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Eclogue 4 received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
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This is a very welcome article done with a lot of care. I have one reservation.
Perhaps because of the emphasis on Nachleben, the Christian interpretation of the work strikes me as given undue weight. Allusion to Jewish messianism is not completely implausible (there was a significant Jewish community in Rome in the mid-1st century BC, and Julius Caesar was regarded as a patron of the Jews, so a "court poet" of Augustus might've had some interest in Judaism, as also Varro did around this time), but all the elements of the poem can be explained by a Classicist as something other than proleptically Christian.
For example: the word Aeneid or Aeneas (with its attendant theme of destiny) appears in the body of the article only once. "Christian", "Christ" and related words appear 38 times. There's only one passing reference to astrology in a quote, and the words cosmology/cosmos etc. only twice. "Saturn" appears four times, and the phrase Golden Age six times, only in the synopsis, and the interpretation of the poem in the light of the religions of its own time isn't really taken seriously. Its Christianization is a significant aspect of the poem's Nachleben, of course: but it doesn't actually explain the poem … unless you believe that Vergil as vates was inspired by the Christian god to foretell the birth of Jesus.
There's very little interpretation of the poem as a poem, or of the celebration of poetry itself at the end (the name of Orpheus appears twice in the poem, only once in the article). It isn't much discussed in relation to its genre as an eclogue, and it isn't related to the themes of the Eclogues as a whole.
The poem is stuffed with references to deities and religious practices (such as Lucina and allusions to religious practices associated with birth), and with the agricultural imagery that will become pervasive in Augustan art, as on the Ara Pacis. But instead, I feel that this article treats the Fourth Eclogue as a stepchild to Christian culture.
There's more said about the Sibylline Oracles than the Cumaean Sibyl who actually appears in the poem. To quote from our article Sibylline Oracles: These are a collection of utterances that were composed or edited under various circumstances, probably between the 2nd century AD and the 6th century AD, and are not to be confused with the original Sibylline Books of ancient Roman religion which are now lost. It's the Sibylline Books, destroyed in 83 BC, that were attributed to the Cumaean Sibyl; the reconstruction of these texts and their "preservation" by Augustus is part of Vergi's religious environment.
So I do applaud the care and effort shown here, and forgive me if I sound more critical than I intend, but I can't help feeling that as a reader I wouldn't actually learn much about the poem in its own cultural context. Cynwolfe ( talk) 17:37, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Eclogue 4 received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
A fact from Eclogue 4 appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 16 August 2014 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
|
This is a very welcome article done with a lot of care. I have one reservation.
Perhaps because of the emphasis on Nachleben, the Christian interpretation of the work strikes me as given undue weight. Allusion to Jewish messianism is not completely implausible (there was a significant Jewish community in Rome in the mid-1st century BC, and Julius Caesar was regarded as a patron of the Jews, so a "court poet" of Augustus might've had some interest in Judaism, as also Varro did around this time), but all the elements of the poem can be explained by a Classicist as something other than proleptically Christian.
For example: the word Aeneid or Aeneas (with its attendant theme of destiny) appears in the body of the article only once. "Christian", "Christ" and related words appear 38 times. There's only one passing reference to astrology in a quote, and the words cosmology/cosmos etc. only twice. "Saturn" appears four times, and the phrase Golden Age six times, only in the synopsis, and the interpretation of the poem in the light of the religions of its own time isn't really taken seriously. Its Christianization is a significant aspect of the poem's Nachleben, of course: but it doesn't actually explain the poem … unless you believe that Vergil as vates was inspired by the Christian god to foretell the birth of Jesus.
There's very little interpretation of the poem as a poem, or of the celebration of poetry itself at the end (the name of Orpheus appears twice in the poem, only once in the article). It isn't much discussed in relation to its genre as an eclogue, and it isn't related to the themes of the Eclogues as a whole.
The poem is stuffed with references to deities and religious practices (such as Lucina and allusions to religious practices associated with birth), and with the agricultural imagery that will become pervasive in Augustan art, as on the Ara Pacis. But instead, I feel that this article treats the Fourth Eclogue as a stepchild to Christian culture.
There's more said about the Sibylline Oracles than the Cumaean Sibyl who actually appears in the poem. To quote from our article Sibylline Oracles: These are a collection of utterances that were composed or edited under various circumstances, probably between the 2nd century AD and the 6th century AD, and are not to be confused with the original Sibylline Books of ancient Roman religion which are now lost. It's the Sibylline Books, destroyed in 83 BC, that were attributed to the Cumaean Sibyl; the reconstruction of these texts and their "preservation" by Augustus is part of Vergi's religious environment.
So I do applaud the care and effort shown here, and forgive me if I sound more critical than I intend, but I can't help feeling that as a reader I wouldn't actually learn much about the poem in its own cultural context. Cynwolfe ( talk) 17:37, 16 August 2014 (UTC)