Vergil, Eclogue I, 64-83

M.: I am going to have to travel to the ends of the earth. Will I ever return to my homeland and my poor cottage? A brutish soldier will get my land. Look what this civil war has done to us: we cultivate our lands for men such as these. Meliboeus, you can go plant your vines and fruit trees; come on, goats, get moving. I'll never be a carefree shepherd around here again, singing my songs. T.: But you could have rested here with me. I have fruit and chestnuts and cheese, and the evening fires are already burning in the country villas.

64–65  nōs … aliī … ībimus … / pars … veniēmus: aliī … pars instead of the usual aliī … aliī to contrast two parts of a group; nōs includes both, referring to those displaced from their lands in the recent turmoil.

64–66  Afrōs/ … Scythiam … Oaxen/ … Britannōs: Tityrus’s geographic impossibilities remind Meliboeus of an exile’s harsh reality. Like Parthia and Germania, these places are at or beyond the limits of the Roman empire.

64  sitientīs … Afrōs: “to the thirsty Africans,” accusative of place to which, as with Scythiam, Oaxen, Britannōs in the following verses as well.

65  Scythiam: lands in the northeast beyond the Roman empire, considered by ancient Greek and Roman writers a frozen wilderness.

65  rapidum crētae Oaxen: “the Oaxes river churning with clay”; Oaxen is the Greek form of the accusative of Oaxes; crētae is a genitive specifying what the river churns up in its violent onrush (AG 349d).

66  penitustōtō dīvīsōs orbe: “deeply separated from the entire world”; tōtō … orbe is an ablative of separation used with dīvīsōs (AG 401). Here, dīvīsōs has both cultural and physical meaning; like the Scythians, the Britons were considered barbarians and culturally separate, but they also lived extremely far away.

67  ēn umquam: introduces an emotional rhetorical question; the subsequent disjointed word order reflects Meliboeus’s highly emotional state.

67–68  patriōs … fīnīs / … et … congestum … culmen: direct objects of videns in verse 69.

68  pauperis … tugurī: genitive after culmen (AG 343). The conjunction et is postponed, as often in poetry.

68  congestum caespite culmen: “roof (LS columen I.B) piled with turf,” as would be typical of a peasant cottage.

69  mea regna: apposite to aliquot … aristās, the direct object of mīrābor, heavily ironic in tone. His fields, his kingdom, have been reduced to a few wheat stalks in the hands of the soldier.

70–72  impius … mīles habēbit: a veteran has been given Meliboeus’s land. The soldier is impius (and a barbarus, line 71) either because he fought against other Romans in the civil war, because he is a foreign mercenary, or because soldiers threaten the peaceful rusticity of the Italian countryside; to the civilian farmer the soldier is uncivilized.

71  quō: an exclamatory interrogative adverb, “in what a state!”

71  discordia: civil war, emphasized by cīvīs, is the cause of all this upheaval.

73  nunc: along with the imperatives īnsere and pōne bitterly sarcastic; his hard work will be for someone else’s gain because he won’t be there to harvest the pears and grapes.

74  meae … capellae: the hyperbaton combined with the interrupting descriptive noun phrase felix quondam pecus conveys strong emotions.

75–76  vōs: accusative subject of pendēre in indirect statement introduced by vidēbō in verse 76.

75  viridī prōiectus in antrō: participial phrase modifying ego.

76  pendēre: i.e. they seem to be attached to the steep slope without any support under their feet (Coleman).

77   mē pāscente: ablative absolute.

77  capellae: vocative used with carpētis in verse 78.

79  hanc … noctem: accusative of time during which (AG 423).

79  poterās: the imperfect tense indicates unreal action in present time, similar to the imperfect subjunctive in a conditional (AG 517b, c), so it could be a polite invitation (“you could”) or a true contrary-to-fact (“you could have”).

80–81  mītia pōma, / castaneae mollēs et pressī cōpia lactis: the ascending tricolon in verses 80–81 and the chiastic word order of verse 81 (noun-adjective-adjective-noun) elevates a simple meal of apples, roasted chestnuts and cheese (pressī lactis) (Clausen).

83  māiōrēsque … umbrae: the shadows of the opening lines that facilitate Tityrus’s song as part of the locus amoenus become shadows of closure that end the song.