by Virgil
her peers, the Dryads: Eurydice too was a nymph, and so is lamented by the nymphs of Thrace; Cyrene will confirm to her son in lines 534–6 that he must appease them with sacrifice. Rhodope (line 461) is a Thracian mountain range, Rhesus (line 462) the Thracian king who was treacherously killed by Odysseus and Diomedes (Iliad 10) when he came to defend Troy. The Getae (line 463) were a tribe contemporary with Virgil, the Hebrus (cf. line 524) the Thracian river which would carry away Orpheus’ severed head, and Orithyia, princess of Athens and sister of Procne and Philomela, was abducted by the north wind to the same cold northern regions.
his lyre / a hollowed tortoiseshell: the Homeric hymn to Hermes tells how Hermes invented the lyre by scooping a tortoise from its shell to make the sound box of his instrument.
the gorge of Taenarus: Taenarus, in the region of Sparta, like Avernus in Campania, was believed to be an entrance to Hades.
to approach the shades … settled to a standstill: in sixteen lines Virgil includes all the elements of the underworld, taken from Odyssey 11 and later sources, which he would develop in the sixth book of the Aeneid. He does not even mention that the lord of Hades grants Orpheus’ appeal, but describes the souls of the innocent dead enclosed by the rivers Cocytus and Styx, and Tartarus guarded by Cerberus where the sinners (only Ixion is named: cf. note to 3.38–9) are punished by the Furies.
Eurydice … trailing close behind (as Proserpina/had decreed): only now, and with a painful slowness, does Virgil reveal both the consent and the terms decreed by Proserpina (cf. 1.39) as queen of Hades. This is all the more agonizing as Virgil was the first to claim that Orpheus failed in his quest and lost Eurydice for ever. In Virgil Eurydice speaks now for the first and last time: Orpheus, ‘with so much still to say’ (line 501), cannot speak, but even after his death his head will repeat her name which will be taken up by the river banks (line 527), as they earlier (line 463) wept at her original death.
No longer would the ferryman permit him cross … that lay between them: as Virgil shows in his depiction of Hades at Aeneid 6.326–30, Charon only ferried the properly buried dead across Cocytus and the Styx: it was forbidden for him to convey the living (Aeneid 6.391). Virgil does not explain how Orpheus had been able to cross into Hades earlier, but Hercules and Theseus had succeeded.
For seven whole long months … through the land: Orpheus is now back in Thrace, by the river Strymon, and (line 517) as far north as the river Tanais (the Don, on the north coast of the Black Sea). It is in Thrace that the women in Bacchic frenzy are angered by his lament and tear him apart.
Thus spoke Proteus: Proteus has told Aristaeus only the cause of his loss; but Cyrene, apparently standing near, moves from past to future, instructing him in the sacrifices he must make.
he did all that his mother bid: Cyrene too only tells him half of what she knows. When Aristaeus has carried out all the sacrifices and waited patiently, the miracle (line 554) comes as a surprise to him, though Virgil’s readers will have been guided to expect something of this kind by the slightly different Egyptian procedure of lines 295–314. With the new swarm of bees the narrative ends; there is no return to Virgil’s own apiculture.
Such was the song: this personal sphragis, or ‘signing off’, contrasts Octavian’s military glory at the edges of empire with Virgil himself, his name, the sheltered place of his ‘studies of the arts of peace’ (line 564) and his works to date. The last line (‘you, Tityrus’), echoes the first line of Virgil’s first Eclogue, but puts the poet himself under the spreading beech tree.
1 These details of Virgil’s education come from Donatus’ Life of Virgil (based on the biographer Suetonius), lines 21–5, in Vitae Vergilianae, ed. C. Hardie (Oxford, 1966). There is no English translation but a good discussion by Horsfall in A Companion to Virgil (Leiden, 1993).
2 This is the so-called Appendix Vergiliana (ed. W. V. Clausen, Oxford, 1966); I know of no English translation, so have offered my own version of the epigrams.
3 Cf. Georgics 2.198–9: ‘rolling plains such as Mantua was misfortunate enough to lose, | where graceful swans are flourishing in weedy waters.’
4 This and all subsequent quotations from Eclogues are from the translation of Guy Lee (1980).
5 P. Veyne, ‘L’Histoire agraire et la biographie de Virgile dans les Bucoliques I et IX’, Revue de Philologie (1980), 233–57, uses the poems to reconstruct where Virgil’s father had his farm and to interpret Tityrus as a slave entrusted by his master Octavian with a plot of land from which to earn his freedom. But Tityrus is the product of a poet’s imagination, and Veyne is more valuable as commentator on agrarian conditions than for any factual light on the poet.
6 Donatus, Life, lines 91–7. The following quotation is from lines 81–4.
7 On Virgil’s use of Varro in the Georgics, see R. F. Thomas, Reading Virgil and his Texts: Studies in Intertextuality (Ann Arbor, 2000), chs. 5 and 8.
8 A. Dalzell, The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid (Toronto, 1998) is a wise and accessible study (ch. 4 on Georgics) that should be better known outside Canada: see also K. Volk, The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford, 2002), ch. 4.
9 The chief scholarly discussions of Virgil’s art of allusion are Thomas, in his two-volume commentary (Cambridge, 1988) and essay collection (1999, above n. 7) and J. Farrell, Virgil’s Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History (Oxford, 1991).
10 Thomas (1999), 137–40, has identified allusions to seven Greek and Latin poets in Virgil’s adaptation of this passage alone. Virgil adapts Nicander’s Theriaca for his account of antidotes to snakebite in Georgics 3.414–39, and probably for his vivid botanical description of the curative flower amellus (4.271–80): too little survives of Nicander’s Georgica to establish a link between them.
11 On this passage, see Thomas (1999), ch. 6, ‘The Old Man Revisited’.
12 J. M. Frayn, Subsistence Farming in Rome and Italy (London, 1979) notes that most Roman agricultural writers seem to vary between addressing the landowner and the smallholder or tenant farmer, but that this creates no problem, since the same methods would be used in large-or small-scale farming.
13 This cannot pass without comment. What glory is there in warding off unwarlike or ‘craven’ enemies? The Indians were not involved in any fighting at this time, and remained utterly remote from the Capitol. Irony is out of the question in this context, but the line may allude to diplomatic approaches from India (cf. Augustus’ own record, Res Gestae 31), seen as a reflection of their fear of Octavian. We know of appeals from later Indian rulers in 25 and 20 BCE.
14 See Thomas (1999), ch. 2, especially pp. 89–90, and Conte, ‘Proems in the Middle’, Yale Classical Studies, 29 (1992), 147–59.
15 The phrase ‘live on in the mouths of men’ (3.9) quotes a famous line of his epic predecessor Ennius, who also celebrated a military hero, Scipio Africanus.
16 Here and elsewhere the Euphrates stands for Rome’s enemy, Parthia, which had twice inflicted defeat in previous years. Augustus would achieve a face-saving settlement through diplomacy in 20–19 BCE.
17 See the introduction to Thomas’s commentary (1988), vol. i. R. A. B. Mynors’ fine commentary (Virgil: Georgics (Oxford 1990)) was published posthumously and so has no introduction.
18 See Varro, De re rustica 1.2.19 on goat sacrifice to Bacchus; 2.4.9 on sacrificing pigs to Ceres. The animal sacrifice to Ceres at Georgics 1.345 goes unidentified but should be a piglet. Swine are mentioned in passing at 1.400, 2.520, and 3.497.
19 Cf. Lucretius 5. 783–836, esp. 826–36.
20 D. Ross, Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton, 1987), 1049; Thomas (1999), 156–8, 170–2.
21 Aratus, Phaenomena 96–136.
22 Lucretius seems to have ended his poem with his version of the Thucydidean plague of Athens (Thuc. 2.48–56). Virgil transfers many details to the sufferings of animals and makes an equally sud
den ending to his third book.
23 Varro mentions incidentally at 3.16.4 that bees can be generated from a rotting bull carcass, quoting two Hellenistic lines of epigram.
24 C. G. Perkell, The Poet’s Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil’s Georgics (Berkeley, 1989) notes that Virgil’s contemporary Diodorus Siculus (4.15) made Orpheus successful in restoring Eurydice: there is no previous tradition of his failure.
25 See Enciclopedia Virgiliana, vol. i, s.v. ‘Aristeo’, and ‘Aristaeus, Orpheus and the Georgics’, in Conte, Virgil: The Poetry of Pathos (Oxford, forthcoming).
26 Odyssey 4.351–570.
27 L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 10, ‘The Georgics in After Times’.
28 This is Cather’s version (My Ántonia, book 3, ch. 2) of the lines from Eclogue 9, quoted above in Guy Lee’s translation.
1 ‘Afterwords’, The Georgics of Virgil (Oldcastle, 2004).
