228 pastores. pecorum magistri 



known. But Vergil seems to attribute to them a more real and intel- 

 ligent interest in the welfare of their charge than it is reasonable to 

 expect from rustic slaves. The pastores of IV 278, who gather the 

 medicinal herb used in the treatment of bees, may be slaves : if so, they 

 are not mere thoughtless animals. And the scene is in the Cisalpine, 

 where we have noted that slavery was probably of a mild type. In 

 III 420 the pastor is called upon to protect his beasts from snakes. But 

 we know 1 that it was a part of slave-herdsmen's duty to fight beasts of 

 prey, and that they were commonly armed for that purpose. In III 

 455 we find him shrinking from a little act of veterinary surgery, which 

 the context suggests he ought to perform. But we know that the 

 magister ptcoris <y& a farm was instructed 2 in simple veterinary practice, 

 and it is hardly likely that other slaves, specially put in charge of 

 beasts, had no instructions. The pastores (if more than one, the chief,) 

 appear as pecorum magistri (II 529, III 445, cf Buc III 101), a regular 

 name for shepherds: they are not the same as the magistri of ill 549, 

 who are veterinary specialists disguised under mythical names. In 

 II 529-31 we have a holiday scene, in which the farmer (ipse) treats 

 the pecoris magistri to a match of wrestling and throwing the javelin. 

 If slaves arfe meant, then Vergil is surely carrying back rustic slavery 

 to early days as part and parcel of the 'good old times' to which he 

 points in the following lines hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini etc. 

 The ipse will then be a genial farmer of the old school, whose slaves 

 are very different from the degraded and sullen chattels of more recent 

 years. But in this as in other cases the poet gives us no clear sign. 



A passage 3 in which the reticence of which I am speaking has a 

 peculiar effect occurs in the description of the grievous murrain that 

 visited northern Italy some time before. One of a pair of oxen falls 

 dead while drawing the plough. The tristis arator* unyokes the other, 

 sorrow-stricken at the death of its fellow; he leaves the plough where 

 it stopped, and goes his way. Then follows a piece of highly-wrought 

 pathos 5 describing the dejection and collapse of the surviving ox. 

 'What now avail him his toil or his services, his past work in turning 

 up the heavy land with the ploughshare?' And the hardness of the 

 poor beast's lot is emphasized by the reflexion that disease in cattle 

 is not induced by gluttony and wine-bibbing, as it often is in the 

 case of mankind, nor by the worries (curd) that rob men of refreshing 



1 Varro RR n 10. 



8 See Varro RR n 2 20, 5 18, 7 16, even for treatment of homines 10 io 

 Written books of prescriptions were provided. 



3 Georgui 515-30. 



4 tristis suggests the owner. A slave was not likely to care. 



5 In Sellar's Virgil chapter VI 5 there is an excellent treatment of this episode, with a 

 discussion of V's relation to Lucretius and a most apposite quotation from G Sand. 



