The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Virgil · a book of ten pastoral poems · about 828 lines of Latin dactylic hexameter, composed about 42 to 39 BC and issued as one book, Virgil’s first · scored as one collection in Virgil’s order, on his Latin, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Latin quoted only where its words are certain, with Guy Lee’s facing-text version for sense
Mode
Pastoral book as an argument between song and history; Theocritus’s herdsmen moved into an ideal landscape and into Rome’s time
Mythos
Arcadia, the place apart where song, love and death are the only events; the dying and rising shepherd; the golden age returning as a child’s birth
Phase
The years of the land confiscations after Philippi, about 42 to 39 BC: a consul’s year, a young god in Rome, a poet dying of love
Presentation
Poems; ten eclogues of dactylic hexameter, about 828 lines, the odd poems dialogues or reported contest, the even ones a single voice, paired about the fifth
Register
Low matter in Homer’s line; muted for long stretches, rising in endings, in the prophecy and in the creation song; the contests flat by design
Scale
Herdsmen, their flocks and loves under one tree, with the state, the war, the turning of the ages and the cosmos entering their place
Governing Proposition
Ten poems of herdsmen who sing, love, compete and mourn, in a landscape made for song, into which history comes as a soldier who takes the land. The wager of the book is that a minor Greek form of shepherds’ song can carry what Rome was doing to its own fields: that only in a world where nothing should happen but song and love does an eviction register as the violence it is. Song is the shepherd’s work and his comfort, and the book shows, poem by poem, that it does not suffice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi”
“Tityrus, you, lying back beneath the spreading beech’s cover” (1.1). The book opens on a man at ease in the shade, and the one who speaks to him is leaving. Two herdsmen meet under one tree. One is confirmed in his land, and says why: “deus nobis haec otia fecit”
“a god made this ease for us” (1.6). The god is a young man in Rome. The other is going into exile: “nos patriam fugimus”, we flee our country (1.4). His fields will go to a godless soldier. There is no narrator. The fortunate and the dispossessed speak side by side, and the poem does not reconcile them.
The book is scored here as one work: the ten eclogues of Virgil, his first book, composed about 42 to 39 BC in the years of the land confiscations after Philippi and issued in his order. They are short. The ten run to about 828 lines of hexameter, by the usual count from 63 lines in the shortest to 111 in the longest; the whole could be read aloud in an hour. The odd poems are dialogues or a contest reported; the even ones are spoken or framed by a single voice, once the poet’s own, three times a narrator’s framing another’s song, once a lover’s monologue under a short frame. The voices alternate down the book.
The first poem ends at evening, and it closes not on either man but on the land: “maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae”
“and the shadows fall longer from the high mountains” (1.83). The line turns exile into landscape, and it is the book’s first height. Everything after is read against this poem: the peace in which song is possible is a gift of power, and what power gives it can take away.
Movement II
Half the book is the inherited pastoral. The second poem is a lover’s song of unhappy love, with a catalogue of gifts; the eighth sets two songs of love under a refrain; the third and the seventh are singing contests, the singers answering each other in matched couplets or quatrains. The model is Theocritus, whose Idylls had made a Hellenistic form of herdsmen’s song, already artful, already a city poet’s game, and in these four poems the debt is close, in places line by line. They render a convention of love and rivalry more than a condition newly seen.
Yet even here the place changes. Theocritus’s herdsmen were Sicilian. Virgil calls the two singers of the seventh poem “Arcades ambo”, Arcadians both (7.4), and out of a rough Greek region he begins to build an ideal landscape, the place apart where song, love and death are the only events. The making of Arcadia is the book’s largest invention, and it is made here, in the poems that look least new.
The contests are flat by design, and many of their stanzas could be dropped or reordered with little lost. They are also where the hexameter is most exactly engineered, in the matched quatrains of the seventh and the refrain of the eighth. And their closes are exact. The third poem ends with an order to the farm boys: “claudite iam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt”
“shut the channels now, boys, the meadows have drunk enough” (3.111). The contest stops, and the work of the farm resumes.
Movement III
The fourth poem says aloud that it is stretching the form: “paulo maiora canamus”, let us sing a little greater things (4.1). It names a consul, Pollio, and it announces an age: “magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo”
“the great order of the ages is born anew” (4.5). “iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna”, now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns (4.6). The golden age comes back as a child’s birth, and the poem ends on the child: “incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem”
“begin, little boy, to know your mother with a smile” (4.60).
Who the child is the poem does not say, and the question has not closed: a son of Pollio, of Antony and Octavia, of Octavian, an allegory of the age, or, as Constantine and Augustine read it and as Dante’s Statius confessed, Christ foretold. That reading was not the poet’s intent and is not credited to him as disclosure. It is evidence that the pattern was built strongly enough to bear it, and it made Virgil a prophet to the Christian centuries.
At the centre of the book stands the fifth poem: Daphnis dead, mourned by nature, and deified, standing at the doorway of Olympus and taken to the stars. The sixth answers the fourth. Apollo plucks the poet’s ear to keep him to the “deductum carmen”, the fine-spun song (6.3 to 5), and the poem then sets Silenus singing from the seeds of the world to the myths. It is held in the pastoral only by Apollo’s instruction and by being sung, and its frame is loose; the stretch is the book testing its own law.
Movement IV
The ninth poem answers the first. Another farmer has lost his land, and neither his patron nor his songs could save it: songs avail among the weapons of Mars, the poem says, as much as doves when the eagle comes (9.11 to 13). Its singer’s memory is going: “omnia fert aetas, animum quoque”
“time takes all, even the mind” (9.51). Moeris’s lost memory is the poem’s last disclosure: poetry neither protects its makers nor answers the soldier.
With the ninth the book’s architecture shows. Its poems pair about the fifth: the first and ninth are the poems of the confiscations, the second and eighth the songs of unhappy love, the third and seventh the contests, the fourth and sixth the poems that sing a little greater things. That concentric pairing by subject is not disputed, and it makes the book a sequence that argues, each poem read against its partner. Numerical schemes in the line counts have also been proposed for the book; they are disputed, and nothing here rests on them.
The pairing is what Theocritus’s collection did not have, and it is the third of the book’s turns from its model. The first was to let Roman history into the form, a young ruler made a god, a consul and a fellow poet named among the herdsmen; the second was to make the landscape symbolic, so that pastoral became a mode for speaking of anything. The third built ten poems into one book. Its architecture is clearer than its necessity, and the contests could lose stanzas, but the poems that carry it cannot be moved.
Movement V
The tenth poem stands outside the pairs, a coda for Gallus, a fellow poet set dying of love in Arcadia. The book gives him its last place of honour, and the landscape it has built cannot cure him. He yields: “omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori”
“Love conquers all: let us too yield to Love” (10.69). It is the same defeat as Moeris’s lost memory. Song answers love as it answered eviction, with more song, and it does not suffice.
Then the poet turns from pastoral. “surgamus”, let us rise (10.75): the shade, he says, is heavy to singers. The book ends where the first poem ended, at evening, and on an order to the flock: “ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae”
“go home full fed, the evening star is coming, go, my goats” (10.77). The book’s heights are in its endings, and this is the last of them.
The book went on. The whole European pastoral descends from it, through Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus, the medieval eclogue, Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s Latin bucolics, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Milton’s Lycidas, Pope’s Pastorals and the elegiac tradition after them, to the painters’ “Et in Arcadia ego”. The poet went on to the Georgics and the Aeneid, which finished the larger reorganisation of Latin poetry this book began. It survives whole, in Virgil’s order, and has been read without a break.
Act III · The Twelve
Read as a book, almost nothing can go. Remove the first poem and the book loses the dispossession every later poem is read against; remove the ninth and the answer to the first is lost; remove the tenth and the book has no close, no turn from pastoral, “surgamus”, let us rise (10.75). The fourth must be there for the sixth and tenth to read as they do. What holds the axis lowest but one is the contests. In the third and seventh poems the exchanges run in matched couplets or quatrains, and many could be dropped or reordered with the knowledge little changed; the catalogue of gifts in the second and the refrains of the eighth are similar. The frame needs a contest, not every stanza in it: perhaps a sixth of the lines are ornament.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the peace in which song is possible is a gift of power, and what power gives it can take away; poetry neither protects its makers nor answers the soldier. The first poem sets it down in two men under one tree. One is confirmed in his land: “deus nobis haec otia fecit”
“a god made this ease for us” (1.6). The other goes into exile, “nos patriam fugimus”, we flee our country (1.4), his fields given to a godless soldier. The ninth completes it: “omnia fert aetas, animum quoque”, time takes all, even the mind (9.51). It stands exactly at the gate because half the book renders an inherited convention of love and rivalry more than a condition newly seen.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevations are frequent, and of two kinds. The quiet kind comes at endings: the close of the first poem, where evening turns exile into landscape, “maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae”
“and the shadows fall longer from the high mountains” (1.83), a line felt as one of the summits of Latin verse; and the close of the tenth, “ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae”
“go home full fed, the evening star is coming, go, my goats” (10.77). The grand kind: the fourth poem’s annunciation of the returning age, Daphnis at the doorway of Olympus in the fifth, Silenus singing from the seeds of the world in the sixth. Held at 8.6 because the grand poems are brief, the contests flat by design, and the book’s music mostly muted.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Here the myth is built, not evoked. The book makes Arcadia. Theocritus’s herdsmen were Sicilian; Virgil calls his two singers “Arcades ambo”, Arcadians both (7.4), and sets Gallus dying of love in Arcadia in the tenth poem, and out of a rough Greek region he builds the European landscape of the pastoral idea, the place apart which history enters as a soldier. The construction is load-bearing: it carries the first and ninth poems, where the place is invaded. Daphnis is the dying and rising shepherd, mourned by nature and taken to the stars. The fourth poem builds the golden age as a birth, a pattern made strongly enough that a later faith read itself into it. Held at 9.0 because Arcadia is a frame of feeling more than a story.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is Theocritus: the Idylls, a Hellenistic form of herdsmen’s song, already artful, already a city poet’s game. The turn is in three moves. Virgil let Roman history into the form: the confiscations after Philippi, a living young ruler made a god, a consul and a fellow poet named in the bucolic world. He made the landscape symbolic, an ideal place rather than a Sicily, so that pastoral became a mode for speaking of anything. And he built the ten as a book, an architecture the Greek collection did not have. The stake was real: a first book in a minor form, put before the patrons of a civil war. Held at 8.8 because the debt is close, line by line in places, in the second, third, seventh and eighth poems.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The pastoral frame is the instrument: only where nothing should happen but song and love can an eviction register as violence, and the dialogue of the first poem sets the fortunate and the dispossessed under one beech with no narrator to reconcile them. The alternation of dialogue and single voice, and the pairing of poems about the fifth, make the book a sequence that argues, each poem read against its partner. The hexameter, Homer’s line given to herdsmen, carries the mode’s strain between low matter and high form, and the fourth poem announces it: “paulo maiora canamus”, let us sing a little greater things (4.1). Held at 8.7 because in the contests the form holds inherited material rather than making new knowledge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: two thousand years of return that have not closed the questions. Who is the child of the fourth poem: a son of Pollio, of Antony and Octavia, of Octavian, an allegory of the age, or, as Constantine and Augustine read and Dante’s Statius confessed, Christ foretold? Is Tityrus Virgil? How far is the book allegory, and how far is the allegory a trap set for readers who want it? Has the book a numerical architecture? Why does the last poem give the place of honour to Gallus? Servius, the medieval glosses, the Renaissance commentators and the long modern argument over the political readings have all found new yield. Held just below the top because a book of some 828 lines has fewer rooms than an epic.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Latin poetry of the late Republic, set against the Greek it inherited, and European literature after it. The intrinsic force: the book refounded a minor Hellenistic form as a mode able to carry politics, elegy and prophecy, and gave Latin a hexameter of new softness and finish between Lucretius and the Aeneid. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the whole European pastoral descends from it, through Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus, the medieval eclogue, Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s Latin bucolics, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Milton’s Lycidas and Pope’s Pastorals, to the painters’ “Et in Arcadia ego”; and the fourth poem made Virgil a prophet to the Christian centuries and a guide Dante could choose. Held below the top because the reorganisation was of a mode.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is of millennia, and the text is whole. All ten poems come down in the order Virgil set, in the late antique capital manuscripts, the Mediceus, the Palatinus and the Romanus, with Servius’s full commentary behind them and only small textual doubts, the best known a single line in the eighth poem. Presence has been continuous: a school text in antiquity, read through the Middle Ages, in every Renaissance schoolroom, translated into every European language and still taught. The form is fully legible, and nothing in the fabric is charged. It stands at the foot of the band for a text whole and read without break because the book is now read mainly by students of Latin and of the pastoral, and the mode it founded has passed from living use.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on the Latin. The command is of the hexameter at small scale. The first line, “Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi”
“Tityrus, you, lying back beneath the spreading beech’s cover” (1.1), sets the book’s sound in its interlaced word order and its play of vowels. The refrain of the eighth poem and the matched quatrains of the seventh are engineering of a high order, and the tonal control that lets the first poem hold gratitude and grief without a judging voice is complete. The closes are exact: “claudite iam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt”
“shut the channels now, boys, the meadows have drunk enough” (3.111). Held at 9.1 because this is a first book: some imitation is close to paraphrase, and the frames of the sixth and eighth poems are loosely joined.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One law runs through the book: song is the shepherd’s work and comfort, and the world outside it, war, eviction, unrequited love and death, presses on it and is answered only by more song, which does not suffice. Take the two most distant elements, the bawdy rivalry of the third poem and the cosmic prophecy of the fourth. They obey the law, because the fourth says aloud that it is stretching the pastoral, and the stretch is the law’s own test. Gallus’s “omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori”
“Love conquers all: let us too yield to Love” (10.69) is the same defeat as Moeris’s lost memory in the ninth. What holds the axis is that the law is a frame more than a single physics: the Silenus song is held in only by being sung.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as a book of some 828 lines, and high for its form. The orders held are more than a short book usually holds, and they are joined, not listed: labour, the herdsman’s work, grafting, the flocks, the farm to be lost; the natural order, season, evening, a countryside that mourns Daphnis; love in two sexes and in Gallus’s elegy; death and deification; the state and history, the confiscations, Rome, the young god, the consul, civil war; the cosmos in Silenus’s song; the sacred and the turning of the ages. The pastoral world is the structure that holds them, each order seen as it enters or threatens the shepherd’s place. What holds the axis lowest is size and vantage: each order is touched in a poem or a few lines, the city and the war stay offstage, and the family across time is barely present.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.5, then Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 9.0. A text whole in Virgil’s order and read without break for two thousand years; the founding book of the European pastoral and, through its fourth poem, of Virgil as prophet and guide; the hexameter commanded at small scale; Arcadia built as the landscape of an idea; and a child whose identity has not been settled since antiquity.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, high for a book of some 828 lines: labour, nature, love, death, the state, history, the cosmos and the sacred are joined in one frame, but each is touched in a poem or a few lines, and the city, the war and the family stay offstage. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.4: the poems that carry the book cannot be moved, but the contests and the catalogues could lose stanzas, perhaps a sixth of the lines.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below The Inevitable at 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Virgil’s Eclogae, also called the Bucolica, scored as one collection: the ten pastoral poems in dactylic hexameter in Virgil’s order, composed about 42 to 39 BC and issued as one book, his first. Some date the latest poems a few years later, and the date of the eighth is disputed. The text is the transmitted one, whole, with no poem lost: the late antique capital manuscripts, the Mediceus, the Palatinus and the Romanus, with the commentary of Servius behind them. The textual questions are minor; the best known is a doubtful line in the eighth poem. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. The opening lines and the famous lines are known well, and every poem’s argument, speakers and structure; the book as a whole closely, but not line by line throughout. Line counts are by the standard numbering, from memory, and editions differ by a line in the eighth poem, so the total of about 828 is approximate. Every axis is judged on the Latin, as a reader of Latin verse hears it and not with a native ear; nothing is charged to the poem for that limit. Latin is quoted only where its words are certain, with the page’s own close rendering; citations are by poem and line. Translations · Guy Lee’s Penguin facing-text version, which keeps to the Latin line by line, for sense; David Ferry’s (1999) for an English poem; Dryden’s (1697) as the historic English Virgil. None is quoted, and no translation is charged to the poem. Matters not verified or contested are not given or are given as contested: the numerical schemes proposed for the book’s line counts are disputed and are not scored, and the names of those who proposed them, and the course of the modern criticism of Arcadia, are not given.