Minor Latin poets; with introductions and English translations

EINSIEDELN ECLOGUESour youth can dig the fields, and tlie boy,trained to the slow-moving plough, marvels atthe sword hanging in the abode of his fathers.Ear from us is the luckless " glory of Sulla andthe threefold crisis ^ when dying Rome despairedof her final resources and sold her martial arms.Now doth earth untilled yield fresh producefrom the rich soil, now are the wild wavesno longer angry with the unmenaced shiptigers gnaw their curbs, lionsendure the cruelyoke : be gracious, chaste Lucina : thine ownApollo now is King.'"[The poem thus relates the shepherd's gaudiabut not the curae of verse 1.]" Sulla was traditionally regarded as felix.**The allusion seems to be to (1) the first capture of Romeby a Roman army when Sulla took the city in 88 B.C.; (2)Marius' reign of terror in 87 when slaves from the ergastulawere armed {Mnrtia vendidit arma), and (3) the occupationof Rome by Sulla in 82.' This last line is taken from Virgil, Ed. iv. 10, Lucina,goddess of childbirth, is here not Juno, but Diana, who asthe Moon-goddess is sister to the Sun-god Apollo. He is thedeity of the tenth Sibylline era which Virgil in Eel. iv.identifies with the Golden Age.335