Introduction

The following couplet, said to have been inscribed on Virgil's tombstone, conveys the substance of what we know about his life:

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.

Mantua gave me birth, Calabri snatched me away,
Naples now holds me. I sang pastures, fields,
heroes.

This is to say that Virgil was born in Mantua, died in Brindisi, and was buried in Naples. He was the poet of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid .^[1]

Born in 70 B.C. in Mantua, then part of a Roman province, he did not become a Roman citizen until his twentieth year, when all of Transpadane Gaul was admitted to citizenship. He died in 19 B.C. at Brindisi, in southern Italy, on his return from Greece in the company of Augustus. From Virgil's humble birth (Vita Donati 1) to his ultimate intimacy with the world's most powerful men, we may infer something of the drama of his life. He became a famous man within his own lifetime, and his poems were received immediately as classics and set for study in schools (Juv. 7.226). Virgil took much joy in time spent in Naples (Parthenope), to which he fondly alludes at the close of the Georgics (4.564), the only reference to himself by name in all his works. Naples, founded centuries earlier by Greeks, retained still in Virgil's day its peculiarly Greek ethos and spiritual distance from

Rome, itself the one city strikingly absent from his epitaph as it never was from his poetry.

The most ancient and best Life of Virgil, that of the grammarian Aelius Donatus, dates from the fourth century A.D. ,^[2] thus long after Virgil's lifetime, and is unreliable in many respects. Its retailing of, for example, prophetic signs at Virgil's birth and its tendency to interpret incidents in Virgil's poetry as references to real events of his life suggest its credulity and naiveté. Some of its account is, nevertheless, plausible: that Virgil had his early schooling in Cremona, Milan, and then Rome; that he spent three years composing the Eclogues, seven the Georgics, and eleven the Aeneid, which his death prevented him from revising fully. At some point, already an accomplished young poet, he made the acquaintance of C. Asinius Pollio, then governor of Cisalpine Gaul and a powerful adherent of Antony's. To Pollio he dedicated the fourth and eighth Eclogues . Subsequently he became acquainted also with Maecenas, Octavian's close ally and a cultivated patron of the arts. Ultimately he came also to know Octavian himself. In the Georgics he addresses directly both Maecenas and Octavian (whom he calls Caesar in his poetry) with assurance and grace. He was, in his way, a peer of these powerful men, and they accorded him comfortable support for his poetry, both completed and promising.

Of the larger conditions of Virgil's life, which determined his historical and political experience and shaped his thought, we can say more. The rivalries of the first and second triumvirates, dominating the political scene of Virgil's adolescence and early adulthood, erupted in civil wars over such an extended period of time that Roman poets voiced the fear that some, perhaps fratricidal, curse had hung over Rome from its inception (e.g., G. 1.501–502; cf. 2.533). Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon when Virgil was twenty. His triumph over Pompey was soon followed by his own assassination in 44 B.C. , setting off another round of civil dissension, this time between Caesar's assassins,

the republicans Brutus and Cassius, and Caesar's would-be heirs, Octavian and Antony. These last engaged in wholesale proscriptions of their enemies (including Cicero), emerged triumphant from the battle of Philippi in 42 (see G. 1.490), and then turned to deadly rivalry with each other. An era of stability began with Antony's defeat at Actium in 31. In 29 the doors of the Temple of Janus were closed, signifying that Rome was at peace throughout the empire for the first time in over two hundred years. The year 29^[3] saw publication of the Georgics, which Virgil is said to have read to Octavian on his triumphant return from the East, his position as the most powerful man in the Roman world unarguably secured.

One might well suppose that experience of such unstable times and bloody events would result in a deeply pessimistic vision, in fear of loss, and in anxiety for the future. David Ross admits to reading Virgil as a poet of deep pessimism, for, as he says, he cannot see how it could be otherwise.^[4] Nevertheless, throughout the centuries since Virgil's death, his poems have consistently been read as affirmations of faith in Octavian and in the values and achievements of imperial Rome. Particularly the fourth and fifth Eclogues, the second and fourth Georgics, and the Aeneid as a whole, with its stirring prophecy by Jupiter in Book 1 and its patriotic pageant in Book 6, have been seen as powerful expressions of hope in a redeemed future under Octavian. L. P. Wilkinson, for example, wholly contrary to Ross, can speak of Virgil's "temperament, always sanguine, and his tendency to hero-worship."^[5] These views of Ross and Wilkinson well exemplify the current poles of critical discussion about the nature of Virgil's work as a whole and, consequently, of the Georgics in particular.

The controversy over Virgil's work is most familiarly epitomized in the critical history of the Aeneid, which may be briefly summarized. As R. D. Williams points out, the most famous line of the Aeneid during this century has been

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
(Aen. 1.462)

and there are tears for passing things: here, too,
things mortal touch the mind.

In previous periods it was

tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem
(Aen. 1.33)

So hard it was to found the race of Rome.^[6]

The first of these verses looks to the melancholy and sense of loss that many modern critics, especially American, see in the poem, to the costs of victory, and to the emotional and moral failures of Aeneas. The second points to the awesome achievement that Rome represents, and seems to endorse the discipline and dedication that brought it about.

Clearly the critical challenge for readers of the Aeneid must be to incorporate both of these verses and what they suggest about the poem into a truer vision of what the poem does. Since Virgil wrote both these verses, to privilege one to the exclusion of the other is surely to falsify the poem. A valid reading of the Aeneid, and of Virgil's other works, must reflect the tensions of his composition and maintain as vitally present in mind the entire ambiguity of the whole. A useful reading cannot focus exclusively on the light (or "optimistic") or dark (or "pessimistic") passages. Indeed, these terms, "optimistic" and "pessimistic," long current in criticism of Virgil, now risk seeming facile and irrelevant. We must move to a reading that accommodates divergent experiences of the poem, for views held by cultivated readers of this or of past centuries cannot reasonably be disregarded

as wrong,^[7] but must be understood in a larger, more complex and subtle vision of the poem's effects and of the poet's purposes.

Certain insights of reader-response criticism, because it eschews the search for a single correct reading to the exclusion of others, can help us with the interpretive problems posed by Virgil's texts. Such criticism emphasizes a reader's progressive revision of the sense of a text over the course of a single or of many readings. Wolfgang Iser speaks of a reader's continuous attempts at "acts of constitution" from the different perspectives present in a text, pointing out that "no single textual perspective may be equated with the meaning of the whole."^[8] He further observes, even more importantly, that readers conventionally assume that a text's meaning must ultimately resolve its tensions and conflicts. Readers expect "a meaning that will remove illogicalities, conflicts, and, indeed, the whole contingency of the world in the literary work."^[9] Iser considers such an expectation to be particularly inappropriate to many modern texts. My contention is that it is inappropriate to Virgil's as well. Scholars' traditional assumption that Virgil must be consistent and also positive has been the greatest obstacle to a fully appreciative reading of his work. I suggest that Virgil's texts tend to ambiguity and irony, those "evasions of committed speech,"^[10] and that, therefore, consistency and unity—at least as conventionally conceived—are not features of his texts. Stanley Fish has demonstrated with certain texts of Milton that, within units as small as a verse or two, two different and even opposed readings may be equally plausible. This may result from the ambiguity of a single term (as spare in Milton, Sonnets 20.13) or from conflicting claims as to where to locate closure—at verse end, for example,

or with the end of a phrase or other sense unit.^[11] Of this latter problem the Georgics provides an important example with its famous and enigmatic verse

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

labor conquered all things,
unremitting labor and need pressing in harsh circumstances.

Some readers, making closure (perhaps even unconsciously) after vicit, interpret the verse as signifying the triumph of technology over a hostile world: labor made all things tractable. Reading of the following verse, with its unexpected qualification of labor as improbus, compels the reader to entertain a different meaning, even a meaning opposite from that initially envisaged. In this second case, the verse would have the sense

Relentless toil and pressing need dominate mortal experience.^[12]

In the view of Fish, however, one need not and indeed must not prefer one reading to another. Rather this very ambiguity and the questions that it raises for the reader make the meaning of the verse. One must allow unresolved tensions to stand, both within verses and between passages. To attempt to "normalize" an ambiguous text, to exclude one sense and privilege another, is to distort the text by ignoring its resonance and complexity.

Such views are not new to critics of the Eclogues or of the Aeneid . Charles Segal, in attempting to interpret apparent con-

He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.)

tradictions in the Eclogues, wrote of "tensions . . . unresolved," "suspension amid contraries,"^[13] "suspension" in which "antitheses" are framed.^[14] All these phrases reflect the existence of unresolved oppositions within a single text. More recently Paul Alpers, in his study of the Eclogues, makes much of the concept of "suspension," deeming the very essence of pastoral to be "that it holds potential conflicts in suspension."^[15] Again, the poet's mode is "to render and acknowledge truths and relations, but not to claim the power to resolve them."^[16]

The introductory chapter of W. R. Johnson's study of the Aeneid is a particularly fine demonstration of the degree to which the Aeneid is an "uncommitted meditation on man's nature and on the possibilities and impossibilities of his fate."^[17] He would avoid the error of imposing a "false and reductive unity" on the poem or of applying "monochromatic solutions" to it.^[18] There is, in fact, no "solution" to the Aeneid, for there is no resolution of its conflicts. The Aeneid is not, in that sense, a unity. Much the same, I would argue, can be said of the Georgics .

The Georgics is, in the first instance, the georgic and didactic poem that it declares itself to be:

Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram
vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites
conveniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo
sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis,
hinc canere incipiam.
(1.1–5)

What makes the cornfields joyous, under what constellation
It's best to turn the soil, Maecenas, and join the vine
To the elm; what care suits cattle, and what tending suits flocks,
What knowledge you need for keeping frugal bees—all this
I'll now begin to sing.

It does deal with such topics as the planting of grain and the care of vines, livestock, and bees. It deals with much else as well, touching on a variety of issues critical to contemporary Rome. Among these are the character of Iron Age civilization and its technology, Italian patriotism and war, passion and death, religion and the gods. It has, therefore, long been recognized that the poem is not truly an agricultural manual, for which purpose it would, in fact, be both incomplete and inaccurate,^[19] but a meditation on urgent political and moral questions.^[20]

The Georgics, composed probably between 36 and 29, takes its title from a poem (now mostly lost) by Nicander (second century B.C. ). For its technical passages the Historia plantarum of Theophrastus (370-288 B.C. ) and the De re rustica of Varro (116–26 B.C. ) are the primary sources; but other technical texts (of which there were many) used by Virgil include, for example, Aristotle's Historia animalium, the Phaenomena of the poet/metaphrast Aratus (315-240 B.C. ), and the Hermes of Eratosthenes (275-194 B.C. ).^[21] In its treatment of moral, ethical, and political issues, the poem finds its closest parallels in the Works and Days of Hesiod (seventh century B.C. ), like the Georgics largely agronomic in focus, and in the De rerum natura of Lucretius (94-55? B.C. ), an exposition of the atomic theory of matter and a parallel exhortation to the values of Epicurean philosophy, alone suited, as Lucretius represents it, to spiritual peace in a morally random, material world.

The Works and Days shares substantive concerns with the Georgics . In this regard one might adduce Hesiod's sense of man as fallen, as separated from the gods, as well as his anxious reflections on the problematic behavior of Zeus, on the limitations of human knowledge of the true and the false and of the good and the evil, and on the potential of poetry for solace and clarification. The question of the justice of Zeus or the moral quality of human experience and the ambivalence with which it is treated is common to the Works and Days and the Georgics . While Hesiod sometimes asserts that Zeus is just (e.g., 239, 247, 281) or sometimes merely hopes that he is so (268, 273), the reality and real impetus of his poem is that brothers quarrel and judges take bribes (37–39; cf. 184). Zeus gave men justice, since men do not eat each other as fish and beasts do (276–79). The implication of this observation is that surely then Zeus himself will treat men with justice. Why should men be led to conceive of justice if there is none? Yet Zeus is inscrutable (483–84), and the question of his justice is ultimately unresolved in the poem. The fable of the hawk and the nightingale (202–12), unconcluded as it is, reflects this lack of resolution. The hawk speaks for power and injustice; the nightingale, powerless in the world, does not respond. The conclusion to their encounter seems—yet not conclusively—foregone and unpalatable. Another example of a motif that is central to both poems and equally unresolved is that of moral and cognitive ambiguity. To discriminate clearly between good and evil is not possible in Hesiod's world because evils are either invisible (Zeus gave them no voice 104) or delusive (Pandora, apparently good, is truly evil 57–58). Yet even here the ambiguity intensifies as Pandora/woman, bringer of evil, brings also good (62–89, 702). The enigmatic, haunting incident of Pandora letting loose evils from the jar, yet just retaining hope within it, suggests in another way the ambiguity of the human condition (94–99). In our harrowing condition of being mortal and knowing it, we both have and have not hope, which either is or is not an evil, and makes it possible to live with the knowledge of death. In sum, we live an ambiguous existence, unable to discriminate between good and evil, true and false, unable to know the larger circumstances—Zeus' purposes—that determine our

lives. Of these several perceptions of the ambiguities of human life there are correlates in Virgil's text.^[22]

Parallels and coincidences between Virgil and Lucretius have been amply demonstrated.^[23] Beyond imitation of Lucretius' didactic phrases or similarities between particular passages, however, we can see Virgil deeply engaged with issues treated by Lucretius throughout the De rerum natura . Here one might adduce such questions as the possibility and nature of truth, the relative value of science and poetry in this regard, the moral and spiritual potential of human life. From the seductive and patriotic, if ultimately delusive, opening of this poem to its concluding, unlovely truth of the indifference of the whole to human concerns and of the irrelevance of religion and convention to spiritual peace, Lucretius seeks to lead his reader to truth through science, that is, through knowledge and understanding of the physical universe. Virgil explores the possibility of truth in science in the Georgics but, as I will argue, finds his deepest truths in poetry.

Lucretius seeks to answer through science the most profound spiritual questions. However, even in Lucretius' poem, a major text in the long dispute between science and poetry, we see that poetry is a necessary completion or suppletion of ratio, which is seen to leave much unexplained—attachment to life or to one's own; the swerve of atoms; the power of Venus (the only indisputably divine power, as set forth in Books 1 and 4); and Lucretius' own personal vitality, commitment, and awe. In the final scene of the poem an event of historical truth, the plague at Athens, is transmuted through poetry into something resembling a mythic image. Extracted from history and the contingent conditions of

war, the plague assumes the significance of a timeless symbol of death and suggests perhaps a vision of the end of the world.^[24] Lucretius renders the event less historically real in order to make it more significantly, deeply true. Virgil exploits a comparable paradoxical relationship between the real and the true at the conclusion of the Georgics, as I will attempt to demonstrate. Therefore, in Lucretius as well as in Virgil, all truth is not in science. The symbolic language of poetry can go beyond science in intuiting and expressing the unseen.

In its formal perfection, that is to say, in the finish of its verses, in its attention to structure and balance, in its dense and polemical allusiveness, in its obscure and wide learning, the Georgics shows its dependence on Alexandrian esthetics. Richard Thomas discerns the influence of the Alexandrian poet Callimachus (C. 300–240 B.C. ) in the division of the poem into four books, in the programmatic openings of Georgics 1 and 3, as well as in various more subtle references throughout the text. It is difficult to assess with real certainty the influence of Callimachus and of such Latin Neoteric poets as Cinna, Calvus, and Gallus on the Georgics, as their work is either lost or fragmentary. Even the Aristaeus-Orpheus narrative of Georgic 4, which is clearly influenced by the sixty-fourth poem of Catullus (84–54 B.C. ), itself an exemplar of the epyllion favored by Neoterics, reflects as well certain features of the Odyssey of Homer (seventh century B.C. ). Certainly, Virgil had read widely in both Greek and Latin, in both prose and poetry, and his poem bears witness to this learning. Yet it would seem, despite the loss to us of many texts that surely influenced the composition of the Georgics, that in its formal perfection, in its particular fusion of science and poetry, in its moral urgency and haunting pathos, it has no real predecessor. In form Alexandrian, in substance intensely Roman and contemporary, the Georgics is a unique achievement.

The Georgics, as the poet tells us, is a difficult and original poem:^[25]

cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes,
omnia iam vulgata: quis ant Eurysthea durum
aut inlaudati nescit Busiridis aras?
(3.3–5)

Other themes, which might have pleasured idle minds
Are hackneyed, all of them: who does not know of cruel Eurystheus and the awful altar Busiris built?

The poet disdains idle minds (vacuas mentes ) and the obvious and familiar (omnia iam vulgata ). We cannot, consequently, be surprised by the interpretive problems that this challenging and elusive poem has always posed for readers. The variety of critical responses that the poem has occasioned, so disparate as to be termed contradictory, illuminates precisely its points of ambiguity and discrepancy. These instances of ambiguity or discrepancy, which exist both between different passages as well as within individual passages, characterize the poet's procedure in the Georgics and consequently pose problems of method and of genre.

In the poem's opening verses the poet states that the intention of his poem is georgic and didactic, but we have suggested that the poem deals most significantly with moral and political questions central to Roman—and, indeed, much of modern—life. There is not, however, critical consensus of even the most general sort concerning the poet's attitude in the poem towards such fundamental issues as the political future of Rome, the role of Caesar therein, the nature of divinity—in sum, the moral quality and potential of human experience. Among the many passages that could be cited as sources of critical controversy we may consider the climax of the poem, the bougonia, which tells of the sacrifice of a calf to generate a swarm of bees. This episode has

been seen by most critics as a miraculous rebirth or resurrection, which resolves the tensions of the poem and portends a positive future.^[26] Others have argued that this image and its accompanying narrative of Aristaeus and Orpheus speak as powerfully of death and irreparable loss as they do of resolution or resurrection.^[27] Whether, then, the poem overall expresses a comic or a tragic vision of life is an unresolved issue. Critical disagreement on such central questions suggests that the poem's ambiguity is pervasive and deep.

Since E. Burck's important work in 1929 it has been generally agreed that the poem is an "organic whole."^[28] Burck's particular interest was to establish that the poem's mythological "digressions," as they were termed, were not in fact digressive but were functionally related to the text, giving enhanced meaning to the didactic passages that they introduced. The larger critical assumption was that the poem had a transcendent unity subserved by all its parts, a coherence that readers could ultimately and correctly discern.

This view constituted a substantive advance over the views of previous scholars who had little vision of the poem as a composition. The controlling artistic principle was felt to be variatio, that is, alternation between light and dark, or, more accurately, between tedium and relief.^[29] The mythological digressions and

such set pieces as the so-called praises of Italy and praises of country life were extracted from the poem's larger context and then interpreted as uncomplicated endorsements of Augustan values or as exhortations to (urban, sophisticated) Romans to return to the farm to live with rural simplicity and such traditional Roman values as austerity, discipline, and patriotic selfsacrifice. "In the Georgics men responded easily to the underlying moral intention, the ethical precepts, the great sermon on rural and natural virtues, the noble patriotic passages interspersed with the interpretation of nature herself."^[30]

Burck's conviction of the poem's unity made possible a more synthetic and substantive evaluation of the Georgics . K. Büchner,^[31] F. Klingner, and Brooks Otis all study the poem's symbolism, its relation to Roman themes, and the interrelationship of various parts with the whole. Klingner's reading of the poem is deeply sentimental, while Otis's is quite Christian in its attribution of great significance to the image (as he sees it) of resurrection at the poem's conclusion. (Wilkinson's book is different from these in that it is essentially not an interpretive study, but rather a most useful collection of information prerequisite to interpretation.) All these scholars seek unity in the poem despite the fact that they characterize Books 1 and 3 as pessimistic and Books 2 and 4 as optimistic. That is, despite their perception of significant discrepancies in tone between books, they nevertheless see the poet as resolving the tensions of the poem in Book 4, with the miraculous rebirth of the bees portending a positive future and reflecting Virgil's faith in the political and moral renewal of Rome under Octavian.

Within the past ten years, the major works of M. C. J. Putnam and Gary B. Miles changed the tone and altered the direction of discussion of the Georgics . Both are what I would term "revisionist" readings of the poem, for both are especially sensitive to ambiguity and to tragic undertone; both apprehend the poem's sympathy for victims, its sensitivity to loss and to the cost of

survival. Both do, however, see Aristaeus as the hero of the poem, as a figure who learns, who comes ultimately into a right relation with man and nature, and who in some sense embodies a resolution to the poem's conflicts.^[32]

The two most recent major works on the poem are the study by David Ross (Virgil's Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics [Princeton, 1987]) and the commentary by Richard Thomas (Cambridge, 1988). These studies, in their decidedly pessimistic readings, mark a complete reversal in interpretation of the poem from antiquity to the present, thus giving the lie to R. D. Williams's assertion that one must take the poem in eighteenth-century terms or not at all.^[33]

Ross's book, a contribution in its gathering of scientific sources,^[34] proposes to interpret the poem on the basis of the poet's perception (as he sees it) of the world as composed of opposing elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and of opposing qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry). It is the achievement of science, of agriculture specifically, to resolve elemental oppositions in nature and thus to create civilization. The pinguis arista, or "ripe ear of corn," in its synthesis of moist and dry, exemplifies man's skill.^[35] Although Ross sees oppositions between elements as capable of resolution, he nevertheless does not see resolution in the poem as a whole, but rather asserts a thoroughgoing pessimism. The brutality, as he reads it, of science and the

inevitable mortality of all creatures result for him in a tragic view of the whole. He concludes that "knowledge, science, the artes: all are won by violence and lead inevitably to death."^[36]

Because it will become the standard reference text for students of the poem, Thomas's commentary will surely have a profound impact on conventional views of the Georgics . His is a careful and sensitive work, critically audacious, polemical in many ways (thus rather resembling the Alexandrian poets in whom he is so interested). Thomas downplays the influence of Hesiod and Lucretius on the poem. More than any other commentator he attributes the poem's artistic care, density, learning, and allusiveness not only to Alexandrian esthetics in general but above all to the work of Callimachus in particular. This influence he discerns in major programmatic passages, like the openings of Books 1 and 3, as well as in other discrete references.

In interpretive matters Thomas is negative or pessimistic, although perhaps not quite so negative as Ross. In his reading he sees success and failure as the central motifs of the poem, success being always qualified and failure inevitable. In support of this reading he adduces not only the explicitly pessimistic passages of Books 1 and 3, but dwells attentively on the "subtle denigration" of Roman values (to use his phrase broadly) in the putatively positive passages of Books 2 and 4. His concluding observation is of the "complexity, ambivalence, and ultimate darkness of the Virgilian world view."^[37] While, then, much previous criticism entirely dismisses the dark side of the poem, Ross and Thomas (despite the latter's reference to "ambivalence") seem to focus wholly on it.

I propose that we need to move towards a more balanced, inclusive view of the poem, not because balance is inherently admirable or virtuous but because, as I believe, it is truer to the poem and, not incidentally, to life. As life has joy and grief, so this poem reflects the real tensions of most human experience. The concept of suspension (discussed above in its relation to criticism of the Eclogues and Aeneid ), the acknowledgment of

unresolved and, perhaps, unresolvable oppositions or tensions within a text, suggests, I argue, an interpretive strategy for reading the Georgics as well, since the poem will not ultimately sustain a single interpretation (e.g., optimistic or pessimistic) without complexity or ambiguity.^[38] The concept of tension or suspension allows us to see in the Georgics ' central and unresolved oppositions not just inconsistencies to be normalized or problems to be overcome, but rather an expression or reflection of the poem's deepest vision of the nature of experience. In Plato's Symposium (187A) Eryximachus alludes to Heraclitus' description of "a unity which agrees with itself by being at variance, as in the stringing of a bow or a lyre."^[39] This image of the tense balance of opposing forces in a strung bow well illustrates the dynamics of the Georgics as I see them.

It is the presumption of this study, then, that the Georgics is a deliberately ambiguous poem. By making opposing views present in dynamic tension the poet establishes poles of debate and engages readers' imagination and critical thoughtfulness (not vacuas mentes ) in the issues of the poem. This ambiguity, which leads ultimately to greater awareness of questions that the text centrally and problematically poses, is, I suggest, the poet's characteristic mode in this poem. We can, therefore, say that the ambiguities that readers have always recognized are not problems to be solved, but rather may be perceived as the poem's deepest meaning.

The fact of the poem's ambiguity, of its leaving the reader in a state of suspension between different perspectives, leads us into the question of the poem's genre. As was indicated above, this poem cannot be described adequately as didactic, most obviously because of its incompleteness and inaccuracy in the treatment of agricultural issues. No less important to note, however, is that truly didactic poetry is not, like the Georgics, characterized by

ambiguity.^[40] Didactic writing requires a reliable narrator, that is, a text in which the response of the reader and the view of the narrator are consistently congruent. At the opening of the Georgics the poet states his georgic and didactic purpose with such elegance and grace as to suggest competence and confidence and, hence, to invite the reader's trust. The poem modulates rapidly, however, into an acknowledgment of an order of problems other than georgic, namely, political, religious, philosophical, moral—questions for which the poet claims no answers. For example, political and religious questions are raised in 1.24–39, in which the poet reveals that he is ignorant of the nature of Caesar's future sphere of power, of what kind of a god he will be. In this way the poet represents himself as an unreliable guide for questions that his text raises. As another example, the poem concludes with a myth (that of Aristaeus, Orpheus, and bougonia ).^[41] By concluding with a myth the poem exceeds the bounds of strictly didactic writing, thus calling into question the premises of the genre (i.e., the value and possibility of the materially knowable) and even the stability of the knowable world that the genre implies. By concluding with this particular myth the poet privileges metaphysical and moral questions that agricultural praecepta, or precepts, do not address. Through incompleteness, therefore, through inaccuracy, ambiguity, and discrepancy, through the ultimate privileging of mystery and divine revelation over experiment and practice, the poem shows itself to be other than typically didactic.

In the image of bougonia that concludes the poem are embodied, it will be argued, such unresolvable oppositions in Roman society as humane value vs. material progress. art vs. profit, myth vs. praeceptum, beauty vs. power. This representation of unresolvable oppositions is a feature of the genre of tragedy more

than of the genre of didactic poetry, for it is tragedy that finds beauty and value in the perfect statement of what in real life is intolerable conflict. Tragedy makes exalting the revelation of certain dilemmas as universal, inevitable, and unresolvable.^[42] The Georgics, then, moves from an explicit opening statement of knowing to an implicit closing statement of not knowing. It moves from didactic, which presumes to know, to tragic, which does not.^[43]

The guiding presumption of this study, then, is that the purpose of the poem is not to propagandize in favor of Octavian's political reforms or to prescribe directly to readers remedies for political, social, or moral problems; rather it is to "enlarge the reader's sensibility,"^[44] the poet having no real intention or hope of changing what he depicts as eternal relations between man and nature, man and man.^[45] In support of this contention, we may note the impotence of the poets in this poem. Orpheus' beautiful song is ultimately useless in achieving his goal; the Georgic poet acknowledges his lack of real power in the world (4.559–66).

The subject of this study, as its title indicates, is the figure of the speaker in the poem, whom I call the Georgic poet, and his

Qu'il est laid le bonheur qu'on vent
Qu'il est beau le malheur qu'on a.

characteristic vision and values. My approach differs from the most recent major works of Putnam and Miles (and of Otis and Klingner, for example, before them) in not being a book-by-book treatment of the poem. I have chosen rather the single focus of the poet, a subject that has the interest of spanning all four books of the poem and of being central to it, yet not altogether on its surface. My thesis, briefly, is that the poet, like the farmer (the normative figure of a georgic poem), is an Iron Age figure, flawed in his relation to other men and to nature. While the farmer is menaced by nature and the city, the poet is menaced by passion and irrelevance. He has a particular sensibility, distinct from the farmer's, that inclines him to pity (1.41) and to a sense of mission to the Roman community (2.176). While the farmer seeks to restore Golden Age plenty through his labor, the poet seeks to restore Golden Age community through pity. Pity, according to Aristotle, comes from the sense of being liable to suffer the same evil as another.^[46] It requires, therefore, identification with the experience of the other and thus generates a moral community, what Pietro Pucci calls a "community of pain."^[47] Again, according to Aristotle, only the weak and the wise pity.^[48] The poet appeals to Caesar, as if he were a god, to pity the farmers (1.41). As a superior being he cannot pity through weakness but only, if at all, through wisdom. The poem as a whole aims to make its readers feel pity for loss and hence to identify with the weak and to be, in this sense, wise. Caesar and all responsive readers (evidently not those with vacuas mentes ) will come to pity initially through a sense of superior wisdom but ultimately through a sensed community of the vulnerability and weakness of all human enterprise. Thus the social disparities implicit in the poem's opening are transcended through pity into a moral community that recalls the poet's Golden Age (1.125–28). This hu-

manizing pity is not pity for the self, such as Aristaeus and Orpheus experience, but pity for the other, which requires identification and thus results in felt community. This lesson of pity, wherein the poet manipulates the reader's sympathy and elicits sorrow for loss, is the poet's mission in the poem.

The subject of chapter 2 is the poet's various representations of the Golden Age, here termed the poet's "vision." Virgil's Golden Age has a quality of community between man and nature and man and man. I argue that it is the poet's special mission to preserve the humane value of pity, thereby creating a moral community. Discrete communal Golden Age features do exist in the communities of the farmers, bees, and plague victims, for example; but they do not thereby constitute a renewed Golden Age. Community remains morally inert without enlightened, willed moral value, which is the poet's special contribution.

In chapter 3, "The Poet's Truth," I study in particular the image of bougonia, which illuminates central oppositions between power and beauty, profit and art, material and spiritual in Roman society. Consequently, I also consider the poet's privileging of myth over praeceptum, of divine revelation over experiment and practice, of mystery over solution. My contention is that the very presumptions of the farmer's mode, of the materially knowable, of Iron Age value, and of the didactic genre are called into question by the poem's conclusion. I suggest, not without precedent,^[49] that we are to see Aristaeus not as a resolution but as a pole of an unresolvable opposition with Orpheus and the Georgic poet. The conflicts of georgic and poetic values remain unresolved. As a basis for this contention I attempt to demonstrate that the image of bougonia itself offers not resolution of tensions but rather a powerful image of their unresolvability. Miles, in particular, sees the poet's ultimate emphasis to be on the search for solutions, whereas I see it rather on complexity, ambiguity, and mystery. As a correlate of this, my treatment of the Golden Age differs from those of Patricia A. Johnson and

(earlier) H. Altevogt, for example,^[50] who see it as a blueprint for the future, to be implemented by Augustus. I treat the Golden Age rather as symbol of the humane value of community for which the poet proselytizes.

The specific topics of poet and community, both central to my study, have been previously treated by others, most notably by Vinzenz Buchheit in Der Anspruch des Dichters in Vergils Georgika: Dichtertum und Heilsweg (Darmstadt, 1972), Edward W. Spofford in The Social Poetry of the Georgics (Salem, N.H., 1981), and, for the Eclogues, by Paul Alpers in The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley, 1979).

Buchheit's study is important in attributing significance and coherence to the poet's voice in the Georgics, taking his poetic self-consciousness seriously, and seeing the role of the poet as critical to an interpretation of the poem as a whole. His central thesis is that the Georgics envisions a new political Golden Age in Italy, secured both by the poet's song (conceived as a priestly act) and by Caesar's military victories. The victorious poet and the victorious Caesar, with their parallel contributions, belong together ultimately in a recreated paradisiacal and musical Italian world. Poet and general are, then, analogous figures in the birth of a new Golden Age. As summary may suggest, this study, despite many strengths, lacks a sense of ambiguity and complexity, tending as it does to disregard passages incompatible with its thesis.^[51]

In the view of Spofford's subtle study the poet's mission is to enable farmers/readers to "enrich [their] environment by imagination"^[52] and specifically to derive comfort from an imagined world in which rural, urban, and military are pleasantly connected, a world that, through its myths and divinities, demonstrates concern and affection for farmers. The persona of the poet is perceived as genial, affirmative, and witty, both urbane

and of generous sensibility. The poet addresses both Maecenas and farmers, thus suggesting his own wide-ranging interests and imagination, which he invites readers to share. Community is an important motif in Spofford's book, for, in his view, the Georgics implies that the whole cosmos is an interrelated community, as is shown by, for example, the portents at Caesar's death, the pervasive effects of plague, or, more positively, the willingness of gods to respond when summoned. Thus the poet would both create community between himself and readers and also invite readers to acknowledge the larger community of the world, which they share with others.

This original and valuable study gives pause only, if at all, in its perception of tone. Spofford reads the poet as genial and amused, no matter how apparently grim (to this reader) is the passage under discussions.^[53] Consequently he makes nothing of the poet's implicit self-criticism, sense of limitation, or characteristic melancholy and haunting pathos. While Spofford perceives the poet as attempting to make farmers happy in a refuge of imagination, the argument of this study is rather that the poem memorializes sorrow and finds a certain painful beauty precisely in tragedy, not in forgetfulness of or distance from it.

Alpers sees community as the very essence of Virgilian pastoral, noting that shepherds/poets come together to sing and that their song relies for its vitality on a responsive natural and human audience. He argues that no one sings a song purely his own, but that each speaker, while seeking self-expression, "reaches out to, speaks and sings for, the other."^[54] Indeed the "central myth" of the Eclogues is that poetry "is produced by and exists for" the community.^[55] In the Eclogues, then, Alpers

sees community as created by shared song, shared tradition, and mutuality of concern. This concept of poets in community illuminates by contrast the position of the poet in the Georgics, where, as an isolated figure, he sings his song alone, for no one else shares his sensibility. Learning, sophistication, and moral perspective separate him from the farmer, as do power and social status from Maecenas and Octavian. His mission, precisely, is to create community where none as yet exists.

The subject of my final chapter, the privileging of myth and mystery over material praecepta, with its consequent questioning of the presumptions of Iron Age materialism and of the georgic genre as a whole, has not (to my knowledge) been observed or dealt with by others. In treating this topic I hope to contribute to and advance earlier readings of the Georgics by suggesting how its unresolved contradictions may be meaningfully comprehended in a larger, more complex view of the whole.