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]