The Eclogues may be studied in a number of different ways—as biographical material, as social and political documents, as poems. I am here concerned only with the last. In this first collection of Virgil’s poetry we already see some of the qualities which were to play their part in the Georgics and the Aeneid, and also some qualities which were not to reappear in these two more ambitious works. Essentially the Eclogues are set in a minor key; they do not aim at power or dramatic tension; their relationship with human experience is of a circumscribed kind; their method is mannered, largely conventional and traditional, often very imitative of Theocritus;they sing of beauty and sorrow and death, but in my view they do not generally explore these things. They are delicate and fragile poems, presented in a diction which charms and soothes, in a metre whose cadences have always captivated those with enough Latin to read them.