The Eclogues

Composed in the first century BC, this sequence of ten Latin pastoral poems presents shepherds in an imagined Italian or Sicilian countryside who sing of love, land, and exile. Speakers compete in verse, mourn a lost companion or a confiscated farm, and, in the fourth poem, hail a child whose birth will restore a golden age. The setting is rural, but Roman civil war and land assignments press on the songs. There is no single plot. The book is a set of pastoral dialogues and monologues, not an agricultural treatise and not an epic.

Quarter bound in brown buckram with cream paper sides printed with images in white and grey. Cream endpapers. Brown slipcase.