Virgil, the Shepherd
The work of the little-known Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto laments the loss of land after war, reflecting on the familiar fields around his home as a way of noticing the effects of time on his own identity. Born in 1921 in Northern Italy and witness to the devastation of World War II, he often uses metaphors about the natural world, especially the altered landscape of post-war Italy, to probe within himself. The land, in a way, is part of him. What happens to it also happens to him. Though this is largely what Zanzotto is known for, he was not the first Italian to explore the unity of nature in poetry—the way nature can reflect the changes going on inside a person, helping us to make sense of loss, of change, of growth. Another Northern Italian beat him to it by two thousand years: Virgil, the great poet born in Mantua in 70 BC.
Page from the beginning of the Eclogues in the Vergilius Romanus, ca. 5th century AD.
From his very first published work, Virgil focuses on the land and those who cultivate it. Virgil lived through land confiscations, including the Battle of Philippi, where Caesar’s supporters and opponents fought over the eastern and western provinces of Rome. While Virgil was writing his first work, the Bucolics (or Eclogues), someone intervened for him and got his land back, which had been lost during the Battle of Philippi. At first, Virgil’s Bucolics seem to be a straightforward example of the classical pastoral tradition. However, there’s something unusual going on in the Fourth Eclogue, something which doesn’t fit neatly into classical pastoral conventions and has been read as a prophetic “proto-Christian” anticipation of the Incarnation. Originating in the Greek Hellenistic period with the poet Theocritus, classical pastoral poetry praises an idyllic life in the countryside away from modern urban life, and romanticizes a shepherd’s life as richer and more fulfilled. For the most part, praise of nature in classical pastoral poetry celebrates rural life as an escape from political life and an opportunity to live more contemplatively. Virgil’s vision certainly includes some of these elements, but his praise of nature tips towards a unity among creation—a vision of nature that shows a fullness of living, rather than an escape from one way of living. What I want to suggest is that the Fourth Eclogue is not unique in its proto-Christian bent. If we read Virgil’s other works more closely, including the Aeneid, we can see how he anticipates a Christian view of creation in his approach to the pastoral. In other words, his vision of pastoral poetry is more Christian than classical.
T.S. Eliot, in his essay “Virgil and the Christian World,” has said that in the Fourth Eclogue, Christ’s coming “was foreseen by Virgil in the year 40 B.C. Lactantius and St. Augustine believed this; so did the entire medieval Church and Dante; and even perhaps, in his own fashion, Victor Hugo.” Whether Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue is indeed a prophecy of Christ, and whether Virgil was aware of the full meaning of this prophecy are questions that are still up for debate. Regardless, this “prophecy” appears in a work devoted to shepherds and country life; Christ is known as the Good Shepherd, frequently using parables of sheep in explaining the kingdom of God. Some argue, however, that Christ as the Good Shepherd is a Christian adaptation of the ancient pagan motif of the ‘moschophoros.’ Virgil’s interest in the shepherd, therefore, would not be a unique anticipation of a Christian theme since it already existed in the ancient world. Those who believe it is indeed a prophecy will point out that although the ten poems of the Eclogues are about shepherds and their daily lives, the Fourth is different in that it makes statements about a male child and his destiny to usher in a Golden Age, bringing peace and freeing the world from fear. Early Christian scholars like Saint Augustine, for example, read this poem and concluded that this child that Virgil spoke of had to be the Messiah. Later writers, such as Dante, would also interpret this poem as a prophecy referring to Christ. The language in this poem, too, compares to that of the prophet Isaiah, whose words the Jews understood to be about the coming Messiah.
The opening lines of the Bucolics introduce the idea of exile and longing for home, which—again, wittingly or not—are both Christian themes. It begins: “I from my sweet fields, / And home’s familiar bounds, even now depart. / Exiled from home am I.” Though the speaker acknowledges feeling exiled, nature provides joy and also inclines the speaker to feel a sense of obligation to keep it. In this vein, in the Second Eclogue, Virgil acknowledges that nature attracts in a way that man-made things (or, in this case, those structures built by the gods) cannot. He writes, “Let Pallas keep the towers her hand hath built, / Us before all things let the woods delight.” Respect and reverence for nature such as this permeate his writing and show a desire to encourage a common care for nature—to see that one has a responsibility to the land. In the final Eclogue, the Bucolics conclude: “Now homeward, having fed your fill— / Eve’s star is rising—go, my she-goats, go.” The poet-“singer” commands the sheep to go home, having been fed (by literal food but also by the poetry). This can be read as the poet calling on readers to return to the land, having heard his poem about it, and perhaps to seek their true home in heaven, if he is indeed a prophet foretelling the coming of Christ who will gather all souls to Himself.
Virgil continued to write about similar topics with a focus on nature in his second work, the Georgics, and maintains this proto-Christian attitude toward cherishing man’s common home of the earth. Writing somewhat in the style of a naturalist, Virgil wrote the Georgics after the Battle of Actium in the 30s BC, when Octavian conquered Mark Antony and became the undisputed master of the Roman world. Octavian became Caesar Augustus, and it was he who commissioned Virgil to write a follow-up to Ennius’s Annales, which covered Roman history from the fall of Troy. Eliot, in the same essay on Virgil and the Christian world, explains, “It is more likely that he hoped to remind absentee landowners, careless of their responsibilities and drawn by love of pleasure or love of politics to the metropolis, of the fundamental duty to cherish the land. Whatever his conscious motive, it seems clear to me that Virgil desired to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour, and the importance of good cultivation of the soil for the well-being of the state both materially and spiritually.” Neglect of the land, then, is also a neglect of the soul and of one’s duty to care for a common home. Later, in the Aeneid, the lament for lives lost in battle is often compared to scenes in nature where things have died or wasted away, suggesting that that common care for creation includes humanity.
Virgil praises the life of the farmer, a life that is not caught up in politics—with civil strife, founding of cities, and establishing new regimes of leadership. In the Second Georgic, he celebrates the “blessedness” of those “happy tillers of the soil”:
Blest too is he who knows the rural gods,
Pan, old Silvanus, and the sister-nymphs!
Him nor the rods of public power can bend,
Nor kingly purple, nor fierce feud that drives
Brother to turn on brother, nor descent
Of Dacian from the Danube’s leagued flood,
Nor Rome’s great State, nor kingdoms like to die;
Nor hath he grieved through pitying of the poor,
Nor envied him that hath. What fruit the boughs,
And what the fields, of their own bounteous will
Have borne, he gathers; nor iron rule of laws,
Nor maddened Forum have his eyes beheld,
Nor archives of the people.
The farmer is blessed because he does not get caught up in power or politics that cause “brother to turn on brother,” something he will return to when he writes the Aeneid. Eliot remarks,
“There is I think no precedent for the spirit of the Georgics; and the attitude towards the soil, and the labour of the soil, which is there expressed, is something that we ought to find particularly intelligible now, when urban agglomeration, the flight from the land, the pillage of the earth and the squandering of natural resources are beginning to attract attention.”
If he is the first to write this way, as Eliot claims, then Virgil may also be the first to bring together an attitude of showing equal respect to the land, to a particular region, to a community, to the individual, to family, and to life as a whole. Concern over squandering natural resources, then, is not a modern concern but one that can be traced back to Virgil and echoed in writers like Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard.
Again, concern for nature and its care, as well as its connection to the community, is a Christian attitude not typical to the conventions of classical pastoral poetry, which might be taken as further evidence that Virgil anticipated the coming of Christ. In fact, Eliot says that the description of “pious” Aeneas in the Aeneid is often interpreted to mean a devotion to his father, but in fact is more expansive and can be defined more accurately by applying the Christian ‘pietas’ to these descriptions. The word ‘pietas’ for Virgil, Eliot says, had
“much wider associations of meaning: it implies an attitude towards the individual, towards the family, towards the region, and towards the imperial destiny of Rome. And finally, Aeneas is ‘pious’ also in his respect towards the gods, and in his punctilious observance of rites and offerings. It is an attitude towards all these things, and therefore implies a unity and an order among them: it is in fact an attitude towards life.”
If one has read Virgil’s other works—the Bucolics and the Georgics—this attitude would not be surprising. His own pietas for life is consistent in all of his writing.
The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas, Nathaniel Dance-Holland, ca. 18th century AD. The Tate Britain.
Commissioned by Octavian to write the Roman complement to Ennius’s Annales, Virgil complies; but instead of following up on this history, he replaces it with his own account with his own focus. That focus is still on the land, which readers can see Virgil wants to continue to write about despite the fact that the story of the war gets in the way. At the end of Book 2, for example, Aeneas narrates, “The Dawn Star rose past Ida’s highest slopes / And brought the day. The Greeks held every gate / To the city. There was nothing left to help us. / I picked my father up and sought the mountains.” In a moment of lament and loss, Aeneas—pious Aeneas—is devoted to his father, but also to the land. He seeks the mountains since the city holds nothing for him any longer. Like the speaker in the Bucolics, he is exiled and seeks home. Similarly, there is a sense in Virgil’s understanding of things that all life returns to nature. When Dido dies in Book 4, he describes: “So dewy Iris swooped on saffron wings, / Trailing a thousand sun-reflecting colors, / And floated near her head. ‘I am to take / This gift to Dis and free you from your body.’ / Her right hand made the stroke. All living heat / Vanished, and life dissolved into the wind.” Dido’s life, despite its violent end, becomes part of the wind. This supports what Eliot claims about Virgil’s belief in a unity and order in all things.
Death is obviously a main feature in the Aeneid, as it is a story of war, and Virgil, in writing about these losses, shows a curiosity about death and the fate of souls. This curiosity is transferred to “pious Aeneas,” who is devoted to his men and the task the gods have given him. In Book 6, when he visits the underworld, Aeneas observes that “The river Lethe drifted past the still homes. / Above the water, souls from countless nations / Flitted, like bees in tranquil summer meadows / Who moves from bud to vivid bud and stream / Around white lilies—all the field whirs loudly. / The unexpected sight enthralled Aeneas. / He wished to learn about it—what the stream was…” Here, Virgil compares the souls to bees, drawing on nature to help describe what Aeneas sees. Aeneas longs to know about the stream, about this place where souls go after death. His respect for life, even after death, is apparent here.
There are several deaths in the Aeneid that strike a deeper chord in Aeneas and in readers. Virgil focuses on these with further comparisons to nature. In Book 9 when Euryalus, described as a youth, dies, Virgil writes, “His lovely limbs and shoulders / Poured streams of blood; his neck sank limply down: / So, cut off by a plow, a purple flower / Faints away into death; so poppies bend / Their weary necks when rain weighs down their heads.” This young boy who has been lost as a casualty of war is seen as a flower that has been cut down in a field. It seems that Virgil laments for both of these things—any destruction of life, in fact. Finally, in Book 11, when Pallas dies and Aeneas sobs for him, Virgil turns to nature once again: “Others worked urgently to weave a bier / Out of soft oak-tree and arbutus branches; / To build a couch and leafy canopy. / High on this rustic bed they laid the boy out, / Like a plucked blossom in a young girl’s hand, / A drooping hyacinth or tender violet— / Its beauty and its brightness lingering, / But without food or strength from Mother Earth.” Without being fed—as the sheep in the Bucolics were fed by the shepherd—without strength, another life has been lost. This causes some of the greatest agony that Aeneas experiences in the Aeneid. And it would seem that, in Virgil’s view, this should also cause grave sadness for the reader. Piety for life includes the life of all creatures, of the land itself, and any loss of one of these is a loss from the unified whole.
Blessed are those who till the land, who do not get caught up in politics and war; pious are they who reverence the earth, the family, the individual, the community. In all his writing—starting with the Bucolics, then the Georgics, and finally the Aeneid—Virgil praises nature and laments any loss of its unity. Whether he should be considered a prophet or not, this attitude which underscores all of Virgil’s writing carries Christian themes, particularly the care for creation. Go, he seems to say, having read all this, go and till what is yours: the people and the places entrusted to you. Lament, he also urges, for any loss of life. Do not let war or power or politics blind your vision, his writing implores; do not forget your home.
Mary Grace Mangano is a writer and educator whose poetry and writing have appeared in Dappled Things, Fare Forward, and America Magazine, among others. She currently teaches high school English in Philadelphia.