'Audax iuventa': Virgil's 'Eclogues' and the art of fiction

Recent studies of ancient pastoral poetry have emphasized its self-conscious and self-critical aspects, as evidenced by the texts' preoccupation with the process of literary production itself: the presence of performance and writing, and the significant role of allusion and intertext, in these poems have led many critics to judge Greek and Roman pastoral to be interested primarily in the processes entailed in its own existence as text. This dissertation supplements and corrects such views. The Eclogues, by staging dramatic situations and characters, create fictive space within which the reader works imaginatively to construe a poem's meaning. Pastoral poetry like the Eclogues is fictional in a referential or semantic sense: discursively the poems refer not to the actual world but to a fictional one they themselves construct. More pragmatically, the reader's role is to reconstruct the fictional world in cooperation with the text's instructions. Since such instructions can never be exhaustive, the reader must avail him or herself not only of historical knowledge and an awareness of other texts but also the resources of the imagination.;Reading the Eclogues is complicated by the fact that we have the ten poems in the form of a book evidently designed to be read as an integrated whole. The book exhibits signs of formal unity such that a sequential reading is preferable and fruitful. At the same time, efforts to impose order by reading a plot or linear narrative into the collection have proven unsatisfactory. The dissertation argues that the search for the Eclogue Book's unity yields richer understandings of particular poems and a better appreciation of the artistry of the whole---but not the specious satisfaction offered by tidy structural schemes. Furthermore, that tension between order and disorder, and the frustrations to which it may lead readers, is a formal feature of the book that also is reflected in its fictional contents. The characters of the Eclogues are often constrained by external forces and painfully aware of their own limitations; pleasure or happiness exists in the poems despite the absence of complete satisfaction or unfettered efficacy.;Chapter 1 begins with Greek bucolic poetry (especially Theocritus' Idylls 7 and 11, and The Lament for Bion) to provide, in concert with theoretical approaches to fictionality, a context for interpreting Virgilian pastoral as fiction. In Chapter 2 it is argued that Eclogues 4--6 variously stage their author so as to blur the distinction between author and character, ultimately suggesting that a number of characters internal to the fiction share the capacity to speak as the (or an) author of the Eclogue Book. Chapter 3 responds to critics who have insisted on a "gap" between the sophisticated pastoral text and its content, to which it is somehow alien and superior. However, Eclogues 2, 8, and 10 demand that we imagine their fictional speakers as poets whose eloquence emulates that of Virgilian verse and whose fictional songs are, by virtue of their supernatural properties, "superior" to the discourse that represents them. These and other Eclogues call attention to the limitations of textual representation and thus to the need to apply the resources of the imagination in construing pastoral fictions. Chapter 4 treats Eclogues 1 and 9 as dialogues that create character and action within a fictional world. Moreover, the language of the Virgilian text is considered as both means of representation and as content: we may imagine the poetry as also the speech of the characters, which mitigates the sense of pessimism and loss that pervades the poems. The Conclusion reconsiders the familiar idea of the Virgilian poetic career as that of a maker of fiction, with the Eclogues as a bold point of departure rather than a humble beginning. As the poet of the Georgics tells us he is also the poet of the Eclogues, Virgil's didactic poem avails itself of "pastoral" techniques of authorial self-representation; Virgil also develops his fictionality to suit didactic poetry and its generic prerogatives.