The tenth Eclogue[6] gives Vergil’s impressions upon reading one of the elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army post in Greece after the news of Cytheris’ desertion.  In his elegy the poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East away from his beloved.

“Would that he might have been a simple shepherd like the Greeks about his tent, for their loves remained true!” And this is of course the very theme which Vergil dramatizes in pastoral form.

[Footnote 6:  This is the interpretation of Leo, Hermes, 1902, p. 15.]

We, like Vergil, realize that Gallus invented a new genre in literature.  He had daringly brought the grief of wounded love out of the realm of fiction—­where classic tradition had insisted upon keeping it—­into the immediate and personal song.  The hint for this procedure had, of course, come from Catullus, but it was Gallus whom succeeding elegists all accredited with the discovery.  Vergil at once felt the compelling force of this adventuresome experiment.  He gave it immediate recognition in his Eclogues, and Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid became his followers.

The poems of Gallus, if the Arcadian setting is real, were probably written soon after Philippi.  Vergil’s Eclogue of recognition may have been composed not much later, for we have a right to assume that Vergil would have had one of the first copies of Gallus’ poems.  If this be true, the first and last few lines were fitted on later, when the whole book was published, to adapt the poem for its honorable position at the close of the volume.

XI

THE EVICTIONS

The first and ninth Eclogues, and only these, concern the confiscations of land at Cremona and Mantua which threatened to deprive Vergil’s father of his estates and consequently the poet of his income.  There seems to be no way of deciding which is the earlier.  Ancient commentators, following the order of precedence, interpreted the ninth as an indication of a second eviction, but there seems to be no sound reason for agreeing with them, since they are entirely too literal in their inferences.  Conington sanely decides that only one eviction took place, and he places the ninth before the first in order of time.  He may be right.  The two poems at any rate belong to the early months of 41.

The obsequious scholiasts of the Empire have nowhere so thoroughly exposed their own mode of thought as in their interpretations of these two Eclogues.  Knowing and caring little for the actual course of events, having no comprehension of the institutions of an earlier day, concerned only with extracting what is to them a dramatic story from the Eclogues, they put all the historical characters into impossible situations.  The one thing of which they feel comfortably sure is that every Eclogue that mentions Pollio,