Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral

Paul Alpers’s Singer of the Eclogues argues that Virgil’s ten*Eclogues (composed c. 42–38 BCE) are the single most consequential document in the pastoral tradition—formative for Renaissance poetry and exemplary of the mode’s possibilities—yet oddly neglected outside classics. Written under the first triumvirate amid civil war, not under Augustan stability, the poems imitate and converse with Theocritus without making him a lesser poet. Alpers pairs a new, reader-oriented translation with gr...