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Virgil's third Eclogue: how do you keep an idiot in suspense?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

John Henderson
John Henderson
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

Two herdsmen meet and bicker; bargain over a stake; duel in balladeering; and ballot their umpire for a final decision. The first half of their poem dramatizes the process of challenge and defiance from which the bout materializes; the result is a draw. Critics attempt what none of its three herdsmen try out loud, namely to solve the pair of riddles with which the song-contest ends, before the judge pronounces the result. Solutions range between putative attribution to the bucolic minds of the riddlers, and ascription to their creator, the intellectual, urban, bookish, Hellenizing poetaster, who here, in any event, dares a touch of rustic needling that he precisely did not find in his studies in Theocritea, which include no riddles. Solution has generally seemed the self-evident challenge to scholar-readers.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 1998 , pp. 213 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

1 Powell, B. B., ‘Poeta Ludens: thrust and counter-thrust in Eclogue 3’ ICS 1 (1976), 113–121Google Scholar

2 Segal, C. P., ‘Vergil's caelatum opus: an interpretation of the Third Eclogue’, AJPh 88 (1967), 279–308 (= Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil [Princeton, 1981], pp. 235–264).Google Scholar

3 Otis, B., Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford, 1964), p. 143.Google Scholar

4 Almost uniquely, Leach, E. W., Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Cornell, 1974), pp. 174fGoogle Scholar. claims that Damoetas' ‘boasting gives Menalcas a chance to close the bargain and dismiss the heifer. When the singing is over, Palaemon, the judge, seems unaware that the cups had been offered and assumes the prize was a heifer.’ But Rose, cf. H. J., The Eclogues of Vergil (Berkeley, 1942), pp. 39–42, at p. 41, ‘The heifer has not been wagered [Palaemon] d o e s n o t know what they are singing for but merely assumes that so earnest a contest must be for a considerable prize.’ Powell (n. 1), p. 115n., claims that ‘Segal, I take it, has not understood that a heifer is the prize’; but this, I take it, is not quite to understand Segal's position: while it is true that he slights ‘the lowly cow’ against ‘the elaborate cups’ (loc. cit., p. 307), and forgets what he is about by remarking that ‘The cups and the long debate on the relative value of cups and cow (29–43) are now forgotten’ (p. 302), and ‘Both the cups and the contest of which they are the prize become meaningful at a level other than that of rustic realism: both are transformed into something symbolic’ (p. 286), Segal wanted his Vergil to find a way to let the Theocritean scenario shine through his own–unresolved–by–play: ‘Theocritus has the single shepherd offer both cup and goat. The two gifts are of coordinate value.... For Vergil... there is a cleavage between the two realms.... [H]is scene of bargaining... begins to open the dichotomy between practical and aesthetic, “rustic” and “poetic” ’ (p. 284). ‘The issue between them, cups or cow, is still unresolved at the moment when Palaemon, the umpire-to-be, appears and brings an end to this first half of the poem’ (p. 286). With ‘Palaemon's closing speech the poet returns to and re-affirms the simplicity of his original pastoral setting after he has intimated the larger possibilities that lie within it ’ (p. 302). My Segal treads a fine line between having his cups and milking them.Google Scholar

5 E.g. Coleman, R., Vergil, Eclogues (Cambridge, 1977), p. 113, adloc, believes the herdsman: ‘like the bull in 100 the heifer belongs to himself and not like the sheep to Aegon’Google Scholar

6 Many readers spy ‘two beech cups’ here, presumably reading back from et nobis idem Alcimedon duo pocula fecit (‘For me too did the same A. make two cups’, v. 44), as if Damoetas were guessing Menalcas had a pair of cups, and perhaps blurring the detail of the ‘two signs’ (duo signa, v. 40) into the bargain, perhaps, even, not managing or deigning to concentrate

7 Cf. Segal (n. 2), pp. 289f. for brief appreciation of the artistry paraded here.

8 On the poetic imagery of working ‘in relief’, cf. Crinagoras, Anth. Pal. 9.545.1 (on Callimachus' Hekale), TO , with G. D. Williams, Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 80f., esp. p. 81, n. 70

9 Boyle, Cf. A. J., ‘A reading of Virgil's Eclogues’, Ramus 4 (1975), 187–203, at p. 194, ‘The works of art [the cups] fail to affect the discord manifest in the herdsmen's world. From the artist's values and perceptions, embodied in his creative work, the herdsmen learn nothing’CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, M. O., Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia (New York, 1989), p. 55, ‘...there is no indication that either of the boys knows what the figures on the cups might mean. Neither of them, in fact, has ever drunk from the cups’; Leach (n. 4), p. 175, ‘The cups symbolize all that is lacking in these rustics whose conversation makes disorder its theme and takes no account of the beauty of the natural world.’Google Scholar

10 So Lee (n. 9), p. 54, ‘Through the contest we are never quite sure what the prize will be’; Schmidt, E. A., Poetische Reflexion. Vergils Bukolik (Munich, 1972), p. 178Google Scholar: ‘Vergil lasse uns in eel. III im unklaren dariiber, welche Preise eigentlich gesetzt werden.’ Too sure: Conington, J., P. Vergili Maronis Opera with a Commentary (London, 1881 4), vol. I, p. 50 on v. 109, ‘Both ultimately wagered a heifer’Google Scholar; Clausen, W. V., Virgil, Eclogues (Oxford,1994), p. 104, on v. 49, ueniam quocumque uocaris, ‘So confident is Menalcas of winning that he now agrees to meet Damoetas on his own ground, i.e. to stake a cow.‘ More circumspect, e.g. Coleman (n. 5), p. 116 on v. 49, ueniam quocumque uocaris, ‘The phrase suggests that Menalcas has conceded Damoetas' point and will wager a heifer after all.’Google Scholar

11 Coleiro, E., An Introduction to Vergil's Bucolics with a Critical Edition of the Text (Amsterdam, 1979), p. 123, ‘The real song was from v. 60 to v. 107.’Google Scholar

12 Halperin, Cf. D. M., Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (Yale, 1982), pp. 185–189, ‘Three scenes on an Ivy-Cup’, for the arguments in favour of viewing the goatherd's cup in Idyll 1 as a figure for themes of bucolic poetry.Google Scholar

13 Segal (n. 2), p. 301; Putnam, Cf. M. C. J., Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton, 1970), pp. 125f., ‘These are strange objects for a humble shepherd to be carrying around–esoteric and highly cultivated’;Google ScholarFaber, R., ‘Vergil Eclogues 3.37, Theocritus 1, and ekphrasis’, AJPh 116 (1995), 411–417, sees in caelatum here pastoral figured as parody of epic.Google Scholar

14 Contrast Putnam (n. 13), p. 128, ‘All in all, this is no competition in the negative sense but an attempt to join in depicting the perfect shepherd's life, with divine assurance and happy love’, with Lee (n. 9), p. 55, ‘The two shepherds...never really pass beyond Sicilian banter in the contest itself.’

15 Calpurnius' Eclogue 6 springs the surprise of allowing the bickering to overflow past the selection of the judge. No songs are heard; rather, the judge finally loses patience and, for his last word, threatens to get some help in putting an end to the back-biting. Virgil's closest influence, in this regard, was Theocritus 5 (but see below).

16 To play by the sane regulations of Rosenmeyer, T. G., The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, 1969), p. 159, ‘If the palm is to go to the singer with the creative imagination, then it should go to the starter, since it is he who sets the pace initially. If, on the other hand, the victory should accrue to the more accomplished artist, then in many cases the second singer, who has his opponent's model to draw on, ought to get the prize.’ Leach (n. 4), p. 176 follows Jachmann in averring ‘that the topical linking of the strophes does not appear natural and effortless...but artificial and strained. In fact, the singers do not attempt to complement one another or to embroider each other's themes.’ Cf. Clausen (n. 10), p. 114 on w. 96–97, ‘Only here does Damoetas take his cue from Menalcas.’ I follow the lines of Powell's analysis in finding oblique but engaged and continuous dialectic running clear through the contest.Google Scholar

17 ‘The matching of perceptive beings in a nexus of friendship and equality’, as Rosenmeyer defines the song-contest ([n. 16], p. 157), without a trace of cynicism.

18 The fusion of love-poetry-song-contest is cued already at the outset in v. 59, amant alterna Camenae (‘the Muses–the only Italian Muses in all Virgil–love alternation’).

19 ‘Another marked change of tone suddenly comes over the poem at line 92', Putnam (n. 13), p. 130; Leach (n. 4), pp. 177, 179, ‘...here the singers’ rivalry takes an explicitly unpleasant turn from this point on the descriptions of the pastoral world become harsh and unpleasant.’

20 I borrow this from Powell ([n. 1], p. 120), though it obscures the force of the bull's rutting lust as a caricature for the herdsman.

21 Segal (n. 2), pp. 300, 302, 301.

22 Segal, Ibid., pp. 296f. attempts to cordon ‘love’ from ‘poetry’ as a thematic ‘alternation’ through the song-contest, but the love of poetry modulates into and out of the poetry of love (Schoepsdau, cf. K., ‘Motive der Liebesdichtung in Vergils dritter Ecloge’, Hermes 102 [1974], 268–300).Google Scholar

23 So Putnam (n. 13), p. 134, ‘The shepherds have not really been challenging each other, as at the poem's outset, but have presented a unity of subject and mood at each stage of the debate. Each is therefore worthy of the prize’ Powell (n. 1), p.121, ‘Palaemon rightly calls it a draw. Each man deserves the sacrificial animal’; Berg, W., Early Virgil (London, 1974), p. 192, ‘Palaemon blesses both: each is worthy of the heifer, for each has shown that he understands what it is to be a poet.’ Contrast Boyle (n. 9), p. 194, ‘Palaemon pronounces both singers worthy of the heifer, not of the cups’; Leach (n. 4), pp. 175, 181, ‘Or perhaps he considers both contenders unworthy of the cups.....It is only fitting that no prizes should be awarded to singers who have distorted their subject to serve their own hostile ends’; Lee (n. 9), p. 55,‘ each deserves to win a heifer. Neither, presumably, is worthy of the cups. Works of art have never communicated any message to them.’Google Scholar

24 Callim. Ait. fr. 1.23f., Virg. Eel. 6.5.

25 Theocritus' most immediate ‘answer’ appears at 5.1, llatyes multievocation of Idylls usurps and undoes the schemata of Id. 1, even as the poem pastes together Id 4 and 5, destabilizing all three ( four...more) structures of power and valuation as it does so, and providing us with too many ‘answers’–and this is exactly the riddle of intertextuality, where the practice of reading begins its productivity, and of sociality, where it will never be known how Battus (Id. 4) would have got on with Lakon (Id. 5) or Thyrsis (Id. 1), nor Goatherd (Id. 1) with Korydon (Id. 4) or Komatas (Id. 5), nor Menalcas and Damoetas with any of their ‘mummies and daddies’, nor what ‘our’ poets would have made of them, with us. And these questions engross the politics as well as the poetics of pastoral, since Virgil turned Id. l.lff. into the entrie to both the exchange between pensioned Tityrus and expropriated Meliboeus, and to the book of triumviral Eclogues (Farrell, cf. J., ‘Literary allusion and cultural poetics in Vergil's Third Eclogue’, Vergilius 38 [1992], 64–71).Google Scholar

26 Keith, A. M., The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2 (Michigan, 1992), pp. 95–114, esp. 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gutzwiller, Cf. K. J., Theocritus' Pastoral Analogies: The Formation of a Genre (Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 35–44, ‘The animal thief and intellectual activity’, esp. p. 40 on Eel. 3.16–3.20.Google Scholar