GRATIA AND THE POETICS OF EXCESS: ECLOGUE 4
The fourth eclogue provides another example of the way in which Vergil's pastoral absorbs the discourse of benefaction. Because self-reflexivity is a
[29] See Hellegouarc'h 1963, 202, on the association of gratia-with elogeand thus laudes. I discuss the association between gratiaand libidinal excess in chapter 1. See Sailer 1982, 21, on gratia as “an attitude rather than an action.”
Vergil's most famous “pastoral” is a poem not originally conceived in the bucolic mode. Written to celebrate Asinius Pollio's consulship in 40 B.C.E., the fourth eclogue's messianic predictions of the return of a golden age, the rule of Saturn, anticipate and arguably provide a source for the political use of the topos in the art and poetry of the 20s B.C.E. and later.
[30] Eclogue 4 has generated vast critical commentary. I have particularly profited from Putnam 1970, 136–65; Leach 1974, 216–44; Du Quesnay 1977, 25–99; Van Sickle 1978, 55–75;Segal 1981, 265–70; Arnold 1994; Hubbard 1995. For broader discussions of the concept of the golden age in Augustan ideology and literature, see [n. 7] above. Both Galinsky (1996, 90–100) and Barker (1996) argue against taking the fourth eclogue as a blueprint for later appearances or evocations of the golden age topos.
Possibly influenced by the Sibylline prophecy of a new temporal order, Vergil adapts the idea of a golden race in Hesiod and Aratus to the Roman concept of a new saeculum, or “age.” The identity of the child whose birth and successive stages of life will coincide with generations of mythic historical time remains obscure; he is possibly a son of Asinius Pollio, but more likely the offspring of the recent alliance between Antony and Octavia (a marriage that was to be short-lived). This political union was intended to cement through kinship the treaty of Brundisium, negotiated with the assistance of Pollio in September of 40 B.C.E., between the political rivals Antony and Octavian. Thus, Vergil's poem draws both from the genre of the epithalamium, in celebration of the recent wedding, and from the basilikon, adapted to the Roman occasion of Pollio's consulate: the praise of Pollio includes and is partially displaced onto the praise of the child who will rule as a king (Du Quesnay 1977, 56–57). Despite the eventual dissolution of the treaty, the marriage, and the accord between the factions of the Caesarian party, the attributes of the golden age here—the lion lying down with the lamb, the voluntary fecundity of nature-resemble the emblems of peace that later decorate so much of the sculpture of the Principate and early Empire. Recent scholarship has stressed the mutability of[31] As Barker (1996, 436) suggests, “in the myth of the golden age one is confronted less by a fixed symbol than by a mobile discourse—that is, by a composite of different positions taken by different Romans at different times around the idea of a returning golden race.”
the fourth eclogue differs from later literary narratives of the golden age in its emphasis on nature's spontaneous fertility without the need for human labor. This feature not only characterizes Hesiod's description, one of Vergil's major sources; it is also dramatically consistent with the social relations of patronage in which the poem is embedded.To begin with, in contrast to the dramatic fiction of shepherds engaged in song, the occasion of the fourth eclogue draws attention to the poem as a means of honoring Pollio, possibly Vergil's patron at this time.
[32] Pollio's role as a patron of the Eclogues is by no means indisputable, given the ambiguity of lines 6–13 in Eclogue 8, where the speaker claims that his songs began at the command of the addressee's bidding (iussis / carmina coepta tuis). The patron here has often been understood as referring to Pollio, because Vergil describes his addressee as a poet of tragedy, and Pollio was the most famous tragedian of his day. However, Clausen (1994, 234–37), following recent scholarship, attributes the reference to Octavian, who was known to have begun an Ajax and whose travels at the time of this eclogue's composition better square with the lines describing the patron's journey.
The speaker introduces a grander, more amplified tone, using a pastoral metaphor:
Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus! non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae; si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae. Sicilian Muses, let us sing in a slightly higher mode, more lofty matters! Orchards and humble tamarisks do not please all; if we sing about woods, let them be a forest worthy of a consul. (4.1–3)
The consulate as a political occasion clearly demands a grander strain, but the honor accorded to Pollio in this poem also flatters him as a patron of poets. In particular, the theme of the golden age looks back to Pollio's appearance in the third eclogue (Segal 1981, 251–52, 261; Arnold 1994, 146–47). There, Damoetas's appreciation of Vergil's patron as a reader expresses itself in the invocation to the Muses to “fatten a calf” for him (vitulam lectori pascite vestro, 85). When Menalcas tops this display of gratitude by flattering Pollio's talent as a poet himself, and invokes the preparation of a bull as sacrificial offering, Damoetas responds with lavish praise that pulls out all the stops: he wishes that the one who appreciates Pollio's verse arrive in a place that the poet already inhabits, a land where honey flows and the thornbush bears spice—adunata, or impossibilities, that
[33] Verg. Eel. 3.84–89: Damoetas: Pollio amat, quamuis est rustica, Musam: /Pierides, vitulam lectori pascite vestro. Menalcas: Pollio et ipse facit nova carmina: pascite taurum, / iam comu petat et pedibus qui spargat harenam. Damoetas: Qui te, Pollio, amat, veniat, quo te quoque gaudet; / mella fluant itti, ferat et rubus asper amomum.
Thus Damoetas flatters Pollio, through a metaphor that suggests he has already achieved perfection of pastoral technique. Though both the initial lines of Eclogue 4 and this exchange in Eclogue 3 are thought to be additions to the poems as originally composed, intended to help integrate them into a unified book (Clausen 1982, 310–11; 1995, 126), the alteration only enhances an effect already present. The amplification of tone, the more grandiose strain of Eclogue 4 is, at some level, already inscribed in a discourse of benefaction: without conflating Damoetas with the Eclogue poet or the author himself, figures who operate on different contextual levels,[34] See Leach 1974, 245–76, on the various roles played by the “Eclogue poet.”
we may still read the elevation of tone in part as an impulse or function of gratia—the appreciation felt in response to Pollio's patronage of Vergil as a poet. Damoetas's desire for the discriminating reader qua poet to join Pollio, already set in the metaphorical land of honey and adunata, structurally parallels the Eclogue poet's invocation of the Muses' assistance, in the next poem, to sing paulo maiora worthy of a consul.Moreover, though the comparative maiora refers in its immediate context to the difference between the lowly tamarisk and more stately woods, and thus metaphorically to the contrast between humble and grand themes, it also strongly connotes the idea of excess or surplus value associated with gratia. As I discussed in chapter 1, when Cicero distinguishes between monetary exchange and a gift economy, he alludes to the paradox that gratia, though returned, leaves behind an excess or residue, a trace of itself-something that, in fact, causes the favor to increase in value.
[35] “A man has not repaid money if he still has it; if he has repaid it, he has ceased to have it. But a man still has the sense of favour, if he has returned the favour; and if he has the sense of the favour, he has repaid it” (Cic. Off. 2.69; trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition).
Specifically, Cicero's distinction suggests the consequences of the idea that one who receives a benefit or kindness can never fully pay back his benefactor and be free of the debt: gratia as expressed in a concrete form of return, as “return favors,” may very well exceed the original gift; and, because a feeling of gratitude is left over despite the return favors, causing the social relationship to outlast the exchange, gratia suggests a value of libidinal excess.[36] Seneca (Ben. 2.18.5) makes the same distinction as Cicero; he concludes that to the benefactor (as opposed to the creditor), at illi e plus solvendum est, et nihilo minus etiam relata gratia cohaeremus; debeo enim, cum reddidi, rursus incipere, manetque amicitia.
Indeed, we perceive one aspect of such excess assimilated to the conventions of pastoral in the amoebean competition between DamoetasIn addition, paulo maiora might suggest the actual excess involved in a return gift or acknowledgment of a benefaction pure and simple. Again, as we saw in chapter 1, Cicero quite explicitly relates gratia and the idea of increase when he discusses the appropriate response to an unlooked-for benefaction: “for no duty (qfficium) is more imperative than that of proving one's gratitude (referenda gratia). But if, as Hesiod bids, one is to repay with interest (maiore mensura), if possible (si modo possis), what one has borrowed in time of need, what, pray, ought we to do when challenged by an unsought kindness? Shall we not imitate the fruitful fields, which return more than they receive?” (Off. 1.47–48).
[37] Trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition.
The use of the comparative maiorin both contexts is slim evidence of a connection, but Cicero's analogy to Hesiod and agriculture is relevant in many ways to Vergil's description of the golden age in Eclogues 4.[38] The idea of measurement in relation to Rome comes up in the first eclogue, when Tityrus admits that the city confounded his pastoral sense of dimension: sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos / noram, sic paruis componere magna solebam. / verum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes / quantum lenta solent inter vibuma cupressi (22–25).
Given that Pollio is not only a consul in this poem but also possibly the person who as a patron first encouraged Vergil to write bucolics, the phrase paulo maiora suggests Hesiod's advice to give back more than one has received. Paulo, unattested elsewhere in Vergil, could allude to Cicero's qualification of si modo possis, his acknowledgment that repayment in “greater measure” is difficult and not always possible. More important, for all that Hesiod's advice occurs in the context of the human toil of the iron age, Cicero's analogy to crops growing in natural and spontaneous increase suggests the voluntary surplus of the golden age. To be sure, Cicero presents the increase of gratia in terms of nature's response to the labor of planting or the “gift” of seed—that which is analogous to the unprompted or unsought benefaction. However, the emphasis on both the apparent spontaneity of the original gift—it is not expected or induced—and the similarly spontaneous “excess” of the return suggests[39] For a list of passages in the Greco—Roman tradition that contain these specific features as part of the golden age, see the conspectus rerum in Gatz 1967, 229, and the specific headings 1. terra sua sponte victumferens and 1.b) variae res se ultra offerentes.
Hesiod's advice to give back more than one has received is, in many ways, a translation of nature's generosity in the golden age into the ethical realm of human relations (see esp. Op. 352–60).I propose, then, that the discourse of patronage conditions more than just the loftier tone of the eclogue. Gratia, which expresses appreciative responsiveness either as an attitude or in the concrete terms of a return gift, metaphorically characterizes the very activity of nature's spontaneous profusions in this depiction of the golden age. In sympathetic response to the child's birth, at first the earth spontaneously produces little gifts (nullo munuscula cultu) of flowers, ivy, and acanthus (18–20). The word munuscula, appearing nowhere else in the Vergilian corpus, initially suggests the offerings of the shepherd-lover in a pastoral context displaced to the symbiotic relationship between earth and child (Putnam 1970, 146). Significantly, however, it also connotes the symbolic gifts of Roman social relations.
[40] See Veyne 1990, 216: “petty gifts maintained the relation of clientage, which often consisted in an exchange of services very widely separated in time. In order that the obligation to return the service received might be kept up, there had to be a bond of affection between protector and protégé, and this affection was symbolized by petty gifts which seemed to create the bond but in fact merely served to maintain friendship and the memory of a service which still awaited its reward.”
Cicero uses the word to describe a speech as a “little gift” he has written in defense of Deiotarus, his old host and friend, which he later sends to Dolabella.[41] Cic. Fam. 9.12.2: Sed ego hospiti veteri et amico munusculum mittere volui.
Caelius employs it ironically to refer to a charge brought by a defendant against his accuser,[42] Cic. Fam. 8.8. 1: Nemini hoc deferre munusculum maluit quam suo accusatori.
a usage that underscores its usual positive connotation as a symbol of relationship. Suetonius describes Augustus's distribution of munuscula to the residents of Capreae, again suggesting the bond symbolized by the gift (Aug. 98.3). Horace uses the word, though somewhat negatively, to describe an unsolicited gift in Epistles 1.7.17. Indeed, though I am choosing to read munuscula in the fourth eclogue as an expression of gratia, it is also possible to read these gifts as spontaneous benefactions. Spontaneity and the absence of coercion are visible in other motifs: the goats returning home unbidden, a common feature of golden age descriptions; or the sheep famously changing the color of their wool by their own will (sua sponte), a fanciful invention of Vergil's own that he adapted from Etruscan prophecy (Du Quesnay 1977, 42). Suggestive of either benefaction or gratia, the emphasis on voluntarism and the lack of calculated interest behind these gifts of nature accord withThe ease with which a golden age discourse could assimilate such Roman attitudes to the bucolic landscape helps account for the later adoption of such motifs as symbolic of the Augustan regime. For it is precisely the patronal aspect of the imperial rule ushered in by Augustus's regime, as it became established in the 20s B.C.E. and later, that is “naturalized” by the topos of the golden age or pastoral motifs more generally.
[43] For example, the issue of coins with Octavian in 41 B.C.E., and later Augustus in 17 B.C.E., in conjunction with the image of cornucopiae, suggests precisely the role of the emperor as ultimate benefactor. See, too, my discussion of Horace's epistle to Iccius (1.12.28–29) later in this chapter. Galinsky (1996, 111) cautions that the images on coins cannot be “interpreted indiscriminately as betokening a Golden Age suggestive of the fourth Eclogue” and cites the tradition of such iconography dating back to 207 B.C.E. and the Second Punic War. Such caveats and observations notwithstanding, Vergil's poem associates nature's fertility with a discourse of benefaction, a connection elsewhere visible in Augustan iconography and literature.
In Eclogue 4, nature's enthusiastic response to the advent of the young child and the stages of his maturation serves literally to provide the initial lineaments of a naturalizing discourse for the authoritarian rule of a single man who will “rule the world” (reget … orbem, 17); such a discourse gains power from originating in and evoking the recognizable terms of Roman social relations. Rather than appear as imposed by force, authoritarian rule evolves as a form of gift or distinction, a glorious age (decus hoc aevi, 11) that is freely bestowed or “sent down from heaven” (caelo demittitur alto, 7) and voluntarily received. The amplified tone and vatic register of the speaker, as a reflex of honor and index of gratia for Pollio, parallels nature's expressions of gratitude and symbiotic responsiveness to the child as a metaphoric “gift” of Pollio's consulship: the external frame of the poem's occasion is repeated in the structural relationship between the child and nature.Yet ironically, Vergil's deployment of the topos here presents nature's superfluity as an excess that becomes aesthetic. What begins as the libidinal excess of gratitude expresses itself in images that self-reflexively connote poetic production. As we have seen, in sympathetic response to the child's birth the earth spontaneously produces little gifts of flowers, ivy, and acanthus. Their aesthetic associations are heightened by analogy to the Greek word for flower, anthos, which can allude to poetry (Arnold 1994, 147). But aesthetic production is also seen as cumulative: the golden age is a place of extremes, and so we find an organic world pumped full of hormones to the point of monstrous, or at least “unnatural,” output. Not only does honey—a symbol of pastoral poetry-drip from trees (cf. Theoc. Id. 1.146), but nature expands beyond her bounds: iridescent sheep, effortlessly
[44] Rosenmeyer (1969, 214–17) notes that the golden age topos, replete with the adunata of “animal skins that come in technicolor hues,” honey from oaks, and the lion bedding down with the lamb, becomes a feature of the pastoral tradition only with the fourth eclogue. Vergil's sheep have often been considered a breach of aesthetic decorum.
The landscape as a place of aesthetic production thus recalls the effects of Meliboeus's transfiguring imagination in the first eclogue. Here, however, the capacity to transform, to metamorphose, literally to change (mutare) appearances or colores originally emanates not from loss but from an impulse of gratia. The Eclogue poet again invokes this assimilation of the libidinal excess of grateful joy to the aesthetic fertility of the pastoral landscape when he claims: “Behold how all things rejoice at the coming age! O, may the end of a long life remain for me then, and enough breath to glorify your deeds!” (aspice, venture laetentur ut omnia saeclo! / o mihi turn longae maneat pars ultima vitae, / spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta! 52–54). The rejoicing of all things (laetentur ut omnia), including the speaker's own wish to celebrate, looks back to the phrase omnis feret omnia tellus, which leads into the sheep as emblems of aesthetic production. The desire to praise the future deeds of the child thus derives from the same responsive sympathy as do the metamorphosing sheep. Epideixis, or the rhetoric of praise, is here symbolized by the ovine colores (a symbolism distinct from the meaning of colores in Roman rhetoric, discussed below). Thus, even as the eclogue provides a naturalizing discourse for political
We might push this reading further and suggest that the potential for the aesthetic to manufacture consent, to elicit the voluntary acceptance of contingent social formations as natural, is perhaps self-reflexively represented by this figure of Vergil's famously “indecorous” sheep. For the aries spontaneously changing the color of his coat presents in a kind of hybrid form the image of a citizen, needing no intervention from the law above, conflated with art as a means of persuasion. This veiled reference to the operations of ideology becomes clear when we consider two other distinct connotations of the ram's colores. On the one hand, the activity of dyeing to produce colorful hues is associated, in the literature of late Republican Rome, with an extensive poetic discourse of sin, deceit, and corruption (see Putnam 1970, 153–55; Barker 1996, 445–46). Here, in the golden age, the wool will not have to be taught “to deceive,” or falsely represent, various colors (nee varios discet mentiri lana colores). Sheep changing their own color, as a replacement for the maritime trade that once brought in the expensive dyes, thus implies a liberation from the trafficking and economic exploitation that led to moral decline. In this respect, sheep qua citizens are choosing, autonomously (sua sponte), to live in a way that is virtuous and free of sin. On the other hand, the colores also connote the figurative embellishments and excesses of Roman rhetoric (Arnold 1994, 149). Even more specifically, as one commentator remarks about the use of colorin Quintilian, it is the technical term for “the particular aspect given to a case by skilful manipulation of the facts”—the gloss or varnish that may even alter the truth (Peterson 1891, on Quint. Inst. 10.1.116.). Hence, in the fourth eclogue the colores ironically suggest the aesthetic means by which spontaneous good conduct and the acceptance of the child as king are encouraged. That is, the various colores imply Vergil's own pastoral art, with all its rhetorical figuration, as it provides the naturalizing discourse that brings the freely choosing citizen into alignment with the governance of the single man. However, such authoritarian rule is only a vision, intimated rather than spelled out by the celebration of the child in conjunction with the return to a golden age.
Given the probable date of the fourth eclogue's initial composition, this poem should not be read as a conscious endorsement of Octavian and what later became the Augustan regime: in 40 B.C.E., Antony was the man of the moment (Clausen 1994, 125).
[45] Du Quesnay (1977, 38) remarks that many of Vergil's Epicurean friends from Philodemus's community at Naples fought on the Republican side at Philippi and, after their defeat, turned to Antony rather than to Octavian.
But the Eclogues were no doubt continuously modified with both additions and deletions until the moment of their[46] See Hubbard 1995, 6, for this reading. If these lines were added later, I would tentatively suggest yet one more connotation of the changing colores: in 35 B.C.E., Octavian had superseded Antony as the man of the day, and Vergil may well be referring to a shift—and possibly his own—of political sympathy, a necessary (perhaps voluntary) reorientation of his own allegiances.
One way in which the eclogues function to legitimize or naturalize political structures is through the very absence of overtly specific and identifiably consistent contemporary references: thus, though Antony may hover behind the original epithalamium of Eclogue 4, with his offspring the recipient of the implied basilikon, it is Octavian whom many perceive as the deus of Eclogue 1. And because neither figure is named outright, the poems can represent a political structure—in this case the phenomenon of “Caesarism” or the charismatic single leader-headed now by one, now by another individual. That the topos of the new saeculum or “age” inaugurated by a single “ruler” was originally associated with Julius Caesar (see Du Quesnay 1977, 61) underscores the vanity of seeking allegorical precision. Rather, we should note that the basilikon of Eclogue 4 and the sacrificial practice of Hellenistic ruler cult in Eclogue 1 are both embedded, in different ways, in a Roman discourse of benefaction and assimilated to a pastoral context.The backdrop to this assimilation is, of course, the redistribution of land to the various veterans supporting these powerful military figures; and whereas the first eclogue unflinchingly confronts, if only to resolve temporarily, the painful and inequitable practice of expropriation from the land, the fourth treats the issue indirectly but no less ideologically. As we noted earlier, pastoral abundance has resonances both generally with responsive gratitude and specifically with the “initial” gift in a patronal exchange. And so, if land grants were one means of securing loyalty to the Caesarians' program, particularly the loyalty of veteran soldiers (as well as of poets), then a topos of a natural economy of spontaneous surplus would serve to gloss over and mystify the material reality of confiscations that made many of those grants possible.
[47] See [n. 9] above for specific facts on land confiscation. To be sure, the collection as a whole starkly acknowledges the effects of expropriation. Nonetheless, in the fourth eclogue, human authority is entirely sanctioned by nature in a dialogic interaction: the spontaneous flowers that spill into the cradle at the poem's beginning suggest the same interactive endorsement as the image at the end (so ambiguously reflective of this dialogue) of the child recognizing-either with his own or by her smile—his mother's face. As a powerful semiotic emblem of “nature,” the image of maternity here contributes to the overall effect of pastoral as mystifying the real facts of dispossession that surface in the first and ninth eclogues.
Moreover, we know that Vergil'sThe manipulation of property law that such confiscations entailed may have prompted two of the most striking features in Vergil's later versions of the golden age: the lack of laws and the absence of private property.
[48] For discussion of these attributes of the golden age in particular, see Wallace—Hadrill 1982, 22–28. Gatz (1967, 229) notes that the absence of private property is a Roman innovation. Keppie (1983, 59–66) cites the agreement at Bononia backed by the lex Titia as the authority by which Octavian and Antony carried out the confiscations that enabled resettlement of the veterans who fought at Philippi.
To be sure, such defining absences were always implicit in the Greek tradition of the topos, whether the perverted and antisocial “paradise” of the Cyclopes in Homer (see E. Cook 1995, 98–99) or the prototypical account of Hesiod. The anxiety connected with justice, inheritance, and the bequeathing of property that motivates the speaker of the Works and Days, toiling to make ends meet in the fallen age of iron, implicitly assumes a golden age free of such concerns. And the Cynic and Pythagorean cry “back to the golden age,” with its rejection of the structures and institutions of the polis, certainly voices a critique of private property (Detienne 1979, 60–66). Nonetheless, that Vergil brought these implicit features to the fore, proclaiming the imminent return of an age in which laws and property divisions are unnecessary, fits his particular, late Republican or triumviral context. On one level, the prophecy constitutes a Utopian fantasy born of a sincere desire to be free of the effects of civic turmoil; but such a vision also weakens, or at least casts in a different light, any criminality in the confiscation of land. Expropriation may be necessary to bring about a social order in which prosperity will be had by all.This necessity is intimated, albeit in a distorted fashion (there is no outright reference to land confiscation), in the fourth eclogue: traces of sin (sceleris vestigia, 13) will become inactive under Pollio's consulship yet
[49] Verg. Eel. 4–31–33: pauca tamen subemnt priscae vestigia fraudis, /quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris / oppida, quae iubeant telluri infindere sulcos.
Thus it is property itself, rather than its seizure and expropriation, that constitutes a crime. Precisely that point is made in the description of Saturn's kingdom in the Georgics: “Before Jove there were no farmers turning over the soil; it was not lawful even to mark or divide the field with a boundary.”[50] Verg. Geo. 1.125–28: antelovem nutti subigebant arua coloni: / ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum /fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus / omnia liberius nullo poscenteferebat. Comparing these lines to other passages in Vergil in which Saturn (the ruler of the Golden Age ante lovem) is the original legislator (Aen. 8.321–32), and toil and hard work characterize the true Italian “golden age” (Geo. 2.532–40), Wallace—Hadrill (1982, 23–24) relates these “internal incoherences” in the accounts to “embarrassment” over “the security of property, the unequal hierarchy of rank and the strict legislative structure which the Augustan regime in fact ensured” at a later date.
The motif that the land belongs to all thus underplays the deprivations suffered by those who are individually dispossessed.Alternatively, from the perspective of the recipient, the topos of communal ownership is paradoxically reassuring. A gift of property may never adequately ensure ownership, for the benefactor may never loosen his hold over the recipient.
[51] For Augustus's wish to maintain a close “patronal” relationship with his veterans, see Keppie 1983, 114–22.
But to anticipate a return to an era of plenty, in which the earth's spontaneous profusions are enjoyed by all, shifts the focus from any uncertainty about ownership and sense of constraint felt by the recipient to an ideology of disinterested voluntarism on the part of the benefactor. Once again, we see such attitudes, reminiscent of the language of Roman social relations, in the first book of the Georgics: “people would acquire things for common use, and the earth gave all things more freely then when no one was asking” (1.127–28).[52] As Sen. Ben. 2.2.1 repeatedly stresses, the best benefaction is the one that is not explicitly sought: Molestum verbum est, onerosum, demisso vultu dicendum, rogo, and properet licet, sero beneficium dedit, qui roganti dedit.
Karl Galinsky has recently stressed the uniqueness of the golden age vision in the fourth eclogue, claiming that its view of an age of indolence, in which nature provides spontaneously and no human effort is required, is replaced in subsequent versions by the conditional dependence on human labor. He points out that the description of the age of Saturn in the Georgics, quoted above, is a world to which Jove introduces labor as a means of inciting civilization. The hard-earned profits and pleasures of the farmer, the fruits of toil, constitute the real golden age. A similar conditionality is present, he argues, in the plastic arts, where images of agricultural fertility
I would qualify these claims: images of pastoral abundance may not have obscured the realities of the age, but they certainly constituted an element of an ideological discourse that rendered the presence of militarism necessary and even natural. The coexistence of these seemingly antithetical images-military arms and fruitful fields-encourages a belief in their co-dependence, an idea that goes back to the early Roman concept of the citizen as both farmer and soldier. And just as these images were ideologically linked in the plastic arts of the Principate, so we have seen that Vergil's novel use of literary pastoral provides, if not an easy justification for, at least a way of understanding land confiscations and the resettlement of veterans in the late forties. David Halperin's comments on the attributes particular to pastoral as a genre also suggest that it is especially suited to the work of ideology: “A kind of contrast … intimate to pastoral's manner of representation is that between a confused or conflict-ridden reality and the artistic depiction of it as comprehensible, meaningful, or harmonious” (1983, 68). Rather than elide dark realities, Vergil's daring reshaping of Theocritean pastoral builds the dissonance between the confusions of history and the harmonies of art into the very structure of many of the eclogues. Vergilian pastoral “manages” contradictions through imaginary resolutions even as it calls attention to, and comments on, their imaginary status.
[53] See Rose 1992, 36, for such management as a feature of all ideology, a process that Jameson's negative hermeneutic makes explicit.
In this respect, the social and economic conflicts that ideology resolves or negotiates lend themselves to pastoral.So far we have examined pastoral images only in terms of their capacity to endorse or at minimum render “meaningful” the contingent power relations of the triumviral period and the uneven distribution of resources that maintained that power. Viewed through Jameson's negative herme-neutic, the system of benefaction by which those resources (specifically land) were transmitted is naturalized by its assimilation to the pastoral landscape. Yet poetry cannot be reduced to a seamless articulation of ideology, for aesthetic texts are necessarily overdetermined by rhetorical excess; that is, they manifest certain elements of diction, formal structure, registers of imagery, and gaps or lacunae that contradict, reveal, or even resist the ideological distortions supporting the social formations of a particular period.
To some degree, this idea of subversion shares its origins and intellectual ground with the language and effects of deconstruction. For it is precisely
[54] Derrida's (1978) concepts of “play” and “supplementation” contribute to “undecidability” when, in de Man's (1979a) analysis of the rhetoric of literature, its “performative “aspect works against its “constative” aspect, or what it states.
As Geoffrey Hartman comments, “Literature destabilizes, by overdetermination or indeterminacy—by what seems to be an excess (figurality) or a defect (equivocation)—the ‘real character’ of communication” (1978, viii).[55] See also Preminger and Brogan 1993, s.v. “deconstruction.”
Those who practice deconstruction tend to find in the free play of signification a text so “undecidable” and “decentered” that political implications become moot, but a positive hermeneutic could use a deconstructive tactic to illuminate ways in which aesthetic play provides resistance to hegemonic discourses.When Horace invokes either a pastoral or a golden age motif as ways of figuring his relationship to his estate, these generic allusions introduce a certain rhetorical instability to his poems: this figural excess, I believe, is connected both to the aesthetic connotations of pastoral as a genre in general and to the historical moment of Vergil's Eclogues in particular. As in Vergil, the estate gives rise to an economy of otium, in which land is valued for its aesthetic returns and the socioeconomic context of patronage may be comfortably assimilated to pastoral conventions. On the one hand, these Horatian poems conform to an ideal vision of benefaction and demonstrate Bourdieu's notion of the misrecognition of the economics behind gift exchange; on the other, they simultaneously reveal how the farm, as a site of pastoral aestheticism and hermeneutic multivalency, provides the rhetorical strategies by which the speaker resists ideas of debt, constraint, and potential deprivation paradoxically associated with the estate as a gift.