The Capture of Silenus

Extract

A possible place to start yet one more discussion of the song of Silenus is to reiterate Otto Skutsch's ‘robuste Fragestellung’ of 1956: ‘Was will im Grunde die sechste Ekloge besagen?’ One could argue that the answer is ‘Gar nichts’: this is perhaps the implication of some treatments, notably of Zeph Stewart's article and of at least the first part of Williams's discussion of the poem in Tradition and originality in Roman poetry. Anyway it is a tenable hypothesis that we should regard the values of the sixth Eclogue as purely formal and that it is a positive error to look behind its exquisite formal ποικιλία for some discursive statement about life or poetry or both. ‘Look behind’ is certainly what in this case we have to do if we want a discursive statement, because overtly the poem makes no such statement. But from antiquity to now it has been hard to rest with the hypothesis that the poem's values are purely formal, and this recurrent unease seems motivated by something about the poem, not just something about its readers: reluctant or not, at intervals most of us do grit our teeth and say: ‘Etwas besagt sie schon.’ The variety of views about what that something might be and the sad banality that the something too often turns out to exhibit have not so far deterred us from trying to find it.