1
The Figure of the Poet
The subject of this chapter is the figure of the poet in the Georgics, the poet being represented by both the Georgic poet, that is, the first-person speaker in the poem, and also by the singer Orpheus, as he is portrayed in Georgic 4.[1] Both the poet and Orpheus have been the subjects of previous studies. Buchheit's study of the poet, although it arrives at conclusions different from those to be drawn here, makes a great contribution to critical understanding of the first-person speaker in the poem in its focus on the significance and coherence of the poet's voice in the Georgics . Orpheus also, especially in his polar relationship to Aristaeus, has been carefully studied by other scholars.[2] The particular effort of this chapter, then, will be to study the figures of the Georgic poet and of Orpheus together, as significant embodiments of poetic sensibility and achievement. Parallel in some ways, different in others, they exemplify different dimensions of the experience of the poet in the Iron Age world. Features common to both suggest the fundamental nature and aspiration of the poet as Virgil conceives it. Distinctions between them allow us to isolate characteristics unique to the Georgic poet, whom we are ultimately invited to identify with Virgil himself (4.559–66).
[1] On Orpheus as paradigmatic poet see, for instance, Segal, "Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic, " 313; P. J. Davis, "Vergil's Georgics and the Pastoral Ideal," Ramus 8 (1979): 31, who cites Ecls. 3.46; 4.55, 57; 6.30; 8.55, 56. Ross's view is unusual. Based on his reading of the Eclogues, which he extrapolates to the Georgics, he sees Orpheus as the "exemplary poet of science" and of "intellectual understanding" (Virgil's Elements 226–29). It appears, however, that in the text of the Georgics Orpheus' power derives from charm and magic, not intellectual understanding.
[2] For example, Bradley, 355–58; Segal, "Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic, " 313–17.
The figure of the poet emerges most clearly in distinction from the farmer, the normative figure of a georgic poem, for they have different aspirations, values, and sensibilities. As the Georgic poet and Orpheus are taken in this study to exemplify the idea of the poet, so the farmer (variously termed agricola, arator, colonus ) in the poem and Aristaeus will be taken to exemplify the idea of the farmer. Oppositions between Aristaeus and Orpheus may be summarized by saying that while Aristaeus is concerned with work and control, Orpheus is concerned with beauty and sympathy; Aristaeus is materially productive, while Orpheus is materially useless; Aristaeus' relationship to nature is agonistic, while Orpheus' is liberating and benign. In this chapter these fundamental observations concerning Aristaeus and Orpheus will be elaborated and extended to the whole concept of farmer and poet throughout the Georgics in an effort to isolate and illuminate the characteristic qualities of the poet. We should note further that while the poet emerges primarily in distinction from the farmer, he is carefully distinguished as well from Maecenas, a sophisticated and socially elevated reader and the poet's addressee, and from Caesar, a powerful political figure, evoked above all in his military aspect.[3]
Differences between Aristaeus and Orpheus are reflected and elaborated in the relationship between the farmer and the poet, where we see a different sensibility and relationship to nature and to other men. The farmer, like Aristaeus, values the material and the useful; the poet, like Orpheus, the nonmaterial, useless, and beautiful. One could expand these observations in the poem's terms by noting that, with respect to knowledge, the farmer relies on experientia and usus, the findings of which may be summarized in praecepta, while the poet relies on the Muses and on divine revelation. And while, overall, the farmer's relationship to nature is one of domination and control in which he compels nature to ends that are productive for man, the poet's relationship to nature is characterized by harmony, song, and
[3] Contrast Buchheit (e.g., 92ff.), who sees the poet as an analogue of Caesar. Spofford, 1ff., is important on the social distinctions implicit in the poem's opening.
play. The poet, therefore, unlike the farmer, embodies a set of values that are tangential to Roman culture, values that constitute in many ways an alternative culture. This contrast between farmer and poet, although not without complexity or exceptions to the description above, is nowhere resolved in the poem, but remains a constitutive polarity of the text and central to its meaning.[4]
The Farmer
The role of the farmer is paradigmatic in the Georgics, as the farmer is certainly the normative figure in a georgic poem. I would suggest also, with Wilkinson, that the farmer represents Man in general. "For the farmer's life is sometimes taken as typical of all human life, and in it man is brought starkly face to face with the facts of nature and the powers that govern the universe."[5] The farmer represents Man in respect to Iron Age experience; he exemplifies also, in certain specific qualities, the traditional values of Roman man.
A number of different considerations lead the reader to perceive the farmer as representative of man in general in his relationship to the larger forces that shape and limit his experience. First, the farmer is the agent of agriculture, which often is represented as the paradigmatic activity of civilized man and therefore, by metonymy, can stand for civilization as a whole.[6] A. Bradley observes that cultus of the fields is a metaphor for culture in general, as the etymology of our word makes clear. Since the ostensible purpose of the Georgics is to offer instruction to the farmer, the poem is largely centered on the farmer's activities and concerns. He is its main and primary focus. Nevertheless the Georgic poet suggests his overall concern not only with agriculture specifically but also with other related forms of skilled endeavor. For example, in the "theodicy" of Georgic 1, which describes the development of Iron Age technology, he
[4] Contrast Putnam's concept of the georgic artist.
[5] Wilkinson, Georgics, 15.
[6] T. Haecker, Vergil: Vater des Abendlandes (Munich, 1952), 163. Similarly Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1268.
alludes to hunting, trapping, and sailing, among other occupations, which are analogous to farming in skill. Similarly, in metaphors and similes that imply equivalence between various occupations, as in 1.302–4, where he compares farmers and sailors, he suggests a common quality in all human endeavor and thereby facilitates the reader's vision of the paradigmatic status of the farmer's labor . (Other examples are 2.279, comparing farmers and soldiers; 3.346, comparing herdsmen and soldiers; 2.541–42 and 4.116–17, comparing the poet himself to charioteers and sailors.)
Another perspective on the symbolic and paradigmatic status of the farmer in the poem comes from the poet's archaizing description of him, wherein the farmer appears as an individual colonus, working his land without slaves. Scholars have noted that Virgil's treatment of farming and of the farmer here is different from that of Cato and Varro, whose prose works are aimed at large-scale commercial farming and assume a land-owner with many slaves to work his sizeable estate. Such practice was increasingly common in Virgil's time, and according to Wilkinson, "even quite a modest colonus would have some slaves,"[7] so that the absence of any mention of slavery in the Georgics is striking and provocative. Farming without slavery, as Virgil describes it, had not been common for centuries,[8] as one may infer from references to slaves even in Hesiod's Works and Days (e.g., 406). Virgil's poem, however, seems generally to assume an individual farmer working his own land, as is implied by the tu form of address or by the scene of the farmer selling his produce in the city in exchange for a millstone or pitch (1.273–75) or sharpening knives by a winter fire while his wife weaves (1.291–96).[9] Since the independent free peasant was a phenomenon of increasing rarity in Virgil's time and had virtually disap-
[7] Wilkinson, Georgics, 54.
[8] Wilkinson, Georgics, 50–55.
[9] Joan M. Frayn, "Subsistence Farming during the Roman Period: A Preliminary Discussion of the Evidence," G & R 21 (1974): 16. See also her Subsistence Farming in Roman Italy (London, 1979).
peared from Italy's most important farming areas,[10] Virgil creates a picture in this poem that seems calculated to evoke memories of an earlier period. To a contemporary reader it would probably seem regressive and idealized. The idealization is no doubt intensified by the fact that Virgil's farmer is never specifically directed towards fructus ("profit"), which the poet never mentions. (A subtle and discreet exception may be argued for 3.306–7.) In attempting to interpret the archaizing descriptions of the farmer we may adduce a useful critical principle of Büchner's, namely, that the less practical a praeceptum is, the greater is its symbolic value.[11] This insight will be especially relevant to the discussion of bougonia, but for our present purposes we may infer, by analogy or extension of this principle, that the archaizing descriptions of the farmer in this poem, as they are no longer relevant or practical for Virgil's contemporaries, throw the poet's emphasis on the farmer as symbol. Almost as a mythic symbol he exemplifies the experience of the individual confronting, without intermediary, the stark terms of his existence. These include not only the challenges and hardships of nature, with its unpredictability, ungovernability, and overwhelming power; but also inevitable decline, mortality, and the gods (or however we might define those conditions that seem to limit human existence and are greater than man). The effect of the anachronistic representation of the farmer, to the degree that it is of no practical use, is precisely to support the paradigmatic, symbolic value of the farmer as an individual, facing on his own the larger terms and conditions of mortal experience.
Again, the poet opens the poem with the absolutely primal moments of farming: plowing an unknown field and making a plow. According to W. Steidle plowing is the most representative and important activity of the farmer; and with the phrase ignotum aequor (at prius ignotum ferro quam scindimus aequor, "Yet before we cleave with iron an unknown plain" 1.50), the
[10] Wilkinson, Georgics, 50–55; Miles, 26ff; K. D. White, Roman Farming (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 52.
[11] Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1310.
poet places the farmer at the very inception of his efforts ("Ursituation des Bauern"), extraordinary for the organization of a didactic poem.[12] The instructions for the making of a plow (1.169ff.) are equally primal in substance, since as early as Hesiod's time one bought plows instead of making them. Cato (Agr. 135) gives names of the best manufacturers in Italy, and Varro (1.22.1) does not mention the plow as something that could be made even on a large farm.[13] As, therefore, this description of the making of a plow is without practical usefulness, we may infer that it signifies as symbol, illuminating the poet's vision of the individual, lonely, unmediated existence of the farmer in this poem.
Finally, the poet's changing forms of address from "we" to "you" to "he" dissolve boundaries between the groups of farmers and readers and poet and thereby challenge the natural assumption of such readers as Maecenas and Caesar and ourselves that they/we are different from the farmers conceived in the poem. Such verses as
depresso incipiat iam tum mihi taurus aratro
ingemere
(1.45–46)[14]
even then would I have my bull groan
over the deep-driven plough
contrast with
et segnem patiere situ durescere campum
(1.72)[15]
you will also let the plain idly stiffen with scurf
[12] W. Steidle, "Die Anordnung der Arbeiten im ersten Buch von Vergils Georgica, " RhM 109 (1966): 138, asserts that plowing is the most important function on a farm, citing Cato Agr. 61.1, Pliny HN 18.174, and Georgics 1.1, 119, 147; 2.513. On the "Ursituation des Bauern" and the primal significance of the "unknown plain" see 139; on the primal significance of the plow see 157.
[13] Wilkinson, Georgics, 58.
[14] Cf. 1.50, 204, 351.
[15] Cf. 1.155, 156, 157.
and
aut unde iratus silvam devexit arator
(1.207)[16]
from which the angry ploughman has carried off the timber.
The fluidity of boundaries between groups reinforces the suggestion of their equivalence. The idea of a bounded or limited community that includes only farmers and excludes, for example, urban sophisticates or victorious generals is hard to sustain. While sometimes, then, poet and reader are explicitly identified with the farmer's experience, at other times they are dissociated from it, thus allowing the poet continually to pose the question of the relative identities of farmers and readers. On occasion, then, throughout the poem, the reader, despite his superior sophistication (a subject to be discussed below), is invited to share the farmer's experience, since he and the farmer, who represents all men, are implicitly identified.
If the farmer is symbolic of Man, he is also a figure of enhanced and special resonance for Romans because he is seen to embody those qualities in themselves that they most admired and to which they attributed their exceptional military successes and consequent political power. Such qualities as endurance, courage, discipline, and simplicity were seen to characterize those who worked the land and were also seen to be responsible for Roman military expansion. Frequently cited in this regard are Cato's words in the preface to his De agriculture:
Et virum bonum quom laudabant, ita laudabant, bonum agricolam bonumque colonum. Amplissime laudari existimabatur qui ita laudabatur. Mercatorem autem strenuum studiosumque rei quaerendae existimo, verum, ut supra dixi, periculosum et calamitosum. At ex agricolis et viri fortissimi et milites strenuissimi gignuntur, maximeque pius quaestus stabilissimusque consequitur minimeque invidiosus, minimeque male cogitantes sunt qui in eo studio occupati sunt.[17]
[16] Cf. 2.405, 514–15.
[17] For this and other related passages see Miles, 1–15.
And when they would praise a worthy man their praise took this form: "good husbandman," "good farmer"; one so praised was thought to have received the greatest commendation. The trader I consider to be an energetic man, and one bent on making money; but, as I said above, it is a dangerous career and one subject to disaster. On the other hand, it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most pious, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility, and those who are engaged in that pursuit are least inclined to be disaffected.[18]
From Vegetius' fourth-century Epitoma rei militaris (1.3) comes a similar sentiment:
numquam credo potuisse dubitari aptiorem armis rusticam plebem, quae sub divo et in labore nutritur, solis patiens, umbrae neglegens, balnearum nescia, deliciarum ignara.
I think that there never could have been any doubt that rustic people are better suited to arms [than urban people], since they are nurtured under the open sky and in toil, enduring of sun, indifferent to shade, without experience of baths, ignorant of luxuries.[19]
[18] W. D. Hooper and H. B. Ash, trans., Cato and Varro: De re rustica, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1934; reprint, 1967).
[19] Author's translation; cited by Frayn, 11. Cf. Aen. 9.607–13:
at patiens operum parvoque adsueta iuventus
aut rastris terram domat aut quatit oppida bello.
omne aevum ferro teritur, versaque iuvencum
terga fatigamus hasta, nec tarda senectus
debilitat viris animi mutatque vigorem:
canitiem galea premimus, semperque recentis
comportare iuvat praedas et vivere rapto.
As youths
they learn frugality and patient labor
and tame the earth with harrows or compel
towns to tremble. All our life
is spent with steel; we goad the backs of bullocks
with our inverted spears, and even slow
old age can never sap our force of spirit
or body's vigor. We clamp down gray hairs
beneath a helmet, always take delight
in our new plunder, in a violent life.
The farmer then is also and especially Roman man, embodying the characteristic Roman veneration of tradition, discipline, order, and courage.
Finally and most significantly the farmer is also Iron Age man with, in this poem, a technology to which the poet ascribes an aggressive and destructive quality:
tunc alnos primum fluvii sensere cavatas;
navita tum stellis numeros et nomina fecit
Pleiadas, Hyadas, claramque Lycaonis Arcton;
tum laqueis captare feras et fallere visco
inventum et magnos canibus circumdare saltus;
atque alius latum funda iam verberat amnem
alta petens, pelagoque alius trahit umida lina;
tum ferri rigor atque argutae lammina serrae
(nam primi cuneis scindebant fissile lignum),
tum variae venere artes.
(1.136–45)
Then first did rivers feel the hollowed out alder-trunks;
Then did the mariner group and name the stars—the Pleiades,
Hyades and the bright Bear.
Then was invented the snare for taking game, the tricky
Bird-lime, the casting of hounds about the broad wood-coverts.
One whips now the wide river with casting-net and
Searches deep pools, another trawls his dripping line in the
Sea. Then came the rigid strength of steel and the shrill saw-blade
(For primitive man was wont to split his wood with wedges);
Then came the various arts.
Iron Age technology, as the poet characterizes it in this programmatic passage, is aimed at dominance and control, and its techniques, from the point of view of nature, are violent. As Otis notes, "The items . . . that Virgil selects involve at every point the rending and perversion of natural things (i.e. the discovery of fire, navigation, trapping, hunting and fishing, iron and steel tools)."[20] The verbs captare and fallere (139), verberat (141), and scindebant (144) suggest the assault on nature that Iron Age
[20] Otis, Virgil, 157 n. 1. Cf. Perkell, "Virgil's Fourth Georgic, " 216–17 and notes, on the violence of agriculture. Ross, Virgil's Elements, 78, cites Servius similarly at 1.198.
civilization entails. That agriculture requires the destruction and domination of natural things becomes a leitmotif of the poem, ultimately and most dramatically exemplified, as we shall see, in the bougonia that concludes Georgic 4.
In this poem the poet attributes to farming a military character, which serves to suggest that the farmer is engaged in a war of sorts with nature. The farmer's mode is to vanquish nature through his technology, the aggressive character of which is implicit in the military terms that the poet applies to agriculture throughout the Georgics . For example, following the Golden Age, when nature, unasked, produced all things everywhere in abundance (1.127–28), man has been in mortal combat with his surroundings for his very existence. To cite an example:
exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis.
(1.99)
At his post he disciplines the ground and commands the fields.
Note here especially the term imperat . Another example:
quid dicam iacto qui semine comminus arva
insequitur
(1.104–5)
Why tell of him who, throwing the seed, closes upon the field
hand to hand?
Frequens (1.99) is used of a soldier at his standards, and iacto (1.104) implies that as the legionnaire throws his spear and then runs in to grapple hand to hand with his enemy, so the farmer throws his seed and grapples with the land. Comparable expressions are found in
ante Iovem nulli subigebant arva coloni
(1.125)
Before Jove's time, no settlers brought the land under subjection.
quod nisi et adsiduis herbam insectabere rastris
(1.155)
Unless you assail the weeds relentlessly with your mattock
Dicendum et quae sint duris agrestibus arma
(1.160)
I'll tell you too the armoury of the tough countryman.
The farmer dominates by tilling (2.114), compels (cogendae, domandae 2.60–62), imposes his hard rule (dura exerce imperia 2.370.)[21] His actions towards nature's creatures are violent:
hic plantas tenero abscindens de corpore matrum
deposuit sulcis
(2.23–24)
One man tears suckers from the tender body of the mother
And plants them in trenches.
Tenero (23), which personifies the plants, and abscindens (23) assure that the reader's sympathy is with the plant as helpless victim. Similarly in
aut unde iratus silvam devexit arator
et nemora evertit multos ignava per annos,
antiquasque domos avium cum stirpibus imis
eruit; illae altum nidis petiere relictis,
at rudis enituit impulso vomere campus.
(2.207–11)
Or acres from which the angry ploughman has carted away the wood,
Levelling the groves that stood idle for many a year;
He felled them, root and branch he demolished the ancient dwellings
Of birds; their nests abandoned, the birds have made for the sky,
But the land that once was wild is gleaming now with furrows.
[21] Cf. John Conington and Henry Nettleship, eds., The Works of Virgil (London, 1898; reprint, Hildesheim, 1963), at 1.99, 104–5, 125, 155, 160; 2.207–11, 277, 367–70; 3.468–69; 4.106–8. Cf. Aya Betensky, "The Farmer's Battles," Ramus 8 (1979): 108–19, whose essential thesis is that the positive qualities of war can be put to good use in agriculture. My argument is that such a moral distinction is arbitrary. Cf. Altevogt, 24, on the "military character of agricultural labor." Cf. Bradley, 350, on the order and productivity that come from warfare.
We see that the farmer tears up the birds' ancient homes, and the poet, since he follows the birds' anguished responses, necessarily involves the reader's sympathy with their fate. By making the reader identify with what is destroyed, the poet makes him realize the cost of a field productive for man.
Especially striking since it is without precedent is the use of arma for farm tools.[22] Elsewhere, as in Varro 1.17.1, farm tools are termed instrumenta . Such an original usage for arma ("arms") confirms the poet's pattern of characterizing farming as a military operation against nature. This language, consistent throughout the poem, is not paralleled in earlier writers like Cato, Varro, and Lucretius, who do not characteristically use language that represents farming as a kind of aggression against nature or nature's creatures.
Another significant feature of the poet's description of technology is that the arts that man has been compelled to contrive are all aimed at material survival and therefore lead to visible and quantifiable, but not to moral or esthetic, progress. We may note how this description of the discovery of civilization includes the material and the practical, but omits fas ("divine right") and art. In this respect the Georgic poet differs significantly from, for example, Lucretius, who includes the fine arts in his description of the discovery of civilization:
Navigia atque agri culturas moenia leges
arma vias vestis et cetera de genere horum,
praemia, delicias quoque vitae funditus omnis,
carmina picturas, et daedala signa polire,
usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
paulatim docuit pedetemptim progredientis.
(Lucr. 5.1448–53)
Navigation, agriculture, cities, law,
war, travel, clothing, and all such things else,
money, and life's delights, from top to bottom,
poetry, painting, the cunning sculptor's art,
the searching, the trial and error of nimble minds
have taught us, inching forward, step by step.
[22] Wilkinson, Georgics, 80.
If Jove has any concern for spiritual purpose or moral conscience in man, it is not so stated in this passage. Neither is it reflected in Iron Age reality, since a necessary consequence of Jove's intervention in mortal affairs is that man's moral relationships become compromised. Merely for survival man must become aggressive towards nature. In this way both man and technology appear to be instruments of Jove's purposes, which are represented as indifferent to moral qualities or aspirations. Thus Virgil's poetry, as it often does, points to discrepancies between moral values and divine actions.
The military character of agricultural labor in this poem, as outlined above, has been noted by many and is not at issue here. What is at issue is the interpretation of this motif. My thesis is that the military activity of the farmer, analogous as it is to war, suggests the moral ambiguity and tension of the human condition as it is epitomized in the farmer's experience, where material progress is pitted against humane value in man's relationship both to nature and to other men. Further to intensify the ambiguity of man's relationship to nature is the fact that, despite its characteristic military quality, it is also sometimes sustaining. On occasion, instead of being represented as aggressing against nature militarily, man is represented as helping:
Multum adeo, rastris glaebas qui frangit inertis
vimineasque trahit crates, iuvat arva
(1.94–95)
He greatly helps his land who takes a mattock
To break the sluggish clods, and drags bush-harrows.[23]
Another such example is
sic quoque mutatis requiescunt fetibus arva,
nec nulla interea est inaratae gratia terrae.
(1.82–83)
So too are the fields rested by a rotation of crops,
And meanwhile not thankless is the untilled earth.
[23] L. P. Wilkinson, trans., Virgil: The Georgics (Harmondsworth and New York, 1982.).
Similarly, although the farmer is often metaphorically and sometimes even literally a soldier (as when he is conscripted into the army [1.506–8]), the farmer is sometimes the antithesis of the soldier, morally distinct from and implicitly superior to him in the moral hierarchy that the poem at times suggests. At the end of Georgic 2, for example, the farmer is procul discordibus armis, "far from discordant arms" (459). Analogously, at the end of Georgic 1 the poet envisions a future moment at Philippi, twice, as he says, the site of Romans dying at Roman hands, when the farmer will upturn with his plow rusted weapons and bare bones (493–97). The farmer will endure, laboring and productive, although in a declining world, while the soldier, whose anonymous bones he upheaves, once a destroyer, is now himself long destroyed. Here we infer an apparent dichotomy between, on the one hand, the peacefulness of rural life and its distance from war and, on the other, the violence and horror that war entails. And further to intensify the ambiguity even of the war theme, we must note—although it may be perhaps ironic—that Caesar's wars are apparently benign (4.560–62).
The unresolved ambivalence that the poem expresses towards agriculture may be summed up in the tension between the following two passages, which imply contrasting attitudes towards the effect of agriculture on nature. The first is 2.207–11 (cited on p. 35). Here, despite evident depredation of nature, the field is seen to gleam as a result of the plow's work. At 2.438–39, however, the poet is rapturous at the sight of a field untouched by man:
iuvat arva videre
non rastris, hominum non ulli obnoxia curae.
What a joy it is
to look on land beholden to no drag-hoes
nor any human care![24]
Man's developing relationship with nature, characteristically, but not exclusively, aggressive and destructive, parallels in its ambiguity his relationship with other men. As man becomes
[24] Wilkinson, trans.
aggressive towards nature, so he becomes competitive with or negligent of others. While pre-Jovian men cared for the common good (1.127), modern man finds himself, envying another's plenty, left to starve alone (1.155–59). Comparable in substance is condit opes alius defossoque incubat auro (2.507), where a miser hoards his secret wealth. Some men (perhaps only city men) are worse than merely negligent. They seek actively to harm others, sometimes their own brothers (2.496, 510), inferior in this way even to beasts, which grieve at their brothers' death (3.518). Yet the farmer, on the other hand, sustains his country and his grandchildren through his labor (2.514–15), thus serving both his private interests and those of the nation. Indeed, a certain austere morality is attributed to the farmer's life, as in
casta pudicitiam servat domus
(2.524)
a house that preserves the tradition of chastity.
And yet, contrarily, Justice is said to have left even these (relatively) virtuous inhabitants of the country:
extrema per illos
Iustitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.
(2.473–74)
When justice
left earth, her latest footprints were stamped on folk like these.
In effect, then, and truly enough, the farmer is represented both as victim (of nature and of the city) and as victimizer (of nature and its creatures). He is nature's victim in such passages as 1.324–27, in which devastating storm dissolves all his achievements. He is necessarily limited by the tendency of all things to deteriorate (1.197–203). He is victim of the city at 1.507, for example, conscripted for wars that overtake his life and ruin his efforts. In these passages the farmer's life is represented as inevitably defeating, an existence that is at best one of poverty and deprivation (2.472).[25]
[25] The difficulties of farming were known to all. Not even the urban plebs wished to return to the land. Cf. Miles, 26–27 and 39–40, for citations.
Sometimes, alternatively, the farmer's life is idealized as one of peace, ease, simplicity, and reverence:
at secura quies et nescia fallere vita,
dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis
speluncae vivique lacus at frigida tempe
mugitusque boum mollesque sub arbore somni
non absunt; illic saltus ac lustra ferarum,
et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus,
sacra deum sanctique patres.
(2.467–73)
But calm security and a life that will not cheat you,
Rich in its own rewards, are here: the broad ease of the farmlands,
Caves, living lakes, and combes that are cool even at midsummer,
Mooing of herds, and slumber mild in the trees' shade,
Here are glades game-haunted,
Lads hardened to labour, inured to simple ways,
Reverence for God, respect for the family.
At other times the poet implies that readers of the poem may well find the farmer's life distasteful:
arida tantum
ne saturare fimo pingui pudeat sola neve
effetos cinerem immundum iactare per agros.
(1.79–81)
only be not
ashamed to feed fat the dried-out soil
with rich dung, and to scatter grimy
ashes over the exhausted fields.
Possum multa tibi veterum praecepta referre,
ni refugis tenuisque piget cognoscere curas.
(1.176–77)
I can repeat for you many olden maxims,
unless you shrink back and are loath
to learn such trivial cares.
These attitudes are interestingly paralleled in Eclogue 2, wherein the shepherd-speaker Corydon invites the urban Alexis to join him in his "humble hut" (humilis . . . casas 29) and "country squalor" (sordida rura 28), terms expressing the speaker's understanding of an urban person's view, acknowledging his invitation to Alexis as, in some sense, an invitation to join a smaller world.
This judgment is not, of course, Corydon's own, which rather envisions the country as idyllic (45–55).
As Corydon perceives his rustic naiveté (rusticus es, Corydon 56), so in the Georgics it is evident that the farmer's entertainments are not of the sort to attract the wholehearted participation of such sophisticated readers (e.g., Maecenas and Caesar) as the poem anticipates:
ipse dies agitat festos fususque per herbam,
ignis ubi in medio et socii cratera coronant,
te libans, Lenaee, vocat pecorisque magistris
velocis iaculi certamina ponit in ulmo,
corporaque agresti nudant praedura palaestra.
(2.527–31)
The farmer himself keeps holidays when, at ease in a meadow,
A fire in the midst and friends there to crown the flowing bowl,
He drinks the health of the Wine-god and arranges for his
herdsmen
A darts-match, setting up the target upon an elm tree,
And the labourers bare their sinewy bodies for country wrestling.
As Spofford excellently puts it, the poet is the locus of true taste in the poem, for he can both satirize the corruption of the city and also recognize the naiveté of the country.[26] As is finely suggested here in the distance and difference implied in the adjective agresti ("country"), the poet is more sophisticated than the rustics whose lives he praises but nevertheless declines to live.[27]
The poet treats with ambiguity even the presumed moral qualities of simplicity and purity in the farmer's life, as these qualities may result as much from ignorance as from virtue. For example, the concluding passages of Georgic 2 certainly suggest a moral superiority of farmers to city dwellers since neither cities
[26] Spofford, 47.
[27] Cf., analogously, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, 1964; reprint, 1981), 25: "In one way or another, if only by virtue of the unmistakeable sophistication with which they are composed, these works [pastorals] manage to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. . . . [T]he pastoral design . . . embraces some token of a larger, more complicated order of experience."
nor their inhabitants have much to recommend them in the Georgics . At 2.155 cities are heaped-up stones, the result of technology, labor, and (implicit) defensive needs. At 1.273–75 the city is a place to sell things. Wars come from cities (1.510), which fight against their neighbors, thus exemplifying the complete loss of Golden Age community. Not only is there no concern for the common good, but brothers plot against brothers. Cities in the Georgics are corrupt, their luxuries reflecting depravity more than refinement, esthetic sensibility, or cultural achievement. The following extract, describing urban faults from which the farmer is free, illustrates some of these points:
si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis
mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam,
nec varios inhiant pulchra testudine postis,
inlusasque auro vestis Ephyreiaque aera,
alba neque Assyrio fucatur lana veneno,
nec casia liquidi corrumpitur usus olivi;
(2.461–66)
What if no lofty
dwelling vomits forth from haughty gates at
dawn a flood of callers; what if
they never gape at doorposts inlaid with
beautiful tortoise-shell, at garments
tricked out with gold, or at bronzes of
Ephyra; what if their white wool is not
stained with Assyrian dye nor the use
of their clear olive oil spoiled with cassia?
While urban luxury could have been made to correspond positively with the cultural richness with which the poet characterizes his own work in Georgic 3.11–36 and that presumably differentiates his poetry from the carminibus patriis (2.394), versibus incomptis, and risu soluto (2.386) of the Italian farmers, here it is represented as almost wholly negative. It is possible to say "almost wholly" and not "entirely" because the term pulchra (2.463) suggests that although the farmer may indeed be free from urban vice, he is also deprived of urban beauty. He lives without art or poetry, never seeing doors inlaid with beautiful shell, clothes embroidered with gold, or bronzes from Corinth (Ephyra). Pulchra is the significant term here, for although these
objects may connote decadence, they are also works of acknowledged beauty, expressions of the refinement and depth of the human spirit. Here the poet touches on the cultural barrenness of rural life, which, as not infrequently in Roman poetry, characterizes the Roman tradition.[28] One might compare the words of Anchises in Aeneid 6.847–53, when he concedes to peoples other than Romans the greatest excellence in artistic expression. Because the farmer lives without art, beauty, and poetry such as the Georgic poet makes, the poet can assert that his mission is to bring Ascraeum carmen ("Hesiodic song") to Italy (2.174–76). Therefore we must infer that the farmer's virtue is inadvertent, the result of naiveté or of narrowness of experience, and consequently is not the result of deliberate and willed moral choice. Since the farmer does not know urban corruption, he cannot be credited with having declined or resisted it. He is free from envy, as indeed he is also free from pity (neque ille/aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti 2.498–99), because he has neither seen nor experienced anything that would move him to such a state. To the extent that farmers are virtuous, they are so from ignorance, thus resembling the "prepolitical" men of Book 5 of Lucretius' De rerum natura . These men have the essential Epicurean virtues of freedom from religious fear and from unnecessary desire. They have family life, simple society, and are bound by friendship. Yet their lives are not endorsed by Lucretius as a model to be emulated because "the limitation of men's desires to what is by nature good did not come from wise choice based on knowledge of nature, but from ignorance and lack of exposure to anything else."[29] Since they lacked the enlightenment of Epicurus' truth, they were not able truly to know nature or, consequently, to choose to live the good life. True happiness, which results from knowledge and, therefore, enlightened choice, is
[28] On the narrowness of rural life see Livy 7.4.6–7 and Sall. Cat. 4.1.2 (cited by Miles, 29, 30). Cf. Griffin, "Fourth Georgic, " 64–65, on the traditional Roman's indifference to art, citing Hor. Ars poetica 323ff. In the article Griffin discusses the collective, impersonal, unreflective character of traditional Rome (as exemplified by the bees of Georgic 4).
[29] For this citation and the term "prepolitical" see James H. Nichols, Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), 126ff.
available only to the Epicurean. Analogously in the Georgics, true moral virtue would belong only to a person who, having knowledge of the city, deliberately chose an alternative life. Ignorance, however, is a striking feature of farmers in this poem. Farmers are defined by their limited vision and perspective:
ignarosque viae mecum miseratus agrestis
(1.41)
pitying with me the farmers who are ignorant
of the way.
Ignarosque viae is a phrase of broad philosophical import, not to be restricted to farming.[30] Comparable in its implication of ignorance is
O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas!
(2.458–59)
O happy, too happy, if they were to know
their luck, are the farmers!
Thus, farmers, as they represent all men, experience the limited vision and understanding that characterize the mortal condition. Since the poet has knowledge of both city and country, he is less limited than the farmer, whom he virtually patronizes in 2.458. Nevertheless the poet also confesses his own ignorance of, for example, "the ways of the sky and the stars" (caelique vias et sidera 2.477). He differs from the farmer, perhaps, in his greater interest in knowing causas rather than praecepta . Unlike Lucretius, however, the Georgic poet does not assume that one can achieve happiness (either by becoming felix, a permanent state, or even fortunatus )[31] and hence proposes no dogma or system for achieving such a state.
With the term pulchra and the observation that, for example, the farmer has no experience of envy or pity, the poet implies that the farmer's virtue results from a kind of naiveté. His life is
[30] Cf. Will Richter, Vergil: Georgica (Munich, 1957), ad loc.; Klingner, Virgil, 259.
[31] For the distinction between felix and fortunatus see J. S. Clay, "The Argument of the End of Virgil's Second Georgic, " Philologus 2 (1976): 237ff.
without self-conscious, deliberate art (although it is not entirely without music)[32] and without enlightened moral choice.
In sum, the picture of the farmer that emerges in the Georgics is a wholly ambiguous one from a moral point of view. The farmer both helps nature and hurts it. He is both aggressive towards nature and its victim. He is a man of peace, but also a man of war—often so metaphorically, sometimes even literally. Although sometimes he is like a soldier, at other times he is the antithesis of a soldier. His life seems both idyllic, inviting, and also sordid, repellent. He has moral virtues, but for inadequate reasons. Thus the farmer exemplifies the moral ambiguity that characterizes the relationship of Iron Age man to nature, to other men, to knowledge, and to moral choice.
Thus far the discussion has been of the farmer, the figure who imposes a form and meaning upon nature and thereby establishes culture. We turn now to the poet, who imposes form and meaning upon culture and thereby creates art. As nature is to the farmer, so the farmer is to the poet.[33]
The Poet
It has been suggested that a tension exists in the Georgics between the figures of the farmer and the poet. The farmer is held to represent Man, that is, the common mortal experience of human beings with respect to nature and to other men; he values the material, the useful, and is largely represented as aggressive towards nature. The poet values useless song, is in harmony with nature and even nurtured by it. Despite these oppositions, however, both farmer and poet are Iron Age figures, flawed in their relationships to nature and to other men. While the farmer is
[32] The farmer's wife solaces herself with song (1.293–94); the last vine-dresser sings his finished rows (2.417); the nightingale has song (4.511–15), but she is more like the poet than the farmer. Hell has no song without Orpheus. The nymphs in 4.345–48 are "taken" or "charmed" (captae ) by tales of loves of the gods. (Cf. 1.293–94.) Song, therefore, is sometimes for solace (or just distraction), sometimes for the preservation of grief. The Georgic poet's song is the most interpretive and sophisticated.
[33] See Redfield, 204–23, on the relationship between art, culture, and nature.
menaced by nature, the city, and his limited mortal visions, the poet is menaced by his own passions and his weakness in the world. While the farmer may be seen as seeking to restore Golden Age plenty through his labor, the poet seeks to restore Golden Age community through his song of pity (as will be argued below). The poet differs from the farmer most fundamentally in his basic sensibility, which inclines him to gratuitous and selfless pity, a behavior antithetical the farmer's mode. As pity most significantly characterizes the poet, I will focus on the motifs of the poet's pity and his sense of poetic mission, both of which distinguish his values from the farmer's. I will then proceed to consider how, on the other hand, the poet shares with other men certain characteristic Iron Age flaws, with the result that we shall come to see the poet as simultaneously exalted (as the sole carrier of humane value) and diminished (as an impotent figure in the world of power). Thus the poet, like the farmer, experiences in his work the moral tension that is the lot of all Iron Age men.
For the farmer pity is counterproductive and only costly. Cato and Varro, therefore, throughout their writings, prescribe the elimination of old or sick animals in favor of those that will bring a profit.[34] In the Georgics the farmer is exhorted to eschew pity for nature and its creatures (e.g., 3.95–100) except on such occasions as pity will prove ultimately to be advantageous. The beekeeper, for example, is advised to spare and pity his bees (4.239–40) because this will result in greater future productivity. As the farmer cannot pity nature unless his pity will prove productive, so he also lacks pity (if through ignorance) for other men (2.498–99), as we have seen.
It is easy enough, on the other hand, to demonstrate that the poet's sensibility inclines him to pity and that he aims to elicit pity as a response from his readers. At 1.41 the poet explicitly calls upon Caesar to pity with him the farmers who are "ignorant
[34] See Cato Agr. 2.7, for instance: boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. "Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous" (trans. Hooper and Ash). Cf. Varro 1.17.3. See Richter at 3.95–100 on the difficulties of interpreting abde domo .
of the way." There are other examples, less explicit but more moving, of calls to pity, in which the poet elicits the reader's pity by creating a scene of powerful pathos. Numerous passages in the Georgics elicit pity from the reader by involving his feelings and empathy, moving him to regret for the losses or sufferings of both man and nature. As an example we may consider 2.207–11, in which significant details manipulate the reader's vision and value judgment of the scene. The arator is iratus ("angry"), therefore, we may infer, violent and destructive. He tears up the ancient homes of the birds from their deepest roots. Antiquas, cum stirpibus imis, eruit are all significant details that focus the reader's attention on the anguished responses of the displaced birds, who suffer loss of their "ancient homes," the farmer thus violating tradition, for which Romans had special reverence.
Another such scene is 3.371–75:
hos non immissis canibus, non cassibus ullis
puniceaeve agitant pavidos formidine pennae,
sed frustra oppositum trudentis pectore montem
comminus obtruncant ferro graviterque rudentis
caedunt et magno laeti clamore reportant.
Men hunt them not with hounds now, nor do they use the nets,
No scarlet-featured toils are needed to break their nerve;
But the deer vainly shove at the banked-up snow with their shoulders,
The men attack them at close quarters, they cut them down
Belling loud, and cheerfully shout as they bring them home.
Here attention focuses on the careless (laeti 375) brutality (obtruncant 374) of the killing; sympathy goes to the victims because of the term frustra ("in vain" 373). The animals are seen as helpless victims in a doomed contest, while the men, more savage than the beasts whose skins they wear, vulgarly exploit their technological superiority.
Comparable are the death struggles of the calf at 4.299–302:
tum vitulus bima curvans iam cornua fronte
quaeritur: huic geminae nares et spiritus oris
multa reluctanti obstruitur, plagisque perempto
tunsa per integram solvuntur viscera pellem.
A two-year-old calf is obtained, whose horns are beginning to curve
From his forehead. They stopper up, though he struggle wildly, his two
Nostrils and breathing mouth, and they beat him to death with blows
That pound his flesh to pulp but leave the hide intact.
The detail of the calf's horns just beginning to grow from his forehead suggests the promise of his future growth and vitality; it allows us to visualize and individualize the animal in our minds. Multa reluctanti and plagisque perempto (301) emphasize the calf's unwillingness to die, his futile fight for life, his helpless victimization, and the brutality of such sacrifice.[35]
The scenes considered thus far are expressed by the voice of the Georgic poet. The tale of Orpheus, which is told by Proteus, is famous for its resonant pathos and its engaging of the reader's sympathy and pity for Eurydice and for Orpheus, the victim of Aristaeus' and his own passion. Otis, in his important discussion of Virgil's "subjective style,"[36] points to such details as the rhetorical questions at 4.504ff.:
quid faceret? quo se rapta bis coniuge ferret?
quo fletu Manis, quae numina voce moveret?
What could he do, where go, his wife twice taken from him?
What lament would move death now? What deities hear his song?
These questions deeply involve readers with Orpheus' experience and loss, while leaving them emotionally indifferent to Aristaeus' success.
An analogous example is that of the nightingale:
qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra
amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator
observans nido implumis detraxit; at illa
flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen
integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet.
(4.511–15)
[35] See Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1310, on the repellent "brutality of the sacrifice, which discourages imitation and bespeaks the barbarism of a foreign land."
[36] Otis, Virgil, 200–208 particularly.
As a nightingale he sang that sorrowing under a poplar's
Shade laments the young she has lost, whom a heartless ploughman
Has noticed and dragged from the nest unfledged; and the nightingale
Weeps all night, on a branch repeating the piteous song,
Loading the acres around with the burden of her lament.
She mourns eternally because the unfeeling (durus 512) farmer has plundered her nest and robbed her of her children. Observans (513) shows that the crime is deliberate, premeditated; implumis (513) that the victims are helpless, young, cannot escape. It is a pitiable (miserabile 514) and irremediable loss that the nightingale sings. In sum, then, while Hell never pities (4.470, 489) and farmers pity only when it furthers their interests, the Georgic poet's unique contribution, for which the tone is set at 1.41, is his gratuitous pity, empathy, and involvement with the suffering of others.[37]
As we consider this relationship between the poet and pity in the Georgics, we may note with interest that the effect of art in Aeneid 1.459–62 and also of the Aeneid itself as a whole is to
[37] G. 1.466, in which the sun's eclipse is attributed to its pity for Caesar's death, is the poet's interpretation and does not detract from the unique quality of his sensibility. Proteus, another poet-figure, also feels pity. For all occurrences in the Georgics:
|
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976), 171–91, explicates several of Rousseau's thoughts on pity, which are interesting for the present study. Rousseau sees pity as a prereflexive virtue, awakened by the imagination rather than by reason. If he is correct, it becomes clear why the poet (and not the farmer, general, or philosopher) can best elicit this sentiment. Rousseau sees imagination as the correlate of humanity, passion, speech, liberty, and perfectibility, thus making the poet the likely carrier of humane value.
involve the reader's pity and empathy for loss and suffering. Aeneas understands that the message of the paintings in Dido's temple to Juno is pity for the mortal condition:
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
Aen. 1.462.
There are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart.
Aeneas sees in the paintings tears for sorrow, and the mortality of the human condition moves the heart of the beholder. Dido subsequently confirms Aeneas' interpretation of the paintings, explaining that she has compassion for others' suffering because she has suffered herself:
me quoque per multos similis fortuna labores
iactatam hac demum voluit consistere terra.
non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco.
Aen. 1.628–30
Me, too, has a like fortune driven through many toils,
and willed that at last I should find rest in this
land. Not ignorant of ill do I learn to befriend
the unhappy.
Later it is precisely because Aeneas feels no pity for her, because he appears inhuman and inhumane (4.365–66), that she becomes most enraged at him and bitterly destructive:
num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit?
num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est?
Aen. 4.369–70
Did he sigh while I wept? Did he turn on me a glance?
Did he yield and shed tears or pity her who loved him?
As a last example we may consider the final simile of the Aeneid, in which readers are virtually compelled, through the use of the first-person plural verb, to identify with the terror and weakness of Turnus and to pity him as he is vanquished by Aeneas:
ac uelut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
velle videmur et in mediis conatibus aegri
succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
sufficiunt vires nec vox aut verba sequuntur:
sic Turno, quacumque viam virtute petivit,
successum dea dira negat.
Aen. 12.908–14
Just as in dreams of night, when languid rest
has closed our eyes, we seem in vain to wish
to press on down a path, but as we strain,
we falter, weak; our tongues can say nothing,
the body loses its familiar force,
no voice, no word can follow: so whatever
courage he calls upon to find a way,
the cursed goddess keeps success from Turnus.
Readers are here made to identify with Turnus' nightmare of helpless victimization, to see it both as their own and as universal, thus necessarily are invited to become members of a moral community that pities loss and grieves at the costs of victory. This motif, though climactically placed at the poem's conclusion, occurs throughout the Aeneid and contributes to the haunting melancholy of the whole.[38]
The Georgic poet's inclination to pity moves him to bring a "lesson of poetry" (in Adam Parry's fine phrase)[39] to Roman towns (2.176) and similarly to bring the Muses from Greece to Italy (3.10–15). The poet has just described Italian peoples as characteristically and distinctively fierce and military:
haec genus acre virum, Marsos pubemque Sabellam
adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos
[38] M. P.-H. Schrijvers, "La valeur de la pitié chez Virgile dans l'Enéide et chez quelques-uns de ses interprètes," in Présence de Virgile, ed. R. Chevalier (Paris, 1978), 483–95, cites references that suggest that the conventional Roman's conception of pity was narrower than that of Homer, for example, and was directed towards family, friends, and country, not strangers or enemies. Therefore he argues that the Aeneid legitimizes the final vindictiveness of Aeneas. He ignores the possibility, observed by Iser, 3, 77, 146, that great texts may challenge problematic convention, not merely endorse it.
[39] Parry, 51.
extulit, haec Decios, Marios magnosque Camillos,
Scipiadas duros bello, et te, maxime Caesar,
qui nunc extremis Asiae iam victor in oris
imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum.
(2.167–71)
Her breed of men—the Marsians and Sabellians,
Ligurians used to hardship, Volscian javelin-throwers;
Mother she is of the Decii, Marii, great Camilli,
The Scipios relentless in war; and of you, most royal Caesar,
Who now triumphant along the furthest Asian frontiers
Keep the war-worthless Indians away from the towers of Rome.
It is not implausible that such militaristic peoples might lack or fail to express artistic sensibility. The Muses apparently live in Greece (3.10–15), and the poet does not include them in his praise of Italy (2.136ff.) although they are the supreme object of his reverence (2.475–76). Cicero (Tusc. 1.2.3) had noted (Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti ) and Horace (Ars poet . 323ff.) had lamented that traditional Romans were unfitted for poetry.[40] Here the poet perceives himself as on a mission to bring poetry to his people. In particular he refers to his poetry as Ascraean (i.e., Hesiodic) song, which shall be taken here to denote didactic poetry that, like Hesiod's, describes a fallen world, our Iron Age world, morally inferior to the Golden Age;[41] a world that, through the poet's song, maintains a vision of
[40] See remarks in note 28 on Griffin's view.
[41] J. P. Vernant, "Le mythe hésiodique des races: Essai d'analyse structurale," RHR 157 (1960): 21–54, has shown that the succession and opposition of races (golden, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron) in Hesiod are based not on continuous decline but on the major conflict of hubris and dike . Hubris and dike do not seem to be equally available options for human beings in the Georgics ; rather the oppositions of the Iron Age seem unnegotiable. Virgil eliminates from his account in the Georgics Hesiod's stories of Prometheus and Pandora and the possibility of cycling ages (cf. Works and Days 175, where Hesiod wishes he had been born earlier or later ). Thus in the Georgics guilt for the human condition is less attributable to any particular party, and no resolution to Iron Age conflicts can be expected in time.
The question of how to interpret "Ascraean" song is a surprisingly vexed one. For Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 107, for example, it is an allusion to Hesiod's "pessimistic spirit." For Ross, Virgil's Elements, 119, it is an allusion to the unreliability of Hesiod's Muses with respect to truth. For Thomas ad loc. the allusion is, in the first instance, to Hesiod as a favored model of Alexandrian poets. Secondly, he says, as the adjective (as applied to Hesiod) is first attested in Hellenistic literature (in Nicander), it may have been used by Callimachus and therefore may, in the Georgics passage, allude most significantly to Callimachus himself.
something better, more just, more harmonious, more humane. The poet thus emerges as a moral teacher, seeking in particular to remedy dissension between brothers (a conflict of special resonance for Romans plagued by civil wars). The expressed intent of the Georgic poet (2.176) is to bring this message to his people, to turn them into readers of sensibility, who have an apprehension and appreciation of noncompetitive peace, harmony, and community. He would make readers who could see the moral value of such Golden Age visions.
Pity arises from identification with the suffering of another, from the sense or knowledge that this suffering or something like it could become one's own. Through the pathos of many passages in the Georgics, we readers are made to share others' sorrow, to identify with their suffering, to experience it as potentially our own, and hence to feel bonds of common pain that unite us with others. Pity, then, makes of readers a community, because pity requires identification with the pain of another. The essential thing to note here, in terms of the poet's conception of his mission, is the fact that he imagines the Golden Age precisely as a community—a community among all men and between men and nature:
ante Iovem nulli subigebant arva coloni,
ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum
fas erat: in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus
omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat.
(1.125–28)
Before Jove's time no settlers subdued the land; it
was not right even to mark the fields or to divide
them with boundary lines. All sought the common
gain; and earth of her own accord brought forth
all things more freely, when no one was asking.[42]
[42] Author's translation.
These few verses suggest the traditional Golden Age, with its characteristic abundance of food, freedom from war, toil, and unhappiness. Most significant for this account, however, are harmony between and man nature (nature, unasked, gives all things more freely 127–28 and harmony among all men equally (they look to the common good 127). We note also the deeply solemn moral quality of fas (127), "right" of absolute or divine, as opposed to human, origin. Plowing the earth, represented as a kind of aggression against nature by man, is not allowed (125); neither is the possession of earth by man (127) nor, consequently, the pursuit private interest.
The moral effect of Virgil's poetry is precisely to create community, especially Golden Age community as he represents it. His poetry, since it embodies the ideal of harmony over conquest, of compassion for loss over pride in victory, teaches a sense of victory's cost. Through its preservation of a moral ideal and through its appreciation of sentiment, this poetry seeks to expand the sensibility of readers and to fashion them into a humane community. In instituting the Iron Age, Jove (1.121ff.) allowed the dissolution of moral quality (fas 127; cf. 1.505) in men's relations with nature and with each other. For his own purposes he allowed these relations to become exploitive and aggressive (e.g., 1.139–45) instead of harmonious. The poet, therefore, in seeking to create through pity a moral community and in representing as positive the values of nonexploitive peace and harmony, attempts to redress the omission of Jove. In this way the poet establishes an alternative set of values and creates a moral ideal. Thus he becomes the essential carrier of humane value, the bearer of the vision of noncompetitive peace and harmony; he becomes the carrier of what we must call, in terms of this poem, Golden Age values. Community is restored through pity; in particular, moral or Golden Age community is restored through the poet's poetry. He hopes, through his song, to restore the bonds between man and nature, now broken by technology, as well as those between man and man, now broken by civil and foreign war. The boldness of such aspirations well deserves the term audax that the poet applies to it at 1.40, with echoes at 2.175 and 4.565.
Since the feeling of pity is an ennobling one, the conviction of moral mission and superior moral sensibility might lead to complacency, even arrogance, in both poet and readers. Yet the Georgic poet does not assume an unambiguous superiority, nor is he represented as content in his separate values. Neither uncritical nor lacking in perspective on himself and his aspirations, he suggests in the emergent self-portrait in this poem certain limitations and inconsistencies that confirm his identity as an Iron Age figure.
The major flaw that the poet perceives in his work is what he represents as its futility because the value of pity is negligible in the political world. Events and motifs in the Georgics (as well as in the Aeneid ) suggest that pity is an inadequate, if humane, response to the moral and political dilemmas of the world of power. One could argue also, even more sadly, that the gratification that pity provides to the pitier is cheap and easy, almost a kind of play, as the poet may be suggesting with the verb ludere in 4.565 to describe his own song. Euripides had made Orestes say
Uneducated men are pitiless,
but we who are educated pity much. And we pay
a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.
(El. 294–96)[43]
There is clearly here a self-congratulating element to pity. Pitiers esteem themselves for their superior sensibility and intellectuality, even while they see (with their fine intelligence) the limitations of pity and superiority. As Augustine much later observed, people like to feel pity as long as it is for the suffering of others:
quid est, quod ibi homo vult dolere luctuosa et tragica, quae tamen pati ipse nollet? et tamen pati vult ex eis dolorem spectator, et dolor ipse est voluptas eius . . . quamquam, cum ipse patitur, miseria, cum aliis compatitur, misericordia dici solet . . . non enim ad subveniendum provocatur auditor, sed tantum ad dolendum invitatur . . . lacrimae ergo amantur et dolores.
(Confessions 3.2.2–3)
[43] Emily Townsend Vermeule, trans., Euripides: Electra, in Euripides, vol. 5, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago and London, 1959; reprint, 1968).
Why is it that a man likes to grieve over death and tragic events which he would not want to happen to himself? The spectator likes to experience grief at such scenes, and this very sorrow is a pleasure to him. . . . However, when he himself suffers it, it is usually called misery; when he suffers it with regard to others it is called pity. The auditor is not aroused to help others; he is only asked to grieve over them. . . . Tears and sorrow, therefore, are objects of love.[44]
Pity is perhaps a kind of play, a self-indulgence, that translates into no effective action in a world where power and choice have only serious consequence.
Such thoughts on the limitations and self-gratification of pity as are expressed by Euripides, Aristotle (see p. 20), and Augustine are implicit in the Georgics in the experiences of the poet-figures, who are the carriers of the value of pity in the poem. Not only the Georgic poet but also Orpheus, Proteus, and the nightingale fulfill poetic functions in the Georgics and reveal aspects of the poet's experience. All are represented variously as weak or failed in the world;[45] all are shown as having a certain regressive focus and pleasure in sorrow and loss, which they turn into beautiful, if ineffective, song.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the most moving and haunting passage in the Georgics, is attributed to Proteus. The Georgic poet is the singer of the Orpheus tale only indirectly or at second hand. Proteus' performance, although not described as musical (4.452), is nevertheless the most beautiful and moving poetry of the poem. Orpheus' song, apparently beyond human powers to describe, is never heard by readers. Therefore Proteus'
[44] John K. Ryan, trans., The Confessions of St. Augustine (Garden City, N.Y., 1958).
[45] For this theme in the Eclogues, see J. B. Solodow, "Poeta Impotens: The Last Three Eclogues, " Latomus 36 (1977): 757–71. In a valuable article, "Daedalus, Virgil, and the End of Art," AJP 108 (1987): 173–89, M. C. J. Putnam notes that Daedalus creates his art because of pity (Aen. 6.28) for Ariadne. The artist becomes creative through pity. For our purposes here we should observe further that Daedalus, when it comes to depicting his own failure and loss (i.e., the death of Icarus), is incapable of completing the work (Aen. 6.30–31). This suggests, it seems, a distinction between the case of pity that one can feel for others and then turn to artistic ends and the incapacity one feels at one's own grief and failure. Pity appears more likely than grief to come to artistic expression.
song is the most beautiful within our world of experience; he is the best poet we hear. And again, in him, we find a failure or loser in the world of power, for he is violated, compelled, and outmaneuvered (vim duram et vincula capto/tende 4.399–400; cf. victus, "vanquished" 443) by a power (Cyrene's knowledge, Aristaeus' force) more determined and aggressive than his own capacity to escape it. In addition to being vanquished and victimized himself, he also feels sympathy for Orpheus, the loser in his own drama with Aristaeus. Proteus and Orpheus are both, at least in part, victims of Aristaeus and the real power he represents.
We see, of course, a similar dynamic in the vignette of the nightingale (4.511–15), to which Orpheus is likened. Again there is the victimization of the beautiful singer by the stronger agent of the real world. As in the above examples, the beauty of the nightingale's song lies in its pathos (her children are lost, they are implumis 512–13) and in its eternal voicing of irremediable tragedy (514–15). The key for this discussion is that the nightingale's song is perceived by listeners as beautiful and as tragic. The hypothetical explanation of the melancholy of the nightingale's song (that she mourns her lost children, that the loss is eternal) illuminates the intimate and necessary relationship between tragedy and beauty and powerlessness, which has been the entire subject of this discussion.
This simile of the nightingale and the farmer recalls not only Odyssey 19.518–23 and 16.216–18 but also the fable of the nightingale and the hawk in Hesiod's Works and Days (202–12):
Now I shall tell a fable to the perceptive kings.
Thus spoke the hawk to the nightingale, the speckle-necked bird,
As he was carrying her gripped in his talons high in the clouds,
And she was piteously crying, for she was pierced by the grip of his
Bent talons; thus he spoke and strongly advised her:
"Foolish thing, why are you shrieking? Your captor is much
stronger than you.
There shall you go wherever I take you though you're a singer,
And, as I wish, I shall eat you for dinner or let you go free.
Foolish the man who wishes to fight against those who are
stronger;
He loses the victory and suffers pain in addition to shame."
Thus spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.
The ostensible moral of this fable, as the hawk speaks it, is that might makes right, arbitrarily (209) and regardless of justice. Yet the unpalatable characterization of the hawk and the pathos (205) of the nightingale's circumstance assure both that the reader's sympathy is with the nightingale and that the reader, despite the hawk's apparent present superiority, hears his moral with a certain irony, believing or hoping that Zeus will ultimately destroy the immoral hawk. The emotional dynamic of the fable is that Hesiod identifies with the nightingale, the singer (208), weak and victimized, and similarly involves the reader's sympathy. In this the fable is parallel to the simile in the Georgics . The significant difference is that in Hesiod the fable is unconcluded; there is hope that justice, in the end, will triumph and that the singer will go free. The reader's hope is of a piece with Hesiod's exhortation to justice. In the Georgics passage, on the contrary, the tragic outcome (the nightingale's loss of her young) has already occurred. The substance of the simile is to express the inevitable victimization of the weak by the strong and the related intimate connection between tragedy and beauty and powerlessness.
It is the Georgic poet, above all, who composes beautiful and tragic poetry, for his poem contains not only the pathos of the tale of Orpheus but a grand vision of the ambiguity of human experience as a whole, as will be discussed in the third chapter. He is, consequently, the poem's greatest poet and its most daring figure (1.40; 2.174; 4.565; and cf. 4.469 of Orpheus). Yet he acknowledges with graceful and only partial irony that he has no power in the world when compared to Caesar (4.559–66). Despite the real courage, if not audacity, of his efforts, he is of negligible significance in the world of politics and conquest. The poet values and even proselytizes on behalf of pity. He conceives of his poetic mission as the bringing of pity, of a "lesson of poetry," to his people. Yet the poet also has the perception that poets lose in the real world and that, consequently, pity itself is a kind of self-indulgent play (4.563–66). One might see in the word
ludere (4.565) not only a technical term but also Virgil's derogation of his own poetry, simultaneously ironic and serious. For, futile as it may be, pity is nevertheless the most humane value, necessary to the development of society (cf. Lucr. 5.1023: imbecillorum esse aecum misererier omnis, "that it was right for all to pity the weak") and to the maintenance of a humane order. Therefore the Georgics performs the highest moral function in making readers sensitive to loss and sympathetic to sorrow. Responsive readers must come to sense and to acknowledge the community and vulnerability of all mortal enterprise. Although the poet realizes the particular vulnerability of poets and of pity, he nevertheless consistently engages the reader's sympathy with these variously failed figures.
We see, then, that the poet, as represented in the figures of the Georgic poet, Orpheus, Proteus, and even the nightingale, is simultaneously exalted and disparaged. He is exalted for the beauty and emotional power of his song, for the humane value of pity that it voices and preserves. He is disparaged for his impotence in the world, for the inadequacy of his song as a response to the world's troubles, for his inclination to make of tragedy and loss a beautiful thing. This last propensity is of deeply ambiguous value, for it makes the poet ever backward-looking and hence ineffective. Yet it also makes him the only carrier of humane value in a material world that esteems profit and success above all, regardless of cost. These contrasting perspectives on the poet remain unresolved through the poem's final verses and constitute one of its essential tensions.
In addition to the weaknesses of a poetic method that relies on and appeals to pity, the poet reveals in himself other flaws or, better, inconsistencies that cause him dissatisfaction and identify him as an Iron Age figure. Among these are his pursuit of glory, his domination by irrational amor (both of which he deplores in others), and, finally, a certain alienation that he feels in his own time and place, since he repeatedly idealizes an irretrievable past and aspires to knowledge he cannot have.
The poet experiences ambition for glory and longs for victory and to be first (4.6; 3.8–10, 17). While he sings for the community, he represents himself as happiest when seeking his individual
goal of poetic victory and primacy (3.291–92). His victory will be one of song, hence without exploitation of nature or violence towards other men. Nevertheless, since pursuit of honor and gloria is explicitly condemned in Book 2 (e.g., 2.503ff.), we must infer the poet's awareness within himself of contradictory, Iron Age drives. Although acknowledging the moral inferiority of urban to rural life, he nevertheless distances himself from the latter by declaring his own passion for poetry. His desire to write poetry is not willed, but stems from love (amor ) for the Muses (2.476), by which he is struck. The poet has desires for honor and gloria because of his own particular amor, of which he cannot fail to recognize the irrational source (2.476, 3.285).[46] His poetry originates in amor:
quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore
(2.476)
whose sacred emblems I bear, struck by a mighty love
singula dum capti circumvectamur amore
(3.285)
while we, seized by love, tarry at each separate detail
sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis
raptat amor
(3.291–92)
But over these lonely heights of Parnassus
I'm driven by sweet love.
When the poet terms his amor dulcis ("sweet" 3.291) and Leander's durus ("harsh" 3.259), one senses the ironic awareness of self-delusion. The juxtaposition of ardua ("steep") and dulcis
[46] Richter ad loc., who notes the significant recurrence of the term amor here, is unclear about whether Virgil sees a parallel between his own feelings and those of the animals and human beings he has just described. Virgil, however, as is reflected in his choice of terms, sees amor as leading to passion and conflict as well as to poetry. Miles, 186, points out that "the explicit assertion that men, no less than animals, are vulnerable to amor' s disruptive influence argues for the inescapable ambiguity of human potential as well." In discussing 3.285 and 3.292, however, he detects no ironic self-awareness on the poet's part.
(3.291) suggests the effortful pleasure that the poet takes in his irrational passions and Iron Age strivings. Percussus ("struck" 2.476), capti ("caught" 3.285), and raptat ("seizes," "drives" 3.292) reveal the compelling nature of his passion. Like the charioteers straining for victory (3.103ff), like the stallion longing for challenge and combat (3.77ff), like the city dwellers condemned in Book 2, the poet experiences a passion that can know no permanent satisfaction. There is irony, subtlety, and acuity in the poet's portrait of himself. Certainly the poet's victory will come without violence or exploitation. Since, however, there is no competition (or art, apparently) in the Golden Age, we must see the poet's art and the competitive, irrational urges that sustain it as an Iron Age phenomenon.
The substance of the poet's victory will be its originality and seriousness of purpose (3.4–8). The Muses do not live in Italy, but must be brought there from Greece (3.11–12.). Should the poet succeed in his mission of bringing the Muses (and all that they signify) to his own country, he would construe this as a victory for himself. To express meaningfully the magnitude of his accomplishment in terms valued by Roman tradition, he calls himself victor (3.9–17) and proceeds to describe his victory in such a way as to suggest simultaneously a Roman triumph and an Olympic victory:
in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit.
illi victor ego et Tyrio conspectus in ostro
centum quadriiugos agitabo ad flumina currus.
cuncta mihi Alpheum linquens locosque Molorchi
cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia caestu.
ipse caput tonsae foliis ornatus olivae
dona feram.
(3.16–22)
Caesar's image shall stand there in the midst, commanding my
temple,
While I, a victor, conspicuous in crimson robes, shall drive
A hundred four-horse chariots up and down by the river.
All Greece will leave Alpheus and the Peloponnesian groves
To take part in the races and boxing-bouts I've arranged.
I myself, wearing a chaplet of trimmed olive,
Will present the prizes.
By juxtaposing his name to that of Caesar and by attributing the epithet victor as well as the nominative case to himself, he implies that his victory compares favorably with Caesar's. In 3.26–33 he imagines his creation:
in foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto
Gangaridum faciam victorisque arma Quirini,
atque hic undantem bello magnumque fluentem
Nilum ac navali surgentis aere columnas.
addam urbes Asiae domitas pulsumque Niphaten
fidentemque fuga Parthum versisque sagittis
et duo rapta manu diverso ex hoste tropaea
bisque triumphatas utroque ab litore genres.
On the doors of my temple I'll have engraved in gold and solid
Ivory the battle of the Ganges and the arms of victorious Quirinus
And here the enormous stream of Nile a-surge with a naval
Battle, and columns rising cast from the bronze of warships.
I'll add the cities of Asia we've mastered, Armenians routed,
Parthians whose strength is flight and shooting over their
shoulder;
Two trophies taken in battle from distant foes, a double
Triumph from either shore.
He reveals that the significant feature of his victory in contrast to Caesar's is that it is achieved through song (3.1, 3.3; cf. 4.471), hence without aggression—unlike the farmer's or soldier's. And though the poet triumphs peacefully, he is not passive but emphatically active: deducam (11), referam (12) ponam (13), agitabo (18), feram (22), addam (30). The monument to Caesar's glory is dependent upon the poet, a function of his song.[47]
Primacy is an important aspect of the poet's victory, although the claim to being first is familiar for poets. Commentators, for example, find parallels for these lines in Lucretius:
[47] Cf. Thomas at 3.1–48, one of the most impressive passages of his commentary. Based on inferences from texts extant and otherwise, he is able to discern in this proem a thoroughgoing allusion to Callimachus in which Virgil simultaneously rejects Neoteric/Callimachean themes and genres (in envisioning the Aeneid ) and yet also manifests commitment to a Callimachean esthetic. As Thomas puts it (at 3.28), it is "a proem which rejects the Callimachean rejection of epic."
avia Pieridum peragro loca nuilius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nuili velarint tempora Musae.
(Lucr. 1.926–30)
I travel the Muses' pathless places; none
Before has walked where I walk. I love to find
New founts and drink, to gather fresh, new flowers
And seek the laureate's crown whence Muses never
Till now have veiled the brow of any man.
(Lucr. 1.117–18, concerning Ennius, is similar. Horace refers to his own original achievement in Odes 3.30.13: princeps. ) What is not paralleled in these passages, namely, the claim to be victor, establishes that the military-athletic parallel is not mere convention but expresses significantly the context in which the poet wishes to place his achievement. (Vincere similarly describes his accomplishment in 3.289.) Victor is an emphatic addition to the traditional claim of primacy, and it makes clear the competitive, Iron Age drive of the poet.
The opulence of the temple's artistry, glorious with bronze, ivory, gold, and Parian marble, involves the poet in another inconsistency. The beauty of the poet's conceptions and aspirations, represented in the temple's precious metals and skilled artwork, is at variance with the ethic of utility and material austerity apparently endorsed in the laudes ruris of Book 2.458ff.[48] From the point of view of this ethic, the poet's temple of poetry would have to be condemned as extravagant and decadent. Neither beauty nor ornament serves a useful function or is appropriate to the previously idealized rural values of simplicity, naturalness, discipline, and rigorous restraint. Rather than affirming rural values, the poet's temple tends instead to identify him with city dwellers, who are competitive, ambitious, and eager for luxury.
[48] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 169 (also Miles, 175–77), notes the inconsistency of the poet's aspirations here with those values presumably scorned in 2.458ff. Cf. Boyle, 78–79.
These inconsistencies are points of moral tension for the poet, in which he reveals himself as very much an Iron Age figure. These drives set him apart from Golden Age ideals as he represents them in Georgic 1 and identify him rather with charioteers, soldiers, and city dwellers. Although the poet's goal is humane and sustaining of culture and of the spirit, although his chosen "weapon" of combat is song, his drives are irrational (amor ) and competitive. It is, therefore, difficult for readers to maintain a deep distinction between him and the other flawed Iron Age figures who people this poem.
The poet is also identified as an Iron Age figure by the discontent that he experiences in seeking a knowledge he cannot have, a time (the Golden Age) that is past, and a place (Greek poetic sources) that is unavailable.
The poet desires unattainable knowledge:
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore,
accipiant caelique vias et sidera monstrent,
defectus solis varios lunaeque labores;
unde tremor terris, qua vi maria alta tumescant
obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant,
quid tantum Oceano properent se tinguere soles
hiberni, vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.
(2.475–82)
But as for me—may the Muses, sweet above all,
Whose holy emblems, I, struck by a mighty passion, bear,
Take me to themselves and reveal heaven's pathways, the stars,
The several eclipses of the sun and the moon's travails,
The cause of earthquakes and the force that compels the deep sea
To swell, to break all bounds, to fall back on itself again;
The reason why winter suns race on to dip in Ocean,
And what delays the long nights.
While the farmer does not know his blessings, the poet aspires precisely to knowledge, but not of praecepta ("precepts", "maxims"), practical and productive. Rather he aspires to knowledge of causae ("causes") of ultimate truths, which he represents as the gift of the Muses, for whom he experiences a religious awe. The possibility of failing in this aspiration (483ff.) is very real to
the poet. Thus he confronts openly the reality of a poetic quest forever unfulfilled.
As a second choice he wishes for a kind of rural retreat (486–89), but not to the Italian countryside, although he has just praised it (2.136–76). Rather he desires explicitly to be transported to the countryside of Greek poetry,[49] his spiritual homeland, dwelling place of the Muses, where he hopes to become intimate somehow with the sources of his poetic passion. The ungrammatical effusion in which he expresses his desire suggests the abandon, the sense of rapture and communion with something beyond the material that the poet seeks.[50] In his longing for Greece the poet expresses cultural ideals different from traditionally conceived Roman ones, which do not entirely satisfy his passions nor match his feelings of religious or poetic fervor. His prayer for knowledge shows his aspirations to be different from the farmer's since it expresses spiritual and intellectual goals not encompassed by the farmer's concerns. His prayer for ecstatic experience in Greece suggests the deep bonds that he feels to a tradition outside his own.
The poet's recurrent absorption with the motif of the Golden Age also implies a dissatisfaction with the present and a sense of continuing decline in the moral quality of human experience. He expresses a powerful nostalgia for what he represents as a lost and more perfect past in such passages as 1.125–35 and 2.336–42, 532–40, the myth of the Golden Age embodying a standard by which the present is implicitly measured and found wanting. The present is experienced as a time of tension with the Golden Age, with a certain unrecoverable moral quality that not even the poet fully embodies.
[49] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 148, comments: "What startles here is not only the ardent immediacy of this double supplication, but the precise location away from Italy in a completely Hellenic setting. In spite of the laudes Italiae, it is to Greece, not to his homeland, that Virgil turns when his mind is bent on charting its inspiration."
[50] T. C. Page, ed., P. Vergili Maronis: Bucolica et Georgica (London, 1898; reprint, 1965), remarks ad loc.: "It is difficult to say what is the exact grammar of this rapturous outburst."
Simultaneously the poet is deeply bound to the present and to Italy by patriotic pride and deep commitment. Among many examples, the prayers that bracket Book 1 (5ff. and 498ff.) reveal the poet's concern with Italy's fate, with his contemporary Romans in desperate confrontation with the consequences of their political life. These prayers suggest the urgency of the poet's mission to Italy, which he has not abandoned, despite his desires for Greece. Surely and deeply immured in his world, he feels the responsibility to sing of and for it. His mission to Italy is expressed in grave, exalted tones of religious fervor (2. 174–76) and includes the entire complex of attitudes that he embodies, such as capacity for sentiment, aspiration to mystery and to the Muses' truth, and pity, which makes humane community.
His sense of mission is implicit also in his treatment of the Corycian gardener (a subject to be discussed more fully in Chapter 2). In this passage (4.116–48) the poet describes himself as wishing to pursue his vision of the gardener but as prevented, by limitations of time and space, from doing so (4.116–19, 147–48). Like the Golden Age the Corycian gardener is an ideal unavailable to the poet. Isolated in the genre of georgic poetry (which does not ordinarily treat gardens), in time past, and in distance from Rome, the gardener is an irretrievable dream. In his growing of flowers and in the esthetic disposition of his garden, the gardener embodies an ideal of superfluous beauty or art for its own sake and without political content, which the Georgic poet conceives as unavailable to himself.
In his portrait of the gardener there is a fine expression of the poet's awareness of his unalterable discontent. He is prevented from pursuing his desire, the ideal of the gardener, as he would wish, since he feels the constraints of time and mission. Unlike the gardener he is not free to pursue an isolated and apolitical ideal of beauty. The Georgic poet, deeply committed to his world and sensitive to its suffering, sings the urgency of its troubles.
Throughout the Georgics the Georgic poet is represented in ways that both exalt and depreciate him. He is the sole carrier of the humane value of pity, for we do not find pity characteristic of farmers, city dwellers, or Hell. It is the poet's mission of high
courage and daring to bring Ascraean song to Italian peoples. As Hesiod is a moral teacher to Perses, so the Georgic poet would be a moral teacher to his addressees and to all readers. The beauty of his song has the power to move the spirit and to forge moral values, for he finds even in tragedy a source of beautiful despair that is sustaining to the spirit. On the other hand, the poet is backward-looking, self-indulgent in pursuing his tragic visions, and committed to a song of pity that is impotent in the world of military power and politics. These contrasting perspectives on the poet remain unresolved through the poem's final verses and constitute one of its central tensions.
Aristaeus and Orpheus
In the myth and tradition outside the Georgics both Orpheus and Aristaeus are culture heroes—Aristaeus for agriculture and Orpheus for religious rites, mysteries, and poetry. In this way they exemplify a range of human cultural activity. While exemplary in tradition prior to this poem, both are represented in the Georgics as passionate and, ultimately, destructive, for both destroy Eurydice, who dies once because of each of them.[51]
[51] It will be obvious to the reader of this study that I believe the Aristaeus epyllion to be integral to the Georgics, summarizing, as it does in so many ways, the central themes of the poem. Servius' allegation that this passage was inserted, at the request of Augustus, in place of an original passage concerning Gallus has not had the support of scholarly consensus since 1933, when W. B. Anderson published his refutation of the story ("Gallus and the Fourth Georgic, " CQ 27 [1933]: 36–45). Thomas, 13–16, accepts the primacy and authenticity of the passage, with a good discussion of the issues involved. See also Wilkinson, Georgics, 325–26. A recent attack on the primacy of the piece is seen in H. Jacobsen, "Aristaeus, Orpheus, and the Laudes Galli, " AJP 105 (1984): 271–300. This is a genuinely astonishing piece of work, as Jacobsen implicitly accuses Virgil of carelessness, imperfect poetic imagination, and faulty revision. He then proposes revisions by which, according to his own taste, Virgil could have improved the Georgics . I am reminded of an apposite remark by Page, XXXVIII: "[Virgil's] place indeed is assured by the verdict of eighteen centuries, and for an ordinary man to criticize his poetic power is almost an impertinence."
In any case, Virgil left us the present poem. Whether it represents an early or a late draft, it reflects the poet's last intention. Therefore it is legitimate for us to interpret what we have.
Much scholarly effort has been devoted to reconstructing the history and treatment of the Orpheus myth before Virgil.[52] The consensus of this work is that Virgil is probably the first to have represented Orpheus as losing Eurydice, despite the beauty of his music and the daring of his descent to Hades to retrieve her. The fact that Virgil's telling of Aristaeus' story is equally unparalleled has not received similar attention.[53] Nevertheless, the association of Aristaeus with the process of bougonia and with Eurydice, and through her with Orpheus, is unprecedented in previous accounts as well as unimitated in subsequent ones. Virgil is original in his treatment of both figures, and we see, therefore, that in his role as Georgic poet he is creating new myths from old myths in order to tell his own truth. Here, in powerful and significant innovation, the poet makes the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus cross in the figure of Eurydice, thus bringing together these two figures, polar in the scope of human culture, in such a way as to suggest their significant similarities and oppositions and to comment, through these, on the character of Iron Age culture.
Each, in his feelings towards Eurydice, reveals a significant aspect of his character. Aristaeus yields to transient and destructive passion; Orpheus' passion is consuming, until death and
[52] Important studies are Jacques Heurgon, "Orphée et Eurydice avant Virgile," MEFR 49 (1932): 6–60; E. Norden, "Orpheus und Eurydice," S. Ak. Berlin phil.-hist. Kl. 22.(1934): 626–83. (=Kleine Schriften [Berlin, 1966], 468–532); K. Ziegler, "Orpheus," RE 17.1 (1939): 1200–1316. Prior to Virgil the only known (serious) versions of Orpheus' descent to Hades for Eurydice (i.e., Eur. Alc. 357–62; Isoc. Bus. [11] 7ff.; Hermesianax Leontion B3; [Moschus] Lament for Bion 123–25) tell of his success. Even some versions subsequent to Virgil (e.g., Manilius Astronomica 5.326–28; Lucian Dial. mort. 23.3 Jacobitz) have happy endings, showing that that tradition was still viable. It has been supposed by some (Bowra ["Orpheus and Eurydice," CQ n.s. 2 (1952): 113–26], Heurgon, Richter) that a now lost Hellenistic poem, which described Orpheus' loss of Eurydice, was imitated here by Virgil. Brooks Otis, "A New Study of the Georgics, " Phoenix 26 (1972): 58, sums up: "The important point is that Virgil either invented or selected a very unusual variation of the myth for an obvious purpose, i.e. to depict an attempt at resurrection that was frustrated by passion." Cf. Thomas at 4.453–527.
[53] An exception is W. S. Anderson, "The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid, " in Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto, 1982), 27.
even after. This passionate quality of Aristaeus and Orpheus stands out when we compare them to the first individual treated in Book 4, the Corycian gardener, since they are represented as young where he is old, sexual and driven where he is asexual and without longings. In Aristaeus' case, his passion threatened to destroy all his accomplishments; so it eventually happens with Orpheus. Similarly the structural feature of katabasis (descent) links the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus in that both descend to another world. Here, though, their stories begin to diverge. While Orpheus goes to Hades, where he sees tragic visions that seem to reflect his own predilection for sorrow (4.471–77), Aristaeus descends to a world that is different from himself—a purely feminine world, both peaceful and nurturant. Again, both Aristaeus and Orpheus participate in attempts at regeneration of life. Aristaeus' attempt to acquire new bees succeeds (although it is essential to note that these bees are not reborn, as they are not identical to those that had perished), while Orpheus' attempt to resurrect Eurydice ultimately fails. Aristaeus, content with substitution or exchange, succeeds on earth and in heaven, becoming a god in the Iron Age world. Orpheus, rejecting any substitution, preserves through song the memory of the ideal that he has lost, thus becoming increasingly isolated from any human community or relationship. As a consequence, he is eventually destroyed. Although there is a sterility to Orpheus' grief (as suggested in his frozen wanderings), there is—very importantly—a sterility to Aristaeus' success as well, for the impersonal, inhuman bees are emotionally inadequate as recompense for the loss of Orpheus and Eurydice.
From this summary alone we see that the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus are elaborately parallel as well as significantly different in details and in outcome. Our task will be to probe this myth as the poet tells it, for it crystallizes certain oppositions or tensions central to the Georgics . Aristaeus is aggressive and successful without regard to cost; he is not inclined to retrospect (he does not look back), nor is he reflective. The figure of Aristaeus stands in the same relation to Orpheus as does the farmer to the Georgic poet. In brief, as critics have noted, Aristaeus in this poem stands for "productivity" and for "con-
trol" of nature, thus epitomizing Iron Age man, while Orpheus stands for "creativity" and "sympathy" with nature. From this we see that Aristaeus' relationship with nature typifies the Iron Age, while Orpheus' recalls the Golden Age. Aristaeus is productive of material goods, while Orpheus is productive of non-material song. In distinction from the material, military mode of the farmer, Orpheus typifies the artist. In the Iron Age world, then, he is set apart, ineffective, becoming the chance victim of Aristaeus' violence and also of his own tragic sensibility.
Aristaeus
In myth and tradition outside the Georgics, as far as can be ascertained, Aristaeus is an exemplary figure, a culture hero, a true benefactor of mankind through his teaching of agriculture, cattle breeding, hunting, and beekeeping.[54] The Georgic poet makes Aristaeus representative of all Iron Age men in that the glory of his mortal life, as he himself declares, is his productive labor:
en etiam hunc ipsum vitae mortalis honorem,
quem mihi vix frugum et pecudum custodia sollers
omnia temptanti extuderat, te matre relinquo.
(4.326–28)
Look, even this mere honor of mortal life, which I won
So hardly by craft and much resourcefulness from the care of
Harvest and herd—though you are my mother—I abandon.
The phrase vitae mortalis honorem ("honor of mortal life" 326) suggests that Aristaeus represents the continuing aspirations of all mortals as he strives to achieve his greatest ambitions, in his case the hope of divinity:
quid me caelum sperare iubebas?
(4.325)
Why tell me to hope for heaven?
[54] For sources on Aristaeus see W. H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig, 1884–90), s.v. "Aristaeus"; Friedrich Hiller v. Gaertringen, "Aristaios," RE 2 (1896): 852–59; Miles, 258 n. 14; Johnston, 111; Wilkinson, Georgics, 108 n. 1.
In his relationship to nature as well he epitomizes Iron Age man, for he seeks through his labor to dominate nature, to make it productive for himself, and consequently to achieve gloria and honor . In this poem, then, he is suitably guilty of the rape of Eurydice, for she is a figure of nature,[55] and as we have seen, it is a thematic leitmotif of the Georgics that agricultural productivity or progress absolutely requires the domination of natural things. If one sees rape as an act of domination, it becomes clear that rape is the paradigmatic gesture of productive man to nature. Therefore, by making Aristaeus, the tutelary god of agriculture, guilty of rape and, inadvertently, of the death of Eurydice—not at all a goal in itself but rather an instance of accidental destruction[56] —the Georgic poet makes him represent the Iron Age experience in relation to nature as a whole. It is suggestive that in this instance Aristaeus wishes merely to rape, not to kill; thus he does not succeed where he wishes and is more destructive than he intends. As he needs to control nature's creatures for his glory, so it is consistent that he acts violently, exploitively, and without sentiment towards Eurydice.
Violence and struggle are again required, as Cyrene reveals, for Aristaeus to learn the cause of his suffering and its cure:
nam sine vi non ulla dabit praecepta, neque illum
orando flectes; vim duram et vincula capto
tende
(4.398–400)
Except to violence he yields not one word of advice; entreaties
Have no effect: you must seize him, offer him force and fetters
ad haec vates vi denique multa
ardentis oculos intorsit lumine glauco,
et graviter frendens sic fatis ora resolvit.
(4.450–52)
[55] On Eurydice as a figure of nature see, for example, André Oltramare, Étude sur l'épisode d'Aristée dans les Géorgiques de Virgile (Geneva, 1892), 158. Cf. Dorothea S. Wender, "Resurrection in the Fourth Georgic, " AJP 90 (1969): 431; Johnston, 113 and 113n.11; Segal, "Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic, " 317.
[56] Cf. Aen. 4.68–73.
At this the seer, yielding at last to mighty force,
Rolled his glaring eyes so they shone with a glassy light,
Harshly ground his teeth, and thus gave tongue to fate.
Aristaeus is successful in his quest because this necessary violence is not uncongenial to him. Proteus, having endured his assault, addresses him as iuvenum confidentissime ("boldest of youths" 4.445). Yet his aggression is not represented as daring or courageous, for Eurydice is an undefended female, and Proteus, another figure of nature,[57] an exhausted old man:
vix defessa senem passus componere membra
cum clamore ruit magno, manicisque iacentem
occupat.
(4.438–40)
Scarcely letting the old man lay down his weary limbs,
He rushed him with a great shout and shackled him where he lay.
This scene parallels the sacrifice of the calf in the bougonia (4.299–302), also defenseless, whose sufferings and terror are narrated in some detail.
Like the Romans in 1.501–2, Aristaeus is, according to Proteus, in the position of having to atone for his guilt:
non te nullius exercent numinis irae;
magna luis commissa: tibi has miserabilis Orpheus
haudquaquam ob meritum poenas, ni fata resistant,
suscitat, et rapta graviter pro coniuge saevit.
(4.453–56)
Not without sanction divine is the anger that hunts you down.
Great is the crime you pay for. Piteous Orpheus calls
This vengeance against you—if fate did not interpose—far short
Of your deserts; bitter his anguish for the wife taken from him.
Further, he is like the farmers (ignaros . . . viae 1.41) in his ignorance of the causes of his suffering. An unreflective character, he fails to put the blame for his actions on himself, where, as the reader ultimately learns, it would seem to belong,[58] but
[57] Cf. Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 284.
[58] See Miles, 261, 270, on Aristaeus' refusal to accept responsibility and his attribution of the blame to his mother. Richter, 388, is more kindly: "Aristaeus is not without energy and power." Ross, Virgil's Elements, 226, downplays the significance of Aristaeus' guilt, suggesting that it was merely a way of linking the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus. Yet surely Virgil could have thought of another link, had he wished to. Finally, Proteus certainly attributes great significance to Aristaeus' guilt (4.453–56).
instead attributes the blame to his mother, whom he charges with cruelty (4.321–32).
Most significant, when we recall that the stated purpose of the Georgic poet's poem is pity (1.41), is that—in contrast to Orpheus—Aristaeus, though guilty of attempted rape and indirectly responsible for Eurydice's death, voices no acknowledgment or understanding of guilt nor regret for his action once its consequences have been revealed to him.[59] He expresses no awareness of loss, no pity for his victims. Except when directed towards himself (cf. 4.321–32), the quality of pity is lacking in him. With respect to his bees, he cares for them only as they subserve the ultimate purpose of his glory. Certainly he is not bound to them by sentiment, and, consequently, he is satisfied with a replacement. This is not an unreasonable position for him, given that he cannot perceive his bees as individuals. His hope for future divinity is what drives him—not sentiment, appreciation of the unique, regret for the past, or compassion.[60]
In his labor, then, in his striving for honor, in his aggression against natural forces, in his need to atone, in his ignorance of the causes of his suffering, Aristaeus epitomizes Roman and Iron Age experience. The poet would seem to imply that it is precisely this vitality and aggression, when deliberately channeled, that allow him to survive. Thus Aristaeus, though guilty, survives crime and punishment, while the bees, the sacrificed cattle, Orpheus, and Eurydice perish. Aristaeus' success is bought at a high price, for his passion—misdirected—destroys Eurydice and, more importantly to him, his bees, and thus nearly dooms his entire labor and hope for honor . This portrait, as we see, differs strikingly
[59] See Miles, 270–71; and Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 314 n. 61, for different interpretations of Aristaeus' silence.
[60] John Van Sickle, The Design of Virgil's Bucolics (Rome, 1978), 227, puts it another way: Aristaeus is "concerned above all about property."
from tradition and thereby emphasizes, to the extent that Aristaeus is a culture hero, the aggressive and destructive quality of culture as it relates to nature in this poem.
A very revealing, indeed critical, dimension of the quality of Aristaeus' success is that it is achieved through the bougonia . Whereas in other accounts Aristaeus is associated with the discovery of real and practical improvements in agricultural techniques, here alone is he credited with the fantastical process of bougonia . In order to estimate accurately the quality of Aristaeus' achievement and the symbolic value of the poem's conclusion, we must consider, for a moment, the specific significance of bougonia for the ancients.
Because of the fact that the carcass of a calf or an ox, no matter how treated, will not yield bees, we must assume—for this reason alone—that bougonia was for the ancients (as well as for moderns) a procedure of uncertain or suspect truth and value. At the least we are constrained to say that it could not have had for them the familiar truth of routine reality, since it never happened. Sure knowledge the ancients did not and could not have had. Possibly they believed in bougonia as if it were something on the order of religious faith. Possibly they doubted it. In fact, agricultural writers of antiquity evidence a certain diffidence in writing about bougonia . Varro, for example, does not authenticate it in his own voice at all, but rather cites another source (Merula), who in his turn cites another source:
Merula, ut cetera fecit, historicos quae sequi melitturgoe soleant
demonstrabit. Primum apes nascuntur partim ex apibus, partim
ex bubulo corpore putrefacto. Itaque Archelaus in epigrammate
ait eas esse.
(Rust. 3.16.3–4)
Our well-versed Merula, as he has done in other cases, will tell
you of the practice followed by bee-keepers.
"In the first place, bees are produced partly from bees, and
partly from the rotted carcass of a bullock. And so Archelaus, in
an epigram, says that they are 'the roaming children of a dead
cow.'"[61]
[61] Hooper and Ash, trans.
Varro omits bougonia altogether at 3.16.37–38, where he discusses treatment of ailing bees. Columella is equally diffident in declining to discuss it:
quam rationem diligentius prosequi supervacuam puto,
consentiens Celso, qui prudentissime ait, non tanto interitu pecus istud
amitti, ut sic requirendum sit.
(Rust. 9.14.6)
I think it unnecessary to pursue this method further, agreeing as I
do with Celsus, who most reasonably says that the hive is never so
annihilated that this cure must be sought.[62]
Since bougonia is not a precept of verified and routine value (contrast ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis/paulatim 1.133–34), we may wonder why the poet attributes it to Aristaeus, elsewhere a true culture hero, and makes of it his crowning discovery in this poem. He may be suggesting that there is an illusory quality to ars or to cultural achievement overall. Consistent with this interpretation is the fact that bougonia merely regains for Aristaeus what he had lost through his own violence. As a consequence of the deaths of Orpheus, Eurydice, and the sacrificed cattle, he is not materially advanced but rather, in fact, restored to his previous condition. In this way he resembles the rower at 1.201–3, whose ceaseless striving succeeds only in preventing his headlong rush downstream. Another, less questionable, view (invoking the Büchner rule that the less the practical value of a praeceptum, the greater is its symbolic value) is that Virgil has chosen to epitomize or crown Iron Age technology with the bougonia because of its symbolic value, which, as will be argued here, is that of a dynamic or economy of exchange.
Although, as Büchner says,[63] it would be difficult to prove
[62] Author's translation.
[63] Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1309. I first argued (in "Virgil's Fourth Georgic ") that Virgil was fully aware of the literal untruth of bougonia and that this untruth was a significant feature of the metaphorical meaning of bougonia for the Georgics as a whole. Ross, Virgil's Elements, 215–18, argues, for reasons largely, but not exclusively, different from those presented there, that bougonia is not necessarily to be believed. "A thaumasion is worthy of wonder, but not intended to be believed" (216). On thaumasion see Thomas at 3.281–314 and his Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (Cambridge, 1982), 85.
that Virgil did not believe in bougonia, it is nevertheless true that many features of his narrative suggest that he viewed bougonia as fantastical or mythical. Both Klingner and Büchner observe the change in narrative style at this point in the poem.[64] It becomes impersonal instead of direct: "a place is chosen," "they enclose it" (4.295ff.). Said to originate in Egypt, the bougonia is made literally and emotionally distant from the reader's reality. It is not described as something that the reader knows, but rather as something unfamiliar and alien, occurring in a distant land from which there may be only hearsay.
To summarize, bougonia is not a practical precept for generating bees; it was not part of routine reality, regularly practiced and/or observed by the peoples of the ancient world. Therefore it seems prudent to assume, as is implicit in the ancient writers cited above, that the ancients were in varying degrees diffident in their approach to it as a praeceptum . Such reality as they may have accorded to it must have had a different quality from that of daily experience and must have resembled a matter of faith rather than a matter of knowledge.
If we may adopt for a moment and for purposes of discussion the hypothesis that Virgil and his contemporaries either doubted the value of bougonia or attributed to it a kind of reality different from observable routine, we will then see that the conclusion of the poem, the character of Aristaeus, and the value of his achievement assume a significance different from that usually attributed to them. The prevailing view is that bougonia portends resurrection and a positive resolution to the conflicts of the poem.[65] Such a positive view of bougonia does not seem to be supported by the dynamics or economy of bougonia as understood by the ancients. For them bougonia apparently signified an exchange of death for life rather than rebirth or resurrection. While new bees clearly are born, they are not re born, as there is no regeneration of the bees that had previously died and that
[64] Klingner, Virgil, 324; Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1309–10; similarly Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 273.
[65] See, for example, Otis, Virgil, 213; Segal, "Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic, " 325; Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 318–20.
remain irretrievable. Most telling, this process requires the destruction of a calf, whose body and soul are needed to generate new bees, for the soul of the dead calf was perceived as animating the newly emergent bees. "The main idea seems to be that the life of the bull passes into that of the bees; the closing of the ears and nostrils, as well as the insistence on death by slow contusion, seem to aim at preservation of the soul within the carcass."[66] As an image, then, bougonia signifies not resurrection but rather sacrifice or the exchange of death for life. Let us look at the passage now:
exiguus primum atque ipsos contractus in usus
eligitur locus; hunc angustique imbrice tecti
parietibusque premunt artis, et quattuor addunt,
quattuor a ventis obliqua luce fenestras.
rum vitulus bima curvans iam cornua fronte
quaeritur; huic geminae nares et spiritus oris
multa reluctanti obstruitur, plagisque perempto
tunsa per integram solvuntur viscera pellem.
sic positum in clauso linquunt, et ramea costis
subiciunt fragmenta, thymum casiasque recentis.
hoc geritur Zephyris primum impellentibus undas,
ante novis rubeant quam prata coloribus, ante
garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo.
interea teneris tepefactus in ossibus umor
aestuat, et visenda modis animalia miris,
trunca pedum primo, mox et stridentia pennis,
miscentur, tenuemque magis magis aëra carpunt,
[66] B. G. Whitfield, "Virgil and the Bees: A Study in Ancient Apicultural Lore," G & R 3 (1956): 117. Cf. D. E. W. Wormell, "Apibus quanta experientia parcis: Virgil, Georgics 4.1–227," in Vergiliana: Recherches sur Virgile, ed. H. Bardon and R. Verdière (Leiden, 1971), 432. This procedure has very little in common with religious sacrifice, as is evident from Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, 1983). There is in the bougonia no shedding of the victim's blood, no sacrificial meal. Note also that the victim resists, struggles against death (4.302). Contrast Burkert, 3–4: "Legends often tell of animals that offered themselves up for sacrifice, apparent evidence of a higher will that commands assent." This utilitarian ritual of bougonia takes on a more specifically Roman and religious character in Aristaeus' atonement. Cyrene, in her instructions to Aristaeus, seems to turn the Egyptian bougonia into something resembling Roman sacrifice to the dead. See Miles, 284f. Aristaeus' bougonia is, then, more religious than "scientific."
donec ut aestivis effusus nubibus imber
erupere, aut ut nervo pulsante sagittae,
prima leves ineunt si quando proelia Parthi.
(4.295–314)
First a small place is chosen, a site that is narrowed further
For this same purpose: they close it in with a pantile roof
And prisoning walls: they add
Four windows with slanting lights that face towards the four winds.
A two-year old calf is obtained, whose horns are beginning to curve
From his forehead. They stopper up, though he struggle wildly, his two
Nostrils and breathing mouth, and they beat him to death with blows
That pound his flesh to pulp but leave the hide intact.
Battened down in that narrow room they leave him, under his ribs
Laying fresh cassia and thyme and broken branches.
This is done as soon as a west wind ruffles the water,
Before the meadows are flushed with vernal color, before
The talkative martin hangs her nest under the rafters.
Meanwhile, within the marrowy bones of the calf, the humors
Grow warm, ferment, till appear creatures miraculous—
Limbless at first, but soon they fidget, their wings vibrate,
And more, more they sip, they take the delicate air:
At last they come pouring out, like a shower from summer clouds,
Or thick and fast as arrows
When Parthian archers, their bowstrings throbbing, advance to battle.
As a symbol of exchange the bougonia exemplifies perfectly the central vision of the poem: the moral ambiguity and cost of Iron Age culture, the tense apprehension of an enduring opposition between certain kinds of material progress and humane value. The poet does not allow the reader to remain unaware of the cost of progress,[67] for in describing the calf's death he arouses the
[67] Statements comparable to this are found in Putnam, Poem of the Earth (e.g., 265–71) and Miles (e.g., 253ff.). The difference is that, in their case, these observations are marshalled ultimately in defense of the thesis that the dynamics of bougonia ("a hopeful possibility of radical renewal" [Miles, 254], an "act of renewal" [Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 273]) and the success of Aristaeus' atonement constitute in some sense a positive resolution of the poem's conflicts. The argument of this study is that bougonia, rather than illuminating the positive truth that life comes from death, the pure from the corrupt, and so forth, suggests most powerfully the continuing suspension or unresolvability of opposing claims.
reader's sympathy for the calf's terrified struggle (4.299–302). We may compare also
hic vero subitum ac dictu mirabile monstrum
aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per viscera toto
stridere apes utero et ruptis effervere costis,
immensasque trahi nubes, iamque arbore summa
confluere et lentis uvam demittere ramis.
(4.554–57)
Here, to be sure, a portent sudden and miraculous to tell
They behold: from the oxen's bellies all over their rotting flesh
Creatures are humming, swarming through the wreckage of their ribs—
Huge and trailing clouds of bees, that now in the treetops
Unite and hang like a bunch of grapes from the pliant branches.
Any revulsion that a modern reader may experience cannot be merely an aberration of modern sensibility, for other similes used to describe the bees' birth also have negative connotations (e.g., 4.312–14). This birth is simultaneously miraculous and monstrous (dictu mirabile monstrum 4.554).
In sum, the emphasis here seems to be on the notion of death and destruction as the basis of new life rather than on resurrection and the uncomplicated joy of success. The poet evokes pity for the suffering victim and thus does not allow the reader to overlook the costs of progress. Bougonia, therefore, symbolizes exchange and unresolvable tensions; it illuminates the ambivalence of compromise and the pathos of loss.
To place bougonia in the context of the Georgics, then, and in the context of Aristaeus' whole experience, we may observe that while Aristaeus is indeed represented as a culture hero, he represents a culture or technology of a particular sort. Aristaeus' technology or contribution, symbolic rather than practical, is aggressive towards nature, even destructive of it. His technology is aimed at success as he sees it, according to his needs, and is
negligent of cost. It relies on a dynamic of exchange, here, of death for life, and thus embodies the moral ambiguity of the Iron Age towards nature and other men, a motif already familiar to readers of the Georgics .
Let us now move on to the portrait of Orpheus, the paradigmatic poet, in order to consider how Virgil represents him in relationship to the poem's major issues, as they have so far been set forth.
Orpheus
For the most part Virgil's representation of Orpheus accords with traditional accounts. He was a minstrel; with his lyre he played and sang; the son and servant of the Muses, he was the father of song, an ancestor of Homer and Hesiod. He did not believe in killing, and he taught other men to abstain from bloodshed. Thus the legend portrays a gentle man who, through music and magic, could accomplish feats impossible for others. Diodorus' account of Orpheus (4.25) is particularly valuable to us because he is contemporary with Virgil. From him we learn that Orpheus was Thracian, son of Oeagrus, distinguished for learning, song, and poetry; he could charm beasts and trees, was associated with theology and ritual, and participated in the Argonautic expedition. Finally, of greatest importance for us, he was permitted by Persephone to retrieve his wife from the lower world. Diodorus makes no mention of a second disappearance of Eurydice or of a passionate flaw in Orpheus.[68]
It is crucial to a correct understanding of this myth in the Georgics to realize that the traditional version before Virgil included Orpheus' success in bringing Eurydice back to life. That Orpheus, traditionally a gentle, civilizing musician (poet), should lose his wife through dementia and furor is antithetical to the tradition as we know it, both in Orpheus' failure and in the emotions that the poet attributes to him. Every reader of the Orpheus story experiences its haunting and melancholy beauty. Its sadness overshadows the fourth book, dominating the read-
[68] Heurgon, 27, comments that Diodorus had collected almost all the fables that Alexandrian mythographers had transcribed. Diodorus' work informs us, therefore, about the state of the Orpheus-Eurydice legend in all Hellenistic circles.
er's memory and his response to the poem as a whole. The tale as told in the Georgics is tragic; in the context of the reader's expectations, it is emphatically so. Either by inventing this version or by choosing an obscure variant on a traditionally happy story, the poet emphasizes the tragedy of Orpheus' loss, invests tragedy with a certain pleasure and beauty, and gives expression to his own inclination to sing sad songs.
Orpheus' failure to retrieve Eurydice is the major example of the failure of art in the poem. Orpheus is exceptionally gifted, his song of such unimaginable beauty and power that we do not hear it directly but only hear of its effects. Spirits long dead and otherwise insensitive to pity or human feeling are moved (commotae 4.471):
quin ipsae stupuere domus atque intima Leti
Tartara caeruleosque implexae crinibus anguis
Eumenides, tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora,
atque Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis.
(4.481–84)
Why, Death's very home and holy of holies was shaken
To hear that song, and the Furies with steel-blue snakes entwined
In their tresses; the watch-dog Cerberus gaped open his triple
mouth;
Ixion's wheel stopped dead from whirling in the wind.
et caligantem nigra formidine lucum
ingressus, Manisque adiit regemque tremendum
nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda.
at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulcraque luce carentum.
(4.469–72)
The gorge of Taenarus even, deep gate of the underworld,
He entered, and that grove where fear hangs like a black fog:
Approached the ghostly people, approached the King of Terrors
And the hearts that know not how to be touched by human
prayer.
But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms,
There came the bodiless shades, the phantoms lost to light.
The power of his music moves the dead and enables him to gain from Persephone permission for Eurydice to return from the dead. This would constitute a true resurrection, that is, the restoration of a deceased individual to life, and would thus be
significantly different from and superior to the bougonia of Aristaeus, which is an exchange of death for life and which involves permanent loss of the creatures that die. This miraculous possibility is achieved entirely through song and without sacrifice and loss. The power of song then, its ability to move the spirit, is greater than the power of legions or plows or religious rituals, for example. Thus song is powerfully beautiful; and yet it is ultimately useless, since Orpheus fails to achieve his goal. The suggestion, both (as here) literal and also metaphorical, is that Orpheus fails of his goal because he is backward-looking (490–93).[69] Eurydice terms his backward glance at her furor (495). We can define it perhaps more precisely as part of the characteristic pattern of his absorption with and idealization of the past, as when he obsessively mourns Eurydice's loss, both after her first death (464–66) and after the second (507–20), calling her even beyond the moment of his own death (523–29). It is in the past that he finds perfection and beauty. He seems to cultivate and nurture in himself sensations of pathos and loss, and therefore he makes beautiful songs out of tragic visions. He likes to sing songs of his loss and the pathetic groupings that he sees in Hades (475–77) reflect his own vision, which tends to focus on sorrow. Hades contains all the dead, yet Orpheus sees in particular youths and girls unwedded, those having missed therefore the crown and purpose of their lives (476; cf. implumis 513). There is further pathos in the detail of children buried before their parents. (The too-early loss of the young is a powerful motif also in the Aeneid. ) Both Orpheus and the Georgic poet, who makes poetry of Orpheus' experience, find in tragedy a thing of beauty. At Eurydice's death Orpheus cannot accept this necessary and inevitable loss in order to proceed with life; rather he looks back incessantly, sees his ideal in the past, and seeks to restore it/her through song. In this way he parallels the Georgic poet, who also places his ideal—the Golden Age—in the past. This metaphorical looking back becomes literal when Orpheus turns to glance at
[69] See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), 11ff., on the regressive goal of the poet. Conte, 130–40 (esp. 134–37), conceives the significance of Orpheus more narrowly than is argued here. For him Orpheus is exclusively a poet of tragic love rather than of suffering and loss more generally.
Eurydice. The backward glance is, then, a physical expression of his characteristic tragic and regressive inclination. The wintery, isolated landscape (508–10) that forms the background for his subsequent laments suggests the sterility of his backward quest. Yet again his song has power beyond human imagination. Where previously he had charmed the dead, here he soothes tigers and moves oak trees (510). Thus the constraints of both fate and nature are subject to his song, so skilled is he at the manipulation of pity (for he moves Hades to grant his prayer) and beauty (for he moves the dead, the wild, and the inanimate). Yet all this power is of no avail because Orpheus' own determination and vision of his goal, the regaining of Eurydice, are inadequately sustained. Perhaps his dementia ("madness" 488) is that he takes more pleasure in sorrow than in success. The continuing and cold beauty of his song has nature as its witness (527), not Eurydice or any other human being. Virgil has taken the figure of Orpheus, the paradigmatic poet, and made it a portrait of the failure of the artist, despite all the emotional power and beauty of his art, to affect or effect action in the real world. (We may compare Aeneas' emotion before the pictura . . . inani, "vain picture," in Aen. 1.464.) Orpheus' endeavor, as we have seen, fails through his uncompromising—in some sense, sterile—nostalgia for Eurydice, that is, his longing for an irretrievable ideal. The triumph of love or of song over death is, therefore, surely not the message here.[70] Rather the poet is defeated by regressive passion, isolation, and death. As an inhabitant of the Iron Age world, Orpheus, just like Aristaeus, has flaws that menace his achievements.
The parallels between Orpheus and the Georgic poet are suggestive of the poet's view of the value of poets and of poetry in this poem. For example, while Orpheus is ultimately the loser in the struggle for survival, he appears nevertheless to have greater courage than Aristaeus. Orpheus, whose initial cause for lament is surely as great as Aristaeus', takes the more courageous approach to his loss in relying on his own songs to charm the dead. He dares to descend alone to Hades to face the "king of
[70] Contrast Büchner, RE 8 A2.(1958): 1313–14.
terrors" (4.467–70). These verses suggest the fearfulness of the hell to which Orpheus descends alone, with a courage or audacity that recalls the Georgic poet's (1.40, 2.175, 4.565). While Aristaeus whines to his mother, Orpheus acts, sings (466, 471), has the courage to face death. Neither Orpheus nor Aristaeus, however, has the courage to face life with any compromise.
Orpheus' vision seeks out sorrow, and he sees in Hades particularly pathetic groupings that reflect his own inclinations. His vision of hell parallels his own emotional experience and esthetic sensibility:
at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum,
quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt,
vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber,
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum.
(4.471–77)
But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms
There came the flimsy shades, the phantoms lost to light,
In number like to the millions of birds that hide in the leaves
When evening or winter rain from the hills has driven
them—Mothers and men, the dead
Bodies of great-hearted heroes, boys and unmarried maidens,
Young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes.
The melancholy character of these apparitions—unwedded girls and parents burying their children—reflects Orpheus' own sensibility to loss and his own capacity for suffering. He sees a reflection of what he is, and the sadness of his vision fixes on premature loss. The pathetic focus of this grouping suits Orpheus' capacity for sentiment, which quality, lacking in Aristaeus, he has in the extreme. Time of darkness and season of death are powerfully suggested by the simile of 473–74, an image of dashed hopes and lost glory.
Like the Georgic poet, Orpheus is passionate, dissatisfied, and nostalgic. Dementia (Proteus' term 488) and furor (Eurydice's term 495) precipitate his loss of Eurydice, but, significantly, the Georgic poet presents his actions with sympathy (489):
iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis,
redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras
pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem),
cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem,
ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes:
restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa
immemor heu! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis
effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni
foedera.
(4.485–93)
And now he's avoided every pitfall of the homeward path,
And Eurydice, regained, is nearing the upper air
Close behind him (for this condition has Proserpine made),
When a sudden madness catches her lover off his
guard—Pardonable indeed, if Death knew how to pardon.
He halts. Eurydice, his own, is now on the lip of
Daylight. Forgetful alas! Broken in purpose, he looked back.
His labor was lost, the pact he had made with the merciless king
Annulled.
In his longing for Eurydice, Orpheus is, like the Georgic poet, nostalgic for the past, thus making of Eurydice the final embodiment in the poem of the meaning of the Golden Age.
Exclusively absorbed in his passion for Eurydice, refusing compromise or substitution, Orpheus sings only of loss. In this way he resembles the nightingale (4.511–15), who never ceases to sing her mourning song. Orpheus and the nightingale are parallel in the beauty of their song and in their impotence to achieve what they long for.
Orpheus' grief, austere and uncompromising, renders him an isolated and in some sense sterile figure:
septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine mensis
rupe sub aëria deserti ad Strymonis undam
flesse sibi, et gelidis haec evolvisse sub astris[71
] mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine quercus
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenaei:
solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque nivalem
[71] Reading astris for Mynors's antris .
arvaque Riphaeis numquam viduata pruinis
lustrabat, raptam Eurydicen atque inrita Ditis
dona querens.
(4.507–10, 517–20)
Month after month, they say, for seven months alone
He wept beneath a crag high up by the lonely waters
Of Strymon, and under the ice-cold stars poured out his dirge
That charmed the tigers and made the oak trees follow him
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No love, no marriage could turn his mind away from grief:
Alone through Arctic ice, through the snows of Tanais, over
Frost-bound Riphaean plateaux
He ranged, bewailing his lost Eurydice and the wasted
Bounty of death.
Deserti (508) recalls sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis/ raptat amor (3.291–92, cited on p. 60) and tends to corroborate the earlier suggestion that the poet feels himself to be, to some degree, isolated from others and embodying separate values. Very interesting in this regard is Raymond Williams's observation, in his discussion of Wordsworth, that the poet who feels alienated can either retreat "into a deep subjectivity" (as Orpheus does here) or attempt "to discover, in some form, community," as has been argued above of the Georgic poet.[72]
Through his song Orpheus' grief is continually renewed, not solaced. In his refusal to accept another mate, he reveals his inability to compromise with reality, and consequently he perishes:
spretae Ciconum quo munere matres
inter sacra deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi
discerptum latos iuvenem sparsere per agros.
(4.520–11)
In the end the Ciconian women, scorned
By this devotion, amidst sacred rites and nocturnal orgies of
Bacchus,
Tore him limb from limb and scattered him over the land.
[72] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 295.
Aristaeus is able to accept a substitute for his lost bees, in some sense to compromise, since he is not concerned with individual human value (except in himself). Orpheus is not viable in the world precisely because of his inability to compromise, to live without the ideal, and to look forward. His final loss of Eurydice and his death at the hands of the Ciconian women are the consequences of his own character. What remains of him is intangible—the pathos of loss, the vulnerability of love and artistic strivings, and the beauty of the poetry that sings of these things:
tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum
gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus
volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua
a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat.
Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
(4.523–27)
But even then that head, plucked from the marble-pale
Neck, and rolling down mid-stream on the Oeagrian Hebrus,
The voice alone and the death-cold tongue cried out "Eurydice!"
Cried "Poor Eurydice!" as the soul of the singer fled,
And the banks of the river echoed, re-echoed "Eurydice!"
By his self-assertion, Aristaeus achieves his desired divinity, moving from unacknowledged and unregretted crime to atonement without sentiment and, finally, to success and satisfaction in a substitution for his lost past. One could reasonably argue on Aristaeus' behalf, as have Putnam and Miles,[73] that he is somehow morally or cognitively improved by his descent to the source of waters, where he sees a world different from himself—feminine, nurturant, peaceful. Additionally to his credit one could argue that Aristaeus succeeds because he is bonded to someone, his mother, who wishes to help him, and that thus he is not alone
[73] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 316ff.; Miles, 288ff. Contrast Spofford, 57ff., who wonders if the sequence of events related here is due more to luck than to justice.
like Orpheus. On the other hand, his mother, a goddess, counsels him to success through violence and guile. So the apotheosis that Aristaeus achieves appears ultimately to be the reward neither of virtue nor of sentiment, but simply an index of success and power in the world. Perhaps one could argue that his character and experience best ready him to deal with the ambiguity, cost, and exchange represented by the bougonia . Although Aristaeus expresses no sentiment, sense of guilt, or pity, he does become a god—a provocative comment on the nature of Iron Age divinity.
A vision of Iron Age reality is suggested in the triumph of Aristaeus. Through his vital ruthlessness of purpose he achieves his desired divinity (cf. 1.14, where he is invoked as a god), while Orpheus is the eventual victim of Aristaeus' passion and of his own. Bound to Eurydice by sentiment, he is incapable of compromise for survival. Rejecting any substitution, he preserves through song the memory of the ideal that he has lost. He remains unconsoled, his grief never solaced or relinquished. This myth of Aristaeus' success and of Orpheus' loss mirrors reality as the poet envisions it. In the Iron Age, beauty and sentiment, as embodied in Orpheus and other victims, are in tension with success and progress, represented here by divinity. Despite Orpheus' flaws of regressiveness, egocentrism, and sterility, the poet's clear intent is to engage the reader's sympathy with him. It is Orpheus' sorrow and not Aristaeus' triumph that moves the reader and resonates in memory.
With the closing vignette of the farmer who plunders the nightingale's nest, the Georgic poet further expands the reader's sensibility through pity and through apprehension of ambiguity. We saw in Book 1 that the reader was often identified (through first-person verb forms or direct address, such as at 50, 100, 155–59) with the farmer (durus agrestis 1.160), who struggled continually against deprivation and hardship, against enemies large and small that undermined his labor . At the concluding moment that same farmer (now the "harsh ploughman," durus arator 4.512) appears no longer as the sympathetic figure, but rather as predator and ravager of the nightingale's helpless young, the agent of destruction, loss, and sorrow. Thus we are made to feel, through the sorrows of Orpheus and the nightin-
gale, the character and cost of Iron Age civilization, and hence to expand our moral and critical perspectives on our experience. This dual vision is the quintessence of the poem, for the poet shows man both as victim of the gods and nature (as in Book 1) and also as aggressor against nature and humanity. The poet makes the reader see with complexity and with pity that which otherwise might be seen, without reflection, as the unambiguous triumph of technology and mastery.
The Georgics illuminates aspects of reality as the poet sees them and thus deepens the reader's sensitivity to those humane and artistic values that do not lead to quantifiable progress. The function of song in this poem, then—Orpheus', the nightingale's, and the Georgic poet's—is preservation of the memory of the ideal, variously of harmony and pity, and of its loss, since the ideal is continually seen in retrospect. As a whole, in the songs of its several poet voices, the Georgics preserves and values the memory of a retrospective ideal. This memory is preserved not only, if climactically, in the moving tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also in the repeated representations of and allusions to the Golden Age, which constitute reflections on an ideal beyond reach. It is the nature of these reflections on the Golden Age that I term "the poet's vision" and that forms the subject of the following chapter.