The Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod—“Works and Days”—which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world, with its five ages of the human race—the gold, the silver, the brazen, “the age of heroes,” and the present—which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced.

From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem “On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really composed with a view to their practical instruction.

He addresses his poem to his noble patron MÆcenas. And amongst the long list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.

The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over—advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,—squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,—he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet, would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to CÆsar as the hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English ear:—

The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the vineyard, but especially of the latter. The apple, the pear, the olive, all receive due notice from the poet; but upon the culture of the vine he dwells with a hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air than those which he gives out upon other branches of cultivation. The soil, the site, the best kinds to choose, the different modes of propagation, are all discussed with considerable minuteness. It would seem that in those earlier times, as now, the vintage had a more poetical aspect than even the harvest-field. The beauty of the crop, the merriment of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it has gone through the usual process of conversion, gave, as is still the case in all wine-producing countries, a holiday character to the whole course of cultivation. All other important crops contribute in some way to supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly its enjoyments. And when, at the beginning of the book, the poet invokes the god of wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however temperate his own habits might be, he had not adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for “the dark red wine:” they might have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:—

But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second book:—

The Third Georgic treats of the herd and the stud. The poet’s knowledge on these points must be strongly suspected of being but second-hand—rather the result of having studied some of the Roman “Books of the Farm,” than the experience of a practical stock-breeder. Such a work was Varro’s ‘On Rural Affairs,’ which Virgil evidently followed as an authority. From that source he drew, amongst other precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays down in this formula:—

Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our modern judges of stock. But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with an eye to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow of the present day would not be considered by us a handsome animal. Besides, the object of the Roman breeder was to obtain animals which would be “strong to labour,”—good beasts under the yoke; not such as would lay on the greatest weight of flesh at the least possible cost, for the purposes of the butcher. His points of a good horse are entirely different, and approach more nearly our own ideal—“Fine in the head, short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in the chest.” Bay and dapple-grey he chooses for colour; white and chestnut he considers the worst. He had not reached the more catholic philosophy of the modern horse-dealer, that “no good horse was ever yet of a bad colour.”

The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows the poet to indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of pastoral life under the hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or shepherd drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying with him all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a campaign; and again of his winter life in some vague northern region which he calls by the general name of Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of wine, as the southern poet compassionately phrases it) some kind of beer or cider. But the most remarkable of these passages is that which closes the book, and describes the ravages of some terrible pestilence which, beginning with the flocks and herds, extended at last to the wild beasts and to the birds, and even to the fish. There is no historical account of such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that Virgil used his licence as a poet to embellish with imaginary details some ordinary epidemic, in order to present to his readers a companion picture to that of the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by his favourite model Lucretius.

There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also—and with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a poet—minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a fact in natural history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old preliminary caution—“First catch your bee:” but an experienced bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful.[10]

The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon bee-keeping.

The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,—of his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a nobler kind—“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer expresses it.[11] He compares its details, in more than one passage, with those of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.

is his instruction to his pupils—“From Jove all things begin.” His motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days adopted—“Ora et labora”—“Pray and work.” It has been commonly said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English poet’s words,

But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and beauties, as the “skirts” of a divine glory. In all his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics.

It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of MÆcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their farms. Whether it had that result may well be doubted: the discharged soldier, however heartily he might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as his instructor. The practical influence of these treatises in any way is equally doubtful. “It would be absurd to suppose,” says Dean Merivale, “that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time, and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyment.”[12]