The Eclogues

First published around 39–38 BC, Virgil’s Eclogues is a collection of ten pastoral poems that transformed the quiet world of shepherds and country life into a setting for some of antiquity’s most subtle reflections on love, loss and power. Inspired by the Greek poet Theocritus, Virgil’s shepherds sing of desire, rivalry and the consolations of song, while the Italian countryside is shadowed by the upheavals of civil war and the dispossession of farmers. From the wistful conversation of Tityrus and Meliboeus to the elegiac music of the later poems, an apparently idyllic landscape reveals a world unsettled by political change and personal longing.

These poems established Virgil’s reputation and laid the foundations for the Georgics and The Aeneid, the works that would secure his place at the heart of the Western literary canon. Their influence reaches through the pastoral tradition of Renaissance poetry and beyond, shaping the ways generations of writers have imagined the countryside as a refuge, an ideal and a contested space. Elegant in form yet unexpectedly alert to suffering and historical change, the Eclogues offer an intimate introduction to a poet whose vision extends far beyond the fields and streams he so beautifully evokes.

From the book

“O Meliboeus, a god has made this ease for us.”

— Virgil, The Eclogues, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough

On The Eclogues

“These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem [...] mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary.”

— Gregson Davis, University of Pennsylvania Press