Vergil: Eclogues & Georgics
Prof. Ralph Hexter
The great Latin poet Vergil is most famous today for his Aeneid, the epic poem with which he capped his career and which his death prevented from receiving its final polish. If it is true that, as ancient lives tell us, he took up this task at the request of Augustus, it is because Rome’s new ruler knew Vergil’s immense capacities from the Eclogues and the Georgics. Study of these earlier works, masterpieces in their own right, permits us to see how the poet Vergil developed, writing first a collection of bucolic poems after the fashion of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus and then a didactic poem that fuses inspirations from sources as disparate as Hesiod, Homer, and Alexandrian poets in Greek, and Lucretius and Roman treatises on farming in Latin. Reading significant selections from both texts in Latin, we will focus on understanding how Vergil adapted his predecessors to create uniquely new works, key to understanding the poetry we term Augustan, and which themselves became the models and inspiration for the poets who chose to write in these genres, in multiple European languages over two millennia.