Pastoral as a kind of poetry is a paradoxical combination of apparent naïveté and sophistication; William Empson refers to ‘the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple’. The pastoral landscape in its more ideal moments is the stage for simple country folk who lead an easy and uncomplicated life. But landscape and shepherds appear in poems written by sophisticated poets, whose self-consciousness weighs heavily on the figures who speak in their poems. The picture of an idyllic world often conjured up by the words ‘pastoral’ or ‘bucolic’ is a trivializing and selective simplification of the full reading experience offered by the Eclogues. That simple image is presented to the reader in the first five lines of Eclogue 1 in Meliboeus’ description of his friend Tityrus’ happy situation: Tityrus reclines at ease in the shadow of a tree, composing ‘woodland music’ on his rustic pipe and teaching the sympathetic woods to echo the name of his girlfriend Amaryllis. But this description frames Meliboeus’ statement of his own plight: in contrast to his settled friend he is in motion, away from the boundaries of the idyllic Never Never Land, which in line 3 is already redefined with the very Roman word patria. Eclogue 1 quickly bursts the limits of a simple and timeless bucolicism to encompass the historical and social realities of the city of Rome, in the course of a brief exchange of experiences past and anticipated in which the humble herdsman Tityrus meets a man-god, and the smallholder Meliboeus foresees an exile as far distant as Britain (1.66), the limit of Julius Caesar’s imperialist adventuring a decade and a half before the time of composition. The first Eclogue is typical of the collection as a whole in this testing of limits and in the recurrent thwarting of the desire for fulfilment in an enclosed locus amoenus or ‘green cabinet’. Much of the energy and interest of the Eclogues derives from the constant tension between the limiting case of a static pastoral ‘idyll’ and the forces that threaten to destabilize the idyll.

As evening falls at the end of the Eclogues we come out of the shade of the pastoral world, a shade harmful to crops (Ecl. 10.76) and ‘rise’ (Ecl. 10.75 surgamus) with the poet to the higher subject matter of a didactic poem; the reader, instead of eavesdropping on the self-enclosed world of fictional shepherds singing to each other, is now the addressee of instructions by the poet that aim at results in the world outside the poem. We remain in the countryside, but now as the setting not for the leisurely pastimes of musical shepherds, but for the laborious annual round of the farmer. As in the Eclogues the countryside is at the mercy of individuals and events in the larger world; as in Eclogue 1 that dependence is soon focused on the great man in Rome, now named as (Octavian) Caesar, whose prospective divinity is framed in grandiosely cosmic terms, the reward for a heroism that far outreaches the simple benefaction for which the iuuenis of Eclogue 1 is magnified as a god by Tityrus. Octavian enters the Georgics from a world of epic journeying and struggle, to whose literal presence we are intermittently recalled from our work on the land, but which is also figuratively present within the world of the farmer, who has his own paths to follow and battles to fight. The poem’s final image of Octavian ‘thundering’ in battle in the distant east (4.560–2) is a suitable advertisement of the full-dress epic on Octavian’s legendary ancestor that is to follow.

At the heart of the Aeneid the hero descends to the world of the dead and in its innermost recess is reunited with his father. Anchises, Aeneas’s link to his destroyed Trojan past, reveals to his son the future of his race in the form of a procession of the souls of Roman heroes as yet unborn. In this place where time past, present, and future is held together, the Aeneid also comes to a heightened consciousness of its own literary genealogy, as literary memory is overlaid on family and racial memory. The whole of the Underworld episode is modelled on Odysseus’ visit to the land of the dead in Odyssey 11: Aeneas’ meeting with his father reworks Odysseus’ meeting with his mother Anticleia (Od. 11.152–224), which is immediately followed by the Catalogue of Heroines (Od. 11.225–332), the formal model for Virgil’s very masculine Parade of Heroes. But the tears and words with which Anchises greets his son (6.684–9) allude to the Roman epic of Ennius and specifically to the scene at the opening of the Annals in which Ennius established his own place within the epic tradition, by narrating a dream in which the phantom of Homer explained to the sleeping poet how, through a Pythagorean metempsychosis, the true soul of Homer was reincarnated in the breast of Ennius himself. In restaging this scene of succession in the dreamlike setting of the Underworld Virgil hints at his own relationship to the dead epic poets to whose company he seeks admittance. The encounter of Aeneas and Anchises occurs within a set-piece of Homeric imitation; Anchises’ running commentary on the Parade of Heroes functions as a summary of the matter of Ennius’ historical epic, which it ‘completes’ by extending the story to Augustus’ achievement of world-empire and restoration of a Golden Age (6.791–800). Ennian historical epic is thus framed in a Homeric mythological episode; in the first part of his speech (6.724–51) Anchises encapsulates another branch of the hexameter tradition, with a philosophico-theological account of the nature of the world and of the soul that is indebted both to Anticleia’s explanation to Odysseus of what happens to humans after death (Od. 11.216–24) and to the Ennian Homer’s more philosophical account of these matters, but couched in markedly Lucretian language: a miniature didactic ‘de rerum natura’ to set beside the miniature Annals that is to follow.

The excitement of the new critical and theoretical approaches applied to Virgil in the last thirty years should not make the reader forget the importance of a close attention to the linguistic and metrical detail of the text for a full appreciation of what Virgil is about. Virgilian ambition manifests itself not just in the extensiveness of the poems’ conceptual and allusive scope, but also in a microscopic attention to detail and to the relation of the detail to the wider context. The classic status that his poems immediately achieved was due, as much as to anything, to his perfection of the stylistic and metrical experiments of the previous two centuries of Latin poetry in order to forge a flexible and varied poetic manner, the master and not the slave of both Greek and Latin poetic traditions, responsive to context, and integral to the wider meanings and functions of the poems. For example, in a recent discussion of Virgil’s style, O’Hara draws attention to the fact that the ambiguity that has become so central to modern critics’ treatments of the meaning and ideology of the poem is generated partly by small-scale indeterminacies of syntax; and I have suggested that stylistic figures such as oxymoron and hypallage contribute to larger structures of paradox in the areas of poetics and ideology. Virgil’s liking for stylistic ambiguity and paradox also reminds us that his style is not ‘classic’ in the sense of a uniformly limpid and serenely balanced manner; his use of language can be difficult and unexpected, often straining at the limits of Latinity. While no later Latin poet can escape the influence of Virgil, it was left to Ovid to perfect ‘a poetic koine, a stylistic instrument which was freely manageable by writers of lesser genius. The Ovidian manner, as generations of clever English schoolboys have discovered, is imitable; Virgil’s is not.’