VIRGIL HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN MY TOP-FIVE HEROES LIST, right behind Robin Hood. He wasn’t so good with pike or bow, but he got Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory.
Midway through Purgatory, Dante and Virgil meet the swaggering Italian poet Sordello. “So who are you?” Sordello asks of the tall shade that walks beside Dante.
Virgil responds by saying that he is the poet whose funeral was presided over by Octavian Caesar, Emperor of Rome. It dawns on Sordello just who he is talking to, and the Italian falls on his knees.
“O glory of the Latins!” he exclaims, as all poets have since then. Virgil was author of the Aeneid, the epic of the founding of Rome. But he wrote another epic too, one that was equally famous during his lifetime. It is the Georgics, a long poem about dirt.
The Georgics were composed at a crucial moment (36–29 B.C.) in Roman history. Julius Caesar was dead. Marc Antony bid fair to fill the power vacuum, while the young Octavian Caesar waited in the wings. Then, with the suddenness of a single battle, Octavian was in power, the Roman Republic was a thing of the past, and Rome was embarked upon its era of greatest influence and affluence.
The usual modern idea about the Georgics is that Virgil wrote them to look back in longing toward a simpler time. The turmoil of the incipient empire, according to this view, made for a market in nostalgia. This is rather like calling Virgil a back-to-the-lander, and it sounds suspiciously like the arguments that dismiss Jeffersonian agrarianism as a backward-looking romantic ideology, irrelevant to our times.
Yet perhaps we are the ones who have it backward. Perhaps it is our time that looks through the wrong end of the telescope, and so can scarcely make out a large truth that Virgil, his patrons, and readers—and Jefferson, too—knew well. Nobody needed the information that Virgil put into the Georgics; indeed, he took a fair amount of it from his contemporary Varro, whose De re rustica (On Farming) was the best agricultural manual of its time. Virgil wrote the book for another reason.
Husbandry is the art of daily life, of observation and response. It is not simply a list of practices, but an attitude toward living that entails honesty and economy. In the writing of it, Virgil is the poet of a whole way of life. Among the finest descriptions in Latin literature is that with which he begins the book:
When Spring is new, and frozen moisture thaws
On white-clothed mountainsides, and crumbling soil
Is loosened by the West Wind, let your bull
Begin to groan beneath the pressing plough
And the well-worn ploughshare gleam from the rub of the furrow.
Economical and deeply erotic, the description brings the reader from the cosmic to the local in the space of less than fifty words, a precis of the book. Through the succeeding lines, Virgil tells the farmer how to match his wishes to the “native traits and habits of [each] place.”
How different is this relationship to place from the hysterical and hurrying ways in which we typically regard our yards, farms, and homes! A rhythmic and measured relationship to time is one of the prime virtues that the Georgics note. The husbandman is also for Virgil a type of the just man.
The farmer lives in peace, his children all
Learn how to work, respect frugality,
Venerate their fathers and the gods:
Surely, Justice, as she left the earth,
In parting left her final traces here.
Husbandry, to Virgil, is a question of right scale and right relationship, an economy bound by trust as much as by fear. And he is under few illusions that it is easy to practice. The Georgics are a challenge thrown in the face of his times.
But we think we know better. We know that a patron of Virgil’s sold his business and moved to the country after reading one of the pastoral eclogues (a poem in which two shepherds converse), only to regret it quickly and return to the bank. We know, too, Flaubert’s delicious pillorying, in Bouvard and Pecuchet, of the petit bourgeois pair whose efforts to return to the land are comically thwarted.
We think we know better, but we do not take into account all those who have indeed established a new relationship to the land. Robert Frost was one. Another was the writer Louis Bromfield, who, having conquered Broadway, Hollywood, and Europe, returned to the Ohio farm valley of his childhood and wrote three classics about the farm he founded there. At the end of Pleasant Valley, the first of these books, he thanks the land for giving him “the richest and fullest life that I have ever known.”
The cynic says, “So what! Did these guys make a living off those farms? No, they were writers, so they didn’t have to.”
But what if their first thought were not simply to “make it pay,” but to be paid in the coin of food for honest work? Work is itself a form of pay. We are now entering a time when there is so little real work left, that people will pay a great deal to be allowed to do it. I think of all the archaeological digs, the cattle drives, and tree plantings that people will pay for the privilege of participating in. What is prosperity anyway? Is it money in the bank, or is it a fulfilling life?
In the heyday of the Roman Republic, around 150 B.C., things were not so different from things now. Cato the Elder, the first of the great Roman agricultural writers, characterized economic life in this way:
The pursuits of commerce would be as admirable as they are profitable if they were not subject to so great risks: and so likewise, of banking, if it was always honestly conducted. For our ancestors considered, and so ordained in their laws, that, while the thief should be cast in double damages, the usurer should make four-fold restitution. From this we may judge how much less desirable a citizen they esteemed the banker than the thief. When they sought to commend an honest man, they termed him good husbandman, good farmer. This they rated the superlative of praise.
An honest relationship to work requires a human scale. The multiplications of potential occasioned by banking make possible vaster-scale enterprises, but run the risk of turning wish to greed. Already at the time of Cato, finance was beginning to take its toll on agriculture, driving individual farmers off the land and instituting a system that resulted in ever-larger farms run either by tenants or, increasingly, slaves.
Virgil counseled, “Admire a large estate, but work a small one.” With the expansion of Roman territory and the need to defend it, however, the countryside gradually became depopulated. A large estate became the norm, a small farm the rare exception.
Already in his time, the slave-worked farm was common. Rome had lost over 300,000 men in the Punic Wars, most of them farmers. Consequently, the slaves who had been brought in to replace them during the conflict remained when the war was over. The land passed into the hands of absentee landlords, a gentry who themselves lived in the cities.
By the time of the first-century writer Columella, Rome had a vast urban infrastructure and a population dependent upon the produce of slave-run farms operating on the margins of the empire. In the cities, the masses lived on handouts of bread made from wheat from these farms. Columella, though he extolled the virtues of the independent farmer, recognized the influence of both the banker and the lawyer in destroying farms. The lawyer’s profession, he reports, was called a canine one, because it consisted in barking at the doors of rich men.
Meanwhile, the far-flung empire needed more and more defending. Taxes increased, conscription was general. Though the government made it possible with one hand to keep slaves on the farm by offering proprietors the right to buy them out of military service, on the other hand, the government imposed such crushing taxes on the produce of the fields that the entire harvest might scarcely repay the cost of growing it.
Farmers, caught between a shortage of labor and uneconomic crops, began to abandon the land. As they did so, it was left bare, open to the rains. The earth eroded, and the fields were destroyed. In this respect, Rome fell not under the pressure of the barbarians, but from her own measureless girth, which destroyed her relationship to daily life.
Recently, I asked the writer and farmer Wendell Berry why he continued to work the marginal land of his farm on the banks of the Kentucky River. As he himself said, probably no one else would choose to farm it after him. And he didn’t make a profit on the farm, though its produce dependably supplied his family with much of their subsistence.
His children are grown and gone. On a rainy day, it looks almost as though the farm were going to slip into the muddy brown river. Why keep doing it? “For forty years,” he said, “this farm has been the best education that I ever had.”