The Golden Age in Book 4

The Bees

In Book 4 the Golden Age passages, which are here considered to be those on the bees and the Corycian gardener, are not, as in Book 3, travesties of the Golden Age but again, as in Books 1 and 2 approximations of the Golden Age, in which disparities between real and ideal lead to subtle ironies and new perspectives on questions central to the poem.

As often noted, the bees of 4.1–115 and 149–280 recall in their selflessness and sharing the Golden Age ethic as described in Book 1. As a consequence they have been viewed at times as Virgil's model for the moral and political renewal of Rome, a new Golden Age. This interpretation, based upon an assumed equation of the bees with the Roman people and of Aristaeus with Octavian,^[45] sees in the bees' "resurrection" an image of the

rebirth of Rome under the leadership of Octavian. The perceived optimism of the poem as a whole resides especially in this conclusion to Book 4, where the miraculous birth of the bees is felt to resolve the tensions of the poem and to portend a positive future. This reading, although of long standing, has begun to meet with objections, for the bees appear seriously flawed as models of a renewed Golden Age.^[46] Rather the portrait of them is a complex one in which strengths and weaknesses combine to form a morally ambiguous picture, identifying the bees as typical Iron Age creatures rather than as models for a moral Golden Age.

The Georgic poet devotes a disproportionate space to bees, given their relative lack of importance on a farm. Other small farm animals, such as dogs or fowl, omitted from this book, would reasonably deserve equal treatment. In addition, as Hellfried Dahlmann usefully noted,^[47] the jussive form of the verb is infrequent in this passage, suggesting that here, as elsewhere, the Georgic poet does not have a conventional didactic purpose in mind. His focus is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is the character of the bees' life, as he describes it, that is the focus of interest. His account derives in part from traditional wisdom about the bees and in part from an interest in certain of their behaviors that seem particularly Roman or, perhaps, in which Romans might well see themselves reflected, if obliquely and with some distance and perspective.

Aristotle (Hist. an. 5.21–23) classified bees with wasps, cranes, and men as political (living in a polis ) and as having shared work (koinon ergon ). Equally Varro (3.16.3, 3.16.6) noted their similarities to human beings and especially their talent for cooperative effort.

In the Georgics the analogy between bees and human beings is unmistakable from the book's opening verses, with their references to magnanimosque duces . . . et populos et proelia:

admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum
magnanimosque duces totiusque ordine gentis
mores et studia et populos et proelia dicam.
(4.3–5)

I'll tell of tiny
Things that make a show well worth your admiration—
Great-hearted leaders, a whole nation whose work is planned,
Their morals, strivings, tribes and battles—I'll tell you in due order.

Parallels between the bees' existence and that of human beings are clear. Jove establishes for both the laboring way of life:

Nunc age, naturas apibus quas Iuppiter ipse
addidit expediam, pro qua mercede canoros
Curetum sonitus crepitantiaque aera secutae
Dictaeo caeli regem pavere sub antro.
(4.149–52)

Well then, let me speak of the natural gifts that Jove himself
Bestowed on the bees, their reward
For obeying the charms—the chorus and clashing brass of the priests—
And feeding the king of heaven when he hid in that Cretan cave.

(Cf. 1.121–24, cited on p. 96.) This intervention also entails cura (4.178), amor (4.177), ars (4.56), labor (4.184), pursuit of gloria (4.205), all without rest (mora 4.185): a collocation of features that defines the Iron Age as represented in this poem. Like men, bees have tiny enemies who undermine their labor (4.13ff., 242ff., cf. 1.118–21, 176–86); they suffer from plague (casus . . . nostros, "our ills" 4.251). All these features suggest their similarity to mankind in general.

In other ways their ordered and religious society is represented as specifically Roman, as the terms larem (43), magnis . . . legibus (154), patriam and penates (155) suffice to suggest.^[48]

In their sharing the bees certainly recall the Golden Age. Their lives are very much communal experiences:

solae communis natos, consortia tecta
urbis habent
(4.153–54)

They alone have their children in common, a city shared
Beneath one roof

et in medium quaesita reponunt^[49
] (4.157)

and put their gains into a common store

omnibus una quies operum, labor omnibus unus
(4.184)

For one and all one work-time and alike one rest from work.

Chastity, though not specifically a Golden Age feature, also distinguishes the bees from the Iron Age creatures of Book 3. The bees are apparently free of those destructive passions that characterize all other mortal creatures (amor omnibus idem 3.244). The poet emphasizes the bees' reputation for chastity by adducing the least scientific of contemporary hypotheses to explain their reproduction:

verum ipsae e foliis natos, e suavibus herbis
ore legunt, ipsae regem parvosque Quirites
sufficiunt
(4.200–2)

But all by themselves from leaves and sweet herbs they will gather
Their children in their mouths, themselves supply the succession
And the tiny citizens.

(Cf. the suggestive contrast of apibus fetis, "mother bees" 4.139).

The issue to consider is whether the bees' undeniable Roman and Golden Age features suggest that the Romans, to the degree to which they are symbolized by the bees, have or are to have a new Golden Age. Although some have assumed that the bees

represent a Roman society perfected and renewed,^[50] others have written perceptively about the bees' flaws, which are incompatible with a humane and creative society. The bees' undeniable virtues are in tension with failings that compromise them as moral models. For the Romans, therefore, the bees' flaws might be as instructive as their virtues; for while they embody to a degree a social and moral ideal, they represent equally a life without consciousness or pity.

The poet implies that the bees' sharing is achieved at the cost of individuality and reflection. For example, once their king dies, they are lost, incapable of individual or reflective action. Here total community is not necessarily a good, as it can lead to total self-destruction:

praeterea regem non sic Aegyptus et ingens
Lydia nec populi Parthorum aut Medus Hydaspes
observant. rege incolumi mens omnibus una est;
amisso rupere fidem, constructaque mella
diripuere ipsae et cratis solvere favorum.
ille operum custos, illum admirantur et omnes
circumstant fremitu denso stipantque frequentes,
et saepe attollunt umeris et corpora bello
obiectant pulchramque petunt per vulnera mortem.
(4.210–18)

Besides, they esteem royalty more than Egypt does or enormous
Lydia even, or the peoples of Parthia, or the Mede by Hydaspes.
Let the king be safe—they are bound by a single faith and purpose:
Lose him—then unity's gone, and they loot the honey cells
They built themselves, and break down the honeycomb's withy well.
Guardian of all their works he is. They hold him in awe.
Thick is their humming murmur as they crowd around and mob him.
Often they chair him shoulder high: and in war they shelter
His body with theirs, desiring the wounds of a noble death.

Their uncritical obedience to their king is made to parallel that of the peoples of the (decadent, effeminate) East, whom the Romans did not admire and whose values were fundamentally opposed to Roman republican tradition. Thus, uniform community comes with a certain cost.

A lack of thoughtfulness in the bees accompanies their militarism. Bees' similarities to soldiers are implicit in such terms as signa ("standards" 108), castris ("camp" 108), speculantur ("are on watch" 166), custodia ("keeping guard" 165), agmine facto ("in martial array" 167) and in 4.193–94, which suggests military maneuvers and soldiers in a besieged town. The poet has imagined or created for bees this militaristic character since bees do not, in reality, behave as belligerently as is indicated here. The bee battle is a "literary flight of fancy"^[51] that creates a correlation between militarism and absence of reflection. Bees prepare with excitement (4.69–70, 73) for wars without substance, sacrificing their lives with alacrity in battles that have no urgency (cf. animasque in vulnere ponunt 238). They die for glory, for the appearance of "beautiful" death (pulchra mors 218), thus adhering to the heroic code.^[52] Yet to the poet their dramas appear more pathetic than heroic:

hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
pulveris exigui iactu compresses quiescent.
(4.86–87)

And all these epic battles and turbulent hearts you can silence
By flinging a handful of dust.

Further complicating the bees' claimed status as figures of moral renewal is that their lauded continence and lack of passion is more apparent than real, since they seem merely to have replaced sexual amor with another sort, that is, passion for gain:

illum adeo placuisse apibus mirabere morem,
quod neque concubitu indulgent, nec corpora segnes
in Venerem solvunt aut fetus nixibus edunt.
(4.197–99)

Most you shall marvel at this habit peculiar to bees—
That they have no sexual union: their bodies never dissolve
Lax into love, nor bear with pangs the birth of their young

Cecropias innatus apes  amor  urget habendi
(4.177)

An inborn love of possession impels the bees

(In Aen. 8.327 in the narration of Evander amor habendi, "love of gain,"^[53] and belli rabies, "madness of war," bring about the dissolution of the Golden Age.) That the poet intends to represent the gathering of honey as a substitute for sexual activity is further indicated by the use of terms that denote passion and birth:

tantus amor florum et  generandi  gloria mellis
(4.205)

Such is their love for flowers and the glory of producing
[generating] honey.

Thus, although bees do not weaken their bodies with sexual activity (198–199), they do expend them in battle (218) or in pursuit of honey (205) without consideration of their lives' value. Therefore the same drive that appears as sexual passion in other animals is expressed in the bees' lives as an urgent acquisitiveness or materialism and an unreflecting negligence of life (204, 218) in pursuit of glory.

While, then, the bees have the Golden Age virtues of community and sharing, in their case these come at the cost of their militaristic and appetitive passions. Although they are as flawed as human beings, yet they are without human virtues, such as song or poetry, which distinguish man from beast and serve to define human culture. Neglectful of individual lives, without individual satisfaction or sentiment, they achieve mere existence, existence without meaning. In comparison to the other important figures of this book, they are anonymous and lacking the unique creativity and devotion to beauty of the Corycian gar-

dener, the individual persistence of Aristaeus, and the potential for song and beauty of Orpheus. The bees as well as the human individuals of Book 4 have powerful and destructive passions that exist in tension with their virtues and achievements. None of these figures is a model for flawless existence; all embody conflicts that are illuminated but not resolved by the Georgic poet.

The Corycian Gardener

In his harmony with nature, in his transcendence of natural constraints of time and place, and in his indifference to material goals, the Corycian gardener, most perfectly of any figure in the poem, approaches the spirit or morality of the Golden Age. From land abandoned by others as useless:

cui pauca relicti
iugera ruris erant, nec fertilis illa iuvencis
nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho.
(4.127–29)

a few poor acres
Of land once derelict, useless for arable,
No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines

he contrives a miraculous and artistic fertility, his work thus reflecting the spiritual luminescence of his private Golden Age. The essence of his significance is that his achievement is miraculous and mysterious—not comprehensible, imitable, or possible to describe in conventional georgic praecepta . He makes sterile land productive. His hyacinths bloom while rocks shatter with winter's cold and streams are frozen (4.135–38); he is the first to pluck roses in spring (134); he is the first to gather honey (139–41). Every blossom on his trees survives to bear fruit (142–43). He alone can transplant fully mature trees:

ille etiam seras in versum distulit ulmos
eduramque pirum et spinos iam pruna ferentis
iamque ministrantem platanum potantibus umbras.^[54
] (4.144–46)

He had a gift, too, for transplanting in rows the far-grown elm,
The hardwood pear, the blackthorn bearing its weight of sloes,
And the plane that already offered a pleasant shade for drinking.

(In this feat he anticipates and parallels the poet-singer Orpheus.) The gardener's moral relationship to nature recalls, as we see, that of Golden Age man, for in each case nature, unassailed, responds abundantly. The gardener's success is not attributed to Iron Age technology. Although such terms as captare ("capture"), fallere ("deceive"), insectari ("assail"), terrere ("terrify"), and arma ("weapons") characterize the Iron Age farmer of Georgic 1, the gardener is not represented as being on the attack. Neither do other terms denoting Iron Age technology or anxiety (e.g., labor, usus, ars, cura ) occur of his activities.^[55] One could reasonably argue that labor, cura, and ars are implicit, for example, in the gardener's returning home late at night (sera . . . nocte 132–33). The fact is, however, that the poet has taken care to avoid the use of these particular terms, preferring in this way to emphasize the miraculous, mysterious quality of the gardener's achievements, which are not imitable through routine georgic procedures. The farmer's feats are thus allowed to appear moral or spiritual more than technical. His success is not a function simply of hard work.

Critics have seen in the gardener an embodiment of the fundamental value of agricultural life (Richter); a model, like the farmers of Georgic 2., of wisdom (as they see it), who transcends poverty through serenity and skill (Klingner); and an Epicurean sage, exemplifying beauty and utility (Antonio La Penna).^[56] My thesis here, however, is that the gardener represents not so much a rural or philosophical ideal as a poetic ideal. Neither does he represent so much the simple life as the esthetic life, for he pursues beauty and uselessness more than beauty and utility. The gardener's values are at variance with the materialism and milita-

rism characteristic of the Iron Age; and it is precisely his deviations from this tradition that identify him as a Golden Age figure.

In evaluating the gardener's achievement readers must realize that the garden in question is not the equivalent of a farmer's small vegetable patch. This garden does not provide produce particularly suited for consumption either by the gardener or by his bees;^[57] rather it is described in such a way as to suggest a pleasure garden, an ornament, a timeless profusion of flowering trees and plants that is possible only in the imagination. In addition to its floral beauty the garden has also a formal artistic perfection, reflected in the words in versum (144) and circum (130), for example, which are tantamount to technical terms. These terms suggest, respectively, rows of well-aligned trees and borders of flowers (features "which constitute the grace of gardens . . . esteemed in Greco-Roman antiquity"^[58] ), thus indicating the artistic refinement of the garden. Therefore this garden is above all a symbol of beauty, beauty that serves no material function but that sustains and expands the spirit, like the beauty of art, song, or poetry. In growing flowers, the epitome of superfluous beauty, the gardener pursues (like the poet) an esthetic and spiritual ideal that ignores material function or profit. This is the essential significance of the old man's garden: to serve as an image of beauty that is nonmaterial, nonproductive, non-profitable, and thus in opposition to the farmer's work, which is material and answers to physical needs.

The uselessness of the old man's garden is further underlined by his age. While many take the gardener's old age (senem 127)

to be an index of wisdom,^[59] it is perhaps germane to recall the verses on the old stallion of Georgic 3.95–100, which set old age within a georgic, Iron Age context. There the old stallion, no longer able to procreate or to make war (his legitimizing functions within the georgic or material world), must be dismissed from the farmer's care and attention:

Hunc quoque, ubi aut morbo gravis aut iam segnior annis
deficit, abde domo, nec turpi ignosce senectae.
frigidus in Venerem senior, frustraque laborem
ingratum trahit, et, si quando ad proelia ventum est,
ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis,
incassum furit.
(3.95–100)

Yet even that horse, when he weakens from illness or weight of years,
You must pension off and spare no pity for age's failings.
To be old is to be cold in rut, to prolong a loveless
Labor impotently; and whenever it comes to the conflict,
His passion is vain—a great fire in stubble, without strength.

In the farmer's world, dominated as it must be by material concerns, an old horse, since useless, has no value and cannot be redeemed by pity or sentiment. According, then, to the material standards implicit in the very nature of a georgic poem, the old Corycian would have no value, since he also is useless, not only for war or procreation, but for vigorous labor. Nevertheless, in the poet's vision he represents an experience of great value.

In contenting himself with unproductive land the gardener shows his negligence of profit, prestige, and convention. Although near the city (4.125–27), he pursues a life that excludes urban or, more generally, Iron Age values, as the absence from his life of commerce (dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis, "he loaded his board with unbought dainties" 133), appetitiveness, aggression, and ambition shows. As his old age makes clear the superfluous and inessential character of his activities, so his

unique accomplishments do not translate into material profit or political power, to which concerns he is consistently indifferent. Content without gloria, honor, or amor and thus outside of Iron Age values and morality, he is distinct from the poem's other figures, including Aristaeus (4.325) and the Georgic poet (4.6), who are touched by Iron Age ambition and aspire variously to wealth, power, glory, or divinity. The gardener, by contrast, aspiring to nothing other than what he has, achieves enduring contentment (regum aequabat opes animis 132), unique in the poem.

The fourth Georgic, then, juxtaposes the impersonal, materialistic society of bees to the extravagant, individual passions of the variously failed and imperfect Orpheus and Aristaeus. Opposed to both is the fleeting ideal of the gardener, who has their strengths and not their flaws. Although an individual, he has neither Aristaeus' concern for mortal glory (vitae mortalis honorem 326) and hope of divinity (quid me caelum sperare iubebas 325) nor Orpheus' destructive passion (quid tantus furor 495). To place the Corycian gardener passage in this book, therefore, is to illuminate the tension between the imperfect reality of both farmer and poet and an ideal of human existence, creative in pursuit of beauty, at peace with nature, and free from urban corruption. It is not, then, the bees but the gardener who most closely embodies the Golden Age ideal. The city, although so near and in reality menacing, does not obtrude upon his existence. Unlike the conscripted farmers of Georgic 1 or the exiled poets of Eclogues 1 and 9, whose shattered lives exemplify the city's ascendancy, he lives—ideally and impossibly—free of the city's influence.

The gardener is different from the poet in his spiritual contentment (regum aequabat opes animis 4.132) and in his indifference to those drives for power, profit, honor, or glory that define variously the city, the poet, and the Iron Age. Although the gardener lives alongside the city (4.125), he is untroubled by its needs. Equally without rural connections, he pursues his isolated and marvelous creations. In growing flowers, the epitome of superfluous beauty, the gardener pursues, like the poet,an es-

thetic or spiritual ideal that ignores material function or profit. One might sense that the gardener's appeal is precisely his freedom from the limiting realities, internal and external, that trouble the Georgic poet. He is free from ambition and longing; he does not idealize an irretrievable past, nor does he seek to escape the present. Neither does he conceive artistic goals comparable to the poet's desires to understand the mysteries of the universe or to be in Greece. Creative in pursuit of beauty, in harmony with nature, free from urban corruption and rural constraint, the gardener embodies an ideal of contentment and withdrawal that appeals powerfully to the poet. Of all the figures in the poem he lives closest to the morality of the Golden Age, feeling the challenge neither of mystery nor of mission.

Even the gardener, however, is not a perfect embodiment of the Golden Age, for there are ways in which he too diverges from the Golden Age ethic of Book 1. His pursuit of beauty identifies him most significantly as a poet. We may infer from the learned and Alexandrian adjective Oebalia for Tarentum that he is a poet of a particular sort.^[60] As Oebalia evokes Hellenistic poetry and abstruse mythological reference, so the gardener is subtly associated with the highly self-conscious and refined Alexandrian tradition. Again, he inhabits a city Greek in origin, renowned for its beauty (cf. Hor. Odes 2.6.9–24) and at the greatest remove from Rome. We may infer from these attributes that the cultural value that he is meant to embody is one of high refinement and is defined by the free and timeless pursuit of beauty for its own sake. In his artistic aspects the gardener is learned, graceful, and without mission. As he is untouched by the city's influence, so he is also untroubled by its needs. His "art" is not political, not for the group, but for himself alone.^[61] In his individuality and

indifference to others he reflects a lack of group consciousness and concern. Even he, therefore, is not entirely a Golden Age figure, for he does not have the ethic of sharing or cooperation essential to its spirit.

His indifference to others raises a question critical for understanding the nature of the relationship of the artist to the Golden Age. In this poem it is only individuals, namely, Proteus, Orpheus, the Georgic poet, and the Corycian gardener, who are shown as creative and artistic. The place of art in the Golden Age is equivocal, then, for although it is not explicitly excluded as a component of the Golden Age, neither is it explicitly included. The mystery of its origin remains unexamined. This is an important point, contrasting significantly with Lucretius, for example, who does include song as a natural development in his history of civilization (5.334, 1379–1411). Perhaps we are to infer that art is only an Iron Age phenomenon, just as in Lucretius philosophy belongs only to a highly developed political age. Both the Georgic poet and Orpheus, as we have seen, are Iron Age figures in that each is touched by ambition and discontent. Yet these are not qualities prerequisite to pure art since the Corycian gardener is represented both as content (132) and artistic; they may be prerequisite to politically conscious art. Through the combined experience of these figures the poet would seem to imply that the artistic personality does not form part of a group and that, therefore, the Golden Age ideal, in which all is shared and there are no distinctions, is not compatible with individual artistic endeavor. The gardener, as the only happy figure in the poem, embodies a vision of escape from political and moral questions; but this ideal is realized neither in society nor for society. Secluded in time past, in distance from Rome, and in exile (he is a foreigner, not Roman like the apian Quirites ), he is an isolated figure. Significantly the Georgic poet qualifies this vision of the artist in apolitical isolation as impossible of realization for himself. He cannot pursue this vision, as he says, precisely because of constraints—of time and of responsibility (116, 147–48). He implies that a substantive distinction exists between himself and the gardener when he indicates that he is not able to pursue his vision of the gardener as he would wish. The freedom to pursue

an entirely esthetic ideal is the gardener's privilege and not the Georgic poet's.

While the gardener, then, both in his harmonious relationship to nature and in the spiritual dimension of his life, of any figure in the poem most closely approaches the Golden Age model, he nevertheless fails of it. He too is disparate from the ideal, since he is alone, while in the Golden Age all was shared. In his individuality and absorption with art, he resembles Orpheus and the Georgic poet, both, to a degree, Iron Age figures. While artistic creativity is not necessarily incompatible with the Golden Age, the poet may be suggesting his sense—in thus restricting art to individual figures—that it cannot come out of an undifferentiated community. The irony and pathos of this vision for the Georgic poet is that he is alien not only in the present, as we have seen, but also even in the Golden Age past that he himself creates and idealizes. The ideal of the Golden Age would not exist without his poetry and without the tradition from which his poetry derives; yet he himself could not exist in the Golden Age of which he sings. The poet is the carrier of the values of pity, humanity, and art; but the simultaneous conception of these values exists, apparently, only in the Iron Age, thus creating an ironic play of absence and presence that questions all values and ideals.

In summarizing the poet's treatment of the Golden Age overall, we may observe that in Book 1 he sets forth a miniature meditation on the nature of human society and how it evolved from an ethic of morality, sharing, and harmony with nature to an ethic of egocentric materialism, requiring a certain aggression against nature and other men. In Book 2 the praises of Italy, spring, and country life are all, ultimately, discrepant from the Golden Age as adumbrated in Book 1, because of the lack within them of a moral community. The Scythians and the plague of Book 3, outright travesties of the Golden Age, point as well to the absence of spirit and sensibility requisite to a perfected society. The harmony achieved in Book 3 is a bitterly ironic harmony of

unwilled animality and death. While the bees of Book 4 do share, they are materialistic, militaristic, and without reflection. The gardener, on the other hand, creates beautiful things and is at peace with himself, isolated as he is. For him there is no sharing and no community. Therefore no model exists in the poem for the perfect relation to nature and to other men. An ideal is conceived in the poem but not shown as capable of realization. The conflicts of life to which the poet points appear incapable of resolution. This view, while tragic, is not sentimentalized in the poem or pathetic. The poet sees evenly, with clear-eyed vision.

In the following chapter we will consider further the character of the poet's vision. As we see, it is the poet who emerges as the most troubled and also as the most challenging figure of the poem. Alienated both in the present and in the idealized past, he wishes to bring his poetry—and all it connotes of reflective sorrow, of capacity for pity, of community, and of mystery—to Italy and, of course, to all readers. Yet it is difficult to understand how he can feel this mission with such urgency, given his apprehension that neither the world of power nor fundamental existential problems will be changed by it. In pursuit of some response to this question we will consider in chapter 3 the value and continuing power of the poet's vision and the quality of his truth.