was forced to serve the menial part of a vehicle of
sycophantic praise is less easily pardoned. In
Vergil’s hands a conversation between shepherds
becomes an expression of gratitude to the emperor for
the restitution of his villa, a lament for Daphnis
is interwoven with an apotheosis of Julius Caesar,
and in the complaint of the forsaken shepherd, whom
Apollo and Pan seek in vain to comfort, we may trace
the wounded vanity of his patron deserted by his mistress
for the love of a soldier. The fourth eclogue
was written after the peace of Brundisium, and describes
the golden age to which Vergil looked forward as consequent
upon the birth of a marvellous infant, perhaps some
offspring of the marriages of Antonius and Octavianus,
celebrated in solemnization of the treaty. The
poem achieved considerable fame, which lasted as late
as the time of Dryden, owing to the belief that it
contained a prophecy of the birth of Christ drawn
from the Sibylline books, and won for Vergil throughout
the middle ages the title of prophet and magician.
Whether this belief was well founded or not may be
left to those whom it may interest to inquire; it
is sufficient for our purpose to note that in the poem
in question Vergil first introduced the convention
of the golden age into pastoral verse.
The first of the long line of imitators of whom we
have any notice was a certain Calpurnius. His
diction is correct and his verse smooth, but the suggestion
that he belonged to the age of Augustus has not met
with much favour among those competent to judge.
He followed Vergil closely, chiefly developing the
panegyric. His poems, however, include all the
usual conventions, singing matches, invocations, cosmologies,
and the rest, in the treatment of which originality
never appears to have been his aim. Some of his
pieces deal with husbandry, and belong more strictly
to the school of the Georgics and didactic
poetry. The most interesting of his eclogues
is one in which he contrasts the life of the town with
that of the country, the direct comparison of which
he appears to have been the first to treat. The
poem likewise possesses some antiquarian interest,
owing to a description of a wild-beast show in an amphitheatre
in which the animals were brought up in lifts through
the floor of the arena. Calpurnius is sometimes
supposed, on account of a dedication to Nemesianus
found in some manuscripts, to have lived at the end
of the third century, but even supposing the dedication
to be genuine, which is more than doubtful, it does
not follow that the person referred to is that Nemesianus
who contested the poetic crown with Prince Numerianus
about the year 283[16]. This Nemesianus was probably
the author of some eclogues which have been frequently
ascribed to Calpurnius (numbers 8 to 11 in most editions),
but which must be discarded from the list of his authentic
works on a technical question of the employment of
elision[17]. The editio princeps of these
eclogues is not dated, but probably appeared in 1471,
so that they were at any rate accessible to writers
of the cinquecento. It is not easy to
trace any direct influence, unless, as perhaps we
should, we credit to Calpurnius the suggestion of those
poems in which a ‘wise’ shepherd describes
to his less-travelled hearers the manners of the town.
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