From the new 2 0 0 5 D U C K W O R T H A C A D E M I C C A T A L O G

BCPaperbacks series

This series makes available in affordable paperback editions key monographs on

topics central to the study of the classical world.

THE DESIGN OF VIRGIL’S BUCOLICS

Second Edition

JOHN VAN SICKLE

“Van Sickle’s book is the first to argue, and argue convincingly, for a poetics

of Virgil’s eclogue book that both comprehends and unifies the whole. He

expands our understanding of epos to embrace not only the work of Hesiod

and Homer but Virgilian bucolic as well, a poetic world that looks backward

to lay forceful claim to Arcadian origins and anticipates the Georgics and

Aeneid to come.”—MICHAEL C.J. PUTNAM, BROWN UNIVERSITY

“The Design of Virgil’s Bucolics remains one of the seminal works of Vergilian

scholarship. Its approach to programmatic arrangement and its model of

intertextuality have set the agenda for studies of the Bucolics during the past

quarter-century.”—MARILYN B. SKINNER, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

In 1986, reviewing recent work on the Bucolics, William S. Anderson wrote, ‘Van Sickle’s,

Design, has produced the most persuasive portrait of the Eclogues, arguing cogently for

what he calls an “ideological order”.’ The Design of Virgil’s Bucolics argues that Virgil

composed his ten eclogues as parts of a system: the Book of Bucolics conceived as a

concerted whole. The report of frequent theatre presentations showed that Virgil caught

attention with dramatic flair, masking an ideological program that grew to encompass

motifs of a returning Golden Age and new myth, providing cover for the Caesarist regime,

casting the poet as a prophet, and laying groundwork for the Georgics and Aeneid.

An extensive new Introduction to this second edition reviews developments and

shortfalls in recent work on the Bucolics.

JOHN B. VAN SICKLE is a professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the Brooklyn

College and Graduate School, City University of New York. He is the author of many Virgilian studies,

including A Reading of Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue (1992) and Poesia e potere. Il mito Virgilio (1986).

FEBRUARY 2005

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