Virgil’s Poem of the Land
Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet we know as Virgil, was born and spent his childhood in the fertile countryside of Andes, near the ancient Etruscan city of Mantua, ‘by the waters | of the wide Mincius whose ambling course flows this way and that, | its sides tossing their fringe of wavy rushes.’ (Georgics 3.13–15). We think of Mantua as Italian, but it and most of northern Italy had been inhabited by Gauls (Celtic tribes) until they were brought under Roman control by a series of campaigns ending about a century before Virgil’s birth, on 15 October, 70 BCE. Geographically continuous with Roman territory, this region, roughly corresponding to Lombardy, was still treated in Virgil’s youth as outside Italy proper, and governed as the province of Cisalpine Gaul. The elite acquired Roman citizenship through holding local magistracies, and were linked in family or friendship with Roman society, but the peoples of the Po basin would not become Roman citizens until their last governor, Julius Caesar, had the power to impose a law giving them citizenship when Virgil himself was in his twenty-first year, in 49 BCE.
Despite various reports by his biographers Virgil’s father must have been a relatively prosperous farmer—or even landowner—and he was culturally ambitious, like the parents of Virgil’s poetic predecessor Valerius Catullus from Verona, and of the contemporary historian Titus Livius (Livy) from Padua. He sent his son away to be educated, first for elementary instruction in language and literature at Cremona, then to Milan, and finally to prepare for public life by studying rhetoric at Rome itself.1 But Virgil was not physically strong or socially confident, and his father must have realized that his son was unsuited for the standard career of a lawyer or army officer. In fact both father and son may have taken active steps to avoid being involved in the civil war which broke out when Julius Caesar defied the Senate’s attempts to control him and re-entered Italy with an army at Ariminum (near Mantua), in Virgil’s twentieth year. The civil war divided the loyalties of many families, and most young Romans were caught up in the fighting between Caesar’s forces and the forces of the senate commanded by Pompey, in northern Greece and later in North Africa and Spain.
Once the Aeneid made Virgil famous legends grew up around him, and a body of hexameter poems were ascribed to him; these, together with the poems and epigrams of the so-called Catalepton (‘Miniatures’), were believed to be his youthful compositions.2 Two epigrams are thought to be genuine and reflect the conflict between conventional education, his love of poetry, and his inclination to philosophy. One (Catalepton 5) puts rhetoric behind him, but cannot quite part with poetry:
Away! you hollow hype of the rhetoric teachers, words inflated with un-Greek froth, and you tribe of pedants … dripping with unguent; away! you hollow cymbals of youth, and farewell to you, preoccupation of my affections, Sextus Sabinus, farewell my fine fellows. We are setting sail for the blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siro, and we have freed our life of all preoccupation.
Away! Muses, you too, go now, sweet Muses (for I admit the truth—you have been sweet to me), and yet come back to visit my notebooks, but seldom and with restraint.
Siro was the respected Epicurean teacher who lived in private simplicity at Naples, the city given autonomy by Rome out of respect for its Greek origin and culture. We do not know how long Virgil stayed with Siro, but he writes in the coda to the Georgics (about twenty years later) that he is ‘lying in the lap of Naples, quite at home | in studies of the arts of peace’ (Georgics 4.563–4). Another short poem (Catalepton 8) seems to look back with loving memory on Siro and his little world:
Little house that belonged to Siro, and poor little plot, real riches for him as master, I commend myself to you and along with me the friends I have always loved and foremost my father, should I hear any grim news of my country. You will now be for him what Mantua had been, and Cremona earlier still.
It is difficult to rid ourselves of hindsight and preconceptions, but we should realize that the young Virgil had no reason in 40 BCE to imagine he would compose anything like the Georgics, an unprecedented poem, or his great epic. He had clearly read and loved Lucretius and Catullus, and poets like Catullus’ friend Calvus and the love-elegist Cornelius Gallus, whose work is now virtually lost to us. But what he did compose, some time between 40 and 35 BCE, were his Bucolics or Eclogues, a set of ten hexameter poems, apparently simple shepherd songs modelled on the pastoral poems of Theocritus, a sophisticated third-century poet from Cos who wrote for the courts of Syracuse and Alexandria.
Virgil’s Eclogues vary from skilful imitations of the song contests imagined by Theocritus, to the ecstatic prophecy of the new golden age (Eclogue 4) that would begin with a marvellous child, and tributes to the mythical and erotic poetry of his predecessor Gallus (Eclogues 6 and 10): most are apparently set in Sicily or in Arcadia, the hilly and remote land of the Peloponnese. But two poems, the first and the ninth, are set in Virgil’s homeland and reflect some of the hardships its people suffered from renewed civil war after Caesar’s death. Several cities in Virgil’s region, notably Cremona, were obliged to Mark Antony as patron and had joined his supporters against Octavian. When Octavian emerged as victor he penalized them by confiscating their land to provide homes and farms for his veteran soldiers, and it seems that Virgil’s family property was treated as the territory of Cremona and would have been forfeit if Asinius Pollio, the historian and destined consul of 40 BCE had not intervened to restore it.3 Little as we know about what happened, these two Eclogues reflect the uneven fortunes of local farmers. In the first poem Meliboeus contrasts Tityrus’ fortune to be resting in his own shade when Meliboeus himself must leave ‘the boundaries and sweet ploughlands of home’.4 There is disruption all over the countryside, and he fancies that he will have to go to alien lands like Africa or Syria. In contrast, Tityrus explains that he went to Rome where a divine young leader gave him both his freedom (he has been a slave until now) and his land. It is not good land, mere pasture covered with stones and choked with marsh, but it is cool with springs and alive with birds and bees.
Tityrus treats the young leader as a god and will offer him monthly sacrifice. This is Virgil’s tribute to Octavian, whether or not it reflects his own experience.5 The ninth Eclogue is more melancholy. Moeris is going to town with a gift for the new owner of his land, and tells Lycidas how the stranger came and evicted him with the crude words, ‘this property is mine: old tenants, out!’ It seems that Moeris was farming as a tenant, and with the change of ownership has been expelled. Lycidas had heard that Menalcas (usually considered to be Virgil himself) had saved all this stretch of land ‘from where the hills | begin to drop down, sloping gently from the ridge, | right to the water and the old beeches’ broken crown’, by his songs. If we read this poem literally then Virgil’s appeal to power has been in vain, at least for Moeris. The two shepherds travel together for the first part of their way recalling Menalcas’ songs (snatches of verse from Eclogues 2, 3, and 5) and looking forward to Menalcas’ return.
Did Virgil return? It is likely that his property survived, if only because he came early to the notice of Octavian’s friends, both Asinius Pollio, administering his land grants in the region, and Cilnius Maecenas, who used his wealth to sustain poets such as Virgil, Horace, Propertius. Virgil’s biographers claim he spent three years composing the Eclogues, and seven on his next, more ambitious poem, the Georgics, whose four books he read to Octavian over four successive days on Octavian’s return from Actium and Alexandria in 29 BCE.6 Donatus also offers a glimpse of how he worked, composing a number of verses in the early morning, then spending the day refining and reducing them to a very few, licking them into shape—so he said—like a mother bear her cubs. Seven years would place the beginning of Virgil’s new poem in 36 BCE, in harmony with the evidence for his friendship with Maecenas and the appearance in 37 of a very important prose work on Italian farming, the 80-year-old Varro’s De re rustica. Varro’s three books, the first on arable farming, the second on pasturing cows, horses, sheep, and pigs, and the third on villatica pastio, small-scale garden operations like beekeeping, provided a potential framework for Virgil’s art.7
The title Georgics probably needs more than one English equivalent to convey its meaning, because it relates both to the Greek phrase for ‘working the land’ and to the noun geourgos, or ‘farmer’: we could call it ‘the farmer’s life’, but Virgil’s stress is as much on the continuing relationship between the worker and the earth as it is on his daily or yearly work. Virgil’s poems too are very difficult to describe or analyse, for several reasons: part agricultural manual, with instructions to the farmer on dealing with crops, vines, and olives, livestock, and (surprisingly) bees, they are also in part political poem and allegory. Although they are usually classified in the Greek and Latin tradition of didactic verse, they are an entirely new kind of poem. The four books are balanced against each other in a complex structure that can be characterized in many ways; the world evoked by the poem is caught up in a critical moment for Rome and Italy as the chaos of civil war is becoming a benevolent but unacknowledged monarchy; and we as readers risk blinding ourselves to what Virgil is (and is not) saying with our previous sentimental attachments to the countryside or to Italy itself.
It is perhaps best to start with the tradition of ‘didactic poetry’.8 This is not a genre recognized by ancient critics even a century after Virgil’s death, but it has become a useful critical category. One obvious division is between poetry that teaches how to exercise an art, and poetry that sets out a body of knowledge—such as the map of the stars (Aratus before Virgil, Manilius after him) or at its most ambitious the nature of the material world described by the Epicurean Lucretius in his great poem in six books On the Nature of the Universe. This poem sets out the atomic structure of the physical world, of our psychological world, and of climatic and cosmic phenomena. If Virgil revered his Epicurean teacher Siro, he still rejected Epicurean beliefs about divine indifference, and passionately advocated devout worship of the gods. But the powerful language of Lucretius’ poetry had a greater influence on Virgil’s language in the Georgics than any other Latin poet. The other kind of didactic, that gave instruction in an art or sport, looks like a model for Virgil to instruct the farmer, but normally took a far more trivial form, providing exercise for the many educated amateurs to compose works on hunting or dicing, and a conventional framework for Virgil’s most talented successor, Ovid, to create his parodic Art of Love.
As recent scholarship has shown, Virgil has applied in his Georgics not only the learning of Greek and Roman prose treatises but a wealth of poetic memories from Homer, whose heroic narrative poems were also seen by the ancient world as a source of teaching, from Hesiod’s two great poems, Works and Days and Theogony with their precepts for good farming and virtuous living in relation to men and gods, and from a range of Alexandrian poets.9 Besides Aratus, whose weather lore Virgil adapts extensively in Book 1 of the Georgics, Virgil adapts Eratosthenes’ account of the five zones of the globe, Nicander’s poem on serpent venom and its cures (Theriaca) and surely at least in part Nicander’s Georgica.10 It is also important to take into account the aetiologies and narrated myths of Callimachus’ Aitia, his composite collection of elegies in four books, which have more subtle equivalents in the framing of Virgil’s own four books. Virgil does not plaster allusions onto the continuous thought of his poetry but incorporates echoes and reminiscences for his poetry-loving readers to enjoy.
One defining aspect of ‘didactic’ is its non-narrative, descriptive or prescriptive content: another is its addressee. But no poem has more levels of addressee than the Georgics. An addressee may be pupil or patron, as Memmius, however unsatisfactory, was pupil and patron of Lucretius. But Virgil’s patron Maecenas is not his pupil. In each book Virgil addresses Maecenas, with a simple apostrophe in the second line of his text in Books 1 and 4 and with a more detailed account of his intention in Books 2 (lines 39–46) and 3 (lines 40–5), where he describes his enterprise as ordered by Maecenas (‘no little task that you’ve laid out for me, Maecenas’). But once addressed, Maecenas plays no part in the main body of each book. Virgil’s pupils are supposedly the farmers whom he often addresses, but it is difficult to identify what kind of farmer Virgil had in mind. In any case it is unlikely that his reader would consider making his own plough from found timber (1.169–75). Virgil offers instructions as an allusive tribute to Hesiod, who had done so in the earliest Greek poem on farming, his Works and Days. Well-off Romans all owned land, or aimed to do so, and had it farmed by slaves under the supervision of a bailiff; they valued the land as a superior source of produce for their own use, but also for the market. Less-well-off Romans and Italians usually made intensive use of the little land they possessed, and Virgil provides a delightful, if fantastic, example of such a humble gardener in his account of the old man of Tarentum (4.125–48).11 But in his poem he exploits a Roman linguistic feature, which credited a man with doing whatever he had done for him by subordinates, to instruct the farmer directly.12 He may use impersonal phrases of obligation, or describe the farmer’s task and methods, or use the second person either in straight imperatives or advisory future tenses, but he will not mention slaves: there is only the occasional generic reference to countrymen or tenants. As Seneca said (Epistulae Morales 86.16), Virgil was essentially composing his poem not to instruct actual farmers but to give pleasure to his readers. (It is not within the scope of this introduction to discuss Italian crops or farming methods: some useful works are listed in the Select Bibliography.)
I have postponed one unprecedented addressee, the one who usually causes most alienation in modern readers, Caesar (Octavianus), the future Augustus, who is not simply addressed but invoked as a god-in-the-making for half of Virgil’s great divine invocation opening Book 1. Unlike Rome’s first agricultural writer, M Porcius Cato, writing more than a century earlier, Varro had given his De re rustica a religious setting—at the festival called Sementiva (Sowing) in the temple of Tellus—and an invocation to twelve gods who sustain all the produce of the fields on earth and in the sky: Jupiter and Tellus (Earth), the great parents, Sun and Moon as markers of the seasons, Ceres and Liber (Bacchus), Robigo and Flora, the negative and positive powers controlling the fruiting of blossom, Minerva and Venus, goddesses of the olive and the vegetable garden, Lympha, the spirit of running water and Bonus Eventus (Happy Outcome). Virgil, too, follows his brief enumeration of contents with a multiple invocation, to twelve gods or groups of gods: Sun and Moon (‘grand marshals of the firmament’), Liber and Ceres, then the country demigods, ‘Fauns, and maiden Dryads’, Neptune as patron of horses, and a hero new to Latin cult, Aristaeus, ‘patron of shady woods’, Greek Pan, ‘caretaker of the flocks’, Minerva as patroness of the olive, Greek Triptolemos, ‘that youth … creator of the crooked plough’, and Sylvanus, all gods ‘whose care and concern is | for land’ (lines 21–2). It is at this point that he turns to Octavian.
While the traditional gods have been addressed because they protect the farmer’s world, Virgil assumes that Octavian too will become a god, and the only issue is whether he will choose to be god of earth or sea or sky (given apotheosis as a constellation). He appeals to the young leader both for his poem and for the farmers: ‘grant me an easy course, and bless the boldness of this undertaking— | who shares my sympathy for countrymen whose lives are wanderings in the dark’ (lines 40–1). Virgil asks Octavian to join him in taking pity on the inexperienced farmers and accept their vows and prayers.
Poets had traditionally invoked the Muses or Apollo to inspire their work; now for the first time a poet appeals to a mortal—and subsequent poets would feel bound to pay homage in this way to princes and emperors. The political power of Octavian is paramount and the extreme hardships of civil war explain the real urgency of the poet’s treatment. Octavian is not addressed again in the Georgics but he is kept prominent. At the end of Book 1, as Virgil recalls the sun showing pity for Rome at Julius Caesar’s death and the portents reflecting divine distress and anger, he turns to ‘Romulus, god of our fathers, strength of our homes, our mother Vesta’, begging the gods not to begrudge Octavian to men on earth, but spare him to quell wars that have robbed the fields of farmers, vicious civil wars and foreign uprisings over the entire earth. In the closing image the young charioteer who must fight his team for control of the reins is Octavian himself.
Octavian is only glimpsed in Book 2, warding off the remote and unwarlike Indians from the Capitol (2.170–)13 —but is central to the extraordinary and grandiose proem to Book 3. In this Hellenistic tour de force, Virgil echoes the celebratory odes composed for victorious athletes by Pindar, and Callimachus’ poem honouring the chariot victory of his Alexandrian patron Queen Berenice which similarly opens the third book of his Aitia.14 But first Virgil rejects the old mythological subjects focusing on Hercules and Pelops (who won a bride and a kingdom by cheating in a chariot race), and proclaims his desire to win lasting poetic fame15 and bring ‘the prize of the Muses’ back to Mantua (3.3–15). He will erect a temple to Caesar (Octavian) and make him the centre of the poetic celebration. As Octavian himself erected a temple for his deified adoptive father Julius, so Virgil will create—or is now creating— a poetic temple, honouring the victories over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and Alexandria as Octavian did, with a monument (and a city, Nicopolis) and annual victory games. Assimilating himself to both the victor in the fourhorse chariot race (line 18) and the Roman magistrate who presided (line 21) over the sacrifice at festivals and the celebratory games and races, Virgil plans to make his beloved Mincius the envy and destination of all Greece. To the races (appropriate to his treatment of horse-breeding) he adds a theatre, such as Roman magistrates often constructed for temporary performances, with conquered barbarian peoples (and not yet conquered, such as Britain, Parthia, and India) on the stage curtains and temple doors, and he adorns the scene with precious statues of (Caesar’s) Trojan ancestors, while jealousy and sin are trampled underfoot like enemy captives (lines 24–39).
Scholars are divided on whether Virgil is already anticipating his next great poem, which will become the Aeneid, or enacting the imperial praise by these verses. It is difficult for modern readers to accept this pomp, particularly in the simpler context of the Italian farm, but this is the book in which Virgil will celebrate thoroughbred warhorses and sacrificial bulls (already honoured in 2.145–8); a brief allusion to pasturage (represented as Dryads’ woods) and to Maecenas’ commands is matched with a promise which seems to commit the poet more explicitly to a patriotic epic: ‘That time’s not far away when I’ll have girt myself to sing of Caesar’s hard-fought battles | and guarantee he’ll live, in name and fame, down all the years’ (3.46–7). And Octavian will return at the end of Book 4, the close of the work, depicted in a thundering attack on the rebellious Euphrates, ‘adding victory to triumph, winning the war for people who appreciate his deeds, | and laying down the law—enough to earn his place in heaven’ (4.561–2).16 Military triumph is the prerequisite of legitimate empire and the ruler’s role as lawgiver and just judge that Hesiod too saw as the mark of kings cherished by the gods. What is new is the expectation of actual divinity.
I have lingered over these elements in the hope of making them less strange to readers who approach this poem with a romantic yearning for rural simplicity. Within its courtly frame the Georgics soon gets down to earth, but involves the reader in a constantly changing play of emotions. Structurally, Virgil’s four books permit a number of patterns: the gradual increase of partnership between farmer and produce, from anonymous grain and pulse to more individualized vines and trees (protected like children from harsh conditions, 2.265–72), to the ardent ambitions of racehorses in training, the sexual passions of the animal world, and the pathos of helpless small cattle, and finally the complex community of selfless and sexless bees who are assigned to different services (4.149–69) and often ‘pay the final sacrifice— | such is their love for flowers and pride in the production of the honey’ (4.204-5).
Scholars have also stressed the alternation between ‘pessimism’ and ‘optimism’ as the reiterated stress on work in Book 1 (‘Hard work prevailed, hard work and pressing poverty’ 1.146, in Virgil a present statement of the harsh law of nature) gives way to the passages in Book 2 singing praise of Italy, of spring, and of the old-fashioned country life. In the same way Book 3 foreshadows early, with the much-quoted ‘Poor creatures that we are, the best days of our lives | are first to fly’ (3.66–7), the progressively more distressing accounts, first of desperate animal (and human) passion, then of sickness and death polluting the countryside, aborting sacrifice, and reducing men to draught animals dragging their own carts and ploughs (3.536). But the sickness that destroys Aristaeus’ bees in Book 4 is remedied by his obedient and faithful performance of ritual instructions so that this last book ends in a kind of resurrection.
Another ‘structural’ feature is surely the tension between the end of Book 2, seen as closure of the pair of books presided over by Ceres and Liber (1.7–9, cf. Ceres 1.96, 147, 163, 338–50, and Bacchus/Liber, 2.2–8, 229, 380–96, 454–7, 529) and the continuity it invites with Book 3 through its evocation of Rome’s golden past juxtaposed with hopes of present and future glory.
Given the vivid physical world and the multi-layered poetic inheritance of these books, a short introduction17 can only sample some aspects of each book, just as Virgil himself chose only to sample from the instructions which a farmer would require. In considering each book it will be helpful to bear in mind the contrast between the topics Virgil has chosen and what was available to him, especially in Varro’s three books. Varro’s work is both pragmatic and antiquarian in his enjoyment of religious and cultural history. Thus his first book, covering arable farming, vineyards, olive groves, and orchards, shares with Virgil comments on the origin of the animal sacrifices to Ceres and Liber— but while Virgil explains the offering of goats to Liber by their offence in nibbling at young vine stems, he suppresses the offence of pigs sacrificed to Ceres, as he does all discussion of swine, the staple animal of Italian peasant holdings.18 Varro’s second book, like Virgil’s third, focuses on pasturing, but dilates on the antiquity of the pastoral life: it gives pigs (2.4) as much attention as horses (2.7) and in dealing with each animal pays attention to the forms and requirements of sale. And finally the bees which fill Virgil’s last book occupy only one long chapter (3.16) of Varro’s more miscellaneous study of new and exotic foods that can be raised in the gardens and yards around the country house.
In fact the grain crop itself takes up only a small fraction of Book 1 of the Georgics, in which Virgil is preoccupied with the elements: soil and landscape, water and sky, both the predictable seasons of the year and unpredictable weather. He begins with spring ploughing, but turns first to soil quality and choosing the right crop for one’s soil and site, to preparing the land with rake and mattock and supplying it with irrigation and fighting various pests. Well before he adapts his description of how to make a plough from Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil introduces what is often called a theodicy, a myth to justify the incessant and arduous work of the farm, in a reinterpretation of Hesiod’s five races of men, sinking from the happy leisure of the golden race to the vicious warfare of the present age of iron. Before men devised the concept of property, they shared in common the lavish and spontaneous produce of the earth. It was Jupiter who made their lives difficult by creating pests and suppressing wine and honey and natural fire, not to punish men for wickedness as in Hesiod, but to challenge them to work and devise necessary crafts, making boats and steering them by the stars, hunting, fishing, and carpentry, and it was Ceres who taught agriculture when acorns and berries proved too scanty a source of food. This hardship was for man’s own good. Virgil’s god (or gods) is providential, and it is by divine providence that two of the universe’s five climatic zones are tempered (‘a pair of zones is given | by godly grace to pitiful man’) between the icy poles and torrid equatorial region (1.231–51). Here Virgil colours the original Hellenistic description of Eratosthenes, in reaction against Lucretius’ pessimistic portrait of an earth made increasingly unfit for man by adverse climate, terrain, and failing fertility.19 The regularity of the year is a gift of the sun, just as the second part of this book pays tribute to the benevolent signs given by the sun to man of both natural weather and human offences against the gods.
This first book also instructs the farmer in his calendar, using the stars as his guide (cf.1.1–2, ‘by what star | to steer the plough’). Varro had divided the year into eight half-seasons, defined by the winter and summer solstices and the equinoxes, the Favonius or west wind of spring, the rising and setting of the Pleiades, and the scorching season of the Dog Star. Virgil gives a sample, evoking in one verse that fuses half-lines of Homer and Callimachus, ‘the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Lycaon’s child, the glittering Great Bear’ (1.138), and warning (1.335–7) about the need to watch each month’s constellations, and the planets of Saturn and Mercury. Early Greek poets had other ways of marking the calendar, and Virgil offers a sample of Hesiod’s lucky and unlucky days of the moon at 1.276–86, but he does not forget the farmer’s own experiences at different times of day and year— his work after dark in winter as his wife weaves beside him, the gathering of berries and hunting of small game in winter, the tragic wind storms that ruin the crops before harvest, and the rain storms that flood the fields. Rain is in fact the link to his next theme—the non-seasonal weather signs treated by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. Aratus had followed his description of the sky with weather signs drawn from sun and moon and animal behaviour. Virgil reverses the order, because he will bring the book to a climax in the eclipse of the sun in grief over Julius Caesar’s death: so he gives us first the response to coming rain of heifers, swallows, frogs, and ants, of many kinds of birds, seagulls, rooks, and crows in vivid vignettes; to Aratus’ physical details he adds here a denial that the birds were divinely inspired, in favour of a materialist explanation as a physical reaction to change in what we would call barometric pressure (1.374-429). (He will more willingly embrace the divine inspiration of bees in Book 4.)
Moon signs and sun signs are enriched with mythical allusions, as Virgil leads to the many portents that function both as grief for Caesar’s murder and warning of the ensuing civil conflicts. There is a terrible power in the cumulative list of natural disasters world wide (Etna, Germany, the Alps, the Po, and the Thracian battlefield of Philippi), as some future farmer turns up rusty weapons and human bones in his fields which have been robbed of their cultivation by the endless sequence of war (1.471-97). While Virgil often compares the farmer’s struggle with recalcitrant woodland and fields to warfare, this book finds its poignancy in the opposition of farming and killing. Only if the young driver Octavian can control his chariot will peace in the remote empire and between neighbouring (Italian) cities be restored.
The second book is almost exultant with the lavish variety of the land and the exuberant growth of its fruits. It is not surprising that scholars such as Ross and Thomas have protested at Virgil’s eagerness to boast of incredible grafts and credit Italy with equal productivity of soil and manpower.20 There is an excitement which will return in Book 3 (284–93), as Virgil enhances his theme of variety by a parade of exotic products from remote Arabia and India and Ethiopia, but none of these lands can match ‘this land of ours’ (2.140). Varro had begun his study by praising Italy for the abundance and superiority of its products. Virgil maintains this spirit, celebrating Italy’s olives and vines, oxen and horses, with ‘constant spring—and summer out of season’ (line 149) that bring forth double harvests, but also for the achievements of its peoples, cities and towns on mountaintops, rivers and great lakes as well as engineering feats like the ‘Julian harbour’ (created by Agrippa to provide inland naval docks in Campania) and rich mines of silver and gold. The poet actually gives more space to Italy’s manpower and Rome’s leaders, culminating in Caesar, than to her natural glories, saluting the land as ‘holy mother of all that grows, | mother of men’ (lines 173–4).
A survey of different types of land and their varying suitability to different types of farming looks forward to pasture (lines 195–202), back to good ground for grain crops, some brutally cleared of undisturbed woodland ‘the ancient habitats of birds’ (line 209), and to dry soil, barely fit for bees, while thirsty land exhaling mist and rich in grass is good for every kind of farming: prolific in vine-laden elms and in olives, friendly to cattle and responsive to the plough. The farmer needs detailed instruction on how, where, and when to plant his seedlings before the poet refreshes him with a hymn to spring, the season when the marriage of father sky and mother earth nourishes every kind of shoot, season of birdsong and animal desire (line 329 looks forward to Book 3). There must have been the same abundance of thrusting growth at the world’s first creation, when the great globe enjoyed spring and the first cattle and human offspring of earth raised their heads, when beasts were sent to populate the woods, and stars in the sky (lines 336–45). I am paraphrasing to bring out how here, and again towards the end of this book, Virgil leaps back to the beginning of history and associates present country life with an imagined golden past. Virgil’s description of the Bacchic festival, the origin of drama, will find a counterpart in the athletic contests he mentions as the book nears its close: but first he gives brief attention to undemanding olives, to orchard fruits and all the useful trees, rushes, and reeds that provide wattle and fencing for the farm.
After a disturbing afterthought on the harm that can be done by men drunk with abuse of Bacchus’ gifts, Virgil leaves them for a long coda on the blessings of country life, beginning with what ancient rhetoricians called a makarismos: ‘They’re steeped in luck, country people … earth that’s just | showers them with all that they could ever ask for’ (lines 458–60). Here and elsewhere he delights in a wishful thinking that ignores the hardships he himself has spelled out. We know this is no easy living. Why does Virgil encourage such expectations? I believe the explanation lies in the ancient love of paradoxography, the fantasy literature of marvels. This ‘quiet life—carefree and no deceit— | and wealth untold’ (lines 467–8) is a fairy tale such as we all believe when we first plant our gardens or move to a new home—and it quickly gives way to the more realistic ‘young men wed to meagre fare but born and built for work’, but not without Aratus’ myth of the maiden Justice who lingered last among these peasants when she abandoned the earth.21
Does Virgil see himself as one of them? He begs the Muses whose art he loves to welcome him and explain the ways of the natural world (lines 475–82), but if he falters, to let him delight in the country, and live without glory, loving rivers and woods in romantic Greek wilderness. A second makarismos offers another choice of stronger and weaker achievement, contrasting the man who was able to discover the causes of nature and trample fear of death and Acheron under his feet (lines 490–2), with another who only knows the country gods, Pan and old Sylvanus. There is a deliberate blurring here between the life lived and the poetry written, but just as lines 490–2 come so close to naming Lucretius, the poet of the natural world, that we read the man who knows the country gods as another kind of poet, so the earlier choice should probably be taken as a choice of poetic theme rather than between two kinds of life, one of scientific study and one of shepherding. Countryman or country poet: both escape political ambition and the greed that drives men to restless travel, to mercenary warfare and the life of the court, to fratricide and exile. Like Lucretius, Virgil rejects outright the values of the Roman elite.
When Virgil returns for the last time to the farmer he acknowledges the heavy work of ploughing, but ties the unresting toil of the farmer’s year to the abundance he must gather in even in winter. In a final vignette he presents the countryman pouring libations to Bacchus at his festival (line 529; cf. line 388), presiding over a little world of virtuous family, cattle, and young goats, as his shepherds compete in javelin throwing and wrestling. We have seen that this may be a less glorious life than that of the philosophical poet, and more strenuous, but far happier than the way urban Romans seek their glory. Now just as Virgil saw the beauty of each spring as like the primeval spring of creation, so he sees the happiness of country relaxation as the life once lived by Romulus and the Etruscan neighbours who made Rome great. It is the original good life of Saturn (first evoked in 1.121–8), before Jupiter became king and men learnt to feast on their own plough-oxen and make themselves weapons and answer the call to battle. The poet has taken his readers far in space and further in time; no wonder he speaks of unyoking his horses after this immense poetic journey.
The third book begins, as we saw, with the fanfare of Virgil’s proposed poetic temple to Augustus, but this should not obscure its simple invocation to Pales, the patron deity of herds and flocks. Two invocations to Pales divide the book into the treatment of breeding large animals (lines 1–283) and small (lines 295–566), but the first section also invokes Apollo, who once served as a herdsman, and whose Olympian associations are better suited to the heroic themes of breeding thoroughbred horses and sacrificial cattle. Again, Virgil is selective, treating only the ideal female cow and male horse, the training of colts (whose natural ardour for racing he evokes in lines that will return to describe the Trojan oarsmen in Aeneas’ boat-race), the protection of pregnant cows and mares, and the battles of bulls for supremacy. In keeping with his words in Eclogues 3.101, ‘alike to herd and herdsman love is ruinous’, he builds the climax of this section out of the universal passion: ‘Man and beast, each and every race of earth, | creatures of the sea, domesticated animals, and birds in all their finery, | all of them rush headlong into its raging fury’ (lines 242–4): at its heart Leander’s desperate crossing of the Hellespont to visit his beloved Hero (lines 258–63) is matched by the unbridled ferocity of mares (lines 264–83) until Virgil realizes he has been carried away by his theme and turns to vulnerable sheep and goats.
Virgil’s gentle precepts for pasturing sheep in Italy’s mild climate are offset by ethnological portraits of shepherding in the extreme heat of Libya and cold of Scythia which serve to make Italian herding seem more idyllic, and this contrast is reinforced in the grim account of the onset of plague in remote Noricum, a narrative based on the human plague which ends Lucretius’ poem. Two vignettes bring out the horror of this epidemic in terms of Virgil’s own values of work and devotion to the gods: the sacrificial animal that dies at the altar leaving unrecognizably diseased entrails (lines 483–93, cf. lines 532–3), and the ox that collapses and dies under the yoke (lines 515–30), despite its hardy innocence of human indulgence. Without their oxen men are reduced to scrabbling in the earth, while the polluted hides and fleeces represent both hideous contagion and the power of evil spirits.22
Book 3 ends in horror, but the fourth book will ascend gradually from the paradox of its prologue, whose ‘humble theme’ is also a whole society of ‘leaders great of heart, its customs, character, and conflicts’ (line 4). The farmer is instructed on how to create the bees’ home and environment and handle their civil wars and migrations—the affinity with human societies is at its strongest when Virgil warns his beekeeper how to choose from rival leaders, and destroy the unworthy pretender (lines 88–99). Unlike the birds foretelling storms, Virgil’s bees are seen as inspired by Jupiter (line 149) with a selfless subordination to the common good, which ensures that though the individual may die the race survives: ‘their ancestral rolls include grandfathers of their fathers’ (line 209). The poet even quotes sympathetically the idea that the bees are inspired, as the whole world is permeated by divine guidance, and instead of death those who perish are reabsorbed and soar to live (like Stoic heroes) among the stars (lines 220–27). But a more realistic mention of sickness leads into Virgil’s most marvellous and incredible claim—that a swarm can be reborn by the magic ritual taught by Aristaeus the first beekeeper, and still practised in exotic Egypt (lines 281–94).23 A physical account of the way Egyptians generate bees from a slaughtered bullock leads from didactic into epic and mythological narrative, by means of an appeal to the Muses to tell the origin of the miracle.
Scholarly tradition claimed that Virgil had originally given over the end of his poem to praises of his older friend Cornelius Gallus, governor of Egypt, and had been obliged to change his poem when Gallus offended Octavian and was disgraced. There could have been some lines honouring Gallus where Virgil introduces Egypt and its great river and peoples, but it is far more likely that there was no rewriting, and we have inherited the Georgics essentially unchanged. The double myth of loss, Aristaeus’ loss of his bees and Orpheus’ repeated loss of Eurydice (first when she was bitten by a snake while running away from Aristaeus, then on their failed return from Hades) has been interpreted in many ways. Aristaeus may strike the modern reader as self-pitying and without initiative in contrast with Orpheus, who braved the underworld and —in versions prior to Virgil—was able to bring back his beloved wife.24 In an important discussion G. B. Conte has brought out the affinities which link the two stories.25 Although Virgil’s Hellenistic narrative form seems to subordinate the Orpheus story to that of Aristaeus (whose irresponsible attempt to rape Eurydice set off this tragic sequence), the two heroes’ parallel situations give them equal significance. Both men have earned heroic stature by their achievements (as farmer, as poet), both have suffered a major loss, both attempt a testing ordeal involving a journey outside the normal world of men (underwater, under earth), but one succeeds, the other fails. Aristaeus earns his success by his devotion (and inventiveness) as a husbandman, but also by his perseverance in the battle with the supernatural shapeshifter Proteus, and obedience to his mother’s instruction, an obedience which is reinforced by Virgil’s apparent repetition of Cyrene’s instructions from lines 531–48 at 548–51. This obedience and endurance make him both a model for the recipient of didactic poetry and a model for the farmer. Orpheus, on the other hand, has narrowed his poetry to the self-regarding lament of the elegist, which alienates him from the community. Yet Virgil has given all his emotional power to Orpheus’ loving lamentation that outlives its poet beyond his own brutal death at the hands of bacchantes.
Both the Aristaeus narrative and the journey of Orpheus to the underworld are Catullan, in the fantasy and beauty of Cyrene’s world under water and the poignancy of Orpheus’ pleas that summon the dead, but the framework of Aristaeus’ assault on Proteus is virtually unchanged from the Homeric account of Menelaus’ capture of Proteus in order to discover his way home from Egypt.26 So how is it that Virgil’s Proteus has just returned to Pallene in Thrace from Carpathos? This suggests the influence of still another Greek source unknown to us; certainly a line of Callimachus’ Aitia associated the old man of the sea with Pallene. This narrative—far from the scientific and didactic tradition— looks both backward to the new kind of miniature epic like Catullus 64, and forward to the Aeneid, where the first book contains many echoes of Virgil’s bee community in the account of the new colony of Carthage, and the sixth book offers another, much fuller, descent to the underworld, and similar treatment of the dead.
As Wilkinson showed in his still definitive study,27 the Georgics have remained the least read of Virgil’s poetry, and the work which is best known from passages that are actually extraneous to his formal theme. His contemporaries Tibullus and Horace may well have been moved by the poem to genuine or ironic sentiment over the countryside. Was the moneylender Alfius of Epode 2 a parody of the uncomprehending reception given to the poem by worldly readers? Agronomists took the poem seriously, although Pliny makes specific criticisms and Columella modestly offers as his tenth book the garden poem which Virgil ‘did not have time to write’. Those who have admired and used the poem were either landowners or moralists (or both) like Seneca, who cites it for its comments on human failure, and Montaigne, who found it more perfect than the Aeneid: after its translation by the admiring professional poet and critic Dryden, the Georgics were both read and imitated in eighteenth-century England —though few of us now read Thomson’s The Seasons. But the poem was also studied even in the brutal farming conditions of pioneer Nebraska, if the narrator of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia stands for his author. He first reads the Georgics while studying at university, and is moved first and foremost by those sad lines of Book 3, ‘the best days of our lives | are first to fly’ (lines 66–7), but he appreciates the creative spirit in which Virgil expressed a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, to bring the Muse to his own little country, to his father’s fields ‘sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops’.28
Peter Fallon is both a poet and a farmer, and every line of his translation is vivid with the sights and sounds of the countryside. In the past it was relatively easy for students of the Roman world to read the Georgics with less awareness of real country life than of lofty moral and political allusions. These too are in Virgil’s poem, but it is through concentration on its actual landscape and seasonal chores, its plants and creatures to be lovingly tended, that we shall come to understand and value this poetry of the land.