D.'s purpose in this book is twofold: to argue that Virgil's Eclogues are concerned with the question of how humans can achieve felicity (or eudaimonia); and to illustrate how their negotiation of this theme may have been informed by Epicurean thinking. Through detailed readings of eight of Virgil's ten eclogues (3 and 7 are the ones to miss out) and frequent citations of Epicurean writers such as Philodemus, Lucretius and Epicurus himself, D. succeeds in promoting both these contentions as productive and plausible hypotheses.

What will perhaps persuade many readers of the validity of D.'s two premises are the extremely clear, coherent and remarkably tidy interpretations they enable him to offer of individual eclogues, as well as of the collection as a whole. This is also an effect of the commendably clear and well-structured way in which he presents his argument,Footnote ¹ but it would seem to support too his contention that he has indeed extricated some recurrent threads in Virgil's text. Prominent amongst these are the numerous allusions to Lucretius which, he argues, ‘engage substantive issues concerning human felicity and its discontents’ and ‘constitute “systemic allusions” to the thought of the Epicurean school and provide an ethical frame of reference for describing the predicament of the poets/herdsmen’ (p. 164). Any interpretative framework that can make such coherent and meaningful sense of the Eclogues' exchanges with the De rerum natura is very much to be welcomed.

D.'s central argument is that the Eclogues address situations of intense suffering and that the manner in which they do so is infused with Epicurean language and thought. The world their herdsmen inhabit, he contends, is one of vicissitude, in which the only thing they have any hope of controlling is their attitude to the losses they suffer (of land, fellow singers and love). This, D. demonstrates, was the Epicurean world view too and he proceeds to illustrate how that school's belief that human suffering was increased by the pursuit of excessive, insatiable and so-called ‘empty’ passions, as well as the remedies and techniques of consolation they proposed in response, find their parallels in the Eclogues. In D.'s view, for instance, Tityrus in Eclogue 1 makes a genuine attempt to help Meliboeus recognise that his current sufferings may not necessarily last for ever, but that they are – like his own current good fortune – the result of uncontrollable, quixotic forces which could just as readily be reversed. Likewise, he asserts that Tityrus does in the end offer Meliboeus the best kind of consolation he can under the circumstances: food (of a recognisably Epicurean variety), company and a place to stay the night. Corydon in Eclogue 2, meanwhile, (like Gallus in 10) is held both to display the kind of excessive, insatiable and empty passion diagnosed by Epicurus and to find an appropriately Epicurean remedy when he finally acknowledges the destructive consequences of this futile passion and resolves to move on to other lovers instead. Neither of these readings reflects the majority view at the present moment and each is, indeed, a good example of how D.'s focus on Epicureanism and the issue of human felicity can lead to some refreshingly unfashionable interpretations of these poems. Other notable examples include the claim that Silenus' promiscuity at the start of Eclogue 6 constitutes a healthier way of coping with desire than the obsessive and ultimately tragic stories of passion rehearsed in his song, and the observation that the cyclical conception of time presented in Eclogue 4 points to the fragility of any Golden Age it might be held to prophesy.

It should none the less be acknowledged that, while several of D.'s readings challenge current orthodoxies in this way, they are seldom especially new. Anyone familiar with studies of the Eclogues produced before the past two decades or so will recognise both the general characterisation of the collection offered here and many of the minutiae. Given this, D. might have done more to clarify the ways in which ‘the current efflorescence of international scholarship on the Herculaneum papyri, and the proliferation of recent studies that have refined our understanding of Epicurean thought’ (p. 1), which he says motivated his study, have also opened up new readings of the Eclogues – or at least added nuance to earlier approaches which similarly viewed them as poems of loss and consolation informed by Epicurean philosophy. D. himself describes his approach as ‘unfashionable’ (p. 4) and ‘somewhat revisionist in orientation’ (p. 2) rather than revolutionary as such, and much of his purpose in writing this book seems to have been to instigate a reintegration of the ethical and philosophical elements of the Eclogues which, he believes, have been largely neglected in recent times. As he states in the very last sentence of the book: ‘There is need for future scholarship on Vergilian poetics oriented towards developing a comprehensive, systematic study of these multiple codes’ – of which the ‘eudaimonist ethical conversation’ he traces here is but one – ‘and of their imbrication in the thematic texture of the Eclogues’ (p. 170). There is no doubt that much of the value of D.'s book resides in the coherent and convincing manner in which it reintroduces a way of reading the Eclogues that has fallen largely out of fashion. I would like to close this review, however, by reflecting on how successful or otherwise it might prove to be in constructing a platform upon which a systematic study of the kind it advocates might be founded.

D. sets up his discussion by identifying a tendency among recent studies of the Eclogues to assert a clear distinction between poetry on the one hand and philosophy on the other, and to focus solely on the former at the expense of the latter. There is far too much misinterpretation, misrepresentation and phantom-slaying in the subsequent fleshing out of this picture, but the point is none the less made that when it comes to Virgil, poetry and philosophy are fundamentally intertwined and should thus be interpreted together. At their best, D.'s readings provide good examples of how this might be done. He displays a sophisticated sense of how the Eclogues employ a variety of rhetorical forms and is particularly good on how their often amoebaean structure allows them to explore alternative points of view. Most intriguingly of all, he indicates ways in which the Eclogues' Epicurean interests may have shaped their reception of Theocritus as well as Lucretius.

One senses, however, both from his account of his own critical practice and from his somewhat condescending characterisation of recent studies of the poetic practices of the Eclogues, that D.'s understanding of the relationship between the poetry and the philosophy of these poems (and, indeed, the very manner in which these two nodal units are here constituted) is too rigid and hierarchical to allow entirely for the systematic reading he desires. Indicative of the problem is his tendency to refer to the Eclogues' ‘bucolic scaffolding’. No matter how one spins it, this label will always imply that form is ultimately detachable from content and that the latter can accordingly remain standing on its own. This is by no means either a sole or a solely lexical slip and it is difficult to see how a systematic reading of the Eclogues which takes both their so-called poetic and their so-called philosophical dimensions into account could ever be fully realised when the relationship between them is so heavily skewed. This prejudice is also reflected in the far too simplistic caricature of recent studies of the poetics of the Eclogues. While D.'s book is very much to be welcomed, then, precisely because it weaves together such clear and coherent readings of the Eclogues from threads that are very distinct from those which have tended to dominate recent depictions of these poems, it is more than likely that they – along with the tidy pictures they present – would have to be unpicked and knitted together in quite a different way before the collage for which it calls could ever truly begin to hove into view.