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The Civil Status of Corydon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Roland Mayer
Roland Mayer
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, London
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Extract

There is a suspicion in the minds of a number of Virgil's modern commentators that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave, and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis (who may be the Iollas of line 57) is his master too.1 It is the purpose of this note to show that the suspicion is baseless.

None of the ancient commentators appears to know of such an interpretation. This should be significant in that they probably shared the poet's assumptions about literary decorum. We can gather how Virgil viewed the function of slaves in poetry of an exalted genre by looking at the Aeneid and the Georgics. The essential considerations were set out by W. E. Heitland in Agricola (1921), pp. 218-41. Virgil was less ready to introduce slaves into his epic than Homer had been. More startling is the complete silence of the poet in the Georgics on the use of slave labour in contemporary farming. Literary decorum induces this reticence; slaves are too mean to have a voice or place in epos. How do matters stand with pastoral?

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 298 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1983

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References

1 These commentators, with or without diffidence, take Corydon to be a slave: Conington (ed. 5, 1898), Perret (1961), Coleman (1977), Williams (1979); Forbiger (ed. 4, 1872) asserted that he is free. The list can be lengthened in favour of servitude: Rose, H. J., The Eclogues of Vergil (1942), p. 34Google Scholar; Leach, E. W., AJP 87 (1966), 441Google Scholar; Putnam, M. C. J., Virgil's Pastoral Art (1970), p. 83Google Scholar; Lee, G., Greece and Rome 28 (1981), 10 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clausen, W. V. in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature ii (1982), p. 307Google Scholar.

2 Fraenkel, E., JRS 51 (1961), 47Google Scholar = Kl. Btrg. 2 (1964), 116 f.Google Scholar; Kroll, W., RM 64 (1909), 50–5Google Scholar.