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SUMMARY: In Eclogue 3, Vergil flags the rough verses of his quarreling shepherds as alterna, evoking similar songs in aetiologies of early drama in the Georgics, in Livy, and in Horace. These later treatments often set early Italian practices against their foreign (especially Greek) counterparts to interrogate contemporary literary and social concerns. I argue that Eclogue 3-albeit with pastoral obliqueness-does the same, adumbrating a discomfort with indigenous Italian coarseness. My conclusion reassesses the significance of Palaemon's judgment (e.g., his award of the uitula to both herdsmen) in the context of Roman literary history.
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1. FIGHTING WORDS
IN MANY RESPECTS, ECLOGUE 3 IS EXEMPLARY LITERARY BUCOLIC. ALREADY in its opening exchange, allusive poetics combine with rustic language and concerns in anticipation of a country song-contest.1 Yet from the Theocritean challenge that opens the poem ("Hey, whose flock ...?") to the unanswered riddles that close its singing match, Vergil's third Eclogue also tests the limits of pastoral poetry. The taunts of its herdsmen overload the poem with a sustained harshness that is generally atypical of Theocritean bucolic and the balance of the Eclogue collection.2 Indeed, taunts and insults dominate the first half of the poem until a "neighbor" (uicinus) Palaemon is summoned in medias res to judge the singing contest in the poem's second half. The umpire invites his interlocutors to exchange alterna, which he says are loved by the Camenae, ancient Italian goddesses of springs and song: alternis dicetis; amant alterna Camenae ("You will speak in exchange; the Camenae love exchanges," Ecl. 3.59). The contestants trade couplets-which, like the poem's opening distich, are both provocative and allusive-until Palaemon, apparently unprompted, offers his judgment (Ecl. 3.108-11):
P. Non nostrum inter uos tantas componere lites:
et uitula tu dignus et hic, et quisquis amores
aut metuet dulcis aut experietur amaros. 110
claudite iam riuos, pueri; sat prata biberunt.
P. It is not my task to reconcile such great disputes between you:
You-and he-are worthy of a heifer,3 as is whoever
fears sweet loves or finds them bitter.
Close offthe streams, boys, the fields have drunk enough!
Palaemon's verdict is ambivalent at best, censorious at worst. Accordingly, recent scholarship has regularly viewed the poem in terms of the dichotomous value systems represented...