The poet's silences and hesitation in touching upon this subject of civil war are significant of his mood. The principals of the triumph receive not a word: his friend is the "glory" of a triumph led by men whose names are apparently not pleasant memories. Nor is there any exultation over a presumed defeat of "tyrants" and a restoration of a "republic." The exploit of Messalla that Vergil especially stresses is the defeat of "barbarians," naturally the subjection of the Thracian and Pontic tribes and of the Oriental provinces earlier in the year. And the assumption is made (1. 51 ff.) that Messalla has, as a recognition of his generalship, been chosen to complete the war in Africa, Spain, and Britain. Most significant of all is Vergil's blunt confession that his mind is not wholly at ease concerning the theme (II. 9-12): "I am indeed strangely at a loss for words, for I will confess that what has impelled me to write ought rather to have deterred me." Could he have been more explicit in explaining that Messalla's exploits, for which he has friendly praise, were performed in a cause of which his heart did not approve? And does not this explain why he gives so much space to Messalla's verses, and why he so quickly passes over the victory of Philippi with an assertion of his incapacity for doing it justice?
To the biographer, however, the passage praising Messalla's Greek pastorals is the most interesting for it reveals clearly how Vergil came to make the momentous decision of writing pastorals. Since Messalla's verses were in Greek they had, of course, been written two years before this while he was a student at Athens. Would that we knew this heroine upon whom he represents the divinities as bestowing gifts! Propertius, who acknowledged Mesalla as his patron later employed this same motive of celestial adoration in honor of Cynthia (II. 3, 25), but surely Messalla's herois was, to judge from Vergil's comparison, a person of far higher station than Cynthia. Could she have been the lady he married upon his return from Athens? Such a treatment of a woman of social station would be in line with the customs of the "new poets," Catullus, Calvus, and Ticidas, rather than of the Augustans, Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Vergil himself used the motive in the second Eclogue (l. 46), a reminiscence which, doubtless with many others that we are unable to trace, Messalla must have recognized as his own.
The pastoral which Vergil had translated from Messalla is quite fully described:
Molliter hic viridi patulae sub tegmine quercus
Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant,
Dulcia jactantes alterno carmina versu
Qualia Trinacriae doctus amat iuvenis.
That is, of course, the very beginning of his own Eclogues. When he published them he placed at the very beginning the well-known line that recalled Messalla's own line:
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi.
What can this mean but a graceful reminder to Messalla that it was he who had inspired the new effort?[3]
[Footnote 3: Roman writers frequently observed the graceful custom of acknowledging their source of inspiration by weaving in a recognizable phrase or line from the master into the very first sentence of a new work: cf. Arma virumque cano—[Greek: Andra moi ennepe] (Lundström, Eranos, 1915, p. 4). Shelley responding to the same impulse paraphrased Bion's opening lines in "I weep for Adonais—he is dead.">[
We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his Eclogues is a recognition of Messalla's influence. Conversely it is proof, if proof were needed, that the ninth Catalepton is Vergil's. We may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth Catalepton:
pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas,