Page "Virgil" Paragraph 7

The biographical tradition asserts that Virgil began the hexameter Eclogues ( or Bucolics ) in 42 BC and it is thought that the collection was published around 39 – 38 BC, although this is controversial.

The Eclogues ( from the Greek for " selections ") are a group of ten poems roughly modeled on the bucolic hexameter poetry (" pastoral poetry ") of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus.

After his victory in the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, fought against the army led by the assassins of Julius Caesar, Octavian tried to pay off his veterans with land expropriated from towns in northern Italy, supposedly including, according to the tradition, an estate near Mantua belonging to Virgil.

The loss of his family farm and the attempt through poetic petitions to regain his property have traditionally been seen as Virgil's motives in the composition of the Eclogues.

This is now thought to be an unsupported inference from interpretations of the Eclogues.

In Eclogues 1 and 9, Virgil indeed dramatizes the contrasting feelings caused by the brutality of the land expropriations through pastoral idiom, but offers no indisputable evidence of the supposed biographic incident.

Readers often did and sometimes do identify the poet himself with various characters and their vicissitudes, whether gratitude by an old rustic to a new god ( Ecl.

1 ), frustrated love by a rustic singer for a distant boy ( his master's pet, Ecl.

2 ), or a master singer's claim to have composed several eclogues ( Ecl.

5 ).

Modern scholars largely reject such efforts to garner biographical details from fictive texts preferring instead to interpret the diverse characters and themes as representing the poet's own contrastive perceptions of contemporary life and thought.