Laudator Temporis Acti

Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Roman Social Relations. 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (1974; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 3-4 (note omitted):

Anyone who sketches his mental picture of country life from Vergil's Eclogues must plainly re-do its outlines to match real truth. The shepherd was not his own man but hired to guard someone else's flocks, or a slave: and that someone else might be removed from him by an immense distance, physically, as an absentee landlord, socially, by a wealth that spread its possessions across whole ranges of hills, and administratively, by the interposition of bailiffs, overseers, and lessees. Rustic swains had indeed nothing to sing about. Their world was as poverty-stricken and ignored as it was dangerous. And while Vergil's Lycidas and Tityrus contended only for priority as poets, their living models had to confront each other, village or city officials, outraged farmers, or brigands, in struggles that knew no end.