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
- Catastrophe for Rome?
- Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
- Omens for Princess Lavinia
- Aeneas joins the fray
- Dido falls in love
- Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
- The Trojan horse opens
- Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
- Aeneas is wounded
- Charon, the ferryman
- The death of Priam
- Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
- Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
- Aeneas tours the site of Rome
- King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
- New allies for Aeneas
- Virgil begins the Georgics
- Aeneas prepares for a hopeless fight
- Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
- Rites for the allies’ dead
- Signs of bad weather
- Aeneas’s oath
- Aeneas and Dido meet
- Virgil’s perils on the sea
- The farmer’s happy lot
- Turnus at bay
- The Aeneid begins
- Storm at sea!
- Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
- The death of Dido
- Juno’s anger
- Turnus is lured away from battle
- Vulcan’s forge
- More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
- Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
- What is this wooden horse?
- The infant Camilla
- A Fury rouses Turnus to war
- Cassandra is taken
- In King Latinus’s hall
- The death of Priam
- The Trojan Horse enters the city
- Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
- The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
- Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
- Venus speaks
- The Syrian hostess
- Palinurus the helmsman is lost
- Dido’s release
- Rumour
- Mercury’s journey to Carthage
- Helen in the darkness
- Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
- Mourning for Pallas
- The Trojans reach Carthage
- Aristaeus’s bees
- Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
- Jupiter’s prophecy
- Dido’s story
- Turnus the wolf
- The battle for Priam’s palace
- Juno is reconciled
- Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
- Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
- The farmer’s starry calendar
- The boxers
- Sea-nymphs
- Love is the same for all
- Into battle
- Laocoon and the snakes
- The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
- Aeneas’s ships are transformed
- Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
- Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
- Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
- The portals of sleep
- The death of Euryalus and Nisus
- Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
- The death of Pallas
- Juno throws open the gates of war
- King Mezentius meets his match
- The Harpy’s prophecy
- How Aeneas will know the site of his city
- Aeneas arrives in Italy
- The natural history of bees
- The journey to Hades begins View Latin Poems