Relief Of Mother Earth On The Ara Pacis (13-9BC). The fruitfulness of the earth, portrayed in typical Hellenistic style with
children in her arms, and fruit, flowers, and livestock all about her, is symbolic of the new Golden Age which Augustus sought to
inaugurate and which recalls passages in the Augustan poets, such as the fourth Eclogue of Virgil. (Cf. below, pp. 776 f)
The Eclogues can be ranged between two poles: some are fairly close to Theocritus (2, 3, and 7) others are further distanced but
still Theocritean (8 and 9); at the other extreme some have very little contact with Theocritus at all (4 and 6). They all have in
common a highly polished technique, in which Virgil shows that he has learnt everything that Theocritus, Callimachus, and
Catullus had to teach him. The choice of words is punctilious, the sound of the verse is melodious, and there is a pervasive
atmosphere of an exquisite and faintly melancholy beauty. The paintings of Claude Lorraine are perhaps the best analogy in
another art; and he of course was much influenced by Virgil. It is a small but significant part of this that the first and last poems of
the collections, and others in between, end with the coming of evening and the shadows lengthening from the hills.
Despite much scholarly endeavour, agreement is not possible on the order in which the Eclogues were composed. Their style does
not enable us to extract many dates from the poems, which no doubt were polished to fit the positions they occupy in the final
published collection. It is likely that the book of ten Eclogues was published about 38 B.C.; recent attempts to put the completion
as late as 35 are not convincing. The poems seem to have been an immediate success. We are told that they were acted on the
stage, and that the shy and evasive poet, on his rare appearances in Rome, was pointed at in the street. In the spring of 38, already
an established writer, he introduced Horace to Maecenas, whose name does not appear in the Eclogues, but to whom Virgil was to
dedicate his next work, the Georgics.
In the Eclogues Virgil addressed several great men: Asinius Pollio chiefly, but also Alfenus Varus. They both seem to be in the
position of actual or potential patrons. In this respect Virgil resembles Horace rather than Catullus and (in his First Book)
Propertius, who have no patrons but only friends. The poet Cornelius Gallus, who is praised in the Sixth Eclogue, also receives the
supreme compliment of being the subject of the Tenth. In that poem Virgil presents the elegiac love poet as a pastoral lover in
Arcadia, his amorous complaints transposed into Virgil's own metre, and the lover himself recalling Theocritus' Daphnis. The
procedure seems strange to us in poetry, but it would surprise us less in music: Virgil has written a variation in his own style on a
theme by Gallus.