Virgil’s Georgicswere published some fifteen years after the Julian reform, more
than enough time, if we remember the precedent of Varro’s De Re Rustica,for the
poet to have fully assimilated the new technology. The poem, however, rigorously
keeps within a pre-reform Hesiodic tradition, based on meteorological patterns
and lunar parapegmata. There is not a single date in the Georgics.The poem’s time
markers are all “natural”: time is organized and signaled in the georgic world by
the constellations, the seasons, the forces of wind and rain, the sun and the moon.
Like Hesiod in the Works and Days(765 – 828), Virgil has a section on “days”
(1.276 – 86), but the days here are not Roman calendar days; in particular, they are
not Caesar’s solar days, but Greek lunar days, as in the parapegmata.^174 The first
line tells us that the moon is in control of these days: ipsa dies alios alio dedit ordine
Luna/felicis operum(“The Moon herself has appointed different days in different
order as favorable for work,” 1.276). In the last line of his section on days Virgil
has a dies nona,a “ninth day” (1.286), but this is emphatically not the Roman
Nones: the Nones in the Roman calendar do not denote the “ninth” day into the
month, as must be the meaning here. Roman calendrical dates are not the only ele-
ment of the fastimissing from the Georgics.Virgil names no months in the poem,
even though he gives an etymological pun on Aprilis.^175 Nor does he name any fes-
tivals. He tells the farmer to “perform annual sacrifice to great Ceres” (1.338 – 39),
but his references are generalized and cannot denote a specific festival, such as
the Cerealia or the Ambarvalia.^176 Virgil captures the relentless pressure of the
farmer’s opportunity-cost time, but he does so without dating it or plotting it into
the grid of the city’s calendar.^177 His country world is somehow exempt from the
fasti,in such a way as to reinforce his general picture of detachment between the
rural and urban worlds.
Horace picks up the point in his second Epode,where we read a long praise of
the country life only to discover at the end that all of this has been coming out of
the hypocritical mouth of the usurer Alfius (67 – 70):
haec ubi locutus faenerator Alfius,
iam iam futurus rusticus,
omnem redegit Idibus pecuniam,
quaerit Kalendis ponere.When the usurer Alfius had said this, just on the point of becoming a rustic,
he called all his money in on the Ides, and seeks to lend it out again on the
Kalends.The Country’s Time and the City’s Time. 207