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Two shepherds shall be my flute-players, one from Acharnae, one from Lycope, and hard by Tityrus shall sing, how the herdsman Daphnis once loved a strange maiden, and how on the hill he wandered, and how the oak trees sang his dirge the oaks that grow by the banks of the river Himeras while he was wasting like any snow under high Haemus, or Athos, or Rhodope, or Caucasus at the world's end.
Though, of course, it is meant to convey the poet's thanks to Octavian for a favorable decree, it speaks for all the poor peasants who have been saved. The aged slave, Tityrus, does not represent Vergil's circumstances, but rather those of the servile shepherd-tenants, so numerous in Italy at this time. Such men, though renters, could not legally own property, since they were slaves.
He stroked his mustache, pondered a moment, then struck an attitude, and declaimed: "I go a serenading to Amaryllis; what time my flocks browse on the mountains, and Tityrus drives them. Tityrus beloved of me in the highest degree, feed my flocks and lead them to the fountain, etc."
Virgil perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he pictures himself doing under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth "patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his Celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard landscape: and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the external aspects of
When Tityrus and Meliboeus happen to be on the same farm, they are not sentimentally polite to each other. Alick, indeed, was not by any means a honeyed man. His speech had usually something of a snarl in it, and his broad-shouldered aspect something of the bull-dog expression "Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you."
The "Fairy Queen" is the masterpiece of an original mind, and its supreme poetic quality is a lofty magnificence upon the whole foreign to Chaucer's genius; but Spenser owed something more than his archaic forms to "Tityrus," with whose style he had erst disclaimed all ambition to match his pastoral pipe.
The Thestylis of the past did not think of providing it because she did not know it. The same author shows us Tityrus offering a night's hospitality to his friend Meliboeus, who has been driven from his property by the soldiers of Octavius, and goes limping behind his flock of goats. We shall have, says Tityrus, chestnuts, cheese, and fruits.
More and more his old friends grew dear to him as the years passed and "the goddess Neuralgia," as he called his malady, kept him chiefly at home. He wrote in 1877: "When are you coming back from your Cottage on the Cliffs? The trees on the Common and the fountains are calling for you. "'Thee, Tityrus, even the pine-trees, The very fountains, the very Copses are calling.
We have Daphnis and Bion, Tityrus and Amyntas for characters, Sicilian valleys for scenery, while Pan, Pales, and the Fauns represent the supernatural. The shepherds defend their flocks from wolves and lions. But this factitious bucolicism is pervaded by a pathos, which, like volcanic heat, has fused into a new compound the dilapidated debris of the Theocritean world.
Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Melibeus's mouth, can show the misery of people under hard lords, or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest? Sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, it can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience.
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