Virgil's Garden

The bucolic natives are aware of the presence of Rome, and Virgil himself is free to enter their world. Virgil's bucolic space is, in many ways, a poetic replication of the public and private gardens of his Roman audience - enclosed green spaces which afforded the citizen sheltered social and cultural activities, temporary respite from the turbulence of public life, and a tamed landscape in which to play out the tensions between the simple ideal and the complexities of reality. 'Virgil's Garden' looks at the 'Eclogues' in terms of the relationship between its contents and its cultural context, making connections between the 'Eclogues' and the representational modes of Roman art, Roman concepts of space and landscape, and Roman gardens.