Fun Fact

Bucolic poetry became a literary genre in ancient Greece, where poets idealized shepherd life as simple, peaceful, and free from urban corruption. Theocritus pioneered these pastoral poems in the 3rd century BCE, and Virgil later perfected the form in his “Eclogues.” The bucolic tradition often presents a romanticized countryside that glosses over the hard realities of rural labor—it’s the pastoral fantasy rather than the farming truth. Today, when we call something bucolic, we’re still invoking that same idealized vision of country peace that poets have been selling for over two millennia.