by Virgil
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.
Book One
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 con
sidering 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.
Book Two
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 tre
es, rushes, and reeds that provide wattle and fencing for the farm.