This group meets online to discuss the Latin text of Virgil's Eclogues. It is currently hibernating. If you'd like to be notified when we set a date for our next study, subscribe to the group. You'll receive an announcement a month or so before we start. In the meantime, feel free to browse the archives of our discussion and make use of our links and files.

What kind of people will be in the study I'm hoping that we'll get a mix of students, professional scholars, and amateurs. The only prerequisite: you must be able to read, or at least puzzle out with the aid of a translation, the Latin text.

When you say "study," what do you mean? The goal of this study is to get close to the poems. The first stage in getting close to any poem is to work through it word by word, translating if necessary. If this were a college classroom, we'd probably take turns translating, pausing to discuss vexed points of interpretation as we went. Needless to say, email doesn't work like that. (Chat could, but then we'd have to settle on a time when everyone could log on. Hah!) Instead, we're going to start off each week's discussion with the assumption that everyone has already gone through the poem for that week, looked up the unfamiliar words, and puzzled out the grammar and syntax. This doesn't mean you can't ask a grammar question now and then, it just means that grammar and translation won't be the focus of our discussion.

I came in late. Can I still participate? Sure. Before you jump into the conversation, though, we do ask you to review the messages in the archive. When you're done, you probably won't agree with everything that's been said here, but at least you'll know where we're coming from.