by Virgil
BOOK THREE
who hasn’t heard of Eurystheus … out of ivory: Juno hated Hercules, her husband’s son by the mortal Alcmene, and ensured that he was enslaved to king Eurystheus and had to perform twelve labours. Hercules slew the cruel Egyptian king Busiris who made human sacrifice of strangers. Hylas, Hercules’ boy-beloved, was seized by water-nymphs at a pool in Mysia on their journey with the Argonauts (Apollonius’ Argonautica had recently been translated into Latin by Varro of Atax, but the only Latin treatments of Hylas known to us are later than Virgil’s Georgics). Delos was the floating island which alone offered Latona a place to give birth to the twins Apollo and Artemis/Diana. Pelops won the hand of the princess Hippodamia (‘the horsetamer’) of Argos and lordship over the Pelop-onnese by cheating her treacherous father Oenomaus in the chariot race. His shoulder was an ivory prosthesis, because the bone had been inadvertently gnawed by a god when the infant Pelops had been served to the gods in a disguised cannibal feast.
live on in the mouths of men: echo of a famous phrase of the second-century epic poet Ennius.
the first… to bring back to my own place from the heights of Helicon: like Ennius and Lucretius before him, Virgil claims to be first in composing this new kind of Latin poetry. The Muses were said to live on Mt. Helicon in Boeotia, near Thespiae, which held festivals in their honour in Virgil’s time.
palms of Idumaea: the victory prizes in the races are called Idumaean because they grew in Palestine.
At its centre I’ll place Caesar: on Virgil’s imagined festival to honour Octavian, see Introduction pp. xx–xxi).
all Greece will leave the Alpheus … Molorchus: the river Alpheus (cf. line 180) ran through Olympia, site of the games in honour of Olympian Zeus; Molorchus was Hercules’ host at Nemea when he founded the Nemean Games. Virgil would know of the humble Molorchus from Callimachus’ poem about this occasion in his Aitia.
Britons … at two far edges of the ocean: Virgil’s list of foreign enemies are chiefly those Octavian is expected to defeat (Britain, raided by Julius Caesar in 54 and 55, not conquered until 41 CE), India—off the map; Egypt (already defeated); Parthia—still to come; the Asian cities which had supported Antony but surrendered to Octavian after Antony’s defeat, and the Niphates range of mountains in Armenia. In ancient geography, the Ocean surrounded India as well as Britain, Spain, and North Africa.
scions of Assaracus: according to Aeneas’ genealogy in Iliad 20.232–40, Assaracus, son of Tros, ‘king of the Trojans’, was grandfather of Anchises and great-grandfather of Aeneas. This was a different branch of the family from the false Laomedon, who cheated Apollo over the building of Troy’s walls (see note to 1.502), who was grandson of Tros by Ilus, and himself father of Tithonus (see note to line 48) and Priam.
Ixion tied to a rotating wheel … the rock that bested everyone: Ixion the Lapith, father of Pirithous, (cf. 2.456 and note) tried to violate Hera/Juno, but she turned into a cloud, from which he begat Centaurus, the father of the race of Centaurs. Ixion was one of the canonical group of sinners punished in Hades. The wheel is traditional, the snakes a novelty introduced by Virgil. The rock had to be pushed uphill by another canonical sinner, Sisyphus of Corinth, but constantly rolled back on him.
Cithaeron… Epidaurus: Cithaeron, between Boeotia and Attica, was, like Spartan Taygetus, a mountain associated with hunting. Epidaurus on the north-east Peloponnese has no known association with horse breeding, and scholars have suggested that Virgil wrote ‘Epidamnus’, in horse-breeding Epirus.
first emergence of Tithonus: the Trojan prince Tithonus, brother of Priam, was loved by the dawn goddess who obtained immortality for him but forgot to request eternal youth. He became a symbol of old age, equivalent of Methuselah.
Cyllarus … to the rein: Cyllarus was traditionally ridden by Jupiter’s human son Castor, rather than his brother Pollux. The two Dioscuri were worshipped at Rome as patrons of the cavalry. The chariot teams of Mars (Ares) and Achilles are described in Iliad 15.119–20 and 16.148–9.
Nimble Saturn, at his wife’s arrival: according to Apollonius’ Argonautica, Kronos/Saturn was caught by his wife Rhea while wooing the nymph Phillyra, and turned himself into a horse to complete the seduction, producing the centaur Chiron. The rape was on Mt. Pelion in Thessaly, which became Chiron’s home.
Erichthonius … The Lapiths: in Iliad 20.219–30, Erichthonius is father of Tros and breeder of three thousand horses; the Hellenistic poet Eratosthenes makes this Trojan prince inventor of the four-horse chariot. The Lapiths are the Thessalian people ruled by Ixion (see note to line 38).
Epirus or Mycenae… Neptune’s stable: again, it is assumed that the best breeds came from Greece—Epirus in the north-west and Peloponnesian Mycenae. On Neptune’s creation of the first horse, see note to 1.7–18.
there swarms a pest … Io, daughter of Inachus: like Varro (2.5.14), Virgil warns against the gadfly (Greek myops) that plagues cattle. First he plays on the name of the river Silarus (in Lucania, like Alburnus and the river Tanager) and asilus, then glosses it with the learned Greek name oestrus. In mythology this gadfly was sent by Hera/Juno to plague her husband’s beloved Io. It seems to have been the subject of descriptions in lost poems of Callimachus and Apollonius.
the laps of Elis … Belgian chariots of war: like the river Alpheus, the small state of Elis stands for Olympia, and the chariot race: the Romans did not use chariots in warfare, but may have modelled their racing chariots on the war-chariots of the Belgae.
the mighty woods of Sila: again, Virgil is specific; the mountain of Sila was in Bruttium, near the places named in lines 146 ff., but the battle of the bulls (used again as a simile for the battle of human champions in Aeneid 12.715) could occur anywhere.
the wilderness of Africa: Virgil actually names Libya, pointing ahead to the desert landscape of lines 339 ff.
the ferocity of mares … ‘mare madness’: in a number of ancient myths horses behaved as violently as if they were wild beasts. The racing mares of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, ate their own master, either because he fed them on human flesh or because he denied them access to the stallions. Desire drives them across two wild rivers of Asia Minor, Gargarus and Ascanius, and they are supposed to conceive as they race borne on the violent north and east winds, secreting a fluid in their groin which Virgil calls by its Greek name hippomanes (horse-frenzy) and claims is used by witches and poisoners.
Parnassian peaks … Castalia: these are the heights above Delphi and Apollo’s sacred spring.
bucks from Cinyps: both Cinyps in Libya, and Arcadia (line 314), the hilly region of the Peloponnese associated with Pan, offer sparse pasture only fit for goats.
Libyan shepherds … his enemy surprised: some of the details of Virgil’s nomad (Numidian) shepherds come from ethnographic passages in Sallust’s Jugurtha, but his comparison of the primitive nomad to the familiar slog of the Roman soldier carrying his pack is original. (It is pure poetic fancy that gives this aboriginal a Cretan quiver and Spartan hound.)
Scythia … back to the central pole: the geographical limits of ‘Scythia’ are the Danube and the mountains of Thrace. In the extended description of ultimate winter (lines 352–83), cold and immobility (the penned cattle, the hunted deer buried in snow and frozen on the spot, the natives skulking in underground dugouts) give maximum contrast with the Libyan in constant motion beneath the sun and stars. Virgil’s extended account of snow and frozen rivers was copied by Ovid, but his source is not known. See R. F. Thomas, Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (Cambridge, 1982).
that Pan of Arcadia wooed you, / the Moon: the Virgilian critic Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.22.9–10) says that Virgil took from Nicander this myth that Pan disguised himself in a fleece to win the love of the moon goddess (Selene). No source reports any child of this courtship which may have been frustrated.
learn to burn juniper … his three-forked tongue: Virgil has adapted this section from several passages of Nicander’s Theriac
a, retaining a number of purely Greek names, though he avoids naming the chersydros which he describes in detail and sets in south Italian Calabria (lines 425–34).
the onset of these plagues …: Virgil moves from preventive measures (sheep dipping) and medicating individual ulcers and sickness to an undated epidemic (line 478) in Noricum (the hinterland of Trieste) of which there is no other record. It leapt across species from cows to dogs to pigs to horses (the detailed symptomology describes the horse, lines 498–514) then back to oxen dying beneath the yoke of the plough: for them Virgil avoids repeating symptoms and substitutes an anthropomorphizing lament over their hard life of toil free of human self-indulgence (lines 515–30). Men scrabble like beasts and the whole order of relationship between creatures disintegrates.
Chiron, son of Phillyra; Melampus, son of Amythaon: the centaur Chiron (see note to line 92) practised medicine with herbs; Melampus was both doctor and seer. Hence perhaps Virgil’s transition from medicine to religion, invoking the Fury Tisiphone (line 551), normally a punisher of bloodguilt, as symbol of death triumphant.
BOOK FOUR
heaven’s gift of honey: Virgil plunges directly into his theme, stressing both the supernatural aspect of honey, and the resemblance of the hive to a human society, aspects of the bees’ nature which he will reiterate through the book (see lines 153–5, 164 ff., and 200–5, for example). He will use epic language and allusions, not to mock the bees, but to stress their delicate vulnerability
Procne, her breast still bearing stains: the Athenian princess Procne was married to Tereus, king of Thrace, who raped her sister Philomela. In fury, the women murdered Procne’s son Itys and fed the child’s flesh to his father. When Tereus discovered the crime all three were transformed, he to a hoopoe, Philomela to the nightingale, and Procne to the swallow, which has blood-red breast feathers.
enraptured by such strange delight: while Virgil stresses the sensitivity of the bees to smell and sound, and their indifference to sexual desire, he credits them with a mysterious emotional life; cf. lines 70 and 149 ff.
two queens: modern apiarists know that the hive is ruled by a female, but Virgil like most ancients, thought the leader was male and speaks of choosing between two kings or male leaders. The recommendation to kill one ‘king’ when two are competing (lines 88–91) is found in Varro 3. 16.18, but may be a pointed allusion to Antony as rival of Octavian; Varro also identifies the ‘dusty’ bees as less healthy (3.16.20).
Let there be gardens … Priapus of Hellespont: Italy had imported the cult of the ultra-virile Priapus from Lampsacus on the Hellespont and put home-made wooden herms of the god with his large organ in vegetable gardens to scare away birds and human thieves. Virgil will use the bees’ need for flowers as an excuse for his digression (lines 125 ff.) describing the old immigrant gardener’s allotment by the river Galaesus in sunny Tarentum.
the qualities bestowed on bees by Jupiter … that Cretan cave: when Rhea smuggled the newborn Jupiter to the care of the nymphs in a cave on Mt. Ida in Crete, to hide the baby’s cries the Curetes (Rhea’s attendants) clashed their cymbals as they danced and the bees, attracted by the noise (cf. line 64 above), fed him with honey.
when the Cyclopes … Etna groaned beneath the weight of anvils: the bees’ unanimous and unresting devotion to their delicate task is compared by opposites to the diligence of the giant Cyclopes, primitive subhuman creatures like the Nibelungen, who were believed to forge Jupiter’s thunderbolts under Mt. Etna in Sicily or the Aeolian islands, because the volcanic smoke suggested the chimney of a forge.
Egypt … or the Medes: these nations were seen as willing slaves of their monarchies present or past.
Taÿgete of the Seven Sisters: the rising of the Pleiades in May.
trying to escape from Pisces: the setting of the Pleiades in November, although Pisces will only rise later.
a spider, Minerva’s fateful enemy: the Lydian weaver Arachne, whom Minerva turned into a spider out of jealousy at her superior tapestry work.
a flower farmers call ‘amellus’: as with the asilus, Virgil gives detailed attention to the powers of this aster-like flower, its name derived from the river Mella in northern Italy.
what that great Arcadian keeper / first discovered: this is Aristaeus, last mentioned (but not named) at 1.14–15 as the patron of woods and keeper of cattle on Ceos. His connection with Arcadia is unknown, but the word translated ‘keeper’ here not only means master of a herd, but carries the notion of teacher or inventor. Although the character we meet in the narrative seems an immature figure, he emerges as a model of success despite adversity, and success won through piety and dogged attention to instructions—thus the prototype of the good farmer (and good pupil). He will not be named until after the account of Egyptian bougonia, at line 317, when we shall meet him in Thessaly. (See Introduction, pp. xxx–xxxi.)
Pellaean people … beside Canopus on the Nile: the ruling people of Egypt were Macedonians (so from Pella), and Canopus just one of the Nile’s seven mouths, but the Egyptians are described here as neighbours of the Parthians (called ‘archers’, line 290, and recalled in the comparison of line 312) and associated with the river itself which comes from the equatorial south—hence ‘sun-bronzed Ethiopians’ (line 292), in which the adjective translates the Greek name Aithiopes (‘burnt faces’) which was loosely applied to all the known peoples of East Africa. The Romans of this generation knew Egypt from images of the course of the Nile, filled with boats and crocodiles and flanked by villages and temples such as we see on the Nile Mosaic of Palestrina.
Tempe, through which the Peneius flows: this is the fertile valley of Thessaly, but in lines 363–73, by a kind of magic geography, Virgil makes Cyrene’s underwater home the centre of a network of caverns which provide the source of rivers worldwide—from Colchis (the Phasis) and Asia Minor, the Thessalian Enipeus, Roman Tiber and Anio, the Black Sea Hypanis and Caicus (this Mysian river flows into the Aegean through western Turkey), and finally the mysterious Eridanus, sometimes equated with the Po (as it may be here given the reference to ‘rich farmlands’, line 373), sometimes with other rivers of the west.
directed his complaint to the one who bore him: Aristaeus may seem childish in this self-pitying lament, but his complaint (lines 321–32) is modelled on that of a hero, Achilles’ complaint to his mother in Iliad 1.348–56. Aristaeus is a doubly Homeric figure, taking on the guile and endurance of Menelaus in the second part of his adventure. Virgil has used his protest to recapitulate all the varieties of farming discussed in Books 1–3 (line 327: ‘expert care of crops and cattle’, lines 329–31: ‘fruiting forests … stalls … harvest … vines’).
Deep in the river …: like the respectable mistress of a Roman house, Aristaeus’ mother, the nymph Cyrene, is surrounded by her attendants, preparing the best wool from Miletus (dyed sea-coloured because they are water-nymphs). Their names, chosen for their melodious and foreign sounds, are free invention, though two nymphs are called ‘daughters of Oceanus’, and one is Arethusa, the nymph of the freshwater spring at Syracuse in Sicily.
Clymene, rambling on … and the joy he stole: Clymene is telling what may be the oldest tale of adultery (cf. Demodocus’ version in Odyssey 8): how the sun told Vulcan that his wife Venus was sleeping with Mars and he trapped them in a superfine magic net, but they were unashamed.
all the loves of all the gods, from Chaos’ time to ours: a neat recall of Hesiod’s genealogies in Theogony.
to Oceanus: Ocean seems to be worshipped here chiefly as father of the nymphs of woodland and sea whom, as we shall learn at lines 533–4, Aristaeus has offended.
Proteus: the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus, is gifted with prophecy in Odyssey 4.387 ff., but also with the power to change his shape so as to elude capture. Virgil has adapted Aristaeus’ adventure from that of Menelaus in Egypt, where Menelaus too is instructed by a nymph, Eidothea. But he has changed location, setting Proteus first in the island of Carpathos, then in Pallene. This is probabl
y an Alexandrian variation since Proteus is also associated with Pallene in a fragment of Callimachus.
even agèd Nereus: Nereus the sea-god was father of Thetis, and it was Proteus who warned Zeus that he should not mate with Thetis because her son was fated to be mightier than his father. As a result Thetis married the mortal Peleus and became the mother of Achilles.
The Dog Star … half his daily course: the Dog Star indicates the time of year—high summer—and the sun the time of day—high noon.
like that herdsman in the mountains: the simile comparing Proteus and his smelly herd of seals to a hill shepherd watching his calves and lambs ties this narrative back to the second part of Book 3.
Orpheus: this is the first mention of Orpheus or Aristaeus’ sexual pursuit of Orpheus’ bride, Eurydice, which caused her death by the bite of a water-snake (another link with Book 3). Proteus’ tale of Orpheus will extend from here to 527.
