The Eclogues

The first poem in Virgil’s collection of Eclogues emphasizes the preeminent sociopolitical issue of his time: the Roman civil wars. Born in the year 70 BCE, Virgil witnessed decades of tumultuous conflict. Nearly a century of violent infighting came at great cost to the Roman people, both personally and politically. (See the Themes section’s “Contemporary Roman Politics.”)

One of the consequences of these wars was especially close to Virgil’s heart: land appropriations. After the civil war avenging the assassination of Julius Caesar (43-42 BCE), the Second Triumvirate (a political alliance between historical figures Octavian, Marc Antony, and Lepidus) rewarded their soldiers with land confiscated from ordinary Romans in the countryside. Virgil’s own ancestral farm changed hands during this time, though his connections in Rome soon saw it restored. The panic among land-owning Romans at the time was no doubt intense; as Meliboeus exclaims, “Oh, will I ever in any time to come, look / with wonder at a land I can at last call / my own […] Is some rough soldier to have these furrowed fields? / Some foreigner these crops?” (Lines 69-74).

Virgil contrasts his collection’s setting—an idyllic rural region—and the violence of Roman land appropriations to great effect. Eclogue 1 opens with a classic pastoral image: A shepherd, Tityrus, lazing under a tree playing his pipe (Lines 1-2). This picturesque scene is immediately undercut by Meliboeus’s distress at being forced to leave his farm, a rude intrusion of reality into paradise (Lines 4-5). The eclogue’s lyrical language comes not from Tityrus, but Meliboeus, as he reminisces on the beauty of his home (“Fortunate old man, your fields will still be yours. […] Here your hedge, as it has always been, at your neighbor’s line / will pasture on willow buds those Hyblaean bees, / which soon will coax you to sleep with their light murmuring hum;” Lines 47-56).

Roman readers would have sympathized with Meliboeus being forced from his ancestral home as a free-born Roman; his counterpart Tityrus describes himself as a former slave. Tityrus left for Rome after his new girlfriend, Amaryllis, helped him out monetarily; his previous girlfriend, Galatea, used up all his money. (In Rome, slaves could free themselves by buying their freedom, a process called manumission.) In Rome, Tityrus sought help from a mysterious young man he now worships as a god—Octavian, Virgil’s patron, whom this collection (and Virgil’s later epic, the Aeneid) praises. But even as Virgil thanks the Roman higher-ups for their settling the civil conflict, he also spotlights those who lost something in the struggle. This is typical of Virgil’s poetic voice: Peace only comes at great expense and cannot be achieved without sacrifice.