Mythological Paradigms

I have suggested, then, that the scientific explanations in this poem are not and are not meant to be as compelling as the mythical tales, which function in a more frequent and more powerful way in the poem as paradigms or alternative illuminations of human experience. Through their power to absorb the imagination, to resonate in memory, and to suggest meanings beyond themselves the mythical tales have great emotional impact and value as a mode of perceiving and interpreting experience.

Myths figure with increasing importance in the poem. One proceeds, for instance, from Book 1 with its brief allusion to Deucalion (1.61–63), to the somewhat more elaborated stories of Bacchus and the centaurs (2.455) and Hero and Leander (3.258–63), to give only two examples, and finally to the Aristaeus epyllion, which fills half of Book 4. While the notable scientific passages of the poem are restricted to Book 1, as we come to

Book 4, the close of the poem, we enter a world of nymphs, of descents variously to life or death, of an enthralling poet-vates —Orpheus—whose music animates the woods and charms the dead. Allusions to Homer openly recall the world of poetry. The stories of Jupiter's birth and of Aristaeus, Orpheus, and Eurydice absorb the reader's attention with myth's powerful appeal. Poetic and mysterious processes dominate the book. For example, only here does the poet ask for knowledge from the Muses:

Quis deus hanc, Musae, quis nobis extudit artem?
(4.315)

What god was it, O Muses, who forged for us this craft?

In thus presenting myth the poet suggests his agreement with Epicurus' view of the similar purposes of myth and science, although he differs as to what value to assign to each of them. Epicurus asserted, for example, that if one makes correct inferences from signs, there is no use for myth:

Only let myth be excluded [from explanation of thunderbolts]; and it will be excluded if one properly makes inferences from signs consistent with the phenomena concerning the unseen.^[43]

We observe, then, the extent to which Epicurus conceived of both science and myth as modes—but antithetical modes—of interpreting experience. And we have already noted his view that the choice of a single explanation—as opposed to multiple explanations—characterizes the (low) mode of myth. To envision only one cause is neither rational nor thorough, in his opinion. The Georgic poet also, it appears, views science and poetry as competing modes of interpreting experience, yet he accords the higher value to the modality of myth, which he chooses for the expression of his truth.

[43] Hicks, trans., with my alterations.

A good starting point for understanding the functioning of myth in the poem is the description of the zones of heaven:

quinque tenent caelum zonae: quarum una corusco
semper sole rubens et torrida semper ab igni;
quam circum extremae dextra laevaque trahuntur
caeruleae, glacie concretae atque imbribus atris;
has inter mediamque duae mortalibus aegris
munere concessae divum, et via secta per ambas.
obliquus qua se signorum verteret ordo.
mundus, ut ad Scythiam Riphaeasque arduus arces
consurgit, premitur Libyae devexus in Austros.
hic vertex nobis semper sublimis; at illum
sub pedibus Styx atra videt Manesque profundi.
maximus hic flexu sinuoso elabitur Anguis
circum perque duas in morem fluminis Arctos,
Arctos Oceani metuentes aequore tingi.
illic, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox
semper et obtenta densentur nocte tenebrae;
aut redit a nobis Aurora diemque reducit.
(1.233–49)

Five zones make up the heavens: one of them in the flaming
Sun glows red forever, forever seared by his fire:
Round it to right and left the furthermost zones extend,
Blue with cold, ice-bound, frozen with black blizzards.
Between these and the middle one, weak mortals are given
Two zones by grace of the gods, and a path was cut through both
Where the slanting signs might march and countermarch. The
world,
Rising steeply to Scythia and the Riphaean plateaux,
Slopes down in the south to Libya.
This North pole's always above us: the South appears beneath
Our feet, the darkling Styx and the deep-dead shadow people.
Here the great snake glides out with weaving, elastic body
Writhing riverwise around and between the two bears—
The bears that are afraid to get wet in the water of Ocean.
At the South pole, men say, either it's dead of night,
Dead still, the shadows shrouded in night, blacked out forever;
Or dawn returns from us thither, bringing the day-light back.

Here, what we see in the sky is balanced by what we do not see in Hades or below. The visible modulates subtly and without acknowledgment into the mythological or rather into what can be described only in myth since it is not perceptible with the eye.

What one must note in observing the poet's technique is that this modulation from the real into the mythical is unacknowledged by the poet and thus catches the reader unaware. He is led, without consciousness or volition, into envisioning his world as informed by myth.^[44]

Similarly at 1.404ff. the myth of Nisus and Scylla is subtly integrated into a description of weather signs:

at nebulae magis ima petunt campoque recumbunt,
solis et occasum servans de culmine summo
nequiquam seros exercet noctua cantus.
apparet liquido sublimis in aëre Nisus
et pro purpureo poenas dat Scylla capillo:
quacumque illa levem fugiens secat aethera pennis,
ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras
insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras,
illa levem fugiens raptim secat aethera pennis.
(1.401–9)

Rather do mists hang low and crouch along the plain,
And the little owl, perched on a gable, watching the sun go down,
Keeps at her crazy night-call.
Aloft in the lucid air Nisus
Appears, and Scylla pays for that purple hair she stole:
Wherever in flight she parts the thin air with her wings,
Look! her enemy, cruel, down the wind loudly whistling,
Nisus follows her close; where Nisus zooms upwind,
Frantic in flight she parts the thin air with her wings.

Here again there is no acknowledgment of transition to another, mythical mode of thought. As a useful contrast we may consider the description of the bees' work (4.169–78), a rare example in this poem. In this passage the phrases ac veluti ("just as when")

[44] Contrast Wilkinson, Georgics, 204: "Here Virgil has intruded into a scientific description of the globe the idea of the Styx and the Greek mythology of Hades, with a literary reminiscence from Lucretius (3.25ff.), and others from Homer (Il. 18.489; Od. 5.225). He must have known what he was doing. It was simply that he enjoyed such juxtapositions and had no scientific conscience." Willi Frentz, Mythologisches in Vergils Georgica, Beitr. zur klass. Philol. 21 (Meisenheim, 1967), has made an extensive study of myth in the Georgics . His primary interest is to demonstrate the Hellenistic/Alexandrian source of Virgil's myths. Additionally he argues that myth functions as more than learned play since it adds vividness, beauty, and charm to Virgil's poem.

and non aliter ("not otherwise" or "even so") signify to the reader that a comparison is being made between two things that, although similar, are not in fact identical. The simile is an apparent poetic artifice of which the reader is made aware. In the passages on the zones of heaven and on weather signs, typical of the poet's method in this poem, the subtle modulation from real to mythical results in the unacknowledged pervading of the entire poem by mythical modes of vision, that is, the invasion and even the appropriation of the real by myth.^[45]

The value or truth of myth as paradigmatic of experience is illustrated in the poem by the way in which the poet makes myth become real. By allowing myths to be realized and reiterated in the poem, he makes mythical paradigms become the poem's reality. For example, one first reads of lightning in 1.278–82, when Jupiter uses his thunderbolt to punish the hubris of the Giants:

tum partu Terra nefando
Coeumque Iapetumque creat saevumque Typhoea
et coniuratos caelum rescindere fratres.
ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam
scilicet atque Ossae frondosum involvere Olympum;
ter pater exstructos disiecit fulmine montis.
(1.278–82)

Then Earth spawned the unspeakable
Coeus and Iapetus and the ogre Typhoeus
And the brothers who leagued themselves to hack the heavens
down.
Three times they tried, three times, to pile Ossa on Pelion—
Yes, and to roll up leafy Olympus on Ossa's summit;
And thrice the father dashed apart the heaped-up hills with a
thunderbolt.

Because the storm incident recounted in 1.278–82 is the first description of a storm in the poem, the reader is implicitly invited or may be predisposed to perceive in storms a reiteration of a mythological paradigm. This storm prefigures the occurrence of another storm, real within the poem's action, which is described

[45] For other similar examples, see 1.61f., 276ff.; 3.89–94, 113–17, 152–53, 267–68, 391–93, 549–50; 4.149–52.

shortly thereafter (1.316–27) in an awesome scene, the reality of which the poet personally confirms with the words ego . . . vidi ("I have seen" 1.318). After these initial descriptive verses, the storm is most powerfully imagined or revealed as Jove hurling lightning and casting terror upon all creatures:

ipse pater media nimborum in nocte corusca
fulmina molitur dextra, quo maxima motu
terra tremit, fugere ferae et mortalia corda
per gentis humilis stravit pavor; ille flagranti
aut Atho aut Rhodopen aut alta Ceraunia telo
deicit; ingeminant Austri et densissimus imber;
nunc nemora ingenti vento, nunc litora plangunt.
(1.328–34)

The Father, enthroned in midnight cloud, hurls from a flashing
Right hand his lightning: the whole
Earth trembles at the shock; the beasts are fled, and human
Hearts are felled in panic throughout the nations; on Athos,
Rhodope or the Ceraunian massif his bolt flares down:
The south wind doubles its force and thicker falls the rain.
Now wail the woods with that gale tremendous, now the shores
wail.

The presence of Jove as agent of this lightning storm would seem to corroborate the paradigmatic value of the myth of Jove and the Giants at 1.278–83. Consequently the reader is implicitly or by suggestion invited to envision storms, most especially violent ones, as the flashing anger of Jove.^[46] For the issue of scientific vs. mythological knowledge, which is our subject here, this image of Jove hurling lightning is especially significant because Lucretius had selected for particular ridicule the notion of Jove hurling his thunderbolt as a cause of storms (e.g., Lucr. 2.1093–1104; 6.379–422.). The Georgic poet would, then, be reasserting the symbolic value of this notion, reasserting the validity of mythology (or, as Lucretius would say, of superstition) over the scientific mode.

Myth serves as a paradigm of real experience, as seen above, and also as a paradigm of the poet's new myth of Aristaeus, Orpheus, and Eurydice. The myth of Hero and Leander is a

[46] A similar example is that of the myth of Io, in which the pestis ("plague" 3.153) that attacks her is realized at 3.478ff.

typically Hellenistic tale of destructive passion, which the poet tells in, as we may infer, a conventional way:^[47]

quid iuvenis, magnum cui versat in ossibus ignem
durus amor? nempe abruptis turbata procellis
nocte natat caeca serus freta, quem super ingens
porta tonat caeli, et scopulis inlisa reclamant
aequora; nec miseri possunt revocare parentes,
nec moritura super crudeli funere virgo.
(3.258–63)

What of the young man, burning with cruel love to the bones?
Late in the blindfold night he swims the narrows
That are vexed by headlong gales, while above his head the huge
Gates of heaven thunder and the seas collide with a crash Against the capes: powerless to recall him his sorrowful parents
And the girl who is soon to die of grief over his body.

In its tragic ending (there are no happy love stories in Virgil), it prefigures the outcome of the newly cast stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus, both of which are structured by the poet to be equally compelling and fresh paradigms of experience. Thus the poet selects and creates his myths to reiterate the same truth. The myths have a unitary vision. The tale of Glaucus, also one of unhappy sexuality, is a variation on this motif of sexuality and tragic passion; and we may note that Virgil alone makes the tale an aition of the love-fury of mares.^[48] Because Glaucus refused to allow his mares to breed, he was torn apart by them when they were maddened by Venus:

scilicet ante omnis furor est insignis equarum;
et mentem Venus ipsa dedit, quo tempore Glauci
Potniades malis membra absumpsere quadrigae.
(3.266–69)

But of all, beyond doubt, the fury of mares is the most
remarkable:
Venus herself incited
The chariot-team that day they champed the limbs of Glaucus.

[47] Miles, 198 n. 19, is useful. The names of Hero and Leander do not occur until Ovid Her. 18 and 19 and Am. 2.16.31. It is not clear whether Virgil is suppressing names, otherwise well known, in order to generalize the value of the story or if no specific names were in fact associated with the story. Thomas, at 258ff., assumes an Alexandrian original; see also Frentz, 129.

[48] Frentz, 60.

We may see, further, that the Glaucus myth prefigures the story of Orpheus in another way as well. Orpheus attempts a lonely denial of sexuality and refuses to mate. He suffers dismemberment, just as does Glaucus. In the case of Orpheus dismemberment results from refusal to mate, since the spurned (spretae ) Ciconian women, in fury, tear him apart. Punishment comes roughly from Venus to mortals who struggle against the powerful drive that she represents. The poet's myths reiterate and embody similar visions, and therefore, as Epicurus says, to envision one truth is the practice of myth. Yet in the Georgics the fact that mythical visions are continually reiterated appears to be a subtle affirmation of their truth.

To summarize the poet's use of myth in this poem, we may suggest first that through his fine integration of the mythological into the real he seductively informs the reader's whole vision of the world with mythical images. Second, he contrives to adumbrate the truth and value of myth by allowing certain myths to become real within the poem's reality. Third, he structures the poem in such a way that familiar, traditionally told myths parallel his own newly created myth so that the truth, value, and impact of both old and new myths seem corroborated.

The poet seeks to address the mysteries of existence most powerfully through the medium of myth and not, as we have seen, through scientific inquiry. Myths for him seem to have greater power than science because, first, they have emotional impact and resonance in the imagination, absorbing the reader's feelings and memory. Second, they do not have alternatives as the scientific explanations do, but rather they present a reiterated singleness of vision. Hence we see that the poet's use of myth in this poem serves to rival the value of the technological mode that the poem purports to esteem. Myth's powerful presence in this ostensibly practical tract is part of the poet's compelling argument for his own value and truth.