Virgil, The Development of Pastoral in the Greco Roman World

The idylls of Theocritus may have remained obscure Greek verse if it had not been for Virgil who brought the Pastoral to its most enduring form. For it was his works that were the first point of reference from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this early modern period, virtually anyone that could read was familiar with them. Virgil did not take from Theocritus but built upon the foundation of the genre with his words, embedded in his personal experience. As stated in the previous paragraph, Pastoral is embedded in a song. The song is necessarily played, sung, spoken, felt in the landscape but, in Virgil’s work, the landscape listens to the pastoral’s music- specifically a woodland landscape, removed from the rest of society.

Virgil (70-90 BC) was born into a family of modest landowners. The family farm was in the most fertile region of Italy of the time, modern day Pietole. As a child, Virgil was able to wander freely in his diverse family estate taking a keen interest in both farming practices and the natural world. Civil war broke out in his country at the hand of Julius Caesar, the rich land of his father was confiscated by Augustus and dived into 60 allotments for resettlement. He never returned. These events greatly affected Virgil, leaving a strong influence on his writing and longing for an escape from chaos and violence and a nostalgia for peace of an Arcadian landscape.

In his later years, while in Naples, Virgil was part of a philosophical circle known as “The Garden” which focused on Epicureanism; a belief that obtaining the greatest good was through living modestly and gaining knowledge of the workings of the world. Epicureans were regarded as antisocial , even revolutionary and had a growing sense of resentment towards authority. This stood in opposition to the more popular Stoics beliefs and support of the Roman Republic. The political complexity implicit in poems but never fully explained, offered Virgil the possibility of addressing complicated and dangerous material without making his own position explicit.

In essence, the pastoral presents the reader with a contrast between idyllic harmony of an alternative world, in which man lives in unity with nature, and the reality which threatens to destroy it. The reader is both seeing it and losing it at the same time. This is the continuing fascination of the pastoral which has afforded generations of artists and writers the ability to express their displacement whilst hiding behind the guise of pastoral.

Virgil’s long poem. Georgics (Greek ‘to farm’) was more of an observation of farm management he saw as a child in contrast to the more dream like state of the Eclogues. His childhood experiences left him with a passionate love of the countryside. He had come to see the small farmer as a metaphor for all that was good in the nation. The unfortunate reality was that in the aftermath of the Civil War, small farmers deserted the countryside leaving the land to be managed by absentee landlords who resided in Rome. (almost 2000 years later during the Enlightenment in 1770 Oliver Goldsmith writes Deserted Village, a pastoral mourning the decline of rural life in England) The result was the an inevitable decline in the farming landscape and the state of the countryside was a matter of great concern to Virgil. Though the Georgics appear to be a treatise on farming, they are directed at the Imperial circle in Rome. Virgil wanted to restore a sense of pride in the work of the farmer. He argued that the true Italian way of life, when things were better, had been an agricultural one. Virgil’s message went further than reaching absentee landlords to the restoration of a way of life. Just as he had created the powerful image of Arcadia in the Eclogues, so in the Georgics he set out a powerful vision of the farmer as part of the organic whole, dignified and beautiful in close accord with nature. To establish ancient credentials, Virgil used the works of Greek writer Hesiod, a small farmer from Northern Greece who wrote two pomes: Works and Days and Theogony. The first was a sort of handbook for farmers and the other, and explanation of nature and the history of Gods. 1

...the father of agriculture

Gave us a hard calling, he first decreed it an art

To work the fields, sent worries to sharpen our moral wits

and would not allow his realm to grow listless from lethargy.

Virgil: Georgics I, 123-7

One of the constant themes was the value of hard work. Above Virgil takes up Hesiod’s lines that the farmer should observe justice and piety as well as follow the rhythms of hard work.

One governing thought that Greek philosophers held, revisited throughout this explanation is the idea of mans powerful progress from primitive ignorance to civilized power, and the ancient association between the culture of the land and the culture of the mind. Virgil’s idealizing of of the countryside, country values and the poets capacity to describe the landscape was a key factor in the later development of pastoral poetry. (e.g Petrarch’s Secret c.1350s)