Aristaeus and Orpheus

In the myth and tradition outside the Georgics both Orpheus and Aristaeus are culture heroes—Aristaeus for agriculture and Orpheus for religious rites, mysteries, and poetry. In this way they exemplify a range of human cultural activity. While exemplary in tradition prior to this poem, both are represented in the Georgics as passionate and, ultimately, destructive, for both destroy Eurydice, who dies once because of each of them.^[51]

Much scholarly effort has been devoted to reconstructing the history and treatment of the Orpheus myth before Virgil.^[52] The consensus of this work is that Virgil is probably the first to have represented Orpheus as losing Eurydice, despite the beauty of his music and the daring of his descent to Hades to retrieve her. The fact that Virgil's telling of Aristaeus' story is equally unparalleled has not received similar attention.^[53] Nevertheless, the association of Aristaeus with the process of bougonia and with Eurydice, and through her with Orpheus, is unprecedented in previous accounts as well as unimitated in subsequent ones. Virgil is original in his treatment of both figures, and we see, therefore, that in his role as Georgic poet he is creating new myths from old myths in order to tell his own truth. Here, in powerful and significant innovation, the poet makes the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus cross in the figure of Eurydice, thus bringing together these two figures, polar in the scope of human culture, in such a way as to suggest their significant similarities and oppositions and to comment, through these, on the character of Iron Age culture.

Each, in his feelings towards Eurydice, reveals a significant aspect of his character. Aristaeus yields to transient and destructive passion; Orpheus' passion is consuming, until death and

even after. This passionate quality of Aristaeus and Orpheus stands out when we compare them to the first individual treated in Book 4, the Corycian gardener, since they are represented as young where he is old, sexual and driven where he is asexual and without longings. In Aristaeus' case, his passion threatened to destroy all his accomplishments; so it eventually happens with Orpheus. Similarly the structural feature of katabasis (descent) links the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus in that both descend to another world. Here, though, their stories begin to diverge. While Orpheus goes to Hades, where he sees tragic visions that seem to reflect his own predilection for sorrow (4.471–77), Aristaeus descends to a world that is different from himself—a purely feminine world, both peaceful and nurturant. Again, both Aristaeus and Orpheus participate in attempts at regeneration of life. Aristaeus' attempt to acquire new bees succeeds (although it is essential to note that these bees are not reborn, as they are not identical to those that had perished), while Orpheus' attempt to resurrect Eurydice ultimately fails. Aristaeus, content with substitution or exchange, succeeds on earth and in heaven, becoming a god in the Iron Age world. Orpheus, rejecting any substitution, preserves through song the memory of the ideal that he has lost, thus becoming increasingly isolated from any human community or relationship. As a consequence, he is eventually destroyed. Although there is a sterility to Orpheus' grief (as suggested in his frozen wanderings), there is—very importantly—a sterility to Aristaeus' success as well, for the impersonal, inhuman bees are emotionally inadequate as recompense for the loss of Orpheus and Eurydice.

From this summary alone we see that the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus are elaborately parallel as well as significantly different in details and in outcome. Our task will be to probe this myth as the poet tells it, for it crystallizes certain oppositions or tensions central to the Georgics . Aristaeus is aggressive and successful without regard to cost; he is not inclined to retrospect (he does not look back), nor is he reflective. The figure of Aristaeus stands in the same relation to Orpheus as does the farmer to the Georgic poet. In brief, as critics have noted, Aristaeus in this poem stands for "productivity" and for "con-

trol" of nature, thus epitomizing Iron Age man, while Orpheus stands for "creativity" and "sympathy" with nature. From this we see that Aristaeus' relationship with nature typifies the Iron Age, while Orpheus' recalls the Golden Age. Aristaeus is productive of material goods, while Orpheus is productive of non-material song. In distinction from the material, military mode of the farmer, Orpheus typifies the artist. In the Iron Age world, then, he is set apart, ineffective, becoming the chance victim of Aristaeus' violence and also of his own tragic sensibility.

Aristaeus

In myth and tradition outside the Georgics, as far as can be ascertained, Aristaeus is an exemplary figure, a culture hero, a true benefactor of mankind through his teaching of agriculture, cattle breeding, hunting, and beekeeping.^[54] The Georgic poet makes Aristaeus representative of all Iron Age men in that the glory of his mortal life, as he himself declares, is his productive labor:

en etiam hunc ipsum vitae mortalis honorem,
quem mihi vix frugum et pecudum custodia sollers
omnia temptanti extuderat, te matre relinquo.
(4.326–28)

Look, even this mere honor of mortal life, which I won
So hardly by craft and much resourcefulness from the care of
Harvest and herd—though you are my mother—I abandon.

The phrase vitae mortalis honorem ("honor of mortal life" 326) suggests that Aristaeus represents the continuing aspirations of all mortals as he strives to achieve his greatest ambitions, in his case the hope of divinity:

quid me caelum sperare iubebas?
(4.325)

Why tell me to hope for heaven?

In his relationship to nature as well he epitomizes Iron Age man, for he seeks through his labor to dominate nature, to make it productive for himself, and consequently to achieve gloria and honor . In this poem, then, he is suitably guilty of the rape of Eurydice, for she is a figure of nature,^[55] and as we have seen, it is a thematic leitmotif of the Georgics that agricultural productivity or progress absolutely requires the domination of natural things. If one sees rape as an act of domination, it becomes clear that rape is the paradigmatic gesture of productive man to nature. Therefore, by making Aristaeus, the tutelary god of agriculture, guilty of rape and, inadvertently, of the death of Eurydice—not at all a goal in itself but rather an instance of accidental destruction^[56] —the Georgic poet makes him represent the Iron Age experience in relation to nature as a whole. It is suggestive that in this instance Aristaeus wishes merely to rape, not to kill; thus he does not succeed where he wishes and is more destructive than he intends. As he needs to control nature's creatures for his glory, so it is consistent that he acts violently, exploitively, and without sentiment towards Eurydice.

Violence and struggle are again required, as Cyrene reveals, for Aristaeus to learn the cause of his suffering and its cure:

nam sine vi non ulla dabit praecepta, neque illum
orando flectes; vim duram et vincula capto
tende
(4.398–400)

Except to violence he yields not one word of advice; entreaties
Have no effect: you must seize him, offer him force and fetters

ad haec vates vi denique multa
ardentis oculos intorsit lumine glauco,
et graviter frendens sic fatis ora resolvit.
(4.450–52)

At this the seer, yielding at last to mighty force,
Rolled his glaring eyes so they shone with a glassy light,
Harshly ground his teeth, and thus gave tongue to fate.

Aristaeus is successful in his quest because this necessary violence is not uncongenial to him. Proteus, having endured his assault, addresses him as iuvenum confidentissime ("boldest of youths" 4.445). Yet his aggression is not represented as daring or courageous, for Eurydice is an undefended female, and Proteus, another figure of nature,^[57] an exhausted old man:

vix defessa  senem passus componere membra
cum clamore ruit magno, manicisque iacentem
occupat.
(4.438–40)

Scarcely letting the old man lay down his weary limbs,
He rushed him with a great shout and shackled him where he lay.

This scene parallels the sacrifice of the calf in the bougonia (4.299–302), also defenseless, whose sufferings and terror are narrated in some detail.

Like the Romans in 1.501–2, Aristaeus is, according to Proteus, in the position of having to atone for his guilt:

non te nullius exercent numinis irae;
magna luis commissa: tibi has miserabilis Orpheus
haudquaquam ob meritum poenas, ni fata resistant,
suscitat, et rapta graviter pro coniuge saevit.
(4.453–56)

Not without sanction divine is the anger that hunts you down.
Great is the crime you pay for. Piteous Orpheus calls
This vengeance against you—if fate did not interpose—far short
Of your deserts; bitter his anguish for the wife taken from him.

Further, he is like the farmers (ignaros . . . viae 1.41) in his ignorance of the causes of his suffering. An unreflective character, he fails to put the blame for his actions on himself, where, as the reader ultimately learns, it would seem to belong,^[58] but

instead attributes the blame to his mother, whom he charges with cruelty (4.321–32).

Most significant, when we recall that the stated purpose of the Georgic poet's poem is pity (1.41), is that—in contrast to Orpheus—Aristaeus, though guilty of attempted rape and indirectly responsible for Eurydice's death, voices no acknowledgment or understanding of guilt nor regret for his action once its consequences have been revealed to him.^[59] He expresses no awareness of loss, no pity for his victims. Except when directed towards himself (cf. 4.321–32), the quality of pity is lacking in him. With respect to his bees, he cares for them only as they subserve the ultimate purpose of his glory. Certainly he is not bound to them by sentiment, and, consequently, he is satisfied with a replacement. This is not an unreasonable position for him, given that he cannot perceive his bees as individuals. His hope for future divinity is what drives him—not sentiment, appreciation of the unique, regret for the past, or compassion.^[60]

In his labor, then, in his striving for honor, in his aggression against natural forces, in his need to atone, in his ignorance of the causes of his suffering, Aristaeus epitomizes Roman and Iron Age experience. The poet would seem to imply that it is precisely this vitality and aggression, when deliberately channeled, that allow him to survive. Thus Aristaeus, though guilty, survives crime and punishment, while the bees, the sacrificed cattle, Orpheus, and Eurydice perish. Aristaeus' success is bought at a high price, for his passion—misdirected—destroys Eurydice and, more importantly to him, his bees, and thus nearly dooms his entire labor and hope for honor . This portrait, as we see, differs strikingly

from tradition and thereby emphasizes, to the extent that Aristaeus is a culture hero, the aggressive and destructive quality of culture as it relates to nature in this poem.

A very revealing, indeed critical, dimension of the quality of Aristaeus' success is that it is achieved through the bougonia . Whereas in other accounts Aristaeus is associated with the discovery of real and practical improvements in agricultural techniques, here alone is he credited with the fantastical process of bougonia . In order to estimate accurately the quality of Aristaeus' achievement and the symbolic value of the poem's conclusion, we must consider, for a moment, the specific significance of bougonia for the ancients.

Because of the fact that the carcass of a calf or an ox, no matter how treated, will not yield bees, we must assume—for this reason alone—that bougonia was for the ancients (as well as for moderns) a procedure of uncertain or suspect truth and value. At the least we are constrained to say that it could not have had for them the familiar truth of routine reality, since it never happened. Sure knowledge the ancients did not and could not have had. Possibly they believed in bougonia as if it were something on the order of religious faith. Possibly they doubted it. In fact, agricultural writers of antiquity evidence a certain diffidence in writing about bougonia . Varro, for example, does not authenticate it in his own voice at all, but rather cites another source (Merula), who in his turn cites another source:

Merula, ut cetera fecit, historicos quae sequi melitturgoe soleant
demonstrabit. Primum apes nascuntur partim ex apibus, partim
ex bubulo corpore putrefacto. Itaque Archelaus in epigrammate
ait eas esse  .
(Rust. 3.16.3–4)

Our well-versed Merula, as he has done in other cases, will tell
you of the practice followed by bee-keepers.
"In the first place, bees are produced partly from bees, and
partly from the rotted carcass of a bullock. And so Archelaus, in
an epigram, says that they are 'the roaming children of a dead
cow.'"^[61]

Varro omits bougonia altogether at 3.16.37–38, where he discusses treatment of ailing bees. Columella is equally diffident in declining to discuss it:

quam rationem diligentius prosequi supervacuam puto,
consentiens Celso, qui prudentissime ait, non tanto interitu pecus istud
amitti, ut sic requirendum sit.
(Rust. 9.14.6)

I think it unnecessary to pursue this method further, agreeing as I
do with Celsus, who most reasonably says that the hive is never so
annihilated that this cure must be sought.^[62]

Since bougonia is not a precept of verified and routine value (contrast ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis/paulatim 1.133–34), we may wonder why the poet attributes it to Aristaeus, elsewhere a true culture hero, and makes of it his crowning discovery in this poem. He may be suggesting that there is an illusory quality to ars or to cultural achievement overall. Consistent with this interpretation is the fact that bougonia merely regains for Aristaeus what he had lost through his own violence. As a consequence of the deaths of Orpheus, Eurydice, and the sacrificed cattle, he is not materially advanced but rather, in fact, restored to his previous condition. In this way he resembles the rower at 1.201–3, whose ceaseless striving succeeds only in preventing his headlong rush downstream. Another, less questionable, view (invoking the Büchner rule that the less the practical value of a praeceptum, the greater is its symbolic value) is that Virgil has chosen to epitomize or crown Iron Age technology with the bougonia because of its symbolic value, which, as will be argued here, is that of a dynamic or economy of exchange.

Although, as Büchner says,^[63] it would be difficult to prove

that Virgil did not believe in bougonia, it is nevertheless true that many features of his narrative suggest that he viewed bougonia as fantastical or mythical. Both Klingner and Büchner observe the change in narrative style at this point in the poem.^[64] It becomes impersonal instead of direct: "a place is chosen," "they enclose it" (4.295ff.). Said to originate in Egypt, the bougonia is made literally and emotionally distant from the reader's reality. It is not described as something that the reader knows, but rather as something unfamiliar and alien, occurring in a distant land from which there may be only hearsay.

To summarize, bougonia is not a practical precept for generating bees; it was not part of routine reality, regularly practiced and/or observed by the peoples of the ancient world. Therefore it seems prudent to assume, as is implicit in the ancient writers cited above, that the ancients were in varying degrees diffident in their approach to it as a praeceptum . Such reality as they may have accorded to it must have had a different quality from that of daily experience and must have resembled a matter of faith rather than a matter of knowledge.

If we may adopt for a moment and for purposes of discussion the hypothesis that Virgil and his contemporaries either doubted the value of bougonia or attributed to it a kind of reality different from observable routine, we will then see that the conclusion of the poem, the character of Aristaeus, and the value of his achievement assume a significance different from that usually attributed to them. The prevailing view is that bougonia portends resurrection and a positive resolution to the conflicts of the poem.^[65] Such a positive view of bougonia does not seem to be supported by the dynamics or economy of bougonia as understood by the ancients. For them bougonia apparently signified an exchange of death for life rather than rebirth or resurrection. While new bees clearly are born, they are not re born, as there is no regeneration of the bees that had previously died and that

remain irretrievable. Most telling, this process requires the destruction of a calf, whose body and soul are needed to generate new bees, for the soul of the dead calf was perceived as animating the newly emergent bees. "The main idea seems to be that the life of the bull passes into that of the bees; the closing of the ears and nostrils, as well as the insistence on death by slow contusion, seem to aim at preservation of the soul within the carcass."^[66] As an image, then, bougonia signifies not resurrection but rather sacrifice or the exchange of death for life. Let us look at the passage now:

exiguus primum atque ipsos contractus in usus
eligitur locus; hunc angustique imbrice tecti
parietibusque premunt artis, et quattuor addunt,
quattuor a ventis obliqua luce fenestras.
rum vitulus bima curvans iam cornua fronte
quaeritur; huic geminae nares et spiritus oris
multa reluctanti obstruitur, plagisque perempto
tunsa per integram solvuntur viscera pellem.
sic positum in clauso linquunt, et ramea costis
subiciunt fragmenta, thymum casiasque recentis.
hoc geritur Zephyris primum impellentibus undas,
ante novis rubeant quam prata coloribus, ante
garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo.
interea teneris tepefactus in ossibus umor
aestuat, et visenda modis animalia miris,
trunca pedum primo, mox et stridentia pennis,
miscentur, tenuemque magis magis aëra carpunt,

donec ut aestivis effusus nubibus imber
erupere, aut ut nervo pulsante sagittae,
prima leves ineunt si quando proelia Parthi.
(4.295–314)

First a small place is chosen, a site that is narrowed further
For this same purpose: they close it in with a pantile roof
And prisoning walls: they add
Four windows with slanting lights that face towards the four winds.
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.
Battened down in that narrow room they leave him, under his ribs
Laying fresh cassia and thyme and broken branches.
This is done as soon as a west wind ruffles the water,
Before the meadows are flushed with vernal color, before
The talkative martin hangs her nest under the rafters.
Meanwhile, within the marrowy bones of the calf, the humors
Grow warm, ferment, till appear creatures miraculous—
Limbless at first, but soon they fidget, their wings vibrate,
And more, more they sip, they take the delicate air:
At last they come pouring out, like a shower from summer clouds,
Or thick and fast as arrows
When Parthian archers, their bowstrings throbbing, advance to battle.

As a symbol of exchange the bougonia exemplifies perfectly the central vision of the poem: the moral ambiguity and cost of Iron Age culture, the tense apprehension of an enduring opposition between certain kinds of material progress and humane value. The poet does not allow the reader to remain unaware of the cost of progress,^[67] for in describing the calf's death he arouses the

reader's sympathy for the calf's terrified struggle (4.299–302). We may compare also

hic vero subitum ac dictu mirabile monstrum
aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per viscera toto
stridere apes utero et ruptis effervere costis,
immensasque trahi nubes, iamque arbore summa
confluere et lentis uvam demittere ramis.
(4.554–57)

Here, to be sure, a portent sudden and miraculous to tell
They behold: from the oxen's bellies all over their rotting flesh
Creatures are humming, swarming through the wreckage of their ribs—
Huge and trailing clouds of bees, that now in the treetops
Unite and hang like a bunch of grapes from the pliant branches.

Any revulsion that a modern reader may experience cannot be merely an aberration of modern sensibility, for other similes used to describe the bees' birth also have negative connotations (e.g., 4.312–14). This birth is simultaneously miraculous and monstrous (dictu mirabile monstrum 4.554).

In sum, the emphasis here seems to be on the notion of death and destruction as the basis of new life rather than on resurrection and the uncomplicated joy of success. The poet evokes pity for the suffering victim and thus does not allow the reader to overlook the costs of progress. Bougonia, therefore, symbolizes exchange and unresolvable tensions; it illuminates the ambivalence of compromise and the pathos of loss.

To place bougonia in the context of the Georgics, then, and in the context of Aristaeus' whole experience, we may observe that while Aristaeus is indeed represented as a culture hero, he represents a culture or technology of a particular sort. Aristaeus' technology or contribution, symbolic rather than practical, is aggressive towards nature, even destructive of it. His technology is aimed at success as he sees it, according to his needs, and is

negligent of cost. It relies on a dynamic of exchange, here, of death for life, and thus embodies the moral ambiguity of the Iron Age towards nature and other men, a motif already familiar to readers of the Georgics .

Let us now move on to the portrait of Orpheus, the paradigmatic poet, in order to consider how Virgil represents him in relationship to the poem's major issues, as they have so far been set forth.

Orpheus

For the most part Virgil's representation of Orpheus accords with traditional accounts. He was a minstrel; with his lyre he played and sang; the son and servant of the Muses, he was the father of song, an ancestor of Homer and Hesiod. He did not believe in killing, and he taught other men to abstain from bloodshed. Thus the legend portrays a gentle man who, through music and magic, could accomplish feats impossible for others. Diodorus' account of Orpheus (4.25) is particularly valuable to us because he is contemporary with Virgil. From him we learn that Orpheus was Thracian, son of Oeagrus, distinguished for learning, song, and poetry; he could charm beasts and trees, was associated with theology and ritual, and participated in the Argonautic expedition. Finally, of greatest importance for us, he was permitted by Persephone to retrieve his wife from the lower world. Diodorus makes no mention of a second disappearance of Eurydice or of a passionate flaw in Orpheus.^[68]

It is crucial to a correct understanding of this myth in the Georgics to realize that the traditional version before Virgil included Orpheus' success in bringing Eurydice back to life. That Orpheus, traditionally a gentle, civilizing musician (poet), should lose his wife through dementia and furor is antithetical to the tradition as we know it, both in Orpheus' failure and in the emotions that the poet attributes to him. Every reader of the Orpheus story experiences its haunting and melancholy beauty. Its sadness overshadows the fourth book, dominating the read-

er's memory and his response to the poem as a whole. The tale as told in the Georgics is tragic; in the context of the reader's expectations, it is emphatically so. Either by inventing this version or by choosing an obscure variant on a traditionally happy story, the poet emphasizes the tragedy of Orpheus' loss, invests tragedy with a certain pleasure and beauty, and gives expression to his own inclination to sing sad songs.

Orpheus' failure to retrieve Eurydice is the major example of the failure of art in the poem. Orpheus is exceptionally gifted, his song of such unimaginable beauty and power that we do not hear it directly but only hear of its effects. Spirits long dead and otherwise insensitive to pity or human feeling are moved (commotae 4.471):

quin ipsae stupuere domus atque intima Leti
Tartara caeruleosque implexae crinibus anguis
Eumenides, tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora,
atque Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis.
(4.481–84)

Why, Death's very home and holy of holies was shaken
To hear that song, and the Furies with steel-blue snakes entwined
In their tresses; the watch-dog Cerberus gaped open his triple
mouth;
Ixion's wheel stopped dead from whirling in the wind.

et caligantem nigra formidine lucum
ingressus, Manisque adiit regemque tremendum
nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda.
at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulcraque luce carentum.
(4.469–72)

The gorge of Taenarus even, deep gate of the underworld,
He entered, and that grove where fear hangs like a black fog:
Approached the ghostly people, approached the King of Terrors
And the hearts that know not how to be touched by human
prayer.
But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms,
There came the bodiless shades, the phantoms lost to light.

The power of his music moves the dead and enables him to gain from Persephone permission for Eurydice to return from the dead. This would constitute a true resurrection, that is, the restoration of a deceased individual to life, and would thus be

significantly different from and superior to the bougonia of Aristaeus, which is an exchange of death for life and which involves permanent loss of the creatures that die. This miraculous possibility is achieved entirely through song and without sacrifice and loss. The power of song then, its ability to move the spirit, is greater than the power of legions or plows or religious rituals, for example. Thus song is powerfully beautiful; and yet it is ultimately useless, since Orpheus fails to achieve his goal. The suggestion, both (as here) literal and also metaphorical, is that Orpheus fails of his goal because he is backward-looking (490–93).^[69] Eurydice terms his backward glance at her furor (495). We can define it perhaps more precisely as part of the characteristic pattern of his absorption with and idealization of the past, as when he obsessively mourns Eurydice's loss, both after her first death (464–66) and after the second (507–20), calling her even beyond the moment of his own death (523–29). It is in the past that he finds perfection and beauty. He seems to cultivate and nurture in himself sensations of pathos and loss, and therefore he makes beautiful songs out of tragic visions. He likes to sing songs of his loss and the pathetic groupings that he sees in Hades (475–77) reflect his own vision, which tends to focus on sorrow. Hades contains all the dead, yet Orpheus sees in particular youths and girls unwedded, those having missed therefore the crown and purpose of their lives (476; cf. implumis 513). There is further pathos in the detail of children buried before their parents. (The too-early loss of the young is a powerful motif also in the Aeneid. ) Both Orpheus and the Georgic poet, who makes poetry of Orpheus' experience, find in tragedy a thing of beauty. At Eurydice's death Orpheus cannot accept this necessary and inevitable loss in order to proceed with life; rather he looks back incessantly, sees his ideal in the past, and seeks to restore it/her through song. In this way he parallels the Georgic poet, who also places his ideal—the Golden Age—in the past. This metaphorical looking back becomes literal when Orpheus turns to glance at

Eurydice. The backward glance is, then, a physical expression of his characteristic tragic and regressive inclination. The wintery, isolated landscape (508–10) that forms the background for his subsequent laments suggests the sterility of his backward quest. Yet again his song has power beyond human imagination. Where previously he had charmed the dead, here he soothes tigers and moves oak trees (510). Thus the constraints of both fate and nature are subject to his song, so skilled is he at the manipulation of pity (for he moves Hades to grant his prayer) and beauty (for he moves the dead, the wild, and the inanimate). Yet all this power is of no avail because Orpheus' own determination and vision of his goal, the regaining of Eurydice, are inadequately sustained. Perhaps his dementia ("madness" 488) is that he takes more pleasure in sorrow than in success. The continuing and cold beauty of his song has nature as its witness (527), not Eurydice or any other human being. Virgil has taken the figure of Orpheus, the paradigmatic poet, and made it a portrait of the failure of the artist, despite all the emotional power and beauty of his art, to affect or effect action in the real world. (We may compare Aeneas' emotion before the pictura . . . inani, "vain picture," in Aen. 1.464.) Orpheus' endeavor, as we have seen, fails through his uncompromising—in some sense, sterile—nostalgia for Eurydice, that is, his longing for an irretrievable ideal. The triumph of love or of song over death is, therefore, surely not the message here.^[70] Rather the poet is defeated by regressive passion, isolation, and death. As an inhabitant of the Iron Age world, Orpheus, just like Aristaeus, has flaws that menace his achievements.

The parallels between Orpheus and the Georgic poet are suggestive of the poet's view of the value of poets and of poetry in this poem. For example, while Orpheus is ultimately the loser in the struggle for survival, he appears nevertheless to have greater courage than Aristaeus. Orpheus, whose initial cause for lament is surely as great as Aristaeus', takes the more courageous approach to his loss in relying on his own songs to charm the dead. He dares to descend alone to Hades to face the "king of

terrors" (4.467–70). These verses suggest the fearfulness of the hell to which Orpheus descends alone, with a courage or audacity that recalls the Georgic poet's (1.40, 2.175, 4.565). While Aristaeus whines to his mother, Orpheus acts, sings (466, 471), has the courage to face death. Neither Orpheus nor Aristaeus, however, has the courage to face life with any compromise.

Orpheus' vision seeks out sorrow, and he sees in Hades particularly pathetic groupings that reflect his own inclinations. His vision of hell parallels his own emotional experience and esthetic sensibility:

at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum,
quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt,
vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber,
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum.
(4.471–77)

But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms
There came the flimsy shades, the phantoms lost to light,
In number like to the millions of birds that hide in the leaves
When evening or winter rain from the hills has driven
them—Mothers and men, the dead
Bodies of great-hearted heroes, boys and unmarried maidens,
Young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes.

The melancholy character of these apparitions—unwedded girls and parents burying their children—reflects Orpheus' own sensibility to loss and his own capacity for suffering. He sees a reflection of what he is, and the sadness of his vision fixes on premature loss. The pathetic focus of this grouping suits Orpheus' capacity for sentiment, which quality, lacking in Aristaeus, he has in the extreme. Time of darkness and season of death are powerfully suggested by the simile of 473–74, an image of dashed hopes and lost glory.

Like the Georgic poet, Orpheus is passionate, dissatisfied, and nostalgic. Dementia (Proteus' term 488) and furor (Eurydice's term 495) precipitate his loss of Eurydice, but, significantly, the Georgic poet presents his actions with sympathy (489):

iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis,
redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras
pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem),
cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem,
ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes:
restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa
immemor heu! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis
effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni
foedera.
(4.485–93)

And now he's avoided every pitfall of the homeward path,
And Eurydice, regained, is nearing the upper air
Close behind him (for this condition has Proserpine made),
When a sudden madness catches her lover off his
guard—Pardonable indeed, if Death knew how to pardon.
He halts. Eurydice, his own, is now on the lip of
Daylight. Forgetful alas! Broken in purpose, he looked back.
His labor was lost, the pact he had made with the merciless king
Annulled.

In his longing for Eurydice, Orpheus is, like the Georgic poet, nostalgic for the past, thus making of Eurydice the final embodiment in the poem of the meaning of the Golden Age.

Exclusively absorbed in his passion for Eurydice, refusing compromise or substitution, Orpheus sings only of loss. In this way he resembles the nightingale (4.511–15), who never ceases to sing her mourning song. Orpheus and the nightingale are parallel in the beauty of their song and in their impotence to achieve what they long for.

Orpheus' grief, austere and uncompromising, renders him an isolated and in some sense sterile figure:

septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine mensis
rupe sub aëria deserti ad Strymonis undam
flesse sibi, et gelidis haec evolvisse sub astris^[71
] mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine quercus
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenaei:
solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque nivalem

arvaque Riphaeis numquam viduata pruinis
lustrabat, raptam Eurydicen atque inrita Ditis
dona querens.
(4.507–10, 517–20)

Month after month, they say, for seven months alone
He wept beneath a crag high up by the lonely waters
Of Strymon, and under the ice-cold stars poured out his dirge
That charmed the tigers and made the oak trees follow him
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No love, no marriage could turn his mind away from grief:
Alone through Arctic ice, through the snows of Tanais, over
Frost-bound Riphaean plateaux
He ranged, bewailing his lost Eurydice and the wasted
Bounty of death.

Deserti (508) recalls sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis/ raptat amor (3.291–92, cited on p. 60) and tends to corroborate the earlier suggestion that the poet feels himself to be, to some degree, isolated from others and embodying separate values. Very interesting in this regard is Raymond Williams's observation, in his discussion of Wordsworth, that the poet who feels alienated can either retreat "into a deep subjectivity" (as Orpheus does here) or attempt "to discover, in some form, community," as has been argued above of the Georgic poet.^[72]

Through his song Orpheus' grief is continually renewed, not solaced. In his refusal to accept another mate, he reveals his inability to compromise with reality, and consequently he perishes:

spretae Ciconum quo munere matres
inter sacra deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi
discerptum latos iuvenem sparsere per agros.
(4.520–11)

In the end the Ciconian women, scorned
By this devotion, amidst sacred rites and nocturnal orgies of
Bacchus,
Tore him limb from limb and scattered him over the land.

Aristaeus is able to accept a substitute for his lost bees, in some sense to compromise, since he is not concerned with individual human value (except in himself). Orpheus is not viable in the world precisely because of his inability to compromise, to live without the ideal, and to look forward. His final loss of Eurydice and his death at the hands of the Ciconian women are the consequences of his own character. What remains of him is intangible—the pathos of loss, the vulnerability of love and artistic strivings, and the beauty of the poetry that sings of these things:

tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum
gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus
volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua
a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat.
Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
(4.523–27)

But even then that head, plucked from the marble-pale
Neck, and rolling down mid-stream on the Oeagrian Hebrus,
The voice alone and the death-cold tongue cried out "Eurydice!"
Cried "Poor Eurydice!" as the soul of the singer fled,
And the banks of the river echoed, re-echoed "Eurydice!"

By his self-assertion, Aristaeus achieves his desired divinity, moving from unacknowledged and unregretted crime to atonement without sentiment and, finally, to success and satisfaction in a substitution for his lost past. One could reasonably argue on Aristaeus' behalf, as have Putnam and Miles,^[73] that he is somehow morally or cognitively improved by his descent to the source of waters, where he sees a world different from himself—feminine, nurturant, peaceful. Additionally to his credit one could argue that Aristaeus succeeds because he is bonded to someone, his mother, who wishes to help him, and that thus he is not alone

like Orpheus. On the other hand, his mother, a goddess, counsels him to success through violence and guile. So the apotheosis that Aristaeus achieves appears ultimately to be the reward neither of virtue nor of sentiment, but simply an index of success and power in the world. Perhaps one could argue that his character and experience best ready him to deal with the ambiguity, cost, and exchange represented by the bougonia . Although Aristaeus expresses no sentiment, sense of guilt, or pity, he does become a god—a provocative comment on the nature of Iron Age divinity.

A vision of Iron Age reality is suggested in the triumph of Aristaeus. Through his vital ruthlessness of purpose he achieves his desired divinity (cf. 1.14, where he is invoked as a god), while Orpheus is the eventual victim of Aristaeus' passion and of his own. Bound to Eurydice by sentiment, he is incapable of compromise for survival. Rejecting any substitution, he preserves through song the memory of the ideal that he has lost. He remains unconsoled, his grief never solaced or relinquished. This myth of Aristaeus' success and of Orpheus' loss mirrors reality as the poet envisions it. In the Iron Age, beauty and sentiment, as embodied in Orpheus and other victims, are in tension with success and progress, represented here by divinity. Despite Orpheus' flaws of regressiveness, egocentrism, and sterility, the poet's clear intent is to engage the reader's sympathy with him. It is Orpheus' sorrow and not Aristaeus' triumph that moves the reader and resonates in memory.

With the closing vignette of the farmer who plunders the nightingale's nest, the Georgic poet further expands the reader's sensibility through pity and through apprehension of ambiguity. We saw in Book 1 that the reader was often identified (through first-person verb forms or direct address, such as at 50, 100, 155–59) with the farmer (durus agrestis 1.160), who struggled continually against deprivation and hardship, against enemies large and small that undermined his labor . At the concluding moment that same farmer (now the "harsh ploughman," durus arator 4.512) appears no longer as the sympathetic figure, but rather as predator and ravager of the nightingale's helpless young, the agent of destruction, loss, and sorrow. Thus we are made to feel, through the sorrows of Orpheus and the nightin-

gale, the character and cost of Iron Age civilization, and hence to expand our moral and critical perspectives on our experience. This dual vision is the quintessence of the poem, for the poet shows man both as victim of the gods and nature (as in Book 1) and also as aggressor against nature and humanity. The poet makes the reader see with complexity and with pity that which otherwise might be seen, without reflection, as the unambiguous triumph of technology and mastery.

The Georgics illuminates aspects of reality as the poet sees them and thus deepens the reader's sensitivity to those humane and artistic values that do not lead to quantifiable progress. The function of song in this poem, then—Orpheus', the nightingale's, and the Georgic poet's—is preservation of the memory of the ideal, variously of harmony and pity, and of its loss, since the ideal is continually seen in retrospect. As a whole, in the songs of its several poet voices, the Georgics preserves and values the memory of a retrospective ideal. This memory is preserved not only, if climactically, in the moving tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also in the repeated representations of and allusions to the Golden Age, which constitute reflections on an ideal beyond reach. It is the nature of these reflections on the Golden Age that I term "the poet's vision" and that forms the subject of the following chapter.