Eclogue 6

[2] After the Perusine war (41 BC) Pollio, who had been legate in Transpadane Gaul and aided Virgil to recover his farm (see Eclogue 1), had been superseded, as being a partisan of Antony, by an adherent of Octavian called Alfenus Varus.

[2] Also, in BC 40, a new distribution of lands took place in North Italy, and Alfenus Varus, with the poet Cornelius Gallus, was appointed to carry it out (compare Eclogue 9).

41 He then recounts a cycle of the old Greek myths, beginning with Pyrrha, who recreated the human race by throwing stones after the Great Flood, the Golden Age of Saturn, Prometheus who stole fire and was punished for it in the Caucasus mountains, the boy Hylas, who drowned in a pool on the voyage of the Argonauts, and Pasiphaë, who fell in love with a bull – a madness worse than that of the daughters of Proetus, who imagined they were cows; he imagines the lament Pasiphaë sang as she vainly hunted for her bull in the mountain forests of Crete.

61 Then he tells the story of Atalanta, who was defeated in a foot race because she stopped to admire the golden apples of the Hesperides; the sisters of Phaethon, who were turned into poplar trees when mourning for their brother; how the poet Gallus was greeted by the Muses on Mount Helicon, where the singer Linus presented him with the Muses' panpipes and bade him sing of Apollo's sacred grove at Gryneium in Asia Minor.

[6] The poem also contains praise of Cornelius Gallus, who, apart from his role as a poet, is said to have made a speech criticising Varus for confiscating land right up to the walls of Mantua when he had been ordered to leave a margin of 3 miles.