Nothing illustrates more clearly the unreal conceptions of the pastoral allegory than a comparison of the language in the [pg 138]‘Lament for Daphnis,’ with the strong Roman realism of the lines at the end of the first Georgic, in which the omens portending the death of Caesar are described. Nor can anything show more clearly the want of individuality with which Virgil uses the names of the Theocritean shepherds than the fact that while the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue represents the departed and deified soldier and statesman, the Daphnis of the ninth is a living husbandman whose fortunes were secured by the protecting star of Caesar,—
Insere, Daphni, piros, carpent tua poma nepotes[205].
The peace and tranquillity restored to the land under this protecting influence are foreshadowed in the lines 58–61—
Ergo alacris ... amat bonus otia Daphnis;
and the earliest reference to the divine honours assigned in life and death to the later representatives of the name of Caesar, is heard in the jubilant shout of wild mountains, rocks, and groves to the poet—
Deus, deus ille, Menalca.
Although the treatment of the subject may be vague and conventional, yet this poem possesses the interest of being Virgil’s earliest effort, directed to a subject of living and national interest; and many of the lines in the poem are unsurpassed for grace and sweetness of musical cadence by anything in Latin poetry.
There is no allusion to contemporary events by which the date of the seventh can be determined; but the absence of such allusion and the ‘purely Theocritean[206]’ character of the poem suggest the inference that it is a specimen of Virgil’s earlier manner. Two shepherds, Corydon and Thyrsis, are introduced as joining Daphnis, who is seated under a whispering ilex; they engage in a friendly contest of song, which is listened to also by the poet himself, who here calls himself Meliboeus. [pg 139]They assert in alternate strains their claims to poetic honours, offer prayers and vows to Diana as the goddess of the chase and to Priapus as the god of gardens, draw rival pictures of cool retreat from the heat of summer and of cheerfulness by the winter fire, and connect the story of their loves with the varying aspect of the seasons, and with the beauty of trees sacred to different deities or native to different localities. Though the shepherds are Arcadian, the scenery is Mantuan:—
Hic viridis tenera praetexit harundine ripam
Mincius, eque sacra resonant examina quercu[207].