The poet-herdsmen of Vergil's Eclogues employ differing strategies for coping with acute loss, whether external (e.g. land dispossession) or internal (amatory rejection). The interplay of ideas latent in several of their songs is typically framed in terms of Epicurean concepts.

Gregson Davis, Ph.D. (1969), University of California at Berkeley, is Professor of Classics at New York University. His publications on Latin poetry include articles on Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and the monograph Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (1991).