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Virgil

Eclogues

pastoral

Ten short poems about shepherds singing in an idealised countryside — and almost nothing is what it seems. Beneath the pastoral surface, the Eclogues are about civil war, land confiscation, political exile, and the hope that a child might be born who will redeem the world. Virgil invented a genre that lasted two thousand years. The fourth Eclogue was later read as a prophecy of Christ.

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Books

  • 1
    Book 1

    Tityrus lies beneath a beech tree, playing his pipe. Meliboeus has been driven from his land. Pastoral peace and political dispossession exist side by side. The first eclogue establishes the tension that runs through all ten.

    84 lines
  • 2
    Book 2

    The shepherd Corydon loves the beautiful Alexis. His song of unrequited desire draws on Theocritus but adds a distinctly Roman melancholy.

    73 lines
  • 3
    Book 3

    A singing contest between two shepherds, judged by a neighbour. Alternating couplets of competitive pastoral — the form Virgil inherited from Theocritus and made his own.

    111 lines
  • 4
    Book 4

    A messianic prophecy: a child is about to be born who will usher in a new golden age. Christians later read it as a prophecy of Christ. Virgil probably meant something more political.

    63 lines
  • 5
    Book 5

    Menalcas and Mopsus take turns singing about the death and deification of Daphnis. An allegory that may refer to Julius Caesar.

    90 lines
  • 6
    Book 6

    Silenus is captured by two boys and forced to sing. His song is a cosmogony — the creation of the world, myths of transformation, the origins of poetry itself.

    86 lines
  • 7
    Book 7

    Meliboeus praises the songs of Corydon and Thyrsis. The eclogue includes another lament for the confiscations that dispossessed Italian farmers after the civil wars.

    70 lines
  • 8
    Book 8

    A love poem from the shepherd Damon and a magical incantation from Alphesiboeus. The second song — a woman trying to bring her lover back through witchcraft — is Virgil at his most intense.

    109 lines
  • 9
    Book 9

    Virgil addresses his patron Pollio and reflects on the power of poetry. Lycidas and Moeris discuss a poet who nearly saved his land through verse.

    67 lines
  • 10
    Book 10

    Gallus, the love elegist, appears in Arcadia, dying of unrequited love. The shepherds cannot console him. Virgil ends the collection with evening falling and the goats going home.

    77 lines
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