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Abstract. This article examines the rupture of pastoral exchange between human music and natural sound, familiar from Theocritus and Vergil, as well as the later Western pastoral, in the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus. Calpurnius' focus on nature as obstructive, and on the importance of silence to composition of song, is a distinctive feature of his pastoral poetics that builds on moments of discord between man and nature in Vergil's Eclogues. The appearance of the motif in the poetry of Calpurnius' successor, Nemesianus, alongside the better-known motif of cooperation between man and nature in creating music, sheds light on the alternative trajectory in the development of the pastoral tradition.
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1. INTRODUCTION
There are cerTain Things we Think we know aBouT pasToral poeTrY, basic things that seem to originate in Theocritus, crystallize in Vergil, and then carry over into the later tradition of European pastoral. The later Latin pastoral of Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus, as well as the fragmentary Einsiedeln Eclogues, are more often than not written out of the story.1 The usual justification for this is that the quality of the poetry is inferior; these are "minor" poets.2 Leaving subjective judgments of their aesthetic merit aside, we can see that there are other reasons why they are often ignored. On the one hand, they are difficult to locate in a historical context: the date of Calpurnius is uncertain,3 and Nemesianus' Eclogues were detached from the corpus of Calpurnius and attributed to Nemesianus, not a major author himself, only in the middle of the nineteenth century.4 But more importantly, they break up the apparently smooth trajectory of the development of pastoral from Vergil to the Renaissance. When read closely, they can be seen to develop what they find in Vergil and in Theocritus in ways that are often different from the directions taken by the later European pastoral tradition, in which many poets respond to Vergil without taking poetic innovations of his Latin successors into account as a major part of the tradition.5 While some of their innovations are taken up,6 other aspects of these texts may be said to represent a road not taken.7 As a possible path of pastoral development growing out of Vergil, these texts are interesting...