Ecloga I

Or perhaps Eclogae I-II, to get a bit more experience before returning to Catiline. I’m not having too much trouble yet – I’ve read the first five lines, can scan them properly, and mostly make sense of the text – but I’m probably going to make a thread anyway so I may as well start now.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formonsam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

My problem is in the last line. It seems to be saying “(while) you, Tityrus, at ease in the shade, teach the beautiful Amaryllidis to resound to the woods”. “Formonsam” would seem to agree with “Amaryllida” (I’ve mostly forgotten the Greek third declension over the years but I believe this is correct) which leaves another accusative in “silvas”, which I guess is what Amaryllidis is resounding to? This is probably really simple.

Also “dulcia linquimus arua” – this goes with “patriae”, right? Their native lands’ sweet countryside?

Sorry for the probably-obvious questions. I’m just getting my feet wet in poetry and don’t want to risk any mistakes. I still have a hard time reading for meter and reading for sense at the same time. I read the first five lines sentence by sentence to get what they were saying before scanning them. Is this just a matter of practice?

formonsam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

“You teach the woods to resound ‘beautiful Amaryllis’.”

This is a double accusative. “Formosa Amaryllis” is what Tityrus is singing.

Coleman likes archaic spellings such as formonsam for formosam. There’s manuscript authority for this, and some ancient grammarian–maybe Servius or someone even closer to Vergil’s day–wrote that Vergil preferred these spellings. However, you can never be sure whether whoever wrote that really knew what he was talking about, or whether the archaic spelling wasn’t introduced by an ancient editor as a conscious archaism.

Also “dulcia linquimus arua” – this goes with “patriae”, right? Their native lands’ sweet countryside?

Yes. But I would be more literal: “plowland” rather than “countryside.”

I still have a hard time reading for meter and reading for sense at the same time. I read the first five lines sentence by sentence to get what they were saying before scanning them. Is this just a matter of practice?

Yes, a matter of practice, and it will come to you sooner than you think. Read slowly, and once you’ve worked out the scansion, by all means read aloud a few times.

Note the caesuras in particular. Often an adjective before the caesura agrees with a noun at the end of the verse, as in siluestrem tenui musam meditaris auena. Also, this line has interlocking adjectives and nouns–an elegant feature of Latin hexameter cultivated by the Roman poets. The radical hyperbaton seems violent at first, but you will get used to it and come to appreciate it.

Also, be alert to the patterns of assonance and internal rhyme–work through the first two verses in particular, and note pa- in lines 1, 3 and 4.

formonsam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

“You teach the woods to resound ‘beautiful Amaryllis’.”

This is a double accusative. “Formosa Amaryllis” is what Tityrus is singing.

How do you figure? Is it just that it would make more sense for the woods to be resounding rather than beautiful Amaryllis? This reading does make a lot more sense but I’m not seeing how one would figure it out. “Doces silvas resonare ‘formonsam Amaryllida’” Is this indirect discourse, like “silvas resonare formonsam Amaryllida”? But that would mean “you teach that the woods resound ‘beautiful Amaryllis’”. Okay, I’m confused.

“Formonsam … Amaryllida” frames “resonare doces” which would indicate that it has some importance, though I’m not sure what. Is the caesura between “resonare” and “doces”? That would certainly be elegant though it’s not a rational turning-point of the line.

When I get home I’ll make sure to reread the introduction to Ovid in the Wheelock’s Latin Reader: it’s an overview of Latin poetry that as I remember is a fairly-good nutshell.

formonsam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

This is an example of how Roman poets (like other poets) use language in ways that are unusual and removed from everyday speech. By the way, I was wrong to write that it’s a double accusative. siluas is the object of doces and formonsam Amaryllida is the object of resonare.

An additional point is that when you have verses with two adjectives and nouns in them the adjectives regularly come in the first half of the verse and their respective nouns in the second half. So
siluestrem tenui musam meditaris auena
is typical. The adjectives set it up, the nouns resolve it. The case endings sort out which adjective goes with which noun. The poets take full advantage of the fact that Latin is an inflected language!

formonsam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas is not actually indirect statement, but the problem is the same: you have two accusatives and you have to decide which one is the object of the infinitive. Here it’s the woods that do the resounding, the echoing, and Amaryllis that is resounded, sounded over and over again. The image is of a love-lorn rustic swain repeatedly calling the name of his beloved. That’s how he “teaches” the woods to echo back his cry.

Note that here again you have the adjective at the beginning, with its noun coming in the second half, and the verb (or in this case verbs) intervening. There’s no room in the line for an adjective for silvas too!

This is pastoral (as silvestris musa signals), a genre that Vergil takes over from Theocritus. Not only the genre, characters too: one of Theocritus’ “idylls” begins:
Κωμάσδω ποτὶ τὰν Ἀμαρυλλίδα, ταὶ δέ μοι αἶγες
βόσκονται κατ’ ὄρος, καὶ ὁ Τίτυρος αὐτὰς ἐλαύνει.
The serenade starts Ὦ χαρίεσσ’ Ἀμαρυλλί,
and Vergil’s line invites us to imagine Tityrus likewise calling “O formons’ Amarylli,” only Vergil puts it at a remove. The form Amaryllida enhances the Greek feel.

The 3rd-foot caesura articulates the verse into two unequal halves (so to speak!). Usually it comes after the first syllable of the 3rd foot, as in
siluestrem tenui | musam meditaris auena
but sometimes a half-beat later, as in
formonsam resonare | doces Amaryllida siluas
Caesura at the end of the 3rd foot is avoided. That would split the verse exactly in half, and would result in both halves taking off from the “longum” of the foot, an undesirable effect.

I’d encourage you to train yourself to read the verses word by word in the order in which the words come (as you should also be doing with Cicero, and with anything else you read), and also to read them metrically without mechanically scanning them first (though you may well need to do that initially). Concentrate on getting to the caesura, and until you get more practiced, bash the metrical beat, 6 per line. (For the latter part work back towards the middle from the end if you have to, the closing —⏑⏑—— .) Then once you’ve got the rhythm firmly fixed in your head you can start giving the words their natural accents, and the dynamic relationship between the word accents and the meter will begin to emerge. It’s one of the many glories of reading Vergil.

Thank you both very much for the information. I’ve read lines 6-10 and had no trouble in scansion or sense (I’m still fairly rough: I’ll try mwh’s strategy a bit more firmly tomorrow morning); however, there’s one thing that I’m not sure of:

In the first five lines Meliboeus says that “nos patriam fugimus”. I took this to mean that both Meliboeus and Tityrus were being banished but in lines 6-10 it seems clear that as long as Tityrus appeases his benefactor (“deus”) he will live a charmed life. Is “nos” a royal “we”, or does it refer to his household or something like that? The commentary suggests the same conclusion about Meliboeus’ and Tityrus’ respective situations.

Ed: Also in line 6 (spoken by Tityrus): “deus nobis haec otia fecit”.

There is always the possibility that I’m just misreading it.

Ed2: “Deus” permisit in the past but the lamb’s blood imbuet the altar in the future (and “erit mihi semper deus”) so I guess it’s continuing? Actually “permisit” would work as “has permitted”.

Yes, Meliboeus’ nos does not include Tityrus. The contrast is between tu and nos, (notice how both terms are marked and repeated), i.e. betweeen Tityrus, who’s OK, thanks to the deus, and Meliboeus (or M + companions) who has been driven into exile. (tu:nos::nos:tu chiasmus.) This is pastoral, but with a contemporary political twist. Many farms had been confiscated to be handed over to demobbed veterans after the battle of Philippi in 42 BC in which Octavian and Mark Antony had defeated Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. Virgil, we are told, had appealed successfully to Octavian against the confiscation of the family farm in Mantua (his birthplace), so Virgil himself can be read into Tityrus, and Octavian into the deus. Meliboeus was evidently not so lucky.

6-10 The idea is that since the god has allowed him to keep his farm, he will always show his gratitude. (There’s a bit of a disconnect between the cultivated farm, which has no place in pastoral, and the Theocritean pastoral setting. The gap is papered over by the cows and the lamb, creatures perfectly at home in pastoral, along with their herdsmen.)

Read on and things will become clearer.

Both Tityrus and Meliboeus are part of larger groups of countrymen–one group, including Meliboeus, has lost the lands it farmed, while the other, including Tityrus, has been allowed to stay. That’s the reason for nos here, I think.

However, in literary Latin, nos is frequently used for a single speaker–Cicero does this frequently, and if memory serves me, Vergil also sometimes uses the nos pronouns and adjectives and personal endings of verbs for the speaker. You might think of nos as an unmarked first person pronoun, not necessarily plural but just unmarked as to number, while ego is marked for singular.

But you shouldn’t think of nos as the “royal” we.

There’s a bit of a disconnect between the cultivated farm, which has no place in pastoral, and the Theocritean pastoral setting.

Yes, this is true, this Eclogue sustains a tension between Theocritean pastoral (or rather Greek pastoral generally, and Theocritus was not exclusively a pastoral poet) and the real, historical world of the Roman civil wars and the aftermath. This is Vergil and not Theocritus, though Vergil invokes a Theocritean setting. And the herdsmen that populate some of these poems are not, as represented in Theocritus, real shepherds and goatherds and neatherds–they’re Roman neoteric poets (or at least, their identities fluctuate).

The Eclogues are not “imitations” of Theocritus–these poems are one of the summits of Roman poetry, and they’re not, as used to be thought, a juvenile preparation for the Aeneid. It must have been astonishing–and perhaps dismaying to some–that Vergil could turn to writing a long epic poem after producing these exquisite masterpieces, and then the Georgics.

Thank you both very much. I read lines 11-18 this morning and I’m having a bit of trouble making sense of lines 14-15:

Hic inter densas corulos modo namque gemellos,
spem gregis, a, silice in nuda conixa reliquit.

“Here among the dense hazelnut trees just now (my she-goat), who greatly labored (who was in labor – the “a” in “conixa” is short according to the meter), left on the bare rock little twins, the hope of a herd.”

I can’t find any function for the (detached, so it could go anywhere) “a”. “Namque” refers to the previous line, with “hanc etiam uix duco”? (I forgot to ask: what does “duco” mean here? I’ve looked at every definition in the dictionary but none of them seem right. I take “hanc” to mean a she-goat? Looking at the rest of the lines I’m fairly sure I have their sense. “I scarcely lead even this she-goat”?)

I did a bit better with reading the line metrically as it came but I still found myself going back and looking at the sentences as prose sentences outside the meter. It’ll come.

a is an interjection, a pathetic cry of grief, like “ah,” not the preposition.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:1651.lewisandshort

It goes back to Homer, and It’s a favorite interjection of Vergil and of Latin poets generally.

From the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek lexicon:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Da)%3D3

If you go on to read the second eclogue, you’ll meet it again, so be prepared!

duco – He can scarcely lead her along because she has just given birth traveling on the road, her labor was difficult, she had to leave her kids to die by the wayside and she’s exhausted. As often, where we would say “I can [hardly] lead”, Latin just has duco. Etiam here means something like “and furthermore”, I think.

Edit: He’s driving [ago] the other goats along, as a goatherd normally does, but this she-goat he has to drag [duco].

Looking at it again I don’t think I have lines 16-17 after all:

Saepe malum hoc nobis, si mens non laeua fuisset,
de caelo tactas memini praedicere quercus.

Often by this means evil/misfortune (comes?) to me; if my mind had not been deluded, I would have remembered the foretelling of oaks touched/struck by (a lightning bolt) down from the heavens.

“Memini”, though it’s a past verb with present meaning, would make more sense as a perfect. “Hoc” is long here according to the meter, which eliminates “hoc malum” as a possibility. I’m bad with that word; “by this means” doesn’t seem to work that well but it seems to be grammatical. Does it look forward to the next line?

The vowel of nominative hoc is long and thus indistinguishable from the ablative. Even if the -o- of hoc weren’t long, here the syllable would be “long by position”: the vowel is followed by two consonants, so the syllable is long in any case (or “heavy” in an alternative terminology that avoids confusion between long vowels and long syllables). So malum hoc is right.

“I remember [now] that oak trees struck [by lightning] down from the sky were predicting this misfortune for us on many occasions [and I would have taken heed] if [only] my mind had not been mistaken.” The main clause isn’t quite the apodosis of the conditional si mens non laeva fuisset: this is the compression of poetry.

I really should have gotten that one. I think I did in the morning (I read it correctly then as “malum hoc” before I threw myself off later) but I definitely screwed up while giving it a rushed once-over on a short break on a day when I had woken up at 2:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I want to move on in the poem but I’ve got as much new vocabulary as I feel like handling for today. Bah.

Poetry is definitely very different from prrose: I can say that, dumb mistakes aside (I had overlooked that “meminisse” introduces an indirect statement!). Hopefully I can get a bit of confidence back tomorrow!

(Looking at it now, this doesn’t seem that different from the struggles I had when first reading unadapted prose. I’m a lot better at that now; there’s no real reason to get down)

18-26 wasn’t that hard at all. Got some of my confidence back, but I can’t scan line 20. I’ve even written it out and tried to scan it on paper and I just can’t get it:

Stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quoi saepe solemus

Working forward:

STUL-tus e-/GO HUIC/NOS-TRAE/si-mi-/LEM QUOI/etc.

It would seem that the foot should be TRAE-si-mi but that would throw off the syllables before. Similarly, working backwards:

etc./SAE-pe SO-/LE-mus

It would make sense if it were

QUOI SAE-/PE SO-/LE-mus

But that second syllable of “saepe” is short, according to the dictionary, too. I’m fine with all the other lines but this one. I don’t think I’m overlooking anything…

ego huic: -o is elided with huic. h doesn’t count as a consonant.

STVL-tus e-g’/ HVIC NOS-/ TRAE//si-mi- / LEM QVOI / SAE-pe so-/LE-MVS

Incidentally, both vowels of ego are short. Also, going back to 16-17, I was wrong in writing that hoc is long by position. The -o- of nominative hoc is long and thus indistinguishable from the ablative. I’m going to correct my post, hoping that mwh doesn’t catch me on this before I make the change.

A preponderance of s from 20-23, and various other alliterations and internal rhymes.

Interesting: the dictionary has the O in “solere” as long but all three times here it’s short. I didn’t look it up until I had trouble with line 20 but yes, it seems to be short. Is this a mistake in the dictionary?

Does H count as a consonant in syllables long by position?

(For what it’s worth I think the O in nominative/accusative “hoc” is indeed short. Are you sure?)

Does H count as a consonant in syllables long by position?

No.

I think the O in nominative/accusative “hoc” is indeed short. Are you sure?

Yes.

Ecl. 4.11: teque adeo decus hoc aeui, te consule, inibit

Ecl. 7.29: Saetosi caput hoc apri tibi, Delia, parui

Georgics 2.352-3: urgerent: hoc effusos munimen ad imbris, / hoc, ubi hiulca siti findit Canis aestifer arua.

the dictionary has the O in “solere” as long but all three times here it’s short. . . . Is this a mistake in the dictionary?

Yes.

The big Lewis and Short:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.17:2506.lewisandshort

Looks as if you’re going about things just the right way. With Stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quoi saepe solemus, all that threw you off was not knowing that ego would elide before huic. (Then you get your 3rd-foot caesura, and a stronger 4th-ft one too.) All “h” does is aspirate, and it never (well, hardly ever) inhibits elision. As Qimmik said, it doesn’t count as a consonant at all, which is to say, it just doesn’t count.

And if your dictionary really says that hoc has short o and solere long o, it’s time you got yourself a better dictionary!

And if your dictionary really says that hoc has short o and solere long o, it’s time you got yourself a better dictionary!

I looked again and for the neuter of “hic” it gives both forms, but with the long vowel first and the short vowrl as a variant (and from the examples Qimmik posted). I’m kind of surprised, since I thought I had drilled hic-haec-hoc into my head well enough (I don’t have the Wheelock’s textbook with me; I’ll have to check it). I guess the vowel length never mattered until now so I never questioned it. (It’s Charlton Lewis’ Elementary Latin Dictionary, by the way)

It definitely gives the O in “solere” as long. I guess that would have been fixed in subsequent editions.

I looked, too, and the Elementary Latin Dictionary does have solere marked with a short o. I’m embarrassed because I recommended this dictionary, which is based on L&S and was put together by Lewis himself. I still think it’s better than Cassell’s because it give a lot of examples from specific authors and it’s generally reliable, despite this lapse. The only alternative would be L&S itself or the Oxford Latin Dictionary. The Elementary Dictionary is much less expensive and handier to use.

As for hoc, see Allen & Greenough, sec. 146 and Note 1:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0001%3Apart%3D1%3Asection%3D21%3Asubsection%3D4%3Asmythp%3D146