Georgics (Oxford World's Classics)

by Virgil

  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.

  Book Three

  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 Four

  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 te
sting 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.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  A poem is a translation of something experienced or imagined. To read a poem is, further, to translate it, and the attempt to translate poetry involves a way of reading one poem with the hope of constructing or creating another. That act of reading depends on an affinity between one author and another, one world and another. Such translation is the fruit of various languages —the original author’s, the translator’s, and —if it’s a translation from the past—the languages of both times and cultures. Ideally, the translation of a poem by a poet displays attributes consonant with the kind of poems he or she composes.

  My partiality towards the Georgics hinged on more than the fact that, as Elaine Fantham records in her introduction, Virgil’s home place in northern Italy had been, until a century before his birth, inhabited by Celtic tribes. I hovered round it like a bee for years, attracted to its theme of work and the satisfactions and returns of effort. I loved the poetry of this hymn to peace and people. Virgil’s plea for the restoration of traditions and the reestablishment of the essential value of agricultural life accorded with my own coming to consciousness on a farm in County Meath and subsequent engagement in farming at my home nearby in the north midlands of Ireland. While my country struggled to discover new ways to evolve in the tender aftermath of ‘Troubles’, Virgil’s delineation of the griefs and glories of a land in which people tried to found their lives, while their days were adumbrated by a civil war, was a touchstone. I cherished Virgil’s moral force and how he infused his descriptions of a way of life with prescriptions of a way to live.

  I resisted my first impulses to translate the poem, thinking it beyond me. Then I remembered Coleridge’s observation that not all of a long poem is poetry—and I wondered if I might excerpt the more attractive, self-contained passages. My first forays were rhymed and regular in length and rhythm. But later, when I braced myself to tackle all four books, I realized that I could not sustain those patterns. I substituted assonance for end rhymes and let a longer line unfold. I adopted the iambic foot for its tonic stress and employed units of pentameter. I found, however, in this day and age, the straitjacket of a fixed form inadequate for the variety of Virgil’s invocations of divine assistance and the direct evenness of his practical advice, for the plain song of his care for crops, livestock, and bees (his emblem of a good society), and the tragic opera of his recountings of the losses suffered by Aristaeus and, twice, by Orpheus. Such variety, between what can be predicted and what is unpredictable, nowadays invites more than one language.

  I’ve described elsewhere1 the manner in which I came to feel I’d become bilingual in English. On the one hand, there was an idiom I inherited or absorbed by the osmosis of childhood, that I simply knew by listening. On the other, there was a set of references I’d been attracted to and studied at boarding schools and university, and that I learned. Inevitably, I suppose, my transformation and translocation of the poem draws on both linguistic stores and interests. I’ve tried to play variations on them both to reflect the Georgics’ modulations between tracts of documentary material and interludes of heightened drama.

  Occasionally I came on references I didn’t understand (the roasting of red crabs, 4.48), and I resisted the temptation to ‘correct’ passages in which I think Virgil was mistaken—the claim that bees take on pebbles as ballast to ground their flights (4.194-6), the description of a certain quality of soil as ideal (2.250). I turned a blind eye to apparent contradictions about the advantages of letting land lie fallow.

  Allen Tate spoke of the translator’s ‘sieve’, conjuring images of what has been let go, or lost, and what has been preserved. A translator might, therefore, be one who pans for precious minerals. His work aspires to ‘take off’, as in imitation of another (without parodic meanness), and another take off, that uplift into lyric flight. It is a rendering, as in provision of help or a service, or a melting down to clarify, or a processing to extract what’s still usable, and another rendering, as in a performance. It should also be a surrendering.

  Ultimately, the translator’s aim should be to honour the original. I learned along the way I also harboured hopes that I might inscribe the biography of one place in another age.

  I owe grateful thanks to friends for the generosity of their encouragements,
instructive readings, and responses: Brian Friel, Eamon Grennan, Seamus Heaney, Cormac Kinsella, Andrew McNeillie, Bernard O’Donoghue, Dennis O’Driscoll, and Justin Quinn. Further acknowledgements and gratitude are due to Ed Downe and Des Lally at Ballynahinch, and to Jean, Alice, and Adam.

  The text I worked from was edited by R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969) in which he notes the absence of line 338 in Book 4. We are fortunate when we find a guide who earns our trust. His magisterial commentary (1990) led me by the hand through murky depths. I found further help in translations by John Conington, in prose (Longman Green, 1882); L. P. Wilkinson (Penguin, 1982), whose critical survey, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge, 1989) was a godsend; and C. Day Lewis (Jonathan Cape, 1940) who also ‘sang in time of war the arts of peace’.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Texts and Commentary

  Mynors, R. A. B., Virgil: Georgics (Oxford, 1990).

  Thomas, R. F., Virgil: Georgics, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1988).

  For those who read Latin, the commentaries of both Thomas and Mynors are indispensable. Mynors was himself a landowner who planted and maintained his own woodland and Thomas shares his deep love of trees.

  General Background

  Varro, De re rustica, and Cato, De agri cultura, trans. W. D. Hooper and H. B. Ash, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).

  Frayn, J., Subsistence Farming in Rome and Italy (London, 1979).

  Garnsey, P. D., Cambridge Ancient History, vol. xi (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 23, ‘Crop and Climate’, especially sections i-ii, offers a compact and expert survey of Italian conditions.