Daphnis, another name from Theocritus. Cruelly cut off and lamented by his mother, Daphnis becomes a god, a patron of peace,
hailed as a divinity by all nature and by the country people. Daphnis was young, beautiful, a herdsman-a far cry from the middle-
aged dictator Caesar. But so soon after the assassination and elevation to godhood of the most celebrated man in the world-
descended from the goddess Venus-those spectacular events could not have been wholly out of the mind of Virgil's readers.
The Fourth Eclogue prophesies the return of the Golden Age. The poem is addressed to Asinius Pollio, an early patron of the poet,
as a compliment to his entry on the consulship in 40 B.C. Its exalted language draws on a wide variety of sources: oracles, Greek
versions of Jewish prophecies, Etruscan techniques of divination, Platonic myths, Homer, Catullus. In Pollio's consulship the
'mighty months' will begin to roll: a child will be born, whose birth will be marked by miraculous signs, and whose growing up
will be accompanied by the gradual blossoming of the age of Apollo. The earth shall produce all good things everywhere, without
the need of agriculture; lions shall be harmless; venomous serpents shall cease to exist. War, too, shall cease, and the divine child
shall rule the world.
Many modern scholars think that this poem was written to celebrate the pact agreed at Brundisium in October 40 (above, p. 532),
which included a marriage between Antony and Octavian's sister Octavia, and which averted the danger of war between the two
men: the child of the poem will be the expected son of the new marriage. But a poem to honour a man's consulship should be ready
for presentation on 1 January, not ten months later; and the striking parallels with Isaiah and other similar works show that this
really is a Messianic poem. Such works are produced, not when successful political arrangements seem to have secured peace on
earth, but when the earthly scene is so dark and hopeless that the mind turns away in despair to another order of thought. The
Fourth Eclogue was for centuries believed to be a prophecy of the coming of Christ. The modern mind is unhappy with such
notions; but perhaps that view comes closer to the real nature of the poem than it does to pin it to a specific political happening.
Again Virgil is being deliberately evasive as to his exact meaning, and the suggestiveness of the poem is more effective than
clarity would have been. And after all the treaty of Brundisium did not in the end mean lasting peace; while Octavia bore Antony
two daughters, but no son. Virgil would have been surprisingly credulous if he had not thought of such possibilities.