But over high Parnassus' lonely crest
Poetic rapture bears me: sweet to pass
Where never wheel has marked the tender grass.He wanted to produce the poem, and he felt confident that Maecenas would welcome it. For the poet it offered the challenge of a
work on a large scale, some 2,000 lines in four roughly equal books, far exceeding the length not only of the Eclogues but also of
anything ever attempted by Horace, Propertius, or Tibullus. In a period deeply marked by the Callimachean rejection of the long
poem (above, p. 361), that was a striking departure. The subject-matter was challenging, too. For Catullus and his friends, the word
'rustic' had stood for all that was uncouth, ill bred, boring-both in manners and in poetry. Could the homespun rustic verse of
Hesiod (above, pp. 88 ff.) be transformed into a Latin poem which would satisfy the aesthetic demands of Virgil and his audience?
He was not aiming to translate Hesiod, nor simply to paraphrase him and dress him up in more elegant poetic form. Hesiod had
made his practical instructions on sowing and reaping part of a moral picture of life, with hard work and traditional piety. Virgil,
too, will produce a vision of a way of life, based on work, and embodying the old virtues which made Rome great: piety, tenacity,
patriotism, genuineness.
It must combine exact vision and description of detail, without the golden haze of beautiful generality which so often marks the
Eclogues, and also a grand style, elevated but not hollow, for moral and poetical set-pieces. As for Maecenas and Octavian, they
would have preferred an epic on Octavian's warlike feats: in the prologue to Georgic 3 Virgil promises that 'soon' he will write it.
But the Georgics not only praised Octavian in glittering eulogy, but also endorsed a view of Italian and Roman life which was, in
general terms, highly acceptable to him. The age of civil war must be over, and Octavian must heal a world turned upside down (1.
500). Then the vices of ambition and greed must be rooted out in favour of modesty and hard work (2. 165 ff., 458 ff.). On all that,
Virgil's poem and Octavian's policy were agreed. Of course, neither of them will have expected that educated readers of the
Georgics would rush out to buy small farms and start ploughing with their own hands.
The Georgics were completed in 29 B.C., and some passages were clearly written after the Battle of Actium. Virgil had been at
work on the poem for seven years or so, a length of time which implies constant revision and slow progress. For facts he had prose
works on agriculture at his disposal. Especially valuable was Varro's De re rustica, a systematic treatise packed with information,
far more exhaustive and practically useful than the Georgics. Varro's work could also give the poet other hints, as the First Book
opens with the characters looking at a map of Italy (cf. Georg. 2. 135 ff.), and ends with the random murder of one of them in the
street, a vivid instance of the violence and lawlessness which Virgil laments in his poem.
The first book of the Georgics has some close echoes of Hesiod, to establish the colouring of the whole. 'Nudus ara, sere
nudus' ('Strip to plough and strip to sow', 1.299) which was found very comical in antiquity, is an exact translation of a quaint
Hesiodic line. Hesiod told how Zeus made life hard for men as a piece of vengeance, and laughed aloud as he did so (above, p.
96); Virgil prefers to tell how Jupiter made life hard for man's ultimate good, 'ut uarias usus meditando extunderet artes' ('that need
and thought should useful arts devise', 1. 133). Virgil's Jupiter is more benevolent than Hesiod's Zeus. But even in this book there
is far less of Hesiod than there is of Theocritus in the Eclogues. Lucretius, the great Latin poet of the last generation, is far more
pervasive.
Virgil is careful to be selective. What appears to start out as a list of the necessary equipment (I.160 ff.) actually includes only half
a dozen tools, and those are mostly chosen for having a connection in Greek poetry which ennobles them: not 'a cart', but 'the slow
rolling waggon of the Mother of Eleusis' (because in the great Eleusinian procession (above, pp. 268 f.) waggons were used); not 'a
winnowing fan', but 'the mystic fan of Iacchus' (a minor Eleusinian deity). Virgil is anxious to avoid being dragged down from the
high style by his humble subject matter. He also embellishes his material by many stylistic devices. When, for example, he is
explaining that it is important to rotate crops, as some plants exhaust the soil, he creates out of this unpromising idea an exquisitely
shaped couplet:
urit enim campum lini seges, urit auenae,
urunt Lethaeo perfusa papauera somno.(1-77-8)
Flax burns, and oats will burn, the fertile ground: