Integrity exacts a price from an artist. Take the case of painter George McNeil (1908-1995). A fixture of the New York School, McNeil refused to pose with his peers in a 1950 photo shoot for Time magazine. As the story has come down through his...

In the essay below, Sellar discusses the order of composition of Vergil's Eclogues and maintains that Vergil's earlier poems are imitative of Theocritian poetry. After Vergil mastered the form, rhythm, and diction of the pastoral, Sellar notes, he increasingly demonstrated originality in his choice of subject and in the truthful manner in which he treated his subject.

In the following essay, Coleman identifies elements of Theocritus's pastoral poetry that would later influence Vergil and discusses the chronology and arrangement of the Eclogues. Coleman concludes his overview of the Eclogues by observing that although Vergil's range of themes is somewhat conventional, his details are almost entirely original, and his poetic technique is mature.

In the following essay, Segal studies the literary relationship between Eclogues One and Nine, emphasizing that Vergil's treatment of political issues in these poems is that of a poet rather than of a historian.