Since Messalla's
verses were in Greek they had, of course, been written two years before
this while he was a student at Athens. Would that we knew this heroine
upon whom he represents the divinities as bestowing gifts! Propertius,
who acknowledged Mesalla as his patron later employed this same motive
of celestial adoration in honor of Cynthia (II. 3, 25), but surely
Messalla's _herois_ was, to judge from Vergil's comparison, a person of
far higher station than Cynthia. Could she have been the lady he married
upon his return from Athens? Such a treatment of a woman of social
station would be in line with the customs of the "new poets," Catullus,
Calvus, and Ticidas, rather than of the Augustans, Gallus, Propertius,
and Tibullus. Vergil himself used the motive in the second _Eclogue_ (l.
46), a reminiscence which, doubtless with many others that we are unable
to trace, Messalla must have recognized as his own.
The pastoral which Vergil had translated from Messalla is quite fully
described:
Molliter hic _viridi patulae sub tegmine quercus_
Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant,
Dulcia jactantes alterno carmina versu
Qualia Trinacriae doctus amat iuvenis.
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