Virgil's collection of ten pastoral poems — establishing the idealized world of Arcadia as a literary landscape and embedding political allegory in pastoral form.
The Eclogues as the founding text of European pastoral: Virgil's transformation of Theocritan pastoral into a genre with wider political and philosophical resonances. Eclogue IV — the 'Messianic Eclogue': prophecy of a child to be born who will inaugurate a new golden age — was read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ, making Virgil an honorary Christian. Eclogue I: the displacement of farmers by veterans — a direct reference to the land confiscations that followed the Civil Wars.
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