Virgil’s Eclogues 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 (pastores in Latin), and the Eclogues 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 Eclogues was called by Virgil Bucolica, “the bucolic poems”. The term “eclogue” derives from the Greek ek-loge, 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 Eclogues can thus each be referred to as “an eclogue”, while the collection as a whole might most properly be called the Bucolics.
The title Bucolica represents an...
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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 09 June 2026.]
