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TYRTAEUS IN VIRGIL'S FIRST ECLOGUE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Boris Kayachev
Boris Kayachev*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
*
[email protected]
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Extract

The first eclogue opens with an exposition, put in the mouth of Meliboeus (1.1–5):

      Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
      siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
      nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua.
      nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
      formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.
These five lines receive two and a half pages in Coleman's commentary, five in Clausen's, six in the recent commentary by Cucchiarelli, and eighteen in Paraskeviotis's unpublished thesis on the Eclogues’ sources. Yet on the central line and a half (3–4a), in which Meliboeus speaks about himself rather than Tityrus, only Cucchiarelli spends more (but only slightly more) than half a page. For lines 1–2 and 4b–5, focussed on Tityrus, numerous intertexts have been suggested: Theocritus 1.1–3 and 7.88–9, Lucretius 4.589 and 5.1398, Meleager, AP 7.196.2, Callimachus, Aetia fr. 73 Pfeiffer, to list the most important ones. No allusion seems to have been detected in 3–4a.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 796 - 799
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Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank CQ's anonymous reviewer and CQ's editor for their comments and suggestions.

References

1 R. Coleman, Vergil Eclogues (Cambridge, 1977), 71–3; W. Clausen, Virgil Eclogues (Oxford, 1994), 33–9; A. Cucchiarelli, Publio Virgilio Marone: Le Bucoliche (Roma, 2012), 136–42; G. Paraskeviotis, ‘Vergil's use of Greek and Roman sources in the Eclogues’ (Diss., University of Leeds, 2009), 18–35.

2 In addition to the commentaries, see e.g. B.W. Breed, Pastoral Inscriptions: Reading and Writing Virgil's Eclogues (London, 2006), 95–101.

3 Cf. Verdenius, W.J., ‘Tyrtaeus 6–7 D: a commentary’, Mnemosyne 22 (1969), 337–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 339.

4 Note that πίονα ἔργα and πίονας ἀγρούς are allomorphs of the same formula; cf. Od. 8.560–1 πόλιας καὶ πίονας ἀγροὺς | ἀνθρώπων and Hom. Hymn Dem. 93 ἀνθρώπων πόλιας καὶ πίονα ἔργα.

5 On the engagement with non-bucolic genres in the Eclogues, see especially S.J. Harrison, Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (Oxford, 2007), 34–74, and F. Jones, Virgil's Garden: The Nature of Bucolic Space (London, 2011), 17–24.

6 Cf. in general R. Hunter, ‘One verse of Mimnermus? Latin elegy and archaic Greek elegy’, in T.D. Papanghelis, S.J. Harrison, S. Frangoulidis (edd.), Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations (Berlin, 2013), 337–49, speaking (at 341) of the ‘general Roman silence about archaic Greek elegy, a silence for which there is all but certainly more than one reason, including the relative unfamiliarity of texts’.

7 Suda, s.v. Τυρταῖος, speaks of five books.

8 Such a single-book edition is often postulated for the fourth century b.c.; cf. Meier, M., ‘Tyrtaios – Die Entstehung eines Bildes’, A&A 49 (2003), 157–82Google Scholar, at 170.

9 Lindo, L.I., ‘Tyrtaeus and Horace Odes 3.2’, CPh 66 (1971), 258–60Google Scholar.

10 See e.g. Paus. 4.23.1–9.

11 On bucolic and non-bucolic geography in the Eclogues, cf. Jones (n. 5), 17–18 and passim.

12 Tityrus’ servitude to Galatea, during which he could make no profit from selling his farm products and therefore was unable to buy himself free (1.33–5), can perhaps be compared with the enslavement and heavy quitrent imposed on the Messenians (fr. 6.2–3 West δεσποσύνοισι φέροντες ἀναγκαίης ὕπο λυγρῆς | ἥμισυ πάνθ’ ὅσσων καρπὸν ἄρουρα φέρει).

13 See Breed (n. 2), 101–16.

14 See V. Panoussi, Greek Tragedy in Vergil's “Aeneid”: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge, 2009), 2–3, who speaks of ‘resolving the controversy of the “two voices” of the Aeneid by grounding it in the tension between two generic models, epic and tragic’. This is arguably an oversimplification, but Panoussi's general intuition that the Aeneid's polyphony of ideas in some way correlates with its intertextual polyphony is no doubt correct.

15 Note that Meliboeus denounces his former bucolic voice (1.77): carmina nulla canam.

16 See M. von Albrecht, P. Vergilius Maro: Bucolica – Hirtengedichte (Stuttgart, 2001), 100–2.

17 It has, of course, been disputed whether Tityrus’ invitation is sincere, whether it is an adequate response to Meliboeus’ misfortunes, and whether it will be accepted. For a positive reading, see G. Davis, ‘Consolation in the bucolic mode: the Epicurean cadence of Vergil's first eclogue’, in D. Armstrong et al. (edd.), Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (Austin, 2004), 63–74. Cf. also von Albrecht (n. 16), 102: ‘So regt Tityrus gerade durch seine »Unbeweglichkeit« Meliboeus an, den Bannkreis der Antinomien, in dem er sich bewegt, zu verlassen. Tityrus’ einladende Geste könnte den anderen, wenn auch nur vorübergehend, in die eigene Welt einbeziehen: ein Ansatz zu problemlösendem Verhalten.’