The Goatherd: An Encounter with Virgil's First Eclogue

Abstract

The Goatherd: An Encounter with Virgil’s First Eclogue In Memoriam: Jimmye S. Hillman (1923–2015) NORMAN AUSTIN Jimmye Hillman and I became friends in the 1980s when he enrolled in a seminar that I offered through the Humanities Seminars, a community program offered by the University of Arizona. He then enrolled in every subsequent seminar that I gave in the program, and over the years we enjoyed many conversations outside the seminar about life and literature, Jimmye grew up on a subsistence farm in Mississippi. He became in time a distinguished professor at the University of Arizona and one of the most respected international economists of his generation. He published an account of his childhood in Mississippi in a memoir, Hogs, Mules and Yellow Dogs (Arizona 2012). On June 4, 2015, we met for a lunch in Tucson, Arizona, Jimmy then 91 years of age. When he asked me about my current research, I told him that I was writing an essay on Virgil’s First Eclogue. In this poem, I explained, Virgil creates a dialogue between two herdsmen to address a specific historical event—the confiscation of farms in Lombardy, in northern Italy, to provide land for those veterans who had fought for Marc Antony and Octavian (soon to become Augustus Caesar) at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. When Virgil’s farm in Mantua was threatened, Virgil appealed to a person with political power, and his farm was exempted from the confiscations in his neighborhood. arion 25.3 winter 2018 I explained that Virgil speaks through one herdsman, the shepherd, to thank his benefactor for the favor shown to him; and then through the other, the goatherd, to express his sympathy for those farmers who had been evicted from their own homes. When I had given Jimmye my summary of the poem and the political catastrophe that had given rise to the poem, Jimmye said: “I am the goatherd.” He repeated the sentence , emphatically: “I am the goatherd,” and as our lunch progressed, he repeated the sentence yet again. He was speaking of his experience as a poor Southerner, referring to the carpetbaggers from the North during the Reconstruction Era in the southern United States after the Civil War. “They did not take our land,” he explained; “but they plundered us.” He repeated these words, again emphatically: “They plundered us.” This topic hung in the air throughout our lunch. After lunch, I drove Jimmye back to his house. An hour or two later, he suffered a stroke, fell unconscious, and never recovered consciousness. These were his last words, apart from whatever cherished words he may have exchanged with his wife Helen in that short time before he lost consciousness : “I am the goatherd.” In dedicating this essay to Jimmye Hillman, I dedicate it to all the goatherds whose eviction from Arcadia has immeasurably enriched our human conscience. 1. umbra virgil’s First Eclogue is one of the most shocking poems in the ancient Latin canon. Or rather, it should be. Its theme is “refugees” and “the homeless,” yet we can scarcely glean either of these words from modern studies of the poem. I surmise that the lacuna on this topic is because the masters who taught us our Virgil, and their masters before them, had never suffered the fate of the refugee, to have their front 2 the goatherd doors kicked in by some nameless storm trooper, and to be cast out on to the street by a ruthless government decree. When I was in Graz, Austria, in 2016, attending an international conference on Arcadia, I met a young Syrian who had recently escaped the devastation in Syria and had now found a home in Austria. His was a harrowing tale. He told of some twenty Syrian refugees crowded in a rubber dinghy to make the crossing from Turkey to Lesbos through a ferocious sea. Four of the refugees were swept to sea, including one child. His is the experience that the goatherd faces in this poem. When I think of refugees, I think of my own family’s history . My parents were refugees three times in their adult lives. They served for some twenty years...