This extract from one of Virgil’s Eclogues, or pastoral poems, modelled on the Sicilian Greek poet Theocritus (hence the “Sicilian Muses”), was interpreted by many early Christians as a prediction of the birth of Christ. This helps to explain the special status that Virgil enjoyed in the middle ages as a virtuous pagan prophet, including his appearance in Dante’s work, the Divine Comedy, as the poet’s guide through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Pollio, to whom Virgil addresses himself, was a general whose writings are gone, but who had a literary reputation and was also mentioned by Horace. Cumae was the seat of a famous Sibyl-prophetess. Lucina is the Goddess of childbirth. Who the divine child was meant to be, we don’t know, but Pollio’s consulship was in 40 BCE, the year in which Mark Antony married the sister of Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, in an unsuccessful attempt to counter the growing pressures on their creaky alliance. That this poem was written to celebrate the marriage seems as good a guess as any – the reference near the end to putting an end to (the) guilt (of civil war?) would fit, but something about the poem remains strangely disproportionate.
Eclogue 4, lines 1-17
Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
by Virgil
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Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus.
non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae;
si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae.
ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo.
teque adeo decus hoc aevi, te consule, inibit,
Pollio, et incipient magni procedere menses;
te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri
inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras.
ille deum vitam accipiet divisque videbit
permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis
pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.
Sicilian Muses, let’s sing of slightly greater things.
Orchards and lowly tamarisk aren’t everyone’s delight;
if we sing of woods, let them be worthy of a consul!
The last age of Cumaean prophecy has come,
the great sequence of the ages is born afresh.
The virgin and the reign of Saturn come again,
now a new child is sent from heaven above.
Chaste Lucina, smile on the new-born boy,under whom
the iron race shall make way, a new, golden race rise
throughout the world; now your Apollo reigns. With you,
you, Pollio, as consul, this glory of the age shall
come in, its months begin their great, successive march;
under your consulate, if vain traces of guilt remain,
they shall release the world from its perpetual fear.
He shall have the life of the Gods, see heroes
consorting with the Gods, himself be seen by them, rule
a world that owes its peace to his fathers’ powers.
More Poems by Virgil
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- A Fury rouses Turnus to war
- How Aeneas will know the site of his city
- The death of Priam
- Aeneas arrives in Italy
- Sea-nymphs
- King Mezentius meets his match
- The boxers
- Aeneas and Dido meet
- Vulcan’s forge
- Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
- Dido’s release
- The Aeneid begins
- Rumour
- Into battle
- Aeneas is wounded
- Rites for the allies’ dead
- Jupiter’s prophecy
- Storm at sea!
- The farmer’s starry calendar
- The natural history of bees
- Aristaeus’s bees
- Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
- Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
- Juno throws open the gates of war
- The battle for Priam’s palace
- Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
- Catastrophe for Rome?
- Mercury’s journey to Carthage
- Dido falls in love
- Turnus the wolf
- Charon, the ferryman
- Aeneas’s oath
- Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
- King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
- The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
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- Juno’s anger
- Dido’s story
- Mourning for Pallas
- Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
- The Trojan horse opens
- Helen in the darkness
- The portals of sleep
- Aeneas tours the site of Rome
- The death of Dido
- Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
- Cassandra is taken
- Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
- Aeneas joins the fray
- Turnus at bay
- The Harpy’s prophecy
- The Trojan Horse enters the city
- Signs of bad weather
- The infant Camilla
- Turnus is lured away from battle
- Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
- Love is the same for all
- Palinurus the helmsman is lost
- The death of Pallas
- Juno is reconciled
- In King Latinus’s hall
- Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
- Aeneas prepares for a hopeless fight
- Omens for Princess Lavinia
- The farmer’s happy lot
- Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
- New allies for Aeneas
- The Syrian hostess
- Virgil begins the Georgics
- Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
- The journey to Hades begins
- Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
- The death of Priam
- Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
- The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
- Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
- The Trojans reach Carthage
- Venus speaks
- The death of Euryalus and Nisus
- What is this wooden horse?
- Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
- Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
- Virgil’s perils on the sea
- Aeneas’s ships are transformed
- Laocoon and the snakes View Latin Poems