Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues. The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry. Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the epic in the time in which it was created.

Surprisingly, this is the first full-scale scholarly commentary on the Eclogues to appear in this century. These ten short pastorals are among the best known poems in Latin literature. Clausen's commentary provides a comprehensive guide to both the poems and the considerable scholarship surrounding them. There are short introductions to each poem, as well as a general introduction to the Eclogues as a whole.

Virgil's "Eclogues" represent the introduction of a new genre, pastoral, to Latin literature. Generic markers of pastoral in the "Eclogues" include not only the representation of the singing and speaking of shepherd characters, but also the learned density of the text itself. Here, Brian W. Breed examines the tension between representations of orality in Virgil's pastoral world and the intense textuality of his pastoral poetry. The book argues that separation between speakers and their language in the "Eclogues" is not merely pastoral preciosity. Rather, it shows how Virgil uses representations of orality as the point of comparison for measuring both the capacity and the limitations of the "Eclogues" as a written text that will be encountered by reading audiences. The importance of genre is considered both in terms of how pastoral might be defined for the particular literary-historical moment in which Virgil was writing and in light of the subsequent European pastoral tradition.

The Eclogues, also called the Bucolics, is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil, containing ten pieces, each called not an idyll, populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and performing amoebaean singing in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. The Georgics is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil, with the subject of agriculture; but far from being an example of peaceful rural poetry, it is a work characterized by tensions in both theme and purpose. Publius Vergilius Maro, Virgil, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, The Eclogues, The Georgics, and The Aeneid.

"The date of the Eclogues is much debated.* A preliminary distinction is in order: that between the composition of the individual poems (which, at least in certain cases, were doubtless read immediately and circulated within a restricted group around the poet) and the publication of the final collection. There are only two obvious clues to the dating of the book: the land confiscations in the territory of Cremona and Mantua, which peaked in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi (though continuing during the early 30s BCE: cf. E. 1 and 9), and the consulship of Asinius Pollio, in 40 BCE (E. 4)"--

A collection of ten classic essays on Vergil's Eclogues, written between 1970 and 1999. The contributions represent recent developments in Vergilian scholarship, and are placed in context in a specially written introduction.

Beginning in outer space and ending up among the atoms, "Bucolic Ecology" illustrates how these poems repeatedly turn to the natural world in order to define themselves and their place in the literary tradition. It argues that the 'Eclogues' find there both a sequence of analogies for their own poetic processes and a map upon which can be located other landmarks in Greco-Roman literature. Unlike previous studies of this kind, "Bucolic Ecology" does not attribute to Virgil a predominantly Romantic conception of nature and its relationship to poetry, but by adopting such differing approaches to the physical world as astronomy, geography, topography, landscape and ecology, it offers an account of the Eclogues that emphasises their range and complexity and reaffirms their innovation and audacity.