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.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, March 10, 2025
Country Life
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):