you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So I'm reading Virgil out of my 1840 Cooper's Virgil, where the "study questions" are based entirely on the one-paragraph introductions to each eclogue and the copious and fairly irrelevant notes. One gets the impression that the most important thing to get out of Virgil's eclogues is the classification of different kinds of nymphs. But I digress. Mr. Cooper's commentary is equally amusing in its determination to find one to one "historical" analogues for every single character. Virgil, of course, features in every eclogue (except for IV, because that one is All About Jesus, even though Virgil didn't quite know it). In the fifth, two shepherds lament the death and celebrate the apotheosis of a particularly wonderful and talented youth/poet/shepherd. Obviously this is actually about Julius Caesar (disclosure: I am not averse to reading political/historical allusion into Virgil. Just not, you know, on an allegorical "X actually is A" level.)

This produces some entertaining glosses, such as, on the line

cum complexa sui corpus miserabile nati
atque deos atque astra vocat crudelia mater

(When, embracing the pitiable body of her son, his mother calls both gods and stars cruel): "Cerdanus understands by mater the wife of Caesar, who a little before his death dreamed her husband was stabbed in her breast." I mean, we all know that Caesar's mother was quite influential in his upbringing and life, but… that influential? Oh Virgil, you naughty poet.

Also, amusingly, in the 1920's, D.L. Drew ("Virgil's Fifth Eclogue: A Defence of the Julius Caesar-Daphnis Theory", CQ vol. 16 no. 2) argues that "mother" must be a code-word for either Venus or Roma (both indeed more plausible than Calpurnia) and therefore point to Julius Caesar because mothers do not belong in Pastorals:

For what has a mourning matron to do with a Daphnis? Another step and the local attorney would be there and the family doctor to follow. At such a deathbed we admit nymphs and fauns and Venuses, even Aesculapius -- anything, almost, rather than a mother, who is human.

I was extremely tempted to present the quote without the last three words, but that, I suppose would have been tendentious. And I suppose that given that Daphnis = archetypical Shepherd prince, it is maybe odd to have the intrusion of a mother (although, seriously, it isn't as though mourning women aren't a rather standard topos). On the other hand, given that the movement is from death (i.e. mortal, human) to apotheosis (i.e. divine, mythical) having a human mother show up early to mourn serves that very well, whether D. merely evokes Caesar, is independent of Caesar, or *actually is* Caesar.

And -- April is Poetry month and Springtime Happiness month, so this post is Entirely Relevant. All it needs is a link to the poem itself (translation by Dryden; it's on page 429, if the link doesn't bring you right to the "fifth pastoral".)