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Eclogues


The Eclogues
Dante's minor works include two eclogues, written in reply to two compositions by Giovanni del Virgilio (a professor of classical poetry at the University of Bologna and an intellectual associated with Albertino Mussato's circle in Padua). The eclogues must be considered in the context of this poetic correspondence as a whole. Around the beginning of 1319, while Dante was in Ravenna as a guest of Guido Novello da Polenta and was completing the Paradiso, Giovanni del Virgilio sent him from Bologna an epistle in hexameters, urging him to write in Latin rather than in the vernacular so that his poetry might be properly appreciated by men of learning, and promising that he himself would promote Dante's fame. Dante replied with an eclogue in the form of a dialogue, in which he declared his reluctance to travel to Bologna and expressed his hope that he might receive the laurel on the banks of the Arno. Giovanni del Virgilio renewed the invitation in a composition which was elegiac in tone, but not in dialogue form. In the final composition in the exchange, an eclogue in dialogue form, dating from the end of 1320, Dante regretted that he was unable to accept, because he was fearful of the dangers he might encounter in Bologna, where as Guido Novello's hospitality guaranteed him the peace necessary for writing poetry.
In these works Dante, faithful to the canon of imitation of the classics, pays homage to Virgil, his Latin source par excellence, breathing new life into pastoral poetry - later to be taken up by Petrarch and Boccaccio.

[translated by Prue Shaw from: Guido Martellotti, Egloghe, in ĞEnciclopedia Dantescağ, II (1970), pp. 644-646;
and: Rosetta Migliorini Fissi, Dante, Firenze, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1979]