The earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called “Bucolics”—i. e., Songs of the Herdsmen—and sometimes “Eclogues,” as being “selections” from a larger number of similar compositions which the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in fact, however familiar to us in the language of ancient and modern poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the satyrs and fauns and dryad-nymphs with whom a fanciful mythology had peopled the same region, and who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral poets in the company of their human dramatis personÆ. The Arcadia of history was a rich and fertile district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as one of our own midland counties. Like them, if it had any reputation at all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation for dulness. It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of the qualities of the animal seem to have been shared by the natives themselves. “A slip of Arcadia” passed into a proverbial nickname for a boy who was the despair of his schoolmaster. The Arcadia of the poets and romance-writers, from classical times down to our own Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr Conington says, “the poets’ golden land, in which imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life of the present.” This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the early days of authorship down to a very recent date. Thyrsis and Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetical existence of something like fifteen hundred years, and talk very much the same language in the Pastorals of Pope that they did in the Greek Idylls. It is curious, also, that when society itself has been most artificial, this affectation of pastoral simplicity seems to have been most in vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who lavished their applause and rewards upon Virgil when he read to them these lays of an imaginary shepherd-life; how GalatÆa was won by a present of a pair of wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Meliboeus thankfully went to supper with his friend Tityrus on roasted chestnuts and goat-milk cheese. Society in England had never less of the reality of pastoral simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady chose to be painted with a lamb or a crook—when the “bucolic cant,” as Warton contemptuously terms it, was the fashionable folly of the day. So when aristocratic life in France had reached a phase of corruption which was only to be purged by a revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette, with her ladies and gentlemen in waiting, were going about the farm at Trianon with crooks in their hands, playing at shepherds and shepherdesses, on the brink of that terrible volcano.

Of the ten Eclogues, the majority take the form of pastoral dialogue. Frequently it is a singing-match between two rival shepherds—not always conducted in the most amicable fashion, or with the most scrupulous delicacy in the matter of repartee, the poetical “Arcadian” being in this point a pretty faithful copy from nature. Most of the names, as well as of the subjects and imagery, are taken, as has been said, from the Greek Idylls of Theocritus. So closely has Virgil copied his model that he even transplants the natural scenery of Sicily, employed by Theocritus, to his pastoral dreamland, which otherwise would seem to be localised on the banks of the Mincio, in the neighbourhood of his native Mantua. This gives him an opportunity of touching upon subjects of the day, and introducing, in the name and guise of shepherds, himself and his friends. Sometimes we can see through the disguise by the help of contemporary Roman history; more often, probably, the clue is lost to us through our very imperfect modern knowledge. We know pretty well that Tityrus,—who in the First Eclogue expresses his gratitude to the “godlike youth” who has preserved his little farm from the ruthless hands of the soldier colonists, while his poor neighbour Meliboeus has lost his all,—can be no other than the poet himself, who thus compliments his powerful protector. So, too, in a later Eclogue, when the slave Moeris meets his neighbour Lycidas on the road, and tells him how his master has been dispossessed of his farm by the military colonists, and has narrowly escaped with his life, we may safely trust the traditional explanation, that in the master Menalcas we have Virgil again, troubled a second time by these intruders, and compelled to renew his application to his great friend at Rome. The traditional story was, that the poet was obliged to take refuge from the violence of the soldiers in the shop of a charcoal-burner, who let him out at a back-door, and eventually had to throw himself into the river Mincio to escape their pursuit. Lycidas, in the Pastoral, is surprised to hear of his neighbour’s new trouble.

Honest Lycidas expresses his horror at the narrow escape of the neighbourhood from such a catastrophe. What should they all have done for a poet, if they had lost Menalcas? who could compose such songs—and who could sing them? And he breaks out himself into fragmentary reminiscences which he has picked up by ear from his friend. Then Moeris too—who, being a poet’s farm-servant, has caught a little of the inspiration—repeats a few lines of his master’s. “As you hope for any blessings,” says Lycidas, “let me hear the rest of it.”

Moeris can remember a scrap or two of his master’s verses. There was one in particular, which Lycidas had heard him singing one moonlight night, and would much like to hear again;—“I can remember the tune myself,” he says, “but I have forgotten the words.” Moeris will try. The compliment to Augustus with which the strain begins sufficiently marks the real poet who here figures as Menalcas.

But Moeris cannot remember much more. They must both wait, he says, until his master comes home again. So the pair walk on together towards Rome, cheating the long journey with singing as they go; and thus closes this pretty pastoral dialogue, the graceful ease of which, with its subdued comedy, it would be impossible for any translator to render adequately.

Another of these Eclogues relates the capture of Silenus, one of the old rural deities of very jovial reputation, by two young shepherds, while he lay sleeping off the effect of yesterday’s debauch. He is commonly represented—and he was rather a favourite subject with ancient artists—as a corpulent bald-headed old man, riding upon an ass, in a state of evident inebriety, carrying a capacious leather wine-bottle, and led and followed by a company of Nymphs and Bacchanals. He had the reputation, like the sea-god Proteus, of knowing the mysteries of nature and the secrets of the future; and there was a current story, upon which this Pastoral is founded, of his having been caught while asleep, like him, by some shepherds in Phrygia, and carried to King Midas, to whom, as the price of his release, he answered all questions in natural philosophy and ancient history—just as Proteus unfolded to Menelaus, under similar compulsion, the secret of his future fate.

The Pastoral into which Virgil introduces this story is addressed to his friend Varus—a man evidently of high rank—and seems meant as an apology for not complying with his request to write a poem on his exploits.

Then he goes on to tell his story:—

Silenus’s strain is a poetical lecture on natural philosophy. He is as didactic in his waking soberness as some of his disciples are in their cups. He describes how the world sprang from the four original elements, and narrates the old fables of the cosmogonists—the Deluge of Deucalion, the new race of men who sprang from the stones which he and Pyrrha cast behind them, the golden reign of Saturn, the theft of fire by Prometheus, and a long series of other legends, with which he charms his listeners until the falling shadows warn them to count their flocks, and the evening-star comes out, as the poet phrases it, “over the unwilling heights of Olympus”—loath yet to lose the fascinating strain.

Besides this Pastoral addressed to Varus, there are three inscribed to other friends: one to Cornelius Gallus, and two to Caius Asinius Pollio, who was among the most eminent men of his day alike as a statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, and at that time held the high office of consul at Rome. He had been the friend of the great Julius, as he was afterwards of his nephew Octavianus (Augustus), and was probably the person who preserved or restored to the poet his country estate. The fourth in order of these poems, commonly known as the “Pollio,” is the most celebrated of the whole series, and has given rise to a great amount of speculation. Its exact date is known from the record of Pollio’s consulship—40 before the Christian era. Its subject is the expected birth of a Child, in whom the golden age of innocence and happiness should be restored, and who was to be the moral regenerator of the world. The date of the poem itself, approaching so closely the great Birth at Bethlehem—the reference to the prophecy of the CumÆan Sibyl, long supposed to be a voice from heathendom predictive of the Jewish Messiah—and the remarkable coincidence of the metaphorical terms employed by the poet with the prophetical language of the Old Testament, have led many to the pious belief that the Roman poet did but put into shape those vague expectations of a Great Deliverer which were current in his day, and which were to have a higher fulfilment than he knew. The “Pollio” may be familiar to many English readers who are unacquainted with the original through Pope’s fine imitation of it in his poem of “The Messiah,” first published anonymously in the ‘Spectator.’[6] But as the Latin Eclogue itself is short, it may be well to attempt a translation of it here, before remarking further upon its meaning.

It would be out of place here to discuss the various conjectures of the learned as to who the Child was, to whose birth the poet thus looks forward. Whether it was a son of the Consul Pollio himself, who died in his infancy; or the expected offspring of Augustus’s marriage with Scribonia, which was, after all, a daughter—Julia—whose profligate life and unhappy death were a sad contradiction of Virgil’s anticipations; or a child of Octavia, sister of Augustus;—which of these it was, or whether it was any one of them, neither ancient nor modern commentators have been able to decide. “It is not certain,” says Mr. Conington, “that the child ever was born; it is certain that, if born, he did not become the regenerator of his time.” It is possible, too, that the whole form of the poem may be strictly imaginary—that the child had been born already, long ago, and that it was no other than Octavianus CÆsar—and that Virgil does but use here the licence of poetry to express his hopes of a golden age that might follow the peace of Brundusium. And as to how far this very remarkable poem may or may not be regarded as one of what Archbishop Trench has called “the unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” would be to open a field of inquiry of the highest interest indeed, but far too wide for these pages. Yet it cannot be entirely passed over.

The Sibylline oracles, to which Virgil alludes in his opening lines, whatever their original form, were so garbled and interpolated, both in Christian and pre-Christian times, that it is impossible now to know what they did or did not contain. But they were recognised, in the early Church—by the Emperor Constantine, who is said to have attributed his own conversion in great part to their study, and by St. Augustine, amongst others—as containing distinct prophecies of the Messiah. The recognition of the Roman Sibyl or Sibyls as bearing their testimony to the truth of Christianity is still familiar to us in the ancient hymn, “Dies IrÆ,”—so often translated—

and in an old Latin mystery-play of the eleventh century, when the witnesses are summoned to give evidence as to the Nativity, there appear among them, in company with the Hebrew prophets, Virgil and the Sibyl, who both join in a general “Benedicamus Domino” at the end. St. Augustine quotes twenty-seven Latin verses (which, however, seem very fragmentary and unconnected) as actual utterances of the Sibyl of ErythrÆ, which contain prophecies, more or less clear, of the great Advent. The original, he says, was in Greek, and the initial letters of each verse formed a sentence, “Jesus Christ the Son of God the Saviour.”[7] Whatever truth there may be in any special predictions of this nature as existing in the heathen world, it is at least certain that there prevailed very largely, about the date of the Christian era, a vague expectation of some personal advent which should in some way regenerate society.

The new “cycle of centuries,” which the poet supposes to begin with the birth of the Child, refers to the doctrine held by Plato and his disciples (possibly of Etruscan origin) of an “Annus Magnus,” or Great Year. It was believed that there were certain recurring periods at long intervals, in which the history of the world repeated itself.[8] A curious story in illustration of this belief is told by Plutarch in his life of Sulla.

Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of the genius and character of Virgil’s pastoral poetry. It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said to have now become obsolete. English poets were at one time strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton, Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,—the last perhaps the most successful,—were all more or less imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity again.