The Road Not Taken: Dante’s First Eclogue and Virgil’s Career

Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid . Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio , which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics , Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid .