Page 17 - Gullivers

The greatest Roman pastoral pœt, Virgil - born into a rural family near
Mantua in 70 B.C. – transformed the Greek world of Theocritus and his fellow- pastoralists into a vision of life in Roman Italy in his Eclogues (c. 42-37 B.C.) and considered the art of farming in more detail in his Georgics (c. 37-30 B.C.), composed as the Roman empire began to expand. Shadows pass over the rural scene – Virgil himself lived through a period of civil war – but the pœt leaves his readers in little doubt that the best life is to be lived in the countryside.
It was a vision that held enormous appeal for readers not only in Virgil’s own day but throughout the Renaissance and up to the lifetimes of Swist and his contemporaries. Virgil’s contemporary, Horace, wrote one of the most celebrated pœms on this theme: his fourth epode, the ‘Beatus ille’, opening with lines that Swist’s friend, the pœt Alexander Pope, would echo in ‘On Solitude’:
Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground. (ll. 1-4)
For Pope, as for other essentially middle-class pœts and their readers, such sentiments were more the stuff of wish-fulfilment than reality, least of all the osten harsh reality of actual rural existence. Even Swist was not immune from such thoughts, however, and his imitation of Horace’s Satires, 2.6 opens:
I. Swist and Dublin 11