The Eclogues

“O Meliboeus, it was a god who gave me this repose. / He’ll always be a god to me. Often I’ll stain / his altar with blood of a young lamb from my fold. He / it was who allowed my cattle to graze like this and me / to play the songs I choose upon my flute.”

Tityrus is grateful for the patronage of the young master of Rome, Octavian, and wishes to worship him as a god on his farm. Octavian’s predecessor and adopted father, Julius Caesar, controversially introduced this divine aspect to rulership in Roman political life; he was assassinated due in no small part to his latent claims to godhood. Octavian would further develop this concept as Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. Virgil may also be expressing genuine gratitude to Octavian through Tityrus, as he enabled his artistic lifestyle as one of Rome’s earliest court poets.

“Oh, will I ever in any time to come, look / with wonder at a land I can at last call / my own […] Is some rough soldier to have these furrowed fields? / Some foreigner these crops? What misery civil strife / has brought to us Romans! For such as these have we sown this land!”

Land appropriations saw free-born Roman property owners lose their farms to people of “lesser” status in Roman society—soldiers and foreigners. Ironically, the slogan of Octavian’s political party was “Libertas,” the Latin word for “freedom.” Virgil plays on this slogan, with the ex-slave Tityrus maintaining his property and the “free” Roman farmer, Meliboeus, losing his.

“Don’t trust / O, beautiful boy, too much in lovely hue. The pale / privet falls. The dusky hyacinth is plucked.”

This quote comprises a common sentiment across ancient genres, especially in elegiac and pastoral poetry, where youthful beauty is often compared to flowers (i.e., flowers withering or being plucked).