Wendell Clausen's commentary on Bucolics sets out (pp. 109-119) to

demystify the fourth Eclogue: it becomes "a brilliant little poem.

Brilliant and playful, with overtures of grandeur . . . " (p. 119),

essentially Hellenistic in character like all the rest of the

collection. In this poem, not on the same level as the others (so

Virgil says in the first line), a new golden age is about to begin, and

this restoration of human felicity coincides with the birth of a puer

(male child). Who? Any commentary will list the five historical

possibilities, of whom a child to be born of the marriage between Mark

Antony and Octavia, Octavian's sister, is the least unlikely (though

they never did produce a son). In later times, the poem was thought to

prefigure Augustus (not a good idea, except in the loosest of terms) or

indeed Christ: Lactantius noted some parallels between prophecies of

the coming of the Messiah and the language used by Virgil; the emperor

Constantine was convinced that Virgil really did prophesy the coming of

Christ (while St. Jerome was quite clear that he did not), and St.

Augustine hedged his bets, saying that Virgil was, after all, quoting

the Cumaean Sibyl, and she, not the poet, had prophesied Christ's

coming. More to the point are the abundant close parallels in imagery

between the fourth Eclogue and, notably, the book of Isaiah. That is

not to suggest that Virgil read the Old Testament, but he must

inevitably have had some contact with Alexandrian Jewish prophetic

literature (as represented for us by the so-called Oracula Sibyllina).

It is not even absolutely clear that Virgil had the real birth of a

real child in mind; though he speaks of pregnancy, of the goddess of

childbirth, and of the smiling infant, even so the child may be

imagined as the symbol of a new age of hope, rendered more human and

more concrete than in any other obviously political poem. Of all the

Bucolics, the fourth is the most puzzling.


Nicholas Horsfall, Virgil. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 211: Ancient Roman Writers. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Ward W. Briggs, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1999. pp. 350-365.

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