1. All translations are my own. The Eclogues’ translations come from my The Eclogues of Virgil, translated with introduction, notes and Latin text (Melbourne 1976).

2. On the importance of the Lucretian passage in determining the echoic significance of the siluestris Musa see Damon, P., ‘Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse’, UCPCP 15 (1961) 285fF.Google Scholar, who also sees E.1.5 – formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas (‘you teach woods to echo “beautiful Amaryllis”’) – as inspired by the same passage: uerba … docta referri (Lachmann’s reading, ‘words taught to rebound’, DRN 4.579).

3. Desport, M., ‘L’écho de la nature et la poésie dans les Eglogues de Virgile’, RE A 43 (1941) 270Google Scholar.

4. My attitude to the echoic Muse differs markedly from that of Desport (n. 3 above, 297), who sees the pastoral echo as ‘la première manifestation, la signe perceptible à tous, d’une immense sympathie de la nature et de la poésie, du pouvoir que le poète doit exercer sur la nature’. Cf. Muecke, F., ‘Virgil and the Genre of Pastoral’, Aumla 44 (1975) 174Google Scholar, who, citing Desport with approval, sees the echo motif as an illustration of ‘the theme of sympathy between the singer and his world’. Similarly Leo Marx in his illuminating survey of the pastoral motif in the nineteenth century American novel, ‘Two Kingdoms of Force’, Massachusetts Review 1 (1959) 69–95Google Scholar, interprets (p. 91): ‘By insisting that the woods “echo back” the countryman’s music – a recurrent device in Pastoral – Virgil evokes that sense of relatedness between man and not-man that is akin, in feeling if not in concept, to prayer or revelation.’ Unfortunately Marx is prevented by the prevailing Eclogues’ orthodoxy from seeing even closer affinities between Virgil, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Clemens, Melville and Adams than he is prepared to claim. The ‘strong tragic undertone’ which he sees as one of the distinguishing features of American pastoral (p. 95) pervades the Eclogues: see my ‘A Reading of Virgil’s Eclogues’ in Boyle, A. J. (ed.), Ancient Pastoral. Ramus Essays on Greek and Roman Pastoral Poetry (Berwick 1975), 105–21Google Scholar, esp. 116f. Closer to my own attitude to the echoic Muse is that of Damon (n. 2 above), whose conclusion (p. 288) however needs considerable modification: ‘The echo-filled atmosphere helps to inform the Eclogues with the basic admission that the pastoral world is a green thought in a green shade, the product of a special sensibility which has consciously excluded the world of fact.’ The latter may be true of Tityrus; it is not true of Virgil (of whom Damon intends the remark). Virgil’s point –as far as the Eclogues as a whole are concerned – seems to be more subtle, less restricted, focussing less upon the fictiveness of the poet’s constructed world as upon its impotence, the pastoral construct being not so much ‘trivial because fanciful’ as ‘trivial because vain’, studiwn inane (E.2.5), labor effusus (G.4.492), pictura inanis (A.1.464).

5. See n. 13 below.

6. On Tityrus’ insensibility see Boyle (n. 4 above) 106f., and Putnam, M. C. J., Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton, N.J., 1970), esp. 55Google Scholar: ‘By his use of these analogies [E. 1.59–63] Tityrus betrays little or no comprehension of what is afflicting mankind … while confirming Meliboeus’ sketch of his idyllic state, [he] has made no attempt to understand, much less sympathize with the lot of Meliboeus. He betrays no knowledge of suffering.’

7. Meliboeus’ echoic mode is well noted by M. C. J. Putnam, ‘Virgil’s First Eclogue: Poetics of Enclosure’, in Boyle (n. 4 above) 85: ‘Meliboeus, in fact, makes his own desperate echo, a seeming parody of Tityrus’ iterations because for him they are created by words alone …’ Putnam’s treatment of the latter’s (Tityrus’) echo, however, is significantly different from my own, his emphasis being on the way Tityrus’ landscape ‘through echo’ is ‘both bounded by and filled with sound’. My emphasis is not on echo as a means whereby Tityrus’ landscape is filled and bounded, but on echo as the defining characteristic of Tityrus’ song itself, an index both of the confined world from which the song comes and of the song’s inefficacy. Oddly Putnam omits the echoic dimension of siluestrem Musam, regarding it as mere ‘abstract inspiration’ (p. 81), although later suggesting (p. 90) that the Lucretian context from which it originates may incline us ‘to scrutinize the reality and, by corollary, any potential Epicureanism of Tityrus’.

8. On the union of Bacchic and Apolline forces in Silenus see Segal, C. P., ‘Vergil’s Sixth Eclogue and the Problem of Evil’, TAP A 100 (1969) 420Google Scholar, and Putnam (n. 6 above) 201–3, 217f.

9. On the poetic idealism of Eclogue 4 and 6 see Boyle (n. 4 above), esp. 111f.

10. Callimachus writes: ‘Bard (aoide), feed the victim (thyos) as fat as possible’ (Aetia fr.l.23f. Pf.). Note the change from ‘bard’ and ‘victim’ to ‘shepherd’ (pastorem) and ‘sheep’ (ouis). Virgil wishes to remind his readers of Hesiod directly, not simply tangentially via the Hesiodising Callimachus.

11. See Boyle (n. 1 above) ad loc.

12. Callimachean allusion, of course, also unites the prologue and the Gallus initiation scene (for Callimachus’ dream-encounter with the Hesiodic Muses on Mt. Helicon, see Aetia fr.2 Pf.): see Clausen, W., ‘Callimachus and Latin Poetry’, G&R n.s. 5 (1964) 194ff.Google Scholar, with whose statement (p. 196) – ‘References to Hesiod in Virgil and Propertius are really references to Callimachus or his conception of Hesiod’ – I cannot agree. Virgil’s description of the Georgics as Ascraeum carmen (G.2.176) is not simply a comment on the poem’s style: it is a comment on the poem’s didacticism, and didacticism in the moral, philosophical, spiritual, not simply technically instructive sense. Hesiod to Virgil was not only an aesthetic ideal (the Callimachean conception), but a moral ideal. Other connecting links between the prologue and Silenus’ song include: Apollo (3, 11, 29, 66, 73, 82); meditabor (‘I shall study’, 8) and meditante (‘studying’, 82); non iniussa (‘not unordered’, 9) and iussit (‘ordered’, 83 and 86).

13. See Leach, E. W., Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca and London 1974) 118Google Scholar, and Van Sickle, J., ‘Studies of Dialectical Methodology in the Virgilian Tradition’, MLN 85 (1970) esp. 893–96Google Scholar, who sees the auena as an ‘unpromising poetic tool’, as opposed to the reed (calamus/harundo), possibly ‘one that really works’. Mrs Leach interestingly comments (118 n. 7): ‘Mr Van Sickle has demonstrated the point quite cogently by presenting me with an actual oaten straw, a slender stalk about one-quarter inch in diameter, quite useless for producing any variety or modulation of sound.’ Not that what Tityrus is using is in fact an oatstraw; Meliboeus merely describes it as one (Tityrus’ more flattering term is ‘rustic reed’, calamo agresti, E.1.10) to express among other things his amazement at Tityrus’ apparent obliviousness – reflected in the triviality of his song – of the widespread rural chaos. Robert Coleman’s brave attempt (Vergil: Eclogues, Cambridge 1977, ad E.1.2) to interpret auena generically seems self-consciously unpersuasive.

14. For example, by Elder, J. P., ‘Non Iniussa Cano: Virgil’s Sixth Eclogue’, HSCP 65 (1961) 116Google Scholar, who sees Virgil as simply connoting ‘a pastoral song … in the Alexandrian style’, and Jr.Ross, D. O., Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry Gallus, Elegy and Rome (Cambridge 1975) 19Google Scholar, who takes Syracosio uersu, 1, siluas, 2, agrestem Musam, 8, myricae and nemus, 10f., as more or less synonymous (= ‘pastoral’). See also Stewart, Z., ‘The Song of Silenus’, HSCP 64 (1959) 197Google Scholar, Clausen (n. 12 above) 193ff., Segal (n. 8 above) 413, Putnam (n. 6 above) 197f., Berg, W., Early Virgil (London 1974) 145Google Scholar, Muecke (n. 4 above) 173f., Coleman (n. 13 above) ad E.6.8. Van Sickle, J., reviewing Boyle (n. 4 above), RFIC 105 (1977) 200Google Scholar, appreciates part of the force of agrestem but restricts his interpretation to ‘the definition of a particular mode’, viz. ‘Hesiodic-Callimachean’.

15. Pace Bailey, C. (ed.), Lucretius De Rerum Natura (Oxford 1947) ad 5.1398Google Scholar, who regards the passages as ‘in many details’ closely resembling each other.

16. Carmina is Lachmann’s reading.

17. On this omphalic, recessed panel arrangement and other structural principles in the Eclogues book see Boyle (n. 1 above) 10–16. The ‘reciprocal pattern’ evident in E.1–9 is emphasised by Otis, B. in his seminal work, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford 1964), esp. 129, 142f.Google Scholar, and can be said to be generally accepted (if not always on the same grounds). Cf. Skutsch, O., ‘Symmetry and Sense in the Eclogues’, HSCP 73 (1969) 158ffGoogle Scholar.

18. Quoting this example – ‘Vergil’s Latin’, Acta Classica 1 (1958) 36fGoogle Scholar. – W. F. Jackson Knight remarks: ‘Vergil often admits casual repetitions in great frequency and, to us, rather offensively.’ But are such repetitions in so fastidious a work as the Eclogues as ‘casual’ as Knight maintains – especially since, as Knight proceeds to comment, Virgil’s ‘care to find synonyms is often very thorough and successful, as when in eleven verses ten words mean water in some form, and eight of them are different [G.4.359ff.]’?

19. The repetition here of course is overtly intended to represent an echo (as also probably at E.5.64). Virgil is also perhaps alluding to the legend of Hylas’ transformation into an echo, for which he may be indebted to Nicander’s Heteroeumena: see McKay, K. J., ‘Frustration of Anticipation in Vergil, Eclogue vi’, Antichthon 6 (1972) 57Google Scholar.

20. Partly – it needs to be said – this is to be explained by the poet’s desire in this eclogue to achieve a sort of incantatory effect. The poem’s resonance does, however, seem also to bear upon larger questions.

21. On these and other relationships between E.10 and E.l-9 see Boyle (n. 4 above) 113ff.

22. There appears to be more involved here than the ‘ring-composition’ of which Williams, G. speaks: Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford 1968) 239Google Scholar.