Virgil's Garden: The Nature of Bucolic Space

Virgil's book of bucolic verse, the Eclogues, defines a green space separate from the outside worlds both of other Roman verse and of the real world of his audience. However, the boundaries between inside and outside are deliberately porous. The bucolic natives are aware of the presence of Rome, and Virgil himself is free to enter their world.

Virgil's bucolic space is, in many ways, a poetic replication of the public and private gardens of his Roman audience - enclosed green spaces which a...