of the University of New England followed by contributions from distinguished scholars including Sir Maurice Bowra, the late Miss A.M. Dale, H.D.F. Kitto, A.D. Trendall and T.B.L. Webster. Of the fifteen essays five relate in some way to Greek tragedy, while Letters's other major classical interest, the poetry of Virgil, is represented by only one piece, a discussion - 57 - of the 'Ivory Gate’ question in the sixth book of the Aeneid from the pen of J.J. Bray who is a Q.C. and a specialist in Roman law at Adelaide University but who describes himself as an amateur in Virgil studies. He handles his subject with delicate tact and imagination, but whether everyone will accept his ideas is another matter. He suggests that in sending Aeneas out by the ivory or 'false dreams' gate the poet was not unwilling for his readers to apprehend a penumbra of scepticism and irony around Book VI (and indeed around the whole poem). 'The dream tells us something about the dreamer and Book VI tells us something about tlie hopes and fears, the passions and aspirations of men..... (Virgil) unrolls the magnificent panorama of Book VI and then by a flick of the magician's wrist tosses us a hint, a doubt, if we care to catch it, that perhaps all this is no more than the shadow of a shade or the dream of a dream.' Mr. Bray was aware too late of Brooks Otis's excellent discussion (T.A.P.4. 90 (1959), pp. 165-179) to make any use of it, which is unfortunate. However, he has given us a perceptive study which will stimulate further thought. Rhetoric, though not pervasive, is still present in the Aeneid, as we see in Dido's passionate tirade against Aeneas and in the debating speeches of Book XI. In Lucan the historical subject-matter is lit up by the constant blaze of a rhetorical aurora borealis. Dr. Morford's short book (dear at 25/-) sets out to show that Lucan's literary methods were in conformity with the taste and tendency of his age, and thus to prepare the ground for a 'fairer assessment' of Lucan as a poet. A preliminary chapter deals with the rules of rhetoric as learned and practised by Lucan, after which come chapters on topics common to poetry and rhetoric - Tyranny, Storms, the Occult and Dreams. A final chapter considers Lucan in relation to the Age of Nero and his status as a poet. If Virgil is the standard then Lucan must fail. But this will not do, protests Morford. Lucan's training was of course based on Virgil, but his 'instinct not to imitate the master so much as to absorb and transform, was correct*. Sensibility differs from one age to another. Rhetorical poetry was in fashion, and rhetorical poetry is always at highest pitch; there is no variation in intensity, no relaxation, no periods ’when the reader (if he so chooses) may let the poetry gently lap round hinij, only to surprise him, as Keats says, Mby a fine excess*.' Poetry there is in Lucan, but of a different kind from Virgil’s. Quite so, but this last chapter is not entirely satisfactory. There is some confusion of thought, so it seems to me, a lack of perspicuity in the treatment of Lucan’s ’poetic' merits. Literary criticism is new territory for most classicists and we have quite some way to go yet. Hr. Morford does not clearly separate the reactions of the 1st century A.D. to Lucan's poetry from, those of the 20th century. Perhaps a surer foundation for the discussion would have been laid if, at the out­ set, a distinction had been drawn between the subject-matter and the theme (or themes) which the work contains (or apparently contains). Lucan’s subject-matter is the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. His story, which proceeds fitfully, as Dr. Morford himself observes, is conveyed with all the various devices (includ­ ing disquisitions necromantic and herpetological) which were so acceptable to his contemporaries and of the essence of poetry at the time. Dr. Morford shows this very well. But poetry is more than technique. This is where the artist's deployment of his themes - how suggestive of larger issues, how pregnant with deeper implications his work is - becomes important. This is the level where people begin to speak of a more diffused or even universal appeal. Nforford spec­ ifically recognises the sense of the rise and fall of human fortunes as a thematic element in the Bellum Civile, but there are others (liberty and the Stoic virtues, for instance). On some (and this will depend on their cultural and aesthetic situation) technique as it mediates subject-matter and themes will have an alien­ ating effect. Very many of his generation would readily accord Lucan the title of - 58 -

poet whether for his skill in handling his tools and his materials or his capacity for sublime treatment of themes or for both. For us today his technical virtuosity holds less attraction, being too elaborate to please for long, though his grander, reflective passages undoubtedly still have power to excite emotion and stir the imagination. H. MacL, Currie.

R.F. PAGET, IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ORPHEUS.» Hale, London, 1967. Pp.208. Cloth, 30/-.

The description of Aeneas' descent into the underworld is a fabrication of Virgil's mind, but the springs of his imagination have long been sought in the region of Cumae. Dissatisfied with Maiuri's identification of the setting as the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, Dr. Paget went further afield. In this book he expounds the reasoning which led him, in 1962, to explore the hill-face at Baiae behind the so-called 'Thermae', which are now shown, with greater probab­ ility, to be the remains of a temple. In a complex of tunnels cut into the hillside, he claims to have found the site of the Oracle, of the Dead in the land of the Cimmerians which Odysseus visited to consult Teiresias and whither the Sibyl conducted Aeneas. As an engineer, he has made an admirable record of his survey of the tunnels and chambers he entered by a passage abandoned by excavator^ in 1958 because of the unhealthy air. The tunnels lead to an underground chamber at an upper level, and at a lower level to a water-filled passage; these two terminal features are linked at either end by connecting galleries. Some of the tunnels and the terminal chamber or Inner Sanctuary were in antiquity deliberately filled in, and Paget thinks that this was the work of Agrippa. But the fill has not been removed at any place for examination to determine the dating. Excavation of at least part of the tunnel-complex, for which the author and his helpers lacked facilities, would help to solve this and other problems of the discovery. It is Paget's thesis that Virgil's description of the descensus Averno is founded on a detailed knowledge of the tujinel-complex, but this supposes and does not prove that the whole complex wa's in use in the first century B.C. It is clear that the complex served some ritual purpose, less clear that it was an Oracle of the Dead wherein the underground water-passage was or rep­ resented the Styx. The author was seeking' a place of necromancy and seems to assume that what he found must be what he sought.. One thinks of rites of initiation as another possibility. But Paget is convinced that the course of Aeneas' journey in Aeneid VI, when 'stripped of poetic imagery', is matched at all relevant points by the subterranean complex of, Baiae. It is indeed possible to think that Luctus, Curae, Morbi, Senectus and so on (A.V.I, 274 ff.) were represented in wall-paintings now destroyed by malice or time. But can one accept that murals depicted all that is not obvious in the complex, including the ulmus opaca, ingens (283)? In what remains, the correspondence is not exact: Paget lays stress on the 'parting of the ways' - hie locus est partis ubi se via findit in ambas (540) - but in his account it is reached before the Styx. Further, in Virgil's account, Aeneas passed over, not through, the Styx. The author's enthusiasm and determination, pleasantly evident in his book, have indeed led him to a revelation of the unknown. It may seem churlish to object that his opinions and knowledge of the ambience leave something to be desired. He may depend on Rhys Carpenter's"Folk Tale, Myth and Saga" (1946) in his assumption that the Homeric Nekyomanteia is an elaboration of a mariner's - 59 - tale, but it is inconsistent with his other statements about Homer and destroys his argument from the Odyssey for the antiquity of his Oracle. Whilst the dependence of Aeneid VI on Odyssey XI is not in doubt, the differences are such that it is difficult to maintain that Virgil offers from personal observation a second description of the same rite. The exposition of the religious setting is also marked by vagueness and looseness of expression. The division of ancient religious' practices into two groups, the worship of the Olympians and cults of Pelasgian origin, is too simple: it supposes a pre-Indo-European unity of Mediterranean civilisation for which evid­ ence is lacking and obscures the syncretism of cults of diverse origin. Nor can the region of Baiae and Puteoli be credited with such fundamental influence on the development of the Early Christian Church as the author would have us believe. It la unfortunate that his care in physical investigation and clarity in description are not equalled by his further interpretation of his discovery. The author has been very ill served by proof-readers and printers Who have failed in both accuracy and consistency in the rendering of proper names. Among the more annoying are Dordona (Dodona), Dichearchia (Dicaearchia) and Dionysius (Dionysus); but similar errors are too frequent to enumerate. D.W. Black.

P. VERGILI MARONIS ECLOGAE, edited by H.E. GOULD, M.A., MacMillan, 1967. 10/6d.

According to the JACT ’list of editions in print' (1st January 1967), the only school edition of the Eclogues at the time was that by Plaistowe and Masom, publish­ ed by the University Tutorial Press (5/-). This is now supplemented by the latest edition to the Modern School Classics series - Eclogae, edited by H.E. Gould and published by Macmillan (10/6d.). Like the other volumes in the series, this is designed mainly for the Ordinary Level pupil, reading Virgil for the first time. The introduction (5 pages) recounts the usual details of Virgil's life and works. The text is plain - and rather formidable to the beginner, perhaps. How­ ever, the notes (47 pages) give plenty of help with grammar and translation, without neglecting the allusions. An appendix ’The metre of the Poem' (7 pages) and the full vocabulary (43 pages) will be indispensable to the beginner. A running summary punctuating the text or the notes would have been useful. It is an attractive volume: as well as the pictorial cover, there are four pages of plates and two clear maps of Italy and Greece. Many teachers who still have copies will prefer to use the edition by T.E. Page, first published (again by Macmillan) in 1891. In accordance with the practice of the time, it has a fuller introduction, longer notes, more detailed vocabulary, and even more illustrations. For those without copies, this will be a satisfactory substitute. D.W. Blandford. I should like to bring to the notice of the Society a remarkable achievement of one of our members, Mr. L.L. Johnson. He has made a verse translation of the whole of the Aeneid in 14-line Spenserian stanzas, with a highly complex pattern of rhyme; the style and language are also Spenserian, and at times attain a grandeur rarely to be found in 'modern* translations. Moreover, Mr. Johnson has printed and bound the work himself, in a limited edition (Argyrokastro Press, Gulberwick, Lerwick, Shetland, 1967). Surely this degree of versatility must be unique among Virgilians! J.G. Landels. V