Pretty in a hollow sort of way. Stellar writing. Excellent for understanding all of the pastoral and romantic poetry - and Shakespeare - that will follow in its stead. Also, a great cure for insomnia.

The Eclogues and Georgics are the other two major works of Virgil, more famous for his Aeneid. The Eclogues, a collection of ten poems, were written around 38 b.c. Virgil modeled this collection off of the Greek Bucolic tradition, as exemplified by Theocritus.

Bucolic poetry, which generally involves shepherds frolicking around the pastoral countryside and singing to each other, is really (really) not my genre of choice. Eclogues II, IV, and X were the strongest of the bunch, in my opinion. Eclogue IV is also historically notable, as you get to watch a young Virgil suck up to Octavian (i.e., the future Augustus Caesar) by mustering all the propaganda he can handle. So there's that. But give me Horace's Odes over these pastoral poems six days a week and twice on Sunday, so 3 stars for the Eclogues. I know, I'd be a terrible shepherd. Let's just move on.

Happily, I enjoyed the Georgics a great deal more. Published around 29 b.c., the Georgics is one long poem split into four books. With 2,188 verses, it is not a short work. Like the Eclogues, the Georgics spends a lot of time discussing livestock & agriculture. But the tone of the Georgics is much more majestic, and the poem soars as a result:

“[A]nd the time will come when there anigh, Heaving the earth up with his curved plough, Some swain will light on javelins by foul rust Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike On empty helmets, while he gapes to see Bones as of giants from the trench untombed.” Book I.

Now that's the kind of agricultural poetry I can get into! Alternately, listen to Virgil describing the King of Bees:

“[H]im with awful eye they reverence, and with murmuring throngs surround, in crowds attend, oft shoulder him on high, or with their bodies shield him in the fight, and seek through showering wounds a glorious death.” Book IV.

Does the Georgics quite reach the heights of the Aeneid? I don't think so. But it isn't terribly far behind, and if you enjoyed the Aeneid the Georgics is definitely worth a read. 5 stars for the Georgics, leaving us with a grand total of 4 stars for the book as a whole.

Note: I read the Dryden translation, which is justly famous. If you liked the lofty language above, I would highly recommend it. It's old, so at times you may need to slow down and re-read something to understand what the hell he is talking about, but worth it in my opinion.

Georgics book IV is a gem even if it gives really bad beekeeping advice.

Slavitt sometimes plays a little fast and loose with Virgil, but his resulting poems are re-inventions that make the work very immediate, as it would have been for Virgil's audience. Best to read his translations alongside the Loeb translations.

Part of the Great Books of the Western World Collection, Volume 12: Virgil. These poems are OK, but mainly read them for my Master's.

I enjoyed the Eclogues, particularly: I, II, III & VII.

The Georgics were not to my taste, although I suspect this may partly be due to the translation.

Eclogues and Georgics (Thrift Edition) by Virgil (2005)

(Oxford World's Classics edition translated by C. Day Lewis. Excellent introduction by R.O.A.M. Lyne.)

5 stars: I loved it.

The didactic poem The Georgics in particular was my favorite. Longing for a life just out of reach, The Georgics had much to say about things that matter: the Roman values of work and duty, the weakness of the individual, the harsh beauty of nature, and the harsh consequences of war. Book IV's bees as a metaphor for the ideal state blew my mind. Such strength and resilience come at a cost: no passion, no art, no individuality. The reader is left wondering which life to choose.

The Georgics is not just a moral and political work under the guise of an agricultural handbook, however. The mood, metaphors, imagery, and descriptions were beautiful. This was a pleasure to read.

The pastoral poems of The Eclogues were pleasant, but less impactful to me. I suspect I did not get out of them all that Virgil intended.

This book of pastoral poems from Virgil is very interested in agricultural methods. As I read the first half of it, I was bored out of my skull, spurred on only by the knowledge that the book was very short and that I could finish it quickly and move on to something else.

In the second half, something happened. I was sitting with my newborn son, just weeks old. For whatever reason, I decided to start reading the poem out loud to him. The act of reading the language did something to change it for me, and I was...not exactly engrossed, but definitely more attentive than I had been. I tried to slow down and just feel the rhythm of the language and the timelessness of the poetry. My son seemed to like it too, as much as a two week old can like anything.

The introduction tried to tell me that these books may have allegorical political meanings, but that was entirely lost on me. This is not a book I'll be revisiting very often, but the specialness of that one memory does mean that I have to bump up my star rating a bit. If you're in an unusually contemplative mood, these poems have been around for thousands of years, waiting to be read aloud.

The "Eclogues" and "Georgics" (Oxford World's Classics) by Virgil (1999)

Lette alcune per dovere scolastico. Non si è rivelata una brutta lettura.

pretty cheeky. a few good lines tho