1.1 Introduction
Vergil’s Eclogues – the ambitious poetry book that condensed Theocritean bucolic into a distinct genre and would become the fountainhead of future versions of pastoral – is filled with sheep, goats, and cattle; with singing birds and buzzing bees; with flowing streams and riverbanks fringed with reeds; and with echoing woods and cool, shady groves.Footnote 1 Its characters lead lives in localized rural environments distinguished by their familiar haunts. This would seem to be a collection of poems intensely interested in the nonhuman world and in a sense of place in which the nonhuman plays a major role.
And yet one of the most prominent critics of pastoral has suggested that seeing the genre as primarily about such features is simply to read the poetry through the distorting prism of Romanticism.Footnote 2 Other readers have been eager to see in the Eclogues poems that are fundamentally about poetry itself.Footnote 3 Readings such as these suggest that the numerous nonhuman presences in these poems are to varying degrees negligible and treat the environment as simply a background, a setting, or a set of symbols for other concerns.
By contrast, this chapter and the next will put the more-than-human environment at the center of these poems. In these chapters, I explore how place and environment are important thematic concerns of the collection, but also – more than this – how they are crucial to the very creation and constitution of Vergil’s poetry. This chapter argues for the central importance of local place to the Eclogues, before examining how the poems construct (and thematize the construction of) locality. The next focuses on the nonhuman presences of the poems, and the ways in which the collection’s understanding of place is fundamentally ecological.
To be sure, a large body of scholarship has addressed ostensibly similar issues in these poems. However, such work often tends to collapse the environments of the Eclogues into a general and limiting concept of nature or landscape, to underestimate the significance of the nonhuman in conceptions of place, or to describe the environmental features of the poems in the service of other interpretive issues (especially genre) without allowing the environment to be a concern of the poems in its own right.Footnote 4
Another prevalent interpretive strategy is to read the poetry’s interest in rural place as part of a larger Augustan contrast between city and country. While this contrast is present in the Eclogues, it is far from Vergil’s only interest in rural place. Moreover, treating this opposition too rigidly can distort and obscure aspects of the poems. Vergil’s herdsmen live out their lives in the districts and spaces of a Roman world in which town and country are interdependent, with networks of transport and exchange connecting rural spaces to towns and even to Rome.Footnote 5 And conflating all rural environments under the label of the countryside effaces important differences between particular places and their specific environments. This particularity of place, I will argue, matters deeply to the lives of Vergil’s herdsmen and to Vergil’s own poetry. The Eclogues are often less concerned with the difference between city and country than with the difference between here and there.
My primary aim in these two chapters is to examine and explicate the multifaceted engagement of the Eclogues with issues of place and environment. However, the stakes of such a reading are greater than simply opening up a new interpretation of these poems alone. Ideas of the pastoral have been central to the development of environmental literary criticism.Footnote 6 Early ecocritics aimed to redeem pastoral from the critical orthodoxy that – following the work of Raymond Williams and William Empson – saw it as an aristocratic parlor game of a genre, obfuscating real social relations between city elite and rural laborers.Footnote 7 Some environmental critics have agreed with such critiques and suggest that pastoral must be jettisoned for other models of environmental literature.Footnote 8 Many, though, have sought to reread and reinvigorate pastoral, in one way or another building a concept of environmental literature on a reinvented version of pastoral.Footnote 9
These invocations of pastoral can be very far from the poems of Theocritus and Vergil.Footnote 10 At the same time, though, these versions of pastoral are often tied back to simplified readings of ancient authors. It is taken for granted, for example, that Vergil invents in the Eclogues the imaginary space of Arcadia as part of “the classical pastoral momentum of retreat into nature.”Footnote 11 Critics assume, therefore, that the classical traditions of pastoral are at odds with the ecocritical goals of a poetry of particular place and a poetry that does not naively idealize nature.Footnote 12 In fact, as this chapter and the next will demonstrate, there is little warrant in Vergil for either of these assumptions.
Pastoral is already complex, place-sensitive, and environmentally oriented in Vergil. Classical pastoral is not something that environmental literary criticism needs to move beyond in search of postpastoral literature but remains a valuable resource and model for thinking through environmental literature.Footnote 13 Returning to Vergil is thus important for rethinking both the possibilities of pastoral and the directions of ecocriticism more generally.Footnote 14 This chapter begins that project with an examination of local place in these poems.
1.2 Local Place in the Eclogues
1.2.1 The Pathos of Place: Eclogue 1
Personal attachment to local place is a clear concern of the Eclogues, underlying bucolic life throughout the collection but surfacing most explicitly in the famous engagement of the first and ninth eclogues with recent land dispossessions.Footnote 15 In the ninth, the aged goatherd Moeris loses the rights to his land, while the first contrasts the fortune of Tityrus, who has received permission to retain his land from Octavian in Rome, with that of the dispossessed Meliboeus, who is forced to leave his home. As Vergil’s Eclogues begin, then, the world they depict is already slipping away for Meliboeus, and a similar loss echoes near the collection’s end. We can get our firmest grasp on what place means to the herdsmen of the Eclogues by examining what is at stake in its dissolution.
When not mined for biographical data or a historical narrative, the tragedy of land dispossession in these poems has often been read in an attempt to parse Vergil’s stance toward the young Caesar who brought the land confiscations about.Footnote 16 But putting aside this question, I aim in this chapter to explore how land dispossession affects the dynamics of local place in the poems. As we will see, far from avoiding political matters, this directs us to a broader, more complex idea of politics – one beyond narrow partisanship – which embraces questions of land division, dwelling and cohabitation, and the flourishing of human and nonhuman communities.
In a discussion of Vergil’s rhetorical skill in stirring up emotion, Macrobius includes the predicament of Eclogue 1 as an example of Vergil’s ability to create pathos from place (a loco).Footnote 17 But what kind of feeling does place stir, and how? How does place matter to Meliboeus, Tityrus, and the other inhabitants of Vergil’s bucolic world? One simple answer is an economic one: the evicted herdsmen of Eclogues 1 and 9 lose their rights to property and their livelihoods. The presence of legal, technical, and economic terminology in these poems certainly testifies that these are among the concerns of Vergil’s characters.Footnote 18 But in Eclogues 1 and 9, leaving one’s home means much more than simply a loss of property or profit. The significant bonds between an individual and a particular place also underlie the emotional freight of these poems.
Work in various fields including anthropology, humanistic geography, sociology, and environmental psychology has formulated a number of terms for these bonds, including place attachment, topophilia, and sense of place. While the terms differ, they all point to relationships between humans and particular place that embrace in various ways emotional, affective, cognitive, and cultural significance.Footnote 19 In addition, the related idea of place making stresses that a sense of place is continually in process, that place is not a stable or given thing.Footnote 20 In short, place is something that we continually participate in making, and that ongoing sense of place is something to which we develop strong attachments. Whereas concepts of landscape or the locus amoenus tend to assume a visual and aesthetic relationship to the environment – and often imply that the environment is a passive background to human activity and observation – a focus on place attends to the multiform, multisensory, and processual experiences of environment operative in Vergil’s Eclogues.
In the Roman context, place attachment is related to the concept of the patria, one’s nurturing homeland. We can get some sense of this concept’s importance from Cicero. At the start of the second book of the De Legibus, Atticus and Cicero walk to a part of his Arpinum estate by the Fibrenus River, of which Cicero is especially fond (2.1–6). The two offer a number of explanations for why this piece of land might be dear to Cicero’s heart, but both agree on the suggestive powers of the place arising from a combination of its physical environment and personal and familial memory.Footnote 21 Atticus, too, mentions that he especially likes this location. Cicero, however, tells Atticus that this particular place means something to him that it cannot mean to Atticus, because it is his homeland, his patria. There is a relationship to this specific place that only this specific person can have, a form of attachment Cicero describes as a certain nescio quid (je ne sais quoi, 2.3).Footnote 22 Elsewhere, Cicero explicates this attachment through the language of familial nurturing and care.Footnote 23
It is exile from this sense of patria that Meliboeus immediately stresses in Eclogue 1:
Patria is repeated twice in the same metrical position and is perhaps even latent in patulae.Footnote 24 It is what Meliboeus must leave behind and what Tityrus continues to dwell within. This bond with one’s home, as well as the tragedy of its loss, is not exclusively Roman (and indeed looks back to the Odyssey), but patria does add a particularly Roman element to Vergil’s adaptation of Theocritus here.Footnote 25 And Rome itself complicates the matter. Meliboeus lives in his local homeland but also belongs to a larger community centered on Rome and is subject to the powers of that capital. Indeed, the specific status of Vergil’s characters within a Roman social hierarchy determines their possibilities for local dwelling and place making throughout the Eclogues.Footnote 26
One of the things Meliboeus emphasizes the most about his relationship to his patria is a sense of familiarity.Footnote 27 This includes an aesthetic appreciation for specific environmental features such as his land’s familiar streams and crops (Ecl. 1.52, 1.70), but also strong links between place and memory. Memories are linked to particular places, and those places call to mind particular memories.Footnote 28 Additionally, beyond memory alone, work in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind has suggested that surrounding environments play a significant and active role in all sorts of cognitive processes: we think with and through our environments.Footnote 29
This work points us to something already represented in Vergil’s poetry: that the rural environment structures and informs the way in which his characters think. The Eclogues are full of rustic analogies, where human and social phenomena are compared to nonhuman objects or natural processes. In the song contest of Eclogue 3, for example, Damoetas sings, triste lupus stabulis, maturis frugibus imbres. | arboribus venti, nobis Amaryllidis irae (“the wolf is bad for the stables, the rains for the ripened fruits. For the trees the winds are bad, for us the anger of Amaryllis,” 3.80–1), and Menalcas responds, dulce satis umor, depulsis arbutus haedis, | lenta salix feto pecori, mihi solus Amyntas (“water is sweet to the crops, the arbute for kids that are weaned. The pliant willow is sweet to the breeding flock, and to me only Amyntas,” 3.82–3).
In a particularly complex example, Tityrus in Eclogue 1 attempts to convey the scale of Rome compared to local towns through a series of comparisons:
This habit of speech is, on one level, appropriate verisimilitude for Vergil’s depiction of rustic herdsmen.Footnote 30 As Andrea Cucchiarelli notes, it was widely emphasized in ancient criticism that character was displayed through how one spoke, and style of speech was thus a crucial aspect of characterization in Vergil’s depiction of rustic herdsmen.Footnote 31 The figure of the rustic analogy also looks back to Theocritus, whose bucolic poems contain many examples of it, including at the start of Idyll 1.Footnote 32 But beyond the propriety of genre and characterization, these comparisons and figures suggest more fundamentally that when bucolic herdsmen set out to describe things like love, song, or the city, they avail themselves of what surrounds them. The plants, animals, streams, and other elements of the environment provide the tools by which Vergil’s characters craft figurative language. Local place influences not just how Vergil’s characters speak, but how they think – how they process and experience the world.Footnote 33 An entire mental world of memory and emotion, but also of cognitive habit and structure, is lost in the severing of herdsman from home.
In addition to this, Vergil stresses another kind of relation to local place: cult and religious practice. One of the things Meliboeus admires about the life that Tityrus will continue to lead in Eclogue 1 is his peaceful existence amid familiar streams and sacred springs: fortunate senex, hic, inter flumina nota | et fontis sacros, frigus captabis opacum (“fortunate old man, here among familiar streams and sacred springs you will take the cool shade,” 1.51–2). It is easy to overlook the adjective sacros and assimilate the springs to the familiar rivers here, but the sacred springs suggest a particular religious concept of locality.Footnote 34 Part of what is lost for the Roman Meliboeus in his exile is an intimate relationship with the particular divinities of a local environment.
Indeed, the presence of nymphs throughout the Eclogues suggests these kinds of local divinities linked to particular places.Footnote 35 References to the ambarvalia (a ritual of lustration in which sacrificial animals were led around the borders of one’s land) also encourage a conception of religiously defined localities.Footnote 36 Moreover, Tityrus’ gratitude toward the young Caesar in Eclogue 1 involves the establishment of an annual local cult:
As these lines illustrate, concepts of local place in the Eclogues are crucially linked to a sense of religious locality, in which local deities and local cult activities help define and demarcate place.
Readers have long noted the deep and personal significance of the loss of land in Eclogues 1 and 9.Footnote 37 But a glance at Roman literary and cultural contexts, along with help from contemporary work on place, has helped us to see more specifically the sheer variety of ways in which local place matters to the herdsmen of the Eclogues. The example of Eclogue 1 shows how local place is connected with personal memory and cognition, property rights and economic livelihood, religious activity, and an emotional, affective bond to one’s familiar home. Meliboeus displays a Roman attachment to his local patria, but this attachment is not a narrow patriotism or sense of belonging to a merely human community. It is a multifaceted set of bonds to an ongoing sense of place, which he participates in making and which – as the next chapter will explore – is defined by a particular ecology of human and nonhuman beings. This idea of locality is what defines the stable bucolic life valorized and idealized in the world of the Eclogues and is what is jeopardized in Eclogues 1 and 9. Before turning to Eclogue 9 and its own treatment of local place, it is worth examining how Vergil constructs this sense of locality through an emphasis on boundaries and borders.
1.2.2 Bucolic Boundaries and Roman Space
Vergil’s literary career begins with what has been called “one of the most famous surprises in ancient literature.”Footnote 38 His programmatic opening calls to mind the equally programmatic beginning of Theocritus’ first Idyll but immediately confronts a reader with the difference between the worlds of the two poems.Footnote 39 Theocritus’ shepherd Thyrsis begins his poem as follows:
Vergil’s Meliboeus begins Eclogue 1 with these words:
Like Theocritus, Vergil begins with one herdsman commenting upon another’s singing – but the Theocritean world thus evoked is immediately qualified, and the situation of Theocritus’ poem turned upside down, as the third line informs us that Meliboeus is facing a kind of exile.Footnote 40 It is not, however, just the dramatic situation of Vergil’s poem or the presence of Roman politics that is new. In fact, the two passages present two very different ways of constructing and conceptualizing place.
In Theocritus, the presence of herdsmen, goats, and Pan puts readers in a generally rural environment, while specific objects marked with deixis and articles – “that pine” by “the streams” – provide anchors for a reader’s imagination of a particular scene. Payne captures well the particular strategy of environmental description at work here: “The herdsmen do not indicate how each element in the landscape is related to the others. They simply point to ‘that sloping mound and the tamarisks,’ and ‘that shepherd’s seat and the oaks,’ and let the reader imagine how they are situated in relation to one another.”Footnote 41
By contrast, Vergil’s opening lines place much more stress on bounded zones, borders, and a holistic view of a differentiated landscape. First, the spreading beech marks a space of shade and protection from the sun only implicit in Theocritus – indeed, the bold metaphor of tegimen, often used for a more solid covering such as armor or a shield, concretizes the boundedness of Tityrus’ sheltered repose.Footnote 42 Beyond the shade are the plowed fields (arva), whose specificity calls to mind the distinctions in Roman agricultural writers between different tracts of land plowed, sowed, or left fallow. The resonant woods (silvae) introduce another kind of space in addition to the more open fields. Finally, with a wider view, Meliboeus refers more generally to his patria, encompassing all the environmental features of these lines. But this expansive sense of patria is immediately circumscribed by reference to its borders (finis), which Meliboeus imagines leaving behind. The borders not only bound Meliboeus’ patria but also imply a larger world beyond it of demarcated zones and spaces into which this particular region fits.
Vergil does not connect all the dots of environmental description for his readers, but – compared to Theocritus – he places his readers in a world defined by edges and boundaries, with interlocking but distinct zones and kinds of space, from the delineated shade of a tree to the border of a particular plow-field to the perimeter of one man’s homeland.Footnote 43 This whole way of looking at the land continues throughout the poem. The borders of Meliboeus’ homeland return later in the poem (patrios finis, 67), while Tityrus’ image of a topsy-turvy world includes peoples wandering beyond their boundaries (pererratis finibus, 61).Footnote 44 When Meliboeus compliments Tityrus on retaining his land, he tells him, tua rura manebunt (46), and, as Coleman comments, the plural here has a particularizing force: “these specific parts of the rus will remain yours.”Footnote 45 Indeed, Meliboeus’ ensuing description contains two references to neighbors (50, 53), implying a countryside of contiguous but demarcated portions of land. He also focuses on the image of a hedge by a neighbor’s property boundary – vicino ab limite saepes (“the hedge by the neighboring border line,” 53) – using the technical term in Roman land surveying for a property line.
A similar spatial preoccupation appears in the poem’s closing lines, as the fortunate Tityrus invites Meliboeus to spend one night with him before leaving for a life of exile:
These lines have often been noted for the way they harmonize the close of the poem with the close of day, leaving the poem in an uneasy suspension.Footnote 46 Vergil aligns his ending, though, not only with the onset of night, but also with a spatial zooming out. The local environment we have spent the whole poem inhabiting is suddenly contextualized in a larger view of social, economic, and spatial differentiation, a panorama of country houses and villas, each one implying its own demarcated fields and groves. And, in the distance, the mountains hint at larger geographical borders separating different regions. This is the world among whose divisions and boundaries Meliboeus will have to make a new life.
Commentators often remark on some of these details as touches of rustic Roman realism.Footnote 47 Some suggest that concepts like the limes (boundary line), fines (borders), and even patria (homeland) are extrabucolic intrusions in this poem.Footnote 48 More precisely, though, these terms are not so much nonbucolic as simply non-Theocritean. What Vergil is doing with these details is creating a new Roman bucolic poetry, one showing the heavy influence of Roman land surveying.Footnote 49
The practice of land surveying was in large part an exercise in boundary drawing, officially carving space into particular localities.Footnote 50 It is hard to overestimate the importance to Roman conceptions of place of the surveying practices by which Rome carved up and divided the land of Italy and, eventually, its broader empire.Footnote 51 Land division and allocation were of course central to the turbulent internal politics of the late Republic, from the Gracchan land reforms to the rewarding of veterans with confiscated lands. Land commissions were a serious concern in day-to-day life, as we can glimpse in Cicero’s letters and Horace’s Satires.Footnote 52 In fact, beyond just Eclogues 1 and 9, most of the Roman public figures named or addressed throughout the Eclogues were involved with the official land commission that confiscated lands around Vergil’s native Mantua, including Octavian, Octavius Musa, Alfenus Varus, and Gallus.Footnote 53
More deeply, though, the concepts and emphases of land surveying influenced Roman articulations of space. In book 5 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas founds a settlement on Sicily, he does so like a good proto-Roman, with the protocol of land surveying.Footnote 54 And the terminology of land surveying appears also in Lucretius’ great poem of the cosmos. The world of the De Rerum Natura is defined through the set laws of Epicurean physics, which establish limits to what can and cannot happen in the world. It is these limitations on reality that Lucretius in part praises Epicurus for discovering, and he refers to them with a striking metaphor:
Among the imperial and militaristic images here, the terminus stands out as properly the boundary stone of Roman agrimensores, contrasting with the immeasurable or unsurveyable (immensum) universe.Footnote 55 In conceptualizing the cosmos, Lucretius thinks with the apparatus of land surveying. Additionally, in his history of early mankind, Lucretius carefully notes the moments at which humans divide land among themselves as marking important stages in the development of human society (5.1110, 5.1441).
When Roman authors imagine the origins of their state, the development of human society, or even the universal laws of physics, they think in terms derived from land surveying and its emphasis on well-defined borders and divisions. This pervasive influence is particularly visible in the work of Vergil, whose literary oeuvre begins with Meliboeus’ fines and ends in the Aeneid with Turnus’ failed attempt to hurl an ancient boundary stone at Aeneas (Aen. 12.896–907) – a scene that aptly figures the Rutulians’ failure to assert Italian boundaries against the incursion of Aeneas’ Trojans. And this emphasis on boundaries lies behind the construction of local place in the Eclogues. It is especially important to Eclogue 9, which narrates the dissolution of local dwelling for one of its characters.
1.2.3 Contingent Locality and Bucolic Dwelling: Eclogue 9
While any idea of place necessarily involves a boundary that demarcates a here from elsewhere, determining where exactly these boundaries lie is a tricky endeavor. Environments do not simply stop at clearly designated lines, and so carving relatively amorphous and interconnected space into distinct, bounded zones is a practice that can never be neutral or natural.Footnote 56 Eclogue 9 arises out of this problem, representing a crisis in the redrawing of local place. The boundaries of tenancy and dwelling have been altered in the world of this poem, with disastrous consequences for the rustics who have made their lives in their own familiar locales.
Eclogue 9 begins with Lycidas encountering Moeris on the road into town, as Moeris has been evicted from the land he used to work.Footnote 57 This breakdown in the continuity of Moeris’ dwelling is matched by a breakdown in the tradition of bucolic singing, as Moeris struggles to remember mere fragments of songs. The poem recalls but reverses Theocritus’ own poem of a roadside encounter, Idyll 7, such that what is in Theocritus an origin story for bucolic poetry becomes in Vergil the moment of its obsolescence.Footnote 58
At the center of this poem is a conflict between different perceptions of rightful boundaries, and differing abilities to impose such boundaries on the world. When Lycidas hears of Moeris’ misfortune, he responds in disbelief,
As Wendell Clausen notes, Lycidas offers “a landscape here defined as by a surveyor’s eye,” using natural features such as trees and streams as boundary markers.Footnote 59 However, as Clausen also notes, while trees feature prominently as such markers in the writings of agrimensorial treatises, the beech (fagus) does not typically appear as one.Footnote 60 These lines demarcate a local place like a surveyor would, but in a different way. Menalcas had tried to offer his own definition and demarcation of a locality. But, as Moeris soon informs Lycidas, he was powerless to contest the official divisions of land into newly organized places.
The fact that Menalcas is to some degree a poet-figure encourages one to read this conflict as a tension between the boundaries and borders that a land commission can establish and those that a poet can make.Footnote 61 Indeed, a reader may recall that a fagus like those Lycidas gestures toward serves as a very important boundary marker in this very poetry collection – one is placed at the edge of the very first line of the Eclogues.Footnote 62 Part of Vergil’s task in creating the Eclogues is in creating poems as bounded wholes within the limits of a metrical structure, and linking these demarcated wholes together to form a coherent poetry book. Some of the terms that describe the members of a land commission – limitator and finitor, for example – could even describe the activity of a poet, who carefully establishes line breaks, as well as the beginnings and endings of individual poems.Footnote 63 After all, the pagina (a bounded “page” or column of text) is etymologically related to the pagus (a bounded area or district).Footnote 64
Beyond the space of the page or book roll, though, the activity of the land surveyor is also comparable to that of a poet in another way. Poets like Vergil and singers like Menalcas can create imaginative worlds within their works. Within their fictive creations, they can define the boundaries of their own locales.Footnote 65 This is precisely what Moeris himself does, albeit fleetingly, with a fragment of song later in the poem:
Out of nothing but his fragile poetic memory, Moeris constructs a place – a specific here (huc and hic are repeated five times) – defined by particular environmental and geographical features.Footnote 66 He is able to construct and delimit space within song. With this in mind, we can return to Lycidas’ rumor that Menalcas had saved (servasse) a portion of land. Perhaps Menalcas was unable to save his land from confiscation, but his and Lycidas’ songs (and Vergil’s poem) in some sense preserve this place. Eclogue 9 allows readers to participate in constructing and imagining a version of the tract of land stretching from the hills to the water and the beeches.
Of course, there is a significant difference between the imaginative environments of poetry and song, and the physical environments in which a poet or singer must live. It is this tension between poetry’s imaginative power and practical futility that creates much of the emotional drama of Eclogue 9, as we can see in Moeris’ reply to Lycidas’ rumor:Footnote 67
Ironically, Moeris’ statement of the impotence of poetry culminates in a virtuoso line, as the eagle in the middle of his verse (aquila veniente) literally disperses the words for the Chaonian doves, which have fled to either end of the line (Chaonias … columbas). Moeris again displays this kind of skill when he laments that, after the land surrounding Cremona did not suffice, land confiscations extended to neighboring Mantua: Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae (“Mantua, alas, too near to miserable Cremona,” 9.28). Here, Moeris pitiably separates Mantua from Cremona as far as he can within a single line of verse, emphasizing all the more their proximity in reality.Footnote 68 The poet’s ability to create spatial relationships among words and establish the boundaries and borders of his verse here confronts the reality of geography and the power of a Roman land commission to establish boundaries with concrete consequences.
Eclogue 9 thus narrates the fallout from a reorganization of local boundaries and explores the limited consolation of poetry in constructing its own textual and imaginative borders and spaces. Eclogues 1 and 9 are both about conflicts that arise in a Roman bucolic world of shifting boundaries and borders, a world of bucolic dwelling amid contingent locality. Questions of who gets to establish which borders and who is allowed to live within what boundaries are at the heart of these poems in which Vergil is able to create pathos from place.
1.2.4 Pastoral, Politics, and Place
Eclogues 1 and 9 narrate the disruption of the local bucolic life that herdsmen in the rest of the poems tend to enjoy. But it is important to offer some clarifications about what this local life is and is not. First, the disruptions in these poems do not represent the city intruding onto a countryside distinct from it. It is worth emphasizing this, because it is a common tradition of scholarship to read these poems as showing a pastoral world suddenly subject to the incursions of Rome, history, and politics. Michael Putnam, for example, refers to “the breaking in of history on the pastoral trance,” and Anthony Boyle to “the destructive impact of the politico-military world – the world of the city, of Rome – upon the country,” while Charles Segal writes that both poems “deal with the confrontation between a peaceful, undisturbed pastoral world and the hard political realities of the Roman present.”Footnote 69
These readings only make sense if one assumes a clear separation between the countryside and politics. In fact, though, the pastoral world of the Eclogues is already political. The Italian countryside is fully interconnected – economically, socially, even physically through networks of roads – with the cities that rely on it. Power dynamics, class and status, and other social and political factors determine the possibilities of local homes, rights to land, attachments to place, and forms of dwelling in the rural world of the Eclogues. In other words, while it is true that political power centered elsewhere is influencing herdsmen’s lives in Eclogues 1 and 9, this is nothing new.
More fundamentally, the world of Vergil’s characters is not a timeless present into which historical change irrupts. The very fields and pastures that support and allow for their bucolic and agricultural activities are the products of historical change, including the small-scale alterations of land through grazing, planting, and other agricultural practices, as well as larger-scale patterns of deforestation. These human effects on the land will later be at the heart of the Georgics but are also the background to the lives of Vergil’s bucolic herdsmen, as Lucretius helps us to see.
In his anthropology in book 5 of the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius imagines Italy’s transformation from primeval forests to arable lands, as humans gradually progressed from simple foraging to more complex forms of agriculture (Lucr. 5.1367–78).Footnote 70 With his account of deforestation, Lucretius asks his readers to see in the present countryside the result of a long process of historical change. Similarly, Vergil’s Eclogues – with their mix of echoing woods and open fields – represent an environment at a particular juncture of human (and more-than-human) history. The beginning of Eclogue 1 is emblematic, with its combination of silvae and arva, of music both of the forest and field (silvestris and agrestis, 1.2 and 1.10).Footnote 71 The lives disrupted by the land confiscations of Eclogues 1 and 9 were already established amid the broader changes of environmental history and carved out amid more recent organizations of boundary lines, land ownership, and political rights. The very formation of this bucolic world is a political matter, and Eclogues 1 and 9 narrate not the intrusion of urban politics onto the pastoral world, but a reconfiguration of already-existing relations.
The countryside of the Eclogues, then, does not represent nature untouched by politics, but a space always already entangled in the knots of natural-cultural politics. In this context arise the contingent but powerful relationships between individuals and local place, the disputes that threaten them, and the poetry that derives from them. The importance of local place understood in this way is most explicit in Eclogues 1 and 9 but in fact underlies the whole collection. Numerous poems take care to specify their particular location, anchoring each poem in a particular place familiar to its characters, in their own local habitation (Ecl. 2.3–5, 3.55–9, 5.1–3, 7.1–13). These localities are fundamentally bounded, but not parochially immured against the outside world. Movement between localities is an important part of the lives of Vergil’s herdsmen, and the local is integrated into a larger web of economic and political relations.Footnote 72
Finally, although it is his patria that Meliboeus emphasizes in Eclogue 1, what is valued throughout the Eclogues is not an autochthonous, natural, or authentic relation to the land. It is rather a familiarity of dwelling that results from historical circumstance. The collection’s characters cherish the contingent dwelling of tenant farmers, freedmen, and the enslaved, who fashion their multifaceted attachments to localities amid the structures and processes of human and environmental history, Roman economic and social hierarchy, and civil war and political turmoil.
Vergil reveals the multifaceted nature of these attachments, which embrace economic, religious, personal, and emotional ties. The Eclogues, then, is a poetry collection sensitive to particularity of place, which recognizes the importance of local dwelling to its characters’ lives – through economic, religious, personal, cognitive, and emotional ties. The collection also takes care to represent the specific environments within which those characters dwell and from which they are expelled. As the remainder of this chapter will explore, these fictional environments constructed by the poems are hard to place in any actual location but remain quintessentially local and particular.
1.3 Placing Pastoral
1.3.1 The Eclogues and Their Settings
For a collection of poetry so concerned with the importance of specific place, the Eclogues are themselves notoriously hard to situate. As Thomas Rosenmeyer summarizes, “Virgil’s landscape is a composite one; the fertile fields of the Po Valley and the barren hills of the heel of Italy rub shoulders to produce a mixture that defies exact localization.”Footnote 73 How can this be true of a collection of poems that so emphasizes specific place and local environment? And in what sense are the places of the Eclogues local if they cannot be identified with any specific place?
In answering these questions, I turn in the remainder of this chapter to the linked issues of fictionality and setting in the Eclogues. I begin by asking where the Eclogues are set and by surveying some modern scholarly responses to this question, which have swirled around the concept of Vergil’s Arcadia. Difficulties with establishing any particular setting for the poems have led readers to question whether they are, in fact, set anywhere at all. The Eclogues are intensely local poems that paradoxically resist location. However, as I will suggest, the poems resist being pinned to any particular setting not because they construct an imaginary, placeless world completely removed from reality, but because the collection is interested in the many points of contact between real and imagined locations, and in the recursive movements between environment and imagination out of which place is made. In this book’s Epilogue, I return to the question of fictionality and contextualize it within broader theoretical debates about environmental literature, realism, and representation. For now, though, my concern is to show how the places represented by the Eclogues are local even if not locatable, and to offer a reading of the fictionality of the Eclogues that does not lapse into assumptions about a placeless Arcadia.
The geography of the Eclogues poses difficulties to a reader attempting to determine their setting in several ways. First, there is variety within the collection: different poems seem to be set in different places. This poses difficulties if one wants to read the collection as taking place within one coherent setting and raises questions when discrete poems establish continuities between themselves. Can the Corydon of Eclogue 7 be the same Corydon of Eclogue 2 when one seems to live in Sicily (Eclogue 2) and the other in northern Italy (Eclogue 7)? More problematically, there sometimes seems to be a variety of settings within individual poems. What are Arcadian shepherds and the Mincius River of Cisalpine Gaul doing in the same poem, Eclogue 7?Footnote 74 Finally, and even more fundamentally, it is often unclear whether Vergil’s use of place names actually sets poems in those places. When the shepherds of Eclogue 7 are called Arcadian, does this suggest that we are in Arcadia, or are they only “Arcadian” insofar as they are proverbially skilled singers?Footnote 75 Does Corydon’s reference to his thousands of sheep in Sicilian hills situate Eclogue 2 in Sicily, does Sicilian in this context simply mean quintessentially bucolic, or is Corydon’s boast just pure fantasy?Footnote 76
This sort of problem attends not just proper names but also the specific environmental features of the poems. Eclogue 1 begins with a tree called a fagus, and this beech would seem to place us in the tree’s native northern Italy.Footnote 77 However, the Latin fagus could also be used to calque the Greek word φηγός (phēgos), which refers to an oak and does appear in Theocritus (Id. 12.8).Footnote 78 Does Vergil’s first piece of scene setting in the Eclogues point to an Italian beech or a Greek oak? Can it suggest both? The iconic tree of Vergilian pastoral probes and problematizes realism.Footnote 79
In short, it is hard to see how one can progress beyond Conington’s dictum offered more than a century ago: “instances of … historical and geographical confusion meet us in every page of the Eclogues.”Footnote 80 Even the most confident and methodical of attempts to untangle these confusions can end up with essentially the same admission of interpretive surrender to complexity.Footnote 81 One way of responding to these difficulties is to assert that the Eclogues are set, in a sense, nowhere at all, in a poetic or imaginary land not to be identified with any real place. This approach has had an immense and lasting impact on how modern readers have approached the Eclogues – and how readers have understood pastoral in general. It is worth spending some time interrogating this reception of Vergil’s bucolic world.
The most influential assertion of the poems’ distance from reality comes from Bruno Snell, who famously argues that in Arcadia Vergil discovered a spiritual landscape (geistige Landschaft), thereby inventing the imaginary land in which Renaissance pastoralists would later play the shepherd.Footnote 82 Snell’s Arcadia is as much about mood as it is about setting. It is a land suffused with melancholy and nostalgia, “an escape into the realm of feeling and pathos,” and “an earthly beyond, a land of the soul yearning for its distant home in the past.”Footnote 83 Snell’s idea of a pastoral world “far distant from the sordid realities of the present”Footnote 84 has had an enormous impact on critics and readers of the Eclogues. It lies behind Friedrich Klingner’s treatment of Vergilian pastoral as a dream world of art, Gilbert Highet’s assertion that “Vergil was the discoverer of Arcadia, the idealized land of country life,” and many other similar formulations.Footnote 85 Its influence can still be felt in the more nuanced claim of Thomas Hubbard that “Arcadia is simultaneously Vergil’s own construction and an object of deconstructive counterpoint.”Footnote 86 And outside of classical scholarship, it continues to inform many environmental literary critics’ hasty judgments of Vergil and classical pastoral.Footnote 87
But Snell’s Arcadia has not been without its detractors.Footnote 88 In a 1975 article, E. A. Schmidt thoroughly demonstrates that Snell’s reading of Arcadia in the Eclogues is essentially the retrojection of a Renaissance symbol (created by Jacopo Sannazaro) onto Vergil’s text.Footnote 89 He shows moreover that Arcadia is never the setting of one of Vergil’s Eclogues.Footnote 90 Richard Jenkyns has similarly critiqued Snell’s reading as confusing Sannazaro’s invention of Arcadia for Vergil’s.Footnote 91 Jenkyns highlights the presence of Vergil’s native northern Italy in the poems but still retains much of Snell’s emphasis on an imaginative world.Footnote 92 He and other critics have stressed a blending of the imaginary with the reality of northern Italy in the Eclogues.Footnote 93
Schmidt’s critique of Snell goes in a different direction, suggesting that Arcadia, while not a setting within the Eclogues, is a powerful symbol in the collection. Schmidt reads Arcadia as a symbol of “the bucolic world of poetic self-reflection.”Footnote 94 For Schmidt, the Eclogues have no exact correspondence to external reality but constitute reflexive poetry about poetry (Dichtung der Dichtung).Footnote 95 Wolfgang Iser takes up Schmidt’s view of Arcadia as “Virgil’s invented world of poetry – a work of art that thematizes art itself,” as part of his reading of pastoral as a paradigmatic example of literary fictionality.Footnote 96 For Iser, the world of the Eclogues has a complex and indeterminate relationship to external reality, separating itself from the real world of politics but then inscribing that reality back into the separate poetic world created.Footnote 97 Joy Connolly perhaps best sums up this strange balance of reality and fictionality in the Eclogues:
The names of living people and places, references to political events, and above all the song-echoing presence of the land itself yoke each poem to the Italian reality in which the poet lives. But they do so only in a brief, dubious and unpredictable fashion, creating an important source of the tension in the poems that so many readers have tried to account for. In the face of a representational poetics that uses references to people and places to help locate the reader in the referential reality of the text, giving him or her literal ground on which to evaluate a text, the Eclogues deny readers that ground.Footnote 98
For Connolly, Vergil’s pulling out the rug of stable reference from beneath his readers has political import: “aesthetic experimentation which questions conventional rules of representation bespeaks a corresponding questioning of the rules of the world.”Footnote 99
The range of modern scholarly responses to the setting of the Eclogues, then, tends to leave us outside of any dreamlike Arcadia but still poised somewhere between fiction and reality.Footnote 100 How does this affect the collection’s interest in particular place and local environment? We can get further traction on this matter by turning from modern readers of Vergil’s bucolic world to the bucolic world of which Vergil himself was a reader, in Theocritus.
1.3.2 Bucolic Space and Bucolic World
Theocritus’ bucolic Idylls take place in a range of locations – from Cos to Sicily and southern Italy – but they all happen in the same kind of place, what Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter stress is a “coherent world.”Footnote 101 Recurring environmental features, characters, and even a particular set of rustic gods establish a coherent setting throughout all of Theocritus’ bucolic poems.Footnote 102 Here, it is useful to make a distinction between particular place and a more general sense of bucolic space. For while some notion of bucolic space is consistent in the poems, it can in fact be difficult to locate some bucolic Idylls, and critics have disagreed over the degree to which place names in Theocritus are meant to situate poems in actual locations.Footnote 103 That this is no recent readerly interest is shown by the scholia to Theocritus, which often specify a particular setting at the beginning of a poem – or at least try to.Footnote 104 Scholia at the beginnings of poems set Idylls 1, 6, 8, and 9 on Sicily, Idyll 7 on Cos, and Idyll 4 in Croton.Footnote 105 Idyll 3 is placed more vaguely somewhere near Croton, and Idyll 5 simply in Italy.Footnote 106 Of Idyll 10, we are informed that it is unclear where the action takes place.Footnote 107
As illustrated by these attempts to pin poems to particular locations, Theocritean bucolic characteristically invites, but can also evade, location. And yet a coherent sense of bucolic space does remain constant: if a bucolic setting is sometimes hard to place, it is never hard to recognize. It is this more general idea of bucolic space that Vergil takes up in writing the Eclogues. The bucolic environment is, already in Theocritus, a kind of space that can be instantiated in various places. Indeed, this applies to the Eclogues as well. Whatever difficulties of localization beset a reader, the collection presents a cohesive kind of space built around recurrent characters, flora, fauna, and other environmental features.Footnote 108
In addition to a concept of bucolic space, Theocritus is important for Vergil in creating a fictional bucolic world. Mark Payne has shown at length that Theocritus creates in his bucolic poetry a “fully fictional world.”Footnote 109 The bucolic Idylls “manifest themselves as neither making present the world of myth, nor offering an imitation of life. … Their appeal lies instead in fiction’s ability to reveal to us a world that we have not encountered or imagined before.”Footnote 110 To be bucolic, on Payne’s account, is to imagine oneself into this fictional world, which seems tantalizingly reachable but is in fact not to be found in any real countryside. The germ of a complex relationship between bucolic world and external reality, then, is already present in Theocritus, long before Vergil’s addition of Caesar, Pollio, and Gallus to the mix.Footnote 111
Theocritean bucolic provides a model for a particular poetry that unfolds in a particular space. This bucolic space can find instantiation in a variety of places but also constitutes a fictional world that is not identical with any of these locations. These qualities of bucolic poetry may seem to pose problems for the importance of locality that I have been stressing in the Eclogues. Are these poems really concerned with local place at all, or simply with imagining bucolic loca amoena in general? In fact, as I will suggest, local place still matters to the Eclogues, even if we cannot know where the environments of the poems are located, and even if they are located nowhere but in the imaginative cooperation of author, reader, and text.
1.3.3 Places Written, Read, and Seen
The uneasy relation of the Eclogues to any definite reality means that the environments of the poems are heavily dependent on the imaginative work of a reader. But the fact that these places are not identical with any real locations outside of the text does not mean that they are not actually places, or that they are merely some illusion held forth by the text. Imagined and fictional places are not entirely divorced from reality. Indeed, perhaps the most enduring influence of Snell’s Arcadia, even in his firmest opponents, is an assumption that imaginative fiction constitutes a profound distance or escape from reality. In fact, experiences of imagined and actual places can intersect, blend, and recursively influence each other. In order to see this, it is helpful to turn to a literary influence for Vergil perhaps less expected, but no less significant, than Theocritus: the philosophical dialogues of Cicero.Footnote 112
When Cicero’s prose dialogues are read alongside Vergil’s Eclogues, numerous parallels of narrative strategy emerge. First, the form of the philosophical dialogue as inherited from Plato (whose Phaedrus we will examine shortly) shares with the amoebean eclogue a structure whereby authorial voice is divided between a number of characters, who may occasionally seem to speak for the author.Footnote 113 The vexed relationship between Tityrus and Vergil may not be so different from that between Cicero and one of his philosophical mouthpieces. Additionally, Cicero’s dialogues create the possibility for a kind of recursive self-citation familiar to the Eclogues. Just as Menalcas at the end of Eclogue 5 quotes earlier poems from the collection in which he is a character, characters within a Ciceronian dialogue can refer to and quote other Ciceronian works.Footnote 114
More significantly for our purposes, though, Cicero places great stress on the setting of many of his dialogues, just as Vergil emphasizes the specific location of various bucolic performances and song exchanges.Footnote 115 The De Oratore, for example, situates the conversation of its characters in book 1 not only at Lucius Crassus’ estate in Tusculum, but on a particular part of the estate, while deliberation in book 3 over where to have a discussion parallels the debate over where to sing in Eclogue 5.Footnote 116 A fragment from the De Legibus, preserved by Macrobius, has a character describe the setting of his conversation with such coloring that the passage would not be out of place in the Eclogues:
visne igitur, quoniam sol paululum a meridie iam devexus videtur nequedum satis ab his novellis arboribus omnis hic locus opacatur, descendamus ad Lirim eaque, quae restant, in illis alnorum umbraculis persequamur?
Shall we, then, since the sun seems to have gone down a little since noon and this whole spot doesn’t have enough shade from these new little trees, go down to the Liris and pursue the matters that remain in those little coverings of shade from the alders?
The particular time of day, the shade of trees, and the riverbank all call to mind the carefully elaborated settings of bucolic song (as well as Plato’s protobucolic Phaedrus).Footnote 117 It is no accident that both Cicero’s De Oratore and Vergil’s Eclogues end with a speaker saying surgamus (“let us rise,” Cic. De or. 3.23; Verg. Ecl. 10.75). In both cases, particular works are defined by their particular places of enunciation.
The relationship between Vergil’s Eclogues and the philosophical dialogues of Cicero presents us with something very different from the intertextuality of Vergil with Theocritus or Lucretius. The importance of Cicero (and Plato behind him) for Vergil consists in a suggestive mapping of the possibilities for constructing and encountering place within literature. Two Ciceronian texts in particular explore the rich possibilities of experiencing place with and through written texts. While something like a full exploration of Cicero’s use of place in his philosophical works is far beyond our present scope, a brief examination of key scenes in the De Oratore and De Legibus will offer useful lessons for handling the complexities of place in the Eclogues.
Early in the first book of his De Oratore, Cicero sets the dialogue in both time and place: at Lucius Crassus’ villa in Tusculum, in 91 bce (De Or. 1.24). More specifically, he describes how the various characters of the dialogue walk in Crassus’ garden and how a plane tree in the garden reminds Scaevola of a scene in Plato’s Phaedrus. Cicero’s adaptation of the pleasant shade beneath Plato’s plane tree – itself a protobucolic setting – has clear import for the shaded locales of Vergil’s herdsmen.Footnote 118
But also of relevance for Vergil’s Eclogues is the way the passage reflects on real and imagined places:
postero autem die, cum illi maiores natu satis quiessent, et in ambulationem ventum esset: dicebat tum Scaevolam, duobus spatiis tribusve factis, dixisse: cur non imitamur, Crasse, Socratem illum, qui est in Phaedro Platonis? nam me haec tua platanus admonuit, quae non minus ad opacandum hunc locum patulis est diffusa ramis, quam illa, cuius umbram secutus est Socrates, quae mihi videtur non tam “ipsa acula,” quae describitur, quam Platonis oratione crevisse: et, quod ille durissimis pedibus fecit, ut se abiceret in herbam, atque ita illa, quae philosophi divinitus ferunt esse dicta, loqueretur, id meis pedibus certe concedi est aequius. tum Crassum: immo vero commodius etiam; pulvinosque poposcisse, et omnes in eis sedibus, quae erant sub platano, consedisse dicebat.
Then on the next day, when those older ones had rested enough, and they had come into the walkway, he [Cotta] said that Scaevola, after two or three paces, said, “Why don’t we imitate that Socrates, Crassus, who is in Plato’s Phaedrus? For this plane tree of yours has made me think of it, this tree wide enough to shade this place with its spreading branches no less than that one, whose shade Socrates sought, which seems to me to have grown not so much from the ‘little stream itself’ that is described as from Plato’s language. And what Socrates did with his hardened feet, as he threw himself onto the grass and thus spoke those things that philosophers claim were spoken with divine influence – surely that is more fairly conceded to my feet.” Then Crassus said, “No, instead let’s be even more comfortable,” and he ordered cushions, and Cotta said that everyone sat together on those seats, which were beneath the plane tree.
This is a remarkable moment of intertextuality between two texts that have much to say about rhetoric and is also a metaliterary hint that this dialogue will be a Romanized imitation of and response to Plato.Footnote 119 But, more than this, the scene is also a probing of the relationship between reading, writing, and place. In this passage, a real tree reminds Scaevola of a place he has experienced through reading.Footnote 120 As he emphasizes, it is not so much the tree and shade itself from Plato’s scene but the fact that it is described in Plato’s fictive writing that lies behind its importance for him. Scaevola illustrates how a reader can experience a place through a text, form an attachment to it, and project that imagined place onto one’s actual surroundings. Textual place is an important part of his perception and construction of actual place.
Plato’s Phaedrus is already a text interested in the relationship between a particular location and a specific mythos. In it, Phaedrus and Socrates walk near a location where Boreas supposedly abducted the nymph Orithyia, and the location causes Phaedrus to ask Socrates about this story (Pl. Phdr. 229B–C). What we see in Scaevola’s (and Cicero’s) reception of Plato is that by enshrining this particular place in a literary text, Plato has complicated things. He has both linked his text to that place and made that place evocative of his own text – a strategy Cicero deploys with the settings of his own dialogues. And yet, by writing, Plato has also made the very particular part of grass Socrates and Phaedrus pick out peculiarly portable. Readers of Plato can imaginatively experience and develop a fondness for the particular place the Phaedrus describes and then transpose that imaginative locale onto their own environment – just like Cicero’s Scaevola. Finally, while revealing this process at work in the reception of Plato, Cicero is also here providing a model for the reading of his own precisely situated dialogue. Scaevola’s experience of the Phaedrus is our experience of the De Oratore, and he illustrates how the places of literature (like the Tusculan villa he himself inhabits) can act upon readers’ experiences in places outside of literature.
We find similar complexities at the beginning of Cicero’s De Legibus. The work begins with Cicero, his brother Quintus, and his friend Atticus strolling around Cicero’s Arpinum estate, and the first words of the dialogue are Atticus’ gesturing toward lucus quidem ille (“that grove indeed,” Leg. 1.1). But just what grove Atticus is referring to is immediately complicated, for he points not simply to a set of trees on Cicero’s estate, but to a tree he has read about in Cicero’s poem Marius:
Atticus: lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur saepe a me lectus in Mario. Si manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim sane vetus.
Quintus: manet vero, Attice noster, et semper manebit; sata est enim ingenio, nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae versu seminari potest.
Atticus: That grove indeed and this oak of Arpinum I recognize as the one I often read about in the Marius. If that oak tree remains, this is it right here; and indeed it is clearly old.
Quintus: Indeed it remains, our dear Atticus, and it will always remain. For it was planted by the imagination. By no farmer’s care can a plant be grown to be so long lasting as by the verse of a poet.
Are “that grove” and “this tree” to which Atticus is drawn the ones on Cicero’s estate or the ones he has imagined in reading Cicero’s poem on Marius? The trees on the estate are what he sees in this scene, but it is the latter that they make him think of, and it is the trees of Cicero’s text that he has formed a relationship with over time (saepe). Again, as in the De Oratore, a place only experienced through text enriches this character’s experience of his actual surroundings.
Quintus expands on this power of represented and imagined place by claiming that poets can perform a kind of planting that outlasts that of farmers. In Quintus’ language, Cicero’s poetry does not guarantee the immortality of any actual tree so much as it creates a kind of ontological double, a Marian oak that exists forever in poetry:
dum Latinae loquentur litterae, quercus huic loco non deerit, quae Mariana dicatur, eaque, ut ait Scaevola de fratris mei Mario, “canescet saeclis innumerabilibus.” … multaque alia multis locis diutius commemoratione manent quam natura stare potuerunt, quare “glandifera” illa quercus, ex qua olim evolavit “nuntia fulva Iovis miranda visa figura,” nunc sit haec. sed cum eam tempestas vetustasve consumpserit, tamen erit his in locis quercus, quam Marianam quercum vocabunt.
As long as Latin literature is spoken, the oak will not be missing from this place, the one deemed the Marian Oak, and the same one, as Scaevola says about my brother’s Marius, “will grow old over the course of innumerable ages.” … And many other things remain in many places longer in memory than they are able to stay in nature, for which reason that “acorn-bearing” oak from which there once flew “the tawny messenger of Jupiter, seen with its amazing figure” – let it be this one here. But when weather and time have eaten away at it, nonetheless there will still be an oak in this spot, which they will call the Marian Oak.
Written places and environmental features can have their own existence in literature, which outlasts that of any real environment.Footnote 121 But, as this scene also illustrates, this textual existence does not remove such places from reality. Rather, imagined places can overlap with, and enrich, the experience of everyday places, as occurs both here and in the De Oratore. Regardless of whether the oak Atticus points to is the same oak Cicero describes in his poem, he and Quintus are able to project it onto their surroundings. Quintus’ sit haec (“let it be this one”) is the same operation Scaevola performs in the De Oratore, where he essentially suggests, “let Plato’s plane tree be this one.”
These issues gain added complexity by virtue of the fact that this discussion of the ontological status of places described in literature occurs within a place we access through literary description. The characters of Cicero’s De Legibus reflect here on what their own readers are currently experiencing. For if the Marian oak exists both on Cicero’s property and in his poetry, it also exists in this prose dialogue. It existed in Cicero’s mind, in Atticus’ and Quintus’, and now in ours. This leads to some fruitful ambiguities of deixis in this passage. Does “this” tree mean this one in the text we are reading? When Quintus says that as long as Latin literature is read, an oak will exist “in this place” (huic loco … in his locis), does he mean in this place in Cicero’s De Legibus? Locus, after all, can also refer to a particular passage or “place” in a text.Footnote 122 As at the beginning of this scene, we may be prompted to ask which oak is even being discussed. The Marian oaks in Arpinum, in Cicero’s Marius, in Atticus’ and Quintus’ minds, in Cicero’s De Legibus, and in our readerly imaginations are all somehow the same tree and yet different – in different places, as it were.
Cicero opens up more questions than he provides answers. He suggests a literary culture in the late Republic alive to the rich complexities of fictive art and imagination tangling with the experience of actual, specific places. Cicero shows that readers can experience their actual surroundings through the environments they have encountered imaginatively, in texts. Indeed, this is what Roman elites did through artifice and landscaping any time they modeled a part of a villa after a famous locale, such as Cicero’s own personal Academy or Lyceum. Cicero’s writings show how this habit opens up rich possibilities for imagined and real place interacting through reading. Place attachments formed through texts can enrich and help shape our experiences of particular locations in the world.
Moreover, Cicero helps us see that even if we could pin certain of the Eclogues to specific locations, this would not solve the complexities attending the poems’ relation to real places. Even if Eclogue 1 were definitively set in a very specific part of the environs of Mantua, to travel there would not be to experience the setting of the poem. Any visitor to that location would simply be like Atticus and Quintus, letting “this” field be the one described in the poem.Footnote 123 In making the relation between his literary settings and actual locations even less definite than in Cicero, Vergil heightens this imaginative aspect of place experience. There are environments in the Eclogues we can experience only by reading the poems – but these imaginative places are created out of real geographical locations and can influence how readers then approach their actual world. This recursive movement between imagination and environment is something that Cicero helps us notice, and, as we will now see, is also something that occurs within Vergil’s own poems.
1.3.4 Pastoral Place, between Imagination and Environment
Throughout the Eclogues, imagination is a crucial part of how characters experience place: like Cicero’s characters, they imagine themselves into places and enrich their surroundings with fantasy and fictionalization. This is part of the difficulty that confronts anyone attempting to decide how tied to real place the world of the Eclogues is: The poems themselves thematize a blending of reality and fictionality. Nowhere is this clearer than in Eclogues 2 and 10.
Eclogue 2 presents a reader with two starkly contrasting views of the same countryside: focalized through Corydon, it is a fantastical place filled with Pan, nymphs, and an impossible variety of flowers. Seen through the unsympathetic eyes of Alexis, the country is nothing but sordida rura (“squalid countryside,” 2.28).Footnote 124 And in Eclogue 10, Gallus projects himself into an Arcadian world.Footnote 125 A mention of Arcadian singers leads him to fantasize about living in a pleasant bucolic land:
The numerous contrafactuals here (fuissem, iaceret, legeret, cantaret, consumerer) show the essentially fantastical and unreal nature of Gallus’ imagined environment. And yet Gallus works himself up to a startlingly immediate evocation of place with the emphatic repetition of hic (“here”) in lines 42 and 43. The imagined world of willows, meadows, and springs is suddenly here – it starts to become real and present for Gallus as if directly around him, as his fictionalizing imagination begins to transfigure his actual surroundings.
Soon after these lines, Gallus’ pastoral fantasy again impinges on his actual experience. He begins by imagining what he might do – ibo et Chalcidico quae sunt mihi condita versu | carmina pastoris Siculi modulabor avena (“I will go and play on the reed-flute of the Sicilian shepherd the songs composed by me in Chalcidian verse,” 10.50–1) – but this imagined bucolic existence edges into reality. Gallus’ declarations of a possible future erupt into a sudden present vision: iam mihi per rupes videor lucosque sonantis | ire, libet Partho torquere Cydonia cornu | spicula (“now I see myself going through the crags and resounding groves; it is pleasant to shoot Cydonian arrows from my Parthian bow,” 10.58–60). Carried away by poetic fantasy, Gallus suddenly seems to be moving in the bucolic world of his own imagination.Footnote 126 He demonstrates in acute form how imagined environments can form a significant part of actual place experience.
Both Eclogues 2 and 10 show characters putting imagined places and environments into relation with their surroundings in different ways. Corydon imposes on his surroundings the trappings of an imaginative world, enriching the sense of place with which he attempts to charm Alexis. Gallus, on the other hand, momentarily (and only momentarily) escapes his surroundings and circumstances by imagining himself into a distant land. While Vergil, as author, models his Corydon on Theocritus’ Polyphemus and his Gallus on the Daphnis of Idyll 1, the characters themselves also model their experiences and surroundings on literary tropes – Gallus’ imagining himself into Arcadia is not so different from a Ciceronian character imagining himself into Plato. Corydon and Gallus dramatize how experiencing place involves bringing imagined or fictional places to bear on actual environments, and it is possible to see in this a model for how to read the places of the Eclogues themselves: as the product of a poetic imagination engaging with but transfiguring actual environments, in the process creating places its readers will experience imaginatively but then allow to cross-fertilize with their actual surroundings.
1.3.5 The Makings of Place
Again, it is important to stress that calling the environments of the Eclogues imaginative or fictional does not make them placeless. Within a fictional bucolic space, the Eclogues stress specific locations, even if a reader is not certain where those locations are. Wherever one imagines Eclogue 1 to be set, at the heart of the poem is the importance of a particular bounded place to Meliboeus, as seen earlier in §§1.2.1 and 1.2.2.Footnote 127 And wherever it is that Vergil’s herdsmen stop to sing, the poems carefully describe the locations of these performances, whose features contribute to their particularity of place.
Wherever Eclogue 7 takes place, for example, the poem begins by specifying a particular locale with a flurry of deictic adverbs:
The Mincius suggests northern Italy, but it is the repetition of huc and hic more than anything that establishes a sense of place here. Even if the rest of the poem, with its “Arcadian” herdsmen, makes us doubt the relation of this place to any real bank of the Mincius, the poem asks us to imagine a specific place. Throughout the Eclogues, as here, it is often not any real geographical location but rather a sense of locality itself that the poems emphasize. Where “here” is on a map may be less important than that we imagine it as a distinct “here.”
In creating such particularity, Vergil draws not just from Theocritus and other intertexts but also from the specific qualities of actual geographical locations. In the case of Eclogue 7, Vergil’s native surroundings of Mantua are a significant influence on the fictional locale he constructs. Especially notable is the Mincius River, which “has fringed its greenish banks with tender reeds” (12–13). As Richard Jenkyns colorfully emphasizes, crucial here is the particular quality of the Mincius, as opposed to other Italian rivers:
Mincius, however, is something of an exception. Its headwaters are collected in the enormous basin of the Lake of Garda … The lake supplies a relatively steady flow of water throughout the seasons, and the modest declivity between the lake and the river’s confluence with the Po makes the current slow; today, in fact, wide marshy lakes have formed around Mantua, apparently since Virgil’s lifetime; reed beds remain a distinctive feature of its course.Footnote 128
Noting that similar descriptions of this river appear also in the Georgics and in the Aeneid, Jenkyns calls the Mincius “Virgil’s sphragis.”Footnote 129 Vergil links his particular authorial identity to the particular identity of his local river.
The specific qualities of this river and its surroundings inform other moments in the Eclogues, as well. The way the Mincius spreads into a variety of smaller streams creates a marshy terrain Vergil alludes to in the Georgics as qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum | pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos (“the sort of field unfortunate Mantua lost, which nurtured snow-white swans with its grassy stream,” G. 2.198–9). Vergil’s strange formulation herboso flumine (grassy stream, instead of watery field) captures the specific quality of the marshes around Mantua, and it is this specific environment that lies also behind the presence of swampland in Eclogue 1 (1.47–8) and the reference to Mantuan swans in Eclogue 9 (9.26–9).Footnote 130 The surroundings of Mantua and their actual nonhuman ecology are crucial to the construction of place in the Eclogues. The poems do not rely simply on generalized locus amoenus descriptions, rhetorical set pieces designed to conjure up the general idea of a pleasant locale, but on details furnished by specific environments.Footnote 131
A close Theocritean imitation in Eclogue 2 makes a similar point. Describing the noontime heat, Corydon says, nunc viridis etiam occultant spineta lacertos (“now also the thorn bushes cover the green lizards,” 2.9). This line recalls a description of noon from Theocritus – ἁνίκα δὴ καὶ σαῦρος ἐν αἰμασσιαῖσι καθεύδει (“when even the lizard sleeps in the wall,” Id. 7.22) – but substitutes thorn bushes for Theocritus’ stone wall. As Cartault recognizes, Vergil here removes a feature common enough on a Greek island like Cos (the setting of Idyll 7) but absent from northern Italian farms, where hedge barriers were more common.Footnote 132 Here, in a minute detail of description, we glimpse Vergil constructing the environment of Eclogue 2 both out of the imagined world of Theocritean poetry and out of the environments he lived in.Footnote 133 The location of the poem is not in any simple sense a real place in northern Italy, but its own particularity as an imagined environment is fashioned out of the specific environmental features of that region. Particularity of environment matters to these poems, even if that particularity is in the service of an imaginative fiction.
Writing of very different kinds of texts, Lawrence Buell has suggested, “perhaps the commonest attraction of environmental writing is that it increases our feel for both places previously unknown and places known but never so deeply felt.”Footnote 134 In thinking of the Eclogues as a kind of environmental writing, we could add that the poems may also increase our feel for places knowable only through their text. Specific, local environments mattered to Vergil as he wrote the Eclogues, but he used them to create a poetry not limited to any real locations, enabling readers to form attachments to and have experiences of places that exist in the poems.
And yet Vergil’s construction of a fictional bucolic world does not establish a profound distance from reality, as both Snell and Schmidt – in their different ways – would have it. Rather, imagination and reality cross-fertilize in the Eclogues. While asserting the importance of local environment, the Eclogues also reflect upon their own creation of place, arising from a combination of environmental experience and literary imagination. And just as with the characters of Cicero’s dialogues, these places that are read and imagined can act powerfully upon readers’ experiences and ideas of actual places outside Vergil’s text, including but not limited to his Mantuan environs. Readers can put the imagined places of the poems in dialogue with the environments they encounter in life. This was Vergil’s experience of living near Mantua, reading Theocritus, and then writing the Eclogues. This is what his imaginative herdsmen-singers do within the poems. And this is what readers of the Eclogues themselves have done and continue to do.Footnote 135
1.4 Conclusion
This chapter has examined how locality matters to the themes and interests of the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. Instead of treating place simply as a background setting, a visual landscape, or a symbol, reading for place as a thematic concern in its own right reveals important aspects of the poetry.
Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling to the herdsmen of the Eclogues, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. This is seen most clearly in Eclogues 1 and 9, where the local patterns of bucolic life are put under pressure, but Vergil’s whole pastoral work imagines herdsmen in rural localities like those lost by Meliboeus and Moeris. In dramatizing the effects of land confiscations on these local herdsmen, Vergil also probes the contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries. Finally, we have seen that the contingent localities of the Eclogues are fictional, but constructed as local, particular places, not the placeless realm of Arcadia that ecocritics too often assume is characteristic of classical pastoral. These fictionalized locations are the result of poetic imagination tangling with actual environments and show how environmental texts can participate in place making, just as much as place participates in the making of environmental texts.
Locality in the Eclogues, then, is a complex, shifting concept – more nuanced than the naïve Romantic holdover it is sometimes treated as in recent environmental criticism.Footnote 136 Some readers of modern and contemporary poetry have suggested that the once-comfortable stability of local or topographic poems has been disrupted by forms of modernity and globalism.Footnote 137 But what has begun to emerge from this examination of the Eclogues, and what the following chapters will continue to demonstrate, is that local place is already a complicated concept in Augustan poetry. We will see forms of quasi-globalism and supralocal mobility that complicate locality in the Georgics and in Horace’s Odes. Already in the Eclogues, though, local dwelling is fragile and contingent, not a natural relation to one’s soil but an ongoing process of place attachment fashioned among shifting forms of political and social organization.
The Eclogues lays the groundwork for the future explorations and complications of local place in the works that follow after it. Tensions seen in Eclogues 1 and 9 regarding shifting boundaries and the power of Rome to reorganize space and place reappear in the Georgics, as that work explores the relationship between Italy, Rome, and Rome’s global empire. Local place attachments of the sort modeled by Vergil’s characters are also centrally important to Horace’s self-representation in the Odes. Finally, the issues of fictional, textual, and real place raised by Vergil’s construction of a pastoral world are important for each of these works and will return in this book’s Epilogue. In all of these Augustan works, as in the Eclogues, local place is a central thematic concern and a concept that each text complicates and problematizes in its own way. Before moving on to those works, though, the following chapter turns our attention to the nonhuman world in the Eclogues.
