eclogue
eclogue,the term for a short pastoral poem, comes from ηκλογή (a choice), the title given in Greek to collections of elegant extracts. The Latinized form ecloga was used, however, for any short poem and attached itself particularly to Virgil 's pastorals which their author had called bucolica, a name commonly applied to the Idylls (εìδύλλια——short descriptive poems) of Theocritus that Virgil had imitated. The terms eclogue, bucolic, and idyll have been widely used as synonyms, except that grammarians have made an effort to confine ‘eclogue’ to poems in dialogue form. The alternative spelling ‘aeglogue’ was prompted by a mistaken derivation from the Greek αíξ, a goat.
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