The eulogy of Messalla, written in 42 B.C., reveals Vergil already at work upon pastoral themes, to which, as he tells us, Messalla’s Greek eclogues had called his attention.  We may then at once reject the statement of the scholiasts that Vergil wrote the Eclogues for the purpose of thanking Pollio, Alfenus, and Gallus for having saved his estates from confiscation.  At least a full half of these poems had been written before there was any material cause for gratitude, and, as we shall see presently, these three men had in any case little to do with the matter.  It will serve as a good antidote against the conjectures of the allegorizing school if we remember that these commentators of the Empire were for the most part Greek freedmen, themselves largely occupied in fawning upon their patrons.  They apparently assumed that poets as a matter of course wrote what they did in order to please some patron—­a questionable enough assumption regarding any Roman poetry composed before the Silver Age.

The second Eclogue is a very early study which, in the theme of the gift-bringing, seems to be reminiscent of Messalla’s work.[1] The third and seventh are also generally accepted as early experiments in the more realistic forms of amoebean pastoral.  Since the fifth, which should be placed early in 41 B.C., actually cites the second and third, we have a terminus ante quem for these two eclogues.  To the early list the tenth should be added if it was addressed to Gallus while he was still doing military service in Greece, and with these we may place the sixth, discussed above.

[Footnote 1:  See Chapter VIII.]

The lack of realistic local color in these pastorals has frequently been criticized, on the supposition that Vergil wrote them while at home in Mantua, and ought, therefore, to have given true pictures of Mantuan scenery and characters.  His home country was and is a monotonous plain.  The jutting crags with their athletic goats, the grottoes inviting melodious shepherds to neglect their flocks, the mountain glades and waterfalls of the Eclogues can of course not be Mantuan.  The Po Valley was thickly settled, and its deep black soil intensively cultivated.  A few sheep were, of course, kept to provide wool, but these were herded by farmers’ boys in the orchards.  The lone she-goat, indispensable to every Italian household, was doubtless tethered by a leg on the roadside.  There were herds of swine where the old oak forests had not yet been cut, but the swine-herd is usually not reckoned among songsters.  Nor was any poetry to be expected from the cowboys who managed the cattle ranches at the foot hills of the Alps and the buffalo herds along the undrained lowlands.  Is Vergil’s scenery then nothing but literary reminiscence?