Eclogue, ek'log, as commonly used, a pastoral poem in which shepherds are introduced as conversing with one another. The word originally meant "selections," or "elegant extracts." In this sense it was applied often to poems of the same form. The satires of Horace, for instance, were called eclogues. The bucolics or pastoral poems of Virgil were called eclogues, probably by grammarians, and not by Virgil himself. Since Virgil's beautiful poems were called eclogues the term has come to signify a poem which is not only of a pastoral nature, but which is elegant in form, highly wrought, and exquisitely finished.