THE EVOLUTION OF ALLEGORY IN THE PASTORAL ... - Repositories

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pastoral life (IV), and the infusion of an epic spirit
projected through political panegyric (IV and V).
To what extent Virgil intentionally meant to employ
allegory cannot accurately be determined.
Theocritus'
seventh idyll is considered "the tangible starting
point of Virgil's intrusion into pastoral of contemporary
poets and courtiers and of Octavian himself, and of double
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meaning and various covert allusions."
But Virgil makes
no consistent attempt to keep up the pastoral masquerade,
for he often alludes to prominent men by their actual
names.
Virgil employs oblique allusions only to a limited
extent, but even those were easily understood by any informed
reader of his own day; and if not, the enjoyment
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of the eclogue did not wholly depend on catching allusions.
Conjecture among modern critics largely coincides
in designating the second, third, seventh, and eighth eclogues
as nonallegorical;
the fifth, sixth, ninth, and
tenth as the kinds of allegory used in Theocritus' seventh,
the poet-shepherd masquerade; and the first and ninth as
personal allegory.-"-^
Allegory was a recognizable figure among the ancients.
There is evidence of allegorical interpretations
as early as the fifth century B. C, when philosophers and
later grammarians used allegory to prove that Homer was
the first moral philosopher.
In the earliest Graeco-Roman
tradition allegory probably had a two fold origin:
the