Latin Pastoral Poetry

3 credits

A century of becoming a global empire and a generation lost in civil warfare drove Roman poets of the late first century BCE into the arms of pastoral, a fantasy genre sparsely inhabited by shepherd who spent their days singing of love and roaming idyllic landscapes. We will read in Latin two contemporaneous pastoral texts--the Eclogues of Vergil and Elegies of Tibullus--as we try to understand what this fictional countryside offered Rome's most urbane writers.