Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THREE ECLOGUES
reader's, unschooled in Callimachean poetics. The refusal to write an epic
poem necessarily involved writing a different poem since the refusal was always
made in a poem. Apollo's magisterial rebuke to the poet and the poet's initiation
on Helicon: these two scenes are complementary, the one explicitly, the other
implicitly, programmatic; and the two occurred together at the beginning of
the Aetia.
One of the Muses conducts Gallus to the summit of Helicon, where the
divine singer-shepherd Linus (pastoralized by Virgil for the occasion) gives
him Hesiod's pipes, with these words:
'hos tibi dant calamos (en accipe) Musae,
Ascraeo quos ante seni, quibus ille solebat
cantando rigidas deducere montibus ornos.
his tibi Grynei nemoris dicatur origo,
ne quis sit lucus quo se plus iactet Apollo.' (69—73)
' These reeds the Muses give you (come, take them), the reeds they gave of old to
Ascra's poet, with which he used to sing and draw the stubborn ash-trees down from
the mountains. With these tell the "cause" of the Grynean grove, so that there be no
wood in which Apollo glories more.'
Apollo will be pleased with Gallus' poem about his sacred grove: at this point
the reader may recall how displeased Apollo was with a poem about kings and
battles. Now with a conclusive quid loquar. . .f" Why should I speak of. . . ?' at
the beginning of line 74, Virgil hurries Silenus' song and his own to a pastoral
close. The abrupt phrase has the effect of underlining what immediately precedes;
and the poet speaks again in his own person, as he did at the outset:
cum canerem reges et proelia.
That the same poet who wrote cum canerem reges et proelia wrote, years later,
Arma uirumque cano is one of the considerable surprises of literature. The sixth
Eclogue is an appropriately oblique — but uncompromising — declaration of
adherence to the aesthetic principles of Callimachus; no reader at the time could
have anticipated that its author would one day write an epic — a didactic or
aetiological poem possibly, but not an epic. The Aeneid so imposes upon the
imagination that Virgil's poetic career is seen as an orderly progression from the
lesser to the greater work; it requires a corresponding effort of the imagination
to see that it cannot have been so.
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