BUCOLICA VIRGILII. THE BUCOLICS OF VIRGIL. WITH SHORT ENGLISH NOTES Bu 16. H. OXFORD, AND 377, STRAND, LONDON; JAMES PARKER AND CO. M DCCC LXXIII. PREFACE. THE Bucolics of Virgil are perhaps too commonly thought to be a book for beginners. This popular, though erroneous, estimate has occasioned, especially in the notes on a few of the first, much elementary matter to be mingled with the notice of difficulties which mere early scholarship would hardly feel. These poems are chiefly important for the many historical allusions which they contain, and which illustrate, from a point of view which no other writer has exactly seized, a few momentous years of the Augustan period. They belong to the literature of a civil war, from the havoc of which Italy perhaps never thoroughly recovered; and the interest which they thus possess far transcends the languid beauty of imitative pastorals, The references indicated by G. are to a series of notes on the Georgics, now nearly ready, and which it was meant should form one volume with the present. Charterhouse, Aug. 10, 1854. H. H. Principal abbreviations used in the notes. met. metaphor. und. understood or understand. constrn. construction. V. Virgil. And the usual abbreviations for parts of speech, case, tense, &c. P. VIRGILII MARONIS BUCOLICON LIBER. ECLOGA I. TITYRUS. MELIBUS. TITYRUS. MEL. TITYRE, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi TIT. O Melibœe, deus nobis hæc otia fecit: 10 MEL. Non equidem invideo; miror magis: undique totis TIT. Urbem, quam dicunt Romam Meliboe, putavi 20 |