Pastoral poetry existed before Vergil’s first Eclogue, but no other poem so successfully defined the genre for future generations. After Vergil, pastoral poetry became largely a poetry of shepherds in an idyllic landscape, singing about their rustic lives while showing off their poetic skill, often with a tone of melancholy or longing. The first Eclogue became the paradigm for pastoral because it masterfully weaves evocative, playful descriptions of the countryside with melancholic meditations on loss and longing.
In the opening verses the goatherd Meliboeus longingly describes the lovely scene: a fellow goatherd, Tityrus, relaxes under a beech tree, playing a song on his reed pipe. This longing immediately takes a surprisingly melancholic turn when Meliboeus recounts his own circumstances to Tityrus—he is a refugee aimlessly searching for a new home, driven into exile because the government in Rome gave his land to military veterans from the recent civil wars. These contrasting circumstancesbring into sharp focus the creative potential of the pastoral landscape and the destructive power of political instability. Meliboeus’s dialogue with Tityrus illustrates the deep gulf between those who lost everything in the civil wars and those who benefitted from a benevolent autocrat. Meliboeus can no longer participate in the activities that occupy Tityrus: composing song, pasturing flocks, and pursuing a lover or meditating on love lost.
Meliboeus lost his land because of the traditional Roman practice of granting land to military veterans. Normally colonies of retired soldiers were established in newly conquered territories, and the newly resettled veterans helped expand the zone of Roman influence, or else established a base in a still hostile territory. Meliboeus, however, lives in Italy. By Vergil’s time (mid-1st century BCE) the practice of colonization and land distribution had become more political in nature, a way for cash-strapped generals to reward loyal veterans, or for politicians to appeal to the urban poor. During the 40s BCE, for the first time veterans were allotted land in Italy, rather than newly acquired foreign territory, as had been the traditional practice. As the veterans of the recent civil wars clamored for their promised land, the newly established governing triumvirate redistributed public land in Italy (ager publicus), forcing out current occupants, often Roman citizens whose families had occupied that land for generations.
In the opening lines of Eclogue 1, Meliboeus reveals that the rustic landscape is the source of creative expression. Hemarvels aloud to Tityrus: Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi / silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena; / nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva (“Tityrus, you, reclining und the cover of a shady beech, play the woodsy muse on your flute; we leave the borders of our fatherland and our sweet fields,” 1.1–3). These opening verses reveal a tension between those pastoral inhabitants composing song and those driven from their lands because of political turmoil, who can no longer participate in the pastoral way of life. The two speakers, Tityrus and Meliboeus, represent these two perspectives, respectively. Their conversation reveals the gulf between them. The opening lines draw attention to the landscape, the shade and the tree under which Tityrus reclines. And it is in this space that Tityrus sings his song. The leisure for song is also a space for song – not only having the time to make song but having a particular space to foster the creative production of the song.
Although the poem is set in the countryside, the city of Rome is central to it. From the exchange between Meliboeus and Tityrus, the reader learns that Tityrus has the leisure to sing and the freedom to pasture his flock because of his trip to Rome, where he sought libertas (“freedom,” 1.26–27). Tityrus’s first words tell us that he owes everything to a “god” (deus, line 6, presumably Octavian, one of the governing triumvirate and the future emperor Augustus) whom he petitioned for his freedom: O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. / . . . / ille meas errare boves, ut cernis, et ipsum / ludere quae vellem calamo permisit agresti (“O Meliboeus, a god has made leisure for us. / . . . / He allowed my cattle to roam, as you see, and me myself to play the things that I wanted on my rustic reed pipe.” 1.6, 9–10). Tityrus’s trip to Rome enabled him to have the pastoral lifestyle, the key features of which are leisure, shepherding, and composing songs.
When asked by Meliboeus a little later in the poem why he went to Rome, Tityrus exclaims “libertas” (1.27). In the context, Tityrus celebrates the fact that he was able to purchase his freedom from slavery, but the word libertas itself was an important cultural value for Romans and a politically charged term in Vergil’s time. Caesar’s assassins had used the language and imagery of freedom to justify their actions. By using this language of freedom, Tityrus links his ability to produce pastoral song with political freedom and the historical reality of the moment
Tityrus’ freedom to pursue his pastoral lifestyle granted to him by a godlike young Octavian is contrasted with Meliboeus’s despair, not only at having to leave his home, but worse, having a veteran take his land. His exile and loss of land is a product of of civil wars: impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit, / barbarus has segetes. en quo discordia civis / produxit miseros: his nos consevimus agros! (“a disloyal soldier will have these such well-tilled fields, a barbarian these wheatfields. Look how discord has produced wretched citizens; we sowed our fields for these men!” 1.71–72). The land is the source of his livelihood and pleasure; without it the two most important things to both him and Tityrus (agricultural pursuits and singing) cannot happen. As Meliboeus’s last words make clear, these are both lost to him now: carmina nulla canam; non me pascente, capellae, / florentem cytisum et salices carpetis amaras (“I will sing no songs; not while I pasture them will my little she-goats pluck at the blooming clover and bitter willow” 1.77-78).
This is a poem of longing, longing for the connection between land and creative production and the longing for connection through song and shared experience. Tityrus’s joy in his own freedom to fully inhabit and participate in the pastoral world is tempered with his sympathy for Meliboeus’s suffering. As the shadows descend, all Tityrus can offer Meliboeus is a night’s respite from his hardship: Hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requiescere noctem / fronde super viridi (“All the same, you could rest here with me this night upon a green bed of leaves,” 1.79–80). The poem ends with an acknowledgement that much has been lost to the darkness of war and the hope that, despite what has been lost, solace can be found in the collective acceptance of this loss, expressed through the offer of quiet companionship for a night.