Eclogue 10

The tenth Eclogue describes how Cornelius Gallus, a Roman officer on active service, having been jilted by his girlfriend Lycoris, is imagined as an Arcadian shepherd, and either bewails his lot or seeks distraction in hunting "with the Nymphs" amid "Parthenian glades" and "hurling Cydonian arrows from a Parthian bow".

"[4] Gaius Cornelius Gallus, born at Forum Julii about 70 BC,[5] was a partisan of Octavian, and is said to have been appointed by him one of the commissioners to distribute land among his veterans in the north of Italy: in that capacity he seems to have rendered Virgil service.

[6] He subsequently fought at Actium and was made prefect of Egypt, where however he incurred the displeasure of the Emperor, as a result of which he committed suicide in 26 BC.

[6] According to one view, she seems to have deserted Gallus for some officer on the staff of Agrippa, who led an expedition into Gaul and across the Rhine in 37 BC (cf.

B. Greenough (1883), Gallus, a friend of Virgil, had been despatched (apparently) to defend the Italian waters from the freebooting squadron of Sextus Pompey.

In his absence, his mistress—here spoken of under the name Lycoris—had been unfaithful to him, and had followed a soldier of Agrippa's army into Gaul (BC 37); and he requested of Virgil a pastoral poem, which might have the good luck to win him back his love.

Virgil addresses the poem to Arethusa (a spring in Syracuse, Sicily, the birthplace of Theocritus), whose waters were said to originate in Arcadia.

But there are some differences: Daphnis is dying in Sicily, not Arcadia; he is surrounded by cows, not sheep; and the gods who visit him are Hermes, Priapus, and Cypris (Aphrodite), the goddess of love.

Although speaking paradoxically in the language of defeat, Gallus, in fact, compelled by love of Lycoris, abandons his pursuit of death and chooses life.

For example, van Sickle (1980) writes that Eclogue 10 ends on a "somber note, defeat and death through love, then threatening shadows, cold".

Piacenza (2023) suggests that the answer may be that the lines contain a hidden anagram of the name of the Umbrian town of Perusia (modern Perugia), where in 41–40 BC a destructive siege took place (the Perusine War) between the forces of Octavian and those supporting Mark Antony.