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

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During classical times, myth and allegory shared
an affinity since both were used as rhetorical devices in
persuasive argument.
Allegory was often used by the ancients
as a means of reconciliation between the philosophy
and the mythology (half-poetical, half-religious) of antiquity.
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Like the Greek Alexandrians, Virgil avoids the
common myths in preference for the more esoteric, often
obscure ones.
Virgil uses myth to reveal an inner or
spiritual significance, and his allegories become a kind
of simplified or partially rationalized version of a myth.
The concept of allegory as used in the Bucolics "hovers
between primitive mythological figurations and more sophisticated
structures of philosophical thought."
According to Honig, "An allegory starts from the
writer's need to create a specific world of fictional
reality."
Perhaps this concept explains Virgil's Arcadian
setting which he establishes in the tenth eclogue as
the bucolic retreat of shepherds and the Golden Age myth
which he recreates as an era of pastoral life.
The mixture of myth and philosophy common to allegory
occurs in Virgil's account of the Golden Age, which
he conceives in terms of a pastoral ideal, representing
to him a perfect peace, and garnishes with the Epicurean
philosophy of Lucretius.
The concept of the first age of
man being the Golden Age originates from Hesiod's Works
and Days, a cosmogony of early Greece.
When the Romans