The Aeneid Read Free

work written on the subject, the De Re Rustica of Varro, which had been published in 37-36 B.C. Of Virgil’s four books the first is on field crops, the second on trees, the third on herds, and the fourth on bees. The only source of sweetness available to the ancient Western world was honey—hence the importance of bee-keeping. Virgil’s poem, with its devotion to the land, the crops, and the herds, fits admirably into the old Roman ideal: the Roman farmer is equally adapted to work on the land and to do the work of a soldier in the legion in time of war. The model was the legendary figure Cincinnatus, who in 458 B.C. was called from his farm and given dictatorial power; he rescued the state by defeating the Aequi and, after holding supreme power for sixteen days, resigned it and returned to his plow. But the Georgics is no more a real manual for the soldier turned farmer than the Augustan ideal of the Roman soldier-farmer was realistic; as a manual for farmers the Georgics has huge omissions and as a practical handbook would be as useless as Augustus’s program of re-creating the Roman farmer-soldier was impractical. Most of Italy was cultivated by slave labor on land owned by absentee landlords who lived in Rome. The Georgics is a work of art—as Dryden declared, “the best Poem by the best Poet”—on which Virgil worked for seven years; he compared his work on it to that of a mother bear licking her cubs into shape.
    In the opening lines of the poem, addressed to Maecenas, he announces the subject of the four books:
    What makes the corncrops glad, under which star
To turn the soil, Maecenas, and wed your vines
To elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks,
All the experience thrifty bees demand—
Such are the themes of my song.
    (1.1-5, trans. Wilkinson)
     
    With an invocation of the country gods, Virgil proceeds to describe the farmer’s life of hard work as in his model, Hesiod. Later he writes about the weather signs that the farmer must recognize as prophecies of what is to come, sometimes evil, as he ends the book with memories of the recent civil wars, of Roman blood shed on the fields of Greece, and with a finale that is a prayer and a dark vision of the future:
    Gods of our fathers, Heroes of our land . . .
Do not prevent at least this youthful prince
From saving a world in ruins . . .
For right and wrong change places; everywhere
So many wars, so many shapes of crime
Confront us; no due honor attends the plow.
The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt . . .
. . . throughout the world
Impious War is raging.
    (1.498-511)
     
    Book 2 is concerned with trees and vines, principally with the olive and the wine grape. There is much good advice here for the farmer, but the book is notable not only for the hymn of praise for Italy already quoted, but also for its praise of the happy life of the farmer as compared to that of the city dweller:
    How lucky, if they know their happiness,
Are farmers, more than lucky, they for whom,
Far from the clash of arms, the earth herself,
Most fair in dealing, freely lavishes
An easy livelihood . . .
. . . Peace they have and a life of innocence
Rich in variety; they have for leisure
Their ample acres, caverns, living lakes,
. . . cattle low, and sleep is soft
Under a tree . . .
    (2.458-70)
     
    Book 3 is concerned with the breeding and raising of farm animals: horses and cattle in the first part and sheep and goats in the later section. After an exordium in which Virgil promises to celebrate the victories of Octavian, a promise fulfilled in the Aeneid, he proceeds to his subject. His discussion of farm animals contains the famous lines that apply equally to the human animal:
    Life’s earliest years for wretched mortal creatures
Are best, and fly most quickly: soon come on
Diseases, suffering and gloomy age,
Till Death’s unpitying harshness carries them off.
    (3.66-68)
     
    Virgil ends this book, as he did Book 1, on a sad note: an account of a plague that struck cattle