The Eclogues and Georgics

Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics belong to the turbulent final decades of the Roman Republic. The ten pastoral poems of the Eclogues blend the literary world of Greek bucolic poetry with recognisably Italian landscapes, people and contemporary upheaval, creating an Arcadia that is never entirely removed from the politics and dispossession of Virgil’s own age.

The four books of the Georgics, composed during the years of conflict between Antony and Octavian, take farming, animals and the natural world as their ostensible subjects while developing a richer meditation on labour, order, loss and renewal. This Oxford World’s Classics edition presents both works in C. Day Lewis’s established verse translations, bringing together Virgil’s early pastoral poetry and his great poem of the land in a single accessible volume.