‘para empresas más altas y de mayor importancia’

Due to the popularity of Don Quixote and later works, Cervantes’s La Galatea has suffered from being overlooked or maligned. This chapter argues that Cervantes, by choosing the pastoral as his first substantial narrative, continues the tradition of the pastoral novel initiated by Montemayor’s La Diana and supersedes it. Cervantes introduces himself as an Orphic poet who participates in the famed rota Virgilii, or Virgil’s Wheel, which may have originated from the enigmatic verses that appeared in the frontispiece of a first-century edition of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, / then, leaving the woodland, compelled the neighbouring / fields to serve the husbandman, however grasping— / a work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars’ bristling’. By starting with the pastoral, a writer would emulate the famed Virgil by later composing works comparable to the Georgics and, afterwards, to the Aeneid.