Calpurnius Siculus and the Transformation of Pastoral

Calpurnius Siculus is a marginal poet: his collection of Eclogues has no secure date, and he wrote in a genre considered minor, bucolic poetry, under the shadow of his great predecessor Vergil. This book treats his marginal status as an opportunity to explore questions about how literary tradition developed in imperial Rome. Setting historical context aside, it reads the collection with an exclusive focus on its literary qualities. It proposes a new dynamic model of intertextuality that sees the poet fragmenting his predecessors’ texts to use often discordant pieces as generative seeds for a new poetics. The chapters explore how the collection presents the process of becoming a pastoral poet; how it treats core generic features of pastoral, responsion of human and natural sound and bucolic competition; and how it interacts with new literary developments following the composition of its dominant predecessor text, Vergil’s bucolic collection—and finally returns to the question of the date and proposes a new approach that can be applied beyond pastoral.