Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues. The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry. Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the epic in the time in which it was created.

“Fresh-minted and sparkling . . . Ferry’s translation wonderfully preserves the exquisite harmonies of the mode while giving it a vigorous edge of reality.” —Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe Virgil’s great lyrics, rendered by the acclaimed translator of Gilgamesh . . . The Eclogues of Virgil gave definitive form to the pastoral mode, and these magically beautiful poems, which were influential in so much subsequent literature, perhaps best exemplify what pastoral can do. “Song replying to song replying to song,’ touchingly comic, poignantly sad, sublimely joyful, the various music that these shepherds make echoes in scenes of repose and harmony, and of hardship and trouble in work and love. Available in ebook for the first time, this English-only edition of The Eclogues of Virgil includes concise, informative notes and an introduction that describes the fundamental role of this deeply original book in the pastoral tradition. “Direct, unmannered and fresh: a modern version of classical simplicity.” —Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times “Mr. Ferry is a gifted poet and much-admired translator . . . Those to whom the original is a sealed book will enjoy much of its charm through the medium of the author’s accomplished translation, while those who, like Shakespeare, have ‘small Latin’ can experience the additional pleasure of savoring, with Mr. Ferry’s help, the musical perfection of Virgil’s lines.” —Bernard Knox, The Washington Times “Ferry has achieved a high degree of fidelity to what Virgil wrote . . . Simple, luminous clarity.” —Richard Jenkyns, The New Republic

John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature. The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance. As Rosanna Warren noted about Ferry's work in The Threepenny Review, "We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing." This ebook edition includes only the English language translation of the Georgics.

Surprisingly, this is the first full-scale scholarly commentary on the Eclogues to appear in this century. These ten short pastorals are among the best known poems in Latin literature. Clausen's commentary provides a comprehensive guide to both the poems and the considerable scholarship surrounding them. There are short introductions to each poem, as well as a general introduction to the Eclogues as a whole.