Bobby Xinyue (University of Warwick)
When Virgil published his First Eclogue (c.35 BC), in which a young man (iuvenis, 1.42) is deified for having restored freedom (libertas, 1.27) to Tityrus and released him from enslavement (servitio, 1.40), the poet could not have foreseen that some fifty years later Augustus, on the verge of divinisation, would open his Res Gestae with the sentence:
annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi, per quem rem publicam a dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi.
Aged nineteen years old I mustered an army at my personal decision and at my personal expense, and with it I liberated the state, which had been oppressed by a despotic faction.
While there is no compelling reason to think that Augustus had in mind Virgil's poem when he looked back on the achievements of his life, the thematic correspondence between the opening of the Res Gestae and the First Eclogue underlines how the official history of an authoritarian regime can cast a retroactive pall over poetic representations, and, conversely, how poetry can articulate what would eventually become the central tenet of a master narrative.
In this paper, I want to suggest that as Virgil's First Eclogue tries to grapple with the rapidly changing political situation during the triumviral years, the poem presents authority in such a way that it naturalizes the power discourse of the future Augustan Principate. Throughout the poem, Virgil not only presents the iuvenis as a libertas-restoring benefactor who is treated as a god by his beneficiaries, but even imagines his elevated status as crucial to maintaining social cohesion and civic stability, and idealizes the beneficiaries’ dependence on his efficacious authority. The poem thus produces the grammar of the discourse of authoritarianism, making the first step towards articulating what will eventually become the core characteristics of Augustan ideology. I suggest that it is precisely this process of naturalization which has led readers since antiquity to identify the iuvenis of Virgil's First Eclogue as the future Augustus. However, in this paper I am interested in transcending this question of individual identification to focus instead on how Virgil's poetic anonymization is no simple pastoral obfuscation, but rather does the hard political graft of 'soft launching' a new political system.