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I will take up my slender reed and practise the music of the countryside.
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), The Song of Silenus, from: The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues), translated by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1949, p. 53.
PLACE: Northern Italy (see also card no.542)
TIME: During Virgil's lifetime, ca. 70 B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Pastoral poetry is called "music of the countryside" here.
And Hylas - how the Argonauts had left the boy beside a spring, and shouted for him, till the long beach itself called 'Hylas', and again 'Hylas'.
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), The Song of Silenus, from: The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues), translated by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1949, p. 54.
PLACE: Northern Italy (see also card no.542)
TIME: During, Virgil's lifetime, ca. 70 B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Hylas, a lad loved by Heracles, whom he accompanied in the ship Argo as far as the coast of Mysia. Landing there with the crew to find fresh water for the voyage, Hylas became separated from his friends. As he gazed down into a spring, the Naiads fell in love with his beauty and dragged him down into the water. The story is told by Appollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica and by Theocritus.(p. 142)
The calling of his name could possibly be a symbolic onomatopoeia for the sound of waves on the beach.
Not one of Proetus' daughters, though they filled the fields with lowing like the cows they thought themselves, sank to such infamy and made a bull her mate.
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), The Song of Silenus, from: The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues), translated by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1949, p. 54.
PLACE: Northern Italy (see also card no.542)
TIME: During Virgil's lifetime, ca. 70 B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Reference to Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, King of Crete. To punish her husband for a broken vow, the gods caused her to fall in love with a beautiful bull. She is here compared to Proetus' daughters who were punished by being made to imagine that they were cows, but they never "made a bull their mate". (p.147 and 149)
And must we follow him, as he went on to sing of Scylla, Nisus' child, whom story pictures as a lovely woman with a ring of howling monsters round her waist ...
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), The Song of Silenus, from: The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues), translated by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1949, p. 55.
PLACE: Northern Italy (see also card no.542)
TIME: During Virgil's lifetime, ca. 70 B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Scylla: there were two creatures of this name, whom Virgil and other Roman poets appear to have confused. The monster described here is obviously the Scylla whom Odysseus encountered on his travels (Odyssey, XII); but this Scylla was the daughter of Phorcys and Cratais. Scylla the daughter of Nisus suffered a more complete but less revolting transformation and became a bird. (p. 150)
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