emerges, Rome has burst into his world. After the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42, the Caesarian party had to take care of the
soldiers in the enormous armies which now looked to them for their reward. What the soldiers wanted was land, and that could
only be found by ejecting its present owners. A recent calculation estimates that a quarter of the land of Italy changed hands in the
proscriptions and evictions. Meliboeus, despite his pretty Greek name, is sufficiently Italian and contemporary to be among the
ejected victims:
A godless soldier has my cherished fields,
A savage has my land: such profit yields
Our civil war. For them we worked our land!
Ay, plant your pears-to fill another's hand.Tityrus has miraculously escaped the general disaster, thanks to a 'wonderful young man' in Rome, who secured him his land. For
that, Tityrus had to go to Rome:
Urbem quarn dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putaui
stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quo saepe solemus
pastores ouium teneros depellere fetus ...I used to think the city men call Rome
Was like our market-town, to which we come
On market days, and drive our kids to sell.
O foolishness ...The lines, standing on the very first page of Virgil's published work, have a prophetic ring. The poet, like his rustic speaker, will
discover Rome; and will find that Rome is something very different from the innocent joys and sorrows of country life. The
imperial city, with its fabulous wealth and power, can at will reward or destroy. That will be a central problem for the Aeneid.
The Eclogues form a unified work of art, with a structure of its own. The number of poems is itself not a random one: the first
book of Tibullus contains ten poems, so does the first book of Satires of Horace. A poet was expected to organize his work into a
pleasing shape. The First Eclogue, as we have seen, is in the form of a dialogue: so are all the odd-numbered Eclogues. The even-
numbered ones, on the other hand, are monologues. The fifth poem ends with a little recapitulation, the speaker presenting his
friend with the pipes on which, he says, he played the second and third poems. That marks the half-way point, and a little break,
comparable to that after the third of Horace's six Roman odes (Odes 3.1-6); as in that cycle of poems, the second half begins with a
fresh scene of invocation, in this case not of the Muse but of Apollo. Another structure, also meant to be felt, centres on the Fifth
Eclogue (allusion to the death and deification of Caesar), which is immediately framed by the two most ambitious and least simply
pastoral poems, (iv and vi), and at furthest remove framed by two poems on the evictions (1 and ix). The last poem, in this
structure, stands rather outside the rest; it is explicitly introduced as 'my last pastoral song'.
As we have seen, the Ninth Eclogue returns to the theme of the evictions. Menalcas, a singer and translator of Theocritus, has been
turned out of his property near Mantua. So far from saving his land by means of his song, he was lucky to escape with his life.
Ever since antiquity people have tried to make the two Eclogues on the evictions into an autobiographical account by the poet of
his own ejection and restoration to his Mantuan property. But it is surely clear that Virgil did not mean to produce such an account.
Tityrus, restored by a superhuman young man (who in real life could only be the nineteen- or twenty-year old Octavian) is elderly
and a slave, in neither respect like Virgil; and he is balanced by Meliboeus, for whom no providential saviour averts disaster. And
in the Ninth Eclogue Menalcas too, it seems, finds no remedy. The two poems would add up to a very odd way of saying 'Thank
you' to Octavian. What Virgil has done, rather, is to show us scenes from the evictions, what is going on in the Italian countryside,
filtered through the poetic medium provided by Theocritus. If we are to guess what happened to Virgil himself, it may seem likely
that he lost his family land near Mantua, and was given by his patrons a property near Naples. That is where we find him living
later on, one of a group of friends of the Epicurean philosopher Siro.
One point is a vital one for understanding Virgil. Already in the Eclogues he is working towards the special way of writing, which
in the Aeneid he has perfected: a manner which allows the reader to see through the poetical surface to events and personalities of
a different kind, which are never made fully explicit. So in the Fifth Eclogue two herdsmen sing of the death and deification of