Ten pastoral poems that reinvented the genre. Shepherds sing of love, loss, and exile in an idealised Arcadian landscape — but the real world keeps breaking through. The fourth Eclogue's prophecy of a golden child would haunt Christian readers for centuries.
Start ReadingTityrus lies under his beech tree in peace; Meliboeus has lost his farm to land confiscations. A pastoral dialogue about dispossession that cuts to the bone of post-civil-war Italy.
The shepherd Corydon pours out his love for the beautiful Alexis — a monologue of unrequited pastoral desire, half-comic, half-heartbreaking.
Two shepherds, Menalcas and Damoetas, trade insults and then compete in an amoebean singing contest. A judge declares it a draw.
The most famous and controversial eclogue. A child is about to be born who will usher in a new golden age. Christians would read it as a prophecy of Christ. Virgil almost certainly meant something else.
Menalcas and Mopsus sing alternate songs in memory of the shepherd Daphnis — a lament for his death and a celebration of his deification.
Two shepherds trap the wild prophet Silenus in a cave and force him to sing. His song is a cosmogony — the creation of the world, the myths of Pasiphae, the Graces, Gallus. Virgil at his most Alexandrian.
Meliboeus overhears Corydon and Thyrsis singing in competition. The songs turn on love, loss, and the harshness of pastoral life — less idealised than earlier eclogues.
A dialogue between two shepherds about the transformations in the countryside. The most political of the later eclogues, with clear references to land confiscations and civil upheaval.
Lycidas and Moeris walk together, discussing the power of poetry and its limits. Menalcas has tried to save his farm through song — and failed.
Gallus, the love-elegist, lies dying of love in Arcadia. The shepherds and gods come to console him, but nothing helps. Virgil's farewell to pastoral poetry — the last eclogue, and the saddest.