19-20 – You got this basically right–indirect questions with quaeris. “Despicable” is not quite the right word, though. De-spicio is literally “to look down on”. Nec = “and . . . not”“You look down on me, Alexis, and you don’t inquire who I am [i.e., you don’t see that I’m someone more important than you think], how rich I am in cattle, how abundantly provided with snow-white milk.” It’s a sort of asyndeton, but even in English connectives aren’t really needed. Note the poetic genitive with diues and abundans, which I think would usually take ablatives. Check Lewis and Short on this.
Lac mihi non aestate nouom, non frigore defit.
nouom is an archaic spelling (o instead of u after u) for nouum, “new”.
“Fresh milk is not lacking for me in the heat, in the cold.” In other words, “I’m never out of fresh milk in summer or winter.”
As I mentioned before, Coleman likes these archaic spellings, which most editors normalize. The manuscripts sometimes–and inconsistently–preserve the archaic spellings, but it’s not clear whether that’s because Vergil used them, or they entered the manuscript tradition as conscious archaisms later than Vergil. Vergil’s text is almost unique in that the principal mss. date from late antiquity, and there’s a flood of mss. from the 9th century on. For most authors, we’re lucky to have a handful of 9th century mss., and for many we have none earlier than the high middle ages or even the renaissance. In some cases the first printed edition is our only source.
Canto quae solitus, si quando, armenta vocabat,
Amphion Dircaeus in Actaeo Aracyntho.
Canto quae Amphion Dircaeus solitus erat si quando armenta uocabat in Arctaeo Aracyntho.
si quando – literally “if ever,” is equivalent to “whenever.” si often combines with indefinite pronouns, adjectives and adverbs as an equivalent to corresponding English words ending in “-ever”. For example, si quis, literally “if anyone” is often equivalent to “whoever.” Look up si in the on-line version of the big Lewis and Short. There shouldn’t be a comma after quando.
“I sing what Dircaean Amphion used to sing in Actaean Aracynth whenever he called his flocks.”
Coleman explains the mythological references. The important thing to notice is the line made up entirely of four Greek names (with a tiny function word), with Greek-like hiatus between Artaeo Aracyntho and a rhythm that is Greek to the point of being antithetical to the rhythm of the Latin hexameter.
Runnning throughout this eclogue, I think, is a tension, perhaps intended to be slightly comical, between Corydon’s status as a humble rustic and the homely subject-matter of his song, on the one hand, and the self-consciously elaborate and sophisticated diction in which his song is cast, on the other hand. Corydon is supposed to be a shepherd, but his song is that of a Roman love poet–specifically, a Roman neoteric elegist. In the poem of Theocritus on which this eclogue is based, the central figure corresponding to Corydon is the uncouth and savage cyclops Polyphemus–young and in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (instead of lambs or kids, he offers Galatea two bear-cubs). Ecl. 2 has something of the same incongruity but carries it further.
Non ego Daphnin
iudice te, metuam, si numquam fallit imago.
metuam is a “future less vivid” apodosis–akin to a potential subjunctive. faillit is the protasis of a present conditional. But there is a future less vivid protasis disguised in the ablative absolute: “If you were to/should judge between Daphnis and me, I would/should not fear [comparison with] him, assuming my reflection doesn’t deceive me.”
You can think of the apodosis of the present conditional fallit as the entire future less vivid conditional si tu iudex sis, non ego Daphnin metuam.