A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues


Book Description

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.




Eclogues and Georgics


Book Description




Virgil's Eclogues


Book Description

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 poems in the time in which they were created.




A Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues


Book Description

Virgil's Eclogues are a fundamental text of Western literature that served as a model for the nascent poetry of the Augustan and later of the Imperial Age. Inspired by the bucolic poetry of Theocritus, the work uses the apparent simplicity of rural settings to explore complex elements of poetic, literary, philosophical, and even figurative culture, and to express the drama of civil war and expropriations. In this commentary, accompanied by a detailed introduction, Andrea Cucchiarelli analyses the Eclogues in depth, establishing comparisons with both Greek and Roman poetic models, with philosophical texts, and with significant later texts from the Roman poetic tradition. The commentary is the first to offer a systematic account of the poem in its historical context, between the end of the Republic and the Age of Augustus: particular attention is also paid to the language of the figurative arts, which for Roman readers constituted an important complement to literary knowledge of myths and stories. The volume offers the reader a reliable and concise interpretation of the text, which is systematically lemmatized and annotated throughout; each eclogue is additionally accompanied by an introductory overview and a detailed bibliography to direct further reading.




Vergil's Eclogues


Book Description

Best remembered for his unfinished epic, the Aeneid, the poet Vergil was celebrated in his time both for the perfection of his art and for the centrality of his ideas to Roman culture. The Eclogues, his earliest confirmed work, were composed in part out of political considerations: when the Roman authorities threatened to seize his family's land, Vergil's appeal in the form of Eclogue IX won a stay. Eclogue I appears to be a thank-you for that favor. Barbara Hughes Fowler provides scholars and students with a new American verse translation of Vergil's Eclogues. An accomplished translator, Fowler renders the poet's words into an English that is contemporary while remaining close to the spirit of the original. In an introduction to the text, she compares the treatment of the pastoral form by Vergil and Theocritus, illuminating the ways in which Vergil borrowed from and built upon the earlier poet's work, and thereby moved the genre in a new direction.




Vergil's Eclogues. Edited by Katharina Volk


Book Description

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.




The Georgics and the Eclogues


Book Description

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.




Pastoral Inscriptions


Book Description

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.




Bucolic Ecology


Book Description

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.




The Eclogues


Book Description

“In the whole of European literature there is no poet who can furnish the texts for a more significant variety of discourse than Virgil. [He] symbolizes so much in the history of Europe, and represents such central European values...” –T.S. Eliot The Eclogues (38 BC), also known as the Bucolics, is a work by Roman poet Virgil. Although less prominent than The Aeneid, Virgil’s legendary epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his discovery of what would later become the city of Rome, The Eclogues have endured as a landmark in the history of pastoral poetry. The Eclogues were inspired by the bucolic idylls of Hellenistic poet Theocritus, poems set in the rural region of Arcadia in Ancient Greece. In contrast to Theocritus, whose poems idealized agricultural life for a cosmopolitan audience based in Alexandria, Virgil’s work is grounded in the complex sociopolitical realities of its day, a time of civil war following the assassination of Julius Caesar. “Some brutal soldier will possess these fields / An alien master. Ah! To what a pass / Has civil discord brought our hapless folk!” Displaced from his land, Meliboeus laments his fate to the farmer Tityrus, who has been fortunate enough to retain his ancestral home. Set amidst civil war, poverty, and cultural upheaval, the Eclogues vary in tone and scope from the tragic dialogue just described to a lonely shepherd crying for lost love and a singing competition held between two gifted men. In emphasizing the connection between poetry, singing, and labor, Virgil recalls the roots of written language in an older, oral tradition, restoring what has been lost—peace, land, possessions, love—in what can never be taken away. “Love conquers all things; yield we too to love!” In a time of widespread uncertainty, Virgil found solace in surrendering to the unknown while remaining certain of one eternal truth: as long as love survives, there will be songs. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Virgil’s The Eclogues is a classic work of Roman literature reimagined for modern readers.