Primary Opposites

Let us move on to the other passage of scientific tone, in which the poet discusses birds' mysterious sensitivity to oncoming changes in weather:

tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces
aut quater ingeminant, et saepe cubilibus altis
nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine laeti
inter se in foliis strepitant; iuvat imbribus actis
progeniem parvam dulcisque revisere nidos.
haud equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis
ingenium aut rerum fato prudentia maior;
verum ubi tempestas et caeli mobilis umor
mutavere vias et Iuppiter umidus Austris
denset erant quae rara modo, et quae densa relaxat,
vertuntur species animorum, et pectora motus

nunc alios, alios dum nubila ventus agebat,
concipiunt: hinc ille avium concentus in agris
et laetae pecudes et ovantes gutture corvi.
(1.410–23)

Then rooks, the guttural talkers, three times or four repeat
A clear cool note, and often up there in the treetop cradles
Charmed by some unfamiliar sweet impulse we cannot guess at
Gossip among the leaves; they love, when rain is over,
To visit again their baby brood, their darling nests.
It's not, to my belief, that god has given them
A special instinct, or fate a wider foreknowledge of things; But when the weather and the inconstant moisture
Of the atmosphere shifts its course, and Jove
Wet with south winds makes dense what up to now
Was rare and rarifies what up to now
Was dense, the images of their minds are changed,
Their sense feels motions other than it felt
While the wind was herding the clouds.
Hence, the countryside over, begins that bird-chorale,
Beasts rejoice, and rooks caw in their exultation.

Here again Richter is sensitive in noting the similarity of scientific tone between this passage and 1.86–93.^[38] In this passage the poet, affecting to doubt divine intervention in the birds' behavior, suggests instead the material or physical cause of atmospheric changes (415–423). The poet affects to explain scientifically or mechanistically the birds' sensibilities, choosing, with the terms "rare" and "dense," one of the typical correlates of primary opposites as proposed by Aristotle, for example. Aristotle says that "it seems evident that [these four primary opposites of hot and cold and dry and wet] are practically the causes of death and of life, as also of sleep and waking, of maturity and old age, and of disease and health" (Part. an. 648b4ff.).^[39] He believes that other qualitative differences, among which are "rare" and "dense" and "heavy" and "light," correlate with and can be subsumed by these. In alluding to primary opposites, then, the poet appears to participate in one of the

[38] Richter at 415ff.

[39] Cited by Lloyd, 195. Primary opposites are a major focus of interest in Ross, Virgil's Elements, although he does not discuss this passage.

central scientific discourses of the ancient world. As with the instance of plural causes, however, he compromises the scientific power of his explanation, this time by thoroughgoing vagueness. The essence of his explanation is that when things change, things change. When what was rare becomes dense and what was dense becomes rare, the birds feel different ("the images of their minds are changed"), and consequently they make different sounds, begin to sing. Thus changes in weather produce changes in their moods. I propose that the lack of clarity or substance here prevents the explanation from being illuminating or persuasive. Other terms of the discussion intensify its vagueness. For example, the wetness of the sky is mobilis ("inconstant" 417), therefore perhaps, implicitly, not susceptible to rational analysis. The birds' minds "are changed" (vertuntur 420), the passive verb form revealing no agent and hence obscuring understanding. Alios, alios ("sometimes one motion, sometimes another" 421) also tends to suggest that the procedure in question here is random and again, therefore, possibly not susceptible to rational analysis.

Further compromising the scientific substance of this passage, the poet introduces Jupiter as the personified and divine cause of storms. Richter understands this Jupiter as merely "meteorological" and as a touch of "poetic coloring." However, this remark takes insufficient note of the inappropriateness, in a passage that affects exclusive commitment to mechanistic explication, of an equation of Jupiter with storm.^[40] In the very moment of proffering a mechanistic or purely physical theory of factors affecting birds' responses, the poet implicitly challenges it by injecting the notion of god and of divine presence into the experience of mortal creatures. Additionally, the words motus and species (420) are deliberately ambiguous, each connoting not only physical movement and appearance but also emotional changes and visionary or phantom appearances.^[41] Therefore, even the terms that the poet uses for his ostensibly physical explanation of the

[40] Contrast Miles, 103, who sees Jupiter as "the archaic sky god, little more than a symbolic equivalent of wind and rain." Both Richter and Miles sense the incongruity of the presence of Jupiter in this ostensibly scientific passage.

[41] Cf. Page ad loc.

birds' sentience connote as well something of a spiritual sort. Again we can only conclude that the poet has consistently compromised the persuasiveness of proffered scientific or mechanistic theories.^[42]

By contrast we may consider the following passage from Lucretius, part of his proof of the existence of unseen particles. This is an admirable example of scientific thought, which allows the reader to grasp an idea and evaluate its plausibility:

denique fluctifrago suspensae in litore vestes
uvescunt, eaedem dispansae in sole serescunt:
at neque quo pacto persederit umor aquai
visumst nec rursum quo pacto fugerit aestu.
in parvas igitur partis dispergitur umor
quas oculi nulla possunt ratione videre.
quin etiam multis solis redeuntibus annis
anulus in digito subter tenuatur habendo,
stilicidi casus lapidem cavat, uncus aratri
ferreus occulte decrescit vomer in arvis,
strataque iam volgi pedibus detrita viarum
saxea conspicimus; tum portas propter aena
signa manus dextras ostendunt adtenuari
saepe salutantum tactu praeterque meantum.
haec igitur minui, cum sint detrita, videmus.
sed quae corpora decedant in tempore quoque,
invida praeclusit speciem natura videndi.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
corporibus caecis igitur natura gerit res.
(Lucr. 1.305–321, 328)

To continue, clothing hung where breakers clash
Grows damp, then dries when spread out in the sun.
And yet, how water-moisture settled there,
Cannot be seen, nor how heat drove it off.
Into small parts, then, water is disposed,
Parts that the eye in no way can perceive.
Still more: as years and years of sun roll round,

[42] Contrast Epicurus' denial of animal sentience: "The fact that weather is sometimes foretold from the behavior of certain animals is a mere coincidence in time. For the animals offer no necessary reason why a storm should be produced; and no divine being sits observing when these animals go out and afterwards fulfilling the signs which they have given. For such folly as this would not possess the most ordinary being if ever so little enlightened, much less one who enjoys perfect felicity" (Ep. Pyth. 115–16, trans. Hicks).

The inner side of a ring is thinned by wearing;
Water-drip hollows rock, the iron plow
Grows imperceptibly smaller in the field,
And paving stones we see worn down by feet
Of people passing; then, near city-gates,
Bronze statues show their right hands worn away
By touch of the many who greet them and pass by.
Once they're worn down, we see these things are smaller,
But how many particles leave at given times,
A niggard nature has blocked our power to see.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Therefore nature works by means of bodies unseen.

This passage is one from among many that one could cite from Greek or Latin writers that demonstrates the possibility of tight and persuasive scientific reasoning. The Georgic poet has, however, not availed himself of the most powerful and cogent insights that ancient science had to offer. He has declined, ultimately, to bring his poetic discourse and the mental world that it entails into congruence with scientific value and methodology.