Errantes hederas passim cum baccare tellus,
Mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho.—v. 18.
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.—Is. xxxv. 1.
Many theories have been proposed respecting the child to whom allusion is made in this eclogue, not one of which was satisfactory to Gibbon;[[563]] but the following is adopted by Heyne as the most probable. The peace of Brundisium was cemented by the marriage between Antony and Cæsar’s half-sister Octavia. She was the widow of Marcellus, and appeared likely to give birth to a posthumous child. To this child yet unborn, the poet applies all the blessings promised by the Sibylline oracles, and predicts that, under his auspices, the peace and prosperity already inaugurated shall be confirmed.
VI. In the sixth, Virgil represents allegorically, under the character of Silenus the tutor of Bacchus, his own instructor Syron; and thus makes it the vehicle of a short account of the Epicurean philosophy. It was not long since the same subject had been treated of at greater length by the eloquent Lucretius; and it is said that when Cicero heard it recited by the mime Cytheris, he was so struck with admiration as to exclaim that he was “Magnæ spes altera Romæ.” This eclogue is parodied by Gay in the Saturday of his Shepherd’s Week.
X. The tenth can scarcely be distinguished from any other amatory poem, except that the heroic metre is not so usual in that species of poetry as the elegiac. The loves of the poet Gallus are sung; Arcadia is fixed upon as the place of his exile; and the lay is said to be set to the music of the oaten-pipe of Sicily: but this eclogue has no other claim to be entitled a bucolic poem.
One passage in this eclogue, which suggested the following beautiful lines in Milton’s “Lycidas,” illustrates the truth that poetry often derives additional beauty from the fact of its being a successful imitation:—
Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ
Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore periret?
Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga nam neque Pindi