Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia

Book excerpt: Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia is an introduction to the Eclogues, based on sound scholarship but also personally felt and addressed to a popular audience. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of Virgil's early poems, discusses each eclogue in some detail, and offers a new and challenging interpretation of the collection as a whole. The ten eclogues are shown to be a young poet's attempt at self-understanding. Their symmetrical arrangement is a journey inward toward the central experience of death, and a journey back toward rebirth and the writing of larger and greater works.