by Virgil
White, K. D., Roman Farming (Ithaca, NY, 1970) is a comprehensive introduction.
Critical Studies
Conte, G. B., ‘Proems in the Middle’, Yale Classical Studies, 29 (1992), 147–59.
——— ‘Aristaeus, Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic’, in Sarah Spence (ed.), Poets and Critics Read Virgil (New Haven, 2001).
Dalzell, A., The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid (Toronto, 1998).
Farrell, J., Virgil’s Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History (Oxford, 1991).
Gale, M., Virgil on the Nature of Things (Oxford, 1999). Griffin, J., ‘The Fourth Georgic and Rome’, in id., Latin Poets and Roman Life (London, 1985).
Klingner, F., Virgils Georgica (Zurich, 1963).
Miles, G., Virgil’s Georgics: A New Interpretation (Berkeley, 1980).
Morgan, L., Patterns of Redemption in Virgil’s Georgics (Cambridge, 1999).
Perkell, C. G., The Poet’s Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil’s Georgics (Berkeley, 1989).
Putnam, M., Virgil’s Poem of the Earth (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
Ross, D., Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton, 1987).
Thomas, R. F., Reading Virgil and his Texts: Studies in Intertextuality (Ann Arbor, 2000). This volume gathers a number of his important articles on the Georgics since 1982.
Veyne, P., ‘L’Histoire agraire et la biographie de Virgile dans les Bucoliques I et IX’, Revue de Philologie, 1980, 233–57.
Volk, K., The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford, 2002).
Wilkinson, L. P., The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge, 1969).
——— ‘Virgil’s Theodicy’, CQ 13 (1963), 73–84.
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West.
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville, ed. Don Fowler and Peta Fowler.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. C. Day Lewis, ed. Jasper Griffin.
——— The Eclogues and Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis, ed. R. O. A. M. Lyne.
A CHRONOLOGY OF VIRGIL
All dates are BCE.
70
Crassus and Pompey consuls: Virgil born 15 October at Andes near Mantua.
55
Crassus and Pompey consuls for second time. Virgil comes of age; goes away to study at Milan and Rome.
49
Civil war breaks out; Caesar occupies Italy, has himself elected dictator at Rome. Pompey and Republican forces evacuate to Epirus, followed by Caesar. (It is likely that Virgil withdrew to the neutral safety of Naples now if not earlier, to avoid fighting and to study philosophy. We do not know when he returned to live in Rome.)
48
Caesar defeats Pompey and Republicans at Pharsalus; Pompey assassinated by Egyptian king. Caesar in Egypt until 47.
44
15 March: assassination of Caesar. Octavian declared his heir, supported by the Senate against Mark Antony.
43
‘Second’ triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus.
42
Octavian and Antony defeat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.
41
Octavian besieges and sacks Perusia, held by supporters of Antony, and begins confiscation of land from northern cities to settle his veterans.
40
Virgil’s 4th Eclogue honours Pollio’s consulship. (The book of Eclogues took three years to write but was complete before 35. During these years Virgil was befriended by Maecenas, and given a house on the Esquiline: he probably spent more time at Rome from now on.)
36
Octavian defeats Sextus Pompeius at Naulochus.
35
Georgics begun this year; the work takes Virgil seven years.
31
Octavian defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium.
30
1 August: Octavian occupies Alexandria.
29
Georgics completed: read by Virgil to the returning Octavian. Virgil must have begun the Aeneid now if not earlier: it is reported to have taken him eleven years.
27
Octavian returns formal control of Republic to Senate and is given the title ‘Augustus’. (During this decade the critic Caecilius Epirota began to give young men formal instruction in Virgil’s poetry along with the work of the New Poets of Catullus’ circle.)
23
Virgil reads Aeneid 2, 4, and 6 to Augustus and his sister Octavia after the death of her son Marcellus.
19
Virgil travels to Greece, falls ill while returning with Augustus, and dies at Brundisium. (The Aeneid, which he had wanted to destroy as unfinished, was published at an unknown date by order of Augustus, possibly edited by his friends Varius and Tucca.)
GEORGICS
BOOK ONE
What tickles the corn to laugh out loud, and by what star
to steer the plough, and how to train the vine to elms,
good management of flocks and herds, the expertise bees need to
thrive—my lord, Maecenas, such are the makings of the song
I take upon myself to sing.
Sirs of sky,
grand marshals of the firmament,
O Liber of fertility, and Ceres, our sustaining queen,
by your kind-heartedness Earth traded acorns of Epirus
for ample ears of corn and laced spring water with new wine;
and you, O Fauns, presiding lights of farming folk
(come dance, O Fauns, and maiden Dryads,
your gifts I celebrate as well); and you, Neptune, whose trident’s
10
booming tap on rock first fanfared to bring forth a snorting horse;
and you, patron of shady woods, whose many hundred head of cattle
fatten, pristine, in the chaparral of Ceos;
and you too, Pan, abandoning your native groves and glades of Lycaeus,
caretaker of the flocks, if Maenalus means anything at all to you,
come to me, O god of Tegea,* a friend and comforter; and you, Minerva,
who first discovered olives; and that youth, too, creator of the crooked plough;*
Sylvanus, too, who carries on his back a sturdy cypress, ripped up from the roots—
20
a god or goddess each of you, whose care and concern is
for land, who nurtures crops not grown from seed,
and who dispatches onto plantings heavy showers from the heavens;
and I address you too, O Caesar,* although none knows the gathering of gods
in which you soon will be accommodated, or whether you would choose
to oversee the city or be in charge of countryside, nor knows if the wide world
will come to honour you as begetter of the harvest or as master of the seasons
(around your brow already a garland of your mother’s myrtle),
or whether you will come as lord of endless sea, and seafarers will worship you,
your power alone, and the ends of earth bow to you in homage,
30
and Tethys forfeits all her waves to have you as a son-in-law,*
or whether you will add a new star to the zodiac* to quicken months
where there’s a lull between Virgo and Libra which comes after it
(already ardent Scorpio contracts its claws for you
and allots to you more than your fair share of sky).
Whatever you will be (let not the nether world of Tartarus hope to have you
as its king, nor ever such a dread ambition lord over you,
however much Greece knows the wonders of Elysian fields
and Proserpina pays her mother little heed although she hears her calling her*),
grant me an easy course, and bless the boldness of this undertaking—
40
who shares my sympathy for countrymen whos
e lives are wanderings in the dark—
look forward now, expert already in the ways to answer our entreaties.
Come the sweet o’ the year, when streams begin to melt and tumble down the hoary hills
and clods to crumble underneath the current of west winds,
it’s time again to put the bull before the deep-pointed plough to pull his weight
and have the share glisten, burnished by the broken sod.
There’s the crop, which twice has felt a touch of snow and twice of frosty weather,
that is a beggared farmer’s prayer come true.
That’s the one to fill his sheds until they’re fit to burst.
And yet before we take our implements to unfamiliar territory
50
we must work to ascertain its changing weather and winds’ moods,
to learn the ways and habits of that locality—
what’s bound to flourish there, and what to fail.
For here you’ll find a crop of grain, and there grapes growing in thick clusters,
and over yonder young trees thriving and grasses coming into green all on their own.
Can’t you see how scented saffron comes from the uplands of Lydia,
ivory from India, incense from soft-hearted races of Arabia;
and we get iron from unclothed inhabitants of Pontus, slimy castor from the Black Sea,
and the choice of mares for breeding from a region in north Greece?
Right from time’s beginning, nature assigned these laws to last for ever,
60
each in its specific place, fixed such compacts from the moment
Deucalion cast onto the world the stones from which mankind
originated, a hardy race!*
And so onward!
From the sun’s first tender touch, run your mighty teams
through fertile fields, tossing sods about
for baking heat to break them down to dust.
But if you’ve not got high yielding soil you will do well
to rake it with a shallow sock by the shine of that time’s brightest star,
to ensure either that weeds won’t block the way for wholesome crops
or that a bare sandy plot retains whatever moisture’s there.
70
Take turns to let the land lie fallow after it’s been harvested,
let fields left to themselves recuperate and renew themselves with firmer footing
or, with a switch of season, set down, say, tawny emmer or einkorn,
where once you’d gathered an outpour of pulses
with their rustling pods, or drawn spindly vetch
and bitter lupins’ brittle stalks and susurrating stems.
For it’s a fact and true, a crop of flax will parch a place,
as will wild oats, as will a sprawl of poppies doused in their forgetfulness.
That said, you’ll lighten loads of routine by rotation.
Don’t spare dry land its fill of dung,
don’t hesitate to spread a heap of grimy ashes on spent fields.
While your land gets a chance to rest by changing crops
80
don’t think that all the while your fallow isn’t earning a return.
Frequently there’s much to gain by setting flame to idle acres
and letting their thin stubble burn—either because it helps
engender some weird force and rich feed for the soil
or because the fire scalds all its faults and failings
and sweats out baleful moisture.
Or is it that the heightened heat unclogs the pores and opens passages
through which the sap ascends into new shoots
or makes clay even firmer by closing yawning waterways
so that it isn’t blasted by a fall of rain or sun’s excessive benison
or the bite of freezing winds that batter from the north?
90
And as for that, great is the good he does a field who with a mattock breaks apart
its lumps and clumps, then with a wicker hurdle harrows it,
earning a look he likes from Ceres high on her Olympian heights,
just as he contributes much who raises flat land into ridges
by ploughing one way, then cross-ploughing,
and regularly works his lands and keeps a tight rein on his holding.
The countryman should pray for wet summers and mild winters;
100
corn delights in hiemal dust. Then the country’s in good heart—
there’s nothing brings out better in places such as Mysia,
and Gargarus* can be amazed by its own harvests.
Need I single him for praise who follows
hard on the heels of setting seed by crumbling heaps of unreceptive soil
and steering into tracks streams to irrigate the plantings?
And when the countryside’s aglow and all that grows is withering in the heat
see how he conjures water from the brim to spill downhill in sloping channels,
a flow that grumbles over gravel, gushing onward
to allay the thirst of scorched places.
110
Or indeed the one who, to ensure that stalks won’t lodge beneath
the weight of ears, grazes to the ground the tender shoots
that grow in such profusion as soon as they clear the furrow’s ridge,
or that one who drains swamp-gathers in a soak-pit,
especially in the course of those unsettled months when rivers burst
their banks and smear mudspills everywhere on everything,
causing steam to rise again from hollows.
And don’t imagine that, for all the efforts and exertions—
man’s and beast’s—to keep the sod turned over, there’s not a threat
from plagues of geese, or Strymon cranes, from bitter roots of chicory,
120
nor hurt or harm in shade of trees. For it was Jupiter himself
who willed the ways of husbandry be ones not spared of trouble
and it was he who first, through human skill, broke open land, at pains
to sharpen wits of men and so prevent his own domain being buried
in bone idleness. No settler tamed the plains before our Father held his sway
and it was still against the law to stake a claim to part of them.
Men worked towards the common good and the earth herself,
unbidden, was lavish in all she produced.
And it was he who instilled in snakes their deadly poison,
bade wolves to prowl, and seas to surge.
130
He shook down honey from the leaves and had all fires quenched.
He stopped the flow of wine that coursed rampant in the rivers
so that by careful thought and deed you’d hone them bit by bit,
those skills, to coax from furrows blades of corn
and spark shy flame from veins of flint.
That was the first time ever hollowed alders sailed on water,
and seagoing men began to number, and then name, the stars—
the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Lycaon’s child, the glittering Great Bear.
Then men came up with ways to try to trap wild animals, by setting snares