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THEOCRITUS AND VIRGIL
This poetical annunciation seems curiously remote from the political fact: such
extravagant reference is typical of the poem and makes it difficult to interpret.
And yet, at whatever remove, political fact must be reckoned with.
The poem begins with oracular solemnity: the last age of the Sibyl's spell
is now come, a great ordinance of time is born anew (nascitur ordo) and with it
a wonder-child: , . c
tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta faue Lucina. (8—10)
Lucina, chaste goddess, bless the boy, at whose birth the iron age shall first cease and
the golden rise up throughout the world.
As this son of time grows slowly to manhood, so will the golden age (for a few
traces of aboriginal sin remain) be purified.
The pact of Brundisium was consummated, after the high Roman fashion,
with a dynastic wedding: Antony took Octavian's sister, the blameless Octavia,
to wife. For contemporary readers of Virgil's poem the vexed question 'Who
is the boy?' would not arise. They would know who was meant: the son of
Antony and Octavia, and heir to Antony's greatness (17) — the son that never
was, a daughter was born instead. 1 Antony claimed descent from Hercules as
proudly as Julius Caesar claimed descent from Venus; 2 thus the boy would
have been descended on his father's side from Hercules, on his mother's from
Venus: a symbol incarnate of unity and peace. Like Hercules 3 (the poem
implies) he will be exalted to heaven, there to see gods mingling with heroes
(15—16, among them the recently deified Julius?), to banquet with gods and
share a goddess's bed (63).
In the year 40 B.C. — on earth — Antony, not Octavian, was the commanding
figure; and of this their contemporaries, spectators to the mighty scene, would
have no doubt. The modern reader, under the disadvantage of hindsight, must
constantly remind himself that Octavian was not yet Augustus nor Virgil yet
the poet of the Aeneid; that both eventualities were as yet latent in an unimaginable
future. Failure of historical perspective distorts much of what is written
about the fourth Eclogue.
The epithalamium is a potentially embarrassing form of composition. That
Virgil conceived of his poem as in some sort an epithalamium is indicated by
'Talia saecla'suis dixerunt'currite'fusis
Concordes stabili fatorum numine Parcae.
1 * Speedon such ages' to their spindles the Parcae sang, unanimous by fate's established
will
1
All this was forgotten with the years, until Asinius Callus (Pollio's son) could assert that he was
the child. What would his father have said!
2 App. Bell. civ. 3.16, 19; also Plut. Ant. 4, 36.
3
The type and model of heroic virtue; the word heros occurs 3 times in Eel. 4, but nowhere else
in the Eclogues. This divine connexion was later appropriated to Augustus even though he "was not
descended from Hercules, cf. Hor. Odes 3.3.9—12, 14.1—4.
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