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The beginning of Virgil's Eclogues, 15th century manuscript, Vatican Library. An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. The term is also used for a musical genre thought of as evoking a pastoral scene.
This eclogue is also known as Pharmaceutria ("Sorceress"). The poet reports the contrasting songs of two herdsmen whose music is as powerful as that of Orpheus. Both songs are dramatic (the character in the first being a man and in the second a woman), both have almost the same pattern of three-to-five-line stanzas, with a refrain after each one.
In 3.1, Meliboeus is mentioned briefly as the possible owner of a flock of sheep. In Eclogue 7 he appears herding sheep and goats, and he is the narrator who retells story of the contest between Corydon and Thyrsis. Eclogue 1.71 suggests that Meliboeus is portrayed as a full Roman citizen, not a slave. [21]
Cristoforo Majorana – Leaf from Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid – Walters W40016V – Open Reverse. Virgil's model for composing a didactic poem in hexameters is the archaic Greek poet Hesiod, whose poem Works and Days shares with the Georgics the themes of man's relationship to the land and the importance of hard work.
Theocritus's Idylls include strophic songs and musical laments, and, as in Homer, his shepherds often play the syrinx, or pan flute, which is considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times.
In Eclogue 5, he caps Mopsus's song about Daphnis with one of his own, and in 5.85–87 he claims to be the author of Eclogues 2 and 3, which he quotes by their first lines. In Eclogue 10, in the guise of a cowherd, he consoles the love-sick poet Cornelius Gallus , who is imagined to have retired to Arcadia .
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