Conclusion

In sum, while the poem purports to be didactic and to teach praecepta, it embodies, in fact, a whole range of values that function in tension with the conventional, material, and Iron Age values upon which a georgic poem might be expected to be based. The poem privileges mystery, not solution; complexity and ambiguity, not certainty. The overall effect of this poem is to highlight the mysteries of existence, to challenge and even to transcend the values of the technological mode that it ostensibly accepts and endorses. In the Georgics, then, the ultimate meaning is at variance with the assumed or implicit values of the form. The Georgic poet is more like Proteus than like Cyrene, for he too is more interested in causae than in praecepta . Hence the bougonia, although false as praeceptum, does embody the poet's sensed truth of the quality of Iron Age existence. The Aristaeus-Orpheus story, parallel in significance to the bougonia, constitutes the poet's revelation in mythic image of the nature of human experience.

The poem should be seen neither as an agricultural tract nor as prescriptive of a return to country values.^[55] Rather it expresses an apprehension of certain oppositions that are not capable of resolution (e.g., victor vs. vanquished, agricultural vs. poetic, Iron Age vs. Golden Age, material vs. spiritual). The poem is not antimaterial or anti-imperial as much as it is an apprehension of the cost of material progress and imperial expansion. The poem provokes the responsive reader to a sense of compassion and of sorrow for loss that is the essence of humanity. The poem forges a community of readers sensitive to loss and capable of pity. It enlarges and deepens the reader's appreciation of those spiritual and artistic values that do not lead to quantifiable progress. In the poem's tragic and beautiful conclusion we see reflected the opposition between the truth of myth and poetry and the value of the agricultural, material poem that the Georgics on its surface professes to be.