While Virgil’s Eclogues seems to celebrate farming and shepherding in the Roman countryside on a surface level, its poetic world has little connection to the realities of ancient agriculture. Pastoral is a highly literary genre, one consciously removed from the harsh realities of rural life. It was developed not by real farmers (like the early Greek poet Hesiod, who grew up on a working farm), but by urban dwellers who romanticized the country as an escape from the stresses of modern life. In this regard, pastoral is closer to the Romantic movement of the 19th and 20th centuries than to a farmer’s manual. As the poet Alexander Pope describes, pastoral’s illusion consists “in only exposing the best side of a shepherd’s life and in concealing its miseries” (Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, Alexander Pope).

The ancients credited the Greek poet Theocritus with inventing the pastoral genre in the third century BCE. While the details of Theocritus’s life are largely lost to history, modern scholars know he was native to Syracuse, a city on the Italian island of Sicily (thus Virgil often refers to pastoral forms as “Syracusan” or “Sicilian”).