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THE LATER BUCOLIC POETS OF ROME.

Ir bucolic poetry found no cultivators at Rome before the time of Virgil, it does not seem to have enjoyed much more popularity afterwards. Wernsdorf (Poetae Latini Minores, vol. 2, praef. pp. vi, vii), who wonders that it should not have flourished more among a people originally sprung from shepherds and preserving the recollection of their origin by annual festivals, and inclines to lay the blame on the luxurious temper of the great city, as being naturally antagonistic to a taste for rustic simplicity, is sufficiently explicit in his testimony to the fact, stating that no trace can be discovered of the existence of any bucolic writer after Virgil earlier than Calpurnius, while the pastoral poets of a later period, with the exception of Nemesianus, who, in his view, as we shall see, is not really one of them, are inelegant and hardly worth reprinting. Calpurnius and Nemesianus themselves cannot be said to stand high in the list of post-Augustan authors; but as they happen to fall within the classical period, as commonly understood, and conform more closely than their successors to the Theocritean or Virgilian type in the treatment of their subject, perhaps a brief account of them may not be unacceptable.

At the outset we are met by a critical question, affecting the authorship of the works which bear their name. These amount jointly to eleven pastorals, most of them averaging less than one hundred lines. All of them were assigned by the five first editions, following the majority of the MSS., to a single writer, T. (or, as the first edition gives it, after one MS., C.) Calpurnius Siculus. The sixth edition, 'impressum Parmae per Angelu Ugoletū,' without a date, but referred by Ulitius to the year 1500, made a division of the authorship, attributing the seven first pastorals to Calpurnius, the remaining four to [M. Aurelius Olympius] Nemesianus, on the authority of a most ancient and correct' MS. from Germany belonging to Thadacus Ugoletus. It also prefixed a title to the bucolics of Calpurnius, inscribing them to this same Nemesianus. This arrangement seems to have been followed almost unhesitatingly by subsequent editors till the time of Janus Ulitius, who, in his 'Venatio Novantiqua' (Elzevir, 1645, an edition of the didactic writers on hunting, together with the pastorals of Calpur

nius and Nemesianus), stated reasons for restoring the whole to Calpurnius. The tide now turned: Burmann, in the preface to his 'Poetae Latini Minores' (Leyden, 1731), accepted Ulitius' view, though, like him, he did not venture in his text to disturb the received division; and Wernsdorf, fifty years afterwards, in his preface cited above, and in an introductory essay on Calpurnius and his Eclogues, enforced the same doctrine by an array of arguments which till very lately were generally supposed to have set the question at rest. The main considerations on which he relies are the absence of any mention of Nemesianus as a pastoral writer by Vopiscus, who alludes to his other works, as well as by the earlier scholars after the revival of learning, the fact that no MS. containing his undisputed works contains these pastorals, the insufficiency of a single MS. authority, the self-contradictory character of the testimony supplied by the Parma edition, which apparently shows that in that single MS. the arrangement had been tampered with by a later hand, the similarity of the style of the two sets of poems, 'ut lac lacti simillimus,' and the probability that Calpurnius would write neither more nor less than eleven pastorals, that being the number of the Idyls of Theocritus which may fairly be called rustic proper-an argument somewhat recondite in itself, and depending on a proposition which has itself to be supported by a good deal of wiredrawn reasoning, of too special a character to be detailed here. So matters appear to have stood till the publication of Maurice Haupt's 'De Carminibus Bucolicis Calpurnii et Nemesiani Liber' (Leipsic, 1854). In this monograph, which in its comprehensive knowledge and ingenuity of conjecture is a fair specimen of the best German scholarship of our day, the divided authorship of these Eclogues is strongly asserted. Rejecting considerations grounded on the literary character of the several poems as too dependent on individual taste to furnish material for argument, the writer points out one remarkable peculiarity which discriminates the undisputed Calpurnian Eclogues from the others, the absence of elisions in any foot but the first, most of the few apparent exceptions being shown either to arise from false readings, or to be such as really prove the rule-a degree of strictness transcending that of Tibullus, Lygdamus, and Ovid, who are particular only not to elide long vowels after the first foot, whereas Calpurnius does not elide long vowels at all. From this positive proof of a distinction of authors, a proof all the stronger as being furnished, as it were, unconsciously by the poems themselves, he proceeds to controvert Wernsdorf's arguments for identity. The argument drawn from the supposed number of the rustic Idyls of Theocritus he meets not only by denying the proposition on which it rests, but by showing how easily a counter argument might be constructed to prove that Calpurnius wrote only

seven Eclogues, because, according to Servius, only seven of Virgil's are rustic proper. Wernsdorf had passed lightly over an apparent objection to his theory founded on the similarity of passages in the earlier Eclogues to passages in the later, alleging other instances in which poets repeat themselves: Haupt contends that this apology does not touch the case of the third and ninth Eclogues, the latter of which is an obvious though unskilful imitation of the former. Having thus, as he conceives, shown that the poems in question cannot be by Calpurnius, he endeavours to prove that they are rightly attributed to Nemesianus, pointing out some resemblances between them and Nemesianus' Cynegetica, and urging that the silence of Vopiscus is not of that kind which would establish a negative. He shows that the MS. evidence for divided authorship, instead of resting on a single copy, is really supported by two others, one of them the best of all, the Neapolitan, and by the tradition of a third; while he considers the inscription of Calpurnius' Eclogues to Nemesianus to have arisen from a confusion between the concluding Explicit Calpurnii bucolicon' and the opening 'Aurelii Nemesiani Carthaginiensis bucolicon incipit,' which would follow it immediately, and cites other instances of similar amalgamations by transcribers. Lastly, he separates the two poets, who had been previously supposed to be contemporaries, by a gulf of more than two centuries, leaving Nemesianus at the date to which he is commonly fixed by external evidence, the date of the emperor Carus and his sons, and advancing Calpurnius, whose ordinary date rests partly on the inscription to Nemesianus mentioned above, partly on an arbitrary identification of him with a certain Junius Calpurnius, named by Vopiscus as the emperor's 'magister memoriae,' to the time of Nero, to whose reign he points out several allusions in the Eclogues. Without presuming to affirm or deny the validity of this chain of reasoning, I may perhaps be allowed so far to adopt Haupt's position as to speak of Nemesianus as the author of four out of the eleven pastorals.

Calpurnius' first Eclogue is a sort of imitation of the Pollio, introduced by a dialogue between two shepherds, brothers, Ornitus and Corydon, who, as they take refuge from the heat in a cave sacred to Faunus, observe some verses carved on a beech-tree, apparently, so it is intimated, by the prophetic god himself. In these verses Faunus, in language reminding us sometimes of Virgil's Daphnis, sometimes of Jupiter's speech to Venus in Aeneid 1, sometimes again of the portents at the end of Georgic 1, announces that the golden age has come, that justice has returned under the auspices of the youth who became a pleader

1 Mr. Merivale (Hist., vol. vii, p. 41) thinks Haupt's arguments about the date of Calpurnius inconclusive, and contends that the allusion to the emperor at the end of the seventh Eclogue "points much better to Domitian." On the other hand, Mr. Greswell believes the emperor in question to be the youngest Gordian.

in his mother's arms-an allusion, Haupt thinks, to the early forensic efforts of Nero-that civil war shall be bound in chains, the senate no longer be sent to the block, and civic honours no more be a mockery— in confirmation of which blissful prediction he points to the meteor, then shining, not with a bloody glare, but in a clear sky. The brothers receive the intimation with becoming awe, and resolve to record the verses, in the hope that Meliboeus-perhaps Seneca, perhaps, as Haupt thinks more probable, C. Calpurnius Piso-may convey them to the ears of Augustus. The MSS. give this Eclogue the somewhat inappropriate title Delos, which may have arisen, as Wernsdorf suggests, from an association in the transcriber's mind between the prophetic island and prophecy of any sort.

The second Eclogue is called Crocale, from a maiden with whom Astacus, a gardener, and Idas, a shepherd, are in love, and whom they accordingly celebrate in amoebean strains, with their respective produce as the stakes, Thyrsis as the umpire, and Faunus and the Satyrs, the Dryads and Naiads, "sicco Dryades pede, Naides udo," and all nature, animate and inanimate, as the audience. They appeal to their patron gods, talk of their respective occupations, vie with each other in offers to any deity who will bring the absent Crocale, enumerate their wealth, boast of their personal attractions, and finally are each reminded that it is time to go home. Thyrsis pronounces them equal in the following words:

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"Este pares, et ob hoc concordes vivite: nam vos

Et decor, et cantus, et amor sociavit, et aetas."

The third Eclogue, entitled Exoratio, is pronounced by Scaliger to be merum rus, idque inficetum :" and certainly, though its coarseness may be paralleled from Theocritus, it is not what we should have expected from an imitator of Virgil. Iolas, on asking another shepherd, Lycidas, after a stray heifer, finds that he can think of nothing but Phyllis, who has deserted him. Lycidas had discovered her under a tree, singing with his rival Mopsus, and inflicted personal chastisement on her on which she had run off to her friend Alcippe, declaring that she would live with Mopsus for the future. The forsaken lover now wishes for her back on any terms, and bethinks himself of sending her a poetical entreaty, which Iolas good-naturedly offers to convey. It is accordingly recited by Lycidas, and taken down by Iolas on cherrybark-a piteous composition, describing the lover's desolate condition, reminding Phyllis of her past pleasure in his society, comparing his personal attractions and his wealth with those of Mopsus, offering to let her bind his vindictive hands-hands which nevertheless had given her many presents-sneering at Mopsus' poverty, and finally threatening that the lover will hang himself in the event of rejection from the

tree which first made him jealous. Iolas promises to report it, and is rewarded at the same moment by the sight of his heifer, which he kindly sets down as an omen of his friend's success.

The fourth Eclogue, Caesar, is again political. Meliboeus, the shepherd-poet's patron, finds Corydon meditating a more than rustic song in praise of Caesar, a design in which his younger brother Amyntas is also anxious to join. The patron reminds Corydon that he had often warned his brother against the thriftless occupation of singing, and is told that it is his own kindness which has placed them both above want, and has given them the means of thinking of such pursuits. As the lines may, perhaps, possess some biographical interest, though the images are obviously borrowed from Virgil's first Eclogue, it may be worth while to quote them, by way of a specimen of the poet's manner: "Haec ego, confiteor, dixi, Meliboee: sed olim :

Non eadem nobis sunt tempora, non Deus idem:
Spes magis adridet. Certe ne fraga rubosque
Colligerem, viridique famem solarer hibisco,
Tu facis, et tua nos alit indulgentia farre.
Tu, nostras miseratus opes docilemque iuventam,
Hiberna prohibes ieiunia solvere fago.
Ecce nihil querulum per te, Meliboee, sonamus,
Per te secura saturi recubamus in umbra,
Et fruimur silvis Amaryllidos, ultima nuper
Litora terrarum, nisi tu, Meliboee, fuisses,
Ultima visuri, trucibusque obnoxia Mauris
Pascua Geryonis, liquidis ubi cursibus ingens
Dicitur occiduas impellere Baetis harenas.
Scilicet extremo nunc vilis in orbe iacerem,
A dolor! et pecudes inter conductus Iberas
Inrita septena modularer sibila canna,
Nec quisquam nostras inter dumeta Camenas
Respiceret, non ipse daret mihi forsitan aurem,
Ipse Deus, vacuam, longeque sonantia vota
Scilicet extremo non exaudiret in orbe."

Meliboeus, after deprecating an expression in which Corydon apparently speaks of himself as successor of the great Tityrus (doubtless Virgil), consents to listen to an amoebean song from the brothers in honour of the emperor. They invoke Caesar, speak of his superhuman power in calming the woods, rendering the cattle prolific, and fertilizing the country, of the freedom to dig treasure and celebrate rural festivities, and the general security enjoyed under his reign, and finally hope that this Deity may live and rule for ever on earth. Meliboeus compliments them on the improvement in their singing which the change of subject has produced, and Corydon in return hopes that he will prove a second Maecenas to a second Virgil, introducing him to the imperial city, and bidding him rise from rural to martial strains.

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