The Poet

It has been suggested that a tension exists in the Georgics between the figures of the farmer and the poet. The farmer is held to represent Man, that is, the common mortal experience of human beings with respect to nature and to other men; he values the material, the useful, and is largely represented as aggressive towards nature. The poet values useless song, is in harmony with nature and even nurtured by it. Despite these oppositions, however, both farmer and poet are Iron Age figures, flawed in their relationships to nature and to other men. While the farmer is

menaced by nature, the city, and his limited mortal visions, the poet is menaced by his own passions and his weakness in the world. While the farmer may be seen as seeking to restore Golden Age plenty through his labor, the poet seeks to restore Golden Age community through his song of pity (as will be argued below). The poet differs from the farmer most fundamentally in his basic sensibility, which inclines him to gratuitous and selfless pity, a behavior antithetical the farmer's mode. As pity most significantly characterizes the poet, I will focus on the motifs of the poet's pity and his sense of poetic mission, both of which distinguish his values from the farmer's. I will then proceed to consider how, on the other hand, the poet shares with other men certain characteristic Iron Age flaws, with the result that we shall come to see the poet as simultaneously exalted (as the sole carrier of humane value) and diminished (as an impotent figure in the world of power). Thus the poet, like the farmer, experiences in his work the moral tension that is the lot of all Iron Age men.

For the farmer pity is counterproductive and only costly. Cato and Varro, therefore, throughout their writings, prescribe the elimination of old or sick animals in favor of those that will bring a profit.^[34] In the Georgics the farmer is exhorted to eschew pity for nature and its creatures (e.g., 3.95–100) except on such occasions as pity will prove ultimately to be advantageous. The beekeeper, for example, is advised to spare and pity his bees (4.239–40) because this will result in greater future productivity. As the farmer cannot pity nature unless his pity will prove productive, so he also lacks pity (if through ignorance) for other men (2.498–99), as we have seen.

It is easy enough, on the other hand, to demonstrate that the poet's sensibility inclines him to pity and that he aims to elicit pity as a response from his readers. At 1.41 the poet explicitly calls upon Caesar to pity with him the farmers who are "ignorant

of the way." There are other examples, less explicit but more moving, of calls to pity, in which the poet elicits the reader's pity by creating a scene of powerful pathos. Numerous passages in the Georgics elicit pity from the reader by involving his feelings and empathy, moving him to regret for the losses or sufferings of both man and nature. As an example we may consider 2.207–11, in which significant details manipulate the reader's vision and value judgment of the scene. The arator is iratus ("angry"), therefore, we may infer, violent and destructive. He tears up the ancient homes of the birds from their deepest roots. Antiquas, cum stirpibus imis, eruit are all significant details that focus the reader's attention on the anguished responses of the displaced birds, who suffer loss of their "ancient homes," the farmer thus violating tradition, for which Romans had special reverence.

Another such scene is 3.371–75:

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.

Men hunt them not with hounds now, nor do they use the nets,
No scarlet-featured 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 attention focuses on the careless (laeti 375) brutality (obtruncant 374) of the killing; sympathy goes to the victims because of the term frustra ("in vain" 373). The animals are seen as helpless victims in a doomed contest, while the men, more savage than the beasts whose skins they wear, vulgarly exploit their technological superiority.

Comparable are the death struggles of the calf at 4.299–302:

tum vitulus bima curvans iam cornua fronte
quaeritur: huic geminae nares et spiritus oris
multa reluctanti obstruitur, plagisque perempto
tunsa per integram solvuntur viscera pellem.

A two-year-old calf is obtained, whose horns are beginning to curve
From his forehead. They stopper up, though he struggle wildly, his two
Nostrils and breathing mouth, and they beat him to death with blows
That pound his flesh to pulp but leave the hide intact.

The detail of the calf's horns just beginning to grow from his forehead suggests the promise of his future growth and vitality; it allows us to visualize and individualize the animal in our minds. Multa reluctanti and plagisque perempto (301) emphasize the calf's unwillingness to die, his futile fight for life, his helpless victimization, and the brutality of such sacrifice.^[35]

The scenes considered thus far are expressed by the voice of the Georgic poet. The tale of Orpheus, which is told by Proteus, is famous for its resonant pathos and its engaging of the reader's sympathy and pity for Eurydice and for Orpheus, the victim of Aristaeus' and his own passion. Otis, in his important discussion of Virgil's "subjective style,"^[36] points to such details as the rhetorical questions at 4.504ff.:

quid faceret? quo se rapta bis coniuge ferret?
quo fletu Manis, quae numina voce moveret?

What could he do, where go, his wife twice taken from him?
What lament would move death now? What deities hear his song?

These questions deeply involve readers with Orpheus' experience and loss, while leaving them emotionally indifferent to Aristaeus' success.

An analogous example is that of the nightingale:

qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra
amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator
observans nido implumis detraxit; at illa
flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen
integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet.
(4.511–15)

As a nightingale he sang that sorrowing under a poplar's
Shade laments the young she has lost, whom a heartless ploughman
Has noticed and dragged from the nest unfledged; and the nightingale
Weeps all night, on a branch repeating the piteous song,
Loading the acres around with the burden of her lament.

She mourns eternally because the unfeeling (durus 512) farmer has plundered her nest and robbed her of her children. Observans (513) shows that the crime is deliberate, premeditated; implumis (513) that the victims are helpless, young, cannot escape. It is a pitiable (miserabile 514) and irremediable loss that the nightingale sings. In sum, then, while Hell never pities (4.470, 489) and farmers pity only when it furthers their interests, the Georgic poet's unique contribution, for which the tone is set at 1.41, is his gratuitous pity, empathy, and involvement with the suffering of others.^[37]

As we consider this relationship between the poet and pity in the Georgics, we may note with interest that the effect of art in Aeneid 1.459–62 and also of the Aeneid itself as a whole is to

involve the reader's pity and empathy for loss and suffering. Aeneas understands that the message of the paintings in Dido's temple to Juno is pity for the mortal condition:

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
Aen. 1.462.

There are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart.

Aeneas sees in the paintings tears for sorrow, and the mortality of the human condition moves the heart of the beholder. Dido subsequently confirms Aeneas' interpretation of the paintings, explaining that she has compassion for others' suffering because she has suffered herself:

me quoque per multos similis fortuna labores
iactatam hac demum voluit consistere terra.
non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco.
Aen. 1.628–30

Me, too, has a like fortune driven through many toils,
and willed that at last I should find rest in this
land. Not ignorant of ill do I learn to befriend
the unhappy.

Later it is precisely because Aeneas feels no pity for her, because he appears inhuman and inhumane (4.365–66), that she becomes most enraged at him and bitterly destructive:

num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit?
num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est?
Aen. 4.369–70

Did he sigh while I wept? Did he turn on me a glance?
Did he yield and shed tears or pity her who loved him?

As a last example we may consider the final simile of the Aeneid, in which readers are virtually compelled, through the use of the first-person plural verb, to identify with the terror and weakness of Turnus and to pity him as he is vanquished by Aeneas:

ac uelut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
velle videmur  et in mediis conatibus aegri
succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
sufficiunt vires nec vox aut verba sequuntur:
sic Turno, quacumque viam virtute petivit,
successum dea dira negat.
Aen. 12.908–14

Just as in dreams of night, when languid rest
has closed our eyes, we seem in vain to wish
to press on down a path, but as we strain,
we falter, weak; our tongues can say nothing,
the body loses its familiar force,
no voice, no word can follow: so whatever
courage he calls upon to find a way,
the cursed goddess keeps success from Turnus.

Readers are here made to identify with Turnus' nightmare of helpless victimization, to see it both as their own and as universal, thus necessarily are invited to become members of a moral community that pities loss and grieves at the costs of victory. This motif, though climactically placed at the poem's conclusion, occurs throughout the Aeneid and contributes to the haunting melancholy of the whole.^[38]

The Georgic poet's inclination to pity moves him to bring a "lesson of poetry" (in Adam Parry's fine phrase)^[39] to Roman towns (2.176) and similarly to bring the Muses from Greece to Italy (3.10–15). The poet has just described Italian peoples as characteristically and distinctively fierce and military:

haec genus acre virum, Marsos pubemque Sabellam
adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos

extulit, haec Decios, Marios magnosque Camillos,
Scipiadas duros bello, et te, maxime Caesar,
qui nunc extremis Asiae iam victor in oris
imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum.
(2.167–71)

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; and of you, most royal Caesar,
Who now triumphant along the furthest Asian frontiers
Keep the war-worthless Indians away from the towers of Rome.

It is not implausible that such militaristic peoples might lack or fail to express artistic sensibility. The Muses apparently live in Greece (3.10–15), and the poet does not include them in his praise of Italy (2.136ff.) although they are the supreme object of his reverence (2.475–76). Cicero (Tusc. 1.2.3) had noted (Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti ) and Horace (Ars poet . 323ff.) had lamented that traditional Romans were unfitted for poetry.^[40] Here the poet perceives himself as on a mission to bring poetry to his people. In particular he refers to his poetry as Ascraean (i.e., Hesiodic) song, which shall be taken here to denote didactic poetry that, like Hesiod's, describes a fallen world, our Iron Age world, morally inferior to the Golden Age;^[41] a world that, through the poet's song, maintains a vision of

something better, more just, more harmonious, more humane. The poet thus emerges as a moral teacher, seeking in particular to remedy dissension between brothers (a conflict of special resonance for Romans plagued by civil wars). The expressed intent of the Georgic poet (2.176) is to bring this message to his people, to turn them into readers of sensibility, who have an apprehension and appreciation of noncompetitive peace, harmony, and community. He would make readers who could see the moral value of such Golden Age visions.

Pity arises from identification with the suffering of another, from the sense or knowledge that this suffering or something like it could become one's own. Through the pathos of many passages in the Georgics, we readers are made to share others' sorrow, to identify with their suffering, to experience it as potentially our own, and hence to feel bonds of common pain that unite us with others. Pity, then, makes of readers a community, because pity requires identification with the pain of another. The essential thing to note here, in terms of the poet's conception of his mission, is the fact that he imagines the Golden Age precisely as a community—a community among all men and between men and nature:

ante Iovem nulli subigebant arva coloni,
ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum
fas erat: in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus
omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat.
(1.125–28)

Before Jove's time no settlers subdued the land; it
was not right even to mark the fields or to divide
them with boundary lines. All sought the common
gain; and earth of her own accord brought forth
all things more freely, when no one was asking.^[42]

These few verses suggest the traditional Golden Age, with its characteristic abundance of food, freedom from war, toil, and unhappiness. Most significant for this account, however, are harmony between and man nature (nature, unasked, gives all things more freely 127–28 and harmony among all men equally (they look to the common good 127). We note also the deeply solemn moral quality of fas (127), "right" of absolute or divine, as opposed to human, origin. Plowing the earth, represented as a kind of aggression against nature by man, is not allowed (125); neither is the possession of earth by man (127) nor, consequently, the pursuit private interest.

The moral effect of Virgil's poetry is precisely to create community, especially Golden Age community as he represents it. His poetry, since it embodies the ideal of harmony over conquest, of compassion for loss over pride in victory, teaches a sense of victory's cost. Through its preservation of a moral ideal and through its appreciation of sentiment, this poetry seeks to expand the sensibility of readers and to fashion them into a humane community. In instituting the Iron Age, Jove (1.121ff.) allowed the dissolution of moral quality (fas 127; cf. 1.505) in men's relations with nature and with each other. For his own purposes he allowed these relations to become exploitive and aggressive (e.g., 1.139–45) instead of harmonious. The poet, therefore, in seeking to create through pity a moral community and in representing as positive the values of nonexploitive peace and harmony, attempts to redress the omission of Jove. In this way the poet establishes an alternative set of values and creates a moral ideal. Thus he becomes the essential carrier of humane value, the bearer of the vision of noncompetitive peace and harmony; he becomes the carrier of what we must call, in terms of this poem, Golden Age values. Community is restored through pity; in particular, moral or Golden Age community is restored through the poet's poetry. He hopes, through his song, to restore the bonds between man and nature, now broken by technology, as well as those between man and man, now broken by civil and foreign war. The boldness of such aspirations well deserves the term audax that the poet applies to it at 1.40, with echoes at 2.175 and 4.565.

Since the feeling of pity is an ennobling one, the conviction of moral mission and superior moral sensibility might lead to complacency, even arrogance, in both poet and readers. Yet the Georgic poet does not assume an unambiguous superiority, nor is he represented as content in his separate values. Neither uncritical nor lacking in perspective on himself and his aspirations, he suggests in the emergent self-portrait in this poem certain limitations and inconsistencies that confirm his identity as an Iron Age figure.

The major flaw that the poet perceives in his work is what he represents as its futility because the value of pity is negligible in the political world. Events and motifs in the Georgics (as well as in the Aeneid ) suggest that pity is an inadequate, if humane, response to the moral and political dilemmas of the world of power. One could argue also, even more sadly, that the gratification that pity provides to the pitier is cheap and easy, almost a kind of play, as the poet may be suggesting with the verb ludere in 4.565 to describe his own song. Euripides had made Orestes say

          Uneducated men are pitiless,
but we who are educated pity much. And we pay
a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.
(El. 294–96)^[43]

There is clearly here a self-congratulating element to pity. Pitiers esteem themselves for their superior sensibility and intellectuality, even while they see (with their fine intelligence) the limitations of pity and superiority. As Augustine much later observed, people like to feel pity as long as it is for the suffering of others:

quid est, quod ibi homo vult dolere luctuosa et tragica, quae tamen pati ipse nollet? et tamen pati vult ex eis dolorem spectator, et dolor ipse est voluptas eius . . . quamquam, cum ipse patitur, miseria, cum aliis compatitur, misericordia dici solet . . . non enim ad subveniendum provocatur auditor, sed tantum ad dolendum invitatur . . . lacrimae ergo amantur et dolores.
(Confessions 3.2.2–3)

Why is it that a man likes to grieve over death and tragic events which he would not want to happen to himself? The spectator likes to experience grief at such scenes, and this very sorrow is a pleasure to him. . . . However, when he himself suffers it, it is usually called misery; when he suffers it with regard to others it is called pity. The auditor is not aroused to help others; he is only asked to grieve over them. . . . Tears and sorrow, therefore, are objects of love.^[44]

Pity is perhaps a kind of play, a self-indulgence, that translates into no effective action in a world where power and choice have only serious consequence.

Such thoughts on the limitations and self-gratification of pity as are expressed by Euripides, Aristotle (see p. 20), and Augustine are implicit in the Georgics in the experiences of the poet-figures, who are the carriers of the value of pity in the poem. Not only the Georgic poet but also Orpheus, Proteus, and the nightingale fulfill poetic functions in the Georgics and reveal aspects of the poet's experience. All are represented variously as weak or failed in the world;^[45] all are shown as having a certain regressive focus and pleasure in sorrow and loss, which they turn into beautiful, if ineffective, song.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the most moving and haunting passage in the Georgics, is attributed to Proteus. The Georgic poet is the singer of the Orpheus tale only indirectly or at second hand. Proteus' performance, although not described as musical (4.452), is nevertheless the most beautiful and moving poetry of the poem. Orpheus' song, apparently beyond human powers to describe, is never heard by readers. Therefore Proteus'

song is the most beautiful within our world of experience; he is the best poet we hear. And again, in him, we find a failure or loser in the world of power, for he is violated, compelled, and outmaneuvered (vim duram et vincula capto/tende 4.399–400; cf. victus, "vanquished" 443) by a power (Cyrene's knowledge, Aristaeus' force) more determined and aggressive than his own capacity to escape it. In addition to being vanquished and victimized himself, he also feels sympathy for Orpheus, the loser in his own drama with Aristaeus. Proteus and Orpheus are both, at least in part, victims of Aristaeus and the real power he represents.

We see, of course, a similar dynamic in the vignette of the nightingale (4.511–15), to which Orpheus is likened. Again there is the victimization of the beautiful singer by the stronger agent of the real world. As in the above examples, the beauty of the nightingale's song lies in its pathos (her children are lost, they are implumis 512–13) and in its eternal voicing of irremediable tragedy (514–15). The key for this discussion is that the nightingale's song is perceived by listeners as beautiful and as tragic. The hypothetical explanation of the melancholy of the nightingale's song (that she mourns her lost children, that the loss is eternal) illuminates the intimate and necessary relationship between tragedy and beauty and powerlessness, which has been the entire subject of this discussion.

This simile of the nightingale and the farmer recalls not only Odyssey 19.518–23 and 16.216–18 but also the fable of the nightingale and the hawk in Hesiod's Works and Days (202–12):

Now I shall tell a fable to the perceptive kings.
Thus spoke the hawk to the nightingale, the speckle-necked bird,
As he was carrying her gripped in his talons high in the clouds,
And she was piteously crying, for she was pierced by the grip of his
Bent talons; thus he spoke and strongly advised her:
"Foolish thing, why are you shrieking? Your captor is much
stronger than you.
There shall you go wherever I take you though you're a singer,
And, as I wish, I shall eat you for dinner or let you go free.
Foolish the man who wishes to fight against those who are
stronger;

He loses the victory and suffers pain in addition to shame."
Thus spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.

The ostensible moral of this fable, as the hawk speaks it, is that might makes right, arbitrarily (209) and regardless of justice. Yet the unpalatable characterization of the hawk and the pathos (205) of the nightingale's circumstance assure both that the reader's sympathy is with the nightingale and that the reader, despite the hawk's apparent present superiority, hears his moral with a certain irony, believing or hoping that Zeus will ultimately destroy the immoral hawk. The emotional dynamic of the fable is that Hesiod identifies with the nightingale, the singer (208), weak and victimized, and similarly involves the reader's sympathy. In this the fable is parallel to the simile in the Georgics . The significant difference is that in Hesiod the fable is unconcluded; there is hope that justice, in the end, will triumph and that the singer will go free. The reader's hope is of a piece with Hesiod's exhortation to justice. In the Georgics passage, on the contrary, the tragic outcome (the nightingale's loss of her young) has already occurred. The substance of the simile is to express the inevitable victimization of the weak by the strong and the related intimate connection between tragedy and beauty and powerlessness.

It is the Georgic poet, above all, who composes beautiful and tragic poetry, for his poem contains not only the pathos of the tale of Orpheus but a grand vision of the ambiguity of human experience as a whole, as will be discussed in the third chapter. He is, consequently, the poem's greatest poet and its most daring figure (1.40; 2.174; 4.565; and cf. 4.469 of Orpheus). Yet he acknowledges with graceful and only partial irony that he has no power in the world when compared to Caesar (4.559–66). Despite the real courage, if not audacity, of his efforts, he is of negligible significance in the world of politics and conquest. The poet values and even proselytizes on behalf of pity. He conceives of his poetic mission as the bringing of pity, of a "lesson of poetry," to his people. Yet the poet also has the perception that poets lose in the real world and that, consequently, pity itself is a kind of self-indulgent play (4.563–66). One might see in the word

ludere (4.565) not only a technical term but also Virgil's derogation of his own poetry, simultaneously ironic and serious. For, futile as it may be, pity is nevertheless the most humane value, necessary to the development of society (cf. Lucr. 5.1023: imbecillorum esse aecum misererier omnis, "that it was right for all to pity the weak") and to the maintenance of a humane order. Therefore the Georgics performs the highest moral function in making readers sensitive to loss and sympathetic to sorrow. Responsive readers must come to sense and to acknowledge the community and vulnerability of all mortal enterprise. Although the poet realizes the particular vulnerability of poets and of pity, he nevertheless consistently engages the reader's sympathy with these variously failed figures.

We see, then, that the poet, as represented in the figures of the Georgic poet, Orpheus, Proteus, and even the nightingale, is simultaneously exalted and disparaged. He is exalted for the beauty and emotional power of his song, for the humane value of pity that it voices and preserves. He is disparaged for his impotence in the world, for the inadequacy of his song as a response to the world's troubles, for his inclination to make of tragedy and loss a beautiful thing. This last propensity is of deeply ambiguous value, for it makes the poet ever backward-looking and hence ineffective. Yet it also makes him the only carrier of humane value in a material world that esteems profit and success above all, regardless of cost. These contrasting perspectives on the poet remain unresolved through the poem's final verses and constitute one of its essential tensions.

In addition to the weaknesses of a poetic method that relies on and appeals to pity, the poet reveals in himself other flaws or, better, inconsistencies that cause him dissatisfaction and identify him as an Iron Age figure. Among these are his pursuit of glory, his domination by irrational amor (both of which he deplores in others), and, finally, a certain alienation that he feels in his own time and place, since he repeatedly idealizes an irretrievable past and aspires to knowledge he cannot have.

The poet experiences ambition for glory and longs for victory and to be first (4.6; 3.8–10, 17). While he sings for the community, he represents himself as happiest when seeking his individual

goal of poetic victory and primacy (3.291–92). His victory will be one of song, hence without exploitation of nature or violence towards other men. Nevertheless, since pursuit of honor and gloria is explicitly condemned in Book 2 (e.g., 2.503ff.), we must infer the poet's awareness within himself of contradictory, Iron Age drives. Although acknowledging the moral inferiority of urban to rural life, he nevertheless distances himself from the latter by declaring his own passion for poetry. His desire to write poetry is not willed, but stems from love (amor ) for the Muses (2.476), by which he is struck. The poet has desires for honor and gloria because of his own particular amor, of which he cannot fail to recognize the irrational source (2.476, 3.285).^[46] His poetry originates in amor:

quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore
(2.476)

whose sacred emblems I bear, struck by a mighty love

singula dum capti circumvectamur amore
(3.285)

while we, seized by love, tarry at each separate detail

sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis
raptat amor
(3.291–92)

But over these lonely heights of Parnassus
I'm driven by sweet love.

When the poet terms his amor dulcis ("sweet" 3.291) and Leander's durus ("harsh" 3.259), one senses the ironic awareness of self-delusion. The juxtaposition of ardua ("steep") and dulcis

(3.291) suggests the effortful pleasure that the poet takes in his irrational passions and Iron Age strivings. Percussus ("struck" 2.476), capti ("caught" 3.285), and raptat ("seizes," "drives" 3.292) reveal the compelling nature of his passion. Like the charioteers straining for victory (3.103ff), like the stallion longing for challenge and combat (3.77ff), like the city dwellers condemned in Book 2, the poet experiences a passion that can know no permanent satisfaction. There is irony, subtlety, and acuity in the poet's portrait of himself. Certainly the poet's victory will come without violence or exploitation. Since, however, there is no competition (or art, apparently) in the Golden Age, we must see the poet's art and the competitive, irrational urges that sustain it as an Iron Age phenomenon.

The substance of the poet's victory will be its originality and seriousness of purpose (3.4–8). The Muses do not live in Italy, but must be brought there from Greece (3.11–12.). Should the poet succeed in his mission of bringing the Muses (and all that they signify) to his own country, he would construe this as a victory for himself. To express meaningfully the magnitude of his accomplishment in terms valued by Roman tradition, he calls himself victor (3.9–17) and proceeds to describe his victory in such a way as to suggest simultaneously a Roman triumph and an Olympic victory:

in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit.
illi victor ego et Tyrio conspectus in ostro
centum quadriiugos agitabo ad flumina currus.
cuncta mihi Alpheum linquens locosque Molorchi
cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia caestu.
ipse caput tonsae foliis ornatus olivae
dona feram.
(3.16–22)

Caesar's image shall stand there in the midst, commanding my
temple,
While I, a victor, conspicuous in crimson robes, shall drive
A hundred four-horse chariots up and down by the river.
All Greece will leave Alpheus and the Peloponnesian groves
To take part in the races and boxing-bouts I've arranged.
I myself, wearing a chaplet of trimmed olive,
Will present the prizes.

By juxtaposing his name to that of Caesar and by attributing the epithet victor as well as the nominative case to himself, he implies that his victory compares favorably with Caesar's. In 3.26–33 he imagines his creation:

in foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto
Gangaridum faciam victorisque arma Quirini,
atque hic undantem bello magnumque fluentem
Nilum ac navali surgentis aere columnas.
addam urbes Asiae domitas pulsumque Niphaten
fidentemque fuga Parthum versisque sagittis
et duo rapta manu diverso ex hoste tropaea
bisque triumphatas utroque ab litore genres.

On the doors of my temple I'll have engraved in gold and solid
Ivory the battle of the Ganges and the arms of victorious Quirinus
And here the enormous stream of Nile a-surge with a naval
Battle, and columns rising cast from the bronze of warships.
I'll add the cities of Asia we've mastered, Armenians routed,
Parthians whose strength is flight and shooting over their
shoulder;
Two trophies taken in battle from distant foes, a double
Triumph from either shore.

He reveals that the significant feature of his victory in contrast to Caesar's is that it is achieved through song (3.1, 3.3; cf. 4.471), hence without aggression—unlike the farmer's or soldier's. And though the poet triumphs peacefully, he is not passive but emphatically active: deducam (11), referam (12) ponam (13), agitabo (18), feram (22), addam (30). The monument to Caesar's glory is dependent upon the poet, a function of his song.^[47]

Primacy is an important aspect of the poet's victory, although the claim to being first is familiar for poets. Commentators, for example, find parallels for these lines in Lucretius:

avia Pieridum peragro loca nuilius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nuili velarint tempora Musae.
(Lucr. 1.926–30)

I travel the Muses' pathless places; none
Before has walked where I walk. I love to find
New founts and drink, to gather fresh, new flowers
And seek the laureate's crown whence Muses never
Till now have veiled the brow of any man.

(Lucr. 1.117–18, concerning Ennius, is similar. Horace refers to his own original achievement in Odes 3.30.13: princeps. ) What is not paralleled in these passages, namely, the claim to be victor, establishes that the military-athletic parallel is not mere convention but expresses significantly the context in which the poet wishes to place his achievement. (Vincere similarly describes his accomplishment in 3.289.) Victor is an emphatic addition to the traditional claim of primacy, and it makes clear the competitive, Iron Age drive of the poet.

The opulence of the temple's artistry, glorious with bronze, ivory, gold, and Parian marble, involves the poet in another inconsistency. The beauty of the poet's conceptions and aspirations, represented in the temple's precious metals and skilled artwork, is at variance with the ethic of utility and material austerity apparently endorsed in the laudes ruris of Book 2.458ff.^[48] From the point of view of this ethic, the poet's temple of poetry would have to be condemned as extravagant and decadent. Neither beauty nor ornament serves a useful function or is appropriate to the previously idealized rural values of simplicity, naturalness, discipline, and rigorous restraint. Rather than affirming rural values, the poet's temple tends instead to identify him with city dwellers, who are competitive, ambitious, and eager for luxury.

These inconsistencies are points of moral tension for the poet, in which he reveals himself as very much an Iron Age figure. These drives set him apart from Golden Age ideals as he represents them in Georgic 1 and identify him rather with charioteers, soldiers, and city dwellers. Although the poet's goal is humane and sustaining of culture and of the spirit, although his chosen "weapon" of combat is song, his drives are irrational (amor ) and competitive. It is, therefore, difficult for readers to maintain a deep distinction between him and the other flawed Iron Age figures who people this poem.

The poet is also identified as an Iron Age figure by the discontent that he experiences in seeking a knowledge he cannot have, a time (the Golden Age) that is past, and a place (Greek poetic sources) that is unavailable.

The poet desires unattainable knowledge:

Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore,
accipiant caelique vias et sidera monstrent,
defectus solis varios lunaeque labores;
unde tremor terris, qua vi maria alta tumescant
obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant,
quid tantum Oceano properent se tinguere soles
hiberni, vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.
(2.475–82)

But as for me—may the Muses, sweet above all,
Whose holy emblems, I, struck by a mighty passion, bear,
Take me to themselves and reveal heaven's pathways, the stars,
The several eclipses of the sun and the moon's travails,
The cause of earthquakes and the force that compels the deep sea
To swell, to break all bounds, to fall back on itself again;
The reason why winter suns race on to dip in Ocean,
And what delays the long nights.

While the farmer does not know his blessings, the poet aspires precisely to knowledge, but not of praecepta ("precepts", "maxims"), practical and productive. Rather he aspires to knowledge of causae ("causes") of ultimate truths, which he represents as the gift of the Muses, for whom he experiences a religious awe. The possibility of failing in this aspiration (483ff.) is very real to

the poet. Thus he confronts openly the reality of a poetic quest forever unfulfilled.

As a second choice he wishes for a kind of rural retreat (486–89), but not to the Italian countryside, although he has just praised it (2.136–76). Rather he desires explicitly to be transported to the countryside of Greek poetry,^[49] his spiritual homeland, dwelling place of the Muses, where he hopes to become intimate somehow with the sources of his poetic passion. The ungrammatical effusion in which he expresses his desire suggests the abandon, the sense of rapture and communion with something beyond the material that the poet seeks.^[50] In his longing for Greece the poet expresses cultural ideals different from traditionally conceived Roman ones, which do not entirely satisfy his passions nor match his feelings of religious or poetic fervor. His prayer for knowledge shows his aspirations to be different from the farmer's since it expresses spiritual and intellectual goals not encompassed by the farmer's concerns. His prayer for ecstatic experience in Greece suggests the deep bonds that he feels to a tradition outside his own.

The poet's recurrent absorption with the motif of the Golden Age also implies a dissatisfaction with the present and a sense of continuing decline in the moral quality of human experience. He expresses a powerful nostalgia for what he represents as a lost and more perfect past in such passages as 1.125–35 and 2.336–42, 532–40, the myth of the Golden Age embodying a standard by which the present is implicitly measured and found wanting. The present is experienced as a time of tension with the Golden Age, with a certain unrecoverable moral quality that not even the poet fully embodies.

Simultaneously the poet is deeply bound to the present and to Italy by patriotic pride and deep commitment. Among many examples, the prayers that bracket Book 1 (5ff. and 498ff.) reveal the poet's concern with Italy's fate, with his contemporary Romans in desperate confrontation with the consequences of their political life. These prayers suggest the urgency of the poet's mission to Italy, which he has not abandoned, despite his desires for Greece. Surely and deeply immured in his world, he feels the responsibility to sing of and for it. His mission to Italy is expressed in grave, exalted tones of religious fervor (2. 174–76) and includes the entire complex of attitudes that he embodies, such as capacity for sentiment, aspiration to mystery and to the Muses' truth, and pity, which makes humane community.

His sense of mission is implicit also in his treatment of the Corycian gardener (a subject to be discussed more fully in Chapter 2). In this passage (4.116–48) the poet describes himself as wishing to pursue his vision of the gardener but as prevented, by limitations of time and space, from doing so (4.116–19, 147–48). Like the Golden Age the Corycian gardener is an ideal unavailable to the poet. Isolated in the genre of georgic poetry (which does not ordinarily treat gardens), in time past, and in distance from Rome, the gardener is an irretrievable dream. In his growing of flowers and in the esthetic disposition of his garden, the gardener embodies an ideal of superfluous beauty or art for its own sake and without political content, which the Georgic poet conceives as unavailable to himself.

In his portrait of the gardener there is a fine expression of the poet's awareness of his unalterable discontent. He is prevented from pursuing his desire, the ideal of the gardener, as he would wish, since he feels the constraints of time and mission. Unlike the gardener he is not free to pursue an isolated and apolitical ideal of beauty. The Georgic poet, deeply committed to his world and sensitive to its suffering, sings the urgency of its troubles.

Throughout the Georgics the Georgic poet is represented in ways that both exalt and depreciate him. He is the sole carrier of the humane value of pity, for we do not find pity characteristic of farmers, city dwellers, or Hell. It is the poet's mission of high

courage and daring to bring Ascraean song to Italian peoples. As Hesiod is a moral teacher to Perses, so the Georgic poet would be a moral teacher to his addressees and to all readers. The beauty of his song has the power to move the spirit and to forge moral values, for he finds even in tragedy a source of beautiful despair that is sustaining to the spirit. On the other hand, the poet is backward-looking, self-indulgent in pursuing his tragic visions, and committed to a song of pity that is impotent in the world of military power and politics. These contrasting perspectives on the poet remain unresolved through the poem's final verses and constitute one of its central tensions.