The Nightmare of Arcady: A Complementary Reading of the Dirae and Lydia

Joseph Groves (University of Michigan)

An authorless orphanin the Appendix Vergiliana, once considered a single poem, the Dirae is now correctly divided into the Dirae and the Lydia. However, this division should not force editors to treat connections as interpolations and dissociate the two. Rather, they should be read in close conjunction, as both poems appear to have the same speaker, a displaced Italian colonus, are thematically complementary, and are dependent on Vergil’s 1^st and 9^th Eclogues for context, and illustrate a single emotional progression. The Dirae itself is an extended curse, dissimilar to the Ibis and the Hellenistic Arai upon which it is based, and alludes to the mimesis of the first Eclogue from the very first word, addressing instead of Tityrus, a similarly enigmatic Battyrus. Our poem eschews the polite conversation and contrasting fortunes of Vergil’s two rustics but is entirely a curse upon land to be left behind, showing a jealous fixation on the land and avoiding completely the ad-hominem attacks and self-conscious literarity of the Arai. The curse itself is not of primary importance since, although long, it completely omits the lex taliionis, the magical principle of punishment corresponding to the crime. The second poem, the Lydia, also turns on the speaker’s jealousy of his former land, this time because it will continue to be home to the speaker’s beloved, Lydia. With its emphasis on bucolic imagery, this poem completes the thematic link to the Eclogues and fits this second poem into the emotional drift of the first, from destructive rage to sentimentality. This thematic and contextual coherence links the poems, and makes the two, admittedly awkward, mentions of Lydia in the Dirae tractable. Rather than intrusive interpolations of a different poet trying to give a reason to attach his Lydia to the Dirae, they prefigure the speaker’s change of focus and trace his transition from anger to sentimentality.