ἐξ ὄρεος δρέψασθαι, ἐγὼ δ’ ὁδὸν ἁγεμόνευον·
παύσασθαι δ’ ἐσιδών τυ καὶ ὕστερον οὐδ’ ἔτι πᾳ νῦν
ἐκ τήνω δύναμαι· τίν’ δ’ οὐ μέλει, οὐ μὰ Δί’ οὐδέν[233].
But they are so varied as to suggest a picture of ease and abundance among the orchards and rich cultivated land of Italy, instead of the free life and natural beauties of the Sicilian mountains. The descriptive touches suggesting the picture of the innocent romance of boyhood are also all Virgil’s own.
The song of Alphesiboeus represents a wife endeavouring to recall her truant, though still faithful, Daphnis from the city to his home. Though some of the illustrations in this song also are Greek, yet it contains several natural references to rustic [pg 151]superstitions which were probably common to Greek and Italian peasants; and the fine simile at line 85 (of which the first hint is to be found in Lucretius[234]) suggests purely Italian associations. The final incident in the poem, ‘Hylax in limine latrat’ (though the name given to the dog is Greek), is a touch of natural life, such as does not often occur in the Eclogues. On the whole, Virgil seems here to have struck on a vein which it may be regretted that he did not work more thoroughly. If, as has been suggested by Mr. Symonds, in his account and translations of popular Tuscan poems, any of the Eclogues of Virgil are founded on primitive love-songs current among the peasantry of Italy, the songs of Damon and Alphesiboeus are those which we should fix on as being the artistic development of these native germs.
The tenth Eclogue was the last in order of composition, probably an after-thought written immediately before the final publication, or perhaps before the second edition, of the nine other poems. In this poem Virgil abandons the more realistic path on which he had entered in the eighth, and returns again to the vague fancies of the old pastoral lament for Daphnis, as it is sung in the first idyl of Theocritus. Nothing can be more remote from actual fact than the representation of Gallus—the active and ambitious soldier and man of affairs, at that time engaged in the defence of the coasts of Italy—dying among the mountains of Arcadia, in consequence of his desertion by Lycoris (a dancing-girl, and former mistress of Antony, whose real name was Cytheris), and wept for by the rocks and pine-woods of Maenalus and Lycaeus. Yet none of the poems is more rich in beauty, and grace, and happy turns of phrase. As the idealised expression of unfortunate love, this poem is of the same class as the second, and as the song of Damon in the eighth. That vein of modern romantic sentiment, already noticed in the second, the longing to escape from the ways of civilised life to the wild and lonely places of Nature, and to [pg 152]follow in imagination ‘the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,’ meets us also in the lines,
Atque utinam ex vobis unus vestrique fuissem
Aut custos gregis aut maturae vinitor uvae[235],—
and again in these,
Certum est in silvis, inter spelaea ferarum