Vergil and the Georgics | Dickinson College Commentaries

Of Vergil’s three major works, the Georgics is likely the least read and the least well understood. The Eclogues, charming and short, bring Greek pastoral into a Roman world, and the Aeneid, ubiquitous and required for all Latin readers, has for millennia been Rome’s greatest epic. The Georgics suffer as all middle children do, and for years seemed to be read not for what the poem might have to say, but rather as a window into the development of Vergil’s poetics and the eventual composition of the Aeneid.

The Georgics have fared slightly better since the turn of the twenty-first century, as interest in agriculture came into fashion among urban dwellers divorced from the land (not unlike, perhaps, the fashion for the Georgics in Vergil’s own day). Yet, it will aid the reader to know something of the circumstances of the composition of these agricultural verses, to better appreciate how book 4 fits into the whole.

The Georgics is an example, at its most basic, of a genre we call didactic poetry. This genre goes back at least as far as Hesiod’s Works and Days, and examples of didactic poetry combine the two strands inherent in the label: a poem in verse meter on a practical topic for instruction. It is not a genre that has much appeal today, but the wide variety of examples in both Greek and Latin demonstrate its interest for the ancients. It was a genre that flourished in the Hellenistic period: most notable, perhaps, are Aratus’s Phaenomena, Nicander’s Theriaca, Alexipharmaca and Melissurgica. Given the influence of other Hellenistic Greek works on the Eclogues (Theocritus) and the Aeneid (Apollonius), it should not come as a surprise that Vergil was lured by Hellenistic didactic poetry and decided to try his hand at crafting a Roman exemplar.

Though readers and scholars seem to enjoy having a laugh at an ancient didactic poet’s expense, when he blunders about animal behavior or misunderstands the scientific rationale for a natural phenomenon, we should do our best to curb this impulse, not least because Vergil’s knowledge of such matters is not all bad. One might attribute this to first-hand knowledge of agriculture—and while it may be true, it is pure speculation. Yet, the Romans were avid collectors, translators, and writers of agricultural texts. Many of these are lost to us, except for the odd phrase. We find the names of more than fifty Greek agricultural sources in Varro’s Res Rusticae (1.8-9), as well as testimony about the superiority of the Carthaginian work of Mago, which the Senate had translated into Latin (Pliny HN 18.22–23). The Georgics demonstrates a familiarity with an array of agricultural writings and conforms in many places to what earlier authors, such as Aristotle, Xenophon, Theophrastus, Varro, or Cato the Elder, tell us of farming and the natural world in their prose treatises. While I cannot guarantee that Vergil read Varro and other writers before composing the Georgics, I find it incredibly likely, given the level of concinnity in numerous passages. Would you want to use the Georgics as your sole agricultural guide as a farmer? Probably not. Could you do worse? Most definitely.

Like the Eclogues and the Aeneid, the Georgics are written in a meter called dactylic hexameter, and are divided into four books, each of which addresses a different agricultural topic: field crops (grains), trees and grape vines, animal livestock, and honeybees. Notable for its absence is a discussion of vegetable gardening (which the agricultural writer Columella attempts to rectify much later in a poetic homage in his tenth book). This structure gives a sense of the Georgics as part of these earlier traditions, especially the Hellenistic, where topics tend to be addressed discretely. Yet, as a work of poetry, and not an actual agricultural handbook, Vergil organizes the four books with a series of interlocking structural and thematic motifs. For example, Books 1 and 2 deal with plants, Books 3 and 4 with animals; Books 1 and 4 address the proem to Maecenas, 2 and 3 to divinities of crops and flocks; Books 1 and 3 address disasters for the farmer, whereas Books 2 and 4 represent an idyllic natural landscape. Such structural pairings are numerous, but the point is not to send the reader on a hunt for these motifs and framing devices. Rather, one can see the care with which Vergil attempts to interweave the themes, actions, and tales of the agricultural world, created in a work of four books whose tension between these contrasting elements allows it to cohere.

While the structure of the poem—along with its deep engagement with both the poetry and the didactic literature that preceded it—suggest a master technician with an explicit agenda, it may be best to think about this poem with those who treat it as profoundly ambiguous. There is too much at work in it to permit a single interpretation or meaning. Unlike the Hellenistic models which often appear to endorse a specific goal or interpretation, Vergil’s Georgics instead asks the reader to wander with him into an agricultural milieu that is informed by the past but awaiting an undetermined future, and as such to find meaning in the tensions produced therein.

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