The Greek poet of third-century Sicily and Alexandria invented pastoral: herdsmen trading songs and insults, a girl working a love charm by moonlight, the Cyclops pining for Galatea, and two chattering Syracusan housewives elbowing through the crowds to a festival in Alexandria. C. S. Calverley renders the idylls in a mix of blank verse and rhymed metres.
The fountainhead of Virgil’s Eclogues and the whole pastoral tradition, in a version by a Victorian master of light verse. Download the free EPUB.