by Virgil
But while his feeling is all his own,—the happy survival probably of the childhood and youth passed in his home in the district of Andes,—he largely avails himself of the observation, the thought, and the language of earlier writers, both Greek and Roman. His poem is eminently a work of learning as well as of native feeling. He combines in its varied and firm texture the homely wisdom embodied in the precepts and proverbs of Italian peasants (‘veterum praecepta’),—the quaint and oracular dicta of Hesiod,—the scientific knowledge and mythological lore of Alexandrine writers,—the philosophic and imaginative conceptions of Lucretius,—with the knowledge of natural history contained in the treatises of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and the systematic practical directions of the old prose writers on rural economy, such as the Carthaginian Mago, whose work had been translated into Latin,—Democritus and Xenophon among Greek prose writers,—Cato, the two Sasernae, Licinius Stolo, Tremellius, and Varro among Latin authors. The purely practical precepts of the Georgics were apparently selected and condensed from these writers. But no literary inspiration or ideas were likely to have come from any of these last-named authors, unless the Invocation in the first Book may have been suggested by the example of Varro, who begins his treatise with an invocation to the XII Di consentes. The proverbial sayings or rustic songs embodying the traditional peasant lore, such as the ‘Quid vesper serus vehit?’ and the ‘hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra, Camille, metes,’ which add an antique and homely charm to the poem, may have become known to Virgil from the book of the Sasernae, who are quoted by Varro as authorities for many of the old charms used by the primitive husbandmen, such as ‘Terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto,’ which is to be repeated ‘ter novies.’ Servius notes that the words ‘sulco attritus splendescere vomer’ recall an old saying of Cato, ‘Vir bonus est, mi fili, colendi peritus, cuius ferramenta splendent.’ The notices of ceremonial observances, such as the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of things that might lawfully be done on holy days, were probably derived from the pontifical books and the sacred books of the other priestly colleges, of which Virgil made large use also in the Aeneid. In all the writers on practical farming, from Cato to Varro, he found that strong appreciation of the supreme worth of rural industry and that strong interest in its processes and results which justified him in identifying his subject with the thought of the national life.
Among the sources of literary inspiration from which Virgil drew in the Georgics, the oldest, and not the least abundant, was the ‘Works and Days’ of Hesiod. Yet a comparison of the two poems shows immediately that the Georgics do not, either in form or substance, stand in that close relation to their prototype, in which the Eclogues on the one hand, and the Aeneid on the other, stand to the idyls of Theocritus and to the epic poems of Homer. The immediate influence of Hesiod is most apparent in the first Book of the Georgics, in which the subject is treated in connexion with theological ideas; while in the second Book and in the later Books, in which the philosophical conception of Nature, though in subordination to the conception of a supreme Spiritual power, becomes more prominent, the spirit of Hesiod gives place to the spirit of Lucretius. There is, however, a real affinity between the primitive piety of the old Boeotian bard and the attitude in which Virgil contemplated the world, though the faith of Virgil has become more rational under the speculative teaching and enquiry which had taken the place of earlier modes of thought among the Greeks. Virgil is ever seeking to produce a poetical reconcilement between primitive tradition and more enlightened views both of moral and physical truth. Thus he introduces the old fable of the creation of the present race of men in immediate juxtaposition with the assertion of the ‘laws and eternal conditions imposed by Nature on certain places.’ He accepts the belief in a Golden Age and in the blight which fell on the world under the dispensation of Jove; but he regards this blight as sent, not in anger, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. He describes the natural progress of the various arts of life under this stimulus, but still leaves room for divine intervention in the more important discoveries:—
Prima Ceres ferro mortalis vertere terram
Instituit.
Again, the teleological view of Nature, which appears in the Georgics in antagonism to the teaching of Lucretius, in such passages as i. 231—
Idcirco certis dimensum partibus orbem, etc.,
and i. 351—
Atque haec ut certis possemus discere signis—
is in the spirit of Hesiod, though in advance of his conception of Zeus, who appears in him not as a beneficent Providence, but rather as a jealous task-master. So too the constant inculcation of prayer and ceremonial observances—
Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
Agricolae—
Votisque vocaveris imbrem—
In primis venerare deos, atque annua magnae
Sacra refer Cereri—
the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.
But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint naïveté characteristic of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as ‘quo sidere terram Vertere,’—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being regulated not by the Roman Calendar, with its prosaic divisions of the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the constellations,—the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in the line
Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris,—
the use of such quaint expressions as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’—seem all intended to remind the reader that the subject is one ‘antiquae laudis et artis,’—the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,—that too in which man’s dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above Nature is most vividly realised. This infusion into the practical realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder and ‘freshness of the early world’ Virgil derives from the relation which he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.
Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil’s debt to Hesiod is greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as ‘Strymoniae grues,’ by reference to the products of distant lands—
nonne vides croceos ut Tmolus odores, etc.,—
by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for the natural products which were supposed to be their gifts. But to several special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233—
Quinque tenent caelum zonae, etc.,—
is copied from Eratosthenes. The account of the signs of the weather, from i. 355 to 465, is taken from the ”¹¿Ã·¼µÖ± of Aratus, a work so popular at Rome, that it was not only imitated and almost incorporated in his poem by Virgil, but had been translated by Cicero in his youth, and was subsequently translated by Germanicus. Again, the description at iii. 425, of the dangerous serpent that haunts the Calabrian pastures, is closely imitated from the extant ˜·Á¹±º¬ of Nicander; nor can we doubt that there were in the fourth Book imitations of the lost œµ»¹ÃÿÅÁ³¹º¬ of the same author, who probably anticipated Virgil in the use which he made of Aristotle’s observations on the habits of bees.
A comparison of the passages in the Georgics with those of which they are imitations produces the impression not only of Virgil’s immense superiority as a poet over the Alexandrine Metaphrastae, but of the immense superiority of the Latin hexameter, as an organ for expressing the beauty and power of Nature, over the exotic jargon and unmusical jingle which those writers compounded out of their epic studies and their scientific nom
enclature. To take one or two instances of Virgil’s imitations from these writers:—in the passage Georg. i. 233–246, Virgil reproduces very closely scientific statements of Eratosthenes and Aratus. But of the five lines which follow—
Illic, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox
Semper et obtenta densentur nocte tenebrae,
Aut redit a nobis Aurora diemque reducit;
Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis,
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper,—
where through the evanescent mists of early science we discern the enduring substance of poetic creation, there is no trace in either of the Greek writers. Again, in the passage at i. 410, imitated from Aratus—
Tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces, etc.,—
the mere natural phenomenon is given in greater detail in the original passage; but the lines which communicate to it the touch of tender sympathy—
iuvat imbribus actis
Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere nidos,—
and the following lines—
Haud equidem credo quia sit divinitus illis, etc.,—
which elevate the whole description into the higher air of imaginative contemplation, are entirely Virgil’s own. So too in nearly all the indications of stormy or bright weather, whether taken from natural phenomena or the habits of animals, we find in the Latin poet some suggestion of poetical analogy giving new life to the thing described, or some touch of tender feeling, of which his original supplied him with no hint whatever.
For the true poetry of the Georgics—the colour of human and sympathetic feeling, the atmosphere of contemplative ideas, the ethical and national associations with which the subject is surrounded—Virgil owes very little to Greek inspiration. Much of this poetry is the mode in which his own spirit interprets Nature and human life. But much also is due to the genius of his great predecessor in Latin poetry, who, though ‘unnamed,’ is ‘not unowned,’ but felt to be a pervading presence in the thought and feeling, the creative diction and the grander cadences, of the Georgics. Yet this influence is perhaps as potent in the antagonism as in the sympathy which it evokes. Virgil is no mere disciple of Lucretius, either as regards his philosophy or his art. Though his imagination pays homage to that of the older poet; though he acknowledges his contemplative elevation; though he has a strong affinity with the deep humanity of his nature; yet in his profoundest convictions and aspirations he proclaims his revolt from him. The key to the secret of much in the composition of the Georgics,—of the condition of mind out of which this work of genius assumed the shape it has as a great literary possession,—is to be sought in the collision between the force of thought, imagination, and feeling which the active spirit of Lucretius stored up and left behind him as his legacy to the world, and the nature, strongly susceptible indeed, but, at the same time, firm in its own convictions, which first felt the shock of that force, in its attractive, stimulating, and repellent power.
The entrance to Virgil’s tomb, a Roman burial vault dating back to the Augustan age, located in Naples, where according to legend the famous poet was buried
