William Faithorne, Tityrus and Meliboeus (Virgil’s First Eclogue), after Francis Cleyn, 1654, engraving.
Inscription: Tityre patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, / Silvetrem tenui musam meditaris avena; Eclo 1 / Illustrissimo Domino Do. Gulielmo Seymour Marchi- / oni et Com: Hartfordiae, Vicecomiti Beauchamp, / et Baroni Seymour. / Tabula merito votive/ F: Cleyn inv. W Faithorne sculp:
This print is one of the many illustrations from John Ogilby’s The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, London: Thomas Warren, 1654. The designer was the German artist Francis Cleyn, who was employed by King Charles I at the Mortlake tapestry works and during the Commonwealth period, losing his royal patronage, worked for the print publishers in London. William Faithorne, the engraver, was also a royalist who spent some time in exile in France, returning to London in 1652. Following the Restoration, he became one of the leading printmakers in England and ‘engraver in copper’ to Charles II. Ogilby was a prolific translator (Virgil, Homer, and Aesop), a royalist who helped in the organisation of Charles II’s coronation, and a cartographer who produced a map of London following the Great Fire in 1666. Although his translation of Virgil was overshadowed by John Dryden’s 1697 version, it is a beautiful book full of fascinating annotations, illustrations and maps.
The inscription on the print refers to the opening lines of Virgils’ first Eclogue spoken by Meliboeus to Tityrus: ‘Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena’ or in Day Lewis’s translation ‘Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading / The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering beech’.[1] Meliboeus complains that while Tityrus enjoys his leisure in idyllic surroundings, he is being ‘driven from my home place’. Virgil introduced contemporary events into the pastoral setting here by alluding to the confiscation of land in Italy by Octavian to reward returning veterans from campaigns in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 41 B.C.). Tityrus owes his happier fate to a successful petition to Rome (effectively, Octavian), ‘one who will always be a god to me’. The parallels with exiled royalists following the execution of Charles I in 1649 at the end of the English Civil War would have been underlined during the Commonwealth by Ogilby’s dedication of this print to William Seymour, a moderate royalist, whose loyalty was rewarded by King Charles II at the Restoration in 1660 when he made him the 2nd Duke of Somerset.
Seppilli focused rather more on Homer than on Virgil in Poesia e magia, but she does mention the Eighth Eclogue in passing in a discussion of how the magical power of words is enhanced by the musical rhythms of song and the movements of dance: ‘the witches of Tibullus, of Horace and Virgil etc., operate with ‘song’ and ‘charms’, like the shamans of primitive cultures’ [Le streghe di Tibullo, di Orazio, Virgilio ecc. operano col “canto” e coi “carmi”, come gli sciamani delle culture primitive].[2] In the Eighth Eclogue, the shepherds Damon and Alphesiboeus compete in a singing competition, where Alphesiboeus, in the words of Ogilby, sings of ‘a Sorceress endeavouring by Charms to work Daphnis to a Compliance with her desires, which at last she effects’.[3] Virgil described witchcraft working with an image of the beloved, threads bound into ‘a triplicate knot’ (‘odd numbers bring luck’), medicinal herbs and incense, and of course the power of words, in the form of charms or spells, to draw down the moon from the sky. As Ogilby’s translation puts it:
That I some way my Magick art may find,
To change my now neglectfull Husbands mind:
For nothing but commanding Verse we lack.
Now from the Town, my Charms, bring Daphnis back.
Vanquish’d with Charms, from heav’n the Moon descends,
Circe with Charms transform’d Ulysses friends,
Charms in the fields burst a cold poys’ning Snake.
Now from the town, my Charms, bring Daphnis back.[4]
Three of Ogilby’s annotations to these verses are worth quoting in full here: On the power of magic in general he commented ‘that Magick hath that power (though attributed unto it by Poets and others) is deni’d by most antient and later Divines; for though it may beget madness, distract the fantasie, disturb the office and function of the Organs of the brain, & corrupt the memory, it cannot yet force the Will from its repugnancy to a consent to sin, and therefore not to unlawfull Affections; The sensitive Appetite it may compel to a longing or loathing, and so bind or loose, promote or hinder, conjugal love and duties’. The relationship of poetry and magic is then noted by Ogilby with reference to the story of Medea as related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses: ‘Verses were believ’d of greatest efficacy in all incantations; Quid enim non Carmina possunt? Ovid. Met, 1, 7.’ Finally, the drawing down of the moon from the sky by the use of charms is explained with reference to Plutarch’s essay De Defectu Oraculorum (The Obsolescence of Oracles): ‘The Moon, of all Planets, was esteem’d most subject to the power of Charms, either as being nighest the Earth, or because conceiv’d the President of Witchcraft. Examples are frequent amongst the Poets. Plutarch de defect. Oracul. Turnebus.’ Plutarch referred to the belief that the women of Thessaly could draw down the moon, and that Aglaonice the daughter of Hegetor, ‘who was skilled in astronomy, always pretended at the time of an eclipse of the moon that she was bewitching it and bringing it down’. The witch Medea claimed similar powers in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
‘When my power commands,
the rivers turn from their accustomed ways
and roll far backward to their secret springs!
… From your appointed ways,
O wonder-working Moon, I draw you down
Against the magic-making sound of gongs’.
The moon, together with the goddess Hecate, are invoked in another poetic treatment of magic: the second Idyll of Theocritus (ultimately the source for Virgil’s Eclogues and for his treatment of the ability of verses to charm). Here the abandoned lover Simaetha uses love-magic, including a magic wheel (iunx), binding red thread, and barley grains thrown on the fire, to call back Delphis to her arms:
‘But now, I shall bind him with fire magic. Come Moon,
Shine bright, for it is to you I’ll chant my soft spells,
And to Hecate below the earth; at her approach dogs
Shiver as she goes among the tombs and dark blood of the dead.
Hail to you, dread Hecate! Stay with me to the end,
And make these drugs as powerful as Circe’s were,
Or those Medea devised, or Perimede of the golden hair.
Magic wheel, draw my lover home to me’.[5]
In these passages from Virgil, Ovid and Theocritus, where poets from antiquity explicitly describe magical procedures, the residual shamanic power of poetry lingers – although described at one remove. Seppilli argued that in prehistoric or so-called ‘primitive’ cultures: ‘the ideational process, of a poetic character, which we might consider autotelic, came to be considered in such cultures as the vehicle for an exceptional power: a power that not only enabled us to enter into immediate contact with other cosmic forces, but also to act directly on the entire cosmos’ [Il processo ideativo, di carattere poetico, a nostro modo di vedere, autotelico, viene cioè considerato in tali culture come carico di una forza eccezionale: una forza che non solo permette di entrare in contatto immediate con le altre forze del cosmo, ma anche di agire direttamente sul cosmo intero].[6]
[1] Virgil, The Eclogues and The Georgics, translated by C. Day Lewis, Oxford: Oxford Wold’s Classics, 2009, p. 3.
[2] Anita Seppilli, Poesia e magia, Torino: Einaudi, 1971, p. 199. In footnote 128, Sepilli gives the references to Tibullus, Elegies, I, viii, 19; Horace, Satires, I, viii, 19, and Epodes, V, 45.
[3] John Ogilby, The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, London: Thomas Warren, 1654, p. 41.
[4] Ibid, p. 44.
[5] Theocritus, Idylls, translated by Anthony Verity, Oxford: World Classics, 2003, p. 7.
[6] Anita Sepilli, Poesia e magia, Torino: Einaudi, 1971, p. 9.