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 po

"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 cert

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

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 th