Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum. 5
non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam: usque ego poster a
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex:
dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus 10
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnavit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica 15
lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.

It is essential to observe that Euripides' dramatization of the tragedy of Hippolytus is such as to reveal a striking disparity between word and action, between the values or motives professed by the leading characters and their actual behaviour, between the secondary characters' assessment of the events of the drama and the events themselves. At the basis of such an observation is the noticeable emphasis which Euripides accords to the fact that all the participants in the drama, including the chorus, are most concerned to proffer explanations of the situations and behaviour which confront them. Yet it becomes most apparent that all of these explanations fall far short of a proper assessment of the circumstances with which the play is concerned and the conclusions to which a responsive audience is directed by Euripides' particular organization of the constituents of the traditional story. The following paper is concerned with an examination of the nature and extent of this disparity between statement and performance, and with a determination of its function.

The first lines of Vergil's Georgics make clear the literary debt:

Vos, o clarissima mundi
lumina, labentem caelo quae ducitis annum;
Liber et alma Ceres … (G.1.5-7)

The reader recalls immediately Lucretius' invocation to Venus:

Parallels of subject are obvious. Lucretius' famous pessimism about the earth's ability to renew herself, at the conclusion of his second book, is behind Vergil's insistence, in Georgics I, that the farmer prepare all his resources to bolster a faltering soil; the famous picture of rustic celebration and the pleasures of soft grass and jovial interchange with which Georgics II ends is an elaboration of Lucretius' spring-time, when men stretch at leisure on greening grass inter se prostrati (‘relaxing with each other’); the hideous account of Athens' plague in Lucretius, Book VI, is matched by Vergil's description of Noricum at the end of his third book.

The first thing that the student of Vergilian pastoral may notice in turning to the pastoral Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus is the obvious symmetrical arrangement of the poems in the later book. While the multitudinous inter-lacings of theme and subject in Vergil's ten poems continue to tease and baffle investigations of the larger organizational pattern, the principles of Calpurnius' design are simple and clear. Instead of ten poems, an even number that causes Vergil's centrally oriented balancing of similar pieces to remain ambiguously off-centre, Calpurnius has seven, clearly divided by subject into two kinds: four rustic poems and three that critics have called court poems, allegorical poems, or, more rightly, political poems whose chief topic is the benefits of the Neronian golden age. The uneven number allows for a precise balancing of similar poems in the two halves of the book. A political poem, a contest poem and a rustic dialogue in the first half have their counterparts in a rustic monologue, a contest poem and a political poem in the latter half. The central poem is political. In devising this order, Calpurnius may well have aimed to remedy what to him seemed defective in Vergil's uncertain symmetry, but the pattern is also well adapted to his own themes.