Virgil’s

are a collection of ten short poems that represent the beginning of the European tradition of pastoral poetry. Pastoral poetry is, first of all, poetry about herdsmen (

in Latin), and the

feature a cast of characters made up largely of herdsmen, along with other occupants of rural Mediterranean landscapes. The work which in English is most commonly known as the

was called by Virgil

, “the bucolic poems”. The term “eclogue” derives from the Greek

, meaning “selection”, and was conceived in antiquity to describe one poem in a collection of poems. The ten poems that make up the book of the

can thus each be referred to as “an eclogue”, while the collection as a whole might most properly be called the

…

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Citation: Breed, Brian. "The Eclogues". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 June 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=994, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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