Georgics

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Georgics (gğōrgica, ‘husbandry’), Virgil's didactic poem (in four books and over 2, 000 hexameter lines) written in imitation of the Works and Days of the early Greek poet Hesiod. Virgil spent seven years (36–29 BC) on its composition and dedicated it to his patron Maecenas. His debt to the Works and Days is relatively small. The Georgics are much more sophisticated in thought and in technique, and owe something to the polished versification of the later Greek didactic poets such as Aratus of Soli and Nicander. The poet derived some factual information from Varro's prose handbook De re rustica (‘on farming’) published in 37 BC (and he was perhaps also influenced by its moral and patriotic tone). However, Virgil resembles Hesiod in that his intention is not to compose a handbook of instruction for those who wish to be farmers; rather he is presenting a picture of the (Italian) farmer's life as the ideal: it is frugal and austere, prone to setbacks and not free from suffering, but, lived in harmony with nature and with the divine scheme of things, it is morally satisfying and it brings the reward of peace and contentment (2. 458 ff.); it is also the basis of Italy's greatness. For Virgil, as for Hesiod, hard work, labor improbus, is essential; he sees the individual as an oarsman rowing upstream whom the current will carry backwards if he slackens his effort (1. 199). Virgil's greatest debt is perhaps to Lucretius, to whom he alludes obliquely in 2. 490. He recalls that poet not only in phrasing and in style but also in the passion with which he expounds his subject. Nevertheless the Georgics are a rebuttal of Lucretius' Epicureanism which asserted that the gods did not intervene in the world; Virgil reasserts divine providence, and dwells affectionately on the gods of the countryside. It was Virgil's deep sympathy for all living things and his sense of the need for men to co-operate with nature that led his English translator John Dryden (1631–1700) to call the Georgics ‘the best poem of the best poet’, a judgement also supported by Virgil's mature mastery of expression. The poem must therefore be seen as far more than a practical guide to farming, which its omissions and inaccuracies could not allow it to be, and to which the philosophical ‘digressions’ are irrelevant. Ancient critics soon observed that Virgil's aim was to give pleasure rather than instruction.

Book 1 deals with the raising of crops and the signs of the weather, ending emotionally with a description of the horrors suffered by Italy as a consequence of the murder of Julius Caesar; book 2 covers the growing of trees, chiefly the olive and the vine, and also contains magnificent praise of Italy (136 ff.); book 3 deals with the rearing of cattle (concluding with the notable description of the cattle-plague in the Alps); in book 4 Virgil describes bee-keeping, treating the bees with affectionate irony as exemplars of the ideal citizen body, ‘little Romans’ (parvi Quiritēs). The work ends with the episode of Aristaeus together with the story of Orpheus and Eurydicē. The reason for this latter inclusion is hard to discern; the ancient commentator Servius implausibly suggests that it was written to replace an earlier panegyric of the Roman poet Gallus which had to be excised after the latter's disgrace. Whatever the reason, it contains some of Virgil's most haunting poetry, and the effect of the highly individualized, hapless love of the poet Orpheus for his beautiful wife Eurydice, following after the description of the busy, orderly, useful, and sexless lives of the bees, is deeply moving.

This article is about the work of Poetry by Virgil. For the style of poetry known as the Georgic Mode, see Pastoral.

Georgics Book III, Shepherd with Flocks, Roman Vergil.

The Georgics, published in 29 BC, are the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil. Their ostensible subject is rural life and farming. They are generally described as didactic poetry. The 17th century poet John Dryden described The Georgics as, "The greatest poem by the greatest poet."

Contents 1 Description 2 Influences 3 Related terms 4 See also 5 Further reading 6 Online Text

Description

The work contains 2,188 hexametric verses divided into four books. Books One and Two deal with agriculture (field crops, legumes, trees, small woodland creatures, as well as truffle hogs). Book Three is concerned with the rearing of cattle and other livestock, which includes rams, boars, and horses, and Book Four largely focuses upon beekeeping, and the lives of bees, wasps and hornets. However, in modern scholarship of the Georgics, the ostensible subject matter of the poem is not often considered to be its chief focus, not least because of the poem's tendency towards non-agricultural "digression". The debate concerning the "true" subject of the Georgics is ongoing.

The poem has an explicit political dimension, making several references to Octavian, who would become emperor Augustus in 27 BC. Virgil's patron Maecenas, in whose honor the poem was written, was a confidant and advisor to Octavian. Suetonius reports that Virgil and Maecenas read the Georgics to Octavian while he was ill in the summer of 29 BC. There is debate as to whether Virgil's treatment of Octavian in the poem is entirely positive; but if Suetonius' report is accurate, it casts doubt upon the likelihood that the poem would contain any severe criticism of Octavian.

Influences

The Georgics are influenced by Hesiod, whose Works and Days was regarded as the first work of didactic poetry, but references to Hellenistic poets Aratus and Nicander are more numerous. Virgil also draws heavily upon Lucretius' On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura).

Related terms

"Georgic" is also used in literary criticism and art history to describe the depiction of a rather more hard-working, and less flirtatious, version of pastoral — the works of the 19th century English artist Samuel Palmer, who illustrated the poems, would be a good example.

A "Georgic" is a traditional punishment of Harrow School and Eton College where pupils are required to copy hundreds of lines of the text — one book or about 500 lines. In Frank Richards' (writing as Owen Conquest) 1951 English School Novel The Rivals of Rookwood School the reader is encouraged to assume that this is the appropriate punishment given to any public schoolboy, particularly for a member of the "Classics" alignment as opposed to the "Moderns" — in reference to the school in question being divided into those boys choosing/chosen for Latin/Greek language studies, and those who were studying modern subjects. David Cameron was the recipient of such a punishment after smoking cannabis before his O level exams.

At Harrow, a coloured Georgic is the name given to a Georgic where a four-coloured pen is used, resulting in a multicoloured Georgic, a much more time-consuming and severe punishment. A coloured Georgic was traditional punishment for spitting in the street, for extreme rudeness (such as to a lady) or as extreme punishment at the discretion of a 'beak' (master).

See also

• Bugonia
• Interview with Virgil scholar Richard Thomas and poet David Ferry, who recently translated Virgil's "Georgics," on Thoughtcast

In 2003 the German company Icon Genetics encoded the lines from Georgics "Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt" (Neither can every soil bear every fruit) into the genome of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant.

Further reading

• Buckham, Philip Wentworth; Spence, Joseph; Holdsworth, Edward; Warburton, William; Jortin, John, Miscellanea Virgiliana: In Scriptis Maxime Eruditorum Virorum Varie Dispersa, in Unum Fasciculum Collecta, Cambridge : Printed for W. P. Grant; 1825.

Online Text

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Georgics

• The Georgics at MIT
• Georgics (English) at Project Gutenberg
• Georgicon at Perseus Digital Library, Latin text with J.B. Greenough translation

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