Virgil vs. Cicero, Lucretius, Theocritus, Plato, and Homer: Two Programmatic Plots in the First Bucolic

Thirty years ago, scholarly opinion found no program to speak of in the first eclogue. The vacuum left scope for those who claimed that that the entire book's program came only in eclogue six and was Callimachean. But in fact the eclogue book opens with a powerful program that revises Theocritus' seventh idyll: Simichidas' programmatic encounter with Lykidas on a country road becomes, in Virgil's revision, Tityrus' authorizing encounter with a god at Rome, signalling a new bucolic departure. Yet two recent studies go so far as to dismiss the seventh idyll's role, offering instead reductive and contradictory accounts of Virgil's opening program. In response, the present paper seeks to build more scrupulously on scholarly history, including early modern commentators who have largely disappeared from conversation. It focuses attention on an array of features, such as elements of landscape, postures, sorts of musical art, and names, that enjoy traditional and quasi-mythic status. Virgil uses these mythemes to fabricate a new poetic myth, drawing on analogues in Theocritus, of course, but also Callimachus, Plato, Homer, Lucretius, and Cicero. The paper also illustrates how Virgil deploys his mythic themes in two programatic plots: the epic exile of Meliboeus and the bucolic pilgrimage of Tityrus.