THE

BUCOLICS

OF

V I R G I L.

WITH SHORT ENGLISH NOTES
FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS.

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PRINTED BY MESSRS. PARKER, CORN-MARKET, OXFORD,

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PREFACE.

The Bucolics of Virgil are perhaps too commonly thought to be a book for beginners. This popular, though erroneous, estimate has occasioned, especially in the notes on a few of the first, much elementary matter to be mingled with the notice of difficulties which mere early scholarship would hardly feel.

These poems are chiefly important for the many historical allusions which they contain, and which illustrate, from a point of view which no other writer has exactly seized, a few momentous years of the Augustan period. They belong to the literature of a civil war, from the havoc of which Italy perhaps never thoroughly recovered ; and the interest which they thus possess far transcends the languid beauty of imitative pastorals.

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The references indicated by G. are to a series of notes on the Georgics, now nearly ready, and which it was meant should form one volume with the present.

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ECLOGA I. TITYRUS.

MELIBEUS. TITYRUS.

Herstand.

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Mel. Títyre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi
Silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena :
Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva ;
Nos patriam fugimus : tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

Tit. O Meliboe, deus nobis hæc otia fecit:
Namque erit ille mihi semper deus; illius aram
Sæpe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus.
Ille meas errare boves, ut cernis, et ipsum
Ludere, quæ vellem, calamo permisit agresti.

10
MEL. Non equidem invideo; miror magis : undique totis
Usque adeo turbatur agris. En, ipse capellas
Protenus æger ago; hanc etiam vix, Tityre, duco.
Hic inter densas corulos modo namque gemellos,
Spem gregis, ah! silice in nuda connixa reliquit.
Sæpe malum hoc nobis, si mens non læva fuisset,
De coelo tactas memini prædicere quercus.
[Sæpe sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice cornix.]
Sed tamen, iste deus qui sit, da, Tityre, nobis.

Tit. Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Melibee, putavi 20
Stultus ego huic nostræ similem, quo sæpe solemus
Pastores ovium teneros depellere fetus.
Sic canibus catulos similes, sic matribus hædos

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