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RECUBANS SUB TEGMINE FAGI


The visitor to Arcadia should perhaps be urged to leave his microscope at
home. Happiest, at any rate, is the reader of Vergil's pastorals who can
take an unannotated pocket edition to his vacation retreat, forgetting
what every inquisitive Donatus has conjectured about the possible
hidden meanings that lie in them. But the biographer may not share that
pleasure. The _Eclogues_ were soon burdened with comments by critics who
sought in them for the secrets of an early career hidden in the obscurity
of an unannaled provincial life. In their eager search for data they
forced every possible passage to yield some personal allusion, till the
poems came to be nothing but a symbolic biography of the author. The
modern student must delve into this material if only to clear away a
little of the allegory that obscures the text.

It is well to admit honestly at once that modern criticism has no
scientific method which can with absolute accuracy sift out all the
falsehoods that obscure the truth in this matter, but at least a
beginning has been made in demonstrating that the glosses are not
themselves consistent. Those early commentators who variously place the
confiscation of Vergil's farm after the battle of Mutina (43 B.C.),
after Philippi (42) and after Actium (31), who conceive of Mark Antony
as a partizan of Brutus, and Alfenus Varus as the governor of a province
that did not exist, may state some real facts: they certainly hazard many
futile guesses. The safest way is to trust these records only when they
harmonize with the data provided by reliable historians, and to interpret