by Virgil
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First published as The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon by The Gallery Press,
Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland in September 2004
This revised translation and Translator’s Note © Peter Fallon 2004, 2006
Editorial material © Elaine Fantham 2006
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1
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
VIRGIL
Georgics
Translated by
PETER FALLON
With an Introduction and Notes by
ELAINE FANTHAM
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
GEORGICS
PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO (VIRGIL) was born near Mantua in northern Italy in 70 BCE. He was educated at the larger town of Cremona and finally at Milan. He moved to Rome around 52 BCE, but spent most of his time thereafter in the (then) congenial surroundings of the Bay of Naples. He wrote the Eclogues in the period circa 42–39 BCE. Around the year 38 he joined the circle of poets in the entourage of Maecenas, the future imperial ‘Minister for the Arts’. The composition of the Georgics occupied him from 37 or earlier until 29. He spent the rest of his life working on his epic poem, the Aeneid. He died at Brundisium in 19 BCE after abandoning a visit to Greece and Asia on which he intended to complete and perfect his epic.
PETER FALLON grew up on a farm near Kells in County Meath. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was Writer Fellow in 1994. He was inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2000. He founded The Gallery Press in 1970 and has edited and published more than 400 titles. His own books include News of the World: Selected and New Poems (1998). He lives in Loughcrew in County Meath.
ELAINE FANTHAM was educated at Oxford and taught first at the University of Toronto (1968–86) then Princeton University (1986–2000). She is author of commentaries on Seneca’s Trojan Women, Lucan, Civil War, Book 2, and Ovid, Fasti IV, of Roman Literary Culture, and most recently of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Oxford Approaches to Literature) and The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Virgil
GEORGICS
BOOK ONE
‘What tickles the corn to laugh out loud …’
BOOK TWO
‘Thus far I have been singing of working the land …’
BOOK THREE
‘You too, Pales, great goddess of the folds …’
BOOK FOUR
‘Which brings me to heaven’s gift of honey …’
Explanatory Notes
for Adam
… cecini pascua rura duces
I sang of farms and fields and men who lead
Virgil, on his deathbed
INTRODUCTION
Virgil’s Poem of the Land
Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet we know as Virgil, was born and spent his childhood in the fertile countryside of Andes, near the ancient Etruscan city of Mantua, ‘by the waters | of the wide Mincius whose ambling course flows this way and that, | its sides tossing their fringe of wavy rushes.’ (Georgics 3.13–15). We think of Mantua as Italian, but it and most of northern Italy had been inhabited by Gauls (Celtic tribes) until they were brought under Roman control by a series of campaigns ending about a century before Virgil’s birth, on 15 October, 70 BCE. Geographically continuous with Roman territory, this region, roughly corresponding to Lombardy, was still treated in Virgil’s youth as outside Italy proper, and governed as the province of Cisalpine Gaul. The elite acquired Roman citizenship through holding local magistracies, and were linked in family or friendship with Roman society, but the peoples of the Po basin would not become Roman citizens until their last governor, Julius Caesar, had the power to impose a law giving them citizenship when Virgil himself was in his twenty-first year, in 49 BCE.
Despite various reports by his biographers Virgil’s father must have been a relatively prosperous farmer—or even landowner—and he was culturally ambitious, like the parents of Virgil’s poetic predecessor Valerius Catullus from Verona, and of the contemporary historian Titus Livius (Livy) from Padua. He sent his son away to be educated, first for elementary instruction in language and literature at Cremona, then to Milan, and finally to prepare for public life by studying rhetoric at Rome itself.1 But Virgil was not physically strong or socially confident, and his father must have realized that his son was unsuited for the standard career of a lawyer or army officer. In fact both father and son may have taken active steps to avoid being involved in the civil war which broke out when Julius Caesar defied the Senate’s attempts to control him and re
-entered Italy with an army at Ariminum (near Mantua), in Virgil’s twentieth year. The civil war divided the loyalties of many families, and most young Romans were caught up in the fighting between Caesar’s forces and the forces of the senate commanded by Pompey, in northern Greece and later in North Africa and Spain.
Once the Aeneid made Virgil famous legends grew up around him, and a body of hexameter poems were ascribed to him; these, together with the poems and epigrams of the so-called Catalepton (‘Miniatures’), were believed to be his youthful compositions.2 Two epigrams are thought to be genuine and reflect the conflict between conventional education, his love of poetry, and his inclination to philosophy. One (Catalepton 5) puts rhetoric behind him, but cannot quite part with poetry:
Away! you hollow hype of the rhetoric teachers, words inflated with un-Greek froth, and you tribe of pedants … dripping with unguent; away! you hollow cymbals of youth, and farewell to you, preoccupation of my affections, Sextus Sabinus, farewell my fine fellows. We are setting sail for the blessed harbours, in search of the wise words of great Siro, and we have freed our life of all preoccupation.
Away! Muses, you too, go now, sweet Muses (for I admit the truth—you have been sweet to me), and yet come back to visit my notebooks, but seldom and with restraint.
Siro was the respected Epicurean teacher who lived in private simplicity at Naples, the city given autonomy by Rome out of respect for its Greek origin and culture. We do not know how long Virgil stayed with Siro, but he writes in the coda to the Georgics (about twenty years later) that he is ‘lying in the lap of Naples, quite at home | in studies of the arts of peace’ (Georgics 4.563–4). Another short poem (Catalepton 8) seems to look back with loving memory on Siro and his little world:
Little house that belonged to Siro, and poor little plot, real riches for him as master, I commend myself to you and along with me the friends I have always loved and foremost my father, should I hear any grim news of my country. You will now be for him what Mantua had been, and Cremona earlier still.
It is difficult to rid ourselves of hindsight and preconceptions, but we should realize that the young Virgil had no reason in 40 BCE to imagine he would compose anything like the Georgics, an unprecedented poem, or his great epic. He had clearly read and loved Lucretius and Catullus, and poets like Catullus’ friend Calvus and the love-elegist Cornelius Gallus, whose work is now virtually lost to us. But what he did compose, some time between 40 and 35 BCE, were his Bucolics or Eclogues, a set of ten hexameter poems, apparently simple shepherd songs modelled on the pastoral poems of Theocritus, a sophisticated third-century poet from Cos who wrote for the courts of Syracuse and Alexandria.
Virgil’s Eclogues vary from skilful imitations of the song contests imagined by Theocritus, to the ecstatic prophecy of the new golden age (Eclogue 4) that would begin with a marvellous child, and tributes to the mythical and erotic poetry of his predecessor Gallus (Eclogues 6 and 10): most are apparently set in Sicily or in Arcadia, the hilly and remote land of the Peloponnese. But two poems, the first and the ninth, are set in Virgil’s homeland and reflect some of the hardships its people suffered from renewed civil war after Caesar’s death. Several cities in Virgil’s region, notably Cremona, were obliged to Mark Antony as patron and had joined his supporters against Octavian. When Octavian emerged as victor he penalized them by confiscating their land to provide homes and farms for his veteran soldiers, and it seems that Virgil’s family property was treated as the territory of Cremona and would have been forfeit if Asinius Pollio, the historian and destined consul of 40 BCE had not intervened to restore it.3 Little as we know about what happened, these two Eclogues reflect the uneven fortunes of local farmers. In the first poem Meliboeus contrasts Tityrus’ fortune to be resting in his own shade when Meliboeus himself must leave ‘the boundaries and sweet ploughlands of home’.4 There is disruption all over the countryside, and he fancies that he will have to go to alien lands like Africa or Syria. In contrast, Tityrus explains that he went to Rome where a divine young leader gave him both his freedom (he has been a slave until now) and his land. It is not good land, mere pasture covered with stones and choked with marsh, but it is cool with springs and alive with birds and bees.
Tityrus treats the young leader as a god and will offer him monthly sacrifice. This is Virgil’s tribute to Octavian, whether or not it reflects his own experience.5 The ninth Eclogue is more melancholy. Moeris is going to town with a gift for the new owner of his land, and tells Lycidas how the stranger came and evicted him with the crude words, ‘this property is mine: old tenants, out!’ It seems that Moeris was farming as a tenant, and with the change of ownership has been expelled. Lycidas had heard that Menalcas (usually considered to be Virgil himself) had saved all this stretch of land ‘from where the hills | begin to drop down, sloping gently from the ridge, | right to the water and the old beeches’ broken crown’, by his songs. If we read this poem literally then Virgil’s appeal to power has been in vain, at least for Moeris. The two shepherds travel together for the first part of their way recalling Menalcas’ songs (snatches of verse from Eclogues 2, 3, and 5) and looking forward to Menalcas’ return.
Did Virgil return? It is likely that his property survived, if only because he came early to the notice of Octavian’s friends, both Asinius Pollio, administering his land grants in the region, and Cilnius Maecenas, who used his wealth to sustain poets such as Virgil, Horace, Propertius. Virgil’s biographers claim he spent three years composing the Eclogues, and seven on his next, more ambitious poem, the Georgics, whose four books he read to Octavian over four successive days on Octavian’s return from Actium and Alexandria in 29 BCE.6 Donatus also offers a glimpse of how he worked, composing a number of verses in the early morning, then spending the day refining and reducing them to a very few, licking them into shape—so he said—like a mother bear her cubs. Seven years would place the beginning of Virgil’s new poem in 36 BCE, in harmony with the evidence for his friendship with Maecenas and the appearance in 37 of a very important prose work on Italian farming, the 80-year-old Varro’s De re rustica. Varro’s three books, the first on arable farming, the second on pasturing cows, horses, sheep, and pigs, and the third on villatica pastio, small-scale garden operations like beekeeping, provided a potential framework for Virgil’s art.7
The title Georgics probably needs more than one English equivalent to convey its meaning, because it relates both to the Greek phrase for ‘working the land’ and to the noun geourgos, or ‘farmer’: we could call it ‘the farmer’s life’, but Virgil’s stress is as much on the continuing relationship between the worker and the earth as it is on his daily or yearly work. Virgil’s poems too are very difficult to describe or analyse, for several reasons: part agricultural manual, with instructions to the farmer on dealing with crops, vines, and olives, livestock, and (surprisingly) bees, they are also in part political poem and allegory. Although they are usually classified in the Greek and Latin tradition of didactic verse, they are an entirely new kind of poem. The four books are balanced against each other in a complex structure that can be characterized in many ways; the world evoked by the poem is caught up in a critical moment for Rome and Italy as the chaos of civil war is becoming a benevolent but unacknowledged monarchy; and we as readers risk blinding ourselves to what Virgil is (and is not) saying with our previous sentimental attachments to the countryside or to Italy itself.
It is perhaps best to start with the tradition of ‘didactic poetry’.8 This is not a genre recognized by ancient critics even a century after Virgil’s death, but it has become a useful critical category. One obvious division is between poetry that teaches how to exercise an art, and poetry that sets out a body of knowledge—such as the map of the stars (Aratus before Virgil, Manilius after him) or at its most ambitious the nature of the material world described by the Epicurean Lucretius in his great poem in six books On the Nature of the Universe. This poem sets out the atomic structure of the physical world, of our psychological world, an
d of climatic and cosmic phenomena. If Virgil revered his Epicurean teacher Siro, he still rejected Epicurean beliefs about divine indifference, and passionately advocated devout worship of the gods. But the powerful language of Lucretius’ poetry had a greater influence on Virgil’s language in the Georgics than any other Latin poet. The other kind of didactic, that gave instruction in an art or sport, looks like a model for Virgil to instruct the farmer, but normally took a far more trivial form, providing exercise for the many educated amateurs to compose works on hunting or dicing, and a conventional framework for Virgil’s most talented successor, Ovid, to create his parodic Art of Love.
As recent scholarship has shown, Virgil has applied in his Georgics not only the learning of Greek and Roman prose treatises but a wealth of poetic memories from Homer, whose heroic narrative poems were also seen by the ancient world as a source of teaching, from Hesiod’s two great poems, Works and Days and Theogony with their precepts for good farming and virtuous living in relation to men and gods, and from a range of Alexandrian poets.9 Besides Aratus, whose weather lore Virgil adapts extensively in Book 1 of the Georgics, Virgil adapts Eratosthenes’ account of the five zones of the globe, Nicander’s poem on serpent venom and its cures (Theriaca) and surely at least in part Nicander’s Georgica.10 It is also important to take into account the aetiologies and narrated myths of Callimachus’ Aitia, his composite collection of elegies in four books, which have more subtle equivalents in the framing of Virgil’s own four books. Virgil does not plaster allusions onto the continuous thought of his poetry but incorporates echoes and reminiscences for his poetry-loving readers to enjoy.
One defining aspect of ‘didactic’ is its non-narrative, descriptive or prescriptive content: another is its addressee. But no poem has more levels of addressee than the Georgics. An addressee may be pupil or patron, as Memmius, however unsatisfactory, was pupil and patron of Lucretius. But Virgil’s patron Maecenas is not his pupil. In each book Virgil addresses Maecenas, with a simple apostrophe in the second line of his text in Books 1 and 4 and with a more detailed account of his intention in Books 2 (lines 39–46) and 3 (lines 40–5), where he describes his enterprise as ordered by Maecenas (‘no little task that you’ve laid out for me, Maecenas’). But once addressed, Maecenas plays no part in the main body of each book. Virgil’s pupils are supposedly the farmers whom he often addresses, but it is difficult to identify what kind of farmer Virgil had in mind. In any case it is unlikely that his reader would consider making his own plough from found timber (1.169–75). Virgil offers instructions as an allusive tribute to Hesiod, who had done so in the earliest Greek poem on farming, his Works and Days. Well-off Romans all owned land, or aimed to do so, and had it farmed by slaves under the supervision of a bailiff; they valued the land as a superior source of produce for their own use, but also for the market. Less-well-off Romans and Italians usually made intensive use of the little land they possessed, and Virgil provides a delightful, if fantastic, example of such a humble gardener in his account of the old man of Tarentum (4.125–48).11 But in his poem he exploits a Roman linguistic feature, which credited a man with doing whatever he had done for him by subordinates, to instruct the farmer directly.12 He may use impersonal phrases of obligation, or describe the farmer’s task and methods, or use the second person either in straight imperatives or advisory future tenses, but he will not mention slaves: there is only the occasional generic reference to countrymen or tenants. As Seneca said (Epistulae Morales 86.16), Virgil was essentially composing his poem not to instruct actual farmers but to give pleasure to his readers. (It is not within the scope of this introduction to discuss Italian crops or farming methods: some useful works are listed in the Select Bibliography.)
