2
The Poet's Vision

The motif of the Golden Age is a recurrent one in the Georgics . In this chapter we will consider both those passages generally agreed to evoke the Golden Age and some others that (it will be argued) also relate to this motif, as we attempt to understand the significance of the Golden Age in this poem. Some scholars have felt that the Golden Age descriptions in the Georgics constitute Virgil's prophecy of or prescription for a renewed and perfected Roman society. Here I will argue that the Golden Age is not a prescription for political action but rather that it serves as a metaphor for a set of moral values that function in continuing and unresolved tension with Iron Age experience. Since it idealizes the past, the concept of a Golden Age necessarily criticizes the present, no matter how indirectly.^[1] To use Raymond Williams's fine phrase in a slightly altered context, we may observe that the concept of the Golden Age allows the poet, reflecting critically upon aspects of contemporary experience, to turn "protest into retrospect,"^[2] to focus the reader's attention upon the disparity between the present, as the poet sees it, and an ideal vision of alternative moral values. The Golden Age is a standard by which to evaluate and question the present, yet without indicting any particular class, policy, or individual. Indeed the poet takes a larger view of such problems as he sees and consequently does not propose solutions. Virgil allows the reader to

[1] Some argue that the Golden Age was a heedless, lazy time and that man's lot is improved in the Iron Age, where he has opportunity for challenge and enlightened moral choices. See, for instance, Johnston, 50, 58, 69, 71; Richter, 137; Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1271; Perret, 81; Wilkinson, Georgics, 79; Klingner, Virgil, 189–91; Miles, 79. Contrast Perkell, "Vergil's Theodicy."

[2] Raymond Williams, 83. Williams's entire study provides a perspective that is most illuminating of Virgil's work.

consider critically certain conventional values not by openly attacking them or by showing defeats of authority, but rather by suggesting the moral compromises that are necessary in order to preserve Iron Age values.

The Golden Age functions as a praise of absence, the absence of certain humane values that create moral community. Hence there is continual tension in the poem between any positively conceived ideal and its real opposite, such as spring vs. winter, peace vs. war, harmony vs. aggression, past vs. present.^[3] Even the most positive Golden Age passages of the poem, the laudes veris ("praises of spring" 2.323ff.) and the laudes ruris ("praises of country life" 2.458ff.), conclude with the acknowledgment of winter or burning summer (2.343–45) and war (2.540), respectively, thus interrupting the compelling reverie of an alluring ideal. The poet does not imagine a paradisiacal past to have occurred historically, nor does he genuinely imagine such an event for the future. Rather he uses the motif of the Golden Age to express moral tensions central to the poem, thus illuminating certain oppositions between material progress and humane value.^[4]

Virgil's Golden Age has a particular quality of community between man and nature and between man and man. City life, which epitomizes the present, is most different from the Golden Age precisely in its loss of community, that is, in the dissolution of bonds that (ought to) unite brothers (2.510) or neighbor cities (1.510). Instead, fratricide is expanded to civil war in pursuit of individual interests. It is the poet's special mission to create a moral community, to preserve and perpetuate the humane value of pity, to turn us into readers who would acknowledge Golden Age values as high and true. Thus the poet attempts to redress the moral omission of Jove (when he terminated the Golden Age, 1.121ff.) by restoring a moral content to the Iron Age. As has been noted by others, discrete Golden Age features do exist in the present communities of, for instance, the farmers (Book 2), the bees (Book 4), even the plague victims (Book 3).

[3] Cf. Raymond Williams, 18.

[4] Cf. Raymond Williams, 297, 293.

These communities do not, however, constitute a renewed Golden Age on earth, as most readers would agree. The reason, as will be argued, is that community remains morally inert without the enlightened, willed value of pity, which is the poet's special contribution.

The Golden Age in Book 1

The myth of the Golden Age,^[5] since it is fundamentally opposed to progressivism, is a striking motif in a work ostensibly dedicated to agriculture. One might well assume that pride in and conviction of the value of agriculture would motivate a writer treating georgic themes. In Varro (1.2.16, 2.1.13), for example, one finds a positive, progressivistic expression of man's technology, knowledge, and ability to make nature productive for his own purposes.^[6] With praise and enthusiasm for the development of agricultural technology, he represents man as coming from a primitive state and from an absence of skill and as progressing towards valuable knowledge. In the Georgics, however, allusions to past abundance (e.g., 1.127–32) compel the reader to envision the whole of civilization and its technology as a continuing attempt to compensate for the loss of the Golden Age. The very need of agriculture confirms the absence of this ideal (ipsaque tellus/omnia liberius, nullo poscente, ferebat, "Earth yielded

[5] The myth of the Golden Age is familiar to us primarily from poetry: Hesiod Works and Days 109–20; Aratus Phaen. 96–114; Tib. 1.3.35–50, 1.10.1–12; Ov. Met. 1.89–112, Am. 3.8.35–36. Similarly Pind. Pyth. 10.38f., Ol. 2.68f. For an exhaustive compilation of relevant texts see A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935),1–388. The myth of the Golden Age as it is represented in Hesiod is the oldest form of chronological primitivism in the Western tradition. On its moral quality see J. Fontenrose, "Work, Justice, and Hesiod's Five Ages," CP 69 (1974): 3ff. Cf. S. Benardete, "Hesiod's Works and Days: A First Reading," Agon 1 (1967): 156–57, on the absence of eros in the Golden Age. Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore, 1977), 82, sees the Golden Age as natural, the Iron Age as culture.

[6] This progressivistic position is paralleled in many other writers; e.g., Aesch. PV 442–68, 478–506; Eur. Supp. 201–13; Diod. 1.8.1–7; On Ancient Medicine 3 (1, 574–8 L.). For these and other references see W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, 1971), 79–83.

all, of herself, more freely, when none begged for her gifts" 1.127–28).

The initial description in the Georgics of the Golden Age (1.121ff.), with its ethic of sharing and harmony between men and nature, establishes a standard set of features that recur in subsequent variations on this theme. Of these I will discuss the so-termed praises of Italy (2.136ff.), of spring (2.323–45ff.), and of country life (2.458ff.) in Book 2; the passages on the Scythians (3.349–83) and on the plague (3.478–566) in Book 3; and in Book 4 the passages on the bees (4.1–115, 149–218) and on the Corycian gardener (4.116–48). In Books 2 and 4 resemblances between the Golden Age and the present are unmistakable, if ultimately delusive. The passages on the Scythians and on the plague in Book 3, however, take a different approach to the Golden Age. These passages are perversions or travesties of certain features typical of the Golden Age (as, for example, property held in common, peace among usually predatory animals, and harmony between animals and men). By isolating certain of these conventionally Golden Age features and thereby revealing them to be insufficient in themselves to constitute or to restore a Golden Age, the poet suggests that the elusive essential of the Golden Age is a spiritual quality of mutuality or community. This vision of a moral community, without which discrete Golden Age features remain morally inert, appears to be, as we have seen, the exclusive preserve of the poet.

The Golden Age ideal, as it is first described at 1.125–35, sets, by virtue of its initial position, the standard for the variations that follow. The passage suggests the absence of aggression, of private interest; it suggests sharing among men and a spontaneous giving from nature to man:

ante lovem nulli subigebant arva coloni:
ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum
fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus
omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat.
ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris,
praedarique lupos iussit pontumque moveri,
mellaque decussit foliis ignemque removit
et passim rivis currentia vina repressit,
ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis

paulatim, et sulcis frumenti quaereret herbam,
ut silicis venis abstrusum excuderet ignem.
(1.125–35)

Before Jove's time no settlers brought the land under subjection;
Not lawful even to divide the plain with landmarks and boundaries:
They sought the common good, and earth unprompted
Was freer with all her fruits.
Jove put the wicked poison in the black serpent's tooth,
Jove told the wolf to ravin, the sea to be restive always,
He shook from the leaves their honey, he had all fire removed,
And stopped the wine that ran in rivers everywhere,
So that practice by experiment might forge various crafts
Little by little, might seek the corn-blade in the furrow,
And strike the hidden fire that lies in the veins of flint.

In verses 125–28, two of which are negative statements and two positive, the poet sketches the essence of his Golden Age. No farmers "subdued" the fields, that is, man was not an aggressor in his relationship to nature. Neither was he dominating or possessive, for private ownership of nature by man was not allowed (126–27). Fas ("right," "lawful" 127) is a strongly emotive, powerful term, indicating that this Golden Age had an internal moral quality that functioned in such a way as to protect man from moral compromise in his relationship with nature. Among men there was sharing and pursuit of common interest (in medium quaerebant 127) and from nature an abundance of giving (ipsaque tellus/omnia liberius . . . ferebat 127–28) even in the absence of demand.^[7] What existed, then, was an ethic of sharing and community among men as well as between men and nature. Once, therefore, there existed a nonexploitive relationship between men and nature, when earth poured forth

[7] Ecl. 4.18–25 reflects the same ideal. Earth brings forth crops spontaneously, grapes hang from uncultivated vines, lambs uncalled bring milk; there are no poisons, no snakes, no hostilities between animals. Contrast the view of early man in Lucr. 5.958–59:

nec commune bonum poterant spectare neque ullis
moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti.

For the common good they had no eye, nor knew
Of the mutual uses of custom or of law.

plenty and men did not manipulate or do violence against nature in order to survive. Neither, consequently, was there competition or conflict between men, since all was abundant and given into the common store. While the Golden Age apparently accords no value or expression to individual strivings (this is, in any case, not mentioned in the text and seems to be precluded by in medium quaerebant ), it also denies expression to individual competition and its worst consequences—murder and war (e.g., 1.505–14).

It has been possible, in reading this passage, to draw many inferences from few details. The qualities of this Golden Age (not even so termed by the poet)^[8] must be inferred and defined from their absence, since their description is indirect. Readers cannot envisage this Golden Age from the poet's description, but must fill in the gaps created by negative statements from their own imagination, sentiment, and knowledge of literary tradition. For example, because Jove put poison into snakes, one must infer that once they had none. Because he struck honey from trees, one must infer that once it flowed freely from them. To describe the Golden Age in this way is to leave it to readers to imagine, to create or conceive in their own minds, the alternative values that the poet is indirectly suggesting. From its absence readers may conceive what they might desire and aspire to. The genius of the Georgic poet's description of the Golden Age is to have engaged the readers' own creative responsiveness on behalf of values or of a vision that they might not otherwise endorse.

A most powerful and ironic event in the history of the Iron Age is the role played by Jove.^[9] As noted above, the character of the Golden Age was deeply moral, for it was not fas (a term that connotes in itself divine approbation) to subdue or even to possess the fields. There was no competition, since earth provided all in abundance and since men sought the common, not the individual, good. There is, therefore, no heedless or irrespon-

[8] Johnston, 52, notes that Virgil "never modifies gens, genus, aetas, or saeculum, any of which might be used to denote an "age" or "race" of mortals, with adjectives denoting the metals of Hesiod's metallic myth."

[9] For a more complete discussion of this passage see Perkell, "Vergil's Theodicy."

sible element in this vision of the Golden Age. Rather there is an ethic of sharing and responsibility towards others, explicit in in medium quaerebant . Because this period recalls the Golden Age, because it is characterized by fas, the reader is led to perceive it as positive. The irony (which is a function fundamentally of disparity)^[10] of Jove's attitude towards the Golden Age is that in this period of moral harmony and absence of strife, he saw only veternus ("inactivity," "lethargy" 1.124). This perception of Jove's illuminates indirectly his own moral values:

pater ipse colendi
haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem
movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda
nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno.
(1.121–24)

The father himself did not wish the way of
agriculture to be easy, and he first stirred
the fields through art, sharpening mortal hearts
with care, not enduring his realms
to be sluggish with lethargy.^[11]

Jove creates conditions that compel man to material, but not to moral or spiritual, goals.fr12 As represented here Jove is without

[10] Quint. Inst. 8.6.54; Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1974), 183.

[11] Author's translation.

[12] A perception of ironic comment here would resolve long controversies on this verse. Most previous attempts to interpret it have assumed that Jove's intervention must have been for good—in the poet's and hence in the reader's eyes. Many critics assume without question that Jove acts beneficently towards man, stimulating him to creative action. Support for this reading is not actually in the text. As W. R. Johnson, 114–34, observes, Jove represents no moral principle at the conclusion of the Aeneid either. Rather he accedes chillingly to evil and becomes its agent. At 4.560–61 Thomas notes that Virgil is ambivalent towards Jupiter throughout the poem. Recently Karl Galinsky, "Vergil and the Formation of the Augustan Ethos," in Atti del Convegno Mondiale Scientifico di Studi Virgiliani, vol. 1 (Milan, 1984), 242–43, argued that Jupiter was "good" to wean men from their earlier stagnation, that labor "takes place under the aegis of a providential God," and that this passage is a "very personal statement" of Virgil's. I have attempted (Perkell, "Vergil's Theodicy") to show in detail that such thoughts are not actually implicit in Virgil's text but result rather from insufficient appreciation of his ironic and/or ambiguous expression. (Bodo Gatz, Weltalter, Goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen, Spudasmata 16 [Hildesheim, 1967], 162–65, takes a similar view of the passage and even sees Virgil as a proto-Christian.) Galinsky's assertion that the passage is a "very personal statement" of the poet is especially problematic. Cf. Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, 1987), 4, on Virgil's dismemberment of his own voice and his shifting authorial presence in the Eclogues .

concern for moral conscience or spiritual purpose in man. In order to compel man to activity Jove must make the world, initially hospitable towards man, inhospitable. He withdraws the natural abundance of honey, fire, and wine; he poisons and represses. In this way he drives man, whose survival is now in question, into an adversarial relationship with nature. As man must subdue the fields and conquer nature, so labor conquers him:

labor omnia vicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.^[13
] (1.145–46)

Labor conquered everything,
perverse labor, and driving need in hard circumstances.

The military mode connoted by vicit (145) thus epitomizes the new regime, in which total community has been replaced by total combat. Man becomes simultaneously victim and victor, besieged by want, oppressed by labor. Man's technologies, represented as "the rending and perversion of natural things,^[14] force him into the role of predator (captare, "capture"), destroyer (verberat, "whip," scindebant, "rend"), deceiver (fallere, "deceive"), this last term suggesting the absence of an ethical component in the new age. Whereas in the Golden Age there was interest in the common good, in the Iron Age an individual who

[13] These familiar verses are often taken to mean that labor has overcome or made tractable all difficulties: see Klingner, Virgil, 204; Wilkinson, Georgics, 141. Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 34, argues persuasively against this interpretation. Altevogt, 28–29 and 43, states unequivocally that labor is an evil, but feels that ultimately all will be well because man's labor will restore the Golden Age. This is also the essential thesis of Johnston's book. Otis's view, Virgil, 153 and 213, is that the undoubted pessimism of this passage is outweighed by the optimism of Books 2 and 4.

[14] Otis, Virgil, 157 n. 2.

fails to sustain himself is abandoned, envying others' private plenty, to starve alone:

heu magnum alterius frustra spectabis acervum,
concussaque famem in silvis solabere quercu.^[15
] (1.158–59)

Vainly alas will you eye another man's heaped-up harvest
and relieve your own hunger by shaking an oak in the woods.

Each man works only for himself, without responsibility, as previously, for the general welfare. As a result of Jove's intervention, then, man's moral relationship both to nature and to other men is compromised, for his survival requires continuing departure from the ideals of the Golden Age. Man's ambiguous moral position on the earth can never he resolved or ameliorated, but is a condition of the Iron Age.

As Jove's primary concern is for something other than morality or spiritual quality, so the Georgic poet does not show modern man making meaningful moral choices. Rather man is absorbed by care (curis acuens mortalia corda 1.123); overwhelmed by war (saevit toto Mars impius orbe 1.511), by passion (in furias ignemque ruunt 3.244), by disease (contactos artus sacer ignis edebat 3.566), or by failure (ibi omnis effusus labor 4.491–92). This view of man is corroborated by the adjectives that the poet attributes to him: ignarus ("ignorant" 1.14), avarus ("greedy" 1.47), durus ("hard" 1.63), aeger ("weak" 1.237), acer ("harsh" 2.405), tristis ("sad" 3.517), and miser ("wretched" 3.313). Men have transient joys when freed from work, but find themselves, overall, subject to destructive forces more powerful than they, such as universal decline (1.199–203) or pervasive war (1.511–14). Iron Age man relies on his labor for survival and for glory. Yet the failure of labor is a recurrent motif in the Georgics (1.324–26; 3.97–98, 525; 4.491–92).^[16] This picture does contrast

[15] Contrast Griffin, "Haec super arvorum cultu, " 32, who finds this line "gently humorous."

[16] Cf. Ecl. 10.64:

non illum nostri possunt mutare labores

That god [i.e., Love] no labors of ours can change.

with Hesiod who asserts, on occasion (e.g., Works and Days 308–13), a correlation between work and prosperity.

In sum the poet represents early society as communal and generous, without sin or aggression. To this vision he juxtaposes, without explicitly qualifying them, technological achievements that are, by implication, of a violent and destructive character (1.139–45). Man's technology is not praised by Virgil, nor indeed is it qualified in any way. Since the poet uses no adjectives at all, he leaves the possibility open to the reader to see in the discovery of technology either a positive or a negative development. Thus the poet is deliberately uncommitted, allowing the ambiguous potential of labor and ars to suggest itself.^[17]

Besides being morally ambiguous, 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. Under Jove's dispensation man pursues the material and practical, but lives without fas or art, a suggestive omission for a poet to allow. Virgil's description differs, in this respect, from those of his two major models, Lucretius and Hesiod. Lucretius, as we have seen, includes poetry, painting, and sculpture in his history of civilization (5.1448–53). Equally in Hesiod we find that Zeus likes poetry and is, indeed, the father of the Muses (e.g., Theog. 36–43, 53ff.) In the Georgics, however, Jove, like the farmers of Georgic 2 or the Romanized bees of Georgic 4, is indifferent to art. Poetry and song do not address the problem of material progress. It is most probably for this reason that Jove does not attend to them.

This passage on the development of civilization as we know it has several echoes in the concluding lines of Book 1, where the poet describes wars raging out of control. Fas recurs (127, 505), as do robigo ("mildew," "rust" 151, 495), lupus ("wolf" 130, 486), arma ("arms" 160, 511). These echoes suggest that the passages are in some way paired and, therefore, invite comparison. Thus the reader is invited to compare the life of Golden Age

[17] Cf. Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 34: "There is no commendation of progress as virtuous or indication that in reality, or in Jupiter's thoughts, a new golden age is in prospect."

man with that of his contemporary Romans. Civilization has evolved from universal harmony to almost universal war, from the reign of moral law to the confusion of right and wrong (fas versum atque nefas 505). Jove appears more offended by veternus than by nefas .

In conclusion, the Golden Age in Book 1 is defined by community among men, who pursue the common good, and between men and nature, which gives forth bounteously. There is no domination or manipulation of nature. There is no agricultural labor, perhaps no labor of any kind (i.e., perhaps no poetry). Subsequent variations on the Golden Age motif echo and also question this initial version in various ways.

The Golden Age in Book 2

Turning now to the Golden Age passages of Book 2—the praises of Italy, spring, and country life^[18] —we approach three of the best-known passages of the entire poem. These passages, often read independently of the poem as a whole, have been taken as expressions of the poet's uncomplicated confidence in various aspects of Roman life. All recall in numerous ways the Golden Age as it was described in Book 1. All also have features at variance with the Golden Age described there, and these discrepancies are equally important for the poet's purpose. While these passages express traditional Roman ideals and values, they do so in such a way as to provoke the reader's attention and to challenge his assumptions. In their provocative dissonance from Book 1, in their extravagant overstatement, or in their manifest untruth, these passages draw the reader's attention to those ways in which life's real ambiguities exceed the truth of facile formulations. Thus the Georgic poet is not uncritically limited to the bounds of conventional Roman patriotism, for his real purpose is to enlarge the reader's sensibility.

[18] Cf. Richter, 233: "Saturnian land, Saturnian age, Saturnian life"; also Klingner, Virgil, 2Z7; Büchner, RE 8 A2 (1958): 1280; Otis, Virgil,, 163, 166.

The Praises of Italy

The laudes Italiae (2.136–76), as it is often called, is frequently read as a set piece because, independent of the poem as a whole, it can be taken as a charming expression of Roman patriotism and as a vision of Italy as a contemporary embodiment of the Golden Age.^[19] Indeed the poet explicitly uses the term laudibus ("praises" 138) in beginning the passage:

Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra,
nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus
laudibus Italiae certent
(2.136–38)

But neither the Median forests, that rich land, nor fair Ganges,
Nor Hermus rolling in gold
Compares in praise with Italy

and the vigorous apostrophe

salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
magna virum
(2.173–74)

Hail, great mother of harvests! O land of Saturn, hail!
Mother of men!

in closing.

Let us first note the parallels between contemporary Italy as described in the following passage and the Golden Age of Georgic 1.125ff.:

hic ver adsiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas:
bis gravidae pecudes, his pomis utilis arbos.
at rabidae tigres absunt et saeva leonum

[19] Wilkinson, Georgics, 52 n. 1, notes that even Varro's praise of Italy (which, unlike Virgil's, is restricted to the fertility of the land) "must not be taken au pied de la lettre ." Contemporary passages show this to be a rhetorical set piece; cf. Strab. 6.4.1; Dion. Hal. Ant. rom. 1.36–37. Ross, Virgil's Elements, 110, rejecting a positive reading of all of these passages, considers them with the "sole purpose of watching for the Virgilian lie," that is, as untruths with negative implications for conventional formulations of ideals. Thomas, ad loc., also looks for untruths and implied criticism.

semina, nec miseros fallunt aconita legentis,
nec rapit immensos orbis per humum neque tanto
squameus in spiram tractu se colligit anguis.
(2.149–54)

Here is continual spring and a summer beyond her season;
Cattle bear twice yearly, apples a second crop.
No bloodthirsty tigers are found here, no fierce young lions roar.
No aconite grows to deceive and poison the wretch who picks it,
Nor does the scaly snake slither at such great length
On the ground or gather himself into so many coils here.

These verses suggest that contemporary Italy retains features of a primeval paradise, examples of which are her extraordinary fertility (149–50) and the absence of predatory animals (151–52), poisons (152), and snakes (153–54). These features have led critics to see here the poet's vision of a new Golden Age to come in Italy. A variation on this interpretation is that of Klingner, who sees Italy as representing the Golden Mean, a contrast to the excessive abundance of exotic growths of the decadent East.^[20] In Italy, on the other hand, all is on a human scale, healthfully abundant, offering wholesome challenge, perfect for the farmer:

haec loca non tauri spirantes naribus ignem
invertere satis immanis dentibus hydri,
nec galeis densisque virum seges horruit hastis;
sed gravidae fruges et Bacchi Massicus umor
implevere; tenent oleae armentaque laeta. hinc bellator equus campo sese arduus infert,
hinc albi, Clitumne, greges et maxima taurus
victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro,
Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos.
(2.140–47)

This land of ours has never been ploughed by bulls fire-breathing
Nor sown with dragon's teeth;
It has never known a harvest of serried helmeted spearmen;
Rather is it a country fulfilled with heavy corn and
Campanian wine, possessed by olives and prosperous herds.
Here the charger gallops onto the plain in his pride,

[20] See Klingner, Virgil, 232–41. Contrast R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939; reprint, 1971), 25, who shows there must be some idealizing in Klingner's reading. "Italia" was a precarious concept and may have political overtones.

Here the white-fleeced flocks and the bull, a princely victim
Washed over and over in Clitumnus' holy water,
Lead Roman triumphs to the temples of the gods.

Klingner relates the passage also to the contemporary political situation, taking the East as an embodiment of "unmeasure" and hubris, of Antony's opposition to Rome and to her traditions of loyalty and manliness.

These observations have textual referents and are plausible. They do not, however, account for the entire content of this passage, which reflects as well a certain ambivalence towards Roman values. An undercurrent of verses of ambiguous import, too many to be easily ascribed to consistent carelessness (a concept difficult in itself), suggests a subtle tension determining the structure of this passage. In order not to lose the reader in tedious detail, let us restrict observations to some significant points of tension in this passage.

As a first example one may consider 14off., in which the poet would seem to suggest that Italy is free from a mythologically monstrous past. Other lands, while fabled and wealthy, have disturbing, unnatural myths associated with their past, myths that, presumably, characterize in some real way aspects of their continuing present. Therefore these nations cannot compete with Italy for praise. This allusion to myths of the ancient past might, however, invite the reader to consider some of Rome's earliest myths, which, while offering nothing so fantastical as firebreathing bulls, do offer their own kind of horror. Fraternal murder marks the founding of the Roman state, as all readers knew.^[21] This myth was deeply disturbing to Virgil's contemporaries, since they saw in Romulus and Remus prototypes of the civil wars that had shattered their lives. Crime and violence, although not monstrous or fantastical, mark Rome's history

[21] Cf. H. Wagenvoort, "The Crime of Fratricide," in Studies in Roman Literature, Culture, and Religion (Leiden, 1956), 169–83, who studies the disturbing quality of this myth for Romans. He cites Hor. Epod. 7.18 scelus fraternae necis ("crime of fraternal murder") as an illustration of contemporary concern with Romulus and Remus as prototypes of civil war. Cf. Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (New Haven, 1962; Bloomington, Ind., 1967), 181: "For what is civil war but expanded fratricide?"

from its very inception, a Roman version of original sin (cf. 1.502 and 2.537), so that the civil wars were perceived by some, and certainly treated in poetry, as proof of and payment for sin. This myth, then, to which the poet indirectly calls attention, was as fearful—in very real terms—to Roman eyes as any Eastern counterparts. Indeed it is a portrait of brothers rejoicing in the shedding of fraternal blood that closes this book (2.510), indicating the poet's present concern with fratricide and explicitly with the tale of Romulus and Remus (533) in this section of the poem.^[22]

Another point of some ambiguity in this passage involves the question of cities and man's labor and technology. As we saw in the labor improbus passage of Book 1 (118ff.), man's technology, the defining feature of the Iron Age, has a rather destructive, aggressive character that renders it morally ambiguous in some of its expressions. Labor has vanquished or conquered all things (1.145; similarly 1.150), with the consequence that man's relationship to other men and to nature has the quality of combat more than harmony, as in the Golden Age. The praise, therefore, of Italian cities as creations of labor points to a certain unhappy dimension of their origin.^[23] Cities are not natural or innocent but reflect the need for defensive posture that characterizes the Iron Age:

adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem,
tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis
fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros.
(2.155–57)

Number our noble cities and the labor of our hands,
The towns piled up on toppling cliffs, the antique walls
And the rivers that glide below them.

The poet does not praise the city for its wealth of art or culture or as a refined expression of man's greatest creative acts; rather he praises it as a product of technology. Further to confirm the

[22] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 159, finely terms the suppression of the name of Romulus (G. 2.533) a "moral precipice."

[23] Cf. Ecl. 1.19–25, 4.32–33. Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 101, notes that cities "are provocative objects for a singer of georgica to magnify."

poet's reticence or ambiguity here, we observe that this book concludes with an extended and thorough condemnation of city life for its pursuit of vain and destructive goals, the city absolutely epitomizing the dissolution of the Golden Age (2.503–12).

Another example in this passage of the praises of Roman life coming into implicit conflict with the ethic of the Golden Age is Romans' treatment of their seas:

an memorem portus Lucrinoque addita claustra
atque indignatum magnis stridoribus aequor,
Iulia qua ponto longe sonat unda refuso
Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur aestus Avernis?
(2.161–64)

Shall I mention our harbors, the wall that was built to bar the
Lucrine
And made the deep cry out in mighty indignation
Where the Sound of Julius murmurs with the noise of the sea
locked out
And Tyrrhene tides flow through a canal into Averno?

Here enumeration of Italy's splendid resources modulates into the familiar motif of man's violation of the natural order. Indignatum (162) especially is a significant term here, given its other uses in Virgil.^[24] Assuming its usage here to be consistent with these other occurrences, we infer that the poet is—if subtly—suggesting that Agrippa, as agent of Octavian, is (like Xerxes and Alexander) outraging the sea and exceeding mortal bounds in his violence against nature. The Romans' technology is, as in 1.139ff., represented as aggressive against natural things. Finally, the phrase Iulia . . . unda (2.163), with its implication that

[24] Forms of indignor occur eleven times in Virgil: Aen. 1.55; 2.93; 5.229, 651; 7.770; 8.649,728; 11.831; 12.786,952; and G. 2.162. Since ten out of eleven occur in the Aeneid, we infer that the word has an epic coloring. Four of the uses have to do specifically with natural forces restrained or inverted: Aen. 1.55; 7.770; 8.728; 12.786—in addition to G. 2.162. The others express anger at loss of honor or life. Aen. 8.728 describes the Araxes River, which had destroyed the bridge Alexander had built over it; Augustus then built a new bridge in an effort to subdue the river (Serv. Auct. ad loc.). See R. D. William, ed., The Aeneid of Virgil (London, 1973) at 8.728; and M. C. J. Putnam, "Italian Virgil and the Idea of Rome," in Janus: Essays in Ancient and Modern Studies, ed. Louis L. Orlin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1975), 185–92, for a similar discussion.

Caesar claims to own the waters, corroborates the notion that fas has been overturned (1.506), since, in the Golden Age, man did not claim for himself possession of the natural world.

A last example from this passage of discrepancy from the Golden Age is the portrait of Italian peoples:

haec genus acre virum, Marsos pubemque Sabellam
adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos
extulit, haec Decios Marios magnosque Camillos
Scipiadas duros bello
(2.167–70)

Fierce 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.

These tribes are defined by their harsh and military character. No other qualities are attributed to them. Acre ("fierce" 167), adsuetum malo ("accustomed to hardship" 168), verutos ("armed with a javelin" 168), duros bello ("relentless/hard in war" 169) are the phrases that occur here, making the Italians' aptitude for war and hardship their salient characteristic. Richter points out that this list of heroes parallels that in Horace Epode 16.1ff., which regrets Rome's apparently inexhaustible taste for war.^[25] The list also anticipates the parade of heroes in Aeneid 6.756ff., which combines just the same tone of pride in Roman achievements with dismay at excessive actions committed on behalf of Rome and glory:

infelix utcumque ferent ea facta minores:
vincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido.
(Aen. 6.822–23)

Unhappy, however late ages will extol his deeds.
Love of country will conquer and boundless passion for praise.

The patriotism of Anchises, speaker of these words, is ardent, yet he seems to imply that there is a danger in uncritical love of country.

[25] Cf. Richter ad loc.: "Almost a literary symbol of Roman hero worship."

It is at this point that the poet asserts his intention of singing Hesiodic song throughout Roman towns, implicitly pointing to an absence in his homeland of art and all that it connotes in this poem (1.174–76). The poet's patriotism and commitment to Italy are also great, even if different in character from the soldier's.

In sum, while vital patriotic spirit resonates in this passage, most especially in 136–39, subsequent verses (e.g., 149–54), which reproduce topoi, or commonplaces, of the Golden Age, invite comparison of contemporary Italy with a previously stated ideal, and it is here that the ambiguities of the passage are found. More subtle and ambiguous than often assumed, the praises of Italy suggest a spirit moved, on the one hand, by deep sentiment for country and, on the other, inclined to a certain thoughtful perspective on its character and values.

The Praises of Spring

Like the praises of Italy, the praises of spring recall the Golden Age.^[26] Characteristic of the Georgic poet's retrospective point of view is the notion that spring recalls a former period of ideal vitality. Spring is conceived as the partial reenactment of the birth and primeval perfection of the world:

non alios prima crescentis origine mundi
inluxisse dies aliumve habuisse tenorem
crediderim: ver illud erat, ver magnus agebat
orbis et hibernis parcebant flatibus Euri,
cum primae lucem pecudes hausere, virumque
terrea progenies duris caput extulit arvis,^[27
] immissaeque ferae silvis et sidera caelo.
(2.336–42)

So it was, I believe, when the world first began,
Such the illustrious dawning and tenor of their days.

[26] Cf. Otis, Virgil, 166; Richter, 233, calls it the "Saturnian age." Klingner, Virgil, 258 parallels G. 2.333–34 with Ecl. 4.22:

nec magnos metuent armenta leones
neither shall the herds fear huge lions.

[27] Although most MSS read ferrea, both Mynors and Thomas print terrea .

It was springtime then, great spring
Enhanced the earth and spared it the bitter breath of an east wind—
A time when the cattle first lapped up the light, and men
Children of earth themselves arose from the raw champaign,
And wild things issued forth in the wood, and stars in the sky.

Spring is lovely, but is compared to something lovelier and past. The present is positive in the degree to which it reflects a past perfection. The tenses are past, suggesting that earth's greatest vigor and clarity preceded altogether the creation of human beings. The vitality, joyousness, and fertility of spring are marked by the songs of birds (avibus . . . canoris 328) and by pathless thickets (avia . . . virgulta 328), which parallels the poet's joy at seeing fields untouched by man (2.438–39). This nostalgic placing of perfection in a period without mechanization or commerce is a characteristic note in this poem and absent from the Lucretian model of this passage, which will be discussed below.

Another characteristic note here, as also in English rural poetry, is the continuing tension between contrasting perspectives, as Raymond Williams puts it, "summer with winter, pleasure with loss, past or future with present."^[28] In this passage spring represents only a transient peace for nature's creatures between the rigors of winter, on the one hand, and summer, on the other:

nec res hunc tenerae possent perferre laborem,
si non tanta quies iret frigusque caloremque
inter, et exciperet caeli indulgentia terras.
(2.343–45)

Nor could so delicate creatures endure the toil they must,
Unless between cold and heat there came such quietude
And the gentleness of heaven embraced the earth and comforted
her.

One type of experience always implies its opposite in the continuing cycle of seasons and men's lives. This passage oscillates

[28] Raymond Williams, 18.

between the alluring ideal of spring's peace and the impossibility of maintaining this peace in any permanent way.

Despite its clear relationship to the Golden Age motif, Wilkinson, for example, saw in this passage an essentially meaningless interlude "introduced with little particular relevance save that this is to be a happy book."^[29] Klingner and Will Richter, on the other hand, see the passage as a kind of exalting proof of the immanence of God in nature, Richter adducing the epithet omnipotens (325) and the phrase caeli indulgentia ("heaven's gentleness" 345) to corroborate this reading.^[30] One might feel, though, that pater Aether ("Father Air" 325) is an insufficiently emotive term to be the focus of such intense religious feeling as Klingner and Richter perceive here. One might feel that this term, since accompanied by such scientific and dispassionate language as semina genitalia ("seeds of new life," "generative seeds" 324), tener umor ("mild moisture" 331), and ver utile ("good, beneficial spring" 323), works to create a philosophical or scientific tone more than a religious one. The conception, expressed here in scientific language, of perfection as past is a scientific or philosophical analogue of the Golden Age myth and seems to invite comparison with its Lucretian models, especially Lucretius 1.10–20 and 250–61.^[31] Virgil's regressive emphasis in his praise of spring and his emphasis on the absence of negative elements emerges clearly when juxtaposed to these Lucretian passages, one of which follows:

postremo pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater Aether
in gremium matris Terrai praecipitavit;
at nitidae surgunt fruges ramique virescunt
arboribus, crescunt ipsae fetuque gravantur;
hinc alitur porro nostrum genus atque ferarum,
hinc laetas urbes pueris florere videmus

[29] Wilkinson, Georgics, 191. Cf. Perret, 65.

[30] Klingner, Virgil, 257; Richter, 232.

[31] On the debt of Virgil to Lucretius see Conington, 224; Richter, 231. See Merrill, 222–24, for echoes of Lucretius in G. 2; also Klepl, 11–51, for Book 1 of Lucretius and G. 2. Another similar passage in Lucretius is 5.780ff.

frondiferasque novis avibus canere undique silvas;
hinc fessae pecudes pingui per pabula laeta
corpora deponunt et candens lacteus umor
uberibus manat distentis; hinc nova proles
artubus infirmis teneras lasciva per herbas
ludit lacte mero mentes perculsa novellas.
(Lucr. 1.250–61)

Finally, rains are lost when Father Heaven
Has dropped them into the lap of Mother Earth.
But shining grainfields sprout, and twigs grow green
On trees; the trees grow, too, and bear their fruits;
Hence our land and the animal kind are fed,
Hence we see happy cities bloom with children
And leafy woods all filled with young bird-song;
Hence flocks wearied with fat lay themselves down
Out in the fertile fields, and bright white liquor
Leaks from their swollen teats; hence newborn lambs
Gambol on wobbly legs through tender grass,
Their baby hearts tipsy with winy milk.

As Richter notes, Lucretius' concern is with the physical power of nature, positive and vigorous, as manifest in renewed growth every spring. The finely noted details of artubus infirmis ("wobbly legs" 260) and mentes perculsa novellas ("their baby hearts tipsy" 261) reveal deep sympathy with animals and pleasure in their growth. There is no touch of retrospect or of melancholy here. The notion of a Golden Age or past perfection is antithetical to Epicurean doctrine. Through Epicureanism the spiritual ideal of peace and the opportunity of a better life are ever available. Though the physical condition of the world may he morally flawed or degenerate, Epicurus' truth offers relief from care and fear. Spiritual peace, the discovery of Epicurus, results from an individual's insight into truths of existence (i.e., the gods are distant from human affairs; death, merely a rearrangement of eternal atoms, is not fearful). The ideal time for human beings beckons in the future, a function of an individual's conversion to Epicurus and as permanent as one's ability to

maintain one's conviction of Epicurean truth. The Georgic poet, however, offers no prescriptions for spiritual peace, in respectful deviation from the message of Lucretius (2.490ff.)^[32]

The Praises of Country Life

The laudes ruris, or "praises of country life" (2.458ff.), the last Golden Age passage of Book 2, makes the points conventionally associated with that theme: he who lives simply avoids the vanities of political life, the dangers of war, the distress of envy and poverty; he experiences the uncorrupted pleasures of family, friends, and the bounty of nature. Since the farmer's life is free from political ambition, he—unlike his urban counterpart—is not driven to defile family ties or to abandon his country in criminal exile (511); rather it is he who sustains country and family (514). The farmer's relationships and purposes, in correspondence with the eternal motions of earth, endure, while political matters have only transient importance (498). Only nature is continually renewed, and the farmer, bound to nature's cycles, participates in its larger eternity. That these points are conventional detracts neither from their truth nor from their power to move readers.^[33] Yet such a summary of the passage ignores its implication that the farmer's life, even as it epitomizes early Roman virtue, is, in its own way, flawed and limited. This passage, like many others in the poem, reflects a tension between the farmer's kind of knowledge and the poet's sensibility.

The first verse of the passage (O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,/agricolas! "O happy, too happy, if they were to know their luck, are the farmers!") is suggestive for it recalls the ignorance that was adduced as the farmer's defining problem in

[32] See Büchner, RE 8 A 2 (1958): 1290; Richter, 265; Klepl, 9. For interesting discussions quite different from mine, see Ross, Virgil's Elements, 119–122; and Thomas ad loc.

[33] On the morality and piety of the farmer see Cato Agr. Introduction 4; Varro Rust. 3.1.5; Cic. Sen. 51–60; Quint. Inst. 2.4.24. Hor. Epod. 2 constitutes a kind of satire of this tradition.

1.41 (ignarosque viae mecum miseratus agrestis, "pitying with me the farmers who are ignorant of the way"). Farmers, as representative of all men, lack illumined purpose in living. There is much of mystery that we can never know, and this mystery limits us. For farmers this inevitable epistemological limitation is compounded by a certain narrowness of experience. Farmers live a rural life and thus have a chance virtue, not virtue as the result of deliberate moral choice. If farmers are fortunate or blessed in their existence, yet without knowing it, they have no awareness or knowledge of their situation in life. Their experience is inadequate to give them the perspective and conscious thoughtfulness to come, for example, to a sophisticated rejection of the extravagance and urbanity of which they are involuntarily deprived. That farmers are ignorant of their "blessings" suggests something of the restricted quality of their lives.^[34]

The next two verses

quibus ipsa procul discordibus armis
fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus
(2.459–60)

For them most just earth, of her own accord, far from discordant
Arms, pours forth from the soil an easy living

are at variance with the truth of the farmer's life as it was described in Book 1. There he is not "far from discordant arms," but is swept up into the whirlpool of war, exchanging pruning hook for sword:

non ullus aratro
dignus honos, squalent abductis arva colonis,
et curvae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem.
(1.506–8)

The plough has so little
Honor, the laborers are taken, the fields untended,
And the curving sickle is beaten into the sword that yields not.

[34] Contrast Miles, 151–52, who says that rustics have learned to control their appetites, terming rustic life a "contemplative ideal." See also the Introduction, note 32.

War is reality, and we have seen in Book 1 the easy exchange of roles between farmers and soldiers. The effect of this discrepancy between Books 1 and 2 is to create a tension between certain conventional assumptions about rural virtues and perceived reality.^[35]

Such verses as 2.460 (cited on p. 112), and

at secura quies et nescia fallere vita
(2.467)

but calm security and a life that will not cheat

are starkly inconsistent with Book 1 and therefore similarly create tension for the reader, who cannot rely on the narrator for a unified perspective. Consequently the reader must come to an independent perspective on these oppositions. As we saw in Book 1 the farmer's security is vulnerable to disease, storm, or political intrusion, for example; his efforts to make earth productive must be ceaseless (cf. nec requies, "no rest" 2.516) and can nevertheless be unavailing (e.g., 1.324–26). These inconsistencies thrust upon the reader the real conflicts of experience and constitute a challenge to his thoughtful awareness of which problems might be solved by country life and which might not.

To confirm further the moral ambiguity of the whole, the poet indicates that Justice, although planting her last steps among rural people, has departed even the country (2.473–74). Nowhere is there justice, not even among rural people. This ultimate departure of justice from the earth remains unexplained—as is consistent with the poet's method in this poem. A murky multiplicity of causes for the degenerate condition of man is suggested

[35] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 144, terms the laudes ruris ("praises of country life") outright "false." (See note 19.) He states that 2.527–31 portray a "make-believe georgic life." Contrast Antonio La Penna, "Esiodo nella cultura e nella poesia di Virgilio," in Hésiode et son influence, Fondation Hardt Entretiens, vol. 7 (Geneva, 1970), 239–40, who attributes the inconsistencies that he perceives between the pictures of the farmer's life in G. 1 and G. 2 to Virgil's failure to integrate successfully the Hesiodic tradition, his major source for Book 1, with the pastoral idealization of country life that inspired him in Book 2.

in the poem's course: the will of Jove (1.121), Laomedon's perjury (1.502), the tendency of all things to deteriorate (1.199–200), the slaughter of animals for food (2.537). The essential thing to note in considering this passage is that, in closing, the poet reminds us that, despite rural virtues, Justice has departed even from the country and hence that no Iron Age life, not even the farmer's, is without moral ambiguity.

Analogous to the departure of Justice from the country is Rome's fratricidal history:

hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,
hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit
scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,
septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.
ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante
impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis,
aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat—
(2.532–38)

Such was the life the Sabines lived in days of old,
And Remus and his brother: thus it was, surely, that
Etruria grew strong and Rome became of all things the finest,
Ringing her seven citadels with a single wall.
Before the rise of the Cretan
Lord, before impious men slaughtered bullocks for the banquet,
Such was the life that golden Saturn lived upon earth.

Romulus and Remus, although living a golden life in the Saturnian Age, nevertheless became the very symbols of fratricide.^[36] Since Remus and the Sabines (2.532) were victims of violence even in the Saturnian Age, was Rome corrupt in some way from its inception? In the strengths and virtues of Rome's Saturnian or rural Golden Age, the very foundation of its power and glory, lay—evidently—the seeds of its dissolution:

sic fortis Etruria crevit
scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma
(2.533–34)

Thus it was, surely, that
Etruria grew strong and Rome became of all things the finest.

[36] Miles, 162–63, notes the paradox of the Saturnian Age turning into the dreadful present, as did M. C. J. Putnam in "The Virgilian Achievement," Arethusa 5 (1972): 36. On the multiplicity of causes for moral decline see R. O. A. M. Lyne, "Scilicet et tempus veniet . . .: Virgil, Georgics 1.463–514," in Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, ed. Tony Woodman and David West (Cambridge, 1974), 47–66.

For this difficulty no facile explanation is offered; the problem is only posed. Even in the Saturnian Age Romans built citadels that reflect the defensive posture characteristic of the Iron Age (2.535). As Richter points out here, ensis ("swords" 2.540) is the last word of the book proper. The poet does not allow the reader to forget, even in reverie, the reality of contemporary experience. While acknowledging the virtues that convention respects, the poet suggests the irresolvable ambiguities of Roman life in particular and of the human condition in general.

The Golden Age in Book 3

The Scythians

Book 3, because of its horrifying passages on love and on the plague, is generally considered the most pessimistic book of the poem and, as such, may initially seem a strange quarry for treatments of the Golden Age.^[37] In Book 3 the approach to the Golden Age seems to be parodic. For example, the passage on the plague (3.478ff.) has been widely recognized as a travesty of the Golden Age,^[38] for it results in a harmony among animals that recalls the Golden Age (cf. Ecl. 4.22; G. 1.129–30), since predatory relationships among animals cease after the plague:

non lupus insidias explorat ovilia circum
nec gregibus nocturnus obambulat: acrior illum
cura domat; timidi dammae cervique fugaces
nunc interque canes et circum tecta vagantur.
(3.537–40)

Wolves no longer lurk in ambush around the folds, nor lope
Towards the flock at night: more desperate the care

[37] See, for example, Otis, Virgil, 151, 180; Perret, 68; Klingner, Virgil, 296; Wilkinson, Georgics, 74–75; Parry, 42.

[38] By (among others) Wilkinson, Georgics, 208; Otis, Virgil, 179; Richter, 325. See also Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 210; Miles, 211

That makes them tame. Now timid fallow-deer and elusive Stags wander amongst the hounds and about men's houses.

This harmony, however, is not sustaining of community and spirit, but ironic, the bitter and brutalizing sharing of all creatures in death. The poet thus grimly parodies some conventionally conceived ideals with the effect of suggesting how they are, in themselves, incapable of creating or sustaining an enlightened moral community. Harmony, as above, can exist as an isolated and meaningless phenomenon, when achieved without deliberate moral choice or enlightened purpose.

Although this has not been commented upon previously, one could argue that the passage on the Scythians (3.349–83) also is a travesty or parody of certain Golden Age phenomena. The representation of remote and primitive peoples as living in a moral Golden Age was familiar practice to Roman readers. Horace (Odes 3.24) subsequently described the Scythians as living morally, in a contemporary Golden Age.^[39] He represents them in particular as figures of virtue. For example, after observing that even great wealth is of no avail against death, he proceeds

campestres melius Scythae,
quorum plaustra vagas rite trahunt domos,
vivunt et rigidi Getae,
immetata quibus iugera liberas

fruges et Cererem ferunt,
nec cultura placet longior annua,
defunctumque laboribus
aequali recreat sorte vicarius.

ille matre carentibus
privignis mulier temperat innocens,
nec dotata regit virum
coniunx nec nitido fidit adultero.

[39] See Lovejoy and Boas, especially 288–90 and 315–44, on the overall eulogistic treatment of the Scythians throughout antiquity for their "non-commercial and communistic life" and "general simplicity and lack of luxury" (327). Ross, Virgil's Elements, 176 and 177, takes the passage as genuinely idyllic—"scene of peace, ease, and delight," "strangely civilized wild men." With respect to Horace, even if he is indulging in some irony here, this would not detract from the conventional nature of the thought.

dos est magna parentium
virtus et meteuens alterius viri
certo foedere castitas,
et peccare nefas aut pretium est mori.
(Odes 3.24.9–24)

Far better live the Scythians of the steppes, whose wagons haul their homes from place to place, as is their wont; far better live the Getae stern, whose unallotted acres bring forth fruits and corn for all in common; nor with them is tillage binding longer than a year; another then on like conditions takes the place of him whose task is done.

There, matrons spare children of their mother reft, nor do them harm, nor does the dowered wife rule o'er her husband or put faith in dazzling paramour. Their noble dower is parents' virtue and chastity that shrinks in steadfast faith from the husband of another. To sin is wrong; or if they sin, the penalty is death.^[40]

They live better (melius 3.24.9). Among the comparable Getae the poet notes the sharing of crops and the unpossessed fields. Particularly relevant to our theme is the moral quality of their lives: virtus ("virtue" 22), castitas ("chastity" 23), certo foedere ("sure bond" 23). They are conscious of wrong (nefas 24), which is punished by death. Their simplicity of life, lack of sophisticated culture, and distance from the city correlate with a morally pure life.

In the Georgics, by contrast, we find a different and more probing perspective on life among the Scythians. In the Georgics also they are without urban vice, competition, or war. Free from sophisticated criminality, they have no money and hold all in common. In these particular features they recall the Golden Age. Yet the poet suggests that despite these apparently Golden Age features the Scythians are more brutal and devoid of humanity than the animals whose skins they so aptly wear (gens effrena virum, "an unbridled race of men" 3.382). They sustain themselves virtually without labor or ars (contrast, for example,

[40] C. E. Bennett, trans., Horace: Odes and Epodes, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

1.122, 133, 145), for neither of these is required to trap animals already immured in ice:

intereunt pecudes, stant circumfusa pruinis
corpora magna boum, confertoque agmine cervi
torpent mole nova et summis vix cornibus exstant.
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.
(3.368–75)

Cattle die, the bulky oxen stand about
Shrouded in frost, and herds of deer huddling together
Grow numb beneath new-formed drifts, their antlers barely
showing.
Men hunt them not with hounds now, nor do they use the nets,
No scarlet-feathered 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 there is no harmony between men and nature, no pity, no moral community. While these Scythians have an abundance of food, secure leisure (secure . . . otia 376–77; cf. secure . . . quies 2.467), games (ludus 379), and are joyful (laeti 379), they lead a brutal life, without conscience or thoughtful consciousness. The image of animals, defenseless from cold (torpent 370), that are raucously and callously killed (magno laeti clamore reportant 375), repels. These people are not, in the Georgics, a moral ideal but a gens effrena, a "wild race," as the poet says (382). They have no Golden Age, since no humane or moral purpose animates them. Their spiritual destitution is perhaps reflected in their surroundings. They inhabit a place of pallentis . . . umbras ("pale shadows" 357), rather like Hades, where the sun never shines, where running water freezes, where the sea's surface is solid, and wine must be split with axes (3.35 6–66). These people, devoid of sensibility and pity, are in need of a "lesson of poetry." Without this moral or spiritual quality animals, even if not predatory, or mankind, even if free from

modern crime, cannot live a humane, illumined existence. As we saw in chapter 1, spiritual illumination, sensibility, and pity are the province of the poet and essential to a humane age.

The passage on the Libyans, though far briefer, makes points comparable to those on the Scythians. As the Scythians live in the far north, so the Libyans live in the south, and thus Scythians and Libyans together could express a range of possibility. The Libyans have simple lives. Unencumbered by possessions, they take everything with them (omnia secum/armentarius Afer agit 343–44).They have no elegance, wealth, or competition and hence are free from the decadence of Rome. On the other hand, there is no suggestion of peace or happiness in their lives. They have no security of possessions or of spirit. The comparison of these shepherds to Roman soldiers suggests the menaced and difficult quality of their lives, as if spent in anticipation of enemy attack: iniusto sub fasce ("under an excessive load" 347), et hosti/ante exspectatum positis stat in agmine castris ("till the column is halted, the camp pitched, the foe surprised" 348). There is no illumined purpose in their lives, no community. The geographical expanse of vacant fields (tantum campi iacet 343) seems to parallel their own spiritual vacancy. The Golden Age in its essence, although not in all its particulars, eludes them.

The Plague

The plague that the poet describes in 3.478–566 is of exceptional horror.^[41] An extract will suffice to suggest the gruesome details that the poet includes:

Hic quondam morbo caeli miseranda coorta est
tempestas totoque autumni incanduit aestu
et genus omne neci pecudum dedit, omne ferarum,
corrupitque lacus, infecit pabula tabo.

[41] Virgil's primary models for this passage are Thuc. 2.49ff. and Lucr. 6.1138ff. See Jean Bayet, "Un procédé virgilien: la description synthétique dans les Géorgiques, " in Studi in onore di Gino Funaioli (Rome, 1955), 9–18, for a useful examination of Virgil's method of synthesizing various sources and traditions in order to contrive one most dramatic event.

nec via mortis erat simplex; sed ubi ignea venis
omnibus acta sitis miseros adduxerat artus,
rursus abundabat fluidus liquor omniaque in se
ossa minutatim morbo conlapsa trahebat.
(3.478–85)

For here it was that once the sky fell sick and a doleful
Season came, all hectic with the close heat of autumn,
And it killed off the whole gamut of cattle and wild beasts,
Infected their drinking pools and put a blight on their fodder.
Death took them by two stages:
When parching thirst had seared the veins and shrivelled the poor
limbs,
Watery humors broke out again in flux till the bones all
Rotted and melted piecemeal as the malady ran its course.

Nevertheless, as many critics have noted, the plague results in a renewed, if horrific, Golden Age. Echoes between this passage and the passage in Book 1 that describes the transition from the Golden Age to the Iron Age are unmistakable. The significant terms ars, usus, cura, and labor occur in both passages (there are many other echoes as well), and thus invite comparison. For example, in inaugurating the Iron Age, Jove ordered wolves, previously gentle, to become predators (praedarique lupos iussit 1.130). After the plague wolves become, once again, docile:

non lupus insidias explorat ovilia circum
nec gregibus nocturnus obambulat
(3.537–38)

Wolves lurk no longer in ambush around the folds, nor lope
Towards the flock at night.

But this docility is not gentle or blessed; rather the wolves have been tamed brutally:

acrior ilium
cura domat
(3.538–39)

More desperate the care that makes them tame.

As another example, in the Iron Age, men had to contrive means to trap fish:

atque alius latum funda iam verberat amnem
alta petens, pelagoque alius trahit umida lina
(1.141–42)

One whips now the wide river with casting net and searches
Deep pools, another trawls his dripping line in the sea.

After the plague there is once again Golden Age plenty, and labor is not required. The earth recalls her Golden Age plenty only in parody, however. for the sea freely casts up quantities of fish, diseased and untouchable, a useless abundance of food:

iam maris immensi prolem et genus omne natantum
litore in extremo ceu naufraga corpora fluctus
proluit;
(3.541–43)

Now the deepwater tribes, yes, all the swimming creatures
Lie on the shore's edge, washed by the waves like shipwrecked
bodies.

As a final example, we may consider the fearfulness of poisonous snakes, which originated in the Iron Age through Jove's intervention:

ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris
(1.129)

Jove put the wicked poison in the black serpent's tooth.

This fear vanishes, since the snakes perish from disease, but it does not thereby renew the Golden Age:

interit et curvis frustra defensa latebris
vipera et attoniti squamis astantibus hydri.
(3.544–45)

The viper perishes too, in vain defense of her winding
lair; and the startled snake, his scales standing on end.

A certain harmony exists among animals:

timidi dammae cervique fugaces
nunc interque canes et circum tecta vagantur.
(3.539–40)

Now timid fallow-deer and elusive
stags wander amongst the hounds and about men's houses.

Harmony exists among animals and men as well, for oxen are no longer exploited for plowing:

ergo aegre rastris terram rimantur, et ipsis
unguibus infodiunt fruges, montisque per altos
contenta cervice trahunt stridentia plaustra.
(3.534–36)

Painfully men scratched at the soil with mattocks, used their
Own nails to cover in the seed corn, harnessed their necks
To tug the creaking waggons over a towering hillside.

Yet these ancient enmities are not resolved with sympathy or felt community, but only by the terminal equality of death.

In sum, the aftermath of the plague shares with the Golden Age an absence of competition, of private property, and of predatory relationships among earth's creatures. Conventional adynata, such as harmony between sheep and wolves, ordinarily predicted only of a fantasized future, are realized.^[42] Mankind is once again freed from vain concerns and artifice. The Iron Age ethic of usefulness stands revealed as ill conceived, for salvation lies precisely in abandoning technology:

quaesitaeque nocent artes; cessere magistri
(3.549)

Cures (artes ) they invented only killed; healers gave up

and in abandoning the Iron Age ethic of profitable materialism:

nam neque erat coriis  usus
(3.559)

the hides were of no use .

Yet, although Iron Age flaws are eliminated, a new Golden Age does not ensue. Iron Age values of ars, usus, and technological achievement are abandoned;^[43] but they are abandoned through

[42] Wilkinson, Georgics, 208.

[43] Büchner, RE 8 Az (1958): 1302, observes that man learned to deal with the plague not through the ethic of use but, paradoxically, of uselessness.

compelling disaster and without deliberate choice. Here, although without technology, man does not attain a new innocence but a new barbarism, as he is driven to dig the earth with his nails (3.534–3 5). Quid labor aut benefacta iuvant? ("Of what avail are work and good services?" 525 ).^[44] The poet poses this question at the poem's grimmest moment, implying that the purpose of achievements and morality is unknown.

As a whole, then, this passage highlights the necessity of a certain spiritual quality or moral community, which alone might sustain Golden Age values. Such a quality does not exist as a consequence of the plague, for the harmony achieved there is grotesque and without spirit or volition. The poet has taken up conventional Golden Age features in successive isolation and permutation and finely revealed thereby what is absent—a spark of willed mutuality and illumined purpose.

The Golden Age in Book 4

The Bees

In Book 4 the Golden Age passages, which are here considered to be those on the bees and the Corycian gardener, are not, as in Book 3, travesties of the Golden Age but again, as in Books 1 and 2 approximations of the Golden Age, in which disparities between real and ideal lead to subtle ironies and new perspectives on questions central to the poem.

As often noted, the bees of 4.1–115 and 149–280 recall in their selflessness and sharing the Golden Age ethic as described in Book 1. As a consequence they have been viewed at times as Virgil's model for the moral and political renewal of Rome, a new Golden Age. This interpretation, based upon an assumed equation of the bees with the Roman people and of Aristaeus with Octavian,^[45] sees in the bees' "resurrection" an image of the

[44] Benefacta had particular currency as a political term in the Roman party system. Cf. David Ross, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (Cambridge, 1969), 83–86.

[45] E.g., Perret, 83–85; Steele Commager, ed., Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1966), 3; Hellfried Dahlmann, "Die Bienenstaat in Vergils Georgica, " in Kleinen Schriften (Hildesheim, 1970), 189.

rebirth of Rome under the leadership of Octavian. The perceived optimism of the poem as a whole resides especially in this conclusion to Book 4, where the miraculous birth of the bees is felt to resolve the tensions of the poem and to portend a positive future. This reading, although of long standing, has begun to meet with objections, for the bees appear seriously flawed as models of a renewed Golden Age.^[46] Rather the portrait of them is a complex one in which strengths and weaknesses combine to form a morally ambiguous picture, identifying the bees as typical Iron Age creatures rather than as models for a moral Golden Age.

The Georgic poet devotes a disproportionate space to bees, given their relative lack of importance on a farm. Other small farm animals, such as dogs or fowl, omitted from this book, would reasonably deserve equal treatment. In addition, as Hellfried Dahlmann usefully noted,^[47] the jussive form of the verb is infrequent in this passage, suggesting that here, as elsewhere, the Georgic poet does not have a conventional didactic purpose in mind. His focus is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is the character of the bees' life, as he describes it, that is the focus of interest. His account derives in part from traditional wisdom about the bees and in part from an interest in certain of their behaviors that seem particularly Roman or, perhaps, in which Romans might well see themselves reflected, if obliquely and with some distance and perspective.

Aristotle (Hist. an. 5.21–23) classified bees with wasps, cranes, and men as political (living in a polis ) and as having shared work (koinon ergon ). Equally Varro (3.16.3, 3.16.6) noted their similarities to human beings and especially their talent for cooperative effort.

In the Georgics the analogy between bees and human beings is unmistakable from the book's opening verses, with their references to magnanimosque duces . . . et populos et proelia:

[46] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 244–63, and Griffin, "Fourth Georgic, " passim, write perceptively on the bees' flaws.

[47] Dahlmann, 186.

admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum
magnanimosque duces totiusque ordine gentis
mores et studia et populos et proelia dicam.
(4.3–5)

I'll tell of tiny
Things that make a show well worth your admiration—
Great-hearted leaders, a whole nation whose work is planned,
Their morals, strivings, tribes and battles—I'll tell you in due order.

Parallels between the bees' existence and that of human beings are clear. Jove establishes for both the laboring way of life:

Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse
addidit expediam, pro qua mercede canoros
Curetum sonitus crepitantiaque aera secutae
Dictaeo caeli regem pavere sub antro.
(4.149–52)

Well then, let me speak of the natural gifts that Jove himself
Bestowed on the bees, their reward
For obeying the charms—the chorus and clashing brass of the priests—
And feeding the king of heaven when he hid in that Cretan cave.

(Cf. 1.121–24, cited on p. 96.) This intervention also entails cura (4.178), amor (4.177), ars (4.56), labor (4.184), pursuit of gloria (4.205), all without rest (mora 4.185): a collocation of features that defines the Iron Age as represented in this poem. Like men, bees have tiny enemies who undermine their labor (4.13ff., 242ff., cf. 1.118–21, 176–86); they suffer from plague (casus . . . nostros, "our ills" 4.251). All these features suggest their similarity to mankind in general.

In other ways their ordered and religious society is represented as specifically Roman, as the terms larem (43), magnis . . . legibus (154), patriam and penates (155) suffice to suggest.^[48]

In their sharing the bees certainly recall the Golden Age. Their lives are very much communal experiences:

[48] Contrast Thomas at 4.201 concerning Quirites .

solae communis natos, consortia tecta
urbis habent
(4.153–54)

They alone have their children in common, a city shared
Beneath one roof

et in medium quaesita reponunt^[49
] (4.157)

and put their gains into a common store

omnibus una quies operum, labor omnibus unus
(4.184)

For one and all one work-time and alike one rest from work.

Chastity, though not specifically a Golden Age feature, also distinguishes the bees from the Iron Age creatures of Book 3. The bees are apparently free of those destructive passions that characterize all other mortal creatures (amor omnibus idem 3.244). The poet emphasizes the bees' reputation for chastity by adducing the least scientific of contemporary hypotheses to explain their reproduction:

verum ipsae e foliis natos, e suavibus herbis
ore legunt, ipsae regem parvosque Quirites
sufficiunt
(4.200–2)

But all by themselves from leaves and sweet herbs they will gather
Their children in their mouths, themselves supply the succession
And the tiny citizens.

(Cf. the suggestive contrast of apibus fetis, "mother bees" 4.139).

The issue to consider is whether the bees' undeniable Roman and Golden Age features suggest that the Romans, to the degree to which they are symbolized by the bees, have or are to have a new Golden Age. Although some have assumed that the bees

[49] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 254, writes interestingly on the differences between quaerebant (1.127) and reponunt (4.157), inferring from reponunt that "the bees' existence is a decline from, rather than a reversion to, the Golden Age."

represent a Roman society perfected and renewed,^[50] others have written perceptively about the bees' flaws, which are incompatible with a humane and creative society. The bees' undeniable virtues are in tension with failings that compromise them as moral models. For the Romans, therefore, the bees' flaws might be as instructive as their virtues; for while they embody to a degree a social and moral ideal, they represent equally a life without consciousness or pity.

The poet implies that the bees' sharing is achieved at the cost of individuality and reflection. For example, once their king dies, they are lost, incapable of individual or reflective action. Here total community is not necessarily a good, as it can lead to total self-destruction:

praeterea regem non sic Aegyptus et ingens
Lydia nec populi Parthorum aut Medus Hydaspes
observant. rege incolumi mens omnibus una est;
amisso rupere fidem, constructaque mella
diripuere ipsae et cratis solvere favorum.
ille operum custos, illum admirantur et omnes
circumstant fremitu denso stipantque frequentes,
et saepe attollunt umeris et corpora bello
obiectant pulchramque petunt per vulnera mortem.
(4.210–18)

Besides, they esteem royalty more than Egypt does or enormous
Lydia even, or the peoples of Parthia, or the Mede by Hydaspes.
Let the king be safe—they are bound by a single faith and purpose:
Lose him—then unity's gone, and they loot the honey cells
They built themselves, and break down the honeycomb's withy well.
Guardian of all their works he is. They hold him in awe.
Thick is their humming murmur as they crowd around and mob him.
Often they chair him shoulder high: and in war they shelter
His body with theirs, desiring the wounds of a noble death.

[50] So Antonio La Penna, "Senex Corycius, " in Atti del Convegno Virgiliano sul Bimillenario delle Georgiche (Naples, 1977), 65: "That the society of the bees constitutes an ethical-political Augustan model is a truth which does not need to be confirmed."

Their uncritical obedience to their king is made to parallel that of the peoples of the (decadent, effeminate) East, whom the Romans did not admire and whose values were fundamentally opposed to Roman republican tradition. Thus, uniform community comes with a certain cost.

A lack of thoughtfulness in the bees accompanies their militarism. Bees' similarities to soldiers are implicit in such terms as signa ("standards" 108), castris ("camp" 108), speculantur ("are on watch" 166), custodia ("keeping guard" 165), agmine facto ("in martial array" 167) and in 4.193–94, which suggests military maneuvers and soldiers in a besieged town. The poet has imagined or created for bees this militaristic character since bees do not, in reality, behave as belligerently as is indicated here. The bee battle is a "literary flight of fancy"^[51] that creates a correlation between militarism and absence of reflection. Bees prepare with excitement (4.69–70, 73) for wars without substance, sacrificing their lives with alacrity in battles that have no urgency (cf. animasque in vulnere ponunt 238). They die for glory, for the appearance of "beautiful" death (pulchra mors 218), thus adhering to the heroic code.^[52] Yet to the poet their dramas appear more pathetic than heroic:

hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
pulveris exigui iactu compresses quiescent.
(4.86–87)

And all these epic battles and turbulent hearts you can silence
By flinging a handful of dust.

Further complicating the bees' claimed status as figures of moral renewal is that their lauded continence and lack of passion is more apparent than real, since they seem merely to have replaced sexual amor with another sort, that is, passion for gain:

illum adeo placuisse apibus mirabere morem,
quod neque concubitu indulgent, nec corpora segnes
in Venerem solvunt aut fetus nixibus edunt.
(4.197–99)

[51] Wilkinson, Georgics, 2.63. Cf. Klingner, Virgil, 304, on the epic language used to describe the bee battle, as well as other differences from Varro's account.

[52] Quinn, 1–22.

Most you shall marvel at this habit peculiar to bees—
That they have no sexual union: their bodies never dissolve
Lax into love, nor bear with pangs the birth of their young

Cecropias innatus apes  amor  urget habendi
(4.177)

An inborn love of possession impels the bees

(In Aen. 8.327 in the narration of Evander amor habendi, "love of gain,"^[53] and belli rabies, "madness of war," bring about the dissolution of the Golden Age.) That the poet intends to represent the gathering of honey as a substitute for sexual activity is further indicated by the use of terms that denote passion and birth:

tantus amor florum et  generandi  gloria mellis
(4.205)

Such is their love for flowers and the glory of producing
[generating] honey.

Thus, although bees do not weaken their bodies with sexual activity (198–199), they do expend them in battle (218) or in pursuit of honey (205) without consideration of their lives' value. Therefore the same drive that appears as sexual passion in other animals is expressed in the bees' lives as an urgent acquisitiveness or materialism and an unreflecting negligence of life (204, 218) in pursuit of glory.

While, then, the bees have the Golden Age virtues of community and sharing, in their case these come at the cost of their militaristic and appetitive passions. Although they are as flawed as human beings, yet they are without human virtues, such as song or poetry, which distinguish man from beast and serve to define human culture. Neglectful of individual lives, without individual satisfaction or sentiment, they achieve mere existence, existence without meaning. In comparison to the other important figures of this book, they are anonymous and lacking the unique creativity and devotion to beauty of the Corycian gar-

[53] See Johnston, 101, who cites parallels: amor terrae of plants at G. 2.301; amor laudum of horses at G. 3.112, 185–86.

dener, the individual persistence of Aristaeus, and the potential for song and beauty of Orpheus. The bees as well as the human individuals of Book 4 have powerful and destructive passions that exist in tension with their virtues and achievements. None of these figures is a model for flawless existence; all embody conflicts that are illuminated but not resolved by the Georgic poet.

The Corycian Gardener

In his harmony with nature, in his transcendence of natural constraints of time and place, and in his indifference to material goals, the Corycian gardener, most perfectly of any figure in the poem, approaches the spirit or morality of the Golden Age. From land abandoned by others as useless:

cui pauca relicti
iugera ruris erant, nec fertilis illa iuvencis
nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho.
(4.127–29)

a few poor acres
Of land once derelict, useless for arable,
No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines

he contrives a miraculous and artistic fertility, his work thus reflecting the spiritual luminescence of his private Golden Age. The essence of his significance is that his achievement is miraculous and mysterious—not comprehensible, imitable, or possible to describe in conventional georgic praecepta . He makes sterile land productive. His hyacinths bloom while rocks shatter with winter's cold and streams are frozen (4.135–38); he is the first to pluck roses in spring (134); he is the first to gather honey (139–41). Every blossom on his trees survives to bear fruit (142–43). He alone can transplant fully mature trees:

ille etiam seras in versum distulit ulmos
eduramque pirum et spinos iam pruna ferentis
iamque ministrantem platanum potantibus umbras.^[54
] (4.144–46)

[54] Conington states ad loc. that seras, eduram, iam pruna ferentis, iamque ministrantem . . . umbras are all emphatic. For fuller discussion see C. G. Perkell, "On the Corycian Gardener in Virgil's Fourth Georgic, " TAPA 11(1981): 167–77.

He had a gift, too, for transplanting in rows the far-grown elm,
The hardwood pear, the blackthorn bearing its weight of sloes,
And the plane that already offered a pleasant shade for drinking.

(In this feat he anticipates and parallels the poet-singer Orpheus.) The gardener's moral relationship to nature recalls, as we see, that of Golden Age man, for in each case nature, unassailed, responds abundantly. The gardener's success is not attributed to Iron Age technology. Although such terms as captare ("capture"), fallere ("deceive"), insectari ("assail"), terrere ("terrify"), and arma ("weapons") characterize the Iron Age farmer of Georgic 1, the gardener is not represented as being on the attack. Neither do other terms denoting Iron Age technology or anxiety (e.g., labor, usus, ars, cura ) occur of his activities.^[55] One could reasonably argue that labor, cura, and ars are implicit, for example, in the gardener's returning home late at night (sera . . . nocte 132–33). The fact is, however, that the poet has taken care to avoid the use of these particular terms, preferring in this way to emphasize the miraculous, mysterious quality of the gardener's achievements, which are not imitable through routine georgic procedures. The farmer's feats are thus allowed to appear moral or spiritual more than technical. His success is not a function simply of hard work.

Critics have seen in the gardener an embodiment of the fundamental value of agricultural life (Richter); a model, like the farmers of Georgic 2., of wisdom (as they see it), who transcends poverty through serenity and skill (Klingner); and an Epicurean sage, exemplifying beauty and utility (Antonio La Penna).^[56] My thesis here, however, is that the gardener represents not so much a rural or philosophical ideal as a poetic ideal. Neither does he represent so much the simple life as the esthetic life, for he pursues beauty and uselessness more than beauty and utility. The gardener's values are at variance with the materialism and milita-

[55] Cf. Klingner, Virgil, 309 n. 1, for a similar observation.

[56] Richter at 4.125–48; Klingner, Virgil, 309; La Penna, "Senex Corycius, " 57.

rism characteristic of the Iron Age; and it is precisely his deviations from this tradition that identify him as a Golden Age figure.

In evaluating the gardener's achievement readers must realize that the garden in question is not the equivalent of a farmer's small vegetable patch. This garden does not provide produce particularly suited for consumption either by the gardener or by his bees;^[57] rather it is described in such a way as to suggest a pleasure garden, an ornament, a timeless profusion of flowering trees and plants that is possible only in the imagination. In addition to its floral beauty the garden has also a formal artistic perfection, reflected in the words in versum (144) and circum (130), for example, which are tantamount to technical terms. These terms suggest, respectively, rows of well-aligned trees and borders of flowers (features "which constitute the grace of gardens . . . esteemed in Greco-Roman antiquity"^[58] ), thus indicating the artistic refinement of the garden. Therefore this garden is above all a symbol of beauty, beauty that serves no material function but that sustains and expands the spirit, like the beauty of art, song, or poetry. In growing flowers, the epitome of superfluous beauty, the gardener pursues (like the poet) an esthetic and spiritual ideal that ignores material function or profit. This is the essential significance of the old man's garden: to serve as an image of beauty that is nonmaterial, nonproductive, non-profitable, and thus in opposition to the farmer's work, which is material and answers to physical needs.

The uselessness of the old man's garden is further underlined by his age. While many take the gardener's old age (senem 127)

[57] The squash (cucumis 4.122) is not grown by the Corycian gardener, although La Penna, "Senex Corycius, " 57, does not note this distinction. Contrast the plants recommended for bees at 4.30–32, 63, 109, 112. The character of this passage emerges clearly when it is compared with Varro's Veianius brothers, who turned their very small holding into a profitable apiary, as E. Burck notes in "Der korykische Greis in Vergils Georgica (IV 116–148)," in Navicula Chiloniensis: Festschrift F. Jacoby (Leiden, 1956), 160.

[58] P. Wuilleumier, "Virgile et le vieillard de Tarente," REL 3 (1930): 326. A certain refinement is implicit also in the term dapibus . J. S. Clay, "The Old Man in the Garden: Georgic 4.116–148," Arethusa 14 (1981): 61, sees the flowers as reflecting "the love of the beautiful for its own sake."

to be an index of wisdom,^[59] it is perhaps germane to recall the verses on the old stallion of Georgic 3.95–100, which set old age within a georgic, Iron Age context. There the old stallion, no longer able to procreate or to make war (his legitimizing functions within the georgic or material world), must be dismissed from the farmer's care and attention:

Hunc quoque, ubi aut morbo gravis aut iam segnior annis
deficit, abde domo, nec turpi ignosce senectae.
frigidus in Venerem senior, frustraque laborem
ingratum trahit, et, si quando ad proelia ventum est,
ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis,
incassum furit.
(3.95–100)

Yet even that horse, when he weakens from illness or weight of years,
You must pension off and spare no pity for age's failings.
To be old is to be cold in rut, to prolong a loveless
Labor impotently; and whenever it comes to the conflict,
His passion is vain—a great fire in stubble, without strength.

In the farmer's world, dominated as it must be by material concerns, an old horse, since useless, has no value and cannot be redeemed by pity or sentiment. According, then, to the material standards implicit in the very nature of a georgic poem, the old Corycian would have no value, since he also is useless, not only for war or procreation, but for vigorous labor. Nevertheless, in the poet's vision he represents an experience of great value.

In contenting himself with unproductive land the gardener shows his negligence of profit, prestige, and convention. Although near the city (4.125–27), he pursues a life that excludes urban or, more generally, Iron Age values, as the absence from his life of commerce (dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis, "he loaded his board with unbought dainties" 133), appetitiveness, aggression, and ambition shows. As his old age makes clear the superfluous and inessential character of his activities, so his

[59] Such as La Penna, "Senex Corycius, " 63. Cf. Clay, "Old Man in the Garden," 60, for a good discussion of the significance of the gardener's old age.

unique accomplishments do not translate into material profit or political power, to which concerns he is consistently indifferent. Content without gloria, honor, or amor and thus outside of Iron Age values and morality, he is distinct from the poem's other figures, including Aristaeus (4.325) and the Georgic poet (4.6), who are touched by Iron Age ambition and aspire variously to wealth, power, glory, or divinity. The gardener, by contrast, aspiring to nothing other than what he has, achieves enduring contentment (regum aequabat opes animis 132), unique in the poem.

The fourth Georgic, then, juxtaposes the impersonal, materialistic society of bees to the extravagant, individual passions of the variously failed and imperfect Orpheus and Aristaeus. Opposed to both is the fleeting ideal of the gardener, who has their strengths and not their flaws. Although an individual, he has neither Aristaeus' concern for mortal glory (vitae mortalis honorem 326) and hope of divinity (quid me caelum sperare iubebas 325) nor Orpheus' destructive passion (quid tantus furor 495). To place the Corycian gardener passage in this book, therefore, is to illuminate the tension between the imperfect reality of both farmer and poet and an ideal of human existence, creative in pursuit of beauty, at peace with nature, and free from urban corruption. It is not, then, the bees but the gardener who most closely embodies the Golden Age ideal. The city, although so near and in reality menacing, does not obtrude upon his existence. Unlike the conscripted farmers of Georgic 1 or the exiled poets of Eclogues 1 and 9, whose shattered lives exemplify the city's ascendancy, he lives—ideally and impossibly—free of the city's influence.

The gardener is different from the poet in his spiritual contentment (regum aequabat opes animis 4.132) and in his indifference to those drives for power, profit, honor, or glory that define variously the city, the poet, and the Iron Age. Although the gardener lives alongside the city (4.125), he is untroubled by its needs. Equally without rural connections, he pursues his isolated and marvelous creations. In growing flowers, the epitome of superfluous beauty, the gardener pursues, like the poet,an es-

thetic or spiritual ideal that ignores material function or profit. One might sense that the gardener's appeal is precisely his freedom from the limiting realities, internal and external, that trouble the Georgic poet. He is free from ambition and longing; he does not idealize an irretrievable past, nor does he seek to escape the present. Neither does he conceive artistic goals comparable to the poet's desires to understand the mysteries of the universe or to be in Greece. Creative in pursuit of beauty, in harmony with nature, free from urban corruption and rural constraint, the gardener embodies an ideal of contentment and withdrawal that appeals powerfully to the poet. Of all the figures in the poem he lives closest to the morality of the Golden Age, feeling the challenge neither of mystery nor of mission.

Even the gardener, however, is not a perfect embodiment of the Golden Age, for there are ways in which he too diverges from the Golden Age ethic of Book 1. His pursuit of beauty identifies him most significantly as a poet. We may infer from the learned and Alexandrian adjective Oebalia for Tarentum that he is a poet of a particular sort.^[60] As Oebalia evokes Hellenistic poetry and abstruse mythological reference, so the gardener is subtly associated with the highly self-conscious and refined Alexandrian tradition. Again, he inhabits a city Greek in origin, renowned for its beauty (cf. Hor. Odes 2.6.9–24) and at the greatest remove from Rome. We may infer from these attributes that the cultural value that he is meant to embody is one of high refinement and is defined by the free and timeless pursuit of beauty for its own sake. In his artistic aspects the gardener is learned, graceful, and without mission. As he is untouched by the city's influence, so he is also untroubled by its needs. His "art" is not political, not for the group, but for himself alone.^[61] In his individuality and

[60] Cf. Klingner, Virgil, 309, for Oebalia as evocative of ancient Greek poetry and mythology. Thomas ad loc. specifies the particularly Alexandrian style of this difficult periphrasis for Tarentum. (Oebalus was a king of Sparta, and it was Spartans who founded Tarentum.)

[61] Cf. La Penna, "Senex Corycius, " 65, who thinks the gardener blamably indifferent to society, and Clay, "Old Man in the Garden," 60, who notes his "apolitical solitude."

indifference to others he reflects a lack of group consciousness and concern. Even he, therefore, is not entirely a Golden Age figure, for he does not have the ethic of sharing or cooperation essential to its spirit.

His indifference to others raises a question critical for understanding the nature of the relationship of the artist to the Golden Age. In this poem it is only individuals, namely, Proteus, Orpheus, the Georgic poet, and the Corycian gardener, who are shown as creative and artistic. The place of art in the Golden Age is equivocal, then, for although it is not explicitly excluded as a component of the Golden Age, neither is it explicitly included. The mystery of its origin remains unexamined. This is an important point, contrasting significantly with Lucretius, for example, who does include song as a natural development in his history of civilization (5.334, 1379–1411). Perhaps we are to infer that art is only an Iron Age phenomenon, just as in Lucretius philosophy belongs only to a highly developed political age. Both the Georgic poet and Orpheus, as we have seen, are Iron Age figures in that each is touched by ambition and discontent. Yet these are not qualities prerequisite to pure art since the Corycian gardener is represented both as content (132) and artistic; they may be prerequisite to politically conscious art. Through the combined experience of these figures the poet would seem to imply that the artistic personality does not form part of a group and that, therefore, the Golden Age ideal, in which all is shared and there are no distinctions, is not compatible with individual artistic endeavor. The gardener, as the only happy figure in the poem, embodies a vision of escape from political and moral questions; but this ideal is realized neither in society nor for society. Secluded in time past, in distance from Rome, and in exile (he is a foreigner, not Roman like the apian Quirites ), he is an isolated figure. Significantly the Georgic poet qualifies this vision of the artist in apolitical isolation as impossible of realization for himself. He cannot pursue this vision, as he says, precisely because of constraints—of time and of responsibility (116, 147–48). He implies that a substantive distinction exists between himself and the gardener when he indicates that he is not able to pursue his vision of the gardener as he would wish. The freedom to pursue

an entirely esthetic ideal is the gardener's privilege and not the Georgic poet's.

While the gardener, then, both in his harmonious relationship to nature and in the spiritual dimension of his life, of any figure in the poem most closely approaches the Golden Age model, he nevertheless fails of it. He too is disparate from the ideal, since he is alone, while in the Golden Age all was shared. In his individuality and absorption with art, he resembles Orpheus and the Georgic poet, both, to a degree, Iron Age figures. While artistic creativity is not necessarily incompatible with the Golden Age, the poet may be suggesting his sense—in thus restricting art to individual figures—that it cannot come out of an undifferentiated community. The irony and pathos of this vision for the Georgic poet is that he is alien not only in the present, as we have seen, but also even in the Golden Age past that he himself creates and idealizes. The ideal of the Golden Age would not exist without his poetry and without the tradition from which his poetry derives; yet he himself could not exist in the Golden Age of which he sings. The poet is the carrier of the values of pity, humanity, and art; but the simultaneous conception of these values exists, apparently, only in the Iron Age, thus creating an ironic play of absence and presence that questions all values and ideals.

In summarizing the poet's treatment of the Golden Age overall, we may observe that in Book 1 he sets forth a miniature meditation on the nature of human society and how it evolved from an ethic of morality, sharing, and harmony with nature to an ethic of egocentric materialism, requiring a certain aggression against nature and other men. In Book 2 the praises of Italy, spring, and country life are all, ultimately, discrepant from the Golden Age as adumbrated in Book 1, because of the lack within them of a moral community. The Scythians and the plague of Book 3, outright travesties of the Golden Age, point as well to the absence of spirit and sensibility requisite to a perfected society. The harmony achieved in Book 3 is a bitterly ironic harmony of

unwilled animality and death. While the bees of Book 4 do share, they are materialistic, militaristic, and without reflection. The gardener, on the other hand, creates beautiful things and is at peace with himself, isolated as he is. For him there is no sharing and no community. Therefore no model exists in the poem for the perfect relation to nature and to other men. An ideal is conceived in the poem but not shown as capable of realization. The conflicts of life to which the poet points appear incapable of resolution. This view, while tragic, is not sentimentalized in the poem or pathetic. The poet sees evenly, with clear-eyed vision.

In the following chapter we will consider further the character of the poet's vision. As we see, it is the poet who emerges as the most troubled and also as the most challenging figure of the poem. Alienated both in the present and in the idealized past, he wishes to bring his poetry—and all it connotes of reflective sorrow, of capacity for pity, of community, and of mystery—to Italy and, of course, to all readers. Yet it is difficult to understand how he can feel this mission with such urgency, given his apprehension that neither the world of power nor fundamental existential problems will be changed by it. In pursuit of some response to this question we will consider in chapter 3 the value and continuing power of the poet's vision and the quality of his truth.