Pastoral Landscape By Claude Lorraine (1645). The great seventeenth-century landscape painter was much influenced by Virgil,
and this scene, with its group of shepherds (one playing the flute) and its grazing cattle and goats, perfectly catches the mood of
the Eclogues.
The Georgics
All that is in the past, once we turn to the Georgics. Lesser patrons must give way to Maecenas, friends are no longer named, and
Octavian-never named and barely hinted at in the Eclogues-is now in the centre of the poet's view. Ancient scholars claimed to
know the contents of Virgil's will, and they report that he left the very large sum of 10,000,000 sesterces, with substantial legacies
to Maecenas and Augustus. No doubt they were the source of the poet's wealth. But it would be wrong to think of the relationship
as primarily a financial one. In the second half of the 30s the relative position of Octavian and Antony gradually changed. The
ruthless young heir of Caesar, who 'kills and keeps his temper' (a phrase which Dryden put into the mouth of Antony in All for
Love), was cleverly transforming himself into the defender of western values against an Antony dead to decent feeling and going
native in the East. The war of propaganda was lost by Antony before the battle of Actium. Maecenas, personally a luxurious, even
a decadent figure, wrote verse himself, as such men usually do, in the manner of the poets of his own youth; he was of great value
as an intermediary between Octavian and the poets. An artist must be flattered when the holders of power express interest in his
work, and much more when the master of the world (as Octavian was after 31) is anxious to recruit his support for a programme of
reform and restoration, which is to replace civil wars and disasters with peace and the good life. In their different ways Virgil,
Horace, and Propertius all responded, more or less, to that most seductive appeal.
Virgil refers to the Georgics as 'your exacting command, Maecenas' ('tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa', 3.41). The phrase is hard
to interpret. Obviously Maecenas did not 'command' the poet to write a poem in four books on agriculture, and Virgil also says of
his writing:
Sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis
raptat amor; iuuat ire iugis, qua nulla priorum
Castaliam molli deuertitur orbita cliuo. (3. 291)