The poem Dirae is one of the poems that make up the Appendix Vergiliana. It is a pastoral poem, told from the perspective of a Sicilian herdsman forced to give up his land to Lycurgus, who is receiving this land as a reward for his participation in the Roman civil wars. The herdsman spends the entire poem cursing the land so Lycurgus cannot benefit from it.
The scholarly history of the Appendix Vergiliana and therefore of Dirae has been one of authenticating the poems as works of Vergil. Modern consensus is that they are not by Vergil, and the focus has shifted to situating the poem in time and literary context.
Synopsis Dirae is a series of curses. It is told from the perspective of a Sicilian herdsman, who is evicted from his lands by Lycurgus, a veteran of Rome's civil wars. The herdsman directs the poem toward an enigmatic "Battarus" -- the identity of which is uncertain -- to join him in his cursing of the land that they leave behind, swearing that the natural order of the world would be overturned—that prey should chase after predator—sooner than he stops his baleful song.
The series of curses follow a narrative. The unnamed singer asks the land to become infertile, even the hills bereft of water, so that Lycurgus is not able to experience the beauty of Sicily. Then, the breezes that used to blow sweetly on the land, he asks to turn to unmanageable heat. He mourns the felling of the woods he loves so much, and he asks Jupiter to strike the land with lightning so that first the woods, and then all the farmland, might burn up. Once the land has burned, he turns to the sea, calling on the waves to flood the land and on Neptune to drive sea monsters over the land with the waves. If Neptune does not heed his call, the herdsman asks that at least the streams would flood and, when the streams retreat, that they might leave behind marshes.
In the end, the singer takes a final look from a hill upon his land and vows that, again, the natural order of the world would sooner be overturned—that white would appear to be black and left appear to be right—before he ceases to mourn the loss of his land, disappearing afterwards into the woods.
Characters The characters of the poem are the singer, the "Battarus" to whom this song is addressed, and Lycurgus who has been given the singer's land. The singer's girlfriend, Lydia, is mentioned twice. In addition to the humans mentioned in the poem, the speaker refers to several well-known entities from Roman mythology and culture. +List of entitiesCharacterLine numberReferenceLatin unless otherwise cited, quotes come from E. J. Kenney (1966)Ceres15Furrows, bury the worn-out grain of Cereseffetas Cereris sulci abscondatis avenasVenus20these garlands of Venus, flowering with varied splendourhaec Veneris vario florentia serta decoreJupiter/Jove35–36Jupiter (Jupiter himself has nourished this [forest]), it is proper that these things become ash for youIuppiter (ipse Iuppiter hanc aluit), cinis haec tibi fiat oportet52where Vulcan, fed by the fires of Jove encloses the fieldsqua Vulcanus agros pastus Iovis ignibus arcetBoreas37then the strength of Thracian Boreas blows forth immense thingsThraecis tum Boreae spirent immania viresEurus38Eurus bears a cloud mixed by gloomy fogEurus agat mixtam furva caligine nubemAfricus39Africus threatens a storm with threatening raincloudsAfricus immineat nimbis minitantibus imbremNeptune50–51Neptune moves into the farmlands on waves and hard sand floods the fieldsmigret Neptunus in arua fluctibus et spissa campos perfundat harena58–60Neptune bears these hidden things with his hostile trident, inverting the dark tide all around with the winds of the sea, and draws out the black ashes with frothy waveshaec agat infesto Neptunus caeca tridenti atrum convertens aestum maris undique ventis et fuscum cinerem canis exhauriat undis63if, these things, Neptune, we pour less into your earssi minus haec, Neptune, tuas infundimus aurisVulcan52where Vulcan, fed by the fires of Jove encloses the fieldsqua Vulcanus agros pastus Iovis ignibus arcetSyrtis53it is called another Srytis, a strange sister of the Libyan onebarbara dicatur Libycae soror altera SyrtisDiscord83and you, Discord, always an enemy of your own citizentuque inimica tui semper Discordia civis
Style
Pastoral Dirae is a pastoral poem, composed of 103 lines of hexameter, arranged into irregular verses divided by a kind of refrain. Given that other extant examples of pastoral are dated around Nero's reign, this poem is possibly the first example of post-Vergilian pastoral poetry, and it is structured in a very similar manner to Vergil's pastorals. Classical pastoral poetry is a form of poetry that is centred around the landscape of the rural herdsman, structured as a song. Other elements of a pastoral poem include a pathetic fallacy motif, in which the landscape responds in some way to the song, and a construction of an idyllic landscape, including both the aspects of the land, such as mountains, forests, and streams, and its inhabitants, such as chirping birds, buzzing bees, and flocks of sheep and goats. While rural activities such as making cheese or ploughing fields are featured in pastoral poems, the true activity of the poem is the singing and piping of the song, generally sung between two participants, perhaps as part of a competition. The traditional location of these songs is Sicily. A particular aspect of Vergilian pastoral is a lack of grounding in a dramatic context.
Dirae complies with these parameters but also manages to subvert them. The singer is a herdsman, and the herdsman is located in Sicily. He explicitly mentions his song in the very first line and does so another ten times, and references to his pipe appear three times in the song (line 7, line 19, and line 97). The exhortations to Battarus to join the song, thus sustaining the curses, function as a kind of refrain.
However, despite naming Battarus several times, Battarus never joins the song, leaving it vague whether he is encouraging of the song, disapproving, or even present at all. There is no exchange of verses. The song does describe a pastoral landscape. There are references to mountains and fields, to forests and streams, recalling particularly a place where the singer and Battarus gathered thorns and listened to chirping crickets (lines 72–74). While pastoral poetry calls forth the pastoral landscape so that the listener might appreciate its enduring sameness, the singer of Dirae describes the ways in which he wants the land to be destroyed. It is the inverse of golden-age imagery: instead of the song shaping a beautiful landscape, it attempts to shape a beautiful landscape into ruin. Dirae can be, for these reasons, considered to be an anti-pastoral poem.
Style inspiration The poem takes precedence from Vergil's Eclogues. Eclogues 1 and 9 match Dirae in the sense that they all record the threat of eviction and land seizure to the peaceful eternity of the pastoral landscape. Moeris, in Eclogue 9, curses his land, though in a single line rather than 103. There is a possible link, too, between Dirae and Hellenistic curse-poetry. Eclogue 8 explores the potential for changing the landscape through song. Several characters in the Eclogues are quasi-magical singers, such as Orpheus, Silenus, Hesiod, Damon, and Alphesiboeus. Indeed, Orpheus's myths describe him as capable of making the rocks and trees themselves weep. Damon's farewell to his land in the Eclogues matches the farewell of Dirae’s singer. Another link between Dirae and the Eclogues is the repeated mentioning of swans. In Eclogue 8, there is a competition between swans and owls. The poet refers to himself as a goose among swans in and swans sing in order to save Mantua in Eclogue 9. The very first line of Dirae is “Battare, cycneas repetamus carmine voces,” — “Battarus, let us renew our swan-like voices in song.”
The herdsmen of the Eclogues are also farmers, so, though the herdsman of Dirae only mentions his flocks in the last lines of the poem and is principally taken up with the loss of land, he is still a reflection of Vergilian herdsmen.
In the act of separation, Dirae also takes precedence from the Georgics, in which the relationship could also be either destroyed or nourished through song. However, the landscape is not created by song, as in ordinary pastoral poetry, but comes about by itself. Georgics also contains advice on how to care for the land, which is echoed in Dirae, though in an inverse manner—as Dirae is concerned with how to destroy the land.
Ovid’s Ibis, which explores the powerlessness of the speaker, no matter the feeling and forcefulness of the words, matches the ultimate futility of Dirae’s speaker, as he must, in the end, leave his beloved countryside. The Appendix Vergiliana in general has an Ovidian tone. Scholars have also found stylistic similarities between Dirae and poets such as Catullus, Lucretius, and Ennius.
Analysis
Vocabulary At 103 lines, Dirae is quite short, so hard statistics are less applicable than for a longer poem, such as the Eclogues, but it is still helpful. Of all the words in Dirae, 16.3% are unknown in the rest of Vergil’s poetry. These words are cyaneus (dark blue, line 40), cycneus (pertaining to swans, line 1), emano (to flow out, line 72), emergo (to come forth, line 57), emigro (to depart from somewhere, line 101), erro (to wander, line 70), gryllus (cricket, line 74), indemnatus (uncondemned, line 84), libellus (little book, lines 26, 34), pertica (pole, line 45), piscor (to fish, line 80), praetor (leader, line 82), repentinus (sudden, line 56), spica (head of grain, line 73), sterilesco (to grow unfruitful, line 9), transvolo (to fly over, line 44), vernus (pertaining to spring, line 21). “Verna,” in line 21, is not always “verna”: in the edition edited by R. Ellis (1907) the word is “lena” (meaning “bawdy”), and in the edition by Armandus Salvatore (1960) it is “avena” (meaning “oaten”).
Date The poems of the Appendix Vergiliana were written in the Julio-Claudian era (12–68 BCE); however, scholars have many different ideas as to the date of Dirae. Their arguments have ranged from vocabulary, metre, grammatical construction, historical context, and subjective stylistic differences. Naturally these arguments have also been used to determine Vergilian authorship: if the date of the poem was definitively established to a date after Vergil's death, it could not have been written by Vergil.
8.15% of the vocabulary is unusual for Vergil—which is to say, the vocabulary is not found in Vergil's Aeneid, Eclogues, or Georgics—but is found in Ovid's poetry. Thus, H. Fairclough has pushed the poem to the time of Ovid instead.
Professor Tenney Frank believed the poem to be from 41 BCE, as it mimics the “bitterness” that can be found in Eclogue 1.
W. R. Hardie wrote an article dissecting the metre of various Augustan poems, including Dirae, and concluded that the poem was written in either 42 or 41 BCE. He admits that Dirae is rather short, but nevertheless analyses it for different types of metrical lines. He believes, based on his analysis of the vital caesura in Vergilian poetry, that Vergil developed poetry towards varied cadence (more varied than Catullus), thus trochaic caesuras are found in greater frequency in Homeric poetry and less so in poetry of the Julio-Claudian period. Participle endings occur less and less in later periods, and the examples of poetry around Vergil's time generally do not place the participial phrases that they do have after the main verb of the sentence—likewise, Vergil prefers to have his participial phrases in front of his main verbs.
Dirae has one occurrence of a participle that takes up a full hexameter.
It has no occurrence of a participle at the end of the line or a participle that is preceded by a main verb and takes up a whole line.
20.4% of the lines have a vital caesura occurring hepthemimerally.