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Updated: June 15, 2025
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? We may conclude then that Vergil's use of that line as the title of his Eclogues is a recognition of Messalla's influence.
If the Daphnis-song is an elegy written at his death and it would be difficult to find a more fitting subject the poem, undoubtedly one of the most charming of Vergil's Eclogues, was composed in 41 B.C. It were a pity if Vergil's prayer for the poet should after all not come true: Semper honos, nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.
Vergil's study of evolution had for him also united man and nature, making the romance of the Georgics possible; it had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him more complex and subtle.
If the poet wished to make a plausible tale of that period he could no more undertake to modernize his characters than could Tennyson in his Idylls. The would-be gods are in the tale not to reveal Vergil's philosophy they do not but to orient the reader in the atmosphere in which Aeneas had always been conceived as moving.
Indeed the reasonable reader will find that, except for an occasional transference of actual persons into Arcadian setting by an allegorical turn invented before Vergil there is no serious confusion in the scenery or inconsistent treatment in the plots of Vergil's Eclogues.
In fact, Livy, who gives the more usual Roman version, says nothing of the Greeks, but joins Latinus and the Latian aborigines to Aeneas while he musters the Etruscans under the Rutulian, Turnus. The explanation for Vergil's striking departure from the usual patriotic version of the legend is rather involved and need not be examined here.
Cities like Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the puritanic ideals of Cato's day than Rome itself. The clear expressive diction of Catullus' lyrics, full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social ideals of Vergil's Georgics, the buoyant idealism of the Aeneid and of Livy's annals speak the true language of these people.
The man who wrote this was at least a spiritual kinsman of Vergil. The years of Vergil's sojourn in Naples were perhaps the most eventful in Rome's long history, and we may be sure that nothing but a frail constitution could have saved a man of his age for study through those years.
Death plucks your sleeve and whispers: 'Live now, I come anon." Memories of the Neapolitan bay! The Copa should be read in the arbor of an osteria at Sorrento or Capri to the rhythm of the tarantella where the modern offspring of Vergil's tavern-maid are still plying the arts of song and dance upon the passerby.
The vital difference between Vergil's treatment of the theme and Apollonius' may be traced to the difference between the Roman and the Greek family.
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