are supposed(201) to refer to a belief which had become traditional in the time of Suetonius, that the horses which had been consecrated after crossing the Rubicon had refused to feed immediately before the death of their master(202). In the lines expressing the sorrow for his loss, and in those which mark out the divine office which he was destined to fulfil after death,--
Ut Baccho Cererique, tibi sic vota quotannis Agricolae facient, damnabis tu quoque votis(203),--
as in the lines of the ninth, referring to the Julium Sidus,--
Astrum quo segetes gauderent frugibus, et quo Duceret apricis in collibus uva colorem(204),--
allusion is made to the encouragement Caesar gave to the husbandman and vine-planter in his lifetime, and to the honour due to him as their tutelary god in heaven. And these allusions help us to understand the 'votis iam nunc adsuesce vocari' of the invocation in the first Georgic.
Nothing illustrates more clearly the unreal conceptions of the pastoral allegory than a comparison of the language in the 'Lament for Daphnis,' with the strong Roman realism of the lines at the end of the first Georgic, in which the omens portending the death of Caesar are described. Nor can anything show more clearly the want of individuality with which Virgil uses the names of the Theocritean shepherds than the fact that while the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue represents the departed and deified soldier and statesman, the Daphnis of the ninth is a living husbandman whose fortunes were secured by the protecting star of Caesar,--
Insere, Daphni, piros, carpent tua poma nepotes(205).
The peace and tranquillity restored to the land under this protecting influence are foreshadowed in the lines 58-61--
Ergo alacris ... amat bonus otia Daphnis;
and the earliest reference to the divine honours assigned in life and death to the later representatives of the name of Caesar, is heard in the jubilant shout of wild mountains, rocks, and groves to the poet--
Although the treatment of the subject may be vague and conventional, yet this poem possesses the interest of being Virgil's earliest effort, directed to a subject of living and national interest; and many of the lines in the poem are unsurpassed for grace and sweetness of musical cadence by anything in Latin poetry.