Eclogues: structure and content

Two Eclogues in Latin hexameters, written between 1319 and 1320 constitute Dante’s response to two similar compositions by Giovanni del Virgilio. The series starts off with a letter in verse from Giovanni exhorting Dante to abandon the vernacular and use Latin to compose a poem which will bring him fame and poetic laurels at the Bologna Studium. In the guise of a young Tityrus, Dante replies to Giovanni-Mopso with an eclogue modelled on Virgil’s first bucolic, courteously rejecting the invitation to Bologna and expressing his wish to receive the poetic crown on the banks of the Arno once he has completed his Paradiso. Giovanni del Virgilio acknowledges that Dante, like a new Virgil, has revived the ancient pastoral poetry, insists that Dante come to Bologna, where numerous followers anxiously await him, and adds that a second refusal would oblige him to quench his thirst by turning to the Paduan Albertino Mussato, the author of a well-known tragedy in Latin. In his second eclogue, modelled on Virgil’s seventh bucolic, Dante declines this second invitation too, fearing the dangers lying in wait for him if he went to Bologna, especially since Guido Novello’s generous hospitality in Ravenna enables him to devote himself freely to his work. Now that doubts have been dispelled concerning a possible forgery by Boccaccio, the two eclogues are considered an important stage in Dante’s poetic journey, on account of their evocative autobiographical elements and passionate defence of the vernacular, but also because they signal (yet another example of the ceaseless experimentation that had such a profound impact on the literary canon) a rebirth of the bucolic genre during medieval times, a genre which was to find considerable favour from Petrarch to Boccaccio and throughout Humanism.