PREFACE. THE Bucolics of Virgil are perhaps too commonly thought to be a book for beginners. This popular, though erroneous, estimate has occasioned, especially in the notes on a few of the first, much elementary matter to be mingled with the notice of difficulties which mere early scholarship would hardly feel. These poems are chiefly important for the many historical allusions which they contain, and which illustrate, from a point of view which no other writer has exactly seized, a few momentous years of the Augustan period. They belong to the literature of a civil war, from the havoc of which Italy perhaps never thoroughly recovered; and the interest which they thus possess far transcends the languid beauty of imitative pastorals. The references indicated by G. are to a series of notes on the Georgics, now nearly ready, and which it was meant should form one volume with the present. agr. agreeing with. met. metaphor. und. understood or understand. der. derived from. constrn. construction. app. apposition wh. which. And the usual abbreviations for parts of speech, case, tense, &c. P. VIRGILII MARONIS BUCOLICON LIBER. ECLOGA I. TITYRUS. MELIBEUS. TITYRUS. MEL. TITYRE, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi 10 MEL. Non equidem invideo; miror magis: undique totis Usque adeo turbatur agris. En, ipse capellas Protenus æger ago; hanc etiam vix, Tityre, duco. Hic inter densas corulos modo namque gemellos, Spem gregis, ah! silice in nuda connixa reliquit. Sæpe malum hoc nobis, si mens non læva fuisset, De cœlo tactas memini prædicere quercus. [Sæpe sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice cornix.] Sed tamen, iste deus qui sit, da, Tityre, nobis. TIT. Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Meliboe, putavi 20 Stultus ego huic nostræ similem, quo sæpe solemus Pastores ovium teneros depellere fetus. Sic canibus catulos similes, sic matribus hædos B |