Abstract

In a song exchange in his second Eclogue, Calpurnius presents the canales through which water is piped to a garden as equivalent to a pastoral singer's pipe, anticipating his innovative use of canales to denote musical pipes at Ecl. 4.76. Calpurnius's choice of the term suggests a metaphorical reading of Virgil's two references to canales in the Georgics as conduits for water and honey. Calpurnius makes explicit Virgil's implicit association of irrigation through canales with the nourishing value of song. This double sense of canales dramatizes a productive relationship between human song and the natural landscape in Calp. Ecl. 2.

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