Eclogue 8 (Ecloga VIII; Bucolica VIII), also titled Pharmaceutria ('The Sorceress'), is a pastoral poem by the Latin poet Virgil, one of his book of ten Eclogues. After an introduction, containing an address to an unnamed dedicatee, there follow two love songs of equal length sung by two herdsmen, Damon and Alphesiboeus. One is the song of a love-sick young man, whose girlfriend Nysa is marrying another man, Mopsus. The second is the song of a woman who, with the help of her servant Amaryllis, is performing a magic rite to try to entice her beloved Daphnis back from the city.
The poem is believed to have been written in 39 BC, and the dedicatee is usually thought to be Virgil's patron Gaius Asinius Pollio, whose military exploits are alluded to in verses 6–13.
This eclogue is mainly based on Theocritus's Idyll 2, but the first song also includes elements from Idylls 1, 3, and 11.
The introduction
The introduction to the poem narrates how at the beginning of the day Damon and Alphesiboeus sang in competition with each other, while cows, lynxes, and even rivers listened in amazement. In the middle of this narrative is an eight-line address to an unnamed person, who is identified only by various indications. First, Virgil imagines him sailing past the "rocks of Timavus" (a river at the very north of the Adriatic sea) and the Illyrian coast. He looks forward to celebrating the addressee's achievements and poems, which alone are worthy of the Sophoclean stage. Virgil asks him to accept the poems which he has begun on the addressee's command as ivy to be wreathed round the addressee's head along with the laurels of victory.
From early times these indications have been taken as describing Virgil's patron Gaius Asinius Pollio. He is mentioned by name in Eclogue 3 for his liking for bucolic poetry, and again, as consul in 40 BC, in Eclogue 4. Pollio is also known to have written tragedies.
Some scholars, however, such as Bowersock (1971), have proposed that the addressee is not Pollio but Octavian, who fought a campaign in Illyricum beginning in 35 BC; he is also said to have composed a tragedy on the subject of Ajax. But since Bowersock's article, several other scholars have argued against this view. For example, Thibodeau (2006) points that Virgil's description seems to describe not a voyage from Pollio's province to Rome (as some scholars have thought), but one going to his province, and he shows that it is perfectly plausible for Pollio to have set off for his province in 39 BC from Aquileia near the Timavus river. To suppose that the addressee is Octavian, on the other hand, creates considerable difficulties in chronology. There is therefore no need to doubt that Pollio is meant here and that the date of Eclogue 8 is 39 BC.
The words in the 7th line of the dedication (line 11) ( ) go back to Homer's Iliad 9.97 (flattering words spoken by Nestor to Agamemnon). They also recall line 60 of Eclogue 3 ( ). According to Greenough, this poem has every appearance of an epilogue, and perhaps was originally intended to stand at the end of the book.
The two songs
The 16-line introduction is followed by two songs, one sung by Damon and the other by Alphesiboeus. The two songs in the eclogue are loosely based on Theocritus's Idyll 2. In this idyll a woman called Simaetha makes a magic spell to attract her lover Delphis to return to her. At the end of the spell, after dismissing her maid Thestylis, Simaetha sings a second song of 12 slightly longer stanzas, telling the Moon about how she had fallen in love with Delphis when she saw him one day coming from the gymnasium, how they became lovers, and how she had learnt that he had now fallen in love with someone else. Both songs in Idyll 2 are broken up by refrains. The order of the songs is reversed in Eclogue 8, and the complaint is put into the mouth of a man; the content is also changed. Another change made by Virgil is to set the songs in the countryside, whereas Theocritus's Idyll 2 is set in a city.