From Beneficent God to Maddened Bull: The Shepherd of Men in the Works of Virgil

Commencing with Homer and throughout the whole of Greco-Roman antiquity, the metaphor of the herdsman is commonly employed by poets and philosophers to qualify gods, kings, magistrates, and all kinds of authority figures and political leaders. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the meaning and function of this political figure as it is featured in the works of Virgil. Although the main focus of analysis will be on the Aeneid, a preliminary survey of Virgil’s earlier works shall allow us to understand the values and expectations against which the shepherd of the people and his actions were later to be evaluated, while also presenting us with several figures of nonliteral shepherds in their own right and political significance. The first two sections focus on key passages of the Eclogues and Georgics to argue that the peaceful existence of the agropastoral world, itself a signifier for the whole of human life and deeds, is constructed as subordinate to the soterial and beneficial agency of exceptional figures of shepherds, who are drawn from politics and history into the metaphorical frame of the poems. The remaining sections will suggest that this optimistic perspective, wherein war progresses to peace through the actions of exceptional individuals, is disproved and reversed in the characterization of the metaphorical shepherds of the Aeneid. Rather, the shepherds’ actions are directed toward the destruction of the same pastoral world that Virgil’s earlier poems imagined as existing by virtue of the shepherd’s soterial agency. [From the article's introduction.]