Cover of The Eclogues by Virgil Audiobook The Eclogues
Audiobook · Sovereign

The Eclogues

Author
Virgil
Read by
Eloise Fairfax
Language
English
Length
59 minutes
ISBN
9781802568431
Published
29 August 2025
Imprint
Sovereign
  • pastoral poems
  • rural landscape
  • shepherds
  • love
  • labor
  • political realities
  • pastoral tradition
  • loss
  • peace
  • human condition

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Description

Shepherds, songs, a stolen farm. Virgil’s Eclogues are pastoral with politics under the trees: love contests, exile, a child promised to a better age. The countryside as a lyre, and Rome not quite offstage. Tityrus keeps his farm; Meliboeus loses his. Between songs, Octavian’s Rome rearranges the fields. Virgil taught Europe how to make politics sound like a flute, and still hurt. Tityrus keeps the farm; Meliboeus loses his; a child rumoured to heal the age while Octavian redraws the fields. Read in English, unabridged.

Author

Virgil (70–19 BCE) was born near Mantua, studied in Milan, Rome, and Naples, and wrote under the shadow of Augustus. The Eclogues are pastoral with a political weather; the Aeneid is Rome's epic of a man who leaves a burning city and must found another. Duty, piety, and the cost of a future: Aeneas carries them like luggage he cannot put down. Virgil died at Brundisium with the poem, tradition says, still unfinished.

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