The Silent Shepherd

Virgil's Aeneid departs from his earlier pastoral poetry in featuring herdsmen as agents of violence. His Eclogues characterize herdsmen as musicians who are helpless against the violence of outsiders. In the Aeneid, in contrast, herdsmen both unwittingly catalyze and deliberately take part in acts of war; they never make music. In similes in the epic, the hero Aeneas is compared to a herdsman engaged in activities that are not typically pastoral. Partial studies of pastoral elements in the epic have focused on evaluating Aeneas in moral or political terms or on the aesthetic function of pastoral motifs in “reducing” the subject matter of heroic epic to an Alexandrian scale. I take a different approach, examining pastoral motifs in the Aeneid in relation to Greek models in epic and tragedy. The tragedians regularly use pastoral figures, language, landscapes, and music to set up ironic contrasts between peace and its violation. Identifying this tragic use of pastoral offers insight into Virgil's strategy of intensifying the shocking effect of violence by juxtaposing it with images of pastoral peace. Virgil develops the tragic ambiguity of characters, landscapes, and musical language with pastoral associations to express the underlying tragic tension between Aeneas' constructive aims as a leader and his inevitably destructive methods.