The modern attitude to ancient pastoral — that is to say, the attitude of the contemporary reader of ancient poetry, in which I naturally include the contemporary teacher of ancient poetry — is in need of reformation. Misformed by the preciosity of eighteenth century bucolic and the reductive strictures of Johnsonian rationalism, misshaped by the nineteenth century's post-Romantic aversion to ‘imitation” and ‘artifice” (the aberrations of Conington and Page — ‘The Eclogues idealise reality and render it artificial” — are still in evidence) and by its limited conceptions — ‘misconceptions” would be more accurate — of ‘originality’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘sincerity’, ‘reality” and ‘truth’, misfashioned by the hierarchical imperatives of the theory of literary kinds, the prevalent contemporary attitude (there are distinguished exceptions) to ancient pastoral poetry is distancing, trivialising, condescending and cosy — ‘cosy” because unaffected by the spiritual life of the poems themselves, their intellectual, moral and aesthetic stringency, determination, significance.