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Virgil Bucolics 1.1–2 and Interpretive Tradition: A Latin (Roman) Program for a Greek Genre

They owe familiarity to their role as the initial moment in a career that was to transform western literary history, inventing the ideal of Arcadia and going on to graft the Roman and Latin Aeneid onto the epic tradition that traced its roots to the Greek of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad . Familiar, too, has been the scholarly consensus that Virgil here took aim at Theocritus (Servius 3.1.2.14 Thilo): Intentio poetae haec est, ut imitetur Theocritum Syracusanum meliorem Moscho et ceteris qui Bucolica scripserunt (“The poet’s intention is this, to imitate Theocritus of Syracuse as better than Moschus and others who wrote Bucolics”). This consensus, however, has been challenged by a well-known scholar in an authoritative medium. Writing for Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Francis Cairns argues that bucolic themes give only a generic stamp to the opening lines, which lack a specific “strong and unequivocal pointer to Theocritus,” unless we recognize an etymological play that previous scholars, he claims, have overlooked. 1 Yet Cairns offers no compelling reason to overturn the consensus that found here a strong and overt reference to Theocritus. His proposed etymological point turns out to be neither overt nor strong; it had, in any case, occurred to many scholars from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, then again in the mid-twentieth, among the latter a close cohort of