SOURCE: “Tamen Catabitis, Arcades—Exile and Arcadia in Eclogues One and Nine,” Arion, Vol. IV, No. 2, Summer, 1965 pp. 237-66.

In the following essay, Segal studies the literary relationship between Eclogues One and Nine, emphasizing that Vergil's treatment of political issues in these poems is that of a poet rather than of a historian.

One of the difficulties hampering students of Vergil's Eclogues has been a certain loss of perspective about the relations between poetry and biography. While no one would deny that Vergil's writing of the Eclogues has some definite relation to certain political circumstances, that relation is one of a poet and not an historian. It is the ability to transform personal experience into larger, more intensely significant terms wherein lies the distinguishing quality of the poet's genius. The poet's experience of the “actuality” around him is, as other men's, rooted in the succession of historical events...