Pastoral as a kind of poetry is a paradoxical combination of apparent naïveté and sophistication; William Empson refers to ‘the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple’. The pastoral landscape in its more ideal moments is the stage for simple country folk who lead an easy and uncomplicated life. But landscape and shepherds appear in poems written by sophisticated poets, whose self-consciousness weighs heavily on the figures who speak in their poems. The picture of an idyllic world often conjured up by the words ‘pastoral’ or ‘bucolic’ is a trivializing and selective simplification of the full reading experience offered by the Eclogues. That simple image is presented to the reader in the first five lines of Eclogue 1 in Meliboeus’ description of his friend Tityrus’ happy situation: Tityrus reclines at ease in the shadow of a tree, composing ‘woodland music’ on his rustic pipe and teaching the sympathetic woods to echo the name of his girlfriend Amaryllis. But this description frames Meliboeus’ statement of his own plight: in contrast to his settled friend he is in motion, away from the boundaries of the idyllic Never Never Land, which in line 3 is already redefined with the very Roman word patria. Eclogue 1 quickly bursts the limits of a simple and timeless bucolicism to encompass the historical and social realities of the city of Rome, in the course of a brief exchange of experiences past and anticipated in which the humble herdsman Tityrus meets a man-god, and the smallholder Meliboeus foresees an exile as far distant as Britain (1.66), the limit of Julius Caesar’s imperialist adventuring a decade and a half before the time of composition. The first Eclogue is typical of the collection as a whole in this testing of limits and in the recurrent thwarting of the desire for fulfilment in an enclosed locus amoenus or ‘green cabinet’. Much of the energy and interest of the Eclogues derives from the constant tension between the limiting case of a static pastoral ‘idyll’ and the forces that threaten to destabilize the idyll.