The late Charles Segal was one of those great, worldly scholars whose attentiveness to detail never caused him to drift from the larger picture. Segal probes both the Idylls and the Eclogues for their philosophical and literary significance, and in some of the most thrilling (well, to me!) passages, he teases out the implications of often overlooked words and phrases that, under fresh light, can reshape entire interpretative histories.

In an academic landscape riddled with the jargon of various theoretical schools, Segal offers close readings that open the worlds of Theocritus and Vergil as they were conceived, not as they are perceived.