Dante Alighieri: Ecloga

A Latin pastoral poem in hexameters by Dante Alighieri, written at Ravenna in his last years in reply to a verse letter from the Bolognese scholar Giovanni del Virgilio. Giovanni had reproached Dante for writing his great poem in the vernacular and urged him to compose a Latin epic and come to Bologna to be crowned. In the eclogue Dante, as the shepherd Tityrus, talks with his friend Meliboeus about the message from ‘Mopsus’ and promises to send him ten pails of milk.

The ten pails are generally understood as ten cantos of the Paradiso, with which Dante gently defends his choice of the vernacular. The exchange revived the Virgilian eclogue as a vehicle for personal and literary correspondence and stands at the beginning of the humanist pastoral later practised by Petrarch and Boccaccio. Dante wrote a second eclogue in reply to Giovanni’s answer, and the four poems together form one of the most charming literary exchanges of the fourteenth century.